Richard Jury: The Stargazey Part 36

"You know, I find it hard to think of Ralph Rees as doing this. His conscience, misguided as it is, just seemed unsullied."

"Oh, he wasn't in on it."

"How could he not be?"

"Tack the sandpaper over the stolen painting, then paint it. Ilona is a painter. She could have done it with no trouble. Unless, of course, one believes that white lot a work of genius. I don't think Nicholas was in on it either. Not if his pal Rees wasn't."

Melrose was cracking the top of another egg with his spoon. "But how in G.o.d's name did she get it out of the Hermitage?"

"They still don't know. It was cut from the frame-"

"Good lord, they have guards! They have a security system."

"Seems a few moments before the damage was discovered, the guards were distracted by something going on elsewhere. As far as getting it out goes, it wasn't a large painting. The Hermitage people think it might have been rolled and stuck in something like a hollow cane."

"They make you park things like that-canes, walking sticks-by the door before you go in, don't they?"

Jury shrugged. "I would think so, but given the cops got there so quickly and n.o.body left and everyone was searched-" He shrugged again.

Melrose dipped another bit of toast. "So it's still missing. And so is she."

"It is, and she is. Yes."

When Jury and Plant walked into the Jack and Hammer a little after eleven, Trueblood jumped up from where he'd been sitting between Diane Demorney and Agatha and wrung Melrose's hand, saying to them that this was the most excitement they'd had since the body in the secretaire abattant days.

"Or the Man with a Load of Mischief days."

Jury smiled at Diane. "You were brilliant, only-"

Diane rolled her eyes as if suffering an onset of terminal boredom. "Now you're going to ask if I have a license to carry the thing, Superintendent."

"No. I was going to say what you did was very dangerous-"

"A violation of the 'reckless disregard for life and limb' statute?"

Jury laughed. "Okay, okay."

"I mean" said Diane, leaning very close to him and tilting her head so that her crow-black razor-cut hair fell across a well-turned cheekbone, "given some people weren't available for protection, one has to improvise." Diane sat back, plugged a cigarette into the ivory holder, and wiggled it for a light. She might brandish a revolver about, but certainly not a match. Trueblood lit it. Then she said, "Are we having a drink or has everyone taken the oath?"

"We're just trying to decide who's in the chair."

Without any hesitation, three pairs of eyes fastened on Jury.

"I get the point," he said, and called over to d.i.c.k Scroggs, who came, for once, as if he'd grown wings. He liked Jury.

Hands under his ap.r.o.n, d.i.c.k said, "Oh, you needn't order, sir, as I know just what everyone wants. Martini with a twist . . . half pint of Old Peculiar . . . Campari and absent. . . . "

"Absinth, old trout. Lord, you're a publican and you don't even know what you're selling?"

Diane regarded him as she might have an alien. "d.i.c.k, you know I don't drink martinis until the sun is over the garden."

"Yardarm," said Melrose.

"Whatever. When it gets where it's going at noon."

"Okay, miss, then what'll you have?"

Diane raised her arm to examine her diamond and pearl watch. "Twenty-eight minutes."

"Listen," said Trueblood. "Let's all go over to the library until then. We'll have a coffee." He was out of his chair.

"Coffee? At this hour?" inquired Diane.

"The new coffee shop." Melrose got up too, pulled at Jury. "You've got to see it."

"What coffee shop?" Jury asked.

n.o.body answered as they all got up.

"But it's Sunday!"

n.o.body answered and they all trooped out.

"It's quite illegal, you know," said Theo Wrenn Browne, who was sitting at one of the tables in the coffee room, Agatha beside him like a seal in her slick dark fur jacket, looking ready to take on any protesters.

The party of four sat down at the only vacant table, unhappily next to Melrose's aunt and Browne.

"And this espresso," said Browne, making a face after a sip, "isn't even good. Tastes bitter."

Bitter? Melrose glanced across the room at Sally and Bub's mum. One can always hope.

Said Agatha, finding it fertile ground for attacking her nephew, "This woman, Melrose, who nearly shot you-"

(Talk about hope.) "-what on earth were you doing with her? You never did have the good sense to keep out of harm's way."

His fault, naturally, that he'd been robbed and nearly murdered.

"Where's Vivian?" asked Jury. "I haven't seen her in a long time." He looked into the library, as if she might be hiding out in the stacks.

"What we've come up with is," said Agatha, danger to her nephew already pushed aside, "Theo and I have found this 'coffee shop' is breaking all sorts of laws. You haven't council permission for this. And it's in the bylaws that the library cannot be used as a place of trade for food and drink, nor has it pa.s.sed a hygiene inspection."

"Yet I see you're eating some of Betty Ball's uninspected scones," said Melrose.

"You've done Una Twinny no favor here," said Browne, trying to look concerned but only managing to look pleased as punch. "She'll no doubt be fired when her superiors hear of this."

"Over my dead body," chimed in Trueblood.

Agatha adjusted her seal collar and said, "Oh, well, we all know your penchant for peculiar arrangements, Mr. Trueblood. I'm not at all surprised."

Her surprise took a backseat to everyone else's when, suddenly, Vivian rushed through the door, looking wild and exclaiming, "Melrose!"

And, to everyone's astonishment (except Diane's, who was having to light her own cigarette), Vivian quite literally threw herself at Melrose after he'd risen to greet her. "Oh, heavens, oh, G.o.d, you could have been killed!" She stepped back, eyes wet, face mottled red, and shook him a little. "Why do you do these things!"

His fault, as usual.

"You!"

Ah, not his but Jury's fault.

One hand on her hip, Vivian was shaking a finger in Jury's face so instructively he reared back in his chair. "Why do you keep on involving him in your police business?"

Jury shrugged. "Because he's good."

That was, G.o.d only knew, no answer (though Melrose liked it), and, shuddering from the senseless danger of it all, Vivian fell into one of the chairs just vacated by three elderly women who seemed to find the goings-on next to them less than restful.

Melrose was delighted that he'd called up ungovernable emotion in Vivian. That she was bawling out Richard Jury was an unforeseen treat.

"Who was this-this person who very nearly shot you?"

"Oh, we went to school together donkey's years ago."

Vivian was up and pummeling him, then just as quickly sobered up and merely sat there blushing.

"I can tell you one thing about her," said Diane, ratcheting the flint of her silver cigarette lighter.

Five pairs of eyes swiveled in Diane's direction, waiting.

"That suit was a Chanel."

They all blinked, lost on the Demorney sea of inconsequence.

"No."

The five pairs of eyes swiveled round to regard Jury, who'd spoken.

"Max Mara."

Melrose thought he said it awfully sadly, as if Max, once among them, would never come again.

Read on for a preview of The Way of All Fish by Martha Grimes The sequel to her bestselling novel Foul Matter The Way of All Fish Coming January 2014 from Scribner Books

1.

They came in, hidden in coats, hats pulled over their eyes, two stubby hoods like refugees from a George Raft film, icy-eyed and tight-lipped. They opened their overcoats, swung up Uzis hanging from shoulder holsters, and sprayed the room back and forth in watery arcs. There were twenty or so customers who had been sitting in the cafe-several couples, two businessmen in pinstripes, a few solo diners-some now standing, some screaming, some crawling crablike beneath their tables.

Oddly, given all the cordite misting the air like cheap champagne, the customers didn't get shot; it was the owner's aquarium, situated between the bar and the dining area, that exploded. Big gla.s.s panels slid and slipped more like icebergs calving than gla.s.s breaking, the thirty- or forty-odd fish within pouring forth on their little tsunami of water and flopping around in the puddles on the floor. A third of them were clown fish.

All of that took four seconds.

In the next four seconds, Candy and Karl had their weapons drawn-Karl from his shoulder holster, Candy from his belt, Candy down on one knee, Karl standing. Gunfire was exchanged before the two George Rafts backed toward the door and, still firing, finally turned and hoofed it fast into the dark.

Candy and Karl stared at each other. "f.u.c.k was that?" exclaimed Candy, rising from his kneeling position.

They holstered their weapons as efficiently as if they'd drawn them like the cops they were not. They checked out the customers with their usual mercurial shrewdness, labeling them for future reference (if need be); a far table, the two suits with cells now clamped to their busy ears, calling 911 or their stockbrokers; an elderly couple, she weeping, he patting her, stood nearby; two tables shoved together that had been surrounded by a party of nuts probably from Brooklyn or Jersey, hyena-like in their braying laughter, had been sitting at two tables pulled together but now all still were under the table; a couple of other business-types with Bluetooth devices stationed over their ears talked to each other or their Tokyo counterparts. A blond woman or girl, sitting alone eating spaghetti and reading something, book or magazine; a dark-haired woman with a LeSportsac slung over the back of her chair, who'd been talking on her Droid all the while she ate; and a party of four on a girls' night out, though they'd never see girlhood again. Twenty tables, all in all, a few empty.

All of that ruin in less than a minute.

The Clown Fish Cafe was nothing special, a dark little place in a narrow street off Lexington Avenue, its cave like look the effect of bad lighting, rather than the owner's artistic flair. A few wall sconces were set in the stone walls, meant apparently to simulate a coral reef. Candles, squat and fat, seeming to begrudge the room their light, were set in little iron cages with wire mesh over their tops, flames hardly flickering, as if light were a treasure they refused to give up. They might as well have been at the bottom of the sea.

Now these brightly colored fish-clown fish, tangs, angelfish of neon blue and sun-bright yellow-were drawing last breaths on the floor until one of the customers, the blond girl or woman who had been eating spaghetti, tossed the remnants of red wine from her gla.s.s, scooped up water and added one of the fish to her winegla.s.s.

Seeing this, Candy grabbed up a water pitcher, dipped up what he could of water, and bullied a clownfish into the pitcher.

The other customers watched, liked it, and, with the camaraderie you see only in the face of life-threatening danger, were taking up their water gla.s.ses or flinging their winegla.s.ses free of the cheap house plonk and refilling them from water pitchers sitting at the waiters' stations. The waiters themselves ran about, unhelpfully; the bartender, though, catapulted over the bar with his bar hose to slosh water around the fish.

Wading through gla.s.s shards at some risk to their own skin, customers and staff collected the pulsing fish and dropped them in gla.s.ses and pitchers.

It was some sight when they finished.

On every table, an array of pitchers and gla.s.ses, one or two or three, tall or short, thin or thick, and in every gla.s.s swam a fish, its color brightened from beneath by a stubby candle that seemed at last to have found a purpose in life.

Even Frankie, the owner, was transfixed. Then he announced he had called the emergency aquarium people and that they were coming with a tank.

So who the f.u.c.k you think they were?" Karl said, as he and Candy made their way along the dark pavement of Lexington.

I'm betting Joey G-C hired those guys because he didn't like the way we were taking our time."

"As we made clear as angel's p.i.s.s to him that's the way we work. So those two spot Hess in there or they get the tip-off he's there and go in with f.u.c.king a.s.sault weapons, thinkin' he's at that table on the other side of the fish tank, and that's the reason they shoot up the tank?"

"Call him," said Candy.

Karl pulled out his cell, tapped a number from his list of contacts, and was immediately answered, as if Joey G-C expected a call.

"f.u.c.k's wrong with you, Joey? You hire us, then you send your two goons to pull off a job in the middle of a crowded restaurant? No cla.s.s, no style these guys got. Walk in with Uzis and fired around the room, you'd think they were blind. And did they get the mark? No, they did not; they just shot the place up, including a big aquarium the least you can do is pay for. Yeah . . . "