Chapter Thirty-Four

 

Josh Meadows sets the phone back down on the coffee table. Face up, so he can see when the call comes through even before the ringer picks up. Because he's waiting for a call, and it'll be coming through any minute now.

It's not illegal to poke through someone's private records, not exactly. See, there's private records and then there's private records.

Detectives do this kind of thing all the time. Private detectives, not police detectives. Not usually, anyways. With only one name, it's not easy to say which members of Al Queen's estate staff are ex-cons and which aren't.

Because of the one that Josh Meadows knows, exactly one is. If you extrapolate outwards, of the thirty or forty people who Josh saw, they're all convicts. Including himself, very possibly, because someone might look at him and see his relatively shabby clothes and mistake him for a servant when he wasn't.

No, you need a list to go through. Because wildly guessing gets you nowhere. A list isn't impossible to compile, but it is pretty difficult. It's doubly difficult if you're on suspension, with or without pay.

It's triply difficult when the person who you're poking around is Al Queen, who was mayor of this damn city for going on eight years, and now who's running for congress.

No, that's not the kind of person that someone on suspension generally pokes into the affairs of. Particularly not if that someone was suspended for punching Al Queen's kid so hard that he almost certainly had to get dental work done.

That wasn't the kind of digging that got done on its own. It wasn't even the kind of digging that got done if you knew which wheels to grease. It was the kind of digging that got done if you were particularly committed to digging and you didn't mind how dirty you had to get for it.

In this case, he got off fairly light, all told. He owed a few favors, but since when was that surprising? He always owed favors. And people always owed him favors. It was practically a reciprocal economy, at times.

That's how it goes. You ask someone to look into things for you, get some information, and you ask them not to tell the Captain, and the Captain definitely doesn't call you on your cell phone, knowing full well that you're suspended and you should be damn well happy that a suspension was all you got.

Which is why Josh took a second in answering the phone, even though he'd been waiting for a call while trying to scribble out a sixth draft of his apology speech. Because the Captain was definitely not supposed to call him.

He answers the phone anyways, though. Not answering wasn't ever an option. "Captain?"

"What the fuck are these stories I'm hearing about you, Meadows?"

Josh almost smiles. "Stories, sir?"

The voice on the other side of the line is angry. She's cute when she's angry, he has to admit. Not to her face, of course. Or to any of his coworkers. Or ever think about it. Because that's not the sort of thing that you ever bring up. Not ever.

"Don't you play dumb with me, you son of a bitch. You know exactly what I'm talking about, so don't you dare try to play any games with me."

"Games, sir?"

She hates that. It's better that way. Better for everyone, probably. But what's he supposed to do, just come right out and say what he's thinking? No way. She'd shoot it right down.

So Josh is going to keep playing dumb as long as he can manage it, in spite of the fact that the Captain will very likely blow a gasket if he keeps the act up much longer.

"I told you to go home, didn't I? I told you to keep whatever the fuck this personal vendetta was at home, too, didn't I? I told you to leave the Queen boy be. Didn't I?"

"You did, sir."

"And what did you do? Exactly what, precisely, did you do not three days later? Enlighten me."

"I followed up a lead, sir."

Josh can hear her breathing through the other end of the line. She's breathing like she's going to pop a blood vessel. "I'm going to let you have three minutes, and this had better be god damned good. You cannot possibly imagine the world of shit that you will be in if you don't impress the ever loving hell out of me."

Josh thinks that he probably can, actually.

"I've been digging a little."

"Yeah, I know," she says.

"Well, what got me started was, the description of the kidnappers, what description we got from Miss Witt, sounded a little familiar. Jeffries asked me, a while ago, to take a look at that robbery case that he's working on."

She doesn't say anything.

"So I was thinking, there's a good chance that it's one of the guys he's looking at. No problems there. But the similarity in the disguises, it struck me as odd. Both wearing dark, heavy clothes. Both wear ski masks, both cover their eyes so you can't even see the color of their damn skin under the mask."

"That's pretty circumstantial, Meadows."

"Well, I figure, it's a long shot. I've got a weird feeling about Queen, though. The younger one. He didn't seem that surprised when we told him about his daughter going missing, you know."

"I don't think being an asshole is enough to justify the sort of insinuations you're making, Meadows."

"If it turns out to be nothing, I don't make any insinuations at all. I just keep it all to myself, don't say anything, unless my darling Captain calls me up and asks me to explain the whole thing."

"Fine. We'll indulge your fantasy for a minute. Speaking of which, you've got ninety seconds by my watch."

"Okay. So let's say, just for the sake of argument, that he knew in advance. How likely you think it is that someone goes to the victim and warns them about what's coming? Not likely.

"So the information can't have gone in that direction. It could only have happened the other way around. Queen knows what's going to happen because he told someone else what was going to go down before it happened. In other words, he orders it.

"I know. Long shot. You don't need to tell me that. So, if we assume that—"

"Forty-five seconds."

"You'd want pros doing this kind of thing. Only, no real good leads for any of it. Anyone in the game doesn't want to admit it, not even to C.I.s, so either they know exactly how hot the information is—not unlikely—or they're not involved.

"We assume they're not involved, for the sake of discussion. But you still want pros, right? So you would want to go to someone you trust, and someone who knows their way around a job." Josh barely has time to breathe between the words, they're coming out so fast. But as the deadline ticks closer, he's getting to the point.

"Would you like to know how many of the grounds staff at Al Queen's mansion are ex-felons? What percentage?"

"Fine. What percentage? Five, four…"

"Eighty-five. Of the fifty-odd people working there, forty-two of them are felons. The rest are convicts, but non-violent stuff. Petty thefts, fraud, shit like that. Pretty much all walks of life. And who do you think they're loyal to? Al Queen, and by extension, his son—Mitchell Ellery Queen."

The Captain is quiet for a minute.

"So you've got a lot of circumstance, I'll grant you that. That's not remotely going to be enough to make those kinds of accusations in public, Detective. You know that."

"Which is why I'm poking around."

She's quiet another minute.

"This conversation never happened," she says. And then she hangs up, and, as if by magic, the conversation never happened.