Queens Ransom (Sofie Metropolis) (5 page)

Seven

Rather than call my grandfather back, I decided to drive over to his café, figuring I could kill two birds with one stone: not only would I find out what he wanted, I could get a good frappé.

I liked my coffee iced, but not solid ice.

Anyway, I needed to regroup. Rethink this case. And give a bit of attention to other agency business. It wasn’t like I was sitting on my hands when that Russian heavy had dragged me from my car. I had four compensation cases to investigate, three business-viability reports to complete, two background checks to follow up on, and a partridge in a pear tree . . . or, rather, a cheating-spouse case in which the spouse refused to cheat.

Right now, though, I was thankful for Grandpa Kosmos’ perfectionist tendencies as I crossed his clean sidewalk. A glance kitty-corner showed the area around my father’s restaurant had yet to be cleared, and it was almost eleven, nearly time for the lunchtime rush.

I opened the café door and gave a shivery sigh as heat hit me. Lucille seemed to have a hard time warming up in this frigid cold. Probably I should take her in to have her gauges checked. Or whatever it was they did to make sure cars ran properly.

Jake Porter instantly sprang to mind.

Was it really only a few months ago that he’d been tinkering with my Sheila? That I’d come out of my apartment to find his fine ass sticking out from under the hood of my car?

That I’d taken him for a long ride when he’d told me she’d needed to be run but good . . .?

That I had run him but good . . .?

‘What are you doing here?’

I blinked at my grandfather. Not only because I hadn’t seen him come up, but because that’s what I thought he wanted: me being there.

‘Mom told me you needed to see me.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘If you had listened to my message to you, left on that stupid mail voice or whatever it is, you would know I wanted you to call me.’

I blinked . . . slowly.

‘I don’t get it.’

The ever-present coffee klatch in the back shouted hellos and I greeted them back, all of them like uncles to me since I’d known them as long as my real ones, and most of them better since I’d spent half of my teen years as a waitress there, and the other half as a waitress at my father’s.

Grandpa Kosmos moved closer and lowered his voice although no one was near enough to hear. ‘The matter I have to discuss with you is better done . . . in private.’

Oh.

I wasn’t sure if I’d said the word aloud or not.

‘OK. So I’ll call you,’ I told him.

‘Good. Good.’

He walked away.

Hunh.

OK, as far as crazy family members went, Grandpa Kosmos rated among the sanest. In fact, I counted on him to be less zany than the rest of them. But this . . .

I shook my head and moved to the end of the counter, taking a stool and placing an order for a frappé. When it came, I sucked half of it down in one slurp.

Ah, yes. Much better.

Even Grandpa Kosmos’ odd request no longer seemed so odd. So he didn’t want anyone in here to know whatever business he had to discuss with me; nothing wrong with that.

I glanced at where he had rejoined his friends in the back, laughing as if nothing had just happened.

And nothing had.

Had it?

I dialed Rosie.

‘So was she there?’ she asked without saying hello.

‘Yeah.’

No response.

‘Pete come in this morning?’ Pete was my cousin, Uncle Spyros’ biological son from a previous marriage. Things hadn’t always been good between the two of us and there was a time not long ago that, when I saw Pete, it usually meant something was going to come up missing around the agency. Most often cash. And once out of my own purse. Which is when I finally put my foot down, no matter what absentee-father guilt Uncle Spyros felt.

My cousin could steal from my uncle all he wanted; take from me, and we had a problem.

That’s when I gave him a job.

I know, it’s probably never a good idea to hire someone who already had a reputation for stealing – especially from you – but I figured it might be a good way to nudge him in a direction other than the one he seemed intent on taking. So I put him to work painting and fixing up the offices. He’d grumbled and moaned. But he’d done a good job. And I paid him.

Then he went to work at he agency.

Speaking of the agency, still no response from Rosie on the other end of the line.

‘You still there?’ I asked.

‘Yeah. I’m waiting for a thank you.’

‘For a what?’ I sucked on the straw, draining the rest of the frappé. ‘Oh. Yeah. Thanks.’

She tsked. ‘You gotta work on those people skills.’

What people skills? I’d labored for years as a waitress. The extent of my people skills were ‘Ready to order?’, ‘Want fries with that?’, ‘Anything else?’, ‘Thank you’, and ‘Come again.’

Oh, and on occasion, ‘I’ll tell management’, when a customer complained, and, ‘I’m sorry’, when I spilled something, usually on the customer and usually very hot or very cold. Thankfully neither was a regular occurrence and mostly happened on purpose in the case of the latter.

When it came to revenge against a particularly annoying customer, some servers spit in their food. I chose to spill it on them.

‘Whatever.’ I used her favorite response in response to her. ‘Did Pete come in or not?’

‘Yeah. Put him back on the Kent case. He’s not happy.’

‘Tough. What else is going on?’

‘That INS agent called.’

‘CIS,’ I corrected. ‘Thanks. I’ll call you back in a few.’

I hung up on her irate response and immediately dialed the CIS agent, hoping he was still available.

Boggled the mind to think it had been three weeks since Dino was deported back to Greece without explanation . . . and that I still hadn’t been able to discover why. I was a PI, for God’s sake. Surely I could at least accomplish that, if not clear a path for him to return.

Putting aside my personal connection to him, he was an honest, hard-working citizen. He loved this country – sometimes I feared more than I did – and owned a bakery that was fast becoming Astoria’s most popular, which was saying a lot because the borough boasted some awesome bakeries.

And he was hot.

And brought me chocolate tortes.

And ate them off of me.

I bit on my straw, reminding myself I’d determined to put the personal connection aside.

Problem was, that connection was oh so good. Despite his recent favorite topic of conversation: all things commitment.

It wasn’t all that long ago that I’d nearly stood in front of an altar with somebody else. The future? Held no altars at all. Hell, the word altar was no longer a part of my vocabulary.

No matter how hot the sex.

The CIS agent picked up on the third ring. ‘Hunter.’

I snapped upright and tried to focus. ‘Hi, Agent Hunter. Sofie Metropolis here.’

‘Ah, yes. Hello, Sofie. Please, call me David.’

I sat for a moment squinting at the air in front of me.

Not for the first time, I wondered if I knew him from somewhere. He was maybe five years older than me and I was sure we hadn’t, but the almost . . . too friendly way he spoke to me left me thinking some kind of groundwork must have been laid. Because I certainly hadn’t been friendly. If anything, I’d been rude, looking for answers that seemed to be very hard in coming.

Don’t get me wrong. David Hunter was good looking. No, he was hot. At around six foot three, with dark red hair and the bluest of blue eyes, he looked more Wall Street than CIS material. And he had a grin that . . .

I blinked. Was I really inviting romantic thoughts of another man when I already had my hands full of a mess caused by two others? Never mind that just a moment ago I was revisiting the chocolate torte experience.

‘Thanks for getting back to me so fast,’ he said. ‘I got some information on Dino Antonopolous’ case.’

‘Good,’ I said, proud I didn’t say what I wanted to, which was, ‘It’s about time.’

‘I was hoping we could meet for lunch to discuss it.’

I squinted harder.

Lunch?

Since when did CIS agents invite anyone out to lunch to discuss a case?

‘Sure,’ I found myself saying, and then also found myself squinting at myself.

OK, this was getting weird.

‘Great. How about Stamatis at noon?’

‘Twelve thirty. And which one?’

‘The original one. Date.’

He hung up after saying he’d see me then. I wasn’t sure I responded. Probably because my eyes had closed altogether at his choice of words.

Had I really just scheduled a date in the middle of everything going on?

No. I was meeting with the CIS agent who would finally tell me why Dino had been deported.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

I ordered another frappé, took my notes out and then stared through the front windows at Broadway beyond.

Weird. Just plain weird.

I paid for the second frappé and slowly sipped, thinking about Sara Canton in that dingy apartment, her gun-happy brother casually pointing his shotgun in my direction. I checked my notes. A late-model BMW was spotted picking up little Jolie from school . . . a car so similar to the one driven by the nanny it hadn’t been given a second glance. Until the nanny arrived late at the school after encountering not one but two flat tires to find the girl had already been taken.

I absent-mindedly scratched the back of my neck, thinking again of that apartment and of the rental house I visited the night before. Yes, while I’m certain you can rent such high-end vehicles, I could only imagine what the cost was. And the flat tires indicated there were at least two involved. Or one very fast worker.

Sara and her brother were two. But did they have the resources to rent a BMW?

And if they did, where had the girl been while they were at the apartment?

I was pretty sure she hadn’t been in there with them. Sara would never have let me if she had. And her brother would never have let me out.

I considered the street outside again, watching as a dark Crown Vic cruised slowly by outside the cafe.

It caught me up short.

Nah . . . It couldn’t possibly be . . .

I shook my head and then looked down at my notes, figuring I had a good two hours before my, um, date.

‘So sad about little Miss Jolie,’ the Hispanic nanny said to me a while later at Abramopoulos’ apartment in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where the towering residential buildings had a hard time keeping up with the modern-day titans who’d built and lived in them.

I’d already inspected the underground garage and possible access points to get an idea how two of Abramopoulos’ nanny’s tires had been tampered with. The place was more secure than Kennedy airport. OK, maybe I was exaggerating a little, but not much. You needed key-card access at two points, both with three security cameras pointed at the driver and any passengers’ direction following any and all movement, along with two two-man security details, one between gates, the other inside the garage itself.

Yes, while one flat tire could have been a coincidence – a huge one considering what happened that day – two of them? Definite wrongdoing.

I wasn’t entirely sure what I hoped to find out about the nanny and what she might or might not know. What I was really after was a good look inside Abramopoulos’ private quarters. I was more than a little surprised when I was given instant access. I figured Abramopoulos’ guys had already questioned everyone immediately involved and would have blocked my and the others’ access to them.

Of course, I hadn’t exactly contacted anyone and asked for permission. I’d called the house directly, asked for the nanny and gotten her.

The sixtyish Latina looked nothing like how I imagined she might. Weren’t nannies typically college-aged English exchange students with cool accents, large breasts and double-zero-sized wardrobes? The Argentinean-born Mrs Garcia looked more like a housekeeper with questionable resident status than a nanny. Then again, she could be pulling double duty. If that was the case, I hoped she was getting paid double for it. Although I doubted it.

The apartment itself was as amazing as I expected, the penthouse spanning at least two very large floors in a building named after the owner and built to order. While there wasn’t anything ostentatious like gold leaf covering the ceiling as The Donald had (Eugene Waters talked about it often . . . along with his latest plan to get inside so he could chisel it off and sell it), everything was very expensive and very uncomfortable looking. And there wasn’t a TV on display anywhere, although I knew there was probably a button somewhere that would open a full wall to reveal ten of them.

Give me an overstuffed couch, the remote to one workable television, takeout from my favorite
souvlaki
stand and a
Seinfeld
DVD and I was a happy camper.

Of course, outside professionally shot and framed photos on a large fireplace mantle decorated for the holidays, there was no evidence a seven-year-old girl lived there.

Probably she had her own private wing.

The difference between this place and the apartment I found Sara in earlier contrasted so profoundly my brain was almost incapable of the comparison.

Had she lived here? Had she been the woman of the house being waited on hand and foot? Morning brunches with the girls and afternoon spa appointments, with nights out at Lincoln Center and the opera?

I couldn’t even imagine the woman I’d seen earlier gaining access to this apartment, much less living there.

Then again, I’d gotten in.

While I hated to admit it, just being there cast Sara in a darker light. How did you go from this . . . to that? And what would you do to recapture even a bit of it?

Then again, Abramopoulos himself wasn’t looking too good either. What kind of man did something like that to the mother of his child? I’m thinking it would have been less cruel to throw her from the thirty-story window.

The nanny surprised me by leaning in closer where we were sitting together on a red-velvet sofa in the main salon and whispered, ‘I read about you in the paper a couple weeks ago. That story about those women . . . all that blood.’ She gave a visible shiver. ‘So glad you caught the monster who did all that bad stuff.’