Step on a Crack (11 page)

I CHECKED IN with Paul Martelli on my cell as I pulled out from the hospital.

“Still nothing,” he told me. “Take your time. The hijackers are sitting tight. I’ve got your cell number.”

“Ned Mason still there?” I asked.

“He’s around here somewhere. We have you covered, Mike.”

I followed Martelli’s advice. I made a U-turn and then a left onto 66th Street, heading west to give a quick check on my kids.

It had started snowing lightly when I was in the hospital with Maeve, and the dusting on the brownstone walls and tunnels of the Central Park traverse I passed through looked like soft shakes of confectioners’ sugar on gingerbread.

This damn city, I thought, shaking my head, was determined to break my heart into a million pieces with its incessant Currier amp; Ives holiday season quaintness.

Where was a good mugging-in-progress when you needed one?

When I flicked on the FM radio under the police one, the song “Silver Bells” was playing. I was dangerously close to emptying my Glock into the dashboard when the soft, dulcet “Ring-a-ling, hear them ring” stanza began.

“Highway to Hell” by AC/DC was just starting when I violently flicked to the nearest rock station. That was more like it. My new theme song! I cranked the volume as high as it would go for the rest of the ride home.

I could hear my kids through my closed apartment door when I stepped off the elevator into the vestibule. Never a good sign, I thought as I turned the knob.

In the foyer, Juliana was sitting on the floor with her back to me, giggling into the phone. I patted her on the head lovingly before I disconnected the cord from the hall jack.

“Bed,” I said.

My second stop was the girls’ room, where a Mercedes Freer song was blasting. With her back to me, Jane was leading Chrissy and Shawna in an inspired dance routine. Though I could have scooped up the lot of them in a bear hug they were so cute, I vaguely remembered Maeve’s dictum on the inappropriateness of Mercedes Freer.

Three crystal-shattering shrieks sounded when I flicked off the radio, followed by an explosion of giggles and blushing when the girls realized I had been watching them dance.

“Well, well. I didn’t know Mercedes Freer was having a concert here at our house. I’m sure the Underhills next door are quite pleased. I take it you all forgot to get your chores done as well?”

Jane looked cross for a moment, as if she was about to counter with some excuse, but then dropped her head.

“Sorry, Dad,” she said.

“Now that was the right answer, Jane,” I said. “No wonder you get such good grades. Come along. Looks like I have a few more arrests to make.”

Next stop was the living room, where Ricky, Eddie, and Trent were beached out in front of the blaring TV. They were watching the nonstop news coverage of the church takeover on CNN. The network already had its slogan in place-“Cathedral Countdown.” Again, I distinctly remembered that the channels allowed were restricted to ESPN, Food Network, occasionally TLC and Cartoon Network, and public television.

The three of them almost hit the ceiling when I hopped over the sectional and landed in their midst.

“Gathering research for a current events project, are we?” I said.

“We saw you!” Trent screamed after taking his hands away from his face. “On the TV! It’s on every station.”

“You’re still busted,” I yelled back at him.

Brian, my eldest son, was so into his MLB game on his computer in his room, he didn’t hear me enter. The ninja holds nothing on the father scorned. I flicked off the tower of his Dell as Barry Bonds was in mid-grand slam swing.

“Hey!” he said angrily as he looked up. “Dad? Dad!” he said.

“Brian?” I said back. “Brian!”

“I was… uh,” he tried.

“About to throw yourself on the mercy of the court?” I said.

“Sorry, Dad. I’ll start my chores,” Brian said, “
forthwith
.”

I almost knocked down Mary Catherine when I stepped back into the hall.

“Mr. Bennett. Mike, I mean. I’m so sorry,” she said frantically. “I was trying to get them into bed when Bridget needed my help. She told me…”

“Let me guess,” I said. “She had an arts-and-crafts project due for school.”

“How’d you know?”

“Okay, I forgot to tell you,” I said. “Bridget is clinically addicted to arts and crafts. We’ve been trying to wean her off glue, sparkles, and beads for years now, but nothing seems to work. If you let her, she will destroy the earth in her unquenchable desire to make key chains and ankle bracelets and wall hangings. I’ve gone to work with sparkles on my face and clothes from her confounded glitter paint so many times, the guys in my squad thought I was in a glam band. She knows you’re new, so she took advantage. Arts and crafts are
severely
restricted to weekends.”

“I didn’t know,” Mary Catherine said sadly. “I should have done a better job.”

“Good God,” I said. “You’re still alive and still here? You should try out for the Navy SEALs.”

AFTER I RELIEVED Mary Catherine of command and ordered her upstairs to bed, I found a priest in my kitchen.

The squat white-haired man in black was holding a steaming iron ready as my seven-year-old Bridget put the finishing touches on a pink-and-white plastic-bead pony that covered the entire top of our kitchen island.

“Well, if it isn’t
Father Shame-less
, I mean,
Seamus
,” I said.

Nope, it wasn’t Halloween. My grandfather Seamus was a
priest
. After Seamus’s wife died, he decided to sell the Hell’s Kitchen gin mill he’d owned for thirty years and become a man of the cloth. Lucky for him, vocations to the priesthood were at an all-time low, so he was accepted. “Gone straight from hell to heaven,” as he liked to say.

He now lived in the Holy Name rectory around the block, and if he wasn’t attending to parish business-which he was very good at-he was sticking his nose into mine. Because Seamus wasn’t content to merely spoil my children. If he wasn’t actually devilishly encouraging mischief, priest or not, he felt he was slacking off.

Even Bridget’s freckles seemed to drain of their color when she saw me standing there.

“
Goodnightdadgoingtobediloveyou
,” she somehow managed to get out before sliding off the stool she was kneeling on and disappearing. Fiona, holding Socky under her arms, shot out from the other side of the island and managed to exit a step behind her twin.

“Having a senior moment, Monsignor? Forget how to read a clock? Or did you forget it’s a school night?”

“Did you not take a look at this fine steed here?” Seamus said, passing the iron back and forth over the plastic to melt the collection of beads together. It was nearly the size of a real horse. Too bad there wasn’t a barn in the apartment to keep it in.

“That girl is pure artist,” Seamus said. “And like they say, it takes more than books to inspire creativity.”

“Thanks for that little nugget of wisdom there, Seamus, but if these kids don’t get their sleep and stick to their schedules, we’re all doomed.”

Seamus unplugged the iron, propped it up on the butcher block loudly, and squinted at me. “If that’s the case, why bring someone new into the house now?” he said. “That Mary Catherine tells me she’s from Tipperary. There’s a queer breed come from Tipperary. All the wind off the North Atlantic isn’t good for the mind. If you ask me, I don’t like the looks of her or the situation. Young, single woman in a house with a married man.”

That was it. I snapped. I snatched up the plastic pony. Seamus ducked as I Frisbeed it across the kitchen and knocked the chore chart off the fridge.

“Where do you want me to file your concern, Gramps?” I yelled. “To my wife on her deathbed, or maybe to the thirty-three celebrities in St. Paddy’s with guns to their heads?”

Seamus came around the kitchen island and put his hand on my shoulder.

“I just thought I was the one who was going to help you,” he said in one of the most tired voices I had ever heard him use.

I understood now. Why he was being such a pain in the butt about Mary Catherine. He thought he was being replaced, pushed out of our family picture.

“Seamus,” I said, “if I had a staff of twenty, I would still need your help. You know that. There’ll always be a place for you here. I need you to help us by helping Mary Catherine. You think you could do that?”

Seamus’s mouth pursed as he thought about it.

“I’ll try,” he said with a melodramatic, agonized exhalation.

I stepped across the kitchen and picked up the chore chart. When I lifted the plastic pony, I noticed that it was missing its tail.

“Plug that iron back in, Seamus, would you?” I said, bringing it quickly back over to the kitchen island. “If we don’t get this thing fixed, Bridget will kill both of us.”

WHEN I ARRIVED back at the bedlam scene in front of St. Patrick’s, I saw that two FBI Hostage Rescue Team trailers had been parked next to the NYPD one. With all the mobile command buses, the staging area was starting to look like a huge tailgating party.

A party in the parking lot of hell, maybe.

I checked in with my boss, Commander Will Matthews, and then with the other negotiators. Still no new word had come back from the gunmen inside. Nothing new from Jack.

So I poured myself what could have been my twentieth cup of coffee that day and sat.

I hated this part, the waiting, the feeling of powerlessness. It was one of the reasons why I’d transferred out of the Hostage Negotiation Team. In Homicide, there was never a second when there weren’t a hundred things you could do, never a lack of angles to work a case, always countless outlets to pour your persistence and neuroses into.

I sat up suddenly in my swivel chair. There actually was one thing I could do to get me away from the oppressive face of the clock, and it could possibly help us.

I found Commander Will Matthews sitting in the rear of the bus with a glass of fizzing water in one hand. “Hey, boss,” I said. “Remember what I said about Caroline Hopkins? My hunch about her so-called accident? L’Arène, that restaurant where it happened, is three blocks away. I was thinking of swinging by to talk to the kitchen staff.”

Will Matthews rubbed his eyes and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Take twenty minutes to see what you can dig up if it makes you happy. Then get your butt back here.”

I patted my pocket. “I have my cell. And a backup.”

The recent tragedy there, and the siege up the street, must have spoiled the appetites of New York ’s rich and famous because L’Arène looked empty when I jogged in off Madison Avenue. The marble stairs I climbed in the vestibule were draped with a red, white, and blue carpet that seemed more French than American. On either side of the stairs, sumptuous pyramids of lemons and apples sat on top of antique champagne boxes.

Maybe on some other night, the elegance of the setting might not have been so off-putting. And if I hadn’t been grinding so hard in the last few hours, the arrogance that seemed to pulse from the tall, tuxedoed maître d’ posted beyond the inner door wouldn’t have filled me with such anger.

The dark, curly-haired Frenchman looked like he’d just eaten a bad snail when he spotted me in front of his library dictionary-size reservation book.

“The kitchen is
closed
,” he spat, and returned to writing notes in his book.

I closed the tome for him and put my badge on top of it. I savored the shock on his face.

“No,” I said. “Actually it’s not.”

When I told him I was there to investigate the First Lady’s accident, the maître d’ instantly handed me a business card.

“Gilbert, DeWitt and Raby represent us in all legal matters. You will refer your inquiries to them.”

“Wow, that’s really helpful,” I said as I immediately dealt the card back past the sharp tip of the maître d’s long nose.

“But I’m not from the insurance company, I’m from the Homicide squad. Now I can either talk to you and your kitchen staff here, informally, or call my boss and we can go the formal route.

“If we go by the book, everyone will have to be brought down to the station house, and of course, you’ll make sure each and every staff member has all his proper immigration papers available for identification purposes. You know, now that I think about it, there was a request from the Justice Department to play a part in this case. You know, the FBI, the IRS? You do have L’Arène’s tax receipts from the last five years? And, it goes without saying, your own personal ones?”

The maître d’s expression underwent an almost instantaneous transformation. It was amazing how warm a smile he’d been able to hide behind his Gallic scowl.

“I am Henri,” he said with a bow. “Pray, tell me. How can I assist you, Detective?”

AFTER I TOLD HIM I needed to interview the kitchen staff,
mon ami
Henri promptly led me through a set of swinging Tiffany blue doors and translated my question for the chef.

The chef looked like Henri’s shorter and pudgier older brother. He seemed affronted by the questions. He’d personally fixed the First Lady’s meal, and there was no way, he said angrily, that he had put any peanuts in her foie gras.

The only explanation he could fathom was that a foolish prep cook had spilled peanut oil on the dish during the controlled chaos of a busy night, but even that seemed patently absurd to him. The chef then said something in heated French before sweeping a couple of pots off the stainless-steel counter and storming off. I caught the word
American
, and thought I heard the word
Snickers
.

“What was that last part?” I said to Henri.

Henri blushed.

“The master chef suggested perhaps that the First Lady snacked on a… candy bar before her meal arrived.”

So much for repairing French and American relations tonight, I thought.

“Has there been any turnover in the staff since the night she was here?” I said.

Henri tapped a long finger against his bloodless lips.

“Yes,” the maître d’ said. “Now that I think of it. One of the prep cooks, Pablo, I believe was his name, stopped showing up for work a day or so after the terrible accident.”

“Any last name on Pablo? An address? Off his employment application perhaps?”

Henri squinted as a pained, sorrowful, almost penitent expression crossed his features.

“It was like you were saying before about
formal
and
informal
. Pablo was more of an informal hire. We have no application per se,” he said. “His leaving was not even a real concern. Our turnover rate for prep staff, like in most restaurants, is quite high.”

“I’ll bet,” I said.

“Wait,” Henri said. “I believe he left some things in his locker. Would you like to come down and take a look?”

I did, and downstairs in Pablo’s old locker, I discovered two items.

A pair of dirty sneakers and a crumpled Metro North Hudson line train schedule.

The case of the dirty sneakers,
I thought. Encyclopedia Brown would have been impressed.

Yet another dead end, or so it seemed at that moment anyway.

I stuffed the kitchen helper’s things into an empty Duane Reade bag I found under the locker. Maybe we could ID Pablo from prints. If he wasn’t already back in Central America.

It was a pretty sad lead, I realized, but better a sad one than none at all.

“Do you have a clue?” Henri asked excitedly, and I lifted the bag of “evidence.”

I slammed the locker with a resounding bang.

“Very rarely, Hank,” I said.