The Stargazey (45 page)

Diane regarded him as she might have an alien. “Dick, 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.

Nobody answered as they all got up.

“But it's Sunday!”

Nobody 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 passed 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, God, 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, God 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

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 café—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 glass panels slid and slipped more like icebergs calving than glass 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. “Fuck 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 Café 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 glass, scooped up water and added one of the fish to her wineglass.

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 glasses or flinging their wineglasses 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 glass shards at some risk to their own skin, customers and staff collected the pulsing fish and dropped them in glasses and pitchers.

It was some sight when they finished.

On every table, an array of pitchers and glasses, one or two or three, tall or short, thin or thick, and in every glass 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 fuck 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 piss 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 fucking assault 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.

“Fuck'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 class, 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 . . . ”

Candy was elbowing him in the ribs, saying, “Tell him all the fish suffocated and died.”

“And there was all these endangered fish flopping on the floor, some of them you could say were nearly extinct, like you will be, Joey, you pull this shit on us again. Yeah. The job'll get done when the job gets done. Goodbye.” Karl stowed his cell in his inside coat pocket.

“We saw Hess leave through the side door. You'd think he knew they were coming.”

“Jesus, I'm tellin' you, C, the book business is like rolling around fuckin' Afghanistan on skateboards. You could get killed.”

“You got that right.”

They walked on, Karl clapping Candy on the shoulder, jostling the water pitcher as they walked along the street. “Good thinking, C.I got to hand it to you, you got everyone in the place rushing to save the fish.”

The water was sliding down Candy's Hugo Boss–jacketed-arm. “Don't give me the credit; it was that blond dame, that girl, who did that. She was the first one to ditch her wine. You see her?”

“The blonde? I guess. What'd she look like?”

Candy shrugged; a little wave of water spilled onto Lexington. “I couldn't see her face good. She had a barrette in her hair. Funny.”

“You didn't see her face but you saw a hair barrette?” Karl laughed. “Crazy, man.”

They walked on.

 • • • 

There are those girls with golden hair you half-notice in a crowd. You see one in the outer edges of your vision amid the people flooding toward you along Lex or Park or Seventh Avenues, blond head, uncovered, weaving through the dark ones, the caps and hats, your eye catching the blondness, but registering nothing else. Then you find when she's passed it's too late.

A girl you wish you'd paid attention to: a girl you wish you'd paid attention to.

A girl you knew you should have seen head-on, not disappearing around a corner.

Such a girl was Cindy Sella.

 • • • 

Some of them would talk about it later, and for a long time. The businessmen climbing into a cab, the girl with the LeSportsac, her Droid lost inside it.

As if there'd been an eclipse of Apple, a sundering of Microsoft, a sirocco of swirling iPhones, Blackberrys, Thunderbolts, Gravities, Galaxies and all the other smartphones into the sweet hereafter; yes, as if all that had never been, nobody, nobody reached for his cell once the fish were saved and swimming. They were too taken up with watching the fish swimming, dizzy-like, in the wineglasses.

Nobody had e-mailed or texted.

Nobody had sent a tweet to Twitter.

Nobody had posted on Facebook.

Nobody had taken a picture.

They were shipwrecked on the shores of their own poor powers of description, a few of them actually getting out old diaries and writing the incident down.

Yes, they talked about that incident in the Clown Fish Café the night they hadn't gotten shot, told their friends, coworkers, pastors, and waiters at their clubs, not to mention their partners, wives, husbands, and their kids.

Their kids.

Way cool. So where's the photos?

Remarkably, nobody took one.

Wow. Neanderthal.

But see, there were these neon-bright blue and orange and green and yellow fish, see, that we all scooped up and dropped in water glasses, and, just imagine, imagine those colors, the water, the candlelight. Look, you can see it. . . .

But the seer, seeing nothing, walked away.

ALSO BY MARTHA GRIMES

The Man with a Load of Mischief