Untitled (16 page)

   "So someone had to be buying her all those fancy things: the expensive cocktail dress and the apartment and the collar and the rest of it."

   "Or giving her the money to buy those things herself. Look. Here." I pointed at another set of numbers. "A deposit. Once a month. Nine thousand nine hundred dollars. Just enough to squeak under the radar."

   "From who?"

   Did I care that Eve's grammar was off? At a time like this,
who
and
whom we
ren't nearly as important as
why
and
how were we ever going to find out.

   I checked the report again. "Cash deposits," I told Eve. "Every one of them. No way to trace where they came from."

   Eve checked her watch. It was time to get Doc, and I knew she wouldn't wait an extra minute. She opened the car door and got out, leaning down to look at me right before she closed the door. "All this means we're at another dead end, right?"

   She didn't wait for me to answer, and it was just as well. At that particular moment, I didn't have an answer.

   By the time Eve came back with Doc in the carrier, though, I was feeling a little more sure of myself. I waited for her to stow Doc in the backseat and slide behind the wheel. I noticed he had a new collar, and I suspected it came from the extravaganza of doggy attire elegantly displayed across from the receptionist's desk. More sparkles, but this time, I could breathe easy. I knew they weren't real.

   "It does tell us something," I said and caught Eve up on

my thought processes. "I mean, the cash payments to Sarah every month. They tell us that someone was supporting her. Pretty lavishly, too. Did anyone we talked to at the funeral luncheon mention anything like that?"

   Eve shook her head. "I'd remember that for sure. Some of her coworkers complained about the quality of Sarah's work. And some people, like Senator Mercy, talked about her like she was Mother Teresa with a Coach bag and an MBA. But nobody mentioned a boyfriend."

   "Nobody had to mention Dylan. He was right there."

   We drove along in silence, each of us considering the implications of what I'd said.

   "Dylan was in Afghanistan the day Sarah died." I knew this, of course, but I let Eve go right on talking. Hearing it helped solidify everything we'd discovered. "He didn't get back until the day before the funeral. Isn't that what he told you at the luncheon? There's no way he could have killed her. And besides, he said they broke up, remember. He dumped her. So why would he be mad enough to kill her?"

   "Unless the reason he dumped her was why he was mad in the first place."

   We went back and forth like this all the way to Eve's apartment, where she left Doc in the care of the dog walker. We were both on the Bellywasher's schedule that night, and though I would have preferred a night at home in front of mindless DVDs, I knew it was just as well. If the crowds the night before were any indication, it was going to be a mob scene at the restaurant that night.

   And that, I reminded myself, was a very good thing.

          Something told me those weren't the first words Jim expected to hear come out of my mouth. He was behind the bar checking out our liquor inventory, and he looked at me from between the bottle of tequila he held in one hand and the fifth of vodka he balanced in the other.

   "Tequila and vodka? Of course, they're bad together." He set the bottles down. "Don't worry, I'm not developing some crazy new drink."

   "I'm not talking about drinks. I'm talking about that."

   My eyes remained fixed on the object that had attracted my attention the moment I walked into the restaurant.

   Granny's picture. The one of the Scottish cottage. In all its glory.

   It was hanging on the wall behind the bar.

   "Oh, that!" Jim had the kind of grin that was infectious. Unless the person who should have been infected was too busy being horrified.

   Which I was.

   Horrified.

   "I hung it this afternoon," Jim said, his smile wider than ever. "As a sort of celebration. You know, in honor of the good review."

   "Isn't the review what you're supposed to hang?"

   "Oh, did that, as well." Jim motioned over to the copy of Michael O'Keefe's review that had been cut out of the latest copy of
DC Nights
, framed, and hung on the wall near the door. "People will notice the review when they come in, and that's all well and good. But this . . ." He turned around and looked at Granny's picture, and I swear, his face glowed. "A few of the regulars were in this afternoon," he said. "You know, Larry, Hank, Charlie, and the rest of them. They were thrilled to see the picture. Says it shows we're a restaurant with heart."

   
Whatever.
Big points for me. I thought it, but I didn't say it.

   What good would it have done me, anyway? There was nothing I could say that didn't start with
Are you nuts?
and end with
Get that thing off the wall before someone notices
.

   Who was it that said discretion was the better part of valor? I'm not exactly sure it applied in this situation, but I understood exactly what it meant. Rather than point out the obvious and risk hurting Jim's feelings and defiling the sacred memory of Granny, I headed into my office and closed the door. It was nearly dinnertime, and with any luck, in another few minutes, I'd hear the sounds of the crowds gathering. With just a little more luck, maybe our high-flying customers wouldn't notice the picture.

   I shuffled through the charge receipts that had accumulated since the day before, but I didn't fill out the bank deposit as usual. I couldn't concentrate. Every time I tried, I got sidetracked by thoughts of Sarah's bank transactions.

   The monthly cash payments she'd deposited into her account had started four months before, about the same time, so we heard, that Dylan had broken up with Sarah. Who had given her nearly ten thousand dollars in cash each month? And why?

   Something told me that when we discovered that information, we'd be a lot further along with trying to figure out what had really happened to her.

   I was thinking just that when my office door popped open, and Eve scampered in.

   "Look!" She was holding a newspaper, and she waved it in the air. "This proves it. It proves everything, Annie. It's just like I said."

   
What w
as exactly like she said was a little hard to determine. At least until I was able to snatch the newspaper out of her hands. She had the page folded in half, then folded again. Looking up at me was a picture of Ivan Gystanovich, or at least that's what the caption below the picture said the fellow's name was. He was a heavyset guy in his sixties, with a wide nose and eyes that were too small for his face. The photographer had captured him just as he brought both his hands up to his chest, and the pose emphasized the sheer physical power of the man. He had hands like hams and fingers as fat as pork sausages. The line of print below his name said Gystanovich was the head of the Russian Mafia in northern Virginia.

   "See?" Eve stabbed a bright pink fingernail into Gystanovich's stomach. "It's just like I said."

   "Just like you said . . . what?"

   Eve heaved a monumental sigh. She plucked the newspaper out of my hands. "Don't you see the resemblance?" She held the newspaper in front of my nose. "Come on, Annie, who does this guy look like?"

   Considering the picture was close enough for me to see two Gystanovichs, it was a little hard to say.

   I inched my chair back. "Jabba the Hutt?"

   Eve rolled her eyes.

   "Bad Santa minus the beard?"

   She made a face.

   "OK, OK." Whatever she was up to, she was taking it seriously, and I owed it to her to at least not make fun of her. I wiped the smile off my face. "He looks like . . ."

   I tried. Honest. For a couple whole minutes. But even though I thought and thought and thought some more, it didn't help. I threw my hands in the air.

   "Honestly, Eve, I don't have a clue what you're getting at."

   "Gregor! The linen guy." Eve tapped her finger against Gystanovich's nose. "Admit it, Annie, they could practically be twins."

   "Sure, except that Gystanovich is about forty years older than Gregor, twice as fat, and has half as much hair."

   "Which doesn't mean they're not related."

   "And even if it's true, it doesn't mean a thing!" I was tired of looking at Ivan Gystanovich up close and personal, and I popped out of my desk chair. "We've been through all this before," I reminded Eve. "You're suspicious of the linen guy for no reason. He hasn't done a thing."

   "He hasn't done a thing that we know about yet." Eve thought she was correcting me. She didn't realize that I wasn't listening. "OK, we have talked about it," she admitted. "But we owe it to ourselves to go through it all again. We owe it to Sarah. Isn't that what real detectives do?"

   Good thing Heidi tapped on the door to let Eve know that there were customers waiting to be seated. It saved me from mentioning that, though I agreed with Eve about what real detectives do, and though I was all for the bit about how we owed it to Sarah, I wasn't so sure one had anything to do with another.

   "We're not real detectives," I mumbled to myself. Once Eve was gone, of course. I spun my chair away from the door, dropped into it, and turned back to the charge receipts. I dragged my calculator closer, but even as I did, I recognized that I was wasting my time. With a sigh, I shoved aside the receipts and took out the copies of Sarah's bank transactions that I had tucked in my top desk drawer.

   "We're not real detectives," I reminded myself again right before I went back over the information, line by line, and wondered what we were looking at but not seeing.

       times watched on TV, I know exactly what would have happened next. With a shout of "Aha" I would have jumped out of my chair and hurried into the restaurant to tell Eve that I'd figured the whole thing out.

   But this wasn't TV.

   And I didn't see anything different than I'd seen before.

   Lines of deposits. Some of them obviously paychecks, others that tantalizing nine thousand plus. But no matter which way I looked at them or how I tried to spin the information, none of it made any more sense the second time through than it had back at the bank.

   By the time ten o'clock rolled around and the crowds out in the dining room had thinned, I was no further along in figuring out how we could find out where Sarah got her money.

   Dead end.

   The words echoed through my head, taunting me.

   If this was TV, something spectacular would happen and lead us in a new direction.

   I sat back in my chair and waited.

   Nothing spectacular happened.

   In fact, nothing happened at all.

   With a sigh, I dragged myself out into the restaurant. The bulk of the Saturday night crowd was gone, but there were still four tables filled with diners. Jim moved smoothly between them. I heard the low burr of his voice as he explained the difference between Shiraz and Cabernet to a lady with big hair and a too-white smile. There were people seated at the bar, too, but I saw right away that none of them were Larry, Hank, or Charlie. Not unless they'd gotten a big dose of fashion sense. Where once our barstools were filled with guys in camouflage jackets, now Brooks Brothers reigned.

   Provided I didn't look at Granny's picture, it was enough to make me smile. I was still smiling when I turned and realized that one of our tables was occupied by a man in a very bad blond wig and a phony-looking mustache.

   "Good evening, Monsieur Lavoie." I smiled and waved. I had to give Lavoie credit—with a good-natured and very Gallic shrug, he stripped off the mustache and raised his wineglass in my direction.

   "Annie!" Eve poked her head out of the swinging kitchen door. In keeping with our new, upscale ambiance, she kept her voice down. "Psst! Annie, get in here."

   I hurried into the kitchen.

   There was a TV in one corner, and I knew when Marc and Damien weren't busy, they sometimes watched professional wrestling, NASCAR, or that show that follows the lives of the tattoo parlor workers. Jim knew this, too, but as long as the food was cooked right and came out hot and on time, he was cool with it. That night, there were no muscle-bound cretins whopping on each other, no cars speeding around the track. The picture Eve pointed to showed none other than Dylan Monroe, looking like a million bucks in a three-piece suit and a red silk tie. It was time for the local news, and obvious at first glance that this was a promo for that special report Dylan had told us about.

   "
A Soldier's Life
airs tomorrow at six," Dylan said. "Join me. I promise you, you'll have a new appreciation for the men and women in our armed services." Patriotic-sounding music rose in the background. The camera panned out. When it did, I realized for the first time that Dylan was standing in front of the Pentagon. In the background, a group of workers from the utilities department was busy with a street repair. Their bright yellow jackets were reflected in what looked to be a couple inches of water that filled the street from one curb to the other.

   "See that!" Eve pointed at the water. "I noticed it when the commercial started. That's what I wanted you to see."

   "The water main leak. Near the Pentagon." I tipped my head, thinking through what we'd just seen. "Hasn't that been repaired?"

   "Sure has." Damien chimed in. "I got to come through that way every single day. Believe me, I'd know if it was still a problem. Had traffic tied up for friggin' ever for a couple nights."