A Taste of the Nightlife (5 page)

Okay, I do get to watch
some
TV.

What I got instead was three white guys in rumpled suits, one of whom was the shortest, broadest man I’d ever seen. They stood around the body while cops in uniforms blocked off the street outside and wrapped yellow tape around everything they could find. Other guys set up enough lights for a
Vogue
photo shoot and proceeded to take pictures with all kinds of cameras, none of which had flashbulbs and some of which I’m not sure were actually cameras. They kicked at the fresh produce I’d been so happy about just a few short hours ago but now had to watch slowly wilting on the floor.

The ambulance, when it came, didn’t even have its lights on. Two attendants in blue jackets rolled a gurney in, confirmed that this was in fact a dead body, and packed it into a zippered black bag with an efficiency that was actually kind of disturbing. When the body was loaded, the ambulance took off at a leisurely pace through the morning rush-hour traffic.

The three suits stood there, writing things down in little notebooks. One of them said, “Huh.” Perched on a stool at the bar, I clenched my teeth and waited for “Beats the heck out of me, Bob.” The clock hands crawled toward ten thirty, the time Marie-Our-Pastry-Chef and the morning prep staff would arrive.

What’ll I tell people? Why the hell did Dylan Maddox get turned into a corpse in my foyer?

And where in God’s name was Chet?

Because even if you don’t watch cop shows, you know that when a body turns up on your property with fang marks on its neck, the whereabouts of your vampire brother at the time in question will be checked on.

Of course, Chet had nothing to do with the corpseification of Dylan Maddox. Chet wasn’t that stupid, or that thirsty. Besides, he’d have sense enough to use the Hudson River to dispose of any ill-considered snacks.

At least I thought he would. God knew, Chet had done enough stupid things before. Look at how he got himself vamped.

No, don’t. Especially not now.

I was not in the best mental shape by the time the short, broad, rumpled cop flipped to a fresh page in his notebook and stumped over to me.

“Chef Caine?” I nodded and he held out his beefy hand. “Detective Linus O’Grady. Paranormal Squadron.” We shook.
Wow, New York Irish cop,
said the part of my mind that had gotten stuck in the trivial gear.
Iconic.

In addition to being short and white, Detective Linus O’Grady (Paranormal Squadron) was really bald. Neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper stubble ringed his speckled scalp. He had a strong, weathered, tired face. His brown eyes tilted down at the corners to create that droopy spaniel look that can make a girl go nuts when she’s thirteen. He had a wedding ring on his thick hand, which indicated he had indeed made somebody go nuts at some point.

“We need to get through some formalities here, I’m afraid.” Detective O’Grady pulled out a chair from table seven and sat down. He did not ask me to get off my stool. “Charlotte Cordelia Caine, residence East Seventy-first Street, Forest Hills, Queens?”

“Yes.”

“And you are part owner of this establishment?”

I nodded.

“Why were you here so early?”

“I’d just been to the green market.” I looked mournfully at my ruined produce scattered on the tiles. “I was going to work up the new dinner special.”

He looked up at me with those spaniel eyes like he didn’t want to do this. “And the other owner is?”

“My brother, Chet—Chester Calvin Caine—and yes, he’s a vampire, and yes, his registration is up to date.” That he had to be nagged to do it every single year was not something Detective O’Grady needed to know.

“Where was Mr. Caine last night?”

“Until four in the morning he was right here.” The good-cop act was getting nowhere with me. Linus O’Grady was not my friend, and he did not have my or Chet’s best interests at heart. My sudden impulse to offer him breakfast because he looked like he hadn’t eaten or slept in a while was strictly a reflex.

Detective O’Grady flipped through his book again. “All right. Now, I understand there was an incident last night involving the victim?”

I took a deep breath and explained about Pam “Fang Tease” Maddox and Cousin Dylan’s drunken fireball antics and the sprinklers.

Detective O’Grady nodded and flipped a page. “I have down here that after that incident, you said you weren’t able to identify the perpetrator. How come you were able to give his name this morning?”

Which meant that I had to explain about Brendan Maddox and Anatole Sevarin and the warlock-versus-vamp smackdown that had happened in the wee hours, right about where we were sitting.

“And had you known Mr. Brendan Maddox previously?” Detective O’Grady asked, pencil poised over the paper.

“No.”

“How about Mr. Sevarin?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Your brother . . .” O’Grady paused, indicating that he knew this was awkward and that he was sorry and that he really didn’t want to ask, but . . . “Does he have any connection with the vampire Sevarin?”

“Chet never mentioned him before last night. He— Sevarin—was going to review Nightlife for
Circulation
. It’s a vampire dining and entertainment periodical. . . .”

O’Grady looked at me until I remembered that as a detective on the Paranormal Squadron, he probably knew that.

“But your brother had never mentioned Sevarin before last night?”

“No.”

The detective flipped through his book, paused to read a note, flipped and paused, flipped and paused. Behind him, the other two suits murmured to each other and pointed at things—the door, the host station, the door to the coat closet. Me. Their voices made a buzzing backdrop to O’Grady’s flipping pages. I ran my hands over my hair and suddenly wished all these people would just
go away
. Marie-Our-Pastry-Chef was going to be here any second, and we had prep to start. . . .

Which was when it hit me: there was no dinner prep to worry about. There wouldn’t be any dinner service. Nightlife had uniformed cops outside in case all that yellow tape fencing off the sidewalk wasn’t a big enough clue that something had gone really wrong inside. A crowd had formed on the sidewalk. Somebody had their camera out.

Detective O’Grady twisted around in his chair to see what made my jawop. “Sorry about that,” he said heavily. “I am going to have to ask you where your brother is now.”

My mouth had gone very dry. “I don’t know.”

“Is he on the premises?”

I had to swallow before I could get my throat to work. “I don’t think so. He . . . he sleeps in the cooler sometimes.” Except not tonight. He didn’t tonight. Because I saw him leave. He did leave. He was gone. He was not here. He couldn’t have been here when somebody tossed a body into the foyer.

Except the door was locked when I got here and the windows were whole.

“How did Dylan Maddox get in here?” I blurted out.

O’Grady paused in his flipping. “Sorry?”

“How did the body get in here? The front door was locked and the windows aren’t broken.”

O’Grady twisted around to look at the foyer again. “The back door was open.”

“It was?”

He nodded and there was a brief pause to allow me time to mentally kick myself for extreme carelessness. I was the last person here when we closed. It was my responsibility to make sure the place was locked up when I left.

Detective O’Grady pushed himself to his feet. “Can you show me where Mr. Caine sleeps when he does spend the day here?”

I could probably have made him get a warrant to search the premises for the undead, but that didn’t occur to me until much later. It’s embarrassing to find out how much you’ll do just because somebody with a badge asks. O’Grady followed me through my dining room into my kitchen. The place seemed to have expanded, like in a bad dream sequence. And, for the record? Yes, you really can feel the weight of someone’s gaze on the back of your neck. Maybe it’s a thing they learn in cop school. How to Unnerve Witnesses from Behind 101.

Unless they learn it in How to Unnerve Suspects from Behind.

I tried not to look at anything as we passed through the silent kitchen. I didn’t want any more familiar sights mixed up with this nightmare than absolutely necessary.

“Must be a pain having the fridge down here,” he remarked as we headed down the steps to the cellar.

“Actually, we were lucky we could get a space where the kitchen is on the same floor as the dining room.”

When we reached the bottom, I hit the code on the security pad, fished out my keys and unlocked the vault-like door to our walk-in.

“Secure water supply?” O’Grady bent down to get up close and personal with the pad for the security system on the wall. Antivamp groups had been known to smuggle priests into restaurants to bless the bottled water, so we have to keep it locked up.

There’s nothing in here. There’s nothing in here.

I pulled the walk-in door open and snapped the light on to reveal wire shelves loaded with cardboard boxes, wooden-slat crates and row upon row of dated and labeled plastic bins in every size known to man.

“You should probably know, Detective, we keep a lot of blood in here.”

O’Grady didn’t even blink. “Any of it human?”

I shook my head. “Strictly animal.”

“Not even . . . volunteer?”

I thought about Pamela and suppressed a shudder. “Not even. Too many sanitation issues. I can show you our shipping manifests.” The words were out before I could stop them and I bit my tongue. You never volunteer information the sanitation inspectors haven’t asked for. Too much information made them look at you funny. I had to assume the same rule held good for cops—even aging, iconic Irish detectives with good-cop attitudes.

“Hopefully that won’t be necessary,” said O’Grady, but he did make another damned note in that damned book.

Detective O’Grady strolled between the shelves, touching nothing, eyeing everything. It was like having somebody go through my closet at home, and I found myself hovering near the panic button we’d installed along with the lock. He paused by one of the five-gallon buckets and pried open the lid to peer inside. I angled myself so I could see the label scrawled in black Sharpie on the side. Ox blood. O’Grady pressed the lid back into place and then straightened up to make a few more notes and flip a few more pages in his book.

“Thank you. And the freezer?”

That was easier. I didn’t even have to consider the possibility we might find Chet inside. He didn’t sleep in the freezer, as he had no desire to turn into a vamp-sicle. There was very little to see there at all, in fact, except big bricks of meat, both raw and prepped, bundled in aluminum foil and plastic wrap until it could have sat through a Siberian winter without getting frost burn, alongside row upon row of Styrofoam coolers, all labeled and dated. We kept only some of the blood thawed. The rest was stored in here.

“Thank you, Chef Caine. We can go back upstairs now.”

Detective O’Grady waited for me to move, and I suddenly didn’t want to. I knew what I saw, but I couldn’t tell what
he
saw with his cop eyes and cop brain. A dead body followed immediately by piles of frozen meat and buckets of blood—even if it is all neatly labeled—might just make a cop’s imagination run off in the wrong direction. But there was nothing I could do, and no question I could ask that would make things look any better.

Back upstairs, Dylan Maddox’s corpse was gone, but the other cops were still standing around talking. Detective O’Grady went over to join them, leaving me alone by the bar. The three of them paced the foyer, pointing, crouching, gesturing. I had no idea what they were doing. There was no camera with cuts and pans and close-ups to show me what was really important and no microphone so I could follow the dialogue.

Real life can be
so
inconvenient.

Detective O’Grady lumbered back over, flipping through his notebook one more time. “All right, Chef Caine. I think we’re done here. Here’s my card.” He handed it over. “Call if you have any questions, or if you think of anything new. Officer Randolph is going to give you a ride home.”

“It’s all right. I can take the subway.” I really wanted to get out in the fresh air.

He sighed heavily. “Chef Caine, this is already out on FlashNews. You’re going to have cameras on your doorstep by the time you’re halfway across town.”

I stared at him.
How come I didn’t think of that?
Our names were out there—mine, Chet’s, and Nightlife’s—in connection with the murder of a member of one of the most prominent warlock clans in the state, if not the country.

I natched my cell out of my pocket. I keep it turned off on the job, and had switched it back off reflexively after I called 911.

126 messages.

Make that 127.

128.

Oh.

129.

Shit.

4

All things considered, the trip home could have gone a lot worse.

Officer Randolph drove me in an unmarked car and I phoned my building super, Georgie “Big Man” Manizotti. After quizzing me for twelve blocks about “what the hell really happened,” Georgie agreed to meet me around back. A quick check of FlashNews showed they were mostly using the photo from our write-up in
NYC Bites
, which featured me in my class A chef’s uniform and the tightly braided hairstyle that Chet calls my “Swedish helmet” look. So I ditched my white coat and took my hair down.