AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I stared at a photograph of Noah and what looked like his twin sister pinned to his cubicle wall as I thought about it.
“Get the phone company to give you every number that calls that cell number,” I finally said. “Then back-trace for a name to use as a reference.”
“Brilliant,” Noah said excitedly. “So that’s it? Just like that, we’re going to go undercover?”
“Bon appétit,” I said grimly, nodding at the screen.
CHAPTER 77
“WOW, MIKE. NICE SUIT. You scrub up pretty fine. I could almost eat you up. Metaphorically speaking, of course,” Brooklyn Kale said, laughing, as we walked down a cruddy section of West Twenty-Seventh Street that night around ten-thirty.
“Sorry,” said my young, attractive, black-cocktail-dress-wearing, six-foot-three “date” as we continued to walk east near the border of the Koreatown and Chelsea neighborhoods. “I’m just nervous. I’ll shut up now.”
Noah had done it. He’d tracked down a recommendation and scored an invite for tonight’s freakish underground dinner. Brooklyn and I had drawn the short straws to attend the event, while Arturo and Doyle and Robertson were parked around the corner of Seventh Avenue in an unmarked car in case we needed backup.
The street was mostly dingy office buildings and Korean wholesale stores and nail salons, but the address on the invite turned out to be a beautiful two-story Spanish mission–style town house with a terra-cotta roof and a tall black wrought-iron fence that looked like it was from the early 1900s.
The short old woman who answered the arched wood-and-iron front door looked like she was from the early 1900s as well. She wore a faded old green housedress with a brown paisley head scarf and looked easily eighty.
Looking at the witchlike woman, I suddenly remembered the Grimm’s Fairy Tales on Robertson’s desk. I also suddenly wondered how good this undercover idea really was. I definitely didn’t want Brooklyn and me to end up like Hansel and Gretel.
“What do you want?” the woman said with some kind of Eastern European accent.
“We’re here for the dinner,” I said, handing her the invite.
Or are we the dinner? I thought.
The old lady assessed the paper and then both of us carefully with her little black eyes.
“Money,” she said, holding out her hand.
As the cash-filled envelope touched her palm, she opened the door fully and smiled, showing hard little brown-and-yellow teeth that reminded me sickeningly of corn kernels.
This probably wasn’t going to be the last time I felt nauseous before this night was through, I thought as I took a breath and followed Brooklyn through the door.
CHAPTER 78
THE HAUNTED-GINGERBREAD-COTTAGE feeling continued as we were led through the house’s interior, past unlit and dusty empty rooms. The stove in the kitchen looked an awful lot like the falling one that had almost killed Doyle that morning.
Nothing was cooking on it, I noticed, which was weird. Wasn’t this supposed to be a dinner?
We suddenly heard classical music when the spooky old lady opened the set of French doors at the back of the kitchen. Through the doorway off a back deck was a wide-open courtyard with a huge garden and trees strung with garlands of soft white lights.
A pristin
e white tent stood in the garden’s center, and beneath it about twenty people were standing around, chatting casually with drinks in their hands as if they were at a fancy wedding reception. There were several Japanese men and women, I noticed straight off the bat, and several gay male couples.
Was one of them Naomi’s killer? I wondered. Were all of them?
No one seemed to notice us except for a black-clad waiter who stepped up and took our drink orders. After five minutes, two strikingly tall platinum-blond women in matching silver sequin dresses came over to us. In their high heels, they were both six and a half feet tall or more. They were both shapely, nice-looking ladies, but from the width and squareness of their shoulders and jaws, you could tell they were transgender.
Brooklyn shot a now-there’s-something-you-don’t-see every-day look at me as they clomped up to us.
They introduced themselves as Lucy and Barbara.
“Don’t I know you?” Lucy said to me between sips of her whiskey sour. “San Diego two years ago? You were at Christian Gazenove’s birthday with that snotty fashion photographer. The one that ended up in the hospital?”
“Wasn’t me. Sorry,” I said, shaking my head slowly at whatever the hell it was she had just said.
