Quintic (38 page)

Back
to
a bar. Maybe a wine bar? She had liked
working at that club months ago; too bad it had closed down. Surely
not all clubs had in-house hookers and dead bodies in storage.
Would she officially become an alcoholic? A bar with a no-drinking
policy for the employees might be safer, but that might be a bit
too stiff-on-rule environment. She wasn’t keen of rules (nor on
abstinence). What was the point of working in a bar if she couldn’t
sample the wines once in a while.

Johnny’s
bar? Hum, a tad
dangerous. Although, it might prevent Christopher from taking her
for granted. Was he? No, probably not. Was she? No way. She
suspected the Big guy could charm the pants off any woman if he’d
put his mind to it. Of course, he could only keep the pretence up
for five minutes, but the damage to their relationship would be
irreparable (from her end, at least). Luckily, being amiable was
not exactly a natural inclination for him, was it? Then again, he
did win her over and over, and one had to work hard to dazzle her.
She hated cops, the vast majority of them, most of the time. And
yet here she was, in lov− lust with the cop
est
of them all.

Again
. What type of job? Nothing
corporate. Been there, done that, and got disastrous results.
Assuredly, she wanted something part-time. Interesting and
different, since the whole point was to nourish her imagination
elsewhere than at the damn library. Research.

She wrote
fiction, only fiction, but reality had a way of creeping into her
writing, disguised, twisted yet there. Characters. Places. Events.
This book is a work of fiction and any similarities between real
events and characters and bla
h-blah. No
one recognised him or herself in her books; she alone knew whose
nose it was on which character’s face and who had done what, when
and how. She got high on the very process of writing. Her new job
needed to provide interesting characters and events.

Perhaps she
might try
her hand at an office job
again? Surely renowned law firms had no wandering hands. Not that
she liked lawyers a lot more than cops. Both groups had one thing
in common: they were all too damn serious about the law. Being
flexible with the laws was one of the things Christopher did
splendidly. He might not be as
imaginative
as she was about it,
but then again, he was a cop, and he did know more laws than she
did.

An
accounting firm? Were accountants more exciting than lawyers?
Debatable. She had dated an accountant a long, long time ago,
before starting to write seriously. He had been nice. And funny.
Had wanted to get married. They almost got engaged. Well, he did.
She had oh so wanted that life. Still did, even though she knew she
would have ended up addicted to antidepressants. Red wines were so
more enjoyable yet just as efficiently soothing.

“
Hi
, sweetie, it’s Patricia in
four-fourteen. When you have a minute, can you send someone up with
today’s newspapers? Thank you so much.”

She
surveyed the want-ads. Waitressing? The diner
thing haunted her, the smell the dead girl’s rain-soaked hair not
forgotten. Restaurants, a definite no. Offices? A definite no.
Daycare? Kindergarten? What if one of the little ones choked on his
food or fell and broke his arm? Engineering? Here again, been
there, done that, moved on, long, long, so long a time
ago.

She
was
more than smart enough but did she
want to go back to school for a refresher course or a new career?
Like a doctor,
orthophoniste
, schoolteacher,
dentist. No, no, no, and no. They were looking for some director at
a makeup company. Could she run her business?
Self-made entrepreneur woman
sounded successful. Powerful. Busy. Stressful. OK, maybe
not as much as finding dead bodies but still.

What else?
Telemarketer
jobs, as well as escorts and
strippers offerings filled the pages. No way could she be a
stripper. Not that she was a prude in private, but she was no
exhibitionist either, not in public at least, and more than three
she considered a crowd. Besides, from the girls she’d seen, her
breasts weren’t large enough.

Hum. When
she thought about it, what Christopher and Charles and Hamilton
needed on the case was a stripper. An undercover stripper might
learn all the inside dirt on the clubs. Or rather, three fake
strippers. One for Lemieux’s club she had visited with Christopher,
then again with Charles. One where the motel woman used to work.
And a third for the club where they had found the buried woman, the
new case Charles had told her about. Hence, three strippers for
efficiency’s sake.

Reid was the
only woman on
Christopher’s team, could
she do the three in turn? Could she do even one? A resounding no.
Furthermore, Christopher wouldn’t ask her. He’d take someone he
didn’t care about, another female officer from the outside. The
quartet girl perhaps?

Damn.
S
he was back thinking about the case. Ah.
Well, on that note, could she work undercover as a diner waitress?
Yes. And if she worked part-time, she wouldn’t have to tell anyone.
Although, with two murders in two years at two different diners,
she would have to be undercover for years before she found any
leads.

Memo to myself: I have resigned, haven’t
I
?
She sighed and frowned and smirked. Yes, she had quit. And
the Big guy had let her, knowing full well she wouldn’t last, damn
him. How could she, Lemieux had been her friend, her lover? She had
held the diner girl under the rain. She had to see those two cases
to the end.

Surely
, it was possible to do the
filing and hanging around the office part without the finding
and-or smelling dead bodies. How to get back on the team? She
needed to convince Christopher. Yes, he was going to be furious,
but so was she. Why on earth had he let her go from the
team?

Diner’s Club

A
simple enough goal: find a way to get rehired.
Officially she was not, or rather had not been working for the
team, but had occupied a filing clerk position. As a loan from
Central (and on Central’s payroll), she officially worked as a
filing clerk. Amongst her job’s benefits, she received
Christopher’s permission to access one cold case at a
time.

She
had not done much filing in her months of work,
she smiled at herself; Bridget, Christopher’s secretary, always
claimed she didn’t need help with filing. Not that Patricia would
have minded the filing, she had plenty of free time in-between her
reading her cold case, her snooping around, her suspensions, her
throwing up, her dead discoveries. Damn.

W
hy do I want to go
back again?
She enjoyed reading the cold
files, the older, the better. No pressure, she read the data over
and over, went visiting crime scenes long ago cleansed of blood and
foul odours, chatted with the
personnages
involved.

The clerk
position was a major improvement from before at the Archives. She
received no visits over there; could rarely go sightseeing, and
never personally made contact with the characters in the Archives
files. Her job at Christopher’s precinct was different: the people
she met as a filing clerk were interesting, or scary, but never
dull.

She
considered it a bonus when she
successfully tricked one of the guys into taking her out
(officially or not). Each officer on the team had his own style,
each reacted differently, eliciting chain reactions at times. A
chain reaction was what she needed now, to help with her rehiring.
Her imagination didn’t run as wild as picturing Christopher
begging, but a little pleading would be nice.
Vraiment
. Like that
was going to happen.

Christopher
had
already called twice to check up on
her. Overprotective. Nice. Since Lemieux remained an overly
explosive subject between them, her best way back in was with the
cold case diner girl. As there was no chance in heck of her going
back to the second restaurant, she focused on the first diner. That
was where
her
cold case had started after all.
How about lunch?
It was what she had intended to do, before the rain, the
dead girl and the damn library.

Her shoulder
didn’t hurt anymore
, or so she told
herself. She felt more of a numbness than excruciating pain. When
she tucked her hand in her pocket, it took the weight of her arm
off her shoulder; walking thus wasn’t too uncomfortable. She
reached the restaurant at noon, right in the middle of rush hour.
She had to wait ten minutes for a stool at the counter. The staff
was the same as on her previous visit.

The waitress
took a few minutes to get to her, giving her time to watch the
c
ustomers come and go. “I’ll have a
double order of fries and a small salad. Thank you.”

Thank God
for the fries. The salad bowl the waitress sat in front of her was
disappointing.
She sprinkled her greasy
golden crisp fries with salt and pepper and ate them one at a time
but barely touched her salad. Every place in town served salads
these days, but not all of them pulled it off. If traces of rust
showed on the lettuce, if the cucumbers weren’t crisp, if the
tomatoes weren’t firm, if no other veggies spiced up the salad, one
shouldn’t serve salads. Let it be soup instead.

She ordered
a slice of hom
emade sugar pie for
dessert. Calories weren’t an issue; she intended to walk back too.
Had it been raining, snowing or a mix of the two, she still would
have had the fries and the pie. Medicine. The dessert was
spectacular. The waitress offered her a glass of milk to go with
it.

It would
have been better with red wine but as a rule,
Patricia never had red wine in a place where they couldn’t
make salads. One of her many rules that always proved themselves
right. The place got quiet around two. Wow. Had she just spent two
hours eating fries and a slice of pie? Then again, it wasn’t like
she had anything else to do. She didn’t have a job yet.

No, writing
wa
s not a job. It was something she did.
Storytelling was a visceral urge, almost like breathing. Either she
wrote or else she turned crazy mad. Making a living out of it was a
bonus, icing on the cake (and in the last years, the icing had
become pretty thick). Life was grand. Except for her not having a
job. A
regular
job, one where no one harassed anyone, one where
no one was dead, just a damn ordinary job like any
normal
person. She needed to come up with something fast before
that infuriating man hired someone else to do the filing that there
wasn’t enough of to begin with.

“
Hi,
sweetie,” she said as she waved the waitress over. “Do you remember
me from the other day?”

“
S
ure. You’re that lady
writer.”

A decade of
writing and she still found it surprising when people remembered
her, not because of her personality or her looks, but because she
was a writer. However unknown or unread she was to them, her writer
personae’s research and interviews made her memorable to most
people, and if she turned on the charm, well, she often got away
with a surprising lot. During a Monday meeting, she had once gone
as far as offered to lead the pre-interviews. The team had stared
her down with affronted glares while Christopher had laughed,
grumbling something about ‘entrapment and court admissibility’
nonsense.

“You and the team do it often enough. Anything for a case,
Big guy, remember?
”

“As yourself or in any one of fucking alter ego writer
disguises,
I don’t want you
anywhere near a real case, Princess.
”
Whatever.

She did not
consider cold cases to be real anymore.

The waitress
introduced her to the cook and his helper. They were kind enough to
recount the events of the murder as they remembered it. The cook
was defensive at first
, but she smiled,
cooed, took the time to visit the kitchen, listened as he explained
his job, showing the right amount of interest and admiration at his
effectiveness.

“
How can you
prepare so many orders in such a short time? Rush hour was mad
earlier, and you guys handle it as if it was nothing. The food was
perfect. The fries! I had two orders.” She kept her critique on the
salad to herself. “And the pie! Simply delicious.”

That finally
got the cook. “My wife makes the pies.”

“
Does she?
All of them? How wonderful. Please do tell her she’s a wonderful
cook.” A bit thick, but the cook bought the pie delirium. Or
perhaps it was her hand that hovered on his forearm by that time,
she couldn’t tell. To be sure, she left her hand a little longer.
Hovering was not touching; she never touched but the clothing. Her
hand was light, her fingertips barely rubbing the
fabric.

She even got
the cook to open up a little about the police questioning. By that
time, she was convinced
the man didn’t
have anything to do with the girl’s death. One couldn’t be a
murderer when one got happy about a pie compliment to one’s wife.
The police must have reached the same conclusion. Understandably,
it had taken the cops longer, Patricia knew for a fact police
officers often lacked imagination in such things.