She kicked me in the side.
“Shut up.”
Just great, I thought, I poke my nose in where it doesn’t belong and someone hires these two to rough me up. I was stimulating the economy, creating new jobs.
Mr. Dough made a quick tour of my office, drawing the curtains, looking in the bathroom and around the corner of the kitchenette. He nodded an all-clear to her.
She opened up her purse and took out a cell phone and dialed a number with the tips of her tapered, tangerine-sorbet fingernails.
He dragged me by the ankles into the center of the room and sat me up. Dust down my front. I had to clean the place one of these days. Definitely before my next bodily assault.
“Keep quiet and don’t move,” he told me. He brought one of the club chairs over in front of me. The woman sat down in it.
She said, “There’s someone who wants to speak to you.”
She held the cell phone in front of me, aimed at my face. It had a brightly lit, inch-square LCD screen, and it was displaying the face of a bald-headed man with a short black goatee and little piggy eyes over a flat nose with nostrils flaring like an angry bull’s. He was a barnyard amalgam and I recognized him at once.
Maurice “Moe” Fedel, the former NYPD detective who’d retired to start Fedel Associates, Risk Management Consultants, one of the biggest detective and security agencies in the city, with branches in Philly, Baltimore, and D.C. He was one of George Rowell’s oldest friends; they’d started as sparring partners when Fedel was still on the force.
I’d never met him in person, but I’d seen him a few times on TV when visiting my folks. He was a frequent and outspoken guest commentator on their favorite 24/7 cable news network.
He was wearing a blue shirt with a stiff white collar like those cones vets put on dogs so they don’t bite their stitches.
His husky shout sounded tinny over the phone’s tiny speaker.
“So, you’re Sherwood?”
I looked above the videophone at the woman holding it.
“What is this? You want me to talk to an appliance?”
“Hey! Don’t talk to them, dummy, talk to me!” The inch-high face shouted in its mini-bellow. “I’m the one asking the questions and I asked are you Sherwood?”
I didn’t say anything.
Moe said, “What are you, stupid? John, tune him up!”
The man walked behind me and lifted my pinned arms up over my head, twisting until fire shot into my shoulder sockets.
The woman sighed, said in a bored voice, “He’s Sherwood.”
Moe said, “I know all about you, Sherwood. You’re a fuck-up, a joke in this business.”
“Saw my resume on HotJobs.com? I gotta update it.”
“Wise-mouth and smartass. I heard about you. All I want to know is why Owl came to see you this morning.”
“Who?”
“George Rowell. I know he was at your place this mornin’. And now he’s dead. And you’re going tell me what happened or it’s going to get ugly.”
“It’s ugly already. You’re the best argument I’ve seen for going back to rotary phones.”
“Tell me what—”
“Fuck you,” I said. “Instead of asking what he came to see me for, ask yourself why he didn’t go to you, Moe. What was it he didn’t think he could trust you with? Or maybe you were too busy playing with your toys to help out an old friend. Ask yourself that, but first get these two turds out of my office!”
The phone must’ve been a cheap model, because the face on it seemed to have tinted purple.
“You’re done in this city, asshole! You hear me?
Bang bang bang.
Chapter Twelve: A PROCESS OF ELIMINATION
Someone’s fist hammered on my door. It was the prettiest sound in the whole wide world.
BANG BANG BANG.
“Open up! C’mon, Sherwood, I know you’re in there.”
It was Matt Chadinsky. He banged some more. He bellowed, “What’s with the closed curtains? Whatcha doin’ in there, pullin’ your pud?”
It cost me a kick in the ribs, but I croaked out a loud, “Just a second!”
“That I believe!”
He banged on the door again, three times hard. He wasn’t going away. My playmates had to eat it.
“It’s my probation officer,” I said. “He’ll probably need all your names, what should—”
Moe Fedel said, “Okay, you guys get out of there. But, Sherwood, we’re not finished. Not by a long shot.”
The cell phone videoscreen went to black.
John Dough lifted me by my shoulders to my feet.
Jane Dough brushed off my shirtfront as her partner cut the plastic wrist restraints behind me. She patted me gently on the chest.
“No hard feelings,” she said. She’d dropped her Midwestern accent, replaced now by an easygoing New York twang. “Just business, right?”
I massaged my wrists, working out the lingering bite of the restraints, and tried to think of a cutting comeback for her, but couldn’t. My heart wasn’t in it. So then where was it?
I said, “So none of this—all this was a set-up. Jane’s not even your name, is it?”
“Jane Doe and John Doe, get it?”
“Yeh, I got it.” I rubbed a bruised rib. “So then…you two aren’t really…”
“Looking for a background check on our nanny? No, sorry to disappoint you.”
“I was going to say married.”
Standing by the door, John Dough laughed.
“I think he wants to ask you out. Must like the way you roughed him up.”
She arched an eyebrow at me. I felt a little like I was back in high school.
Matt banged three more times on the door.
“Open up, I need to piss!”
“So what’s your name?”
She turned around, let her eyes roam my dilapidated office before they rested back on me. She shrugged.
“You’re a detective, figure it out yourself.”
“I will.”
She nodded her head once, then turned to her partner, who opened my office door and stood to one side. She stepped into the hall. He waited a moment then followed her out.
I heard their footsteps echoing in the stairwell as Matt walked in. He looked around my darkened office, at all the drawn curtains.
“What? Don’t tell me I missed the fucking slideshow?”
I went around opening the curtains again.
“How’d you get in?” He hadn’t buzzed.
“In?” he said, his face a mask of mock innocence. “Oh, your downstairs door. I used this.” He wiggled the
