John Lescroart - Treasure Hunt

Parr nodded in commiseration. “He can be mighty light with a pour, that grandson of mine. I don’t know where he could have picked up that bad habit.”

Mickey, coming over with a fresh glass and the bottle of Chianti, said, “Yeah, well, what Jim here’s not telling you is that he’s still recovering from a few too many nonlight pours yesterday.”

“A rare anomaly for which I’ve already endured too much abuse from my offspring.” Parr picked up the wine and filled Wyatt’s glass, then poured a little more into his own. The two men clicked their glasses. “Mr. Hunt, it’s good to see you.”

“You, too, James. You too.” Hunt put his arm around Parr’s shoulders and drew him toward him. “You been keeping out of trouble?”

“Hah!” Mickey said.

“I had a few drinks yesterday in mourning for my friend, Dominic Como,” Parr said. “And the boy here decided he had to come drive me home from the Shamrock.”

Mickey turned from slicing the meat. “He’s leaving out the part about the bartender calling me at work, saying it was either going to be me or the cops.”

“That would never have happened.”

“Well, luckily, we didn’t have to find that out, did we?” Mickey popped a slice of lamb into his mouth. “And this is all the gratitude I get.”

“It’s a heartless world,” Hunt said. “I guess I shouldn’t have talked Jim into taking in you and Tam all those years ago. You wouldn’t have had all this aggravation.”

“He wouldn’t have had all the aggravation?” Parr said. “You want to talk aggravation, try living with two teenagers for any given week, much less the six or eight years it actually takes.”

“Seven,” Mickey said without missing a beat.

Parr turned on him. “Seven what?”

“Seven years. People are teenagers for seven years.”

“If you want to grant that teenagers are people at all and not an entirely different species. And where do you get seven?”

Mickey held up fingers as he counted. “Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Seven.”

Parr turned to Hunt. “The boy is such a literalist.”

“I’ve noticed,” Hunt said.

Astonishingly, the warm weather was holding. After the dinner and its attendant accolades for the chef, Mickey suggested they take his bottle of homemade limoncello up to the roof, where there was a mellow dim light from a Japanese lantern, more room, a better view, and more comfortable chairs than the kitchen benches. So the three males walked up the outdoor stairway and out onto the deck that got used on every single one of the nineteen days a year that the nights were pleasant.

Everybody had helped bus the table, but at her insistence, Tamara stayed down to wash the dishes-she’d be up soon. So after they all got seated, Hunt checked behind him to make sure she was not coming up the stairs, then leaned in over the round deck table. “Is she seeing a doctor?”

Mickey shook his head. “No. She won’t do that.”

“Why not? How much has she lost?”

“At least twenty pounds, though she says less.”

At this, Parr coughed. “That much? Are you sure about that?”

Mickey nodded. “I asked her yesterday. She said eighteen, maybe more, so I’m thinking probably twenty or twenty-five.”

“That’s too much,” Parr said. “I knew she was losing some weight, but I should have seen it was that much.”

“It’s been gradual, Jim. I didn’t see it myself until I happened to notice yesterday after all the time I’ve been staying away. So you don’t have to beat yourself up over it. But you’re right, Wyatt, it’s serious enough. She says nothing tastes like anything.”

“Well,” Hunt said, “that lamb sure tasted like something, and so did the pilaf and that salad. Have you been making food like that every night?”

“No.”

“Good. ’Cause if she had that in front of her and didn’t eat it. ..”

“Well,” Mickey said, “I haven’t been home here a lot the past few months.” He hunched his shoulders. “Without me, I think these guys live on macaroni and cheese, and not much of that.”

“Hey!” Parr said. “I eat an egg every morning.”

“Oh, sorry,” Mickey said. Then, to Hunt, “And Jim here has a whopping large egg every single day, which is why he’s so fit, relatively.”

“Tam doesn’t make a big deal of it,” Parr said. “She just doesn’t put food in her mouth, or not much of it.” Then, again, “I should have noticed.”

“Well,” Hunt said, “we’ve all noticed now.”

And then Tamara was up there with them and everybody had their limoncello in front of them in matching little blue glasses.

And, finally, Hunt got around to Mickey’s suggestion about Como. “I checked after you left, Mick, and you’re right. Nobody’s put up a reward yet.”

“Are you working on that?” Tamara asked.

“Not yet,” Mickey replied.

Hunt went on. “Mickey got the idea that we could drum up some business, go to some of these charities. The good news is I called the PD hotline number this afternoon, and there’s nothing about Como. So, so far, at least, the PD doesn’t have anything special going on around his murder. It’s just an answering machine saying they’ll get back to you. So the door may be open. The bad news is that the door might not necessarily be open for us.”

“Have you talked to Juhle?” Mickey asked.

Hunt shook his head no. “I thought I’d hit him at home tomorrow. I think his wife still might like me, although Connie’s got that loyal-cop-wife gene and I can’t be positive. But she and I have been through a lot together too. So it’s a faint hope. Anyway, I’ll find out soon enough.”

Parr cleared his throat. “Who’s Juhle?”

“Friend of mine,” Hunt said. “Also the homicide cop who pulled the case.”

“And why will you be talking to him, about this reward, I mean?”

“Because if we do have any luck drumming up this business, we’ll have to coordinate anything we do with what they’re doing. Sometimes cops don’t like to share, maybe you’ve heard. Juhle might take some convincing that this could be helpful to him.” Seeing the questioning look on Parr’s face, he asked, “What?”

“It just seems a little cart before the horse is all. I mean, if there’s no reward yet, what are you bringing to the party? Wouldn’t your position be a hell of a lot stronger if you had something tangible to offer?”

“That’s a good call,” Mickey conceded. “Wait until we get some of these charities on board, then talk to Juhle.”

“You could do that,” Parr said. “Or just save yourselves a lot of time and go straight to Len Turner.”

Hunt spoke up. “Who’s he?”

“He’s pretty much the Man around nonprofits in the city.”

“In what way?” Hunt asked. “I’ve never heard of him.”

Parr chuckled. “Which is the way he likes it. He’s a lawyer, pretty much at the top of the charity food chain. He represents most of the big ones and also runs the mayor’s community outreach program. Back in the day, he was Dominic’s right hand, and if anything, he’s got even more influence now. You want something to happen around a reward, he’s the guy you want to talk to.”

“Len Turner, got it,” Hunt said.

“And then you go get that bastard who killed Dominic.”

Hunt threw a look across at Mickey, then over to Parr. “That’s not exactly it, Jim. The main job would be fielding the calls. We wouldn’t really be investigating on our own.”

Parr leveled his gaze. “Well, you damn well should.” He swallowed against some strong emotion, then looked again around the table. “It’s just that Dominic saved this family. He didn’t have to give me my job. Nobody else would have, not with my history. I mean, here I am, two strikes down… hell, we all know.