James Patterson - Step On A Crack

Seamus’s mouth pursed as he thought about it.

“I’ll try,” he said with a melodramatic, agonized exhalation.

I stepped across the kitchen and picked up the chore chart. When I lifted the plastic pony, I noticed that it was missing its tail.

“Plug that iron back in, Seamus, would you?” I said, bringing it quickly back over to the kitchen island. “If we don’t get this thing fixed, Bridget will kill both of us.”

WHEN I ARRIVED back at the bedlam scene in front of St. Patrick’s, I saw that two FBI Hostage Rescue Team trailers had been parked next to the NYPD one. With all the mobile command buses, the staging area was starting to look like a huge tailgating party.

A party in the parking lot of hell, maybe.

I checked in with my boss, Commander Will Matthews, and then with the other negotiators. Still no new word had come back from the gunmen inside. Nothing new from Jack.

So I poured myself what could have been my twentieth cup of coffee that day and sat.

I hated this part, the waiting, the feeling of powerlessness. It was one of the reasons why I’d transferred out of the Hostage Negotiation Team. In Homicide, there was never a second when there weren’t a hundred things you could do, never a lack of angles to work a case, always countless outlets to pour your persistence and neuroses into.

I sat up suddenly in my swivel chair. There actually was one thing I could do to get me away from the oppressive face of the clock, and it could possibly help us.

I found Commander Will Matthews sitting in the rear of the bus with a glass of fizzing water in one hand. “Hey, boss,” I said. “Remember what I said about Caroline Hopkins? My hunch about her so-called accident? L’Arène, that restaurant where it happened, is three blocks away. I was thinking of swinging by to talk to the kitchen staff.”

Will Matthews rubbed his eyes and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Take twenty minutes to see what you can dig up if it makes you happy. Then get your butt back here.”

I patted my pocket. “I have my cell. And a backup.”

The recent tragedy there, and the siege up the street, must have spoiled the appetites of New York ’s rich and famous because L’Arène looked empty when I jogged in off Madison Avenue. The marble stairs I climbed in the vestibule were draped with a red, white, and blue carpet that seemed more French than American. On either side of the stairs, sumptuous pyramids of lemons and apples sat on top of antique champagne boxes.

Maybe on some other night, the elegance of the setting might not have been so off-putting. And if I hadn’t been grinding so hard in the last few hours, the arrogance that seemed to pulse from the tall, tuxedoed maître d’ posted beyond the inner door wouldn’t have filled me with such anger.

The dark, curly-haired Frenchman looked like he’d just eaten a bad snail when he spotted me in front of his library dictionary-size reservation book.

“The kitchen is closed ,” he spat, and returned to writing notes in his book.

I closed the tome for him and put my badge on top of it. I savored the shock on his face.

“No,” I said. “Actually it’s not.”

When I told him I was there to investigate the First Lady’s accident, the maître d’ instantly handed me a business card.

“Gilbert, DeWitt and Raby represent us in all legal matters. You will refer your inquiries to them.”

“Wow, that’s really helpful,” I said as I immediately dealt the card back past the sharp tip of the maître d’s long nose.

“But I’m not from the insurance company, I’m from the Homicide squad. Now I can either talk to you and your kitchen staff here, informally, or call my boss and we can go the formal route.

“If we go by the book, everyone will have to be brought down to the station house, and of course, you’ll make sure each and every staff member has all his proper immigration papers available for identification purposes. You know, now that I think about it, there was a request from the Justice Department to play a part in this case. You know, the FBI, the IRS? You do have L’Arène’s tax receipts from the last five years? And, it goes without saying, your own personal ones?”

The maître d’s expression underwent an almost instantaneous transformation. It was amazing how warm a smile he’d been able to hide behind his Gallic scowl.

“I am Henri,” he said with a bow. “Pray, tell me. How can I assist you, Detective?”

AFTER I TOLD HIM I needed to interview the kitchen staff, mon ami Henri promptly led me through a set of swinging Tiffany blue doors and translated my question for the chef.

The chef looked like Henri’s shorter and pudgier older brother. He seemed affronted by the questions. He’d personally fixed the First Lady’s meal, and there was no way, he said angrily, that he had put any peanuts in her foie gras.

The only explanation he could fathom was that a foolish prep cook had spilled peanut oil on the dish during the controlled chaos of a busy night, but even that seemed patently absurd to him. The chef then said something in heated French before sweeping a couple of pots off the stainless-steel counter and storming off. I caught the word American , and thought I heard the word Snickers .

“What was that last part?” I said to Henri.

Henri blushed.

“The master chef suggested perhaps that the First Lady snacked on a… candy bar before her meal arrived.”

So much for repairing French and American relations tonight, I thought.

“Has there been any turnover in the staff since the night she was here?” I said.

Henri tapped a long finger against his bloodless lips.

“Yes,” the maître d’ said. “Now that I think of it. One of the prep cooks, Pablo, I believe was his name, stopped showing up for work a day or so after the terrible accident.”

“Any last name on Pablo? An address? Off his employment application perhaps?”

Henri squinted as a pained, sorrowful, almost penitent expression crossed his features.

“It was like you were saying before about formal and informal . Pablo was more of an informal hire. We have no application per se,” he said. “His leaving was not even a real concern. Our turnover rate for prep staff, like in most restaurants, is quite high.”

“I’ll bet,” I said.

“Wait,” Henri said. “I believe he left some things in his locker. Would you like to come down and take a look?”

I did, and downstairs in Pablo’s old locker, I discovered two items.

A pair of dirty sneakers and a crumpled Metro North Hudson line train schedule.

The case of the dirty sneakers, I thought. Encyclopedia Brown would have been impressed.

Yet another dead end, or so it seemed at that moment anyway.

I stuffed the kitchen helper’s things into an empty Duane Reade bag I found under the locker. Maybe we could ID Pablo from prints. If he wasn’t already back in Central America.

It was a pretty sad lead, I realized, but better a sad one than none at all.

“Do you have a clue?” Henri asked excitedly, and I lifted the bag of “evidence.”

I slammed the locker with a resounding bang.

“Very rarely, Hank,” I said.

IN HER DREAM, Laura Winston, the Vogue magazine-dubbed “Fashion Queen of the New Millennium,” was out on the lake at Ralph Lauren’s estate in northern Westchester. She was lying alone in a canoe dressed in a sheet of white muslin, and she was floating beneath a sky of bright, endless blue. The boat skimmed along the shore beneath the boughs of a stand of cherry blossom trees, and a blizzard of falling white petals, fine as angel eyelids, softly landed on her face, her throat, her breasts. When she tried to sit up in the canoe, she realized that the muslin was wrapped tightly around her arms. She was dead and in her funeral boat, she realized-and she began to scream.