Suzanne Forster - The Private Concierge

The pills, he told himself. Maybe he needed to lay off that garbage.

He’d entered into a specialized form of private investigation when he’d left vice years ago. Essentially he did things that law enforcement wouldn’t—or couldn’t—do. It had kept him busy and paid well. But, over the last few weeks, he’d closed all his open cases and informed his clients he was taking some personal-leave time. That was all they needed to know. All anyone needed to know.

Now, here he was, faced with the toughest investigation of his life—and as much as he wanted to walk away from it, he couldn’t. He just couldn’t. He had to do something. The question was, what?

His sigh was resigned. A talk with Ned’s housekeeper might be the way to start. Less complicated than the Lane Chandler situation, which could easily take him places he didn’t want to go. Ned’s funeral arrangements were being taken care of by his attorneys, who were also handling inquiries from the press. The public knew Ned as a star outfielder, not as Rick Bayless’s friend, so Rick had been left out of it, thank God. He could not have dealt with that right now.

Rick hesitated, listening. A loud pop came from somewhere in the house, launching him out of the chair. The carton of lo mein landed on the floor with a splat and Rick kicked it aside, taking care not to slip in the streaming juices. It sounded like a gunshot, and it had come from down the hall. He could see nothing through the open doorway, but someone was definitely in his house.

He slipped out of the small office, his bare feet soundless on the Mexican tiles. He crept down the hallway, his back to the wall, wondering if the intruder had found his gun. It was in the top drawer of the night table next to his bed, but the noise had come from the other side of the house, the kitchen, and he could hear a clicking sound coming from that direction.

Was the intruder reloading? That meant he’d come armed. Rick’s gun was a Colt .357 Python with a cylinder that took six bullets. There would be five left before reloading was necessary.

An odd, breathy squeak made him hesitate. The clicking got louder, urgent. The squeak became a plaintive cry. What the hell? It sounded like a baby or an animal in distress. And suddenly he knew what had happened.

His heart jammed into high gear as he spidered up to the arch that opened onto his kitchen. He craned to look inside—and saw exactly what he’d hoped. Yesssssssss. The mousetrap he’d baited and set days ago had been sprung. Unfortunately, the mangy little creature pinned by the bar was still alive. He was caught by the leg instead of by his skinny neck, but at least he’d been caught.

Rick Bayless had won the war. He’d finally caught the cunning sneak thief that had been raiding his garbage and springing his mousetraps for months. The reign of the devil mouse was over.

Like most bachelors, Rick had never kept what you’d call a tidy kitchen. He routinely left the dinner dishes unscraped and unwashed until the next day or whenever he got around to them. Sometimes they waited until his housekeeper made her weekly visit. It was when she’d found the usually crusty dishes nearly spotless in the sink, and asked Rick if he’d done them himself, that he realized he had an ugly, hairy little dishwasher on his hands—and the war had begun.

He hated mice. He didn’t like snakes, either, but at least most snakes ate insects, which justified their existence to some extent. Mice were scavengers and disease carriers. Can you spell bubonic plague? If Walt Disney hadn’t turned them into saucer-eared heroes, no one would like mice.

But Rick’s enthusiasm waned as he watched his nemesis roll and flail, trying to get his leg free of the spring-loaded bar. Amazing that he had a leg left. The bar would have broken his neck if he’d gone for the cheese first, instead of trying to spring the trap.

Not so clever this time.

Now Rick had to figure out how to quickly end this. The mouse’s shrieks had become heartrending, and trapped animals had been known to chew off their limbs to escape. From the drying rack on the counter, he grabbed a large stainless-steel colander to contain the struggling mouse.

A gunshot was the quickest way to end an animal’s misery, but that would be overkill for a mouse, literally. Drowning it was too much like torture and a cerebral concussion too brutish, but Rick had little choice. The concussion would be quick and painless. He should have invested in one of those live traps, but somehow this had turned into an epic war of wits, with the mouse trouncing him repeatedly, which had probably made him want the wretched little thing to suffer. Obviously, now he was getting soft.

He got a wooden mallet from the kitchen drawer where he kept his tools. But when he flipped the colander over, he found the mouse unconscious—or possibly dead. It didn’t appear to be breathing, and there was no response when he nudged it with the mallet.

He pulled a pair of latex gloves from his jeans’ pocket and settled on his haunches. He’d been carrying gloves with him since his vice days, as religiously as some guys carried condoms. You never knew when you were going to need the protection of latex.

He quickly had the mouse free of the trap, but it still showed no signs of life, and its leg was clearly broken. Funny how it didn’t look so diabolically clever anymore. More like a defenseless creature that was caught up in the universal fight to survive, like everyone else. Food was survival. Cheese was food. It was simply trying to eat without dying.

Rick’s thoughts took a grimly ironic turn. Maybe the mouse wasn’t such a zero after all. It had cleaned up the place. Rick Bayless was the slob who’d left the dirty dishes. Besides, having somebody set a trap for you was no way to die. It just seemed wrong to be tempted with what you wanted most—and then killed for wanting it. Was that how Ned had died? Was he lured into a death trap?

His gut clenched at the thought. He shook off the questions. He had no answers. What he had was a dead mouse that needed to be disposed of. He left it where it was and headed down the hall to his bedroom to get a shoe box. Maybe he’d even give the devil mouse a proper burial.

By the time he got back, the mouse was gone. The trap was where he’d left it, and he could see a faint blood trail leading toward the refrigerator, but no sign of the mouse. It had regained consciousness and made a break for freedom, dragging itself across the floor. Or it had been faking the entire time.

Score one—or twenty—for Mickey. Rick had lost count.

Simon Shan walked over to the display of ancient ceremonial swords on his bedroom wall and removed a nineteenth-century jade-handled dagger. Other than a rare ivory mah-jongg set that had belonged to his grandmother, these weapons were the only heirlooms of value in the Shan family. They’d been passed down from father to eldest son for generations, and his father had told him that this dagger’s blade was sharp enough to cut floating silk.

Simon ran the pad of his index finger over the edge, watching the blood rise to the surface and bubble. Amazing. He hadn’t felt a thing.

Holed up in his spacious bedroom, he’d been considering the remains of his brilliant career. The media had made quite a fuss over his Eurasian features when he became a celebrity two years ago, calling them both exotic and patrician. Possibly that was why his face had graced the covers of five popular magazines this month alone.

The magazines were fanned out like a huge tiara across the cushioned bench at the foot of his bed where his former assistant had arranged them. He’d also been on countless talk shows and news programs, answering questions about his new gig as spokesperson and designer for the Goldstar Collection, one of the country’s largest discount chains.