5. Red, red wine

Upstairs in the bullpen the floor is bustling with bag-laden detectives who have clearly spent their lunch hours shopping. The amount of tinsel around is giving Beckett a headache, as it reflects the precinct strip lights at strange, jittery angles. Fortunately for her temples, Ryan has delved into the CCTV records and found a whole lot of usefulness – such as the registration of the car that the shooting almost certainly came from.  For once – and as a huge contrast to every case in the previous month – it’s looking like this one is easy.

The unaccustomed run of good luck continues the following day: the car is located early on, the owner is brought in, and under the twin intimidations also known as Beckett and Esposito (it’s too early in the morning for Castle, who normally rolls in around 10.30) he points them to the shooter. He’ll go down as well: two low lives for the price of one.  Espo and Ryan go to pick up the guilty party and by mid-afternoon it’s all wrapped up.

The final act before they can complete the ridiculously high number of complicated forms (more than one form, requiring more than one box to be completed, qualifies as ridiculously high and complicated) that they need to supply to 1PP is to tell the Berowitz family they got the guy. Eventually, it might help them to work through their grief.  Eventually.

Beckett raps on the door in her normal forceful manner and, when it’s opened by the mother, clocks instantly that she has spent most of the last two days weeping. This is not unusual.  What is unusual is that she doesn’t want to let them in. (Castle is, naturally, right next to her.)  Beckett insists, very gently but persistently, and reluctantly they are admitted. 

It takes Beckett less than a tenth of a second – and one breath – to understand why. The father is nowhere to be seen.  The smell of whiskey is everywhere, the knocked over glass and the remains of spillage on the table and dripping into the tasteful, woollen rug.  It’ll need dry cleaned, by a specialist, Beckett thinks.  She could recommend one, if asked.   She listens very carefully and hears stertorous breathing from a room she is shortly sure is a bathroom.  She recognises the following noise, too.  At least this man is still capable of vomiting into a toilet.  If he continues down this path, soon he won’t bother with that.  She finishes her message of sorrow quickly, and sends Castle out ahead of her, tossing him the keys to the car and asking him to wait in it for her: she’ll only be a moment.  When he’s gone she turns back to the mother.

“If you need anything,” she says quietly, handing over a card, “this is where to find me.” She swallows.  “I’ve… been through this.”  Her flicked glance to the bathroom is sufficient.  “Just call.”  The drive back to the precinct is very quiet.  Castle has no idea why Beckett took an extra moment – can’t have been a bathroom break, too short even for Beckett’s focused efficiency – but she’s wrapped in thought so for once he thinks he’d better not pry. 

He’d noticed the mess and the smell too, but not being attuned to the sights and sounds of an alcoholic family member he completely misses their significance. Over indulgence belongs to his pre-Alexis days, and college parties.  He’s never been exposed to the late middle-aged, upper-middle class alcoholic, functioning or otherwise; has only seen or thought of it in relation to street sleepers and pan handlers and hobos.  For all his other research, his consequently vast knowledge and experience, this particular form of degradation has wholly passed him by.

Castle spends the remaining hour or so while the paperwork is completed staring (creepily, she insists) at Beckett in an expectantly hopeful manner and, when she finally switches off and tidies her desk, is out his chair with his coat on faster than a speeding bullet.

“Can we go now?” he enquires.

“Yes, okay, we can go,” Beckett replies, not expectantly at all.  Castle pouts.

“Come on. I’ve got all sorts of lovely food and drink to ensure that you’re properly fuelled for shopping.”

“I hate shopping,” Beckett mutters, sulkily. Castle’s jaw drops.

“Could you tell my mother that? I don’t think she’s ever heard anyone say that.  Ever.  Even better, could you convert her?  You have no idea how much she can spend in Saks.”  He pauses.  “You won’t hate shopping with me.”

“Why not?”

“Because it is with me.”  Beckett humphs disgustedly, wholly and obviously unconvinced.

“Do you need a backpack to carry your ego, or a truck?”

“Ouch, Beckett. No fair.  You’ve never been shopping with me so how do you know you won’t like it?  You’re being biased.  You’re not keeping an open mind.”  He sounds ridiculously, petulantly, childishly offended – and all of it is wholly faked.  She grins up at him, Beckett to the hilt.

“I have a theory,” she smirks, and watches as Castle’s faked poutiness dissolves into laughter.

“I never thought I’d ever hear you say that.” He assumes an expression of blinding realisation.  “You listen to me!”

“I can’t not listen to you. You talk all the time.  It doesn’t mean I pay any attention.”

“Oh no, you don’t get away with that. You do so pay attention.  If you didn’t you wouldn’t bother arguing.  I think you like me, Beckett.”  She throws her hands up in a gesture of disgust and turns to the elevator door that they’ve mysteriously reached.  “We’ll get a cab,” he says as they exit the precinct.  “There will be wine involved.  Ordinary or mulled – do you like mulled wine, Beckett?  Some has been mulling since much earlier.  It’s always best if you give it as much time as possible for the flavours to meld.”

Oh fuck.  She can’t bear the smell of mulled wine.  She remembers coming home one dark, cold winter evening to find her father passed out in a puddle of spilt mulled wine and sour vomit.  He’d made it for both of them, but couldn’t stop himself from drinking it all, no doubt on top of whatever he’d already had.  It had barely been February: not four weeks afterward.  It was then that she’d had to realise that he was sinking, drowning in the riptide and undertow of his devastating grief.  She’d thought she could save him, then.  She’d continued in that misconception for some time.  She unknowingly winces at the memory; the stab of old, thin pain in her chest sufficient to cover her physical reaction from herself.

“It’s not my favourite,” she says, mechanically continuing to move forward, not seeing the street ahead, concentrating on not betraying herself.

“That’s okay. I’ve plenty normal wine.” 

She can do this. For a short hour or even two, she can do this.  She just needs to breathe shallowly, as she would at a crime scene, in through her mouth and out through her nose.  Just like a crime scene.  She’s survived much worse, for longer.  By the time she saw her first corpse she was already inured to the sights and smells and degradation: the effects on bladder and bowels of death or of drinking to the point of loss of all bodily control and then unconsciousness are not so very different in result.  She’s never thrown up at a crime scene, no matter how gruesome.  She’d done all of that in the two years before she entered the Academy, as well as all her weeping.  Nothing she has seen in all her years of Homicide has ever been as bad as the scenes she’d dealt with at home, till she walked away.  Nothing.

She’s faintly aware that a cab has pulled up and Castle’s holding the door for her. She slides in, turns her face to the window and, cold both without and within, huddles into her thick winter coat.  She can be Beckett, till the evening’s over.  She has to be, because Kat only exists behind her own door, in her own head, and anyway Castle won’t or can’t let her be Kat.  Her burdens can’t be shared, her father mustn’t be exposed, and Castle wants slick, sarcastic Beckett, not cuddlesome Kat.  He seems to want her to make all the decisions.  Well, she can do that, but there won’t be very many of them.  She supposes, rather bleakly, that he was quite good enough in bed for it to be a pleasant diversion, every so often, for a while.  When neither of them have anything better to do.  Just like this evening will be – once they’re out of his loft – a pleasant diversion.

She turns away from the window and smiles at Castle: her normal cool professional smile, sardonically amused at the foibles of the world around her; setting her at a slight distance from her surroundings, and wholly uninformative. She’ll cope with the short time at his apartment, she’ll cope with the shopping, and then she’ll go home.  She might even take Castle with her, if he wants to come.  It’s sure to be up to her to make the first move.  He won’t.  It seems that he’s sure that she’ll want to take the lead herself – and why should he not be?  She’s hardly shown him any other personality.  Can’t blame him for believing her.

And yet, deep inside where she doesn’t notice it, she does. She unconsciously blames him for apparently being able to read every last twitch of her face and posture in the precinct and then not being able to do so that evening a month ago in her apartment.  She unconsciously blames him for starting down the road of providing comfort and cosseting and then stopping, leaving her to take the initiative.  And she unconsciously feels guilty for blaming him,, because after all every decent man knows that you have to receive consent and yes, she did tell him it was okay, but maybe that simply wasn’t clear enough.  So because she can’t work out why she’s feeling slightly uncomfortable around him, why she’s a little more easily irritated: she hides in her cool professional demeanour and a bright, breezy, sociable shell, and reveals even less than usual, returning to staring out the cab window at nothing in particular.

Castle, after a night in which he didn’t actively think about it, but nevertheless mulled below the surface of his mind, the slightly odd feeling he’d had that there was more to Beckett’s reaction to the alcoholic father than he knew, had also not missed the slight hitch in her gait when he mentioned mulled wine. He’s also slightly discomforted by the way in which she’s been wholly, completely Beckett ever since that extremely confusing evening at hers, when at first he’d thought that she wanted cuddled and petted and then she’d suddenly done exactly what he would have expected from the outset and simply been wholly definitive about what she did and didn’t want and like.  (All of it.  She’d liked all of it.  Even when they’d… Do not go there, Castle.  Not in a cab.)  But there hasn’t been so much as the tiniest, most fragmentary hint at any instant since that softer not-Beckett exists at all, and had he not seen that person he’d never have believed that she’s there. 

He scents a mystery. He likes mysteries.  He likes solving them even better, and come to think of it he hasn’t found out Beckett’s story either.  He’s guessed a big chunk of it – and she didn’t correct him, so he must have been right – but he doesn’t know. Furthermore, he doesn’t know whether his thinking in between the two encounters in her apartment was correct.  It’s all the same mystery, all the same story.  His insatiable curiosity is roused, and, like the Elephant’s Child, he has no intention of reining it in.  In fact, he intends to let it rampage.  He’d liked his glimpse of softer not-Beckett.  He’d appreciate a few more glimpses: not all the time, and certainly not in the precinct, but sometimes.  As he’d thought previously, metrosexuality only takes him so far, and while he has no desire for submission from his partners, he equally has no desire to be submissive.

They’ve reached the loft, and neither of them has said a word to each other, letting the emery-rough, abrading discomfort of the silence surround them.

Beckett looks around as Castle waves her forward to precede him through the door. As she might have guessed, his loft is full of Christmas cheer and decorations: hugely festive and exuding comfortable warmth and the atmosphere of convivially chubby merry gentlemen.  She almost expects that figgy pudding will figure in the snacks.  For now, she readjusts her breathing to minimise the sickly, clinging smell of mulled wine and settles down on the couch to which Castle has directed her.  It’s sufficiently far away from the kitchen that she needn’t look at the liquid and remember it puddling stickily on the floor.  It had taken some time to clean the mess up.

Snacks are, in fact, well-judged, tasty and plentiful; and Beckett makes a fairly substantial meal from them, watched – approvingly, it seems – by Castle. She washes it down with a single slow-sipped glass of a very good Bordeaux, which has the happy effect of keeping the smell of mulled wine out her nostrils and the smell of good Bordeaux in them.  His mother is missing – a Christmas party for distressed actors, Castle explains, indicating without words that he thinks that any distress will be inflicted by his mother upon other members of the theatre fraternity – but Alexis is there: happily chirping about Christmas plans and outings. 

Beckett watches her with her father and preserves a very blandly friendly face; making all the right responses to Alexis’s genuine happiness and sincerity. She remembers when she was equally comfortable with her father: certain sure that she was loved and the apple of his eye.  She had been a little younger, then.  By fourteen, she’d been starting to rebel, push the boundaries; but she’d always been perfectly definite that her parents loved her without limitation.  Maybe her father still does, but he’d loved Jack Daniels more.  She could have coped with his devastating grief – he had loved her mother with everything he had – if he hadn’t made it clear that she wasn’t enough, wasn’t a consolation – was, in fact, a reminder.  He’d said that too, deep in the bottle.  You’re so like her. Why are you so like her? I can’t bear it.  And he’d turned away from her and sunk another measure, until he couldn’t see her, or anything, at all.  Even then, still she’d fought to save him.  Even then, she’d taken him at his other, earlier, word: don’t leave me, Katie. I need you.

So many of the small things that go to make up the unbreakable love for a parent for his child are blindingly obvious to Beckett. The look in Castle’s eye, the slight protective curve of his body when he’s near Alexis, leaning in to listen and clearly paying total attention to what she’s saying: shared jokes and catchphrases; a brief reminder of sense and safety with her friends and Alexis’s slight huff and rolled eyes at the lack of necessity for that at the great age of fourteen; a note that her allowance is not, despite her grandmother’s suggestions, infinite – though the look behind that suggests that Castle gives Alexis a pretty sizeable amount.  He’s proud of her achievements, too: they’re talking about her day and it sounds like Castle is pretty switched on to what she’s doing, and how.

That was Katie and her father, once upon a time long ago.

She drains her wine, excuses herself for a moment, locks herself in the bathroom and lets the memories wash through her and past her and away. She blots her eyes and rapidly reapplies her makeup to hide any trace; returns to the main room and continues her bright social answers and contribution to the conversation.  Her history is no reason to depress Alexis, who is, it seems on further acquaintance, an unusually nice example of the variety of human race known as teen.  Given her father’s general love of far-out theories, conspiracies and unlikely happenings, she’s also unusually sensible.  Beckett supposes that one of the family has to be.  Though that’s a little unfair.  Castle must have applied some common sense and childrearing discipline, otherwise Alexis would be just another spoilt rich brat.

That was Katie and her father – and mother – too, once upon a time long ago.

She makes a small noise, which attracts Castle’s attention. He flicks a look at her, grins widely.

“Ready to go shopping, Beckett?”

“Yep,” she says, social mask and the similitude of pleasure at the prospect in place. Castle reaches for her coat, stands to help her into it – and while she’s organising herself runs an assessing, curious gaze over her that she doesn’t appreciate at all.  She raises an eyebrow in a way that makes it perfectly plain that she has both noticed and been unimpressed by the look.  “Let’s go,” she says, with her practical precinct briskness. Let’s just get this over with.

“Where do you want to start, Beckett?” Castle asks, when they get downstairs, pursued by Alexis’s seasonal good wishes.  She isn’t sure.  Wine and chocolate for Lanie, which needs only a good store.  Her father is… a little more difficult.  What does she get her father?  She’s not reduced to tie-and-handkerchief sets, or scarves, or, God forbid, socks.  Not yet, anyway.  Her father can’t think of anything to tell her; he doesn’t share her literary tastes. That had been her mother.  Maybe a heavyweight political biography, or a historical tome.  She sighs audibly.

“What’s the matter, Beckett?”

“I don’t know what to get my dad,” she admits.

Castle looks momentarily blank. Then he smiles.  “You’ll have thought of all the obvious things, so no point in repeating those.  Anyway, they’re boring.”  He scrunches his face in thought.  Clearly he wants to be helpful.  Beckett had expected a series of outrageous suggestions, but he’s actually taking the problem seriously.  “Does he like chess?  Or board games?”

“Chess, but I got him a really beautiful set years ago” – she’d got it in Kiev – “and he uses it. He’s got a small travel set, too.”

“Checkers? Backgammon?  Monopoly?”  Beckett splutters in horror at the thought.

“No way am I getting my dad Monopoly. Not ever. First rule, Castle, never, ever play Monopoly with a lawyer.  Never.  It’s an absolute disaster.”

“Your father’s a lawyer?”

“Yes.   Anti-trust.”  Her tone, though perfectly even and friendly, somehow manages to make it clear that that’s the end of that line of conversation.  It’s decidedly discouraging.

Castle leaves it, but he thinks the more. He deduces that since her father is clearly very much alive, it must be her mother who is dead, just as he had thought at her apartment.   Not least because she hasn’t mentioned a present for her.  He has the good sense to keep his mouth firmly shut on that point.  From Beckett, though she’s been bright, polite and sociable all evening so far, he’s strongly detecting a sense of underlying fragility that he’s not used to.  It’s rather reminiscent of the way she’d been in the bar, now he comes to think of it.  Hmm.  Actually, there’s been an air of fragility since the very start of the latest case.

Now, if her father is a lawyer, then, going back to the conversation in the bar a month ago, not one word of which has he forgotten, that means that likely her mother was too, again, as he had previously thought. Ah.  One mystery solved, on the basis of a lot of circumstantial, but corroborating, evidence. 

That only leaves the other concatenation of small things. The instant recognition of an alcoholic.  The dislike of mulled wine – how can anyone dislike something so redolent of Christmas and evenings round an open fire; of chestnuts roasting and sleigh bells ringing?  Still, that’s a reach too far.  Some people just don’t like it.  It’s just the way she’d paused for an infinitesimal period, just the way her step had faltered, just that once.  He’d wanted to take her hand, or arm, then; or put his arm around her shoulders and tell her it would all be okay.  Smart, slick Beckett, always ready with a dismissive quip or flip retort, wouldn’t have put up with that for a moment.  So he hadn’t tried.  But he’d wanted to.  He really had.  He still does.

“So, not Monopoly. Clue?”

“No thanks. I solve crimes all day.  I don’t need to do it when I’m seeing my dad.”  They walk another few paces, both thinking, suddenly companionable in the shared issue.

“I know!” Castle ejaculates.