204. Dining at the Ritz

Castle has decided that it might be sensible to do his shopping and as much preparation as possible so that he can maximise the time spent with the team tomorrow. Despite appearances, he is actually quite good at planning and organisation. He wanders contentedly round the shops, and then home, bedecked with bags and with a menu in mind.

Once home, he efficiently prepares a particularly nice marinade, in which he places pieces of chicken fillet and then leaves the whole dish in the fridge to soak overnight and for the majority of tomorrow. It will stir fry in a flash, accompanied by neatly sliced peppers, which will be the work of a moment, baby corn cobs, bamboo shoots and water chestnuts, all of which come from cans, and cashew nuts. It’s a reliable and, most importantly, extremely quick dish. Rice will not take long in the microwave, there will be no alcohol, and he is now ready to embark on a dessert. He whistles as he puts together an open-faced apple tart and, while it’s cooking, concocts a caramel sauce.

Halfway through his sauce-making, Alexis wanders down from her homework to find out what’s going on and, teen like, what’s for dinner tonight, never mind tomorrow. On being satisfied on both counts, she disappears again.

Over dinner, however, she is more pressing.

“So are Detective Beckett and her dad fixed now?”

“Pretty much,” Castle says neutrally. “They’re having dinner every week, so I guess it’s better.”

“Good,” Alexis says. “Does that mean that Detective Beckett will come round more? I like her. She treats me like a grown up.”

Castle doesn’t point out that this is not necessarily true. “Maybe,” he says instead.

“And she can give me loads of advice on clothes and make-up and boys and still doing really well at school.”

Castle chokes.

“And of course, there’s the tattoo I want to get for my birthday,” she says.

“Stop it, daughter, or you’ll get coal for your birthday. You’re not allowed to make fun of me.”

“But it’s so enjoyable,” Alexis mutters. Castle is sure he’s heard exactly that sardonic tone from Beckett, and he really doesn’t want to hear it from his daughter.

“Have you finished your homework?” he asks.

“Yes. Dad, can I stay with Paige at the weekend?”

“This weekend, yes, if you’ve finished your homework” – that’s no barrier at all, his diligent daughter always finishes her homework – “but not next weekend. Grams’ party comes first.”

“This weekend. I don’t wanna miss Grams’ party.”

“Okay. Friday or Saturday night?”

“Both?” Alexis says very hopefully.

“No. One night. You know that.”

“But Da-ad, if I was away for both nights Detective Beckett could” –

“That’s nearly sneaky enough to be an idea of mine, pumpkin, but it’s not going to work. One night. Maybe when you’re eighteen I’ll let you stay out all weekend.”

“I’ll be at college then, and you won’t know,” Alexis points out. Castle splutters, and Alexis takes advantage to clear her dishes. “Saturday night, then,” she says.

“Okay.”

Alexis scampers off, perfectly happy. Castle tidies up, also very happy. The weekend is suddenly looking perfectly wonderful.

Castle rolls in to find the team – well, sulking. Perlmutter has not delivered anything, and is not answering the phone. Montgomery has apparently vetoed Beckett’s suggestion that she goes to the morgue and extracts results. There is a strong impression that she wouldn’t mind extracting Perlmutter’s guts, either. With considerable irritation, Esposito tells Castle that Montgomery also – Castle makes all the right noises of sympathy for the unfairness – wouldn’t let him go and threaten Perlmutter.

The sum total of all this sulking seems to be that there are no trails to follow just yet. Fortunately, CSU is not quite as unhelpful as Perlmutter, and send over a cleaned up ID and, indeed, usable prints just on ten a.m. The machine gets going.

“Diego Diaz,” Esposito says. “New Jersey. Few speeding tickets, nothin’ else obvious.”

“Social security number?”

“Just lookin’ for it – oh. Here we are. Worked at Espanola.”

“Hm,” Beckett says. “C’mon, Castle, let’s go. Field trip.”

Espanola is a small restaurant at First and Eleventh. Some very appetising smells are issuing from its kitchen as they walk in. Castle sniffs happily and obviously.

“I’m hungry,” he says hopefully.

“Too early for lunch.”

A small, dark haired young man emerges from a door through to a kitchen. Beckett flicks her shield out.

“Detective Kate Beckett,” she says briskly. He looks confused. “We’re here about Diego Diaz.”

“Chef?” he says.

“He’s the chef here?”

“Yes, but he didn’t turn up yesterday or today, so that’s his assistant in the kitchen.”

“Smells good,” Castle says. Beckett rolls her eyes.

“You are?”

“I’m Clay. Clay Jones. I’m a server here. Paying my way through school.”

“Okay. Tell me about Diego, Clay.”

Clay appears rather uninformed. “He was just Chef, you know? Turned up, cooked, went home. Never really talked to him.”

“Who’s in charge here?”

“Chef.”

That’s not terribly helpful. Chef is dead, so he’s not going to be in charge of anything.

“When he’s not here?”

“John.”

“John?” This is like pulling teeth.

“John in the kitchen. John Carnoso. He’s the one cooking.”

“Who owns this place?”

“Dunno.”

This kid made it to college? How?

“Okay, Clay. Go get John, please.”

Clay drags off with no enthusiasm at all. Beckett looks at Castle.

“I think I like Alexis’ style a lot better.” Castle blinks. “Intelligence and some enthusiasm about life. He’s just totally meh.” Castle manages not to trip over his own feet in surprise and happiness. “I bet if she were serving in a café she’d know more about what was going on than this guy.”

“Mm,” Castle agrees, temporarily bereft of words. Before he’s retrieved them, Clay trails back again, with a tall Latino following him.

“John Carnoso?”

“Yeah?”

“Detective Kate Beckett and my associate, Richard Castle. We’d like to” –

“Richard Castle? Like the guy who writes the books?”

“I am the guy who writes the books.”

“Really? I love those books. I got a paperback with me. Will you sign it?”

“Sure.”

“You can do that later. Right now, John, I need to ask you some questions about Diego Diaz.”

“Diego? What’s he done?”

“It’s not what he’s done. It’s what’s been done to him.”

“He’s hurt? Who’d wanna do that?”

“I’m sorry to tell you that he’s dead.”

John turns white. “Dead? He can’t be dead.”

“I’m afraid he is.” Beckett deliberately doesn’t mention how.

“An accident? Mugging?”

“It was murder.”

John pales further. “Oh my God.”

“We need to ask you some questions,” Beckett says again, before he can faint.

“Sure, sure, anything.”

Beckett goes through all the basics. Name, address, job, did he own the restaurant, family. Nothing particularly stunning there.

“Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”

“I think he did, but I dunno who.” That’ll need to wait for phone info, then.

“Anyone who disliked him?”

“Bruno.”

“Who’s Bruno?”

“He was one of the servers. Diego fired him a week ago.”

Beckett extracts all the details John can remember.

“Thank you,” she finally says.

“When did you last see Diego?” Castle asks.

“Tuesday. Lunchtime. We don’t do dinners, just breakfast and lunch.”

“And you said Diego lived in New Jersey?” Beckett knows that from the licence run, but she wants to hear John say it again.

“Yeah.”

“So what was he doing down here late Tuesday night?”

“Huh?” John emits, as if he’d been punched. “Here?”

“Near enough.”

“No idea.” He shakes his head. “Not a clue. We start early for breakfast – open from six” – aha! A stop point, since he didn’t show then – “and he wasn’t there, but he wouldn’t be here before five.”

“And he didn’t show at five?”

“No. Couldn’t get him on the phone, so we just got on with it.” An even better stop point.

“Okay. Thank you for your time, John. We’ll need to talk to all the servers and kitchen staff. Can we have a list, please?”

John suddenly looks very nervous. “Um… okay… but some of them aren’t too keen on officials.” Beckett gets it. Some of them aren’t entirely legal. Well, that’s not her problem right now. She’ll check what she ought to do with Montgomery, later. She’s not run across this precise problem before, and she doesn’t want to promise something she can’t or mustn’t make good on.

“I still need that list,” she says, not giving an inch. John, as so many before him, crumples under the weight of her stare.

“Okay,” he says dejectedly. He turns to a small computer in a barely-bigger-than-a-broom-cupboard office, taps, prints, and hands Beckett a list. Clearly he doesn’t know that she normally needs to get a warrant. She’s not going to tell him, either.

“Right. We don’t want to mess up your lunch service” – John looks pathetically grateful – “so we’ll do all the interviews after that.” She privately determines that Ryan and Esposito will be having lunch here, with her and Castle. She’s not that dumb, and she’s pretty sure that one or two on the list won’t be hanging around when their work ends. Besides which, it’s almost lunchtime now, and Castle is making faces that indicate both that he’s hungry and that he’ll whine if he isn’t fed.

“Have you got a table for four?” John’s face falls. It would be funny, if the cause weren’t so serious. “Castle, will you sit at it, and I’ll give the boys a call to join us?

“Sure,” he says.

Beckett goes outside to call Ryan. She explains what she wants, and he agrees to fix it so it happens. Shortly, he and Espo join them for lunch, which is very acceptable in both quantity and quality. After lunch, they wander casually around the corner, and have a thoroughly pleasant conversation with the uniformed officers whom they find there. Strangely, those same officers appear to have found some friends. They look remarkably like three of the servers from Espanola. How very peculiar.

Beckett smiles like a knife and congratulates herself on her foresight. “Thanks, guys,” she says to the uniforms. “Can you take them down to the station, and we’ll get to them shortly?”

The servers left at the restaurant are really not much use to anyone, though courtesy of there being three detectives and one writer to conduct interviews they are dealt with in double quick time. The gang traipse back to the precinct, armed with nothing more than a series of negatives, and hoping that the three servers who’d tried to evade questioning are more use.

Castle keeps urging Beckett to walk quicker, drive faster, get there sooner, and frets at every stop light and intersections. It doesn’t take long for her to become frustrated.

“What’s your hurry, Castle?” she snaps, exasperated.

“I want to get on with this, before I have to go home.”

“Uh?”

“You’re coming for dinner tonight, with your dad. Remember?” He stops. “You’d forgotten, hadn’t you?”

“I’d have remembered,” Beckett says, not wholly convincingly. “The reminder would have come up on my phone.”

Castle gibbers, hugely insulted. “You’d have forgotten about my top-class hospitality and gourmet cooking?” About that point he registers Beckett’s evil grin and barely-controlled laughter. “You are mean!” he complains.

“Of course I didn’t forget. I’m insulted that you think I would.” She humphs, for good measure, and then dissolves into mirth again.

“Can’t we go faster?” he whines.

“Not without causing an accident. Patience.” She hears a very odd noise from beside her. It doesn’t sound friendly: it sounds sulky. “Anyway, I’m sure you thought up an easy-cook meal so you didn’t have to leave till two minutes before I did.” Castle harrumphs. “Am I wrong?”

“No,” he grumbles. “Stop reading my mind. It’s not fair.”

“We’re here,” she points out. “Wanna come interrogate, or do you need to go cook dinner?” She evades his grab with ease, but twines her fingers into his in the elevator.   He harrumphs again, but his fingers curl round hers in return.

They stride into Interrogation One, where a very nervous server is fidgeting in his chair and glancing nervously at the one-way glass. He jumps as they enter, and cringes when the door shuts.

“I din’t do nuthin’,” he says, words spilling over each other.

“So what did you do?” Beckett raps. The server clearly doesn’t get it. “Tell me about Chef.” The server, Tony, repeats a vast amount of useless information which they already have. Beckett regards him with the look of a shark spotting a wounded whale. “You haven’t mentioned Bruno,” she points out, with enough of an edge to frighten the server still further.

“Bruno?” he wobbles. “What about Bruno? He got fired.”

“Precisely,” Beckett says sharply. “Why’d he get fired?”

“He was havin’ an argument with Chef. Getting’ pretty loud.”

“What was it about?” Castle asks, more gently. “They like the same girl?”

“Bruno was the girl, what I heard.”

Castle acquires an exceedingly smug expression which says far more clearly than words I called it, Beckett.

“Oh? Tell me about it.” Beckett leans forward on the table in an attitude of intimidating attention. Tony shudders, and would clearly like to shift backwards. Unfortunately he can’t shift backwards through the wall, which is clearly the desired outcome.

“They was together. Then they wasn’t. Then Chef fired him.” Tony stops. “Dunno what happened after. Not like we was friends.”

Tony, grill him as Beckett will, says nothing more. Nor do the other two servers. Bruno, it appears, was not sociable. Except with Chef, of course, where he was very sociable. Interrogation has taken up most of the afternoon, and it’s already after six. Castle squeaks at the time, and skedaddles, calling to Beckett to follow him in half an hour.

It takes her half an hour to find that the techs haven’t broken into the phone yet – Chef was clearly in that minority of security-conscious people who actually change the code – and that Bruno is not in any of the databases. The boys are running his social security number, but it’s not recognised. Hm. Looks like Bruno wasn’t exactly legal.

“At least we shortened the timeline,” Espo points out. “Seein’ as we got Perlmutter, we gotta take any wins we can get.”

“Yeah,” she replies gloomily. “I want to know where Bruno lives. No-one seemed to know anything about him. He probably isn’t even called Bruno.”

“We could try to get something off camera footage,” Ryan says hopefully. “I should have that first thing tomorrow.”

“I want a lead,” Beckett complains.

“We do too,” the boys agree.

“But it’s almost quarter to seven,” Ryan says, “an’ you should have been gone ten minutes ago.” He looks at her frustrated face sympathetically. “We’ll keep lookin’ for a bit. But all the techs go home and no-one’s giving us anything more tonight.”

Beckett makes a very irritated noise.

“Detective Beckett,” Montgomery says from behind her, “no point being here when you don’t have any evidence, suspects or witnesses. Start again first thing, when you’ve had a break.”

“Yessir,” she says dispiritedly, and departs.

When she opens Castle’s door, everyone else is already assembled, and Alexis is obviously grilling Beckett’s dad about anything and everything. Castle spots her and bounces over to envelop her in a bear hug and plant a kiss on her lips. It feels rather as if he’s making a statement, though she’s not entirely sure to whom.

“Hey, Beckett,” he says happily. “You’re late. Got a lead?”

“I wish. Not even a sniff of a clue.”

“Hi, Detective Beckett,” Alexis says enthusiastically. Since Castle is still embracing her, this does not fill Beckett with anything other than mild embarrassment, which turns to less mild embarrassment as her father regards her with considerable mischief.

“Evening, Katie.”

“Hey, Alexis. Dad. Sorry I’m late, just finishing up neatly.” Castle still hasn’t fully let go of her. This is – well, odd. He’s definitely making a point, but she still doesn’t know to whom, or why. “What are you doing?” she whispers.

“Hugging you.”

“Why?”

Castle’s eyes sparkle. “I wanted to.” That is not a sufficient answer, Castle. Unfortunately, in company, it’s the only one she’s going to get. “Come and sit down. Dinner’s ready.”

For a few minutes, the only sound is of contented munching.

“This is excellent,” Jim says. “Wish I’d learned to cook a bit better.”

“Mom used to do it all,” Beckett says unthinkingly. “She wouldn’t let you near a cookpot. She barely let you in the kitchen.” She realises what she’s said a second later, and blinks.

“She swore I could burn water,” Jim recalls, a hitch in his voice and a very slight forcing of the humour in the comment.

“I learned pretty early,” Castle interjects. “Mother can’t cook at all. It was self-defence, really. Then Alexis arrived and I had to learn a whole new way of cooking. It involved vegetables, and healthy choices, and balance.”

“Not just burgers and fries, then?”

Castle humphs. “I could do a lot better than that. But there was a pretty heavy reliance on mac-n-cheese at times,” he admits. “When I was buried in writing and didn’t want to stop.”

“Dad’s teaching me to cook,” Alexis says happily. “He still tries the weirdest things, though.”

“I hope it’s not those s’morelette things for dessert,” Jim says anxiously.

Castle grins wickedly, and opens his mouth.

“No,” Alexis says.

“Stop spoiling my fun,” Castle grumps. “No. Alexis wouldn’t have let me, so” – sulkily – “I didn’t even suggest it. It’s an apple tart with home-made caramel sauce, and there’s whipped cream or ice-cream or both.”

“Sounds great,” Jim says, clearly much relieved and impressed.

Indeed it is great. Conversation is kept light, for the most part, centring around the new case, in which everyone is interested, but leaving out the gorier details of the extent of the stabbings.

“So we need to track down Bruno,” Beckett winds up.

“Surely that can’t be hard?” Jim queries. “I mean, social security number, drivers’ licence, tax filings. Wouldn’t one of those work?”

“Any of those should have worked,” says Beckett with strained patience, “but it turns out that Bruno’s not on any books.”

“We think he’s likely an illegal immigrant, or doesn’t have permission to work here,” Castle amplifies, largely for Alexis’s benefit.

“Mm,” Jim hums thoughtfully. “Didn’t he even have a surname?”

“Yeah. Talaga. We’re running it, but no luck so far.”

“Shame you don’t know his phone number,” Jim muses, caught up in the intellectual challenge. “You could simply call it and pretend to be a new offer to hire him.”

Castle’s eyes light up. “A disguise?” he grins. “I love acting.”

“Not you,” Beckett says absently, lost in thought. Suddenly she snaps out of her reverie. “I need to call Espo.”

She’s standing even as she says it, pulling out her phone and dialling, pacing impatiently till he answers.