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Chapter 1

Sunday dinner at the Metropolises’ was always a big event, even without Diamond Vision. Forget that there were usually at least seven present at a table that was piled high with all sorts of great Greek delicacies, and that the longtime feud between my father and my maternal grandfather, Kosmos, periodically erupted into an almost food fight. This was the day when opinions were aired in an open environment where, yes, you might be judged, but you were always accepted. The exception being politics. Long ago, my mother Thalia had banned the discussion of any type of politics while there was still food on the table.

Of course, when coffee was served afterward, I imagined that a stoplight was hanging from the ceiling—instead of a chandelier—and it turned green, and everyone revved his or her engines.

Debating politics was as much a part of being Greek as stories about mythological gods doing strange things to swans. And there were usually as many opinions as there were gods, all different from the ones next to them, yet attached to the same family tree.

I’d once read somewhere that consistency was the one true sign of an intellectual. If that were the case then I’d pretty much say we all fell on the dumb side. One of my mother’s maxims was that if you didn’t have anything nice to say, then you shouldn’t say anything at all. And my father always added that the one speaking the loudest was generally the one that had the least to say.

Welcome to dinner at my family’s house.

As I sat at the dining room table sipping my post-dinner frappé, feeling sated and watching the goings-on around me, I recognized that I was in more of a thoughtful mood as of late. Where I might jump into the conversation right there, to contest my brother’s take on the latest political scandal, or there, where my father spoke on the viability of a female candidate for president, I instead stayed quiet.

The truth was, lately I’d become aware of a slight shift in our family dynamic. Oh, nothing drastic. We were still the same loving, sarcastic bunch, each of us easily giving as good as we got. And the changes went beyond the new fondness I’d witnessed between my mother and father ever since he’d surprised her with a thirtieth wedding anniversary party. (A really nice surprise for both of us, since Thalia had thought her husband was carrying on an affair and had half-convinced me of the same. Okay, she’d flat out convinced me. But in this case I’d never been happier to discover I was wrong.) The change also transcended Efi’s recent participation in the dialogue when she usually sat back with her skinny arms crossed over a chest bearing a T-shirt with some sort of crude or offensive saying or another. (Today it was yes, i’m a bitch, just not yours!) And even my maternal grandfather and father seemed capable of trading words without either one of them lunging across the table at each other.

Then again, maybe my family hadn’t changed. Maybe I had.

Someone said something along the lines of, “So what do you think, Sofie?”

I blinked as they all looked at me while my mother poured glasses of cold water and handed them out, perfect with the kumquat preserves she’d spooned onto tiny plates.

“How about those Mets?” I said.

Okay, so I hadn’t been paying attention. In all honesty, I’d much rather give my realization more attention than what it took to accept a water glass from my mother and pass it down. But obviously that wasn’t going to happen. At least not now when I had a family with which to engage in conversation.

“World Series, all the way,” my younger brother Kosmos said.

“Baseball.” My grandpa Kosmos tsked. “When is America going to get with the world program and make soccer its national sport? World Series. Outside of the Americas, who plays baseball?”

“Japan,” Efi offered.

“And when was the last time you saw them play in the World Series?” my grandfather asked. “Give me a good soccer game any day.”

My grandpa Kosmos had recently taken to watching soccer games on a Spanish-only station, even though he didn’t speak a word of the language. My mother said it was because he liked the way the commentators yelled “Goal!” when the teams scored. I’d watched a match with him last weekend and quickly understood that soccer language was pretty universal. Foul, corner, penalty, they were close enough even in Greek for a non-Greek to be able to follow the game. Besides, all you did was sit around and wait for the goals to be made anyway.

At any rate, I was glad that everyone seemed to have forgotten about my momentary blip on the baseball radar screen two weeks ago. Finally. I swear, for at least a week I’d gotten nailed by at least five people a day who’d seen me and either made a snarky comment or openly laughed at me. Not the makings of a good day any way you looked at it.

“Is that another tattoo?” my mother asked my sister, segueing into the “what were you thinking” segment of Sunday after-dinner discussions.

Efi considered her upper arm, which bore a yin-yang type of symbol. “No.”

“I don’t know why you want to go and mark up your body like that.” Thalia shook her head. “It’s a sin.”

“Actually,” I said casually, “I was thinking about getting a tattoo myself. What do you think, Efi?”

My sister’s face lit up like Times Square at night.

Of course, I was merely trying to deflect my mother’s attention. I liked that Efi was participating in after-dinner conversation and not going upstairs to lock herself in her room.

While every now and again I wished I were more like my little sister, the Sofie jury was still out on the tattoo issue. I loved to look at Efi’s. But would I feel the same with the ink on my skin? Hell, I changed my mind on which pair of jeans was my favorite from day to day. What would I do with a permanent tattoo? Especially at this time in my life when it seemed everything was in a state of flux?

“I got the court notice yesterday.”

Grandpa Kosmos’ words stopped all conversation. Partly because he was off topic. Mostly because we all immediately knew what he was talking about but had conveniently relegated the reality to the edges of our collective conscience.

Correction: The fact that my ex-fiancé was pressing criminal assault charges against my sixty-pushing-seventy grandfather for having busted his nose was something I went out of my way not to think about. Otherwise I was afraid of what I might do. Particularly in light of the new bond I was forming with my Glock.

Of course, we’d all known that we’d have to face this sooner or later. You know the saying, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it”? Well, we were now standing staring at the bridge and had to decide who was going to take the first step.

The way I saw it, Grandpa Kosmos was completely justified in socking Thomas Chalikis—more than even I was, maybe. He’d given the lousy skirt-chaser my late maternal grandmother’s ring so he could propose to me. And after I’d decided I wasn’t too keen on the idea of nooky roulette—meaning I didn’t want to be left wondering which one of my friends my spouse was showing little Thomas to now—and Jake Porter had rescued the mangled ring from my garbage disposal, I’d found out that the diamond wasn’t a diamond at all, but high quality CZ—cubic zirconia. Meaning that somewhere between the time Grandpa Kosmos had given my ex my grandmother’s ring and Thomas had it reset to propose to me, the diamond had been switched out.

All things considered, the question should be whether I would sue Thomas for the cost of the missing diamond, rather than whether my grandfather should be facing criminal charges for hitting a man a third his age.

“I can’t believe that no good, lying, cheating, son of a bitch is getting away with this,” Efi said.

Normally my mother would cuff the back of her head or my father might glare at my sister to get her to apologize for her crass words.

Now we were all in agreement.

“When’s the date?” I asked, barely able to swallow the big sip of frappé I’d just sucked into my mouth.

“A week and a half from now. Wednesday at ten in the morning.”

A week and a few days. Good. That gave me some time to work with.

Although what work, exactly, I was going to do remained undetermined.

I could always take a cue from Tony DiPiazza and fit Thomas-the-Toad-Chalikis with a pair of cement overshoes and push him into the East River from Hell Gate Bridge.

But since getting Thomas to come anywhere near me, much less on top of a bridge, was out of the question, I’d probably have to get far more inventive.

One of the advantages of being a private detective was that you set your own hours. There was no time clock, no boss breathing down the back of your neck questioning your tactics or your work ethic. Of course, it also helped that my uncle Spyros was the spyros metropolis, private investigator that was stenciled in gold letters on the front window of the small office on Steinway, wedged between a Thai restaurant and a fish store. And that for the past few months he’d been an absent boss, on an extended vacation in Greece. When I first hired on six months ago Spyros agreed to give me a regular weekly salary until—when and if—I started pulling in commissions greater than that amount.

And I was proud to say that I’d recently passed that important benchmark. Which meant my uncle and I were due for a conversation. An exchange of words that couldn’t take place unless I could get him on the phone in Greece, which I appeared completely incapable of doing no matter my growing proficiency at my job. So I had to wait until he called the agency, something he did every few days or so around the same time in the early afternoon.

Since the office manager Rosie Rodriquez held down the proverbial fort at the agency, my being there on any kind of regular basis wasn’t required beyond the increase-in-income quest and to fill out paperwork for the cases I worked on, much of which I could also do and did while working other boring cases, mostly of the cheating spouse variety. The spitfire Puerto Rican was more than capable of taking care of anything else that came the agency’s way.

Or in this instance, came in through the door.

I walked into the agency after a fifty-something man who was wearing a neat orange Polo shirt and Dockers. Rosie opened her mouth to say something to me and I made a cutting motion across my throat indicating I didn’t want the guy to know I worked there. She made a face that looked altogether too cute on her.

“Hello,” she said, probably more polite to the customer than she normally would have been given that I’d thrown her off her game. “How can I help you today?”

I sat down in one of the two chairs against the front windows put there for people to cool their heels or find out their spouses were knocking boots with everything this side of the East River. I picked up a month-old tabloid Rosie must have brought in and stared at the cover story: aliens among us.

Story of my life.

“I need to hire someone to find my dog,” the man said.

I gave an eye roll and then lifted the paper to cover my face before Rosie could bestow one of her own puppy-dog looks on me and convince me to take on another missing pet case. The last one had netted me a urine stain from a hamster on my favorite T-shirt and had marked the official end to my pet detecting days.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Rosie said, getting up from her chair and coming to stand beside me. She shifted in a way that knocked the paper right out of my hands. “But our agents are really busy and aren’t currently taking on new clients right now.”

I picked up the paper and managed to partially swat her with it before pretending to read it again.

The man sighed, looking a bit too much like my father for comfort. “You’re the fifth place I’ve been to. Hey, I’d probably refuse the case, too, if our roles were reversed. But Tiffany is my wife’s eight-year-old toy poodle and, well, she’s literally worried herself sick over her disappearance.”

I forced myself to read the tabloid cover story. “A farmer outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, reports that the flying saucer landed in his soybean field, where it remained parked for two hours before taking off again. Afterward he discovered that at least an acre of his field had been harvested.”

So aliens liked soybeans. As far as I was concerned they could have them.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. . . .”

“Kaufman. Albert Kaufman.”

She’d named him. Damn. The first rule in keeping things casual and by extension at a distance was not to name an individual. That’s why I referred to most of the cheating spouses I followed by their last names. Helped me keep things in perspective.

But now the man in front of me was Albert instead of a guy who’d missed his tee time and had nothing better to do than hire someone to look for his wife’s froufrou pet.

“Mr. Kaufman, why don’t I take down your contact information and check to see if one of our agents might have time to look into the situation for you?”

I rustled the paper loudly and then turned the page to follow the alien story while Rosie ignored me and took Albert’s information.

Finally, he was gone. I lowered the paper to find Rosie standing in front of me, chewing her gum a mile a minute and making her dimples pop, her arms crossed under her very generous chest.

“You coulda at least talked to the guy.”

I put the paper down. “Have you spotted any alien spaceships lately? According to The Tattler, there appears to be a lot of them.”

“That’s not the only thing there’s a lot of lately.” Rosie sat back down in front of her ancient computer while I searched the top of my paper-covered desk for something interesting. “I swear, we’re getting at least two missing pet case requests a day. Must be the weather or somethin’.”

“Must be.” I picked up a package that was big enough to hold a violin and shook it. “What’s this?”

“I dunno. What do I look like to you, your secretary?” Her fingers hit the keys harder than was necessary, indicating she was a tad upset. “You know, you could take one or two of those cases, already. I mean, we’re talking about people’s pets, their babies.”

“Babies with teeth and the ability to use them.”

I peeled away the plain paper wrapping that bore only my name and address and then opened the lid of the box. The smell of something rotting made me cringe away. Rosie was immediately next to me, looking over my shoulder.

“Oh, no. Somebody sent you dead roses.” She reached around to pick the smeared card out of the decaying stems. “Thanks a lot for ending my marriage,” she read.

She tossed the card back into the box and I closed it and then stuffed it into my garbage can.

“Oh no you didn’t.” Rosie stared at me. “You need to take that out to the back Dumpster on account of them stinking up the place.”

I gave her an eye roll. “I don’t plan on being here long anyway. You don’t want to smell them, you take them to the Dumpster.”

I found it odd that we were both acting nonchalant about the delivery. Truth was, receiving the dead roses creeped me out. And told me that a caught spouse was focusing his or her attention on me rather than accepting responsibility for the fact that they’d screwed up their marriage by engaging in a round of tube snake boogie with someone not their spouse.

“Uncle Spyros get a lot of roses?” I asked Rosie.

“No. He gets death threats.”

Yikes.

And here I thought cheating spouse cases were routine and boring. And they were. Up and until the client received the pictures of their significant other’s extracurricular activities and then introduced the now insignificant other to the meaning of the word “consequences.”

“You dig up anything on the Hanson case yet?”

“Not anything interesting.” She hit a key several times, and then made a go at singeing the brows from my forehead with inventive profanity. “Damn thing, always freezing up on me. Now I gotta go and reboot again.”

“Probably if you had a new computer you could dig up something on the Hanson case.”

“Probably I could. And probably I could use this one to hit your uncle over the head with because I’ve been asking for a new computer and he still hasn’t gotten me one. Holy shit.”

I put down the message slips and looked up to find her staring through the front window.

“Now that’s something you don’t see every day on Steinway,” she whispered.

Outside, a bright yellow customized Hummer the size of a city block rolled up, apparently somebody’s idea of a limo. We both watched as the black-clothed driver got out and walked up to the agency door.

“Now what kind of trouble have you gotten me into?” Rosie whispered, looking in her drawer, probably for her mace or holy water, depending on what she feared was the source for the Hummer visit.

Me? My mind flashed to Tony DiPiazza and those cement boots he’d fitted me for. Then again, this limo wasn’t Tony’s style. And he was in Italy anyway and would be for a good long time to come.

Thank God.

“Ms. Metropolis?” the granite-looking driver said, taking off his hat.

“That would be her,” Rosie said, pointing a red talon in my direction.

“My employer would like to speak to you.”

“Send him in.”

“In private.”

I looked around. “This is about as private as it gets.”

“In the car.”

“Oh.”

I exchanged glances with Rosie who was trying to inconspicuously shake her head.

But curiosity had gotten the better of this particular cat and I followed the guy out so he could hold open the back door of the Hummer for me.

Excerpted from Foul Play by Tori Carrington
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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Foul Play A Sofie Metropolis Novel

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