A/N: Lack of inspiration plus last-second-work-to-do-before-school-breakpanic equals decreased ficcing...I'm trying, though, I promise!
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They decided on Indian food for lunch, and an hour later found themselves, along with Logan and Barek, crowded into their captain's office, which was beginning to smell like curry.
"You've really got to invest in some more chairs one of these days, boss," Logan told Deakins from his standing position a few feet away as he attempted to keep the aluminum container of rice he held in one hand from bending under its own weight while he ate from it with his other hand.
"I told you you could sit on the arm of my chair," Barek reminded him from her seat at the side of Deakins's desk.
Alex shifted her weight in her own chair and tore off another piece of nan bread, grinning at the other woman."Yeah, but you rescinded that offer pretty damn fast after he almost ended up in your lap for the third time."
"Hey, I warned her that it's hard to balance on those skinny arms," Logan said through a mouthful of tandoori chicken.
"And would those be her arms," Alex said with a smirk, "or the arms of the chair?"
"I'll have you know my arms aren't skinny!" Barek protested with a wave of her fork.
"She's right," said her partner, idly rubbing his jaw. "She's got a mean right hook, and you gotta have muscle behind that."
Deakins, who had been ignoring the detectives' casual banter as he concentrated on his chicken tikka masala, looked up at Logan and raised his eyebrows. "Do I want to know how you know how good her right hook is, Logan?"
"Have to keep him in line somehow," Barek said with a casual shrug.
"Feminine wiles can't work all the time," Alex agreed with a matching shrug.
"Yeah?" Deakins said, leaning back in his chair and looking at her with interest. "So tell me this: you ever taken a swing at Goren?"
She looked over her shoulder at her partner, who was standing behind her, leaning one hip against her chair. He paused mid-chew and affected a look of childlike innocence before looking back down at his lunch with more interest than it really warranted.
"Well, no," she conceded, turning back to Deakins, "but that's only because I know better ways to control him."
Logan choked on a piece of chicken, earning himself a wallop on the back from his partner.
"And on that note," Alex said hastily, focusing intently on her own food and trying to pretend she didn't hear Logan's loud coughing, "let's get back to talking about our case, shall we?"
"Works for me," Deakins said, propping his feet up on his desk and looking at the four detectives expectantly. "So?"
"Well," Logan began when no one else had spoken after a few seconds, "Me and Barek ran our asses all over Manhattan trying to track down some of these parolees." He gave the paper he was holding a shake. "Which, and I think I can speak for both of us when I say this, sucked. But we spoke to three of them and eliminated five more who no longer live in the area."
"Who'd you get?" Alex asked, setting aside her bread as she unfolded her notepad and pulled out the pen that had been holding her hair in a messy bun.
"Abe Sykes," Barek began, reading off her own copy of the list, "Garrett Grant, and Jerrold Moore. They're all either at supervised halfway houses or way too busy looking for their next fix to worry about some dead lawyer uptown. They all seemed completely uninterested in what we had to say when we caught them. What was it Moore told us, again?" she asked meditatively, turning to her partner.
"I believe it was 'Who the fuck are you? Fuckin' cops, I got a job now and I ain't killed nobody,'" Logan said, mimicking the man's accent. "That was followed by the slightly more polite, 'Now lemme the hell alone.'"
Alex giggled and looked at her partner. "His Brooklyn accent is way better than yours, Bobby."
"I'd like to see you try it," Goren muttered.
"Nah. You do the cigarette thing way better than I ever could. Besides, I'm just too sophisticated to play the part," she said, giving him a teasing pat on the arm.
"Sophisticated," Logan repeated with a snort.
"Anyway," Barek went on pointedly, "We also tracked down Miguel Estrada, who got married and moved up to Maine; Paul Novatny, who was deported back to the Czech Republic six months ago, kicking and screaming all the way; Aaron Henry, who, in true genius fashion, got himself shot up in a gang war and died last year; Quinn David, who got religion and moved to South Carolina to become a preacher; and everyone's favorite, Dwayne Harrison - he's in jail down in Florida on drug charges."
"So you've eliminated those eight people from the list, is that what you're saying?" Deakins summarized neatly when Barek finally paused to take a breath.
She blinked. "Uh, yeah. That's the gist of it."
"Good. Keep going like this, we'll get the parolees crossed out in no time."
Logan and Barek exchanged a weary look. "Sure," Logan said with absolutely no enthusiasm, a state made worse by the fact that he was sure he saw a subtle look of smugness on Goren's face when he looked at the guy.
Deakins studiously ignored Logan's tone of voice and moved his eyes to Eames. He found himself staring at the back of her head, though; she was turned to face Goren, murmuring something, and seemed oblivious of being stared at. "Yo, Eames! You with us?"
"Uh, yeah," she replied as she turned around to face him, feeling like a kid caught passing notes in class. "You want our report now?"
"Yes, Detective, that would be a big help," he said with a roll of his eyes. "If you're willing to share, that is."
Giving him a dark look, she sighed and re-opened her notepad, even though she didn't really need it. "Ok, well, we talked to the husband at his apartment. The short version of what we found is that the guy's seriously upset by his wife's death, and it looked realistic."
"And he inspires . . . loyalty in his employees," Goren added.
She turned around to look at him again. "Huh?"
"The housekeeper," he reminded her.
"Oh, right. What did she say to us, anyway?" Catching the blank looks on everyone else's faces, she explained, "When the housekeeper let us in, she said something in Spanish that sounded like she was scolding us."
Goren nodded. "She pretty much was. She told us to, uh, behave ourselves, because her boss was a good man and we shouldn't upset him. Which is why I say," he went on, "that Young inspires loyalty. The woman was very protective of him."
"If you want more information," Alex said after a moment, "the long version of the interview with Norman Young is this: we found him in his study, looking like he'd been attempting to work and failing miserably. Didn't want to talk to anyone, but when we identified ourselves he said to go ahead and ask him anything we wanted."
"When I asked how he was doing, he said he felt numb most of the time," Goren picked up when she paused. "He also said that all lawyers have enemies, but he couldn't think of anyone in particular who might have wanted his wife dead."
"I'm totally using that as ammunition against Carver next time he tries to walk all over us," Alex said with a gleeful look.
"Oh, great," Deakins said with a sigh. "Like you guys don't antagonize him enough as it is."
She just shrugged. "Young was also able to tell us the basics of Gabrielle's will."
"Which were?"
She looked at her partner. "Claire gets . . . was it ten percent?"
"Yeah. The daughter gets ten percent of Gabrielle Young's liquidated assets when the will is, uh, executed."
"The rest goes into a . . . I think it's called a family protection trust, where the husband has full access to the assets, but the remainder automatically goes to the daughter when he dies," Eames added.
"I've heard of those," Barek said with a nod. "They're usually intended to keep one parent's assets belonging to their own children in case the spouse remarries or has more kids."
"Interesting . . ." Deakins mused out loud. "So maybe she didn't trust him to leave their daughter an inheritance?"
"I thought that at first too," Alex said with a shake of her head, "but I asked if his will had the same provision and he said yes." She shrugged. "They're lawyers, they do stuff like make trust funds for 'convenience'."
"But, uh . . ." Goren said after leaning forward to look at her, "things started to get more . . . interesting after he answered that question."
"Yeah. Apparently he still thinks we're not investigating fast enough, because he asked if we would skip right to the important questions. Those," she added, amused to see that the room's other three occupants looked as taken aback as she and Goren had felt at the time, "he informed us, were: does he own a firearm, was his marriage in good shape, and where was he the night she died."
"He told you to ask those?" Logan asked with raised eyebrows.
"Yeah. Kinda puts you off balance, right?"
"I'll say."
"He said he wanted to be crossed off the suspect list as soon as possible," she said with a shrug.
"He denied ownership of a gun," Bobby said. "By himself or his daughter. We'll, uh, check that out when we get out of here. His alibi is verifiable, but we haven't checked it yet, either: he was at a meeting at his firm from dinnertime to past midnight."
"Yeah," Alex said with a sniff of disdain, "a meeting to figure out how to get a rapist off the hook."
"It's the way of the world," Deakins said with a sigh as he fingered his pen. "We catch 'em, bloodsucking lawyers get 'em out of jail, and they so they become our problem again. Did you gets names?"
"Uh, yeah," Goren muttered, pulling a folded paper from his portfolio and leaning over his partner's shoulder to hand it to Deakins. "Now, the last question he gave us . . . he had an interesting answer for that one." He pulled his arm back and rested his hands on the back of her chair; useen by the rest of the room, he let the tips of his fingers touch her upper back lightly.
His touch had the intended effect; the contact headed off the insecurity she might have felt at remembering her unprofessional reaction to Young's answer. "He said they had been married thirty years and they were completely happy, that it had taken them this long to get to that point and he couldn't believe it was suddenly gone."
"Poor guy," Barek said softly.
"You buy that?" Logan questioned, looking from one woman to the other. "He was probably lying through his teeth; nobody actually says stuff like that."
"Oh, I don't know," Deakins said lightly. "I'd say thirty years is about how long it took for me to figure out my wife."
"I agree with Captain Deakins. You're just bitter because no girl will marry you," Barek told Logan with a teasing smile.
"Hey!"
"Oh geez, not you guys, too," Deakins muttered, dropping his head into his hands. "I already have one pair of bickering detectives on my hands, I don't need another."
There was a moment of silence as Goren and Eames exchanged an worried look before they looked back at Deakins and said in unison, "We don't bicker!"
"Save it," he said with a casual wave of his hand. "As long as you don't kill each other or anyone else, I can deal with it. But you two," he added, looking back to Logan and Barek. "I'm watching you. Now, go get back to your parolees and let me know if you find anything. Eames, you and Goren are going to check the gun registrations and alibi?"
"Yep."
"Good. Keep me up-to-date. Now, all of you, out - I have a sudden urge to call my wife."
The four detectives evacuated the room with alacrity, three of them barely managing to make it out the door without bursting into laughter.
Tired of missing the joke, Barek stopped walking, leaning to one side and then the other to block her companions' paths as they tried to get past her. "You guys aren't going anywhere until one of you explains this to me," she said, crossing her arms and fixing a glare on her partner.
"Uh . . ." Logan looked at Alex, who was smirking, then Goren, who looked confused. Turning back to his partner after a second, he pointed toward Eames and Goren and said, "Ask them."
"I'm asking all of you!"
"You know, this really isn't the time or the place for this discussion," Alex said cautiously. "Why don't the four of us go get a drink after work and we'll explain ourselves then."
The two men, blindsided by her suggestion, found themselves looking at each other with wariness. "Uh, Eames . . ." Goren said tentatively.
"Sounds like a plan," Barek interrupted. "But if you back out, I'm willing to play dirty to get an answer."
"Sure," Alex said, her face relaxing into a smile. "Meet us back here at quitting time, ok?"
"Works for me." She looked at her partner, who looked like he was trying to plan an escape. "Come on, Logan. Let's go chase some more junkies."