“W hat do you think they’re doing in that warehouse?” I asked, edging a glob of guacamole onto my nacho chip.
BeBe pulled the plate of nachos over toward her side of the kitchen counter and finessed a chip loaded with melted cheese, salsa and sour cream into her rosebudlike mouth.
“Smuggling drugs?”
“Lewis Hargreaves is an antique dealer, not an international drug lord,” I said.
“Think about it,” BeBe said. “That place is right over near the Port Authority docks. Maybe they drill holes in the antiques and stash drugs in them and ship them overseas to their partners.”
“Or it could work the other way around,” I said. “Maybe their partners in places like Hong Kong stash the dope in the antiques and ship them over here to Lewis. He takes the drugs out and peddles them, and gets to sell the antiques too. That could be how he can afford to buy the kind of stuff he does.”
“But I don’t get how the Moses Weed cupboard fits in with any of this,” BeBe said.
“Me neither,” I admitted. “But they’ve got to be up to something crooked.”
“Why?”
“Because Lewis Hargreaves just looks evil,” I said.
BeBe nodded. She gets me.
“You got any more Dos Equis?” I asked. “That salsa of yours is about to burn off the roof of my mouth.”
She had a mouthful of chips, so she just waved in the general direction of the undercounter cooler where she keeps beer and Cokes.
I fetched two more bottles of Dos Equis, cut a couple more wedges of lime, and handed BeBe one of each.
“You’re big buddies with Jonathan McDowell now, right? Why don’t you see if he can get a search warrant so we can get in there and look around?” BeBe asked.
“He’s all hung up with ethics and stuff like that. He won’t call out the dogs on Hargreaves just because I ask him to.”
“Ethics are a pain in the ass,” BeBe said. “How about if we just cruise over there after dark and take a look around?”
“How?” I asked. “It’s a warehouse. I didn’t see any windows.”
“Maybe the windows are on the sides, or at the back,” BeBe said. “Look. It’s Saturday night. We’ve got no dates, and if we get any more bored we’ll end up eating everything in my house. Let’s just ride over there.”
“All right,” I said, finishing off the guacamole, because really, guacamole doesn’t keep, and the cost of avocados is criminal. “Maybe we’ll come up with a plan once we get situated.”
BeBe got up and walked over to her freezer and opened the door. She pulled out a huge cardboard carton. “Fudgsicle?”
“Awesome,” I said, taking one. “I haven’t had a Fudgsicle since I was twelve.”
“I know,” she said, biting off the end of her own Fudgsicle. “My ice-cream wholesaler at the restaurant had these on special. I had to buy a box of sixty to get the price, though. Have two, why don’t you?”
“Nah,” I said, looking around for my truck keys. “If I get too full, I’ll fall asleep.”
“Where you going?”
The chocolate had given me a macho buzz. “I’m going home to shower and change,” I said. “You wanna pick me up in half an hour?”
“You’re not afraid? To go home with Tal there?” BeBe asked. “You could shower here. And you’ve still got clothes left from the last time you stayed over.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Jethro’s there, and he hates Tal. Besides, I’ve decided he really is basically gutless.” But just in case, I opened a drawer and pulled out BeBe’s sharpest meat cleaver. “Protection,” I said.
Tal’s car wasn’t parked at the townhouse, and I didn’t see it on the street either, leaving me to wonder whether Jonathan had hauled him in for questioning.
Not my problem, I decided.
I ran upstairs, showered, and prowled around my dressing room, trying to decide what to wear. Something dark, of course. Sleek, so I wouldn’t be catching my shirttail on anything if we decided to do a little climbing.
I finally decided on a pair of black stretch leggings and a zip-front black top, with flat-heeled black crepe-soled loafers. Standing in front of the mirror, I did some poses, crouching, bending, pointing my make-believe pistol. Secretly I thought myself pretty damn hot. Nearly as hot as my television idol, Mrs. Emma Peel, as played by Diana Rigg on The Avengers. The outfit needed a little oomph, though, so at the last minute I added a silk leopard-print scarf knotted at my neck.
I was in the kitchen, feeding Jethro a doggy treat and trying to explain why he couldn’t come along for the fun, when BeBe knocked at the door, which I’d started locking and dead-bolting, just in case Tal developed a last-minute criminal streak.
I opened the door and let her in. She stood very still and looked at me. I looked at her too. She was wearing a sleeveless black lycra zip-front catsuit with black lace-up running shoes, and a leopard-print belt.
“Nice outfit,” I said, laughing.
“You too,” she said.
“I was going for the Diana Rigg look.”
Her face was a blank.
“You know, from The Avengers. Back in the ’sixties.”
“Who are you supposed to be?” I asked.
“Honey West,” BeBe said, pointing to a mole which she’d eyebrow-penciled just to the right of her lips.
“Who?”
“You never saw the reruns? Weezie, Honey West, as played by Anne Francis, was who Angie Dickinson wanted to be when she grew up. Talk about hot. She was like a private detective–slash–cat burglar. And she had a pet ocelot named Bruce.”
“Are you ready to go?” I asked.
Just then, we heard the kitchen door open behind us. I know I jumped a foot in the air. I grabbed BeBe’s butcher knife and whirled around to face my attacker.
Daniel stood in the doorway with a bottle of wine in one hand and a platter of chocolate seduction in the other.
“Jesus,” he said, backing away.
“I’m a little nervous,” I explained. “The cops think maybe Tal killed Caroline.”
“We found out Caroline was having an affair with Phipps Mayhew,” BeBe added. “So if Tal found out about that, maybe he killed her in some kind of jealous rage. Although personally, I can’t imagine Tal in any kind of rage.”
“Could you put the knife down?” Daniel asked.
“Did you come over here to apologize for bossing me around?” I asked. That chocolate buzz of mine was really something.
He set the dessert and the wine on the counter, beside the knife. “Actually I was hoping we could make up and then make out. But from the looks of things, you two must have other plans.”
He glanced from me to BeBe, then back to me again.
“What’s with the matching outfits? You look like flight attendants for Air Leopard.”
BeBe raised an eyebrow, but she left the explaining to me.
“We’re going out on a little expedition. To find out what Lewis Hargreaves is up to. He’s the antique dealer who bought the Moses Weed cupboard.”
“Why don’t you just ask him?” Daniel asked.
“He’s up to something illegal,” BeBe said. “We followed his assistant to this creepy warehouse over near the Port Authority. She was buying all these chains and paint and stuff. Weezie thinks maybe they’re smuggling drugs.”
“That’s absurd,” he said.
“We’re going anyway,” I said. “Just put the dessert in the refrigerator. You can stay here with Jethro if you want.”
He shook his head. “I’ll drive.”
“OK,” I said, “but you don’t get to boss us around.”
The three of us made a snug fit in the front of Daniel’s pickup truck. I let him fondle my leg while he drove, and BeBe pretended not to notice.
“Shit,” I said when we got to the street where the warehouse was located. It was lit up like a Wal-Mart on Saturday night. There was even a spotlight in the parking lot.
Daniel parked the truck across the street so that we could see the front door of the warehouse. “Seems like a pretty brazen way to be doing drug smuggling,” he said.
We rolled the windows down and watched the place for a while.
“Hear that?” I asked. A high-pitched whining sound floated across the street.
“Power tools,” Daniel said. “Sounds just like my place.”
“They could be cutting the drugs out of the furniture shipped from Hong Kong,” BeBe offered.
“That’s absurd,” Daniel said again.
“We’re not gonna just sit here,” I said finally, nudging BeBe in the side. “Let me out.”
“Hold on,” Daniel said, grabbing my arm. “What’s the plan?”
“Plan?”
“I’ve got a plan,” BeBe announced. She pointed toward the corner of the warehouse, where a For Lease sign was nailed to the siding.
“We’ll tell them I’m a real estate agent, and you’re my client, and we want to look at the space to lease.”
“Not bad,” Daniel said.
“You’re just sucking up to her because she’s your boss,” I said. “Who do I get to be? The interior designer?”
“Nobody,” BeBe said. “Hargreaves knows you—right? If he sees you, you’ll blow our cover.”
“No fair,” I said. “This was my idea. Anyway, you two don’t know anything about antiques. You’ve never even seen the Moses Weed cupboard.”
“You’ve described it to me a dozen times,” BeBe said. “If it’s in there, I’ll recognize it. Now come on,” she said, nodding at Daniel. “Before I lose my nerve.”
I sat in the truck and pouted, watching the warehouse with my hand on the cell phone in case any dangerous-looking drug-smuggling types showed up.
Daniel and BeBe crossed the street, and I had to admit that BeBe looked very cool in her Honey West jumpsuit. BeBe tried the door, then turned around and pantomimed to me that it was locked.
Daniel found a buzzer beside the door and leaned on it for a minute. After a long time, the door opened, and a man, short, Mexican-looking, with thick forearms, came out to talk to them.
I could see BeBe talking and gesturing animatedly, and Daniel talking and nodding in agreement. The Mexican kept shaking his head no, but every time he did that, BeBe took another step forward, followed by Daniel, until they were inside the warehouse and the door swung shut.
Nothing happened for about five minutes, which made me nuts. I tucked the cell phone in the waistband of my pants and got out of the car and crept across the street, trying to stay out of the beam of the parking-lot spotlight.
I crouched down behind a row of Dumpsters at the edge of the lot, out of the light but close enough to keep the doorway in view.
After another five minutes, the door swung open and BeBe and Daniel walked out, followed by the Mexican, who was doing a lot of his own gesturing and talking.
The Mexican stood in the doorway and watched them cross the street to the truck, but I didn’t dare move from my hiding space. They got in the truck, and I could see they were wondering where I’d gone. After a moment or two, Daniel started the truck’s engine and rolled slowly down the street. The Mexican watched them go, then, finally, let the warehouse door swing shut.
Shit. Were they leaving me? I crouched down next to the Dumpster and tried to decide what to do.
My waist started to buzz, which startled me badly until I realized the buzzing was coming from the cell phone. I flipped it open. “Hello?” I whispered.
“Where the hell are you?” BeBe demanded.
“Hiding between the Dumpsters,” I whispered. “Come back and get me. And make it snappy.”
When the truck cruised slowly past the parking lot, I did a very un-Diana Rigg run for the truck. BeBe had the passenger door open, and I jumped inside before Daniel could roll to a stop.
“What did you see?” I asked, gasping for breath.
“A warehouse,” Daniel said.
“Four thousand square feet, unheated,” BeBe added.
“What were they doing in there?” I asked.
“That Mexican kept trying to shoo us back to the front,” BeBe said. “But I explained that my client needed to see all of the space. We wandered out to the warehouse for a minute or two, before he hustled us back to the front office area.”
“You were right about the building materials,” Daniel said. “There were stacks of lumber, power tools. Lots of hand tools too, which I found peculiar. Old bandsaws and chisels and old-timey stuff. They had a paint table set up, and lots of hardware, nails, chains. Like a workshop.”
“What about antiques? Did you see any antiques?”
“We saw a couple of tables almost exactly like the one you and I saw in the window at Hargreaves’s shop,” BeBe said. “Except these were just plain wood. And there was a stack of like, table legs, and doors, like the kind that might go on a cabinet or something. And lots and lots of piles of old-looking wood. The kind that looks like it’s been pulled off an old house or something.”
“What about the Moses Weed cupboard?” I asked. “Did you see it?”
“No,” BeBe said. “But we only got a glimpse of the workshoplike place. There was furniture in there. That’s for definite.”
“Antique furniture?”
“You know, sort of that primitive, junky stuff like you like,” BeBe said. “The guy didn’t speak much English, but it was real clear he wanted us out of there, and pronto.”
“Primitive furniture,” I said. And then I remembered all the sandpaper and steel wool and paint Zoe Kallenberg bought at the hardware store. And I had a very good idea of what Lewis Hargreaves was doing in his warehouse. Really good Southern vernacular antiques were getting harder to find. The market was heating up, but the supply had dwindled to nothing. So Lewis Hargreaves had found a solution. He was making his own.