Triple Threat

terrible crime but justice’s been done. If I start searching, I may have to ask you things--you’ll have to relive the incident. And, well, sometimes when people look into the past, they find things they wish they hadn’t.”
    “What could that be?”
    “Maybe there’d be no way to recover the body, even if I find it. Maybe it was… let’s say disrespected when it was disposed of.”
    Carmel had
not
considered this, he could tell. Clients rarely did. But she said, “I want to say a prayer at her grave, wherever it is. I don’t care about anything else.”
    Caruso nodded and pulled a retainer agreement from his credenza. They both signed it. Also, on whim, he penned in a discounted hourly rate. He’d seen pictures of her three children when she’d opened her purse to get her driver’s license number for the agreement. They were teenagers and the parents were surely facing the horror of college expenses.
    You’re a goddamn softy, he told himself.
    “All right,” he said to her. “Let me keep these and I’ll get to work. Give me your home and mobile numbers.”
    A hesitation. “Email please. Only email.” She wrote it down.
    “Sure. Not call?”
    “No, please don’t. See, I mentioned to my husband I was thinking about doing this and he said it wasn’t a good idea.”
    “Why?”
    She nodded at the news clippings. “It’s in there somewhere. There was a man maybe working for the Westerfields, the police think. Daniel’s worried he’d find out if we started looking for the body. He’s probably dangerous.”
    Glad you mentioned it, Caruso thought wryly. “Okay, I’ll email.” He rose.
    Carmel Rodriguez stepped forward and actually hugged him, tears in her eyes.
    Caruso mentally bumped his fee down another twenty-five, just to buy her a little more of his time.
    When she’d gone he booted up the iPad just to see what he’d missed sportswise. The match was over. Senegal had won five zip.
    Five
?
    A BBC announcer, beset by very un-BBC enthusiasm, was gushing,
“Some of the most spectacular scoring I have
ever
seen in all my years—”
    Caruso shut the device off. He pulled the stack of clippings closer, to take more notes—and to read up in particular on the Westerfields’ possible accomplice.
    He was reflecting that in all his years as a privately investigating security consultant, he’d been in one pushing match that lasted ten seconds. Not one real fight. Caruso did have a license to carry a pistol and he owned one but he hadn’t touched his in about five years. He believed the bullets had turned green.
    He wondered if he would in fact be in danger.
    Then decided, so be it. Game had to come with a little risk. Otherwise it wasn’t Game.
    # # #
    Senior NYPD detective Lon Sellitto dropped into his chair in his Major Cases office, One Police Plaza. Dropped, not sat. Rumpled—the adjective applied to both the gray suit and the human it encased—he looked with longing affection at a large bag from Baja Express he’d set on his excessively cluttered desk. Then at his visitor. “You want a taco?”
    “No, thanks,” Caruso said.
    The portly cop said, “I don’t get the cheese or the beans. It cuts the calories way down.”
    Eddie Caruso had known Sellitto for years. The detective was an all right guy, who didn’t bust the chops of private cops, as long as they didn’t throw their weight around and sneak behind the back of the real Boys in Blue. Caruso didn’t. He was respectful.
    But not sycophantic.
    “You’ll guarantee that?” Caruso asked.
    “What?”
    “No beans, so you’re not going to fart. I don’t want to be here if you’re gonna fart.”
    “I meant I don’t get the
refried
beans. I get the regular beans, black beans or whatever the hell they are. They’re lot less calories. ‘Fried’ by itself is not a good word when you’re losing weight. ‘Refried’? Think how fucking bad that is. But black beans’re okay. Good fiber, tasty. But, yeah, I fart when I eat ‘em. Like any Tom, Dick and Harry. Everybody does.”
    “Can we finish business before you indulge?”
    Sellitto nodded at a slim, limp NYPD case file. “We will, ‘cause sorry to say, the quote business ain’t going to take that long. The case is over and done with and it wasn’t much to start with.”
    Out the window you could catch a glimpse of the harbor and Governor’s Island. Caruso loved the view down here. He’d thought from time to time about relocating but then figured the only real