Free Big Money (Austin Carr Mystery) by Jack Getze

say. “You have to do it, Susan. Bluefish threatened them. Now this gangster tried to kill Luis.”
    “So you say,” Susan says. “But your word doesn’t count much.”
    “I would never lie about our children. How can you even think that?”
    “Where am I going to send the children, Austin? Disney World? Both my parents are sick. It’s too late to book a sitter for the weekend. And I was counting on you picking them up tomorrow. I’ve got plans. You can’t decide to back out at the last minute.”
    “ That’s what you think? That my story is bullshit, that I’m making this up just to get out of taking them for the weekend?”
    “It occurred to me.”
    I take a breath. And another.
    “Austin?”
    “You going to be home for a while?” I say.
    “I’m picking up the kids at school in twenty minutes.”
    “I’ll try to have someone else call you.”
    “Yeah? Who, your secretary?”
    “How about Detective Jim Mallory?”
     
     
    Don’t know exactly what my BPD connections earned Susan in the way of clarification, but I heard later some body convinced her to swallow my idea. Mallory or a patrolman on Mallory’s orders must have explained why I couldn’t know where the kids were headed, either. Otherwise I’m sure Susan would have called to tell me of her change of mind.
    Sure she would.
     
     

 
    NINETEEN
     
    In Vic’s old office the next day, I touch a sterling picture frame with strange reverence. Not sure why I left hanging this mid-ocean action photo of Mr. Vic’s forty-four-foot motor yacht, the “Triple-A.” I do not need visual reminders of my mortality, how close to death by drowning I came last year. But maybe I relish how much private boats like this cost, how much money Mr. Vic made all those years as sole owner of Shore Securities. See, with room and board, figure I’ll need half-a-million for Beth’s and Ryan’s college educations, and it important to keep my hope alive, especially in the midst of Shore’s latest tornado. Maybe the photo of Vic’s yacht helps.
    Except for the boat shot, the rest of the boss’s office crap has pretty much disappeared, casualties of an unbending policy: The Austin Carr Touch. Amplified I’m sure by the key to Mr. Vic’s well-stocked, well-heeled and normally well-locked mahogany liquor cabinet. My motto after two weeks of many forty-year-old double-bourbons: Make yourself at home.
    A fold-up card table with a nifty Swedish coffee drip machine, straw baskets of sweeteners, nondairy creamer, spoons, paper cups and napkins replaces Mr. Vic’s antique glass-front lawyer’s bookcase. A longer, rectangular fold-up table bumps Vic’s ten-ton cluttered desk. Three black trash bags full of photos and other knickknacks—Vic can’t remember what his family looks like?—gives me enough room for a cushy swivel chair, four eighteen-inch computer monitors, three state-of-the-art laptops and a laser printer that could publish the paper version of The Washington Post . Plus, I can slide along the whole table, do four internet dating interviews at the same time.
    The paneled wall’s invisible closet holds half my suits, half my dress shirts, drawers of socks and underwear and a rack of suitably conservative neckties. All this so I can dress here or at home, depending on mood, circumstance and the number of elapsed hours since my latest adventure inside a burning restaurant.
    If this means an occasional wee- bit pile of dirty, smoky laundry, it’s exactly the kind of necessary office evil Austin Carr can live with. Function, not form, is another one of my mottoes, bourbon or no.
    The intercom buzzes. Nasty noise, that. Another Mr. Vic leftover I could do without.
    I touch the black button. “Carmela, after you call the hospital about Luis, call the electrician for me, will you? I want this intercom —”
    “Your appointment is here,” Carmela says.
    “It’s four-thirty already?”
    My new partner sighs. The sound is breathy and sexy. “It ’s