The Old Blue Line: A Joanna Brady Novella (Joanna Brady Mysteries)
Jance, J. A.
The Old Blue Line
I KNEW THE two guys were cops the moment Matty walked them over to their booth. I usually work the bar in the afternoons and early evenings, but the daytime cook had turned up sick. In my experience, it’s easier and better for my customers to bring in a substitute bartender than it is to bring in a substitute cook. Besides, that’s where I started out in this particular restaurant—as a short order cook—and it wasn’t much of a hardship for me to be back running the kitchen. As the two newcomers walked past, I had just put up an order and was waiting for Danielle to come pick it up.
Given that the Arizona Police Academy is just up the street, we get a lot of cops at the Roundhouse Bar and Grill. There’s always a rowdy crew of newbies—the trainees. They tend to show up in groups and hang out together in the bar in the evenings after class. Next come the instructors. They’re mostly older guys, some of them long retired from active police work, who tend to arrive for meals mostly in ones or twos. Not thrilled with retirement, they’re glad to get out of their houses for a while and have a chance to hang out in the restaurant, drinking coffee, chewing the fat, and talking over old times.
These two gents looked to be somewhere in the middle—too old to be trainees and too young to be instructors. They were both middle-aged and severely overdressed for Peoria, Arizona. It may have been the beginning of November, but it was still plenty hot in the Valley of the Sun. These guys were decked out in a way that set them apart from the rest of my regular customers—white shirts, ties, and jackets, the whole nine yards. Yes, and cop shoes, of course. I can spot those a mile away.
After they were seated, one of them said something to Matty—a question, most likely. She looked at me over her shoulder before she answered. When she gave the men their menus, they glanced at them, shook their heads, and immediately handed the menus back. As Matty headed for her hostess station she rolled her eyes in my direction. I knew what she meant. People who come into restaurants at lunchtime and occupy booth space without ordering anything more than coffee are not high on anybody’s list in the restaurant biz.
I had taken a new order down from the wheel in the pass-through and was starting on two plates of burgers and fries when my cell phone rang. After answering it, I perched it on my shoulder and held it in place with my jaw so I could talk and still use my hands to cook. It’s not easy doing two things at once, but in restaurant kitchens, sometimes you have to.
“They’re cops,” Matty explained unnecessarily. “Said they’d like to have a word with you.”
In my experience, cops who want to “a word” usually want a lot more than that. “What did they order?” I asked.
“They’re just having coffee.”
“Right,” I said. “I thought so. It’s lunchtime. In that case, they can take an old cold tater and wait until I’m good and ready to deal with them.”
It was almost an hour later before the kitchen finally slowed down. I ventured out into the dining room, wiping my hands on my apron as I went. My overdressed friends were still drinking coffee.
“You wanted to see me?” I asked.
Just then one of my model trains zipped by overhead. In keeping with the Roundhouse name and theme, multiple trains run on tracks laid on a shelf that a previous owner had hung high on the walls of both the dining room and bar. The tracks come complete with tunnel entrances painted on the partition that separates the two rooms. There are three trains in all—two freight and an old fashioned passenger—all of them running at the same time. People often worry about the trains colliding, but they needn’t. That’s because the shelf holding the tracks is built so close to the ceiling that it’s impossible for an onlooker from below to see that there are actually three separate tracks.
“What’s the deal with the trains?” one of the visitors asked.
“I happen to like trains,” I told him with a shrug, “and so did one of the previous owners. That’s why he named the joint the Roundhouse, that and the fact that the bar in the other room is actually round. I was told you wanted to have a word. What about?”
The guy who was evidently the lead reached into his pocket, pulled out an ID wallet and held it up for my inspection, allowing me to see both his badge and his name—Detective Andrew Jamison of the Las Vegas Police Department.
“I’m Detective Jamison and this is my partner, Detective Shandrow,” he explained, pocketing his ID. “We’re here investigating the death of a woman named Katherine Melcher.”
“Never heard of her,” I said.
“I believe you and she were married at one time.”