Chapter 12 #2
It was pretty interesting. I’ve been in ethnic grocery stores before.
Mexican and Asian, mostly. The more mainstream ones.
This one carried some things I didn’t expect to see.
Like caviar in tubes. The kind you squeeze.
Like a tube of toothpaste. And they had several kinds of caviar, both red and black.
Until I saw it, I hadn’t had any idea that red caviar was even available. Or for that matter, tubed caviar.
There was also a healthy selection of Eastern European beers, and an even healthier selection of herring in jars and tins. By itself, in tomato sauce, in mustard sauce, in wine sauce or cream sauce. Pickled herring. Fermented herring. Herring in aspic.
Then there was the canned beef. Including meatballs in sauce. Made from reindeer.
Up near the checkout registers, there was the usual assortment of candy. Russian candy. There was also a bulletin board, with some pieces of paper stuck to it. I wandered in that direction. A few yards away, Mendoza was busy charming the woman behind the register.
In addition to the usual fliers for lawn care and moving services, there was a schedule for the Nashville Ballet pinned to the corkboard.
Maybe not so surprising, as Zachary had told me the owner of the grocery store was a former ballet dancer.
There was also a calendar turned to the current month.
(October, in case you wondered.) The picture above the calendar showed a building topped by several onion domes.
The Kremlin? Or maybe they’re more like our church spires, and occur mostly on places of worship?
I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know much about Russian culture. I know that the domes are uniquely Russian, or at least Americans associate them with Russia, but I don’t know enough to know whether they only occur on certain types of buildings.
It was a pretty photograph, anyway: a brick building topped by a tower (with a tiny, golden onion dome on top), and several, much bigger onion domes. A white and blue stripe, a yellow and green swirl, a red and green checkered and swirled pattern, a red and white zigzag…
St. Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow, the tiny script below the picture said.
I stared at it, rapt, for a full minute—how did they do that?—before I remembered what I was doing here, and turned my attention to the rest of the services on offer.
A business card for a local vet was tucked into the corkboard frame, along with a couple others. A seamstress or tailor with an Eastern European name. A liquor store; maybe they specialized in vodka.
Or maybe not.
A club. Stella’s.
Music. Dancing. Girls.
“Hey,” I said.
Nobody answered. I looked over my shoulder. Mendoza had his elbow on the counter and was dimpling at the girl behind it. He seemed to have settled in for the duration. She looked dazzled, as well she should.
“Hey!”
He straightened. The girl gave me a look of concerted dislike.
“Never mind,” I said, since I had realized that what I was doing was stupid.
Much better to leave Mendoza to be charming—he did it so well, and if there was anything to get out of the girl, he’d get it.
Meanwhile, I’d just take the business card out of the frame of the corkboard and stick it in my pocket.
I did just that, and headed for the front door. “I’ll wait for you outside,” I told Mendoza on my way past. I think he nodded, but I didn’t look over my shoulder to be sure.
It was another five or ten minutes before he finally sauntered out.
By then, I’d had time to inspect the business card in detail—there was nothing on it that I hadn’t already seen—and look up the address of the club on Google maps.
It was within a mile of here, not too far from the funeral home where I’d held the services for David last month.
“What?” Mendoza wanted to know when he came out the door.
I gestured to the car, and he opened it. When we were both inside, I told him. “I found something. What about you?”
He turned the key in the ignition. The sedan purred to life.
It wasn’t much to look at—incognito police vehicles rarely are—but it drove well.
As he reversed out of the parking space, he said, “She worked last night. She remembers Zachary. He looked around for a minute, and then he asked her if she knew a girl named Anastasia.”
“Not very diplomatic.” Or smart.
Mendoza shook his head. He was watching the traffic on Thompson Lane, and when he spotted a gap, he punched the gas.
We shot across four lanes of traffic and into the far lane that would be going south at the intersection with Nolensville Road.
I swallowed a shriek as we came close to being creamed by an oversized SUV coming up behind us.
The driver lay on the horn. Mendoza flipped a switch on his dashboard, and blue lights flickered in the sedan’s rear window.
The SUV fell back, and Mendoza flipped the switch off. “Works every time.”
I hid a smile. “So what else did the girl say? Her name wasn’t Tatiana, was it?”
He shook his head. “Susan.”
“And did she know Anastasia?”
“She said she didn’t,” Mendoza said, and took the turn onto Nolensville Road without slowing down. “To me and to Zachary.”
“And?”
“He asked her if there were any other Russian or Eastern European businesses where Anastasia might work. Or where they might know her. She referred him to the bulletin board.”
I pulled out the business card I had appropriated. “Ta-dah!”
Mendoza squinted at it.
“Eyes on the road,” I told him. “It’s a club called Stella’s. They’re advertising the old cliché: women, wine, and song.”
Mendoza arched his brows and I added, “Music, dancing, girls. I’ll let you see the card, but not while you’re driving. I want to get there in one piece.”
“Tell me where to go, then.”
I did. “It’s just below the entrance to the zoo. On the other side of the street.”
The car zoomed down Nolensville Road, past Boling & Howard Funeral Home. We were already almost back to Southern Hills Hospital. The entrance to the zoo was coming up on the right.
“You said you talked to Araminta Tucker earlier,” I said.
Mendoza nodded.
“Did you happen to bring the conversation around to Edwina?” If Araminta was Griselda Grimshaw’s nearest relative and heir, chances were Edwina’s fate was in her hands.
I tried to imagine Edwina living in the fussy living room with the big screen TV. Those big bat ears would probably take a beating from the volume. The poor thing would go deaf in no time.
“She doesn’t want Edwina,” Mendoza said.
“Are you sure?”
“It’s a pet free zone. And she wouldn’t want Griselda’s animal, anyway. She said to take her to the pound.”
My jaw dropped. “Surely not?”
“That’s what she said.”
“You aren’t going to, are you?”
He shot me a look. “I planned to tell her that the dog’s taken care of. If she chooses to believe that I took her to the pound, then she can believe that.”
“Thank you.”
After a second I added, “So you’ll let me keep her?”
“I thought I’d give you first refusal. If you don’t want her, I’ll find someone else. But I’m not taking that sweet little dog to the pound.”
Good. “I’ll keep her,” I said. “I didn’t realize I wanted a dog. Or… I didn’t want a dog. But I kind of like having a dog.”
It was nice to share my bed with another warm body, even if this one was around twenty pounds and not good for much except licking my feet.
Mendoza nodded. “If you change your mind, let me know.”
“I won’t change my mind,” I said. “And if something happens to me, I’m sure Rachel will step up. Or Zachary. Once he gets out of the hospital.”
The nightclub was coming up on the left, and I pointed it out to Mendoza.
He flipped on his turn signal. “It might be a while until he’s ready for active duty again. You’ll have to go easy on him.”
“No undercover assignments for a while?”
Mendoza’s lips quirked. “Better not. And don’t expect him to walk the dog for you. It’ll be some time until his lung is healed and he can breathe as well as he did.”
He slotted the car into a parking space outside Stella’s.
“I feel terrible about what happened,” I admitted.
Mendoza put the car in park, twisted the key in the ignition, and turned to me. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I sent him out to look for information.”
“He’s an adult,” Mendoza said. “And if I know him, he was probably excited about it.”
He had been. But— “If I’d realized what would happen…”
Mendoza nodded. “You wouldn’t have done it. That goes without saying. But you couldn’t have known. It isn’t logical that someone would do that to him just for asking questions.”
“So maybe he did something else. Hit on someone’s girlfriend or something.”
“Zachary?” Mendoza said. “I don’t see that happening. Do you?”
I didn’t, now that he mentioned it. Zachary is cute and freckled, and a nice kid, and smart and funny with a lot of other good qualities—plus, he’d saved my life—but I didn’t see him as any kind of a Don Juan.
“Maybe there’s something about the girl we don’t realize.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Mendoza said. He pushed his door open. “Are you coming in, or staying here?”
I looked at the building. It was large, and looked like it might be an old mattress warehouse or something, that someone had morphed into something else.
The exterior was painted black with purple trim, and next to the steel door was a mural of three scantily clad women dancing among shooting stars.
It looked weirdly familiar, but it took me a full minute to place it. Then it clicked.
“Xanadu!”
“Bless you,” Mendoza said.
“No, no. Xanadu. The movie. It looks like the mural from the movie.” Somewhat. Enough that the comparison had struck me.
Mendoza looked at it. His face stayed blank.
“You’re too young,” I said, disgusted. “It probably came out a decade before you were born.”
He shrugged. “Coming?”
I opened my door. “Yes.”
From the outside, at least, it didn’t look like a strip club. The women in the mural were scantily clad, perhaps, but they wore more than pasties. And there wasn’t a pole in sight. At least not in the picture.
Mendoza led the way to the door and twisted the knob. Nothing happened.
“I guess it’s before business hours,” I said.
Zachary and Rachel had both said strip clubs stayed open twenty-four/seven, but this one was clearly locked up tight.
“Let’s check the back.” Mendoza was already moving. I trailed behind him around the corner of the building, looking left and right. The parking lot was pretty much empty aside from Mendoza’s sedan. Zachary’s car was nowhere to be seen, but of course that didn’t mean he hadn’t been here last night.
“There’s the back door.”
Mendoza headed for it. I followed.
It looked a lot like the service entrance to the dry cleaners on Thompson Lane. Another steel door with a buzzer next to it, and nothing else. Mendoza put a finger on the buzzer and leaned.
Nothing happened. We couldn’t hear anything through the steel door and the cinderblock walls, but I assumed that somewhere, a bell was ringing. Or a light was flashing, or something was happening. Something to indicate that there were people out here.
Nobody answered, though. The door remained stubbornly shut.
“I don’t suppose this would fall under the same criteria as Araminta Tucker’s house,” I said.
He glanced over. “Excuse me?”
“You went into Araminta Tucker’s house to look around yesterday.”
“It was next door to a crime scene,” Mendoza said.
I looked around. “This might actually be a crime scene. If Zachary was attacked here.”
“We don’t even know that Zachary was here,” Mendoza said.
“We may not be able to prove it. But I’m pretty sure he was. I told him to check out any clubs he found where a Russian girl might work, or might have worked. It makes perfect sense that he’d check out this one. But we can ask him.”
“Later,” Mendoza said. He had his head tilted back, and was looking up under the eaves of the building. After a second, he pulled out his badge and opened it up. “Police. Open the door.”
I tilted my head back, too, and squinted up into the darkness under the overhanging eaves. After a second I could make something out. “Camera?”
Mendoza nodded.
We waited a little longer. Nothing happened this time, either. Either no one was inside—most likely—or Mendoza’s badge did nothing to convince them that they should open the door for him.
“Guess we’ll have to come back later,” I said.
He shot me a look. “I might be a little busy. I have an operation to set up at the Arena tonight.”
Oh. Right. I’d forgotten about that in the excitement. “Thanks for reminding me. What do you want me to do?”
“Go home,” Mendoza said, moving away from the door and around the building. Since he was still talking, I was forced to follow. “Take your little dog with you. Don’t come back here alone. If they beat up Zachary, they won’t be happy about you coming around asking questions.”
I trotted behind him toward the car. “I meant about the Arena thing. The money drop. Or the newspaper drop, I guess. What do you want me to do?”
He stopped next to the sedan. “Go home. Take your little dog—”
“Thank you.” Sheesh. “I heard you the first time. You mean, I’m not supposed to be at the Arena tonight?”
“No,” Mendoza said. “I’ve got it.”
“Don’t you think Diana might want some moral support?”
He sighed. And then he unlocked the car doors and opened mine. Instead of getting in, I watched as he walked around the front of the car to his own side. “We’ll stay out of your way.”
“Sure you will.” He opened his own door and slid behind the wheel. The door closed with a decisive thump. I was just about to follow suit when a car took the turn into the parking lot and bumped to a stop next to us.