For nyn17 by Primrose

Kowalski tipped his chair so far back Ray thought he might topple over in it. "You know, Vecchio, if you'd asked me in the first place I could've saved you a whole lotta grief. Not to mention plane fare."

"Sure, Stanley, like I'm gonna come running to you for advice."   

"You could do worse."

"Bullshit. You weren't even around, and I could do a hell of a lot better."  

Problem was, a hell of a lot better hadn't been around, either. Benny and Kowalski were already mushing around Hell's Freezer, Canada by the time Ray and Stella left for Florida. Ray didn't figure there was cell phone reception up there, anyway, even if Benny had bothered to get himself one. Which Ray knew he hadn't, because he was Benny.

Even if he could have reached him, the idea of Ray asking Kowalski for advice was a non-starter. A guy just doesn't ask his wife's ex-husband for marriage tips, even when said ex-husband isn't his ex-partner's ex-partner. Nope, there were way too many exes in that equation to even consider it.

"Yeah, well, I don't see anyone offering 'cept me, and anyway, I got experience." Kowalski leaned forward a fraction, making his chair wobble dangerously.  Ray made a mental note to requisition a real desk chair with actual wheels on it before Kowalski killed himself. Not that Ray cared, mind you; he just figured that the paperwork on that kind of thing would be a real bitch.

"Stella's never gonna be happy as a pin jockey no matter how many designer bowling shirts you buy her." He stabbed a finger at Ray. "And she hates Florida, Vecchio. Hates it.  It's too hot, too buggy, and she gets sick if she stays out in the sun more'n a few minutes.  I could've told you all that."

Kowalski was right--not that Ray would admit it to anyone, ever. Stella'd said almost the same things to him, after the first blush of romance was gone and she'd finally looked around and noticed where she was. Ray was damn thankful--and not a little surprised--that she still wanted him. He intended to keep it that way, too, because Ray might fall in love quickly, but when he did it was for keeps. And Stella, she was a keeper, big time.

So here Ray was, right back where he started. Same old desk, same old station, same dirty old Chicago. There was a kind of comfort in that, the familiarity of it. The devil you know.

Only now he had to deal with Kowalski, who apparently had forgotten they were having a conversation and was now aiming crumpled up pieces of paper at Ray's wastebasket and making stupid crowd noises each time he sunk one in.

Ray rolled his eyes like Kowalski would actually notice. "Thousands of cops in Chicago and I get partnered with the poster child for ADHD."

"Bite me, Vecchio. It's not like I forced Fraser to take that promotion."  

Ray couldn't figure out why Benny came back to Chicago at all, let alone take over running the Consulate when the Dragon Lady left. Sure, he deserved the promotion, should have got one a long time ago. There wasn't a better cop in Chicago than Benton Fraser, maybe not in even in Canada. Which made it even more weird that he was okay with doing non-cop stuff like meeting with ambassadors and attending galas and helping lost Canadians find their way home. On second thought, Benny probably loved helping stray Canadians. But the rest of the stuff was definitely un-Fraser. Like how he decided to stay at Kowalski's place after they got back from playing Yukon Cornelius up in Canada. Chicago rents were through the roof, sure, but Kowalski and Benny were about as Oscar and Felix as two people could get. Ray couldn't figure out how they hadn't killed each other by now. Especially in that mousehole  Kowalski liked to call an apartment.

"He shoots, he scores, the crowd goes wild!"  Ray slapped a hand over his eyes and groaned. Maybe Fraser came back because he thought Kowalski needed a babysitter.

"Ah, Detective Kowalski. Unless the NBA has offered you a lucrative contract I'm not aware of, may I suggest that you can the trashcan hijinx and do some police work? Unless, of course, you're willing to let the current agreement betwixt yourself and the CPD...lapse, shall we say."

Ray didn't have a clue how Kowalski managed to slam his chair back down onto all four legs that fast without breaking his neck. Years of practice, probably.

"No sir. I mean, yes sir, I was just about to do that, sir." Ray hid a smirk as Kowalski pulled a handful of pencils out of a drawer and started sharpening them furiously.

Welsh looked impressed. "Commendable work, Detective. I'm sure errant pencils everywhere are quaking in their drawers. However, I was imagining something more closely resembling actual casework."  He slapped a folder onto Kowalski's desk. "This case, for instance."  

Kowalski looked up, still feeding pencils into the sharpener. "Oh. Right. You got it. I'm on it, sir."

Welsh's face was expressionless, which meant he was either enjoying torturing Kowalski or about to blow his stack. Or both. Ray figured what the hell, he'd save the poor guy. After all, they were partners, no matter how much Ray hated it, and if Kowalski got fired Ray would have to do everything by himself until they gave him a new one.

"We'll give it our full attention, sir." Yeah, that sounded helpful.

"My relief knows no bounds, Detective Vecchio. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm expecting a migraine." He started back toward his office, then stopped and added, "I'll be anticipating your written progress report on my desk first thing tomorrow. With actual progress, gentlemen, are we clear?"

"Crystal, sir," answered Kowalski.

"As a bell, boss," added Ray.

Kowalski shook his head as the door to Welsh's office clicked shut. "How does he do that?"

"Do what?"  

"Go all stealth like he does. I didn't even hear him open his door."

"I dunno, Stanley. Maybe the roar of the crowd drowned him out."

"Did I mention bite me, Vecchio?"

"Yeah, I think you might've."

"Just checking."

Ray made a face at him and opened the folder. After a brief read-through he knew two things: a. Life had it in for him, and b. Welsh was gonna kill them.

"Welsh is gonna kill us."

"How come? Can't be that bad."

"Yeah, Kowalski, it definitely can."

"Lemme see."  Ray handed over the file. Kowalski started rifling through the pages, squinting. "I can't read this."

"For crying out loud, Kowalski, put your damn glasses on, willya? I'm getting a headache just from looking at you."

"Can't," came the answer. "Left 'em at home."  

Ray rested his head on his arms to stop himself from beating it against his desk. Welsh was definitely gonna kill them.

"Gimme that." He snatched the file out of Kowalski's hands and opened it. "Yves Doucette, aged 32, was found dead in his room at the Drake Hotel just after eight o'clock Friday morning. The guy who found him is his cousin, a Mr. Augustin Dumont."

"Monsieur."

"Huh?"

"Monsieur. That's French for Mister. Least that's what Fraser says."

"Can I finish, here?"

Kowalski looked offended. "Sure, I was just sayin'."

Maybe Welsh wouldn't have to kill both of them after all. Maybe Ray would kill Kowalski himself and save his boss the trouble.

"Okay, so the weird thing is, Doucette was found without a mark on his body, which sure, makes it look like he died of natural causes, except that autopsy report shows no history of heart disease. Monsieur Dumont--" Ray glared at Kowalski-- "told the cops that his cousin had some kind of seizure disorder but that he was taking meds for it and hadn't had a seizure in years. The autopsy report confirms his story. Other than that, the guy was as healthy as a horse."

"Nothing in the bloodwork? Poison, overdose?" Kowalski was out of his chair, pacing back and forth between their desks with an intense look on his face. Zero to sixty in twenty seconds.

"Nope. So either it was a sudden heart attack brought on by damned if I know, or it was murder."

Kowalski frowned. "But if someone whacked him, why didn't the autopsy show something?"

"If I could answer that I wouldn't be tearing my hair out."  

"Hah. Like that's even possible, Vecchio." Smart ass.

"Save it, Stanley. We got a crisis here. Welsh is--"

Kowalski sounded as impatient as he looked. "Yeah, yeah, Welsh is gonna kill us. So what else is new?"

"If you can turn off your motor for a second, I'll tell you," said Ray. And wonder of wonders, Kowalski did. He stopped wearing a groove in the floor and leaned against his desk, arms folded.

"Okay, Vecchio, shoot."

"Doucette worked for the French arm of Novartis Pharmaceuticals. The company had set him up at the Drake so he could meet up with people from the U.S. office. Exchange of ideas, marketing strategies, networking. Business stuff. He was supposed to attend a conference scheduled for all day Saturday, but he never made it."

"Heh, yeah," interrupted Kowalski. "Dropping dead can sure mess up a guy's plans."  He flapped his hands at Ray. "Never mind, just go on."

"That's all there is about Doucette, except that he had a wife back home. What's interesting is that Dumont has lived in Chicago for ten years. Been a naturalized citizen for three.  He started out managing a movie theatre over on North Sheffield. When the owners retired, he'd saved up enough to buy them out."

Kowalski shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "So you're saying he whacked Doucette."

"I dunno. Doesn't feel right to me, especially since Dumont's insisting his cousin was murdered. He's demanding a CPD investigation."

"He could be using reverse psychology."

"He could also be shooting flowers out of his ass. Jeez, Kowalski, where do you come up with this stuff?"

Kowalski drained his coffee cup and threw it in the general direction of the trash. "Hey, it could happen."

Ray rolled his eyes. "I'll keep it in mind."

"Anyway, Vecchio, who says we can't make a plan from this? Just because we don't know how Doucette died doesn't mean we can't give Welsh a report. We'll tell him we're gonna go back to the Drake and search Doucette's room, and after that we're gonna go down to the theatre, interview Dumont. We tell him we'll have the results of the search and the interview on his desk by the end of the day tomorrow. What's hard about that? It's basic cop stuff."  

Kowalski had a point, but Ray hadn't told him the punchline yet.

"That'd be just dandy, Kowalski, except for the letters."

"What letters?"

Ray took a deep, steadying breath. "The pile of letters that Dumont gave the original investigation team. They're all in the file. He says he's sure he knows who killed Doucette, but he won't say a word about it until after we've read them."

"So what? So we'll read the letters."  

Ray shook his head. "No can do, Stanley."

"Why not?"

"They're in French."  

Kowalski threw up his hands. "FRENCH? Why the fuck didn't you say that in the first place?"

Clearly, Ray thought, the universe was conspiring against him. Maybe he should stop fighting it and let Welsh put him out of his misery.  

"Okay," said Kowalski, starting to pace again. "So we call an interpreter."  

"Are you crazy? It's after six. Even if we could find someone who's still on the clock, they wouldn't be able to get that many letters translated, typed, and back to us by tomorrow morning."  

It wasn't fair. Welsh was asking them to do the impossible.

Still, there might be a chance. Ray could explain, plead for leniency. The Lieu was an reasonable guy. Sometimes. Maybe he'd understand their situation.

Yeah, right. And maybe his Ma would shave her head and join the Hare Krishnas.

And okay, so Welsh probably wouldn't really kill them. Didn't mean he wouldn't think of something worse.

"Face it, Kowalski, we're doomed."

"You picked a rotten time to be right, Vecchio, but you're right. Unless we can somehow find ourselves a speed-reader who also speaks fluent French and can type a hundred words a minute, we're definitely up shit's creek without a--wait."  He shot Ray a look.

A half-second later, Ray got it. He grabbed his coat.

"So, your place in twenty?"

"Yeah. You want dinner?"

"Sure, I'm a little hungry." Hell, Ray was suddenly starving.

Kowalski pulled on his jacket, fishing his keys out of a pocket. "Okay, good. See you in twenty."

"Better make it half an hour. I gotta call home."

"Okay."




Even with Fraser's turbo-charged typing skills, it still took them until three in the morning to get everything wrapped up.

The letters turned out to be selections from a four-year correspondence between Dumont and Doucette's wife, Michelle. Michelle Doucette had become obsessed with Dumont and wrote frequent letters to him, begging him to run away with her. He refused her advances but kept up the correspondence, apparently fearing for her emotional stability.

Starting this year, Michelle's rants became more frequent and more psychotic--she alternately threatened to kill Dumont, or her husband, or herself. In his replies Dumont pleaded with her to get psychiatric help. She refused, and because she was in France he had no legal grounds to have her committed. In her very last letter, dated three months earlier, Michelle spelled out in detail her plans to hire a chemist from her husband's company to replace his anti-seizure medication with an identical placebo. There were no letters after that.

"Okay." said Kowalski, stretching his legs and propping his feet on the coffee table. Ray knew Benny noticed even if he pretended not to.  "Okay, that's good, we got some answers.  But it doesn't answer the big question--what killed Doucette?  He didn't die of a seizure, the autopsy proved that. So how did he die?"

"If I'm correct in my assumptions," answered Fraser, "the likely cause of death was cardiac arrest due to abrupt withdrawal of anti-seizure medication. Of course, there are various factors to consider, such as the type of medication, duration of current treatment, and verifiable evidence of a placebo. We can't make a definite conclusion until the contents of the medicine container are found and analyzed."

Ray almost inhaled some of the beer he'd been drinking. "Come on, Benny, even you can't pull something like that out of thin air."

"As it happens, Ray, I coincidentally read an article in The Lancet on this very subject just the other day."

"He has a subscription," Kowalski chimed in.

Fraser nodded. "Which was a birthday gift from your mother, if I remember correctly."

"Yeah, she knows how much you like that geeky science stuff," replied Kowalski.

"Never mind that," Ray said, a little too loudly, because thinking about Kowalski's mother giving Fraser birthday presents was making his brain hurt.

"What matters is we got plenty of info for Welsh. Typed and double-spaced, even. Thanks, Benny."

"My pleasure, Ray. Diefenbaker was less than pleased, because he'd set on renting a film, but he was willing to put aside his own desires for a friend."

"Where'd he go, anyway?" Kowalski asked.

"He decided to turn in early, although I suspect there was some sulking involved."

"Wait a minute," said Ray. "If Dief is deaf, how can he watch a movie?"  He didn't believe for a second that the wolf could read lips.

"Well, Ray, the television is equipped with a subtitle function."

Kowalski grinned at him. "You had to ask, Vecchio."

Ray yawned and stood up. "Yeah, well, I'm masochistic like that. Anyway, I gotta go or I'll never make it to work tomorrow and then I'll be back in the doghouse with Welsh."

"Now there's a visual I did not need in my head right now."

"Go to bed, Kowalski. I don't want to have to give this report by myself."

"Yeah, yeah, I'm going," muttered Kowalski. "But if I have nightmares it's all your fault."

Ray ignored him. "You too, Benny, get some sleep. Think of all the lost Canadians out there counting on you."

"Right you are, Ray," replied Fraser, getting up from the couch to walk Ray to the door.

Ray took his coat from Fraser and slipped on his shoes. "'Night, Benny."

"Good night, Ray. Sweet dreams."
 
Right before the door closed Ray could have sworn he saw Kowalski come up behind Fraser and slide his arms around Fraser's waist. He figured he must be more exhausted than he thought, because no way did that happen. And if it did, Ray was too wiped to think about it tonight. He'd ask Benny about it when he asked him where the hell he slept in Kowalski's one-bedroom apartment.

But not tonight.

Tomorrow.

Maybe.