First Daughter by Eric Van Lustbader Page B

but it was off, and he knew better than to leave a message on his friend's voice mail.
    Egon Schiltz was not an old man, but he sure looked like one. In fact, give him a passing glance and he might be mistaken for seventy, instead of fifty-nine. Like a hairstylist, he was round-shouldered, with prematurely gray hair so thick, he preferred to wear it long over his ears. In every other way, however, Egon Schiltz appeared nondescript. One curious thing about him: He and his wife had tied the knot in the ME's cold room, surrounded by friends, family, and the recently and violently departed.
    He and Jack had become friends when Jack was asked to investigate missing cartons of fry, as embalming fluid was known on the District's streets, where it had become one of a number of increasinglybizarre drugs illicitly for sale. On anyone's list of bad drugs, fry was near the top, one of the long-term side effects of ingesting fry being the slow disintegration of the spinal cord. Certain bits of evidence were leading the police to suspect Schiltz himself of trafficking in fry, but after a long talk with Schiltz, Jack didn't like the ME as a prime suspect. Jack went looking for the middle man, in his experience usually the easiest to latch on to, since he was usually less off the grid than either the thief or the pusher. Using his contacts, Jack found this particular fence, put the hammer to him, and came up with a name, which he gave to Schiltz. Together, they worked out the way to trap the thief, a member of the ME's staff too impatient to wait for his state pension. Schiltz never forgot Jack's faith in him.
    Schiltz's offices, sprawled on a stretch of Braddock Avenue in Fairfax, Virginia, were in a low, angular redbrick government building in that modern style so bland, it seemed to disappear. Using mostly the Innerloop of the Capital Beltway, it took Jack just over twenty minutes to drive the 16.7 miles from Langley Fields to Schiltz's office.
    "Dr. Schiltz isn't here," the diminutive assistant ME said.
    "Where is he?" Jack demanded. "I know you know," he added as her lips parted, "so don't stonewall."
    The AME shook her head. "He'll take my head off."
    "Not when he knows I'm looking for him." Jack leaned in, his eyes bright as an attack dog's. "You're new here, aren't you?"
    She bit her lip, said nothing.
    "Call him," he said now, "and tell him Jack needs to see him, stat."
    The Indian woman picked up a cordless phone, dialed a number. She waited a moment, then asked to speak with Dr. Schiltz. In a moment, he came on the line, because she said, "I'm so sorry to bother you at dinner, sir, but—"
    "Never mind," Jack said, hustling out of the office.

    E GON S CHILTZ was an Old Southern type. His meals were sacred time, not to be interrupted for anyone or anything. A creature of habit, he always ate his meals at one place.
    The Southern Roadhouse, set back in a strip mall as nondescript as Schiltz himself, was fronted by gravel ground down over the years to the size and shape of frozen peas. Its mock Southern columns out front only added to the exhausted air of the place. At one time, the restaurant had had a platoon of white-gloved attendants, all black, to greet the patrons, park their Caddies and Benzes, wish them good evening. It still had two sets of bathrooms at opposite ends of the U-shaped building, one originally for whites, the other originally for blacks, though no one connected with the place spoke about their history, at least not to strangers. Among themselves, however, a string of ascendingly offensive jokes about the bathrooms made the rounds like a sexually transmitted disease.
    Jack walked in the kitchen door, showed his ID to the chef, whose indignation crumbled before his fear of the law. How many illegals were in his employ in the steamy, clamorous kitchen?
    "Dr. Schiltz," Jack said as they made room for the expediter, bellowing orders to the line chefs. "Has he finished his porterhouse?"
    The chef, a portly man with