Yergen's famous pillowy cinnamon fritters

“Wait—wait—wait! What do you mean, Bag thinks Barty’s suspect for Khan is the same as ours for Ethelbanian?” I asked, sitting up all the way from where I lay sprawled on the garden settee next to him, and eyeballing Curry. “Same suspect as in coincidentally knew both women, or same suspect as in he thinks we might have a stranger murderer?”

“Dunno yet.” Curry shrugged and picked up his paintbrush and the little lap easel with the small canvas he was currently working on, then waited for me to resume my spot comfortably settled against his thigh, where I’d been before he got up for more whiskey. He rested his elbow on my shoulder and wet the brush before dipping it into one of the little paint cups. “He just noticed a couple of odd parallels about how when they both disappeared after the pub, nobody could describe the man they left with. And both their friends swore up and down they never would have gone up with somebody just like that.”

There was a knock on the door in the garden wall. “It’s not locked!” I called. “Let yourselves in!”

Baggett entered, holding a bottle and a paper bag, but accompanied by no Yergen.

“I thought Yerg was coming,” Curry remarked with evident disappointment.

“Yerg got called in for overtime to help process intake on the literal bargeful of seizure on that smuggling thing. He sends his apologies, and these.” He set the bag on the low table in front of the settee, then uncorked the bottle, pulled over one of the empty glasses Curry had set out, and took a seat in Nan’s favorite garden armchair.

“What’s ‘these?’” I queried, trying not to jostle Curry as I sat up to investigate the paper bag, then gasped in delight. “Oh, my gods, Yerg made his famous cinnamon fritters?” I pulled one out and almost swooned with happiness, then slid from the settee down to the terrace stones and situated myself cross-legged so I could be at face level with the fritter bag. “If I had a mother, I know for a fact I would love her less than Yergen,” I told Baggett, inhaling deeply of the delicious sugary scent.

“Are you on something right now, Bersk?” Baggett asked, studying me and making no effort to conceal his amusement. “This is an untoward level of enthusiasm for sweet fried dough. You’re at a nine, when frankly a four or a five would be more seemly.”

“I’m not high,” I said. “I’ve just had the two whiskeys. Why, do you have something fun, like hash?”

“Maybe make a token effort to pretend you like me as much as my husband, and you can find out.” Baggett reached for my silver cigarette case on the side table, while I bit one of the fritters in half and sighed dreamily.

“If you don’t feel like a nine about Yergen’s fritters I don’t know what to say other than fair play to you keeping your figure as you trudge into middle age,” I announced with my mouth full. “The word for this texture is—pillowy, Bag. Pillowy.”

“Thirty is not middle-aged. You ridiculous ankle-biter.” Baggett rolled his eyes and struck a match, cupping his hand around his cigarette to protect the flame from the light summer breeze currently rustling the ivy on the garden wall, then sputtered in surprise when he inhaled. “Fucking clove cigarettes, Bersk?” he demanded, while I bubbled with hysterical laughter at his displeased incredulity. “You couldn’t have warned me?”

“My mouth was full,” I mumbled, with my mouth still full. “It’s not polite. These are so good,” I added.

Curry, who had been focused on his canvas, looked up at this. “Do you plan on sharing any of these pillowy delights you can’t shut the fuck up about?” he inquired, and I passed him the bag and began brushing sugar from my fingers. “And don’t laugh and eat. You’ll **** and wind up hacking up half a lung like that time with the powder doughnut.”

I ignored him. “If you want regular stuff, Bag—I have tobacco in the house,” I offered, attempting an expression approaching repentance, which clearly he didn’t buy, so I just grinned at him instead.

“Fucking hells. Yes, please do go get that,” he said, shaking his head at me.

“I’ll finish that one,” Curry said, before Baggett could stub it out.

“Sure.” He stood and moved over to hand the cigarette to Curry. “It’s official. I work with youths. They buy flavored cigarettes,” he muttered, as if to himself, but really for us. “And I thought you didn’t even smoke,” he added to Curry, before picking up his drink and resuming his seat.

“I don’t,” Curry said, eyes on his painting, as he dragged in a long pull on the cigarette.

“Mag smokes about a pack a year,” I explained helpfully. “He just pretends that’s the same as none.”

“Go get the tobacco,” Baggett ordered me. “I’m going to have a whiskey, and admire whatever it is Curry’s painting today, and not listen to your voice for five blessed minutes.”

“Want anything from inside?” I asked Curry, and he shook his head without looking up, exhaling and directing the smoke away from his canvas.

When I came back out with the tobacco tin and papers, and a pitcher of fresh lemonade I’d forgotten Curry made earlier, Baggett accepted the smoking accoutrements from me without tossing any further half-assed insults in my direction. I smiled at him, then poured myself a whiskey and lemonade and resumed my spot on the settee, this time resting my feet on Curry's leg and reclining against the other end so I could get to my drink on the side table.

“Mag says you think Ethelbanian and Khan might be the same person,” I said to Baggett, once he’d rolled and lit what he made a point of informing me was a “correct” cigarette.

“I said no such thing. Ethelbanian is orcish and Khan is elfish. Stop embarrassing yourself.” Baggett smiled sweetly at me when I attempted, but couldn’t reach far enough, to swat him where he sat in the armchair.

“You know what I meant. The same suspect.”

“I knew what you meant,” Baggett agreed. “It’s probably nothing. When you took the statements from Ethelbanian’s friends, they had so fucking little to say about what the guy looked like that it reminded me how in the notes on Khan, Barty wrote something about the person she left with being ‘unidentifiable,’ which I took at the time to mean, ‘unidentified.’ But I asked and it was the same deal, they had fuckall to say about the appearance of whoever the victim left with. And the same insistence that normally she’d never go off with someone like that, didn’t even want to be there that night, all that.”

“Everybody says that, though,” I pointed out. “I’m the sluttiest person you know and if I disappeared one day Mag would still say to people that I didn’t usually go off with murderers.”

“I’m not touching any part of that statement,” Curry said, rinsing his brush and dipping it into a different color. “Anyway, to me the more interesting bit on both cases is the fact that they couldn’t come up with even basic stuff. You talked to the best friend, too,” he said to me. “Did you get the idea she was sort of guessing when she said it was a man who chatted up her friend?”

“Yeah,” Baggett agreed. “I was half-assed listening while Bersk talked to that girl, and for all she knew a halfling grandma picked up this full-grown elfish adult and walked out with her.”

“She was also probably drunk off her ass,” I said. “How many men have ever chatted me up and you paid enough attention to describe them later for somebody?” I asked Curry. “Honestly.”

“Oh, ‘Honestly?’ she says. Well, honestly, Fuzzy, if we’re trimming that down to the ones you actually leave with and I’m still there? Pretty much every single fucking one of them.”

“Aw. Mag.” I blew him a kiss. “That’s really sweet,” I told Baggett.

Both of them rolled their eyes.

“Well, if I can’t be there with you.” Curry shrugged. “Makes me worry less.”

I squinted at him with exaggerated suspicion. “Is this you angling for an invitation to watch? Because—”

“—do not fucking finish that thought,” he ordered me without looking up from his painting, and I laughed.

“Does it make me a bad partner,” I asked Baggett, “that if our positions were reversed, the best I’d be able to come up with for his murderer would be, probably an elf with big boobs?”

“Yes,” Curry said immediately, before Baggett could answer.

“Does that mean you’ll let me have her?” Baggett asked. “Because I’m never in a scenario leaving somewhere accompanied by a big-breasted elf. I can work with Bersk’s deficiencies if the only problem is her elf blindness.” He flashed me a big toothy grin. “I’m not too proud to take leftovers.”

We all laughed.

“Although,” I said contemplatively, “I think it’s more of a boob-blindness. Like if her breasts are nice enough I can’t pay attention to anything else about her.”

“Pretty much the opposite of boob-blindness,” Curry pointed out.

“It’s adorable how you’re both so into tits,” Baggett said dryly as he lit another cigarette. “Another fucking detail you unaccountably have in common.”

“I’m not only into breasts,” Curry told me, “or elves,” and I laughed.

“You’re such a liar!” I told him. “Admit you have a type! There’s nothing wrong with it, unless you die and somebody wants me to try telling any of them apart!”

Curry set down the paintbrush for safekeeping and curled his hand around my foot to give it a pretend-menacing squeeze. “Shut up before I decide this is getting too insulting, will you?”

I smiled glibly at him, then twisted and turned to Baggett. “Anyway, my only point was it doesn’t seem extremely strange they couldn’t describe him. People are awful at describing people.” I raised myself up enough to take a drink of my whiskey lemonade. “People who aren’t Mag, I mean.”

“Like I said, probably nothing,” Baggett said, leaning forward in his chair and pulling the pitcher of lemonade toward himself.

Curry shrugged again. “I don’t know. I think you had something.”

I wiggled my foot, shaking his hand back and forth with it. “So, then. Joking aside. What am I not getting from just the factual explanations, that has you convinced?”

Baggett and I watched as Curry considered my question. “I guess, it wasn’t exactly what Bag said,” he replied after a moment, with a nod to Baggett. “He didn’t mention any other cases, but after it came up—some unidentified creep in the pub that nobody can describe later, convinces her to go with him, friends all swear up and down she never did that kind of thing—over the rest of the day I thought of at least three others from last year’s unsolved that could fit. Just, most of our cases are people who got killed by somebody they know already. It’s a bit weird, right? Do we really have five-plus different men talking up shy women in pubs and then nobody ever sees them again? Don’t they almost have to be connected?”

He had a point. “Did either of you pull the files?” I asked them.

Curry shook his head. “I didn’t. I was meaning to take at least a quick look but I got sidetracked with that walk-in yesterday afternoon.”

“Not anything past Khan,” Baggett said.

Curry picked up his paintbrush, and I saw from the way he was holding his jaw that there was more that he hadn’t added. “What else, Mag?”

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

My feet were still tangled up with him so I didn’t bother involving my lower half as I sat up on the settee and gave him a long look that meant, liar.

“It just reminded me—” He jerked his chin skyward, and I realized he meant these cases had made him think of the fact that he had a board in his room upstairs with Lamb’s crazy-map plotting out pubs and names across the city.

“Oh! You’re right! Well… I think it’s fine,” I said, cocking my head to indicate I thought we could trust Baggett by now, even though we’d kept the crazy-map to ourselves ever since finding it. “Don’t you figure? Your choice, but I’m game.”

“Yeah? And I mean, all of us… all right,” he decided, “let’s.”

“Fresh eyes,” I agreed. “I’ll go. You have all your paint stuff out.”

“I would love, just once,” Baggett said, sipping politely at his whiskey lemonade, “for either of you to sit waiting like a clueless asshole while two apparent telepaths navigate a conversation this fucking nonsensical.”

“Sorry, Bag,” I said. “But we’re going to show you something. I think you’ll find it interesting. Fill him in,” I ordered Curry, “and I’ll be right back. The breeze died down so it ought to be fine.”

Curry nodded.

Baggett raised his eyebrows at me.

“He’ll tell you,” I said, downing the last of my whiskey lemonade and untangling my feet from Curry’s lap.