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“Dad?” Alexis wandered into Richard Castle’s office, giving him a concerned look. “Are you okay?”
He was staring at his laptop, a stricken look on his face. Alexis wandered around his desk to look as well. There was a blank word processing document there, the cursor blinking back at them calmly from the top of the digital page.
Alexis smiled and threw an arm around her dad’s shoulders. “Writer’s block again?” she asked, kissing his forehead.
“What?” Castle blinked, shook his head a little, straightened up in his chair. “What? No, of course not. I enjoy having a blank document open in front of me. Think of all those possibilities, those potential worlds to build and characters to destroy…”
“Right.” Alexis rolled her eyes, just as her dad’s cell phone rang. He grabbed it so quickly he almost dropped his laptop. “Isn’t it great when you can procrastinate?”
Castle shot a reproving look at his daughter before glancing at the caller ID. “This is not procrastination, this is good, solid research—Beckett! Tell me you have a dead body you need me to come see.”
*
The witness was crying. “Oh my god,” she kept repeating, “oh my god what is her girlfriend going to say when she comes home?”
“Girlfriend?” Beckett asked. She was sitting down with the witness in the kitchen, away from the chaos in the living room where CSU was working and Esposito and Ryan were making phone calls. Castle hovered by the dining table, listening in but looking back occasionally at the activity in the other room. “What’s her name, Mrs. Haddad?”
“Gabriella,” the cleaning lady hiccupped, and Beckett motioned at Castle to find her a tissue. “Gabriella Flores. They’ve been together at least as long as I’ve been cleaning for them, oh my god what is she going to do…”
“And how long have you been cleaning for them?”
“Just under a year.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Haddad,” Beckett rose from her chair. “We really appreciate all your help.” She turned to Castle, motioning him into the bedroom so that the cleaning lady wouldn’t overhear them. He opened his mouth to say something, but she held up her hand, gesturing the other two detectives to join them from the living room.
“Ryan, I want you to check on the vic’s girlfriend, Gabriella Flores,” she said, spelling it out for him when he flipped open his little notebook. “If she’s been dead eight hours already, either Ms. Flores wasn’t home last night or she had something to do with it.”
“The girlfriend, seriously?” Castle asked, following Beckett out of the apartment and downstairs to the car. “Why do cops always go for the obvious choice?”
Beckett quirked her eyebrows. “…Because it’s the obvious choice?”
“Yeah, but c’mon, where’s the story in the lesbian girlfriend killing her partner?”
Beckett rolled her eyes as she buckled her seatbelt and started the ignition. “What’s the matter, Castle, the fact that they’re lesbians not interesting enough for you?”
Castle shrugged. “It’s the twenty-first century,” he said, “kinda lost the allure by now.”
*
“Oh my god.” Gabriella Flores sat down suddenly in the chair across the table in the interrogation room. She’d been pacing, tight lines back and forth near the wall, her arms folded protectively in front of her, until Beckett broke the news to her. “Oh my god.”
She sat there in stunned silence for a long minute, staring at the table in front of her. Beckett and Castle both watched her closely, for their different reasons. Gabriella had short, curly brown-blonde highlighted hair, a round face, wore glasses. She was cute, in a pixie-ish sort of way; she currently wore an elaborate navy blue t-shirt, all jagged and with gold paint splashed across it, with skinny jeans.
She looked up at Beckett, tears filling her eyes. “Sh-she’s dead? Lily’s…she’s…” She turned away, completely, refusing to look at either other person in the room while she cried.
Castle looked wretched. Beckett came around the table and knelt on the floor next to Gabriella, putting a gentle hand on the woman’s arm.
“I am so sorry for your loss,” she said, in that quiet, gentle tone she got when she worked with victims’ families. “I know how hard this is for you, and I know you’re going through a major shock right now, but I need you to answer some questions for me. Do you think you can do that?”
“I…” Gabriella sniffled, drew her arm across her face. “I—yes. I think so.” She turned around again, facing the table, still looking down at it rather than Castle or Beckett. Castle dug a tissue out of his coat--one he'd snagged from her apartment earlier--and pushed it across the table, averting his gaze to give her privacy. She took it, offered him a watery smile before her face collapsed back into new lines of misery.
Beckett sat down again. “I have to ask this, Ms. Flores,” she said. “Where were you this morning between the hours of midnight and four a.m.?”
“What?” Gabriella blinked, taking the tissue away from her nose and looking around for a wastebasket. “What? You think—you think I had something to do with this?”
“We have to ask these questions,” Beckett said patiently, blandly. “We have to rule out all possibilities. You showed up at your apartment complex an hour ago in a taxi with an overnight bag, so why weren’t you at home?”
“I—I was at a conference for the past three days,” Gabriella looked between Castle and Beckett, still clutching the tissue. “In D.C. I caught a flight back late this morning, after a breakfast meet-up with some old co-workers. I know it’s stupid to fly between New York and D.C. but I had a voucher to use up and this was the only trip I was going to be taking before the deadline…” She was losing it again, tears welling up again. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”
“At what hotel were you staying in DC and what was your flight number back this morning?” Beckett made her refocus, talked her through her trip and all the information Beckett needed to verify her alibi. And then the detective asked, “Do you know of anyone who would have wanted to harm your girlfriend?”
Gabriella blinked again, then sniffed. “Well,” she said doubtfully, “her ex-boyfriend was pretty pissed when they broke up last winter—January.”
“Wait.” It was Castle’s turn to blink a lot. “Did you just say--boyfriend?”
Gabriella gave him a long, steady look, her entire body stilling and the grief momentarily fading. “Yeah,” she said. “Lily was bi. So am I. Do you have a problem with that?”
“What?” Castle looked caught, and confused. “What, no, of course I don’t—”
“Boyfriend’s name?” Beckett interjected, throwing Castle a shut-up-you’re-interrupting-my-interview glare (he could easily recognize them by now) before turning back to the other woman.
“Jake,” Gabriella said. “Jake Wacker. But—I can’t imagine he’d still be angry enough to want to kill her a year later.”
“You mentioned him for a reason, Ms. Flores,” Beckett said, her voice soft. “What made you think of him when I asked that question?”
“He…” Gabriella’s eyes strayed, off to the side of the room. “Lily ran into him last week, at the grocery store of all places. He, uh…apparently he didn’t take the meeting very well. She came home—” Gabriella choked. “She came home crying.”
“Thank you, Ms. Flores,” Beckett said. She looked Gabriella in the eye. “We’ll be in touch.”
They saw Gabriella to the elevator, then turned back to the squad room. “Bi,” Castle said, rubbing his hands together. “Ex-boyfriend, current girlfriend…this is turning into a good story.”
Beckett narrowed her eyes at Castle, sitting down at her desk and bringing up her paperwork and notes on the computer. “So her being bisexual makes it a better story than if she were strictly gay, Castle? Is that it?”
“You kidding? Of course it does!” Castle took his customary seat next to her desk.
“And why exactly is that?” Her tone remained light, casual.
“All that indecisiveness! The double allure! Does-she/doesn’t-she, will-she/won’t-she?” He noticed the way Beckett was looking at him. “What? What’d I say?”
“Do you really think that’s what it means to be bi?” Beckett asked.
“Uh…no, not necessarily?”
“Oh, come on.” Beckett sat back in her chair, crossing her legs and tapping her pen on her desk. She looked at Castle with a little smirk. “Surely, with all the people you know and all the contacts you’ve made, you know a few who identify as bi rather than as straight or gay or some other sexual orientation.”
Castle shrugged. “Well, yeah, I suppose. It hasn’t been a topic that’s come up in conversation a whole lot, I guess.”
“What topic is that?” Esposito and Ryan joined them at Beckett’s desk, having just entered the squad room.
“Our victim and her girlfriend were and are bisexual,” Beckett said. “The girlfriend identified an ex-boyfriend who apparently didn’t like getting dumped; could you run him for me? Name of Jake Wacker.”
“Bi,” Castle said again, with a little grin on his face. He looked up at Espo and Kevin. “Isn’t this so cool?”
They both looked down at him oddly. “What?” Castle said, aggrieved. “Are you guys going to read me the riot act about political correctness in our modern society too?”
“Maybe,” Beckett said before either detective could do more than glance at each other in confusion, “maybe it’s about options, Castle. Maybe it’s about not having to be limited by sex. And maybe it’s about honestly finding men and women attractive.” Her phone started buzzing, and she picked it up, though she didn’t break eye contact with the writer. “Maybe people who are bi just like to see the beauty in everyone, rather than a single sex. And maybe they like being able to make that choice for themselves.” She looked down at the screen, paused minutely, then picked it up. “I’ve gotta take this,” she muttered and walked away from the group.
Castle looked surprised again. “Beckett have a new boyfriend I don’t know about?”
Ryan and Esposito looked at each other. “Dunno,” Kevin said, turning around and heading back to his desk with the ex-boyfriend’s name in hand.
“You know how she is, bro,” Esposito said, turning back to the writer with an odd little smirk. “Likes to play it close to the vest, right?”
“Right.” Castle waited, but Espo was still staring down at him and shaking his head. “What?!”
“Nothing, bro.” Esposito shrugged and turned away to follow his partner. “You should just think about what you say sometimes, y’know?”
“What the hell does that mean?” Castle asked nobody in particular. “I make it a point to say what I’m thinking, it helps with the—okay, yeah, filters are sometimes good.”
*
It wasn’t the ex-boyfriend. It turned out not to be the girlfriend, either, but a highly stressed rival at work. They wrapped up the case late that night, in the squad room, collectively sitting back in their chairs, stretching and groaning.
“That’s it,” Castle said, “I’m done. Finito. I still have a blank screen waiting for me at home, ready for me to fill it with brilliant text—but it can wait a couple more hours, if you want to grab a bite to eat?” he added, looking up at Beckett.
“Not tonight,” she shook her head with a smile. “Sorry. Got a date.”
“So you do have a new boyfriend,” Castle said, his tone somewhere between gleeful and despondent.
Beckett paused, her hand in the drawer where she kept her purse. “Not…exactly,” she said, with a little smile. She opened her mouth to say something and then seemed to change her mind, shaking her head. “See you tomorrow, Castle.”
“Until we meet again, Detective,” he said with an elaborate seated bow, watching her walk away and catch the elevator. It opened just as she arrived, a petite blonde woman inside. Even from here, he could see Beckett’s grin at the sight of the woman. And then they hugged and kissed, and Beckett hit a button and the elevator doors shut, her arm around the other woman’s shoulders.
“What?” Castle took a single step toward the elevator. “What?”
“Oh, did you see Beckett’s date?” Ryan said, wandering past. “She’s pretty cute—don’t tell Jenny I said that.”
“Pretty cute?” Esposito said, heading for his own desk. “Dude, she’s smokin’. Even Lanie thinks so.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Castle held up a finger. “You guys knew? All along?”
“She was dating a woman when I first started here,” Kevin said, not looking up from his computer screen. “I started to make a joke and got such a combined Evil Death Glare from Beckett, Espo, and Lanie I decided to keep my mouth shut after that.”
“Yeah.” Esposito said, turning around and walking back to Castle, invading his space and reminding the writer that Javi had Special Ops background and could probably kill Castle with his pinkie. Half a pinkie. “How ‘bout you, bro?”
Castle held up his hands placatingly. “Hey, now. King of non-judgemental behavior here, remember? Whatever consenting adults, two or more, do together is fine by me and not my business unless I’m doing research. I won’t say a word.”
“Damn right you won’t.” Espo looked at him steadily for another ten seconds before backing off and finally sitting down again at his desk. “Don’t you have some writing to do or something?”
“Yeah. See you guys later.”
“Later, Castle,” Ryan said, not looking up from the report on his computer screen.
*
“Ah-ha!” Alexis jumped into her dad’s office with a grin. “You’re writing. Case today broke the writer’s block?”
“Sort of.” Castle was frowning at his laptop screen, his fingers tapping at the keys. “Honey, have you ever been attracted to women?”
Alexis froze, halfway seated in the comfy chair off to the side of the desk. “Uh…dad?”
He looked up at last. “You’d tell me if you were, right?” He sat the laptop down on the desk and leaned forward, looking at his daughter seriously. “And you’d know I love you no matter what, right?”
“Uh, okay?” Alexis didn’t quite know where to look.
“Good.” He sat back again. “Are any of your friends bi?”
“Dad!”
“Well, are they? I need to do some research.”
Alexis rolled her eyes, finally flopping into her chair. “You are not using my friends for research again. Half the teens you had in Death of a Prom Queen were awful.”
Castle winced. “Yeah, I know—can I blame my editor on that one?”
Alexis shook her head—not in negation, but in fond exasperation—and stood up to wander out of the room again. She paused in the doorway. “Dad—did you mean that?”
“Hmm?” Castle looked up, brow creased in creative thought, and then his expression cleared. He smiled at her. “Yes, sweetie. I did.”
She nodded, a thoughtful look on her face, and then she grinned. “Okay. Thanks, dad. Love you!”
And then she was gone.
Castle stared after her for a long moment, and then he smiled again and went back to his work.