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“Hey, hey, hey,” Meldrick calls out, waving in a friendly manner, as a short, slim Asian woman -- over 35 and under 45 years old, he'd guess -- in running gear makes her way up the stairs of the neighbouring brownstone, grocery bag in hand. She pulls her headphones off and looks around until she spots him.
“Hi, I just moved in next door,” Meldrick starts out.
“Hang on!” She walks down the steps -- he’s pretty sure he hears her mutter, “What’s he done now?” -- and over to him. Meldrick doesn’t think he’s the “him” she’s referring to. She seems friendly enough, as she holds out her hand for him to shake. “My name is Joan Watson. Sherlock will be back...uh, some time later. You’ll want to speak to him directly, I’m sure. If you give me your number, I can have him call you when he gets in.”
“Well, the thing is, Ms Watson -- I’m Meldrick Lewis, by the way -- I’m not really sure this will keep.” He points to the box at his feet, still intact with all the shipping labels. It’s emitting a constant, low buzz that Meldrick really does not care for.
“Oh.”
*
Meldrick enters the next door brownstone behind his new neighbour. He takes in the mismatched furniture and the wall of locks and assortment of handcuffs arranged against the wall behind the dining table. Everyone has their hobbies, he supposes.
"Your, ah..."
"Partner," Joan supplies.
"Right." Meldrick gingerly hands her the buzzing box. As far as he can tell, it has air vents, but no way for the bees to get out. Thank God for that. "He had these delivered to the wrong house."
Joan looks around a moment, then sticks the box of bees under the coat rack. "They can stay there for now. I told him they were a bad idea, but I only found out after he had already ordered them."
"He meant to mail them to us?" Meldrick takes his hat off, shoves it into his coat pocket and rubs the top of his newly shaven head. “That might be the strangest present we’ve gotten yet.” And that included all the assorted gifts from Mikey’s brothers over the years, after they’d recovered from their initial shock of finding out Mike was shacked up with him.
“He likes bees,” says Joan. It’s an explanation, not an apology, Meldrick notes. “Come on, let me put these groceries away. Do you like tea?”
“Sure,” he agrees. He’s more of a coffee drinker himself, but he’s been cutting back on the stuff recently, per his doctor’s orders. It isn’t like he misses the bitter sludge that kept you jittery for days on end. Or maybe that was just the job.
On the way to the kitchen, he passes the table with an open file with pictures of a crime scene on it. He stops and takes in the notes scrawled in the margins, until Joan plunks down a mug of tea next to it.
“Gruesome, isn’t it?” she says, moving to put them away. “I didn’t mean to leave them out.”
“Where’d you get the crime scene photos?” he asks, because old habits die hard. And even if his days of being a homicide detective are behind him, he would like to know if he and Mikey have just moved in next to a pair of crime buffs or aspiring murderers or enterprising reporters.
“Oh. I know what you must be thinking,” Joan says, ruefully. “It’s completely legitimate. Sherlock and I consult for the NYPD. We help out on cases. Sherlock has this ability to solve puzzles...people.”
“Huh.” Meldrick wasn’t expecting that.
“You can call Captain Gregson if you like. You might have seen him on the news recently?” Joan reaches for her phone, but Meldrick declines to call. He believes her; it sounds just far-fetched enough to be true. And he can call Munch later to find out if her story checks out.
Meldrick takes a meditative sip of tea. It’s really not the same as coffee. “I used to be a homicide detective,” he tells her. “In Baltimore, we didn’t have consultants. ‘Course, maybe if we had them, the clearance rate might’ve been the cause of fewer ulcers in the department.”
She laughs a little. “Well, Sherlock is one of a kind.”
“Uh huh. He’s not a cop, then?” Meldrick wants to confirm. He can’t quite wrap his mind around hiring someone to do his legwork for him -- when he was a cop, that was. His paperwork, on the other hand...
“No, I don’t think they’d take him,” she says. “His methods can be a little, uh, unconventional.”
Meldrick lifts his eyebrows at that. “Honestly, it all sounds a little unconventional, to me.”
*
He leaves a little while later, without the bees and with an unsettling feeling that he and Mike ought to run a background check on their neighbours. Just a little one. It wasn’t prying; it was caution. A cop listening to his instincts. They didn’t go away just because he hung up his badge and gun.
“This can’t be what normal people do,” says Meldrick, typing with two fingers on Mike’s laptop. It’s early in the evening, but they’re already in their pajamas and in bed. An unpacked box of Meldrick’s clothes doubles as a nightstand, on which he’s stashed a mug of lukewarm decaffeinated tea -- still not the same as coffee -- that he’s probably not going to finish and some crackers in case he wants a snack. Mike has long since given up on complaining about crumbs in bed.
Mike looks up and over his glasses at him. He’s reading an old Dennis Lehane mystery novel. Meldrick knows he’s read it before, so he doesn’t feel bad about interrupting him. “I thought you were going to talk to Munch about this.”
“He ain’t answering his phone.” Meldrick waits impatiently for the ancient laptop to spit out the information he wants and pokes Kellerman’s leg with his toes. “I’m telling you, Mikey, if you’d been over there, you’d be looking into this too. I’m pretty sure there were security cameras in the kitchen. They worried someone’s going to steal their milk?”
“Your feet are cold,” Mike complains.
“So warm them up for me,” suggests Meldrick, off-handedly. In response, Mike props both his legs on top of Meldrick’s and resumes reading. Meldrick snorts, but doesn’t bother moving. He clicks on a couple of links. There’s not much information on Joan Watson, but Sherlock Holmes is quite the popular character.
“Now, see, Kellerman, you could’ve been a ‘consulting detective’,” Meldrick says, as he skims over an article, a few years old, on Scotland Yard and their successful capture of a serial killer. “They help the police find clues and stuff.”
“Yeah? Think it pays well?”
Meldrick shrugs. “The guy’s a crime solvin’ genius, it says here.”
“Ha.” Mike creases the corner of his book to save the page and tosses it over on to the makeshift nightstand, where it lands squarely on top of Meldrick’s late night snack. “Sorry. You and I both know what happens to crime solving geniuses: They burn out. Or do something stupid, like kill a murderer who gets off on a technicality.” He shifts around so his legs are back on his side of the bed and grabs most of the covers. “Or, say he puts a bunch of guys away, what does it matter, in the end? They get out early, ‘cause they cut a deal or the jails are full. And people still go on killing each other. For what? Drugs. Money. Power. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.”
Meldrick shuts the laptop and sticks it on the floor. “Uh huh. Been sitting on that a while, Mikey?”
“I haven’t been a cop for a long time, Meldrick. Had some time to think. They say perspective is a good thing.” Mike closes his eyes. “Can you turn the lights out when you’re done?”
Meldrick obligingly gets up and turns off the lights; he is most definitely done for the night. He settles back into bed, leans into Mike a little until he relaxes and throws Meldrick a corner of the blanket. It’s no wonder his feet are always cold, with Mike hogging the blankets. Meldrick’s creative solution to that is to cuddle closer.
“...Did you really call Tim Bayliss a crime solving genius?”
Mike sighs and wraps his fingers around Meldrick’s wrist, just lightly holding on. “We’re all geniuses in our own way, Meldrick. Even you.”
“About time I got some appreciation around here.”
Mike turns over so he’s facing Meldrick and gives him a big smooch. Meldrick is about to complain that it isn’t a real kiss when Mike says, “I appreciate you all the time, Lewis. And, you know, cops like you tend to outlast those genius types.”
“What do you mean ‘like me’?” he asks, curiously and carefully. He’s pretty sure Mike is not insulting him and he’s not fishing for compliments, but they haven’t talked much about this. Not about him being a cop, not after the fallout from Mahoney, when Meldrick knew being a PI was never what Mike wanted to do.
“Like you,” Mike repeats, with a little more emphasis, as if that clarifies things. He makes a frustrated noise. “You...You get the job done. You can leave at work -- mostly. We all have stuff that haunts us, but, I don’t know, somehow the job doesn’t eat you up. It’s your innate...Meldrickness.”
“Ah,” says Meldrick, “sure, that must be it.”
“Stop laughing at me,” grumbles Mike. He turns his face into his pillow, leaving one arm draped across Meldrick.
“So, if you a crime that needed solving, would you call me or Sherlock Holmes?”
“I’d call that psychic Munch was telling us about.”
“What? He couldn’t psychic his way out of paper bag.” Meldrick crosses his arms behind his head, prepared to count sheep. Mike is already half asleep, his reply incoherent. “Sleep tight, Mikey.”