174. Where the bee sucks

Carl, intimidated by both Beckett and the overshadowing, if virtual, presence of Martha Rodgers, is released to join his colleagues in the stalls area. Ryan and Esposito have managed to list everyone. There is a significant volume of angry declamation and posturing, which is being silenced in a circle radiating outward from Carl and being replaced by awed whispering and open stares at Castle. Just before he’s mobbed by fans of his mother, Beckett walks on to the stage in front of them.

“Listen up,” she says, and every word is precise, perfect and audible at the back of the theatre. Every eye snaps to her and doesn’t shift.

“We have all your details. Thank you for your co-operation. I would like you to co-operate one last time to help us understand this tragic event” – Castle thinks that might be laying it on too thickly, but it seems to work – “I want you to reperform the actions you were all taking for when you were rehearsing about an hour before Cali missed her cue.” She catches every eye. “Go to!” she says, and exits stage left.

“How much acting have you done?” Castle says, incredulously.

“I told you I’d done a bit of musical theatre.”

He stays quiet. Stage presence or command presence, she’d displayed it in spades. He feels story roiling in his head, and knows that he won’t be sleeping tonight. The actors swirl around him, rearranging themselves. Ryan, Espo, Beckett and he arrange themselves in the front row. Castle gets his phone out, and starts to take photos. The rest follow suit, until Beckett says, “Let’s video it, guys,” and herself rises to move to a different area of the stalls to film at a different angle.   Ryan picks up the idea and goes in the opposite direction. The actors continue to drift around. Beckett gives it another ten seconds and then claps her hands. “Places!” she orders. Amazingly, the use of a familiar term works.

The actors shuffle into the places they’re admitting to having been in over the critical time. Beckett doesn’t expect much from this, but with the videos it might produce something. Carl starts, Castle tries very hard not to wince from moment one, and comprehensively fails. By the time Beckett calls time, he’s shuddering, even though he’s a veteran of vile productions.

“That was horrible,” he says, as soon as they’re out of earshot.

“Yeah,” Beckett says, not really listening. “Right. I want to interview the key actors who were offstage.” She glances around, and then at her watch. “Hmm. It’s getting late, and we’ve got the videos, but no results from Lanie yet.   I think we’ll do a brief run through now, let them all sweat a little overnight and bring them in for a full interview tomorrow. We’ll start with the old guy. Ryan, Espo, who do you want, and what’s my guy’s name?”

“Tim Derren.”

The boys look around. No-one is particularly attractive. “Guess we’ll start on him.” They gesture to a younger man and go off to cut him out of the herd to tell him when to show up. She and Castle collect the older man, who on marginally closer acquaintance appears to be in his mid-fifties.

“Mr Derren.”

He turns round. Up close, he looks much older: sixty-something. Broken veins infest his cheeks, not quite concealed by the stage make-up; his eyelids droop slightly; there are bags below them. Beckett develops a feeling of dreadful recognition, which is almost immediately confirmed when he speaks.

“Yes?” he says. A faint trace of liquor wafts past Beckett.

“We’d like you to talk to us tomorrow morning about the play. Your part was?”

“Egeus.”

Castle nods intelligently.

“Can we see you at ten, please?”

“Yes. That should be possible,” Mr Derren pronounces, with very careful diction.

“Thanks.”

Beckett takes his address, and lines up the rest of her interviewees for tomorrow with brisk efficiency; Ryan and Esposito do the same, and fairly shortly they ensure that the theatre is cleared, seal the doors, and depart.

“Can you come back for a bit, Castle?” Beckett says.

“Sure. Do we need food, drink, ice-cream? Or is this merely a ploy to make use of my handsome body.”

Beckett snorts, and then pauses before starting the car. “No,” she says, and nothing more.

“No? I’m deeply distressed. Sent into a slough of despond.”

“You’re a very unlikely pilgrim.” Beckett sniggers, catching the reference without effort.

Castle pout-smirks appreciatively at the riposte. “I’m hurt. All my struggles and travails” –

“I thought it was mostly your mother’s struggles and travails?”

“Stop destroying my lyric prose with your logic and honesty. Yes. Anyway, why are you asking me to come back with you?”

“I want to talk to you.”

Castle raises his eyebrows. “Is there something I should know?”

“Yes,” Beckett says incautiously, and follows up on hearing his gasp, “but not about you.”

“Phew.”

Beckett pats his knee, and then removes her hand to manoeuvre into her parking space.

“Okay, so what do you want to talk about?” Castle asks when they’re safely within Beckett’s apartment.

“Derren.”

“Yeah?”

“He’d been drinking. He might be an alcoholic.”

“And?”

“And Montgomery told me I couldn’t work any cases with an alcoholic.”

“Oh. When’d he say that?”

“Months ago,” Beckett says bleakly, “but he hasn’t rescinded it.” Her fingers tap on the couch, restless and distressed. “I have to tell him about this.”

“Why?”

“Because if I don’t and he finds out – like tomorrow morning when he reads the Dispatch report – he’ll bench me unpaid and there’ll be a black mark on my record. I don’t need that.”

“Oh. Right.” Castle hugs her. “But all you have to do is tell him. So what’s the real point here?”

Beckett taps her fingers some more. She can feel her shoulders stiffening. “I wanna ask Montgomery to leave me on this case, but I think he’ll only do that if he thinks you’ll tell him if I’m getting sucked in.”

“Ah-er…?” Castle says ambiguously. He is not at all sure where Beckett might be going with this.

“So I want you to tell him you will” – he squeaks in surprise – “but I want you to tell me first.” Her words start to tumble out. “As soon as you notice. Then I can step back and you can make sure I do and then when he asks you, you can say I’m dealing with it properly, ‘cause I will be. So he won’t bench me, and I’ll get to deal with it with a… a safety net.”

Castle thinks it through. He doesn’t see a downside. “Okay,” he agrees, slowly. “But…”

“But?”

“But you have to listen to me and not argue,” he says firmly. “If I say you’re getting too close you have to trust me to be right.” Beckett stares at him. “I’m not going to be your patsy, and I’m not going to cover up for you.” He stops talking, very quickly. Beckett’s eyes are so wide they might fall out, were it not for the almost-tangible ice holding them in.

“Did I ask you to?” she says, quietly. “Did I ask you to lie to Montgomery or cover up? Didn’t I just ask you to help me do it properly?”

“Er… no? Yes?”

“I was asking you because I thought you wouldn’t lie. To me or to Montgomery. But thanks for the flowers. I’ll take my own licks.” She starts to stand up. Castle tugs her back down.

“Don’t. Okay, that wasn’t the best way to put that.”

“You think?” She sounds chilled, and she might still be sitting down but she certainly isn’t sitting in the curl of his arm.

“But.” The silence grows no less chilling, or less silent for that matter. “You still have to agree to trust me to call it right. And Montgomery still has to agree to all of it.”

Beckett doesn’t say anything, for a moment. Then, “I’ll talk to him tomorrow.” Which is not, Castle notes, agreement to anything at all. Shit. “I don’t want to think about it any more.”

She breathes in, and out again. “Let’s look at the videos we took. See if there’s anything interesting.” It’s quite clearly a shut-out. Castle realises rather too late that she’d been expressing, in a rather oblique, ass-about-face way, complete trust in his ability to spot the problem and force her to deal with it. More, she’d been saying, also in a totally oblique and ass-about-face way, that she’d listen to him and trust his judgement, over her own.

And he just threw it right back in her face by suggesting to her she was using him as a way to lie to Montgomery. Way to go, Rick. He realises slowly that he’s not only really hurt her, but that she’s simply pushed it all away to concentrate on the case. Just like she had when her father hurt her. Just like she’d, so slowly, not been doing when anything hurt her.

She’s already pulling up the video on her own phone, concentrating very hard on the small screen, watching intently. Oh. Watching very intently through suspiciously gleaming eyes. And she still hasn’t moved one single inch closer to him. She watches her own video for a few seconds.

“Aren’t you going to watch yours?” she asks, completely calmly, as if Ryan or Espo was right there with them. Not a flicker of any other emotion escapes.

“No. I want to watch yours.”

“Okay.” She sets it back to the beginning and hands him the phone. “There. ‘Scuse me.” He can’t argue with that. The bathroom door shuts. Shortly it reopens, and she returns to the room. Instead of sitting down, she wanders over to the window, and picks up her little bird, running her fingers over it. She doesn’t touch the small red quartz beside it.

“Aren’t you going to watch my video?” Castle asks.

“Not tonight. No point, if I’ll be off the case tomorrow. I only wanted to watch mine so that I could tell whoever takes over what I knew.”

Castle looks at her sharply. She sounds resigned to being dropped from the case. “Don’t you want to take it?” He’d have thought she’d fight to stay on, as it’s such a perfectly Beckett-flavoured case.

“Not my decision. It’s up to the Captain.” She changes the course of conversation with a swift swerve before he can repeat the question which she hasn’t actually answered. “It’s late. Have you seen enough? Ryan and Espo’ll want your thoughts. Probably.” She manages a perfectly Beckett-normal smirk. “Maybe not your theories.”

“But what about the case?,” Castle says with emphasis.

“Not up to me. No point thinking about it. I’ll know tomorrow.” He can only see her back, now, as she continues to stare out the window. “There’ll be something else soon enough.”

“But if I said I’d make sure you didn’t get drawn in…”

“It’s still up to Montgomery. There’s no point worrying now.” She glances at the clock, and turns back to the room. The shadows fall such that her face is half-shielded. “It’s after ten.”

“So?”

“So shift starts at eight. If I don’t get some sleep I’ll turn into a rutabaga.”

“Not a pumpkin?”

“No. That’s Alexis, isn’t it?” She acquires a smile, at some considerable cost. “You’ll still be calling her that when she’s sixty.”

“Most likely.”

Castle realises that he’s not going to get anything out of Beckett tonight that relates to the case, how she feels, or why she won’t just tell him she’s upset. Oh. He knows that. Because being upset never helped. Because being upset might have sent her father back to the bottle. Because being upset is childish and stupid and she should have grown out of it. Because she’s hurt and angry and showing either never helped. It simply drove people away. Asking for help never worked, because there wasn’t any, until he and Dr Burke arrived.

And old bad habits die very hard indeed.

Beckett has gone back to repetitive stroking of the little stone bird, which he now thinks is a displacement activity when she’s stressed and not alone. He stands up, not sure whether he intends to leave or to hold her.

“I thought you understood,” she says unexpectedly. “I thought you understood that I’d never short-change the job. It was that or ask to be taken off the case. So I’ll ask to be taken off the case.”

“Uh?” Castle is left utterly wordless.

“You don’t trust me to deal with it properly, so I can’t be on the case. Better not to be near temptation. I’ll tell Montgomery in the morning.”

“What? Don’t do that!”

“I’m obeying orders. You got a better plan?”

“Yeah, I do. You stop pretending you’re not upset ‘cause of what I said, and we have a grown-up discussion about it. I said I’d make sure…” –

“You don’t think I’d listen to you, so if you tell Montgomery I will you’ll be the one lying. I’m not going to take that risk.”

“Well, you sure aren’t listening now,” Castle snaps. “Maybe you’ll listen in the morning when you’ve had some sleep and realised how dumb you’re being.” He stops, and plays back the last few sentences. “You’re wrong,” he states flatly. “You think I don’t trust you on the job – no, you think I don’t trust you near an alcoholic. And you’re upset and angry with me and you’re just hiding it all because that’s what you always do. Did.”

“You just said it.”

Castle isn’t listening to that. “And because you think I believe that, you’re trusting my judgement and walking away from this case without even fighting for it. You wouldn’t even argue with me.” He’s still several feet away from her, not moving closer, still working out what it all means. He sits down again, leaving her still at the window, staring out into the Manhattan lights with her bird cradled in her hands.

She heard him say that he thought she would try to use him to cover up misconduct: disobedience to Montgomery’s diktat, but he didn’t mean it that way: he meant that he’d tell her straight and then not put up with any attempts to weasel round him. He didn’t mean that she’d ask him to lie, just that it wouldn’t be a matter for negotiation or discussion what he said – that he won’t let her wriggle out of the commitment. But even thinking that he doesn’t trust her to do the right thing; doesn’t believe that she’s – oh fuck – doesn’t believe that she’s made enough progress to do this: even then, even so, because he’s said that, shown that – she’s accepted it. So she’s going to walk away from the case tomorrow morning and obey Montgomery’s months-ago order because she trusts his judgement, more than she trusts her own.

Oh. Oh oh oh. Oh, fuck. Because he doesn’t believe that she couldn’t handle it. He really, really doesn’t. It would have been another step to show her that she’d made progress. And he’s stopped her taking it.

“I don’t think you should step back from the case,” he says. “I think we should go with your first idea.”

“Why?” She still hasn’t turned round. There’s nothing in her voice.

“Because you need to try sometime.”

“And if I can’t do it?” Hanging unsaid in the air is you don’t think I can. “Someone won’t get justice if I screw up. Better to wait.” Till I’m ready joins the host of unspoken words. “Ryan and Espo can handle it.”

Castle hears the defeated resolve in her voice. She really is simply going to walk away from this case, and it’s going to tear her apart, but she’s decided that she’s doing the right thing and so she’ll do it at any cost to herself. Typical Beckett. Typical old bad dumb habit.

“Kate,” he says firmly. “Kate, you’re wrong. Sleep on it. Don’t go see Montgomery till I get in.” He breathes in sharply, hoping for the words to pause this for long enough to mend it properly. “We’ll both talk to him. I think you should do it.”

She doesn’t say anything at all.

“Say something.”

“So what’s changed your mind?” she says acidly, but he hears the withheld tears behind the bite. “A few minutes ago you thought I was prepared to lie to my Captain and ask you to do the same so that I could disobey his judgement on my fitness for this case. So I agreed not to work it. Now you say I should go back to Plan A despite you thinking I’d do that. Well, I won’t. I’m not ready and you know it. I don’t need coddling, I needed the truth. There’ll be more cases. You should help Ryan and Espo with this one. If nothing else, we should play the famous Martha Rodgers card as hard as possible.”

There is a miserable pause, in which Castle realises that he’s lost this argument. Unless –

“You’re wrong,” he says again. “And you’re not listening to me trying to tell you I was wrong. You’re trying to martyr yourself without thinking just on the basis of one dumb sentence from me. Just like you did for five years because one dumb therapist fucked you up. You always believe the worst of yourself on the basis of someone you think you can trust and you won’t listen when someone tries to correct themselves. It’s always your fault and you just go right ahead and do whatever you think will punish you most for not being perfect. Well, you’re wrong. I shouldn’t have implied you would ask me to lie and you shouldn’t just have accepted it without an argument.”

Her shoulders are hunched, but there’s a betraying tremor in them, and in her hand when she puts the bird down. She doesn’t pick up the quartz, arms folding across her chest defensively. She doesn’t speak, either.

“Think about it. You’re just falling back into the same old pattern and I won’t let you.” He changes to soft persuasion. “You were going to drop it because you thought I knew best. Don’t drop it now. Let’s go see Montgomery together and stick by his decision. You don’t want to go down without a fight.”

He rises and takes the three strides to reach her and turn her to face him. She’s not crying. That’s sheer force of will, because there’s moisture puddled in her eyes and from her pinched, chilled face she’s holding in everything. He might have broken the one thing she could rely on: her ability to do her job.

“Kate, it’s up to you. Just… just please think about how you’re reacting right now. Don’t do anything till I get there tomorrow.”

He pulls her gently into him, and cossets softly, hoping that he’s got through to her. She’s still trembling, or shivering. She also hasn’t agreed to wait for him, or with his reversion to the original plan.

Beckett is still reeling from Castle’s initial, incautious statement that she’d want him to lie for her. That had been the last thing she wanted. She knows what the risk is here, and she’d thought he’d help her. And then he starts yelling because she actually listened to him and if he thinks she’s not ready then she probably isn’t and somehow it’s her fault for listening because he’s flipped his view a complete one-eighty?

But gradually she starts to think over what he had said.   He’d been wrong to say it, he’d said. She’s taking a black-and-white view and then doing what she thought was right on the basis of only believing the worst possible statement. She can’t have it both ways. If she believes what he says, then she can’t only believe one sentence. She has to believe all of it. In which case… is she slipping into the old mindset? And if so, why now?

It’s at least partly the alcoholic. A sixty-ish man: it’s very close to home. But she’d told Dr Burke she thought she could do it, and she hadn’t lied. She thinks she hadn’t lied. So why’s she so spooked, why’s she so determined to believe Castle’s totally dumb statement when normally she’d have ground him into hamburger?

“Oh, fuck,” she says, and only realises she’d said it out loud when Castle starts and grabs her more tightly. “It’s not what you said. It’s about your mother. Again.”

“My mother?”