19. Talk to me, don't talk to me

When Castle arrives in the bullpen the next morning it’s empty of the team. When he looks at his phone there’s a message that he hadn’t heard arrive.  R & E on the search warrant. Unis picking up CF.  Interrogation.  It was sent thirty minutes ago.  He looks around, and spots Beckett coming back to her desk. 

“Is she here yet?”

“No.”

“Coffee?”

“No. She’ll be here any moment.”  It’s perfectly sensible, but it still feels like a rejection.  Beckett’s desk is, he notices, bestrewn with coffee cups.  Three coffee cups. 

“How long have you been here?”

“Shift started at eight.” It takes Castle a moment to realise that that wasn’t actually an answer.

“When did you get here?”

“What does that matter? Before shift began, so I’m always ready to go.”

“How am I supposed to shadow you if I don’t know when you start?” Beckett looks briefly exasperated, and then blank.

“Okay. I was in at seven.  We don’t just have this case.  We’re helping out to reduce the cold cases.  So I came in to get a start on those.  Then we got the warrant.  Those don’t wait.  Espo and Ryan had to go straight away, and they found the ring.  Stupid woman had put it with her own jewellery.  It doesn’t even fit her.”

“You didn’t call.”

“I texted you as soon as they went to pick her up.” There’s a distinct air of what more do you want?  The potential for argument is instantly removed as Beckett is informed that Carrie Franks is back in Interrogation.  “C’mon.”  There’s fire in Beckett’s eyes.  “Let’s go get her.”

Half an hour later it’s all over. Carrie has been reduced to bitter, vitriolic confession by a combination of Castle sympathising with the story and Beckett’s cold contempt.  The boys have the evidence, and Carrie Franks is taken away.

“Now what?” Castle asks hopefully, in the break room where they’re all partaking of celebratory caffeine.

“Back to cold cases,” Beckett says. The boys make faces. 

“Is that it?”

“You don’t have to stay. It’s not likely to be interesting.”

“Aw, who’s gonna keep us amused, Beckett?”

“We’re here to work, boys.”

“I want to help.”

“Okay. You can start checking witness statements on this one.”  Beckett hands him a file.

“What’s it about?”

“Twenty-seven year old man, found dead, stabbed, in December. Tox said he was fuelled up on cheap booze.  Looked like he’d been on the streets, first off, but he hadn’t been there for long.”  Castle makes a disappointed face.  “We don’t just do the weird ones.  Everyone deserves justice.  See if you can spot anything.” 

Castle notices a small tightness at the corner of Beckett’s mouth, and a small stress line between her eyebrows, and decides to probe a little.

“Why this one?”

“Top of the pile.”

Castle dutifully begins. Beckett is buried in the next folder.  The boys have picked up one each.  The team is quiet and thoughtful.

Beckett, alongside her focus on her own cold case, is only too glad that the top one off the pile was that one. She doesn’t want to deal with cold cases which involve anything more than the normal run of mundane murder, and right now she really doesn’t want to deal with anything involving alcohol.  Who knows, maybe Castle will spot something.  She doesn’t care where justice comes from, only that it comes.  Her team is successful, and it’s staying successful.  If Castle helps it stay successful, that’s fine.  But she needn’t go out of her way to invite him in.  It’s up to him how much shadowing he needs to do.

And then her phone rings. It’s her dad.  This is something of a shock.  He doesn’t normally ring in the daytime.

“Dad?” she says, with a hint of panic that causes Castle to flick a sharp glance upward as she rises to move to a less public place. He hears Is something wrong? before she’s shut the conference room door behind her.  That’s…odd.  Off.  He’d thought it wasn’t her father.  He’s very rapidly rethinking that conclusion.

The story makes sense, if it’s her father. It all makes much better sense that way.  How hadn’t he seen it?  It’s the only narrative that makes the story coherent.  But how’s he a lawyer now, if he’s an alcoholic?  And why, if he’s an alcoholic, is Beckett not supporting him by spending the whole of Christmas Day with him?  She’s got plenty of compassion for people she doesn’t know and isn’t related to, but none for her family?  He can’t imagine that he wouldn’t spend the time on his family, and thinks less of Beckett for her apparent choice.

Filled with satisfaction at having worked out the issue, and a certain amount of displeasure and indeed discomfort at discovering Beckett’s feet of clay, Castle turns his attention on to the cold case. He pokes it and prods at it and makes up innumerable theories to explain why a twenty-seven year old would suddenly be on the streets.  None of them fit even the scanty evidence which is on file.  On the other hand… he’d not been on the streets for long.  Castle looks at the photos.  The corpse hadn’t been wearing much, when he considers how cold it had been when the man died.  A new theory evolves itself.  What if… he’d been trying to get warm?  What if, tanked to the gills on cheap booze, he’d tried to snuggle down in a doorway that was already occupied, and got a little too snuggly with the occupant?  What if… the occupant didn’t take kindly to it, and – accidentally or otherwise – poked a knife into him?

It’s very boring. Not a fun case at all.  But it might actually be the answer.  Not that they’re ever going to be able to prove it.  He tries the theory out on Ryan, who is intrigued, and Espo, who is moderately disgusted.

“That’s sick, man.”

“But plausible. Is there footage of that doorway?”

“Not now, there won’t be. ‘Bout a week is the best we can hope for.  This one’s over a month.  No chance.”

“Later, Dad. Bye,” comes from Beckett, returning to her desk.  Castle interprets her brisk tone as brushing off her father because she’s too busy with work.  He doesn’t see how cold cases can prevail over helping one’s family.  His opinion of her behaviour drops a little lower.

Beckett had gone into the conference room to talk to her father in privacy. Privacy from Castle, that would be.  He doesn’t need to be handed any more ammunition.

“Is something wrong? Are you okay, Dad?” 

There’s always the heart-clenching fear that it’ll be the slurred, incoherent speech of years ago: pleas and tears and anger; and then her leaving to collect him from whichever bar or dingy dive or cell he’d ended up in. The image of him sprawled on the grass in Central Park: dirty, incontinent and paralysed by alcohol, has never quite left her: tears streaming down his face as spittle or vomit and urine soaked his clothes.  Until she’d had to stop: had left him there – wherever there was – to lie, or die, in his own filth and degradation: when she didn’t take his calls, and watched her phone ring out, or go to voicemail, hearing his drunken, pathetic begging for her to come.  Every time, it shredded her soul.  She wanted to save him, but she couldn’t.

Later, she learned that walking away was the only way she might have saved him: that only when an alcoholic hits rock-bottom can he realise that only he can save himself. She knows it, intellectually, and at times repeating it, a mantra, was the only thing that had stopped her going to try, and fail again, to save him.  But she can’t, deep down, heart and soul, believe it.

So she pours herself out to the families and the victims and the search for justice, and pours yet more of herself into holding her father to his fragile sobriety, always trying to make amends for abandoning him in his hour of need, always trying to prove that she can provide the support and help to others that she hadn’t given her father then. Trying to fill the unfillable void in her heart that walking away from him had left, that has never healed.  No matter how often her father tells her that she did the right thing, that he would never have gone to rehab if she hadn’t walked away, that she saved him by leaving him – she can’t escape her guilt. 

“I’m okay, Katie. But… I have to go to Miami for a week.  Tomorrow.”

“Miami? Uh?  Why?”

“Conference. Bill pulled out last night when his big deal didn’t close, but mine did so I’ve got to substitute for him.  The firm doesn’t want to waste the money.”

“Do you have to present?”

“No, not this time.” Beckett sits down hard and breathes an inaudible sigh of relief.  One trigger fewer.  “You’ll be there?”  She knows he doesn’t mean physically.  She, and his sponsor, whom she has never met – doesn’t want to meet.  She’s afraid of what she might see in his eyes – will be on the end of the phone, whenever, whatever, her father needs.

“Yeah. Always there for you, Dad,” she says softly, determination behind the velvet.  She quickly changes the tone: they never get too close to the emotional areas.  Too dangerous.  She might reveal too much – she might let slip her own anger and pain.  He can’t take that: it’s too much for him.  So she’s always walled it up and walled it off.  Now, she’s really, really good at walling her feelings off.  Though not quite good enough, it seems.  Castle saw the truth.  Saw the ugly truth and didn’t like it.

She has to be cheerful and teasing and make sure her father never, ever, knows she’s pretending.  “Will you bring me back a present?” she says, as if she were still four, and sniggers at her father’s snort.

“Sure I will, Katie. Would you like a purple dinosaur or a Barbie doll?”  She laughs out loud.  Another danger point safely rounded.  There are always danger points.  So far, she’s always rounded them.

“Seeing as I won’t see you Sunday, do you want to come round for dinner tonight?”

“That’d be nice.”

“Okay, come about seven. Better get back to the files.  Cold cases.  Ugh.”

“See you later, Katie.” She opens the door and starts back into the bullpen.

“Later, Dad. Bye,” she says briskly, and sits down.  Castle flicks her a look of reproach tinged with contempt.  She ignores both the look and the pain it causes her.  It’s no more than she expects.  She concentrates on her files and reminds herself, several times, that her father has been dry for five years and that there’s no reason he’ll break that record now.  It’s just that conferences make her nervous.  All that networking is all too often fuelled on drinking.

“I’ve got a theory on this case,” Castle says.

“Yeah?” She can’t deal with insane theories.

“I think he tried to get warm and got a bit too close to someone else, who stabbed him.” Oh.  Not such an insane theory.

“Okay, that’s plausible. Why don’t you run with it?  Your chance to do real cop work.”  He looks surprised.  Still, she doesn’t have time to help him right now.  She needs to make arrangements for next week.  They have a process for this, but she needs to make it happen straight away.  Normally she has more notice.   She stands up and aims for the Captain’s office. 

Castle’s left behind, annoyed, again. He’s been in a state of almost permanent irritation and ire since Beckett walked out his loft, firstly because he really didn’t want to find out that she’s not on the pedestal he’d been trying to put her on, and secondly because he feels (not that he’ll acknowledge it) that if he’d been a little more careful with his wording she might not have walked.  It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he’d wanted her to stay, and he’d wanted her to like his family, and he’d wanted to discover her.  Absolutely nothing at all.  And he is not going to go running after someone who doesn’t even care properly for their own family, let alone someone who doesn’t like his.

The door closes behind Beckett. Montgomery looks up, surprised.

“Yes, Beckett?”

“Sir…” She swallows.  She’s done this before, and every time it’s as embarrassing and painful as the first: guilt that she’s not giving her all to the job, guilt that she’s not giving her all to her father.  “My dad,” she forces out.  “It’s another conference.  He only told me just now but he’s going tomorrow, for a week.”

Montgomery looks at her sympathetically. She hates that look: the mingled pity and respect. 

“Okay, Beckett. You team up with Espo, as usual.  Ryan can babysit Castle.  Won’t do either of them any harm, though I’ll be on the lookout for any reports of aliens and CIA agents.  I’ll have a word with Ryan and Esposito.”  Neither of them mention telling Castle.  Montgomery assumes Beckett will.  Beckett assumes that Montgomery, Espo or Ryan will.  She certainly won’t.  Can’t.  Only Montgomery, Ryan and Esposito know, inside the bullpen, and Lanie.  She doesn’t show off her scars, and her father is not a circus freak to be pointed out and stared at.

Beckett comes out of Montgomery’s office, and doesn’t offer Castle an explanation. Shortly, Ryan and then Esposito enter, exit a few moments later, and don’t offer Castle an explanation.  They do, however, offer him coffee and chit-chat – oops, exchange of information and leads – in the break room.  Beckett declines to participate.  She has a tight furrow between her brows and if she clutches her pen any more tightly it will snap.

“What’s up?” Castle asks.

“Shifts for next week,” Espo says casually. “Always a few changes.   People get sick, that sort of thing.”  Castle casts him a somewhat jaundiced look, but there’s no evidence that any of that’s untrue.

“Why not all three of you?”

“Dunno. Just the way it is.”  He smiles evilly.  “Maybe it’s because Beckett’s taken too much time off.”  Ryan snorts his coffee out.  Castle smiles tightly, without much mirth.

Conversation turns to Castle’s theory, and any way at all of finding any evidence. Short of interviewing every panhandler within four streets each way, there doesn’t seem to be much of a chance.  On the other hand, as Esposito points out gleefully, that’s why uniforms were invented.  The three men grin at each other, and Esposito goes off to exercise his inner dictator and start uniforms on the canvass.

Beckett is buried in the next cold case when Castle returns, the furrow in her brow deeper than ever. She’s even less conversational than usual, and doesn’t seem nearly as interested as she should be that the boys thought it was worth a canvass: she just accepts that Espo’s organised one and doesn’t ask about anything more.  Lunch comes and goes, the cold case files come and go, and Castle gets steadily more bored.  At four, he’s had enough, makes his excuses and leaves.  Beckett’s soft, neutral goodbye is the first word she’s said since two.  She’s been quiet ever since her father rang.  Maybe, he thinks, she’s feeling bad about her father.

He’s right about how she feels. It’s just that he’s right for all the wrong reasons.

Being at home does not improve Castle’s mood. Alexis is at an extra music lesson and then orchestral practice.  His mother is out, for which he is thankful.  The last thing he needs is her particular brand of – quote – keeping his feet on the ground.  It’s not necessary – he has never forgotten his childhood – and it’s certainly not welcome.  Normally he succeeds in letting it wash over him, but not today.

He tries to write, but keeps stalling on pieces of police procedure that he simply doesn’t yet know. He’d know them if Beckett would simply let him shadow her like she’s supposed to and been ordered to, he thinks acidly; leaves an almost-blank space on the page between square brackets with a short note of the matter to be checked, and moves on. 

Four similarly empty spaces later, two coffees downed and ninety minutes passed in barely acceptable writing, Castle’s patience has expired. He hates not being able to write continuously.  His frustration expresses itself in an ever-growing desire to explain the facts of life to Beckett: to wit that if she doesn’t let him shadow her properly and start to play nice, he’ll go back to Montgomery or Bob and make damn sure that she does.  Whether she likes it or not.  He needs to write this book.  The characters are screaming to be let out and he can’t not write them.  But he has to be able to do it properly: have the details right and the story realistic.  He has to see what Beckett sees and feel what Beckett feels and absorb every tiny detail of her work and life into his mind and out through his fingers and into his words.

It doesn’t occur to him, while he’s fretting, that at least half his frustration is that he doesn’t know Beckett: what makes her tick, why she reacts the way she does, why she won’t open up to him – and why she won’t be his.  And while he doesn’t understand her, Nikki won’t come out right: a little off in tiny ways, but enough to annoy him.

Frustration fuelling him, he abruptly decides that it’s time to tell Beckett how it’s going to be. He’s allowed to follow her around, and she has been ordered to let him.  So that’s what’s going to happen.  No more shutting him out and hiding inside her own head and not telling him what’s going on or letting him participate.  No more expecting him to know what Ryan and Esposito know and not caring that he doesn’t.  There are going to be some ground rules, starting now.

Beckett is surprised by the harsh knocking on the door. Can’t be a bailiff, she’s paid all her bills and rent on the nail.  She is horrified to find Castle on the other side when she opens it.  She doesn’t want him in her apartment.  Her father is due in less than half an hour and she doesn’t want him exposed to Castle’s censorious, penetrating gaze.  She blocks the doorway and is unceremoniously shunted out of the way.

“I’m coming in.” He shoves in, and shuts the door hard behind him.  “We are going to talk about you shutting me out in the precinct.  You’re supposed to let me shadow you and you aren’t.  You barely tell me anything – I’m surprised you even call when a body drops.”

“I’m not a babysitter and you’re not deaf. It’s up to you to keep up.  Everyone else manages.  If you need to research” – there’s a vitriolic emphasis on that – “then listen and learn.  We have real work to do, dealing with real people with real losses.  Your fictional” – that same emphasis – “characters come a long way behind.”

“You just won’t admit I’m useful, will you, in case it makes you look bad.”

“You’re not a cop. You’re not here for altruistic motives.  You’re here so that you can write more best-sellers.  Well, writing books comes a long way second to getting justice for the victims.”

Castle loses his temper in one infuriated burst of rage.

“How would you know what my motives are? You barely speak to me.  Ever since Christmas you’ve treated me like a flesh-and-blood sex toy.”

“Is that what this is all about? Your hurt pride?  Who was whose sex toy?  You ditched me, not the other way round.”

“You didn’t bother to let me finish what I was saying. I wasn’t ditching you.  You walked out.”

“I’m not doing this any more doesn’t leave much room for misinterpretation.  Anyway, it doesn’t matter.  You were making it pretty clear that I didn’t measure up to your high standards.”  The twist of her mouth and acidulated tone makes it clear what she really thinks of his standards.

“You made it pretty clear” – he’s equally vicious – “that you couldn’t bear seeing my family.”  The colour drains from her face and lips.  “So it’s true.  I couldn’t believe it.”  Hearing himself, seeing the truth in her pallid visage, the last small traces of control that he had maintained are lost.  “You can’t bear any family at all.  I suppose it’s not surprising, since you don’t do much to keep what’s left of yours together.  You won’t even spend the whole day with your father at Christmas.”

“You know nothing about my family.”

“On the contrary, I know enough. Murdered mother, alcoholic father.  You don’t support him through Christmas: you’d rather be at work.  Some family you’ve got.”

Her hand rises, then falls before any contact is made. Her face is frozen.

“Get out,” she spits. “Take your sanctimonious ignorance back to your precious perfect little family in your perfect little life.  You know nothing about living with an alcoholic.  You know nothing about my life and my family. Nothing. You’re not wanted here and you’re not needed or wanted in the precinct.”  She opens the door.  “Goodbye.”

“Am I interrupting something, Katie?”

“Dad?”