“1) shot of Gran Patron Platinum…
“2) guy that smoking hot…
“3) Mercedes convertible with the keys in the ignition…comes along.”
Lee Ann Smith is my “Go ahead, steal the car!” voice. Although, as best I can recall, we never stole a car. Was there some smallish petty crime in our distant past? Yeah. And in the interest of full disclosure, “Kiss this guy” was both a euphemism and an understatement.
She’s an escapee from my hastily buried past. I succeeded in ditching my Lee Ann side for a decade or so. More or less. I will hold her responsible for D.B. Harper, dickhead lawyer extraordinaire.
Forever.
She was the genie I let out of a bottle last summer when Otis and I needed a cover story for our investigation at a scrapyard. I’d slipped right back into her walk, her talk, and her rundown, red cowboy boots. She was a pair of washed-to-death jeans and my favorite beat-up plaid shirt from another lifetime. Naturally, she has my maiden name.
To be fair, Lee Ann seems to be a teensy bit…more present for me than the arguing voice in most people’s heads. She’s like a…um…separated-at-birth-bad-girl-twin.
When I hear her in my head, she can be loud, but she’s not demon possession. Exactly. I don’t have to burn incense to summon her voice. These days she merely wanted to hang out in my head, drink Otis’s best bourbon, and have me wear our boots. Also, some of the stuff she begged me to suggest to Tom was plain wicked.
This wasn’t about any of that.
“Buck up, Alice Jane. He’s back. You gotta accept facts: Tito Ricci’s filthy paw prints are all over this.”
Sometimes I didn’t hear from her for weeks—except for the slutty Tom conversations. But whenever I started thinking she’d moved on—and especially when I was ignoring a skulking uneasiness—she’d go ahead and spit it out. Right now I was trying to calm us both down.
“Lee Ann. Shut up. His name is not even Tito Ricci.”
How is that relevant? Given the givens?
“Which are? According to you…”
“According to me and probably CNN, Little-Miss-Denial-Is-Not-Just-A-River-In-Egypt. It goes like this:
“Number one. A blind man gets shot dead. Tom is also a blind man. Who looks like the dead one. A lot.
“Number two. The blind man gets shot after storming out of an event for blind people. Tom signed up for that thing months ago.
“Now. Number three? Would you like to tell me what three is, Ms. Exceedingly Amateur Sleuth?”
She was ticking off her numbers, one finger at a time. I closed my eyes and focused on remembering the name of the nail polish she was brandishing at me: Urban Decay “Oil Slick.” And how she’d gotten it.
“Lee Ann. You stole that bottle of polish from Crystal’s big sister. In high school.”
“Well, somebody sure did. Number three, please? Alice Jane Smith Harper?”
I exhaled. It felt good to release, all the way, the breath I’d been holding since last night.
“Okay. Yes. All right. The wedding invitation.”
“Like, seriously. ‘What you don’t see is what you get?’ If that isn’t a threat tailor-made for a blind guy, what is? Punctuated by the actual shooting to death of a look-alike? Who, for sure, didn’t see that one coming. Give me a break. And, girl, it’s ominous every which way, but it pales, purely pales, in the spotlight off that money shot of him at the museum door. What’s it going to take for you to get your head out of your—?”
“Stop. I got it. I get it.”
She had me. She was me.
Now I had a question. Relative to the one fear that ruled them all. “So, do we believe Tom was the target? Maybe Kip Wade was a mistake, and it’s Tom who’s supposed to be dead right now?”
“We don’t know. Yet. But, I’ll tell you what, Alice Jane. It’s hard for me to believe the person who set this whole massive thing into motion—and we both now know for dead certain it’s Tito Ricci, right? Even Tito Ricci would never be crazy stupid enough to shoot or have somebody else shoot the wrong guy. Tom wasn’t the intended target, Not last night, anyway.”
“How come you haven’t mentioned this before?”
“Oh, sweetie. You’re slow. You had to see his face before you could hear me talking.”
She was gone again.
I got up. Opened the stall door. Peeked around. Splashed cold water on my face. Noticed, too late, this eco-conscious place had no paper towels. Washed my hands and dried them ergonomically and ecologically in twelve seconds in the hand dryer. Used the sleeve of my sweater on my face. Treated myself to a deep, cleansing breath.
The worst thing about hiding in the ladies’ room is sooner or later you have to come out.
Chapter Thirteen
“Sorry. I ran into a friend.”
The “imaginary” is silent.
Otis and I returned to the dining room and dropped our Tito Ricci bombshell, complete with my eyewitness account—not to mention the promise of video—to substantiate it. Nobody, including Lieutenant Wood, who barely knew of Tito, was dumbfounded by our news.
I was the only one of us who could hear Lee Ann’s self-satisfied, “Damn-skippy.”
Technically, I was the sole member of the group who’d attended The Ladies Room Conference, but they were in sync with its findings: 99.98 percent confident that:
1) Kip Wade was the designated target.
2) Kip’s murder was a message—a cruel and terrible object lesson.
3) They were extra, extra sure the message was addressed to Tom “What-You-Don’t-See” Bennington. 99.99 percent.
Tito was back now. For revenge and a fresh shot at two hundred million dollars. And change.
Payback and his payoff.
Tito Ricci could not have been the highly skilled, terrifyingly accurate killer of R. Kipling Wade. His alibi had smirked at me from the monitor in the security room—but he was our unanimous candidate for Devil in Charge.
Even Olivia Wood, newcomer to our story, was tuned into the logic of Tito. “I’ll review what little we have on him from last year, but it sure sounds like his appearance on the video was intentional. Perhaps staged.”
By him. For us. Tito Ricci, filling in the blanks of many, many of our questions.
“But you know—”
Olivia. Preoccupied now. Deliberating. “For him to let himself be seen—identified. Flaunting his involvement where you could see it, Allie—was ill-advised. Stupid. His anger is making him careless. Unfortunately, it makes him more dangerous—more unpredictable—as well.”
Helpful to know, but here was the heart-stopper for me: On a low-visibility night of rain and sleet, a killer had been waiting on the parapet of Severance Hall, aiming for a tall, handsome blind man with a white cane. I could not stop recalculating the perilous timing, and confronting my mental picture of Tom in the crosshairs. How close he’d come to the line of fire last night.
Intentional or unintentional, dead is dead.
I was an experienced and intuitive reader of the pulse in Tom’s throat. He was grappling with how close he’d come. Fear and impatience crackled in his voice.
“That’s all interesting, Lieutenant Wood. But where exactly does the T&A fit? That’s why we’re here, right? Instead of hiding out in Fiji? Which has tremendous appeal for me right now. What is it you want from us? Specifically? And where do I fit? ‘Moving target’ sucks as a job description—”
“Tom, you’re both his revenge and his reward. This Tito wants to wound you. And he wants as many of your millions as he can get his hands on. Wounding you is easy, right?”
“Right. He’d hurt—”
“Allie.” Tony finished the sentence neither Tom nor Otis would touch.
“Yes.” Olivia didn’t want to agree, I could tell, but she wasn’t going to sugarcoat it either. “A
nd Tom, a payoff—even millions—wouldn’t satisfy him.”
“No. The opposite. Payoff triggers payback. The moment I give him the money, he’ll kill her.”
Tom clasped his hands and put them on the table and bent his head over them, like praying. After a few seconds, he sat back, took his glasses off, tossed them out in front of him, and rubbed at his eyes. His beautiful brown eyes, staring at nothing, empty of emotion. His face was wooden, but anger had him now. His voice trembled with compressed rage.
“I’m going to hazard a guess, Olivia, that we got invited to today’s party, not because of our personal peril, or even because of what happened to Kip, but because last night’s—drama—statement—whatever the fuck you want to call it, took place here.
“And here!” He struck the tabletop. Hard. Everybody jumped. “University Circle. Tito ‘staged’ Kip’s murder as a phony terrorist attack against—everything that’s here. The museum. The orchestra, everything—”
I was locked onto Tom’s fear and anger, but I was watching Lieutenant Wood and Officer Anthony Valerio. She was making metal notes, but he was the one vibrating right along with Tom. When Tom stopped to catch his breath, Tony stepped into the hollowed-out silence Tom’s fury had made.
“You’re right, Tom. Tito—Toto—Whatever the fuck his name really is. Sorry. Can’t—” He shrugged and waved a hand to signal Not sorry. Not taking it back.
“Even I can see he is just dying to be the big mastermind. Last summer, you guys and the T&A blew Tito’s operation sky-high, ran him out of town, and kicked him in his ego.
“But anybody who says, ‘Boy howdy. That Tito Ricci is really, really, off-the-charts pissed at Tom Bennington, and that’s what all this fiasco is about?’ No. Not a goddam chance.
“It’s about all of this.” His impatient gesture swept over our table and on out the window to the view.
“This museum, plus the orchestra, the botanical gardens, the natural history museum—Hell. There’s even a museum full of ‘historically significant’ cars. Not to mention the ‘University’ of University Circle. You could hit a goddam golf ball off the roof of this building, in any direction, and whack some priceless, irreplaceable treasure. Worst case, the radius from here to—to effectively all of it—is barely a thousand feet.
“Right now. Right goddam here. At this goddam table? We’re sitting on the goddam bull’s-eye.” He stopped for a breath. Glaring.
“Oliva,” Tom voice was calm, but steely. “I know you genuinely believe the T&A can help you get to the person behind—all of this. We can. Allie knows what Tito looks like. Otis, Tony, and—others who helped us last summer—have serious skills. But I suspect Cecelia Southgate and her counterparts are also hoping the jackpot might, if push comes to shove, solve the ransom problem. Maybe it would. Who knows? If I could heal half the damage the jackpot has done by giving it all away, it would be a blessing for me. But solving that problem will not solve ours.
“This person. This angry, unstable, evil man will not be done with us until Allie is dead, and my life is over. And I’m probably dead too. We’ll help you, but we need you to help us in return. I promise to handle the payoff, if it comes to that. But I need your word that you’ll do what you can to protect us from his payback. Deal?”
Olivia smiled. “Serve and protect is still our job, Tom. Especially when the stakes are high and our friends are in danger. So, yeah. T&A and the CPD. In this together. Deal. And, for the record, cops are not usually in favor of anybody paying a ransom. For so many reasons. We’ll do what we can to keep the money safe too.”
Tony glared tiredly at us from under the unibrow as he sat back and delivered his professional assessment of our situation.
“This is the deep shit.”
Chapter Fourteen
2:15 p.m.
“Ms. Harper, there’s a phone call for you at the front desk.”
The young woman who came to get me was the same one who’d graciously greeted us this morning. Also the one who’d been so mesmerized by Jack’s duty belt. I was with her on that. The only thing missing from a cop’s belt is nunchucks and a tennis racket.
Otis followed us into the bar, checked to make sure the line of sight between me and Sniperland was blocked, and positioned himself near the door. Stacey, according to the delicate silver script at her throat, who was no-doubt supporting her engineering-degree habit by playing the gracious hostess, showed me the phone.
I stood at the check-in desk of Provenance with my back to Stacey and said hello.
“Is this Allie Harper?”
The familiar voice of Gray-Sari Woman from last night.
The Messenger.
“Yes. And you’re not blind.”
A quiet, but palpable, disturbance-in-the-force from behind me told me I ought to be having this conversation away from prying ears. “Are you safe where you are?”
“You want to know the truth? I don’t think I’m safe anyplace in this world right now. But I’ve been as careful as I can. Why?”
“This”—I turned, smiled, and nodded at my frozen hostess—“is not a good place for a conversation. I’m—hogging their phone. But we do need to talk, and it sounds like you already know why. Give me your number. I’ll call you back in fifteen seconds.”
“I’d rather call you.”
I gave her my number and passed the restaurant’s receiver back to Stacey. Smiled a thank you. She smiled back. Tentative. Polite.
Civilian.
My phone rang. I cleared the door of Provenance in the three seconds it took me to answer it. I sensed Otis falling in behind me.
“Okay. Now. Can you tell me your name and where you are?”
“Not so fast.” Her voice quavered. “I have something else I have got to tell you first.”
Here came the unintended consequence of Otis’s “trick” with the camera footage: This woman, whoever she was, whatever her motivation for coming here last night, was not a complete stranger to me. I had walked through the museum with her, run with her from the alarms, shared her frisson of fear when she saw Tito Ricci sitting at a table. Saw him through her eyes before I was willing to admit it to myself he could be here again.
Tito Ricci chilled me too. This woman and I were Sisters in Tito.
I sighed. I hoped this sigh made it through the ether with all its empathy and compassion intact.
“I know. You were a pawn in somebody else’s game. Believe me, I know him. He’s the Pawn-Master. He convinced you it was a silly prank. You never in a million years thought anybody would get hurt, let alone shot dead. You’re horrified. And you’re not a bad person. He promised you a lot of money for a small favor. You only—”
A thrill of recognition lighted up my neck-tingle again. I heard the echo of my own voice saying, It’s showtime!
“You’re an actress? Actor. Aren’t you? It’s why you were so believable. So good. Last night was a role for you. It was a—a gig.”
It was her turn to get the tingle. I heard it in her gasp. “Do you know about me? Do you know who I am? How—”
“No. Only what I said there. I have experience with that guy too, and the actor part makes sense. Did you meet him? I’m pretty sure what he looks like. Can you describe him?”
I waited for Tito. Tall, dark, and contemptible. Good looking if you could go for a carefully polished, expensively dressed, unregenerate, bullying, menacing thug. Which once upon a time, I had. But we weren’t discussing D.B. Harper.
Not talking Tito, either, as it turned out.
“About the fittest man I’ve ever seen. Very blond—white-blond—hair. Like Swedish children. Pale eyes too. Gray, maybe? Almost silvery—Not super tall. Five ten, maybe? For sure not six. Very composed. Not scary. Exactly. Although I was spooked. No smile. Not fun. Not very much anything. Neutral. Like clear water. Cold, though.” Her tone turned angry. “Colder than t
he ninth circle of hell.”
Ha. The Judas Circle. She read Dante. I read Dante. I liked her already.
“He wore that outfit guys who work out all the time wear. During the three hours of the day they’re not working out. Ripstop? Black. And a killer jacket. Looked like it would repel everything and be warm.”
“What did he say?”
“Not much. We met in a bar. Nobody around, but no chit-chat for him. He told me what, when, where, and set up a time for ‘cane training and wardrobe.’ He said not to worry. He said the only people there who could figure out I was pretending to blind would be blind. And I only had to be partially blind for that role. And then there you were.”
“Okay. Look. What can I call you? Doesn’t have to be your real name.”
“Gloria. That’s my real name.”
“Gloria, tell me where you are. Is your phone even half secure?”
“It should be. Trackfone®. I bought it for twenty bucks this morning.”
“Good. Where are you? We’ll come get you. To be upfront, I’m bringing my bodyguard and probably at least one police officer. He’s a nice guy named Tony, but they’ll both be armed, so if you’re planning—
“I’m planning to live at least another day or two, Allie. I’m thrilled to hear about cops with guns. Have them bring extra. I’m…I’m at a friend’s place. Apartment a half block off Lee.”
She gave me the address.
“Gloria. Lock the door and don’t pick up your phone unless you’re certain it’s me. Does your new phone have my number on it now?” She thought so. I gave it to her again anyway. Safe side. “How did you know to call me here?”
“I have a friend who works at the museum. In their restaurant. That’s how I got the—gig. I called her this morning to see what was happening. I knew something went wrong—something bad. I barely made it out of there last night. It was a damn disaster movie.
“I know they’re—the police—are looking for me. Sta—my friend told me you all were holed up in the banquet room today. Don’t get her in trouble. Please.”
The Devil's Own Game Page 7
