I ran my finger down the long list of corporations owned by Preston and his associates. “Make that a textile empire.”
Veronica squinted. “Franki, read the part in the murder article about Stewart Preston.”
“Sure,” I said as David switched back to the other screen. “It says, ‘Stewart Preston, IV, an American exchange student from New Orleans, Louisiana, who was attending the London School of Economics, was charged with the sexual assault and murder of Di Salvo in August of 2009.’“
David nodded. “Right. And he never went to jail either. Everyone said it was because of his daddy’s money and connections.”
I leaned on the desk with my forearms. “It says, ‘Preston was eventually acquitted and cleared of all charges in January of 2012.’ I wonder why.”
Veronica frowned. “Does it say?”
“No, and it doesn’t explain how Immacolata was killed either.”
She sat on the opposite end of the desk. “David, look for a local article on the murder, maybe one from The Times-Picayune.”
He returned to the main search results page.
She tapped her cheek. “It’s certainly looking like Jessica Evans and Angelica Evangelista are one and the same person, but I wish there was something more concrete to link the two of them.”
David pulled up a Times-Picayune article on the Di Salvo murder dated May 4, 2008. The opening line of the article reported, ‘On May 1, 2008, Immacolata Di Salvo was found strangled to death in her dorm room at the London College of Fashion.’
Veronica shot me a questioning look. “Strangled?”
My insides felt twisted, like they were being strangled. “Just like Jessica.”
David pointed a bony finger at the second line of the article. “Yeah, and look at this part. ‘The murder weapon was a scarf.”‘
“Tombola,” I whispered in Italian. Then I remembered that David didn’t speak the language. “I mean, Bingo.”
11
“A scarf.” I shook my head. “I can’t believe it.”
The three of us stared at the computer screen for a few minutes, dumbstruck.
David swallowed. “So, Angelica and Jessica were, like, the same girl.”
Veronica looked like she’d just witnessed the strangulation, “It sure looks that way, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I breathed. “This case is getting crazy, isn’t it?”
David opened his eyes wide. “And dangerous too. Like, you guys could be dealing with a serial scarf strangler. If I were either one of you, man, I wouldn’t even think of wearing a scarf while I was workin’ this case.”
Even though I wasn’t wearing a scarf, my hand went to my throat. I started to protest but then opted to remain silent. The kid had a point.
Veronica walked to the front of my desk to face us. “Let’s not jump to any conclusions, David. Even if these two cases are related,” she paused to pace, “there’s no guarantee that the same person committed both murders.”
“I guess.” David stared at his dirty white tennis shoes. He was clearly attached to the idea of a serial scarf strangler.
Veronica stopped and looked at him. “We need to actually prove that Jessica was really Angelica before we spend any time investigating the relationship between these two cases. Otherwise, we could make a critical mistake.”
I exhaled a long breath. The plot was getting as thick as the marinara sauce I’d smelled earlier. “So, we need to track down Bill and Barbara Evangelista.”
“Yeah, and Immacolata’s family. Since Immacolata roomed with Angelica, then one of her relatives or friends must’ve seen a picture of Angelica at some point.”
David’s fingers flew over the keyboard. “Uh, here’s an obituary for Immacolata Di Salvo. It mentions her family.”
I scanned the text on the screen. “Here we go. It says, ‘She is survived by her father, Rosario Di Salvo, her mother, Maria Di Salvo, and her sisters Concetta and Domenica.’ Wow, those are some serious Italian Catholic names.”
“Huh?” David turned to look at me. “What do you mean?”
“Well, ‘Immacolata’ is Italian for ‘Immaculate,’ and the other family members’ names mean ‘rosary,’ ‘Mary,’ ‘conception,’ and ‘Sunday.’ Oh, and the ‘Salvo’ part of their last name is the nickname for ‘Salvatore,’ which means ‘savior.’“
His head bounced in approval. “Wicked.”
Righteous, maybe, but not wicked. “Religious-themed names are super common in Italy, especially in the South, so I’m guessing that the Di Salvos are fairly devout.” I returned my gaze to the obituary.
Veronica was behind me again, trying to read over my shoulder. “Does the obituary list a funeral home?”
“Yeah, and it’s in Slidell.” I looked at David. “Where is that?”
“It’s a suburb of New Orleans,” His chest swelled with pride. “It’s, like, a forty-minute drive from here, but I can make it in twenty-five.”
“That reminds me…” I turned to Veronica. “You never told us the cities that Bill and Barbara Evangelista were living in.”
“Oh, right. Let me go get the envelope.” She hurried from the room.
I leaned over David’s shoulder. “See if you can find an address for the Di Salvos.”
“Already got it. There’s a Rosario Di Salvo in the white pages on St. Augustine Street. His phone number’s listed. But I can’t believe people still have landlines, man. That’s sooooo last century.”
Veronica clacked into the office with an envelope and stopped in front of my desk. “Barbara lived on East Queens Drive in Slidell, but Bill didn’t write his return address. It was postmarked in Baton Rouge, though.”
“Well, David just found a Slidell address for a Rosario Di Salvo. If it’s the right person, then Angelica and Immacolata could’ve known each other before they went to college.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Let’s call the Di Salvos and see if we can find that out, shall we?”
“Sure.” I looked at the screen to find the number.
She handed David the envelope. “While Franki and I are on this call, I need you to look up the property tax appraisal records for the parish that East Queens Drive is in and find out whether the Evangelistas own that house. Then get me anything you can on Barbara and Bill Evangelista.”
He rose from my desk chair and stretched his long limbs. “Yes, ma’am.”
Veronica shot him a scowl as she took his seat in front of my computer.
“Uh, I mean, mademoiselle.” He scurried from the room to his workstation.
She smiled after him and then turned toward me. “Will you dial the number on speakerphone? I don’t want to miss any details of the call.”
“Okay.” I pulled my desk phone closer toward us. “Do you want me to talk, or you?”
“You talk, but if they refuse to meet with us, I’ll chime in and ask a few questions.”
As I dialed the number, a knot the size of pizza dough formed in the pit of my stomach. It was one thing to chat up a gossipy salesgirl at LaMarca, but it was quite another to call a family whose loved one had been the victim of a brutal murder. I hoped the Di Salvos would be glad to know that someone was looking into their daughter’s cold case. I tapped my fingers on the desk and waited through seven or so rings.
“Hello?” a female voice answered.
“Hi, Mrs. Di Salvo?”
“Yes, who’s speaking?”
Even though she’d asked who I was, I could tell from her hollow tone that she didn’t care about the answer—or anything, for that matter. “My name is Franki Amato, and I’m on the line with my partner, Veronica Maggio.” I decided to sidestep the issue of Immacolata’s case. “We’re investigating a New Orleans murder that we’d like to talk to you about.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. “But, we’ve already talked to the police.”
“Oh. Uh…” I side-glanced at Veronica. “About your daughter Immacolata’s case, right?”
&nbs
p; “No, about Jennifer’s murder, or whatever Angelica was calling herself.”
Veronica and I exchanged a full-on look.
My heart pounded in my chest. “You mean, Jessica. Jessica Evans.”
“Yes, that’s it. What is this about?”
I sat speechless, replaying Maria Di Salvo’s words in my mind, and Veronica tapped her chest to let me know that she would take over.
“Mrs. Di Salvo, this is Veronica. I know it must be tremendously painful for you to discuss your daughter, but my private investigation firm, Private Chicks, has been contracted by a local individual to investigate Angelica’s murder. We’re trying to determine whether her death is related to Immacolata’s case. Would it be possible for us to meet with you this week?”
Another long silence ensued followed by muffled sobs. “You can come tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.”
There was so much sadness in her voice that my eyes welled with tears. I couldn’t imagine the nightmare that she and her family had been living.
“Thank you so much.” Veronica leaned toward the screen to see the address. “Are you still at the St. Augustine Street address in the phone book?”
“Yes…see you tomorrow.”
I hung up. “That was hard, especially when she started crying. She sounded so unhappy, almost haunted.”
“I’m sure you know from your police work that when you’re interacting with the family of a victim, it can take an emotional toll on you. Even if you solve the case, you can never undo what was done to their loved one. So, you have to try to keep your personal and professional life separate to the extent that you can. And if the case starts to get to you, then you need to do something to deal with the feelings of helplessness.”
“Well, I know one thing I can do.”
Veronica looked at me. “What’s that?”
“Go out and find that scarf.”
As I walked toward Ann Taylor, I looked at my phone. Six o’clock? No wonder I’m so hungry. I’d spent the last seven hours scarf hunting at The Shops at Canal Place and hadn’t thought once about lunch. I was pretty sure I’d never forgotten to eat a meal in my entire life, not even when I’d had a stomach virus. I had heard about people who “forgot to eat,” but I always assumed that they had some sort of brain deficiency or damage from an accident or aneurism. But it looked like I’d just been going about the whole losing weight thing all wrong. Instead of dieting, I should’ve been doing some serious shopping. Why hadn’t I thought of that before?
I arrived at the store and saw a ghastly pale, thin, and bald mannequin rocking the LBD that Veronica had picked out for me. I figured that what I lacked in terms of thinness, I could make up for with my olive skin and long hair. But after questioning the staff, I left Ann Taylor without buying the dress. I wasn’t in the mood to dress shop after learning that no one in the store, or in the entire mall for that matter, had ever seen a black-and-white checked scarf with a yellow border. Plus, every time I thought of my conversation with Maria Di Salvo, I felt guilty about shopping for my date when I could’ve been working on a case that in all probability was related to the horrific murder of her daughter.
Scarf-less and LBD-less, I headed toward the mall exit and passed a jewelry kiosk displaying silver voodoo doll earrings. My mind flashed to Mambo Odette and her bizarre warning about the Evans case. What was it she’d said?
I thought for a moment, and it came to me—”Dat girl, she know what dat boy do.” No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t understand who “dat boy” was. Was it Ryan Hunter? If so, I certainly didn’t know anything about that guy or his past. I also didn’t get why Odette had called me “dat girl” when she was talking directly to me. Or was she?
A light bulb went on in my head as if by voodoo—”dat girl” wasn’t me, she was Jessica.
I rushed from the mall and speed-walked down Canal Street—I made it a policy never to run unless my life was in danger. It was less than a mile to Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo, and I wanted to get there fast to talk to Mambo Odette. As creepy and crazy as it seemed, there was a possibility that she knew something about the case. Although I certainly wasn’t familiar with the inner workings of the New Orleans voodoo community, I had a sense that it was rooted in a system of informants and spies, much like the criminal underworld. It wasn’t that I thought voodoo practitioners were crooks. I just knew that all underground movements—social, political, cultural, and religious—had historically relied on the covert exchange of information.
At Bourbon Street, I hooked a right and slowed my pace to weave through the thick crowd. Even on a Monday, the street was hopping. But I hardly noticed the revelers and the blaring jazz music because I was so focused on deciphering the riddle of Odette’s message. If Jessica was “dat girl,” who was “dat boy”?
My mind kept returning to Ryan. Did Jessica know something he’d done? His criminal record was clean, but that didn’t mean anything. Could he have been the one who strangled Immacolata? It seemed unlikely that a strong-willed type like Jessica would have been living with him if he had. Or…
I stopped dead. Had Jessica been covering for Stewart Preston?
“Excuse me.” I shoved my way through the last two hundred yards that separated me from Marie Laveau’s and caused a guy to spill one of the two sixty-four-ounce plastic bottles of Miller Lite he was drinking. “Oops, sorry.”
He stumbled and blinked.
The guy didn’t need to be drinking that much, anyway. I hurried up the steps to the store and rushed inside, just in case he decided to come after me. Instead of the cashier with the acne, I saw an older woman who looked like she was dressed for a Sunday sermon.
“Hello.” I gave a polite smile as I walked toward the back room.
“Mm.” She frowned and looked down at me through her gray, horn-rimmed glasses.
I had to wonder why a woman like her would be working at a voodoo store, especially while wearing a pale pink church suit and a strand of pearls. Was she keeping a watchful eye on the heathen world for her congregation?
As I entered the dimly lit room, I saw the rockabilly sales clerk in his seat behind the counter. He was smoothing back his pompadour with a small black comb.
“Can I help you with somethin’?”
He seemed much more relaxed than when I was last there. “Yeah.” I strained my eyes in the darkness for the wooden-statue woman. “I’m looking for Mambo Odette.”
“She doesn’t usually come in on a school night.” He stood and began playing air upright bass and bouncing his head to the imaginary beat.
I tried to act like his rockabilly air concert was normal. “School night?”
“You know, a week day?” He pretend-strummed.
“So, she only works on weekends?”
“No, it’s the other way around. She makes the long green during the week, then she comes in here on the weekends to hang out.”
I might speak Italian, but rockabilly was Greek to me. “I’m sorry, the long what?”
He stopped air-strumming. “You know, baby. Bread, grain, money.”
“Ah, gotcha.” I opted to overlook the “baby” since it was part of his rockabilly culture. “So, being a voodoo priestess is a regular Monday-to-Friday job?”
“The weekend is when all the cheatin’ and thuggin’ goes down, you dig? So, Odette spends the work week helping the hapless victims.”
“Oh. Then I’ll come back another time.”
“That’s cool.” He spun his nonexistent bass. “If you need anything else, just let me know. My name’s Hep.”
“Hip?”
He recoiled as though I were the least “with it” person he’d ever met. “No, darlin’, ‘Hep,’ as in ‘Hep Cat’?”
“Oh. Right.” I smiled and returned to the main room. Hep was a different person when Mambo Odette wasn’t around—really different.
As I headed for the door, the gleaming glass vials of potions near the cash register caught my eye. Although I was reluctant to en
dure the disdainful stare of The Church Lady, I decided to take a look. After all, I had kind of hoped to ask Odette about my date with Bradley after I’d discussed the Evans case with her. But since she wasn’t around, it wouldn’t hurt to see whether a love potion would counteract any voodoo hexes the Le Bayou restaurant had in store for me.
I browsed the assorted potions, wrestling with my ambiguous position on voodoo, superstition, and things of the like. I didn’t want to believe in mysticism, but occasionally things happened in the world that made me wonder whether I was wrong. And sometimes, especially on a sad and frustrating day like the one I was experiencing, I needed to believe in magic.
In the end, I settled on the obvious choice—Love Potion #9. A steal at only fourteen ninety-five, I thought as I approached the cash register and placed the bottle on the counter.
The church-suited lady rang up the potion. “That’ll be sixteen dollars and eighteen cents with tax.”
I counted out the exact amount and handed it to her. I waited for her to tell me that there were better uses of my money, like tithing, but instead she grimaced at me as I placed the potion in my handbag and left the store.
As I walked in the direction of the office to get my car, I pulled out my phone and dialed Veronica’s number.
“Hey, Franki. Any luck?”
“Nope. And I covered The Shops at Canal Street so thoroughly that I can even recite its motto—’32 names. 3 floors. 1 place.’“
“Impressive. So now that we’ve covered all the stores in the vicinity of the crime, we’ll have to expand our search to the broader New Orleans area.”
“I’m starting to feel like we’re looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“I know, but we have to keep looking.” There was a firmness to her tone that left no room for discussion. “Now, tell me about the dress. Did Ann Taylor have it in your size?”
I hesitated for a moment. “I didn’t get it.”
Franki Amato Mysteries Box Set Page 13
