Veronica handed her a box of tissues. “Twyla, we don’t know if Harry has done anything to you. All we know is that he met with this woman two nights in a row.”
Twyla’s tears shut off as quickly as water from a closed faucet. “You mean you don’t actually know whether he’s been unfaithful to me?”
I shook my head. “No.”
She dabbed her tear-stained eyes with a tissue. “Well, Harry’s quite fatherly, you know. Maybe that was the daughter of one of his clients, and he was just trying to be of assistance in some way?”
I looked at Veronica, and my gaze said Unlikely.
Twyla patted my knee. “You don’t have to answer that, darling. It was just a rhetorical question.”
Veronica looked concerned. “We apologize if there was any confusion about our findings.”
“Not at all, dear.” Twyla rose to her feet. “I want to thank you girls for all your trouble. I’ll let you know if I need you to investigate this unseemly matter any further, after I’ve talked to Harry.” She walked to the door and then turned to face us. “Whatever you girls do, don’t make the tragic mistake of choosing a dashing man like my Harry to be your groom. Because if you do, you’ll have to protect him from shameless trollops for your entire marriage.”
“Bad boy, Napoleon.” I scolded him for the second time since carrying him into the house. I’d taken him out for a walk, and he’d pulled the leash from my hand to chase a cat through the cemetery. Nothing like a romp through a graveyard hours before a meeting with an alleged murderer to lift your spirits, so to speak.
I hung the leash on a hook by the front door and looked around the living room. It was three o’clock, so I still had a good hour and a half before I had to leave to meet Stewart Preston at the Carousel Bar. I needed to find something to do to keep my mind occupied because I was nervous.
Dust the furniture?
I was never that desperate.
Read?
I wouldn’t be able to focus on the page.
Have a snack and watch mindless TV?
Sounded like a plan.
After grabbing a bag of Mint Milanos and the Nutella from the pantry, I headed for my bedroom. I swung open the doors of my hot pink and black armoire and switched on the tiny TV set I’d received as a hand-me-down from my parents. I flopped onto the bed and flipped through the channels with the remote. The first movie I came across was The Silence of the Lambs.
FBI trainee meets cannibalistic serial killer?
Definitely not. I shuddered and changed the channel.
Unsolved Mysteries?
Not that either. There was every possibility that I would become an unsolved mystery myself.
I switched off the TV.
Now what? Eating the entire bag of Mint Milanos—dipped in Nutella—would while away some time. I pulled out the first cookie and heard a whimper coming from the floor.
I narrowed my eyes. “Not a chance, Napoleon, especially not after that cemetery caper.”
My phone rang—a nice old-fashioned phone ring.
Talking on the phone was always a good distraction. I checked the display, and my heart thudded.
Bradley.
I wanted to answer with every fiber of my being and ask him what the hell he’d been doing with a bikinied bimbo when he was married. But I couldn’t. Bradley’s wandering ways were no concern of mine. But I did wish I knew what it was about me that attracted cheaters. Was I not interesting or attractive enough to keep a guy? Or did I give off a cheat-on-me vibe?
The ringing stopped, and I waited with to see whether he had left a voicemail. At least two minutes passed. I checked the voicemail box—nothing.
Inconsiderate jerk.
I had to find a way to take my mind off him. I decided to check my email. I grabbed my laptop from the bedside table and logged in. Some of the messages were spam—an ad for Viagra, news I’d won an overseas lottery, and an offer of marriage from a Russian bride. But then I saw “photo request” in the subject line of one of the messages.
It was the picture I’d requested from The Times-Picayune of Stewart Preston waving on the courthouse steps.
I opened the message and double-clicked the attachment. It wouldn’t open. I tried two more times and discovered that the file was corrupt. I started to reply to the email but changed my mind. I was meeting Stewart in less than two hours, and I needed to know whether my hunch about his watchband was right. I checked the email for a signature and saw the name Dmitriy and a phone number. I entered the number into my phone and waited.
“Times-Picayune,” a youthful male voice responded.
“Hi, could I please speak to Dmitriy?”
“You got him. How can I help you?”
“My name is Franki Amato, and I just got an email from you with a corrupt .jpg file.”
“Was it the photo of Stewart Preston?”
I was surprised that he’d remembered the picture. “Yes.”
“What is the deal with that image?” he muttered under his breath.
“Pardon?”
“Oh, I wasn’t asking you. It’s just that when I originally went to retrieve the photo, it wasn’t on our server. Luckily, my friend Norm was the photographer assigned to that story, so I was able to get the picture for you from his personal archives. It’s just weird that now there’s a problem with the file.”
My heart sped up. “So, the photo was deleted from your server?”
“Yeah, because it was used in an article, it should’ve been in our process file, but it wasn’t there. It wasn’t in our stock file either. But hey, when your staff consists of mainly unpaid interns, these things happen. Someone probably deleted the image by mistake.”
I doubted that an intern would’ve accidentally deleted the picture from two separate files. “Are you still able to open it?”
“Yeah, it opens right up for me. It’s a pretty big file, though. It could be that the picture didn’t completely download from our server.”
“Could you email it to me again?”
“I hit Send a second ago.”
Holding my breath, I refreshed my inbox. The message was there. I clicked the attached file, and it opened without incident. “Got it. Thank you so much for your help, Dmitriy.”
I closed the call and laid back on my bed, stunned. Who would’ve deleted the file from not one but two places on the newspaper’s server? Could it really have been a careless intern? Or was it someone connected to Stewart Preston? If it was the latter, then it could mean only one thing—there was incriminating evidence in that photo that Stewart and his family didn’t want anyone to see. Like I’d suspected.
I picked up my laptop and scrutinized Stewart’s raised hand and wrist in the photo. The watchband protruded about a half an inch from the cuff of his suit coat. I enlarged the area click by click until it consumed the screen. On the fifth click, my body stiffened. Stewart wasn’t wearing a chunky watchband.
Hidden beneath the sleeve of his suit coat, he wore a bracelet of skull beads—exactly like the one I’d found lodged underneath the scarf rack at the crime scene.
My mind flashed to the night of Jessica’s murder. Had Stewart gone to LaMarca wearing the bracelet? If he had, then it was possible that the bracelet had been broken during a struggle. Jessica could’ve ripped the bracelet from Stewart’s wrist and lodged one of the beads under the rack to implicate him as he strangled her.
Unfortunately, the only person who could’ve confirmed my theory was Jessica. There was only one thing I could do—find out whether Stewart still had the bracelet. It seemed an impossible task, but it was a matter of life and death.
Specifically, my own.
23
“I just can’t get over it.” Veronica stood at her kitchen sink wringing water from a cashmere sweater. “I’ve looked at that picture of Stewart a dozen times, and I never noticed anything unusual.”
“That’s because you don’t like watches.” I’d paced back and forth on Veronica’s green
shag carpet so many times in the past five minutes that I was wearing a path into it.
“True, but I still don’t get it. What made you suspect that Stewart wasn’t wearing a watch?”
“First of all, I’ve never seen a watchband with big bumps on it like that. Even the Gucci bamboo watch that I’ve been lusting over has a smooth silver link bracelet for a band. Plus, in the photo there’s no buckle or clasp showing on the underside of Stewart’s wrist. So I thought it might be some kind of bracelet.”
“Well, I’m impressed.” She placed the sweater on a drying rack near the sink.
“Thanks, but now we have to figure out what happened to that bracelet. If Stewart wore it to the murder scene, then he must’ve picked up the beads after it broke, except for the one that rolled under the rack.”
Veronica entered the living room and took a seat on the couch next to a bowtie-adorned Hercules, who had been watching me pace with a worried gaze. “In that case, I seriously doubt he would’ve kept the beads. He would’ve gotten rid of them right away.”
I stopped in my tracks. “So what do I do? I can’t just say, ‘Hey, Stewart, did you ever happen to own a skull bead bracelet from Marie Laveau’s?’“
She stroked Hercules’s fur. “Actually, you could ask him that and see what kind of a reaction you get.”
“Unless his reaction is to lunge for my throat, that won’t tell me anything definitive.” I resumed pacing. “I’ll have to think of some other way. Maybe I could work voodoo into the conversation somehow.”
“Whatever you do, don’t mention Odette Malveaux. I don’t believe for a minute that Stewart Preston is the Hollywood movie-style voodoo worshipper that Concetta made him out to be.”
“Maybe not.” I pointed at her. “But he did wear a skull bead bracelet to court. That has to mean something.”
“It just makes me think that he’s one of the countless people in New Orleans who are superstitious enough to turn to voodoo trinkets in moments of crisis.”
I threw up my hands. “I guess that makes sense. It’s just so unsettling to find out about the bracelet and then the whole missing photo thing right before I meet the guy.”
Veronica furrowed her brow. “Yeah, the fact that the photo disappeared from The Times-Picayune archives looks bad for Stewart, doesn’t it?”
I put my hand on my neck. “I’ve had heartburn ever since I found that out.”
Her face softened. “I know you’re scared. To be honest, I’m worried too.”
“Well that doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“Remember what you told me—you’ll be meeting Stewart in a public place during the daytime. And don’t forget that I’ll be there to back you up.”
I wrung my hands. “Ah, yes, with the pink breast cancer special.”
Veronica blinked, as though offended by my jab at her girly gun. “It’s a nine-millimeter handgun, Franki. Its color won’t affect its performance, I assure you.”
“You’re right. I’m just on edge.” I collapsed into the armchair. Ten minutes of pacing was an intense workout.
“Can I get you something? A nice hot cup of tea might help.”
I looked at the angry island god perched on the back of my chair. “I think it would take a couple of shots of tequila.”
She frowned. “This is definitely not the time for a drink.”
“I know, I know.” I sighed. “Let’s just go back over the plan.”
“Okay.” Veronica leaned forward. “We’re going to rent a car for you so that Stewart can’t trace the license plates. Then I’ll follow you from the rental lot to the Carousel Bar in my car. We’ll both park at the Hotel Monteleone.”
“Do they have a parking lot?”
“Yeah, it’s beneath the hotel. You pull into the garage, and a valet takes your car and parks it underground for you.”
“All right. After we park, I’ll go to the bar and—”
She shook her head. “It rotates like an actual carousel. You know how dizzy you get on merry-go-rounds.”
“True.” It was a well-known fact that I’d never gotten my carousel legs. Within seconds of stepping foot on one, I was on my knees, puking.
“Besides, there’s no way you’d be able to have a private conversation with Stewart at that bar. It’s always crowded, and the seats are too close together. You’ll have to meet him at one of the seating areas in the lounge. It’s down a small flight of stairs, which is great because that way I can sit up at the bar and have a clear view of the two of you.”
“So, if he’s at the bar when I get there, I’ll ask him to move downstairs.”
“Right, and then if you leave before he does, I’ll stay and keep an eye on Stewart. I’ll text you when I leave. Will that work?”
I nodded.
“Okay then. Go get ready.” Veronica adjusted the bow on Hercules’s head. “We leave in thirty minutes.”
I pulled my rented Chrysler convertible around the back of the Hotel Monteleone and encountered a line of cars waiting to get into the parking garage. I looked in my rearview mirror and was relieved to see Veronica waiting three cars back.
So far, so good.
As I waited to park, I leaned my head on the headrest and looked at the sky. Usually, when I put the convertible top down and let the wind blow my hair and the sun shine on my face, it was a stress reliever. But not at that moment. All I could think about was meeting a murderer. Well, someone I was fairly sure was a murderer, anyhow. And unlike my cop days, I had no uniform, no badge and, worst of all, no gun since I’d turned in my service pistol. But the Evans case had made it clear that I needed to get one—nothing pink or disease-related like Veronica, just a plain purple Ruger.
The car in front of me pulled ahead, and I inched the Chrysler forward. A flash of bright red caught my eye. It was a guy dressed like a giant crawdad—complete with red tights, torso and tail, and a headpiece with eyes and antennae—leaning against the wall smoking. He’d had to remove one of his pinchers to hold the cigarette. While I was taking in his costume, our eyes met. He narrowed his gaze as he took a drag and nodded appreciatively in my direction. I looked away. After my last experience with a crawdad, I didn’t want any more trouble.
Finally, I pulled up to the valet. I was so nervous that I practically jumped from my car and jogged the few steps from the garage entrance to the hotel. As I crossed the busy lobby, I had the unshakable sensation that I was walking toward my doom. Nevertheless, I forged ahead. I was so close to solving Jessica’s murder that there was no way I could turn back. I took a deep breath and entered the Carousel Bar and Lounge.
With Mardi Gras season in full swing, the place was packed and buzzing with an electric energy. I scoured the patrons for Stewart Preston and tried not to look at the brightly lit merry-go-round-style bar as it rotated beside me. I was already nauseated from fear. I didn’t want to add motion sickness to my existing stomach woes.
When I didn’t see him, I scanned the customers in the adjoining lounge. I spotted Stewart immediately. He sat on a couch in the middle of the room with a drink in his hand. I looked at him from the top of the steps, and he stared at me and then lowered his gaze to my breasts.
My fear turned to anger.
I balled my fists and marched down the stairs. As I approached him, I was struck by how bloated his face was. Could that be from drug use? I thought of Odette Malveaux’s mysterious warning to “Watch out fo’ dem who take magic.” And I took a deep breath. “Stewart Preston?”
He took a sip of his drink and, with bloodshot eyes, gave me a slow, insolent once-over.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” I sat on the couch opposite him, my back to the bar.
“So, what is it that you’re calling yourself?” He raised his cleft chin. “Tina, was it?”
He hadn’t bought my cover. “Gina. Gina Mazzucco.”
Stewart narrowed his eyes. “Why don’t you drop this little charade and tell me who you really are?”
I swallowed hard
. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Lady, you and I both know that Angelica Evangelista didn’t have any girlfriends. And if she did, they sure as hell wouldn’t be investigating her murder.”
The jig was up. I had to stop playing games. Otherwise, he might walk. I calculated my risk and went for broke. “That’s not true. Immacolata Di Salvo was her friend.”
Stewart showed no sign of emotion at the mention of Immacolata’s name. “What would make you think I care about Immacolata Di Salvo?”
“I know you were charged with her murder.”
A muscle worked in his jaw. “And I was acquitted.”
“I know that too.”
For some reason, he relaxed. Then he grabbed a handful of mixed nuts, leaned back against the couch, and propped his foot on the coffee table between us. “So, you’re a private investigator.”
I didn’t respond.
“I’ll take that as a yes.” He sneered and popped a few nuts into his mouth.
I seized the moment to look at his jewelry. He wasn’t wearing a voodoo bracelet, just a top-of-the-line gold Rolex.
He took another sip of his drink. “So what is it you want to know?”
“I want to know if you killed Angelica Evangelista.”
Again, no reaction from Stewart. He turned and flagged a passing waitress. As she approached us, I glanced over my shoulder at the bar. Veronica was there with a strawberry daiquiri looking right at me.
“I’ll take another Maker’s Mark, darlin’. Get this lady here whatever she wants.”
I turned and looked at the waitress. “Nothing for me, thanks.”
She nodded and headed to the bar.
I looked Stewart in the eyes. “You haven’t answered my question.”
He drained the whiskey from his glass and placed it on the coffee table. “Oh yeah. I did not kill Angelica.”
“Then why was your father’s company putting ten thousand dollars a month into Angelica’s account, under the assumed name of Jessica Evans?”
“She was working for my dad as a textile consultant.”
Franki Amato Mysteries Box Set Page 25
