Murder at the Mistletoe Ball

by J. D. Griffo

  “Che palle!” Alberta exclaimed. “We’ve moved two feet in the past twenty minutes. My pet turtle, Alphonse, could’ve gotten us here quicker.”

  “You had a pet turtle, Gram?” Jinx asked.

  “My grandfather found it on the docks and brought it home,” Alberta said. “I think he wanted my grandmother to make soup, but we kids adopted it.”

  “Alphonse might be able to avoid the traffic, but could he bring you the smooth sound of Sinatra singing ‘Silent Night’?” Freddy asked as he turned up the radio, filling up the car with the Hoboken-born crooner’s voice.

  “How many times do I have to tell you I hate Frank Sinatra?” Alberta barked.

  “No one hates Frank Sinatra,” Freddy said. “Especially no one from Jersey.”

  “Too skinny and too full of himself, that’s what he was,” Alberta said. “Then he got fat and smoked too much. When he sang he sounded worse than Jerry Vale.”

  “Now you don’t like Jerry Vale?” Jinx asked.

  “Don’t even get me started on that one!” Alberta bellowed.

  “Sounds like Aunt Helen came with us after all,” Jinx said. “Seriously, Gram, you have to calm down. There’s nothing you can do about tunnel traffic except go with the flow.”

  “I know, I know,” Alberta said. “It just feels like we’re wasting precious time to save your brother and every second counts.”

  “If anybody can prove Sergio’s innocence, you and Jinx can, Mrs. Scaglione,” Freddy said.

  “I pray you’re right, Freddy, the entire town already thinks the real murderer is behind bars,” Alberta said. “I read that online article Calhoun wrote about the murder. It was a regular smear campaign and practically begged the court to lock Sergio up and throw away the key.”

  “I tried to stop it, Gram, but I couldn’t,” Jinx said. “Wyck told me that every word Calhoun wrote was true, and he was right. We all know Sergio’s innocent, but the evidence against him is making it really hard to sway opinions.”

  “That’s why it’s so urgent we talk to Rudy,” Alberta said. “He’s the only other person who knew Natalie, he’s got to be able to tell us something about the girl that will lead us to her real killer.”

  Finally, the cars in the tunnel began to move and Freddy was able to drive at a normal speed. “Looks like we’re back on track,” he said. “It won’t be much longer now before we’re at Rudy’s.”

  They couldn’t find a parking spot on Rudy’s street, so Freddy would have to keep circling the block until he found one. He told Jinx to text him if they needed him to run a red light to get back to them in case they were in a jam. Jinx appreciated her boyfriend’s willingness to get a moving violation but told him they would be fine. Alberta had already had one conversation with Rudy, what could go wrong during her second?

  Everything.

  Alberta rang Rudy’s bell a third time and still there was no response. The wind had started to pick up and although the mounds of snow on the pavement were miraculously white and had not yet been topped with the layer of soot and dirt that made them look like unappealing chocolate snow cones, it felt more like they were being enveloped by an Arctic breeze and not a cozy wintry embrace. They weren’t sure how much longer they’d be able to stand on the front steps in the cold waiting for Rudy before they had to call Freddy for an emergency rescue.

  After the fourth attempt to reach Rudy, an older man, bundled up like Nanook of the North about to take a hike through the tundra, came out of the building. He nodded to Alberta, and as he walked down the steps, holding on to the railing to avoid a slip and fall, Jinx held the door open with her foot to make sure it didn’t close behind him. They were able to slip into the building before the man stepped foot onto the sidewalk.

  Once inside the ladies took a moment to thaw out and then climbed the stairs to Rudy’s apartment. When they got to the third floor Jinx was thankful her grandmother stopped in front of 3B, she didn’t relish the idea of climbing another flight in her boots and marveled at the fact that sometimes Alberta had more energy than she did. She would have to remember to add another mile to her early morning jogs.

  Alberta was about to knock on the door when Jinx stopped her. “Gram, what makes you think he’s going to be inside if he didn’t answer the buzzer?”

  “A million things,” Alberta replied. “He could be taking a shower, taking a nap, taking a phone call that can’t be interrupted.”

  “I didn’t take those things into consideration,” Jinx replied. “Okay, knock away.”

  Alberta did, three times.

  “Bussa, bussa. C’è nessuno in casa?” Alberta asked.

  “You can keep knocking, but it doesn’t look like anybody’s home,” Jinx said, translating her grandmother’s remark.

  Instinctively, Alberta gripped the doorknob and gave it a twist. When she felt it turn in her hands she pushed and opened the door. The ladies were shocked to discover Rudy’s apartment door was left unlocked; they weren’t city dwellers, but they knew such a finding was a rare occurrence. No one left their doors unlocked in Manhattan, it was like inviting trouble into your own home and telling it to take whatever it liked. It just wasn’t done. For some reason it had been done, and the ladies knew they weren’t leaving the building until they found out why.

  “Rudy,” Alberta said. “Are you home?”

  No answer meant no one was forbidding them from entering. They weren’t sure if that logic would hold up in a court of law, but they were willing to take the risk if it meant they could rummage through Rudy’s apartment to find a clue that could save Sergio.

  Alberta entered first and Jinx followed, closing and locking the door behind them. They stood in the kitchen and thought the first thing they should do was search the apartment to confirm that they were alone. Just because Rudy didn’t answer didn’t mean he wasn’t there, and since the door had been unlocked it was possible someone else was there hiding in a closet or behind the shower curtain. Oddly, none of these thoughts made the women nervous enough to hightail it out of the apartment and back to the relative safety of the city street. On the contrary, it fueled them, it motivated them to make their good fortune of being able to get into Rudy’s place pay off. Before they started their search, however, they did need to arm themselves just in case their good fortune turned bad.

  A fire extinguisher that was lodged in between the garbage can and the kitchen cabinet and a golf club leaning against the pantry door would serve perfectly as weapons against the unknown. Alberta grabbed the extinguisher while Jinx picked up the golf club and, together, they walked through the apartment in search of uninvited guests. Technically, they were the uninvited guests in this scenario, but they conveniently ignored that fact.

  By the time they returned to the living room area they were confident the apartment was empty. They put their impromptu weapons back where they found them and started to search for the evidence that could point the finger of accusation at someone else other than Sergio. But they felt like blind men in a maze and had no idea where to start looking.

  “Jinx, you search in here and I’ll take the bedroom,” Alberta said. “I have no idea what we’re looking for, but I guess we’ll know when we find it.”

  “Roger that, Gram,” Jinx said.

  “Be careful not to make too much of a mess,” Alberta said. “We don’t want Rudy to know anyone has been here.”

  Jinx looked underneath couch cushions, opened the doors of the media cabinet, rifled through Rudy’s small collection of vinyl records, and even lifted the threadbare rug in the middle of the room, but found nothing incriminating or slightly interesting. Until she knocked over a stack of magazines on the cocktail table.

  She saw that they were mostly medical industry magazines with the occasional Sports Illustrated thrown in the mix, but when she bent down to pick them up, she noticed one of the magazines had flipped open to a page that had been dog-eared. The magazine was New Jersey Pharma and the article was about the Trolloppe cardiac wi
ng at the Sussex County Medical Center. Trolloppe was the word that Rudy allegedly texted Alberta, and D. Edward Carmichael worked at the Medical Center. It was definitely more than a coincidence, it linked the two men, even though Carmichael had told Alberta and Joyce that he had never heard of Rudy.

  “Gram, I think I may have found something,” Jinx said.

  Alberta rushed into the living room. “Good, because I didn’t find a thing except a pile of laundry. I don’t think Rudy’s washed his clothes for over a week. It stinks to holy heaven in there.”

  “That’s typical for a guy,” Jinx said. “If I didn’t remind Freddy, he might never do his laundry. Check this out.”

  “What is it?” Alberta asked.

  “It might be our first real clue,” Jinx said.

  Alberta read the article and confirmed what Jinx already knew, that Carmichael most likely had lied to them.

  The fact that Rudy marked an article about the Trolloppe wing by itself didn’t definitively connect him to Carmichael, who was the center’s hospital administrator. But add in the fact that Rudy knew Natalie, who had been in Newton the day before she was murdered, and it made a more persuasive argument that Rudy and Carmichael were somehow connected. But what was that connection? Enemies, friends, business associates, two men who teamed up to kill Natalie? They had no idea.

  “Why don’t you roll up that magazine and put it in your bag?” Alberta suggested. “It might come in handy later.”

  They quickly inspected the only other room in Rudy’s apartment, his bathroom, and discovered that he was better at doing laundry than he was at keeping his bathroom clean.

  “Let’s get out of here before we catch something, Gram.”

  As they were heading toward the front door, Alberta remembered the stash of boxes Rudy kept in his pantry, the ones with the stickers of flowers on them. He had given them the impression that they were part of his job as a pharmaceutical salesman, filled with medical supplies. When Alberta opened the door, it appeared that Rudy may have gotten a new job; the pantry was empty.

  “È strano,” Alberta said.

  “What’s weird?”

  “Last time I was here this pantry was stocked with boxes, now it’s empty.”

  “Gram, is it possible that Rudy left town and took the boxes with him?”

  “Possibly, lovey, but it doesn’t look like he took anything else. His closet is filled with his clothes and there were a few prescriptions in his medicine cabinet that were more than halfway full and weren’t expired.”

  “Which means that if he did leave town, he might not have left by his own choice.”

  Alberta pondered Jinx’s comment and concluded that she could be right. They knew very little about Rudy and as much as Alberta did like him, she had to admit that he was a shady character. He’d appeared nervous when Alberta and Joyce met him, he was evasive about his relationship with Natalie, and he was probably the one who sent her the text about the Trolloppe wing. Rudy, unfortunately, could be the type who found himself in a situation that forced him to leave town without any notice or was dragged out of town against his will. Either scenario would explain why his door had been left unlocked.

  It would not explain why someone was knocking on the door now.

  Alberta and Jinx grabbed each other when they heard the sound. The only thing odder in New York City than leaving your front door unlocked was hearing a knock at the front door that hadn’t been preceded by the ring of a buzzer. It was a fantasy to think that neighbors in New York City apartment buildings were friendly enough with one another that they knocked on their doors out of the blue to say hello or ask to borrow some sugar. There was an unspoken code of ethics among New Yorkers: Thou shall not disturb thy neighbor. Whoever was banging on Rudy’s front door never got that memo.

  “Rudy, let me in!”

  The voice was immediately familiar, and Alberta knew that she had heard it before, but exactly where she couldn’t recall.

  “Do not play games with me, Rudy, I need you!”

  Jinx turned to face Alberta and mouthed the words, Who is that? Alberta shook her head and put her finger up to her lips to prevent Jinx from adding a voice to her silent question.

  “I know you’re in there so open up!”

  Such a long pause followed the woman’s last words that they thought she had given up and left. They were reminded that they were not the only women in the world who were tenacious.

  “Fine, then I’ll use my key.”

  This time when Jinx turned to face Alberta, she looked at her with fear. They were trapped inside an apartment they had essentially broken in to and were about to be caught by a strange woman who was going to enter the apartment legally. They had to hide.

  They heard the key enter the lock and Alberta grabbed Jinx by the arm, leading her into the bathroom. She pulled back the navy-blue shower curtain and she and Jinx got into the bathtub. Instead of fully closing the shower curtain, Alberta left it open about a foot, exposing the shower head in the hopes that if the woman checked the bathroom, she wouldn’t think anyone was hiding behind the curtain because it was partially open. It was a gamble, but Alberta had learned enough about psychological tactics to bet that it would do the trick. Most of the time people only saw what they wanted to see, and if the woman saw part of an empty bathtub, she’d assume the entire tub was empty and wasn’t being used as a hiding spot.

  They heard the front door slam and they knew it was only a matter of seconds before the woman inspected the bathroom. Alberta prayed her strategy would work.

  “Where are you, Rudy? I need you!”

  They could hear the woman open up another door, presumably the pantry, and slam it shut. They heard her walk past the bathroom directly into the bedroom and slide open the closet doors, slamming them closed so hard Alberta and Jinx were surprised they didn’t hear them fall off their sliding tracks. They didn’t know who this woman was, but they were convinced she was convinced Rudy should be in his apartment and that she was in desperate need of his help.

  “Don’t you know what happened last night?! The entire operation is going to blow up in our faces!”

  The woman’s screams and curses were followed by some loud banging and crashes. Whoever the woman was, she didn’t care if Rudy knew she had been in his apartment. In fact, by the sound of it, she wanted Rudy to know she had been there. When she was done ransacking his bedroom she bounded into the bathroom and must’ve flung open the medicine cabinet because they heard it crash onto the floor.

  “Dammit!” the woman screamed. “Serves you right, Rudy!”

  They heard her leave the bathroom, literally stomping her feet, until she must have reached the kitchen. There was a long pause and then they heard the sound of the door once more opening and slamming. Alberta and Jinx remained in their hiding place for several minutes before deciding it was safe to exit. When they saw the medicine cabinet door on the floor, its glass smashed into little pieces, they realized they had made the right decision to hide and not confront the woman. She was clearly dangerous.

  Out of the utmost caution and not necessarily necessity, Alberta and Jinx tiptoed through the apartment until they got to the kitchen. They stopped when they saw the message that was left on the refrigerator. The woman must have rearranged the alphabet magnets on Rudy’s fridge to leave him a warning. It wasn’t grammatically correct, but it was legible: Dont push me. It was signed JJ.

  “Gram, who’s J. J.?”

  “Rudy’s girlfriend.”

  “This is amazing, Gram! Look how much we’ve learned from one visit to Rudy’s apartment.”

  “We learned more than you realize.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Rudy didn’t only tell us that J. J. was his girlfriend, he also told us that she was dangerous.”

  CHAPTER 18

  La verità potrebbe rendere qualcuno libero, ma manda anche qualcuno in prigione.

  The holding cell at the Tranquility Police Station was a far cry
from a maximum security prison, and not nearly as heartbreaking as when Judy Garland sang “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to a sobbing Margaret O’Brien in Meet Me in St. Louis, and yet it still filled Alberta and Jinx with dread, knowing Sergio was inside the building behind bars. Worse, they knew if DA Garcia had her way, he’d never see the light of day again.

  Freddy had dropped them off at the police station when they got back from New York so they could join Lisa Marie and Tommy for their meeting with Bruno and Sergio. Their first stop, however, was to pay a visit to Vinny’s office to disclose what they’d discovered at Rudy’s apartment. Before they could present their case to him, he presented them with a roadblock.

  “I wish I had better news for you, Alfie, but Roxanne isn’t budging,” Vinny said. “She refuses to entertain the idea of allowing Sergio to post bail.”

  “That isn’t fair!” Alberta yelled.

  “I agree and I’ve stated my opinion to her very clearly, but the DA is adamant,” Vinny said. “In two days Sergio is going to be transferred to the Keogh-Dwyer Correctional Facility in Newton, where he’ll stay to await his trial.”

  “What about the evidence from the autopsy report?” Jinx asked.

  “It’s helpful, and I think Bruno is going to be able to use it effectively to cast doubt on the charges, but it won’t change the DA’s mind,” Vinny said. “There’s no possibility of bail.”

  “Even if we have another suspect?” Alberta asked.

  “What other suspect?” Vinny asked in response.

  “J. J.” Jinx replied.

  “Who’s J. J.?” Vinny asked.

  “Rudy’s girlfriend,” Alberta said. “We think she could have killed Natalie.”

  Vinny slumped into his chair and shook his head. “I think you need to explain yourself.”

  Alberta quickly filled Vinny in on what had happened when they got to Rudy’s apartment and what J. J. said when she thought Rudy was on the other side of his locked door. She needed his help because the operation was going to blow up in their faces. She referenced the fiasco that was supposed to be the festive Mistletoe Ball, which meant she had a link to Tranquility, or at least the area. Unfortunately, they couldn’t describe the woman, they didn’t know what her initials stood for, they didn’t know what kind of operation she and Rudy were involved in, or what role Natalie played in their business. The only thing they knew was that they needed to find out more about this unknown woman because instinct told them she was the key to unraveling the mystery surrounding Natalie’s murder.