Killer Smile

by Lisa Scottoline

  “Killed him? Why would they kill him? He was already on his deathbed.” Gomez frowned. “Why would they care, anyway? So he gets prosecuted for the murder, so what?”

  Judy, who had been listening, looked over at Gomez. “They didn’t do an autopsy on Saracone and he was buried today. Can we exhume—”

  “No way, I can’t order one unless there’s credible evidence of a homicide. This is getting way out of hand.” Gomez shifted his weight in the hard plastic chair. “Look, we have enough questions that we’ll consider taking a drive and talking to Chico. But not tonight.”

  Wahlberg looked at his partner in disapproval. “Dan. Cavuto is cleared. We start running out there, moving too fast, without the facts, we’d lose the evidence in motions—”

  “Then consider this as independent of Frank,” Mary interrupted. “Somebody tried to kill Keisha and you have to catch that guy.” She didn’t bring up that Homicide had no jurisdiction unless Keisha died. “You can at least question him. What’s it going to cost you?”

  Gomez glanced at his partner. “We can check it out, can’t we, Wally? Aside from Cavuto? You got a problem with that?”

  Mary sensed she should shut up but couldn’t. “Just see what Chico’s alibi is. I bet he won’t have one, and if you want me to look at some mug books, I will. He probably has a record, being a thug ain’t exactly a white-collar line of work. Did you recover the knife in the driveway or the church?”

  “No. There are crime scene guys looking for it.”

  “So he didn’t drop it.” Mary knew from Bennie that this was significant. Also from Forensic Files on the Discovery Channel. “He saw me coming and didn’t drop it. He risked getting caught with it, so that means he didn’t want you to look up his prints. Somebody who had no record would have dropped it.” Mary was impressed with her own powers of deduction, but Gomez waved her off.

  “Quit while you’re ahead. Wally and me will go out to the house and check it out.”

  “When, if not tonight?”

  “Soon as possible. We’ll follow standard procedure.”

  “Thank you, thank you!” Mary leapt impulsively out of her seat and into his arms. Gomez felt solid and smelled wonderfully of roast beef hoagie.

  Suddenly, Bill, who had been sitting quietly off to the side, rose stiffly on his long legs. “You’re all assuming Keisha’s not gonna make it through this operation. I think she is, and it would be nice if you thought so, too.”

  Mary felt a twinge she knew the others shared, except possibly Wahlberg. “We’re not assuming that. We’re just talking. Trying to figure it out.”

  Bill’s expression said, Well, don’t. His dark gaze shifted away.

  Later, the detectives left, and Mary and Judy tried to distract Bill by asking him computer questions, which he answered ad nauseam. The three of them were in the middle of his lecture on Microsoft XP when the surgeon entered the waiting room on soft paper booties.

  And slid off his mask to give them the news.

  Thirty-Seven

  When Mary got home, she dropped her briefcase and bag at the front door of her apartment, ignored her bills and other mail, and went almost mechanically upstairs, kicked off her pumps, stripped off her bloody suit, climbed into the shower, and cranked up the temperature. Hot water coursed over her body, and she closed her eyes and stood under the spray, letting it soak into her skin and loosen her muscles.

  Thank you, God.

  She felt tears of relief well up under her eyelids. Keisha had survived the operation and was in intensive care, but she hadn’t yet regained consciousness. The loss of blood had left her in a coma, and the surgeon wasn’t sure when, or even if, she would recover. They couldn’t determine the damage the oxygen loss had caused to her brain. A somber Bill had stayed at the hospital, saying he’d sleep in the waiting room, but he’d wanted Mary and Judy to leave, and they did, reluctantly.

  Mary worried that Keisha wasn’t safe in the hospital. That when Chico found out he hadn’t killed her, he’d come back to finish the job. But Bill had promised to stay by her side, and Mary knew he would. He loved the girl. And he said he’d call Keisha’s mother, so she’d be flying in today. She’d be safe with all those people around her. Now all she had to do was live.

  A wave of exhaustion washed over Mary, with the hot water. She shampooed her hair, feeling the sudsy foam slick on her shoulders, but she was too bummed to shave her legs. At least it was a good excuse. She got out of the shower, toweled off, and slipped into her McNabb jersey, then tucked herself into bed. She couldn’t stop thinking about Keisha and wishing that she’d remembered her before she rushed into Saracone’s bedroom that night. She lay sleepless in the dark and didn’t even consider reaching for the remote.

  Mary took a right turn, then a left, and ended up in the same place she had started, having gone around in a circle for the third time. On a bright Tuesday morning, after a lousy night’s sleep, she’d hit the road early to find Saracone’s office in the suburbs, right off the Schuylkill Expressway.

  LEHIGH VALLEY INDUSTRIAL PARK read the red-and-yellow letters on the sign, but once she was in the industrial park, everything looked the same. Clusters of four-story brick buildings were laid out like a corporate honeycomb, and lush lawn curved around the buildings, bordered by overmulched beds of tulips planted in bands of red and yellow, evidently the team colors. Some evil genius had embedded the red-and-yellow signs for the various companies among the tulips, destroying forever any chance a South Philly girl had of finding Saracone Investments. But if Mary had crashed a funeral, an industrial park should be a piece of cake.

  She gripped the steering wheel and took another turn. Only a few cars were parked in the pocket lots at this hour, and she didn’t see anyone she could ask for directions. She turned left, found another tulip bed, and searched for the sign. Dearborn Computers. Mary was losing her sense of humor. The attempt on Keisha’s life had raised the stakes, and she had fought all last night to suppress the horrific image of the woman slumped bleeding against the alley wall. She had called the hospital from the car, and the intensive care nurse had told her that Keisha hadn’t awakened and Bill was asleep in the waiting room. She cruised to the next cluster and the next tulip bed. Household Plastics, Inc.

  A white Cadillac drove past, and Mary followed him to the next chamber of the hive, where they both parked, side by side. The man, in casual dress, got out of the car carrying a bronze Halliburton, his cell phone bud plugged into his ear. Mary frowned. This ear-bud thing had all started with the Sony Walkman, and she didn’t like it one bit. She flagged him down, raising her voice to be heard. “Excuse me, do you know where Saracone Investments is?”

  “No idea,” the man answered without breaking stride or further conversation, and Mary growled under her breath and backed out of the space. She drove around reading tulips and with only three missed turns, asked five more people where Saracone Investments was. None of them had any idea. It was getting weird. After another wrong turn, she found a gardener in a yellow jumpsuit with a red Lehigh Valley patch and she jumped out of the car and accosted him.

  “On the end,” he said, pointing, and she went back to the car and drove to where he pointed. Then she understood why she hadn’t seen it before. The last brown building had a tiny tulip bed in front and the smallest sign of all, with an array of company names in smaller fonts: Rate Foods, Inc, The Steingard Foundation, Francanucci Insurance, Ltd., Juditha Corporation, Simmons Partners, and Saracone Investments. The pocket lot was empty even though the others had been filling up. Why? She’d see for herself; she had found Saracone’s office. Mary felt a tingle of fear but chased it away.

  She got out of the car, her jacket suddenly sticking to her back. She had dressed in her favorite nondescript beige suit, had her hair pulled back, and was wearing her glasses, so Justin wouldn’t recognize her from the newspaper photo. It was an abundance of caution, because she doubted that he’d be back at work so soon after his father’s death, but maybe s
he could sweet-talk the receptionist and get into his office. She walked up the elegant flagstone walk, past the evil tulips, and reached a brown door, hoping it wasn’t locked. She pulled on the door, and it opened into a hallway with a panel of mailboxes. Each one was labeled: Rate Foods, Inc, The Steingard Foundation, Francanucci Insurance, Ltd., Juditha Corporation, Simmons Partners, and Saracone Investments.

  No! A mail drop? She had driven all the way out here to find a mail drop! She went to the Saracone Investments box, which was stainless steel like the others, and locked, with a little clear window in the top. No mail showed in the window, so it must have been empty, saving both the decision of whether to break in and Mary’s immortal soul. But she couldn’t be stopped now. A dry hole!

  She hit the mailbox in frustration. She couldn’t believe an empty mailbox was all there was to Saracone Investments. Where did Justin go to work, and Giovanni before him? Did they work at all? She had seen something like this only once before in her life. At Grun & Chase, her old law firm, she had met a client whose father had made money in the stock market in the early 1950s. The children and grandchildren spent their lives investing and reinvesting the money he’d earned in the fund but were never employed in real jobs. Was that what she was seeing with the Saracones, and Justin? Where had they earned all that money? She couldn’t just give up and go back to the office. She had forgotten how to be a lawyer. And just when she started to like it, too.

  Ten minutes later, Mary had successfully located the management office of the industrial park and was standing before a reception desk with a cardboard box she’d had in her trunk. She placed it on the reception desk next to a nameplate that read TONI BRUNETTI and waited for the receptionist to get off the phone. It didn’t look like it was going to happen anytime soon. Toni, a young woman with spiky black hair and a fake-diamond stud pierced through her left nostril, had flashed Mary the one-minute sign five minutes ago.

  “And then I find out, just this morning when I get his email, that he was seeing her and her friend and all the chicks from the chat room. All of them. Even hillbillygirl!”

  Mary averted her eyes but there was nothing to see. A plain office with white walls, furnished with a tweedy sofa and chairs, a whitish laminated coffee table, topped off with a dreaded vase of company tulips.

  “How could he do that? Hillbillygirl? Who knows what you could catch from a hillbillygirl?” Toni tore a Kleenex from a gaily patterned cube on her desk and dabbed at her nose with it. Mary wondered what the deal was with that nose pierce. Did it get in the way of heartbreak?

  “I knew he was fooling around. He started working out and he got his eyes lasered and his teeth whitened. Since when did he ever care about his eyes or his teeth? Until February, the only thing he cared about was basketball!”

  Mary tried not to eavesdrop but she couldn’t help it. The woman’s voice bore the unmistakable inflections of South Philly — adorably warped o’s and deliciously nasal a’s, and with a name like Brunetti, she was clearly a paesana. And unwittingly, Toni was giving Mary a better idea than the one she’d had.

  “Oh, yeah, and he bought an Ab-Doer, can you believe that? An Ab-Doer? How could I have been so stupid?” Toni gritted her teeth without smearing her lip liner. “Listen, I gotta go. I’ll call you back, I have to help someone here. Thanks. Bye.” She hug up, sniffed hard, and looked wetly at Mary, who felt a tug for her.

  “You want to go freshen up?”

  “No, I’m fine.” Toni blinked back tears. “I so wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.”

  “I so understand,” Mary said, ramping up her accent, which had barely survived an Ivy League law school. “You’re from South Philly, aren’t you?”

  “You got it. Sixteenth & Wolf.”

  “Get out!” Mary grinned. “St. Monica’s? I graduated Goretti, too. What year were you?”

  “We moved to Delco for high school. I went to Interboro.”

  “It’s all good.” Mary smiled. Having traded both high schools and parishes, the two girls had just transferred billions of information-bytes faster than any Pentium chip. They had learned that they had everything in common, and in fact, might be the same person. “So what are you doin’ out here?” Out here could be west of Fifteenth Street, or Montana.

  “My loser boyfriend was from out here.”

  “He’ll get his,” Mary said, with a twinge. She felt bad, but she had a mission to accomplish, and she was hoping another white lie wouldn’t hurt. It was a venial sin, at worst. She summoned the frustration of her morning, her newfound hatred of tulips and a pathetic frown. “I can’t believe this, you and I have so much in common. More than you think. I’m in the exact same situation as you, with your boyfriend.”

  “You are?” Toni’s damp eyes widened.

  “Yes. That’s why I’m here. I’ve been seeing Justin Saracone, from Saracone Investments. The rich family with the mail drop here, at the end?”

  “My God!” Toni’s manicured hand flew to her mouth. “I know that turd! He hits on me every time he comes in — and he’s married! He thinks that smile will get him anywhere.”

  “I’m not surprised. He told me he wasn’t married when I met him, so now I’m dumping him.” Mary moved her empty box forward on the counter. “This is his stuff.”

  “What is it with men?” Toni asked, bewildered.

  “Don’t ask me.” If I knew any, I’d tell you. “He’s a pig.”

  “A tool.”

  “A dog.” All this name-calling was making Mary feel unaccountably better. But back to the point. “I came to leave his stuff in his mailbox, but I had a second thought. I want to take it to his house. And deliver it to his wife!”

  “What a great idea!” Toni clapped in delight, as Mary had hoped she would.

  “Why should these guys get off scot-free?”

  “They shouldn’t!”

  “We’re not gonna let them treat us this way, are we?”

  “Hell, no!”

  “We don’t have to take their crap!”

  “No way!”

  “We can fight back!” Mary raised her palm, and Toni slapped her five.

  “We will fight back! Do it! Do it! Do it!”

  “I don’t have his home address!”

  “I do, it’s in the file!”

  “Let me have it!”

  Suddenly Toni’s triumphant smile faded and she lowered her hand. “I can’t. Saracone signed up for the lockbox and he pays the bill, but I can’t give you his address. I’m not allowed.”

  Damn! Another casualty of a parochial education. A girl who followed the rules. Mary used to be that. Before Montana.

  “Don’t you have his address?”

  “No, he never gave it to me. He didn’t want me to know he was married.”

  Toni bit her lip. “I really want to give it to you, but I can’t.”

  “You sure? We’re homegirls.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay, I understand. You’ve been through hell this morning.” Mary picked up the empty box. “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

  “You’re not mad?”

  “Not at all. I’ll find another way to get his address.” Mary reached across the counter and gave Toni a warm hug. “And throw that guy out. He doesn’t deserve you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Take care now.” Mary turned to go to the door, but Toni called out:

  “Yo, wait a minute!”

  Mary turned on her heel, with the box.

  “Where you going after this?”

  “To the office.”

  “Where’s your office?”

  “Center City.”

  “Let me give you directions. I bet you don’t know the shortcut.” Toni beckoned her back to the desk with a polished fingernail, and Mary returned to the counter.

  “Shortcut?”

  “Yeah. I know a great shortcut back to the expressway.” Toni grabbed a pen and a piece of paper from her desk, then bent her spiky head o
ver the paper and began drawing a wobbly line. “Go this way. It’ll save you half an hour, easy. And if you keep your eyes open on the way — God knows what you’ll find.”

  Mary finally came up to speed, with a smile. She watched Toni finish the map, which was a long wiggly line, with no X to mark the spot. It was like a treasure hunt for Mensa members. How would she know which house was Saracone’s? “You think I can do this?”

  “No worries. You’re from South Philly, so you’ll recognize it right away.” Toni slid the map across the counter, with a sly smile.

  Not five minutes later, Mary was in her car, following a convoluted series of switchbacks that could qualify as a shortcut only if your destination were Mars. She drove through gorgeous countryside and passed her umpteenth rolling hill, still ponds with cattails not attached to cats, and immense new mansions, where the only neighbors were Canada geese. She eyed each house on the shortcut, but after six winding miles began to worry that she would never find Justin’s house, or that she had already driven past it by accident. Then she took a right turn as the road wound around a bend, glanced out the window at the house on the curve, and hit the brake.

  Mary laughed out loud at the sight. Toni had been right. There would be no mistaking this house, not for a girl from Mercer Street. A huge wrought-iron gate spanned the driveway, and its black bars formed a mile-high, scrollwork S. The same as the screen doors on Mercer Street and every other street in South Philly, only about three billion dollars more expensive.

  Mary pulled the car up a little out of the line of sight, found a sheltering oak tree, and cut the engine, eyeballing the house, which was situated near the street. Thank God that Saracone the Younger didn’t share his father’s obsession with privacy. He lived in a huge mansion, hewn of gray-and-black stone, with a sloping Tudor roof, genuine slate, with little iron stoppers so the cable guy didn’t slide off. A circular gravel driveway curved gracefully in front of a grand, gabled facade, and cars lined the driveway bumper to bumper, too many for one family. There must have been some kind of get-together going on, maybe associated with the father’s funeral.