“Consider it yours,” I said. “What do I owe you for removing the carpet?”
He grinned and rolled the cigar to the opposite corner of his mouth. “Fifty bucks ought to cover it. Once I’ve given the place a look-see, I’ll do up a real estimate.”
I opened my wallet and discreetly pulled out fifty dollars. Pretty silly, since I’d just given the guy a key to my house. Being overly cautious that he might see how much cash I had on hand was probably the least of my worries.
I returned to my office and sent Liam a very insincere thank you email. He replied, but I deleted it and turned my attention to the internet.
In less than five minutes, I had three newspaper articles and a White Pages listing for Melinda Redmond with a zip code in North Palm Beach. The first thing I read was a ten-year-old human-interest piece on her that practically nominated her for sainthood.
After leaving New York and a lucrative job in advertising, she’d devoted her life to providing care and nurture to troubled teens trapped in the Florida foster-care system. There was a small, grainy black-and-white photograph of the woman I kinda remembered surrounded by a half-dozen teenagers. I filled in my credit card information and requested a copy of the picture.
News photos often have the names of the people listed on the back. That a woman who cared for teenagers had lived in my house and the skeleton of a teenager had been left in my house was just too coincidental. I tried to think of scenarios that would explain why a killer would have kept the body. And kept moving it. And not notice Jonathan’s medallion. I did a quick online surf and found an answer to my last question. Apparently, death grip wasn’t an expression; it was a fact. If a person dies with a closed fist, it stays closed. Kinda creepy in a factoid way. The keeping and the moving were things I couldn’t explain.
A shudder danced along my spine at the mere thought. The Everglades were within easy driving distance, so why not dump the body there? I hunted for an answer to that question on the net and found it rather easily. Apparently, alligators prefer live meat or, at a bare minimum, a fresh kill. Who knew those disgusting things were picky eaters? Over the years, many bodies dumped in the Everglades have been retrieved and identified, thanks to the discerning palates of the native reptiles.
So the killer had to have been smart enough to know the feeding habits of alligators, or was a student, I quickly surmised after navigating to the Florida school curriculum page. The local ecosystem is a big part of high-school science. So another possibility was that one teenager had killed another teenager in Melinda’s care. That possibility raised more questions than it answered. Melinda would have noticed if one of her kids had gone missing. Right? If so, why hadn’t she reported the missing teenager to the police? Or the state would have noticed, albeit eventually, that Melinda had been one teen short. And if the state had noticed or Melinda had made a report, why hadn’t anything shown up when the police had searched for possible matches to the skeleton?
None of that explained the frozen part or the climate-controlled part of the ME’s findings. I sat back in my chair and chewed on the tip of my pen as I tried to come up with a logical series of events that would explain everything, including my finding Jonathan’s medallion in the corpse’s hand. Nothing leaped to the forefront.
Well, unless you counted Tony Caprelli, who was standing in my doorway tapping his watch.
“Oh, gosh,” I said apologetically as I quickly clicked my computer into hibernate and grabbed my purse, a pad, and a pen. “I was in the middle of something and lost track of the time.” And my cheesecake dinner was still untouched in the employee refrigerator, so he could expect some serous stomach rumblings.
“Obviously,” he said.
I followed Tony to the elevator, and then into Mr. Zar—his office. Someone had already scraped the gold lettering off the door. To my utter delight, I smelled freshly brewed coffee and immediately decided to forgive Tony for violating my sacred out-by-five policy.
The furniture was the same, but in a single day, he’d turned the ambiance of the office from elegant masculinity to relaxed family playroom. Everywhere I looked, I found framed photographs of a little girl ranging in age from toddler to maybe nine or ten. There were macaroni works of art, crude drawings—mostly rainbows—and clay art projects that held paper clips and pushpins. She was obviously his daughter; the resemblance was unmistakable.
The other obvious thing was there didn’t seem to be a Mrs. Caprelli.
“Her name is Isabella. She’s ten going on thirty,” he said as he motioned me into a chair.
“She’s beautiful.”
“Thanks. Sorry about the last-minute change in plans, but I had to interview a housekeeper.”
“Single father?” I asked, unashamedly fishing.
“Yeah,” he answered as he sat down and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes for a minute. “I’ve had her in a camp for a week. Not her favorite thing. But enough about my domestic disturbances. I wanted to talk about the kinds of cases we’ll be handling.”
“Criminal cases.”
“Yep. The state’s attorneys win about ninety percent of their cases. So get used to losing.”
“If you’ll excuse me for saying, you’re pretty cavalier about innocent people going to jail.”
He shook his head and smiled. That whole dimple thing was really distracting.
“What makes you think our clients will be innocent?”
“I just assumed—”
“Mistake number one. This leads me to rule number one. Never ask a client if he or she is innocent.”
“Why not?”
“Because then I’m stuck with a single fact pattern to argue in court. It’s always better to leave your options open, since you never know what a prosecutor will throw at your client. Criminal law is all about leveling the playing field. The state has a police force and labs and all sorts of things at their disposal to assist in prosecuting an individual. The defendant only has us. My job is simple. Rule number two—make the state prove its case, not the defendant prove his innocence.”
“You make it sound like a game,” I said, remembering quite distinctly how it felt to be wrongly accused of a crime.
“In a lot of ways, it is. It’s like chess. It’s a combination of skill and strategy.”
“Not guilt or innocence?”
“That’s God’s job, not mine. Rule number three—no child-killer cases.”
“Isn’t that contrary to rule number two?”
“Yeah, but they’re my rules, so I get to make adjustments. Margaret showed me the morning paper. So what’s the deal with the skeleton in your house?”
Leave it to Margaret to throw me under the bus. “It violates rule number three. The ME’s report says the deceased was a teenager.”
“Know anything about it?”
“No, how could I? I’d owned the house for a matter of hours before we found the thing in the closet.”
“But it was your mother’s house, right?”
I leaned forward and placed my palms flat on his desk. “A house she never set foot in. If you’re concerned, call Detective Steadman or Graves. They interviewed her last night. Why do you care?”
“Because Victor indicated that you’d probably do or say something that might require the firm to become involved. I just want to be prepared.”
I was starting to get annoyed. “How can the firm get dragged into anything? It’s my understanding that the police don’t work up a sweat on a case this cold.”
“But you will,” he said. “Victor wanted to make sure I reminded you that what you do reflects on the firm.”
Screw his cute dimple. I went past annoyed to completely pissed. “Consider me reminded.”
He shrugged. “Of course I told Victor I thought that was a ridiculous position to take.”
“W-what?”
“Jesus Christ, Finley. If I’d bought a house with a skeleton hidden in the closet, you can bet your a—fanny I’d want to know the wh
o, the how, and the why.”
I was stunned. Until this second, Becky had been my only true ally at the firm. Now it appeared as if handsome Tony Caprelli was on my side too. Color me impressed. And surprised.
“Really?” I relaxed and sat back in my chair.
He nodded. “I can’t imagine how disgusting that was for you and your friends to stumble upon. That said, I need you to focus on taking classes—not on solving puzzles, or, worse, interfering with a police investigation.”
My cheeks grew warm.
“But not scary enough,” Tony continued, “to keep you from disturbing the corpse, though, right?”
I opened my mouth, then snapped it closed. Was he reading my mind?
Again, I got a dimple smile. “Liam McGarrity mentioned it during his interview.”
“Interview?” I repeated, as if English had been a new language.
“Part-time at first. A good defense attorney has to have a good investigator. Is there a problem?”
Hell, yes! “Of course not,” I lied.
“Don’t get sidetracked over this skeleton thing. Dead and murder aren’t always synonymous. There could be a perfectly logical explanation for how the skeleton ended up in the closet.”
“I’m sure that’s true.”
“Liam mentioned that he thought you took something off the body?”
“If I tell you, wouldn’t that sidetrack me?”
“Yep. Just call me curious. It’ll take some time for me to bring in clients, and who knows? Maybe I can help.”
I hesitated, then eventually reached into the side compartment of my purse. I pulled the medallion out of its silk hiding place. “She was holding this.”
After inspecting it, Tony asked, “When did you give this to your father?”
“Stepfather,” I corrected, as if that was somehow relevant. “About a year before he died. So, sixteen years ago. His team won the CV Whitney Cup Championship. It’s a big deal among polo enthusiasts. I bought the medal for him and had it inscribed.”
“And you last saw it…?”
“I’m not sure. I think it was when my mother was married to Enrique Rossi. He was a retired polo player and raised Thoroughbreds in Argentina. They split their time between Palm Beach and his family’s other estate outside Sao Paulo. I know that before Jonathan died, he kept it in a small cedar box on his dresser.”
Oddly enough, Tony was taking notes. “Where was this?”
“Their home on Palm Beach.” I gave him the address. “My sister, Lisa, and I were shipped off to boarding school about a month after Jonathan died. We only came back for holidays and a few weeks in the summer, so I’m not positive if I saw it last before or after Jonathan’s death. It was a long time ago.”
“Your mother told the police it was stolen.”
“It could have been. I know the Palm Beach house was robbed. It freaked my mother out enough so that she closed up that house and moved to New York for a while. Then Jonathan died and my mother married Enrique and she was back in the polo circle again.”
“So Enrique was your mother’s next husband. Could he have taken the medallion?”
I shook my head. “No. Enrique was husband number three. Jonathan was her first husband. He died and she married Jake Halpern. That didn’t work because she was trying to recapture her youth by sleeping with one. Jake was handsome, but he only married my mother for her money. Jake was in his early twenties, and as soon as my mother figured out his motives, he was history. It lasted maybe four months.
“Next came Enrique. He was my mother’s age, only Enrique couldn’t keep it in his pants, so she divorced him. Got half his family’s lands in the divorce.
“My mother wised up and set her sights on…shall we call them more mature men. Enter Kirk Browning. He was a nice guy. Some sort of retired insurance broker. He died seven months after they got married. Never had kids, so his whole fortune went to my mother.
“Her last husband was Carl Johnstone. I’m not sure what he did, he was long retired by the time he married my mother. They were sailing around the world on his private motor yacht when Carl suffered a massive heart attack.”
Tony was grimacing.
“When I say it out loud, it sounds pretty bad, huh?”
“Marrying your mother can be hazardous to your health.”
“Yeah, but you’ve got to give her points for trying,” I joked. “Even with Jake and Enrique, all she was trying to do was reclaim what she’d had with Jonathan.”
“So you don’t think there’s any connection between this Melinda Redmond woman and any of your mother’s subsequent husbands?”
Vehemently I shook my head. “If my mother so much as thought any of them were involved with another woman, she would have jettisoned them from her life in a heartbeat. That’s her style.”
“Is that what she did to you?”
“No, not exactly. I’m her daughter, so she can’t shun me without explaining it to the DAR and the Junior League, so instead, she opted to cut me off when I decided not to go to law school. If I change my mind and/or if I marry someone ‘suitable,’ then she’ll reconsider her position.”
“And here I thought only Italian mothers interfered. Part of the reason I moved to Florida was so my mother would stop setting me up every Friday night.”
“I hate blind dates.”
“Ditto,” he said, pouring us both mugs of coffee. “Only in my case, she falls on the ‘Isabella needs a mother’ sword.”
Hell, we were spilling our guts, so I might as well go for it. “There’s no Mrs. Caprelli?”
“Not since September 11, 2001.”
My heart squeezed in my chest. “I’m sorry.”
“The worst part is Isabella doesn’t remember Maria.”
There was a sad, distant look in his brown eyes that touched me. While I hadn’t lost Jonathan to a national tragedy brought about my fanatics, I knew what it was like to lose a parent. “But you do, and you’ll remind her,” I offered.
He let out a long breath. “Not sure how we got so far afield.”
“I’m using the skeleton as a starting point.”
Tony frowned. “I thought we just agreed that you weren’t going to let this whole skeleton thing distract you from your new responsibilities.”
“It won’t. But what I do on my own time…?” I let that hang in the air.
He shrugged. “Any idea where to go next?”
I shook my head. “I’ll figure something out.”
“If it was me,” Tony said as he stroked the faint shadow of stubble on his chin, “I’d arrange for a private autopsy. The ME’s office is good, but they’ve got a lot on their plate, so they sometimes miss minute traces of foul play. A cause of death would be helpful in establishing your time line. A second autopsy might even give you an ID.” Tony glanced down at his watch. “I’ve got to run. I promised Izzy I’d tuck her in.” He stood and came around the desk.
He was very close. The coffee scent of his breath washed over my face as I felt the heat coming off him. I’m not psychic, but I can certainly tell when a man is looking at me with interest. Yep. Tony’s dark eyes locked with mine, igniting a spark in the pit of my stomach. My whole body tensed. I was waiting for something, but I didn’t know what that something was. Much to my disappointment, Tony reached for my hand. Much to my pleasure, he held it a few seconds longer than necessary. Maybe planning our wedding wasn’t as far-fetched as I’d thought.
“Thanks for coming by,” he said, his eyes fixated on my mouth.
I knew what he was thinking. Hell, I was thinking the same thing. The offices were deserted, we were consenting adults, and there was definitely a connection. The only reason a man looked at your mouth was a prelude to a kiss. I was at an unexpected crossroad—reach for him or play it safe and walk away.
Depleting most of my self-control, I pivoted and took a slow, deliberate walk down the hall. I didn’t need eyes in the back of my head to know Tony was checking out my butt. That knowledg
e alone was enough to put a smile on my face. I’d won the first round.
Twenty minutes later, I was pulling into the driveway of my uninhabitable home. I’d expected to find Happy Harold the Crack Head. Instead, Liam was seated on the front porch, un-corking a bottle of my favorite red wine.
“You’re trespassing.” I watched as he pulled a hunk of cheese and a baguette from a bag he’d partially hidden behind his back. My empty stomach rumbled. Traitor.
“Nice to see you too,” he replied. “Wine?”
“Yes, thank you.” I sat next to him on the top step. “The stench is gone,” I remarked as I glanced over my shoulder through the open door. “How come there are lights on? Wait, how come there are lights?”
Liam shrugged. “I made a trip to Home Depot and called Florida Power and Light and had service turned on. Oh, there’ll be a onetime fifty-dollar security fee on you-first month’s bill.”
“Don’t you need my Social Security number to do that?”
“Yep.”
I bit off a hunk of bread, chewed it, then swallowed it along with some wine. “Is there anything about me you don’t know?”
“Nope.”
“In case you were wondering, that’s very irritating.”
“Want me to take my wine and food and leave?”
“No.” I turned and offered him my sweetest smile. “I want the wine and food to stay. You’re welcome to leave any time.”
“I had to check on Harold’s work.”
I drained my plastic cup. “Thanks for sending me a drug addict.”
“Recovering.”
“Whatever. He has b-u-l-l and s-h-i-t tattooed on his respective knuckles.”
“Popular prison tat.”
“That’s reassuring and screams professionalism.” I stood and stepped over the wine bottle and went inside the house.
The mushy carpeting was gone, revealing partially rotted wooden subflooring. In the center of the dining room was a small, neatly swept pyramid of debris.
It wasn’t until I sensed Liam behind me that I ventured down the hall to the master bedroom. Harold had pulled up the carpet and carted off the closet doors. As he had done throughout the house, Liam had placed an inexpensive, shadeless table lamp in the center of the room.
3 Fat Chance Page 8
