What might have been a flare of triumph, however, was doused by a shower of dismay. Hal and Rita were an item? It made perfect sense that one crook would crave another. And it made Melanie furious.
The man was wasting himself. His melting brown eyes and nonstop body deserved better than that makeup-laden, sticky-fingered dame Rita. And Melanie would make sure he figured that out, right before she dumped him.
“This is not a summit,” said Grampa. “It is an informal meeting with my grandson to offer him good wishes in his new business venture.”
“And possibly to raise capital,” said the round-headed, round-faced Cha Cha, with a smile that flashed and vanished like a card in a magician’s hand.
“So we are talking business.” With a fluid motion, Hal swung the chair around and sat in it. Offhandedly, he gestured to Melanie to take the seat beside him.
Chet remained standing. A tinge of color returned to his freckled face, but he continued to clutch his portfolio and a shopping bag as if his life depended on them. Which, possibly, it did.
“A legitimate venture, of course,” said Grampa.
“Nuttin’ that would interest you,” said Bone Crusher.
The way they were regarding Hal, they were all—with the possible exception of Drop Dead—afraid of him. These big, tough gangsters lived in fear of a man who had held Melanie in his arms as softly as an angel.
But then, she reminded herself, Hal was a pushover for broads. No doubt he’d held Rita with the same tenderness, and maybe done even more interesting things beneath her sweater.
The thought made Melanie feel hot and cold at the same time. Ruthlessly, she brushed away her jealousy. She didn’t want a man, she wanted adventure. And adventure was what she was sitting right in the middle of.
“As a matter of fact, I would be very interested in a legitimate business deal,” Hal told his two-timing friends.
Grampa made a tent with his fingers and tapped the tips together with staccato rapidity. “We are doing this only as a favor to my grandson. He has come up, I believe, with some technology that could earn decent profits for an honest man.”
“Who you callin’ an honest man?” rasped Drop Dead.
“No need to take offense.” Cha Cha reached out as if to pat the gargoyle’s gnarled hand, but apparently thought better of it.
“We are all, as you know, Hal, virtually retired anyway. It is merely a matter of raising capital to give the lad a start in life,” said the Swamp Fox.
He, Melanie recalled, had earned that nickname after he successfully set an arson fire in the middle of a flood. He was absolved in court after the jury learned that he had been hired by a group of little old ladies to torch a strip joint. The fact that the strip joint had failed to pay its protection money was excluded from evidence by the judge, who later retired to the Bahamas.
“So.” Grampa quirked one eyebrow at his grandson. “Show us what you have.”
Eagerly, the young man opened the portfolio and removed several drawings. After clipping these to an easel set up in the corner, he plucked the metallic dog from its shopping bag and set it on the scuffed floor.
Melanie had to wiggle around to see the drawings. In the one on the left, stick figures were scrubbing and sweeping inside a tube. The sketch on the right showed futuristic cars veering along a maze of overpasses while their drivers read the newspaper and dined on lobster.
“Robots!” declared the young man, his voice rising an octave on the second syllable. “They’re going to revolutionize our lives!”
A sharp yip cut him off. Chet frowned down at his mechanical dog, which responded by sinking its metallic teeth into his trousers leg.
With a grimace, he reached down and switched it off. “A security device,” he said. “It’s just a toy, really. To build something more sophisticated, I’ll need money.”
“You were talking robots?” prompted his grandfather.
“The wave of the future!” With a flourish, Chet pointed to the first sketch. “Miniaturized robots will enter our bloodstreams and do everything from battle germs to repair our genes. And look at these robotic cars—they drive themselves!”
Remembering her job, Melanie took notes. Little bloodsuckers. She glanced at the sketch of the motorists. Drivers reading and eating—what else is new?
“Is someone not already testing a prototype for robotic cars?” asked Hal.
“Yeah, but they require a special roadway setup that’s prohibitively expensive,” Chet said. “I think we can make something practical for the roads that already exist.”
“Getaway cars that drive themselves.” Grampa brightened. “Who would have thought of that?”
“But curin’ the sick?” scoffed Bone Crusher. “What’s that gonna do to our reputation? Already we gotta worry about the Russians and the Japanese makin’ us look like wimps.”
“Maybe they could fight fat,” suggested Cha Cha. “There’s a lot of money in fighting fat. I happen to know that Mrs. Noreen Pushkoshky spends fifty thousand dollars a year fighting fat, and where she leads, every dame in Beverly Hills follows.”
Melanie remembered seeing the name N. Pushkoshky on the list of charitable souls taking Rita’s Rescue the Whales cruise. The widow of restaurateur Vladimir Pushkoshky was indeed wealthy enough to have her arteries scraped by robots if she wanted to.
“Robots schmobots,” said Drop Dead. “It’s a dumb idea.”
“Robots can go into fires and rescue people!” Chet’s enthusiasm overrode his natural timidity. “They can handle toxic substances! Help parents keep an eye on their kids!”
“Picture this.” The Swamp Fox leaned across the table. “We get a contract to operate private prisons. Then we use the cons to make robots, okay? Only like we use some kind of mind-control ray so the robots absorb everything the crooks know about how to break into bank vaults!”
“Mind-control ray?” Chester Orion III gaped at him. “This isn’t science fiction! I’m talking about a real business venture here!”
“The kid has good ideas.” Hal sat back in his chair. “Count me in.”
Silence descended upon the room. It was broken a minute later by Grampa, who thumped his fist on the table and shouted, “I knew it!”
“Knew what?” asked Hal.
“That you would try to muscle in! Take over the racket!” roared the king of the crime family, his oversize nose turning even redder than usual. “Who put this kid through college? Who gave him his genes? Anything he invents, it’s mine!”
Chester Orion III snatched the two drawings from the easel and stuffed them into his portfolio. “No, Grampa,” he said with more starch than he’d probably ever shown before in his life. “It’s mine.”
With that, he turned and stomped out of the room. The reverberations must have activated the mechanical dog, because it yipped and scurried after him.
Hal gave a long, lazy stretch. “Well, Grampa,” he said, “it appears we may be bidding for the same project. What say we join forces?”
Unwilling admiration flickered in the old man’s face. “You always was a tough customer,” he conceded. “You talk my grandson into coming back to the conference table tonight, and we’ll see.”
“Consider it done,” said Hal. “Now, is anybody else hungry?”
Grumbling and muttering among themselves, the other gangsters agreed that maybe they were and maybe they weren’t Then they all got up and rushed toward the dining room.
Left alone with Hal, Melanie closed her notebook. Before she could tuck it into her purse, however, he lifted it neatly from her hands, ripped out the scribbled-on pages and shredded them into the wastebasket.
“Hey!” she protested.
“A wise guy leaves no paper trail.” After returning the notebook, Hal took her elbow and assisted Melanie to her feet.
“You really are interested in a legitimate business opportunity, aren’t you?” she asked as he towed her toward the door. “Why not just come out and say so?”
&nb
sp; “Because they would not respect such a man,” said Hal.
“And that matters to you because Grampa is your substitute father?” she said. “Aren’t you a little old to be trying to win his approval?”
“‘Honor thy father and thy mother,’” he said. “There is no cutoff age for the Ten Commandments.”
He sounded sad, and she remembered that both of his real parents were dead. She had never imagined that a thing like that would matter to a criminal.
Melanie hurried alongside as he paced through the bleak courtyard toward the dining room. Although her watch indicated that it was after 6:00 a.m., only a weak amberish light sneaked past the gathering clouds that showed through a break in the fog. “What about ‘Thou shalt not steal’? Not to mention ‘Thou shalt not kill’?”
A sharp wind whipped away his answer. She caught something about “a matter of interpretation.”
Despite an itch to argue further, Melanie held her tongue. After all, she herself had not spent a great deal of time honoring her father, except in absentia.
It had been half a dozen years since she’d seen Dad. Wendy wrote that he was enjoying retirement and even dating occasionally, and that he spent every Sunday afternoon playing with her kids.
Melanie couldn’t picture her drawn, weary father playing with anyone. Or dating. Or holding her the way Hal had done when she awoke from her nightmare.
Why had this gangster shown such tenderness toward her, anyway? Her skin tingled with the memory of how it felt to be held against Hal’s hard body. Even now, inhaling his musky tang gave her a tipsy sensation.
She hadn’t expected him to be so quick-witted, either. He always seemed to be one step ahead of the other men, but never arrogant. One step ahead of her, too; he’d caught her off guard when he’d confiscated her notes.
When they entered the dining room, a new and far less pleasant odor slapped her brain. It made her wonder how half a dozen gangsters, not to mention the family from the shuffleboard court, could sit around looking as if they planned to eat something.
At least someone had attempted to spruce up the room with wallpaper, but Melanie wished they’d chosen something other than gray and black stripes on a mustard background. Neither did she care for the black pull-down blinds hanging crookedly on the casement windows.
“What is that smell?” she asked.
“Prison food.” Hal eyed the trencher-style tables and the backless benches. “Where would you like to sit?”
“At a McDonald’s,” said Melanie. “Or we could send out for Chinese. Know anyplace that delivers by helicopter?”
Nearby, a couple of gangsters glanced up. No longer restrained by the formalities of a summit, Cha Cha called, “Honey, the best seat around here is on my lap!”
“I saw the dame first!” growled Drop Dead.
In the corner, a solitary Chet Orion gave a halfhearted wave. Before they could respond, a waiter in a black-andwhite jumpsuit shuffled through a swinging door and plopped a couple of trays on the tables. The food looked and smelled like week-old leftovers doused with ketchup.
Chet turned green. Grampa pulled out an embroidered handkerchief and covered his nose.
“Where’s the kitchen?” Melanie demanded. “Never mind. I can see for myself.” Ignoring the puzzled stares of the other diners, she headed for the swinging door.
Trust men to sit back and eat swill. If there was one thing she knew, it was how to cook guerrilla-style. And since Casa Falsario came as close to a war zone as anything she’d experienced, she intended to fix breakfast herself.
HAL ARRIVED in the kitchen in time to see a pair of tattooladen ex-cons staring in disbelief at the shapely figure of Melanie Mulcahy. A long column of ash dropped from one man’s cigarette into the stew, or hash, or whatever he was cooking.
“Got a clean pan?” she asked.
Both close-cropped heads shook no. Shouldering past the cooks, Melanie rummaged through the cabinets and came up with a crud-encrusted cast-iron skillet. “Wash this,” she ordered.
Reluctantly, one of the men complied, grimacing as he scrubbed. “It’s a cryin’ shame to waste all this good grease.”
“There’s plenty more where that came from,” said Melanie. “Where are the eggs? Got any onions? How about cheese?”
The other ex-con thrust out a hunk of bluish-gray cheddar through which peeped a few patches of orange. He grinned as if expecting her to withdraw in a fit of squeamishness, but Melanie grasped the cheese, rinsed off a cutting board and began hacking away.
“You can trim this stuff and the cheese is fine,” she advised Hal and the welter of diners who crowded in to watch. “With peanut butter, you have to throw the whole jar away, because peanut mold causes cancer.”
The gangsters shuddered.
In no time, Melanie sautéed the onions, cracked a couple dozen eggs and whipped up a giant omelette. “This works better with ostrich eggs,” she advised. “They’re big enough to feed an army. Wild-bird eggs are the hardest because they’re so small. But you have to make do with what you’ve got”
Everyone looked impressed.
Hal had never met a woman like this before. Melanie had no fear, and she wasn’t putting on airs, either. Unlike most of the dames he knew, she actually seemed to live inside her body.
Against the drab, steely kitchen, she made a splash of color as she whisked about in her red beret. Her continental insouciance went oddly with her sometimes coltish movements, yet he was rapidly becoming convinced that tall thin women with short brown hair were the loveliest creatures on earth.
Soon the diners were filing back into the main room, each carrying a plate of eggs. Melanie herself didn’t depart until she had inventoried the kitchen and given the ex-cons directions on what to prepare for dinner.
“You mean, eat them oranges?” one cook sputtered. “I thought they was for decoration.”
The other shook his head. “I never heard of nobody draining no fat”
“Live and learn.” Handing a plate to Hal, Melanie marched through the swinging door with her own omelette.
Hal couldn’t take his eyes off her. He was grateful when Chet finished eating and departed, so the two of them could sit alone.
He didn’t want to share Melanie’s company with anyone else. This was odd, because most dames aroused in him an urge to socialize with as many people as possible. It was hard to recall a single moment that he and Rita had spent in private, aside from the one in which she requested that he get rid of Melanie.
“So,” he said as they ate, “you have a certain familiarity with kitchens?”
“They inspire some of my best poems,” she said.
“Care to recite one?”
Her mouth, however, was filled with eggs, and she waved off the question. Hal did not mind. He almost thought, at this moment when he was staring at Melanie, that he might compose poetry himself.
Your hat is red
Your eyes is green.
Youse the prettiest dame
I ever seen.
He was definitely not going to recite that in front of Grampa Orion’s gang. It was bad enough they were eyeing him and Melanie speculatively; he could feel the Swamp Fox’s smirk.
The chump must be wondering what Hal planned to do about Rita. The truth was, he had no idea.
To distract himself, Hal said, “Is this the most unusual place in which you have cooked?”
“Not by a long shot,” said Melanie.
“What is?”
“Peru,” she said. “In the middle of a hostage situation on a chicken farm. The rebel leader caught me hiding in one of the coops.”
“Why were you there?” Hal asked.
“A person has to be very aggressive in the pursuit of poetry,” Melanie replied. “It is fortunate I could cook or I might have become a hostage myself.”
“I do not believe I have heard of Peruvian rebels taking hostages on a chicken farm,” he admitted.
“The hostages sneaked out while we w
ere eating dinner.” A small sigh issued from her well-defined lips. “It was not the kind of situation that makes the front pages. The back pages, maybe.”
Since they had finished their food, Hal repeated his offer to buy whatever she needed at the gift shop. Melanie considered briefly. “I would like a toothbrush.”
“As many as you need.”
“One will do,” she said. “As long as it’s red.”
When they left their table, half a dozen pairs of eyes followed them. More than that, if you counted the McAllisters, who broke off debating the fine points of cheating at shuffleboard.
“She looks like a model,” said young Alice McAllister with a sigh, watching Melanie.
“The way men stare at her,” said her mother-in-law, “she would make a terrific decoy at a senior citizens’ convention. What do you think, Joe?”
Hal didn’t hear the answer. He didn’t want to hear it. Although he subscribed to the principle that thieves should confine themselves to ripping off their own kind, he did not think of the elderly as fair game for anyone.
As far as he was concerned, the McAllisters should retire. However, it was not his place to give advice to other members of the underworld.
The gift shop lay adjacent to the dining room. From the courtyard, a small display window was visible through metal bars, but it was empty. Hal knew that cigarettes and cigars were vended one at a time, prison-style, and he could only hope the toothbrushes were not pre-honed to a knifepoint.
Inside, a wrinkled granny sat on a stool, crocheting a scarf at least two stories long. This was Pixie LaBelle, who doubled as the cleaning lady.
Before organizing crooked beauty contests, she was reputed to have run a bawdy house in San Francisco. That must have been a very long time ago, Hal reflected, and yet Pixie still had a mischievous way of sizing up a man that implied she hadn’t entirely lost her touch.
“Help you?” she croaked.
“Toothbrush?” asked Melanie. “Red, please.”
The elderly woman surveyed the dusty shelves. Although the merchandise was enclosed in plain brown cartons that appeared indistinguishable to Hal, she quickly found the item requested.
Kidnapped / I Got You Babe Page 5
