Lubrano stepped forward, his face flushing red, his hands balling at his sides. “Well, I don’t.”
“Jack,” I whispered. “Be careful. He looks pretty angry.”
Lubrano looked up, straight into my face. “Who the hell is she?”
“Tonight she’s my partner.”
I stared in shock that the man could see me at all. A part of me hoped that Jack had brought me back here as an invisible bystander. Apparently not. I looked down to find myself in a belted linen suit with a pencil-thin skirt—the same shade of gray as Jack’s double-breasted. I felt a small hat pinned to my upswept hair, saw white gloves on my hands—and could only assume that this is what Jack believed a female P.I. should be wearing, if there even was such a thing back in 1946.
“Your partner?” Lubrano snorted derisively. “She’s a dame.”
Jack’s lips tilted in a half-smile. “Ain’t she though.”
Lubrano’s gaze turned nasty, lewd. Slowly, he raked me from head to foot. “Tell you what, dick. Why don’t you take a hike and leave the broad. She and I can, uh . . . talk. And when I’m through giving her what she wants, I’ll lay odds she never goes back to you.”
Because I blinked just then, I failed to see exactly which of Jack’s army jujitsu moves he’d used to render Joey Lubrano helpless. I simply sensed a flurry of movement as Jack exploded from his chair, heard a surprised grunt from Lubrano, then opened my blinking eyes to gawk at the end result—Joey Lubrano’s profile kissing the floor, his arms bent back in what had to be a painful position.
“Don’t disrespect my partner, Lubrano. It makes me mad.”
“Ow! Get off me, dick!”
Jack tightened his grip on the young man’s arms. He wailed in pain.
“All right, all right,” he moaned. “What do you want?”
“First . . . apologize to the lady,” said Jack. And when Lubrano hesitated, he tightened his grip once more.
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. I’m sorry!”
Jack loosened his grip, but only a fraction. “Good boy. Now listen to me and listen good. I’ve found incriminating evidence in your place—”
“What evidence?” spat Lubrano.
“A box of photos. Photos of a naked woman in lewd poses. Photos of a woman that Emily Stendall claims you blackmailed for money and then murdered. Now, after I found those photos, I could have slipped out of here and gone to my client with them—and we both could have gone to the police just like she wanted. But I took a very close look at them, and I’m guessing you have something to tell me, don’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Lubrano.
“Fine, then I’ll haul you out of here and we’ll talk it over at the nearest precinct—the one that apparently missed these photos on their first search of your place. How about that?”
“No! I don’t want to do that,” said Lubrano. “Look, this is all wrong . . . you need to know the whole story.”
“Good. And you need to know that after I let you go, I’ll be covering you with my rod, so don’t try any funny stuff or I’ll pump you so full of lead the Parks Department will designate you a metal sculpture. Got it?”
Lubrano quickly nodded.
“Okay, nice and slow,” said Jack, smoothly releasing Joey while simultaneously reaching for the gun in his shoulder holster.
“Jack,” I whispered after Joey rose and Jack had waved him over to the lumpy sofa. “Why didn’t the police find the photos the first time?”
“Baby, didn’t you learn anything back at the Comfy-Time Motel? Badges don’t always find everything they should—especially when they’re not motivated to look very hard. Joey here kept this shoebox under a loose board beneath a throw rug in his bedroom. A good trick, but not an original one.”
Joey sat down heavily on the old sofa, rubbing his bruised wrists.
“Okay,” said Jack. “Let’s take it from the top.”
Joey spilled it all. How Emily Stendall had been the one with whom he’d been carrying on an affair. How she’d come up with a plan to extort a great deal of money from her sister, Sarah Nolan. The two women looked a lot alike—they were both about the same height and weight, both had delicate features and pale skin. The biggest difference was that Emily’s hair was blonde and Sarah’s was jet black.
So one weekend when the Nolans were away, Emily concocted a story for Benny, the routinely half-inebriated doorman, convincing him that the Nolans had left her a key to water her plants, but she’d lost it.
Once inside, Emily shooed Benny away and slipped Joey in. Lubrano took a series of racy photos of Emily—while she was wearing a black wig styled exactly like Sarah’s hair. The shots were out of focus on the face, but clearly showed that the photos had been of a dark-haired woman of Sarah’s build, in Sarah’s bedroom, wearing Sarah’s jewelry, and stripping out of her private clothes and under-things.
Then, one night, while Sarah’s husband was away on one of his long business trips, Joey charmed his way into Sarah’s apartment and actually did sleep with her.
“It was Emily’s idea that I sleep with Mrs. Nolan,” confessed Lubrano. “She said Mrs. Nolan would feel guilty about it afterward. Then that would give us leverage. She’d be more inclined to pay up because she’d know she wouldn’t be able to lie to her husband and claim she’d never slept with me—when she had.”
Joey showed up with the photos the next night, demanding a cool two hundred fifty thousand, which would clean out Mrs. Nolan’s trust fund. Sarah Nolan broke down and agreed to get the money if he’d just give up the photos and negatives.
“We arranged a night for me to come to her apartment and make the trade,” Lubrano explained. “Then Emily and I were supposed to beat it out of town for Miami. That was our plan all along. The money would let us get married and start living the good life.”
“But it didn’t work out, did it Joey?” said Jack.
Lubrano sighed, shook his head. “The night before we were supposed to do the trade-off, Mrs. Nolan ended up dead. I don’t know what happened, but I had nothing to do with it.”
“I know,” said Jack. “I talked to enough cops that saw you at McSorley’s, making bets on dart throws.”
“Damn right. I was innocent . . . but Emily was furious. Said it was all screwed up now, that Mrs. Nolan probably offed herself, but we deserved our money and we’d get it, too.”
“By blackmailing her husband?” prompted Jack.
“Exactly. But I was scared and wouldn’t go for it,” said Joey, “I still had the photos and Emily demanded I give them up, but I wouldn’t. I told her we should just go to Miami anyways, me and her, but she got nasty and said she wasn’t going anywhere with a rube who had no cash and no future and unless I agreed to her plan she’d get even with me good.”
“What did you do?” prompted Jack.
“I told her to take a hike, that’s what. That broad was good in the sack, but she was all bad out of it, and I’d had it with her.”
Jack nodded. “That’s why Miss Stendall needed me. She wanted me to get those photos back from you so she could go through with the second phase of the blackmailing scheme—to blackmail Sarah Nolan’s husband. And at the same time, she needed to incriminate you.”
Joey’s eyes narrowed. He leaned forward on the sofa. “Doesn’t she know I’d turn on her? The police didn’t believe her once, but if they ever did, and I knew for sure I was going down, I’d take her with me. I’d tell all the stuff about her sleeping with me and posing for the photos and our planning the blackmailing together.”
“She’d never give you that chance. That’s also why she needed me. My bet is she’s about to stage a situation between us where I’ll kill you.”
Joey blinked, confused. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying Emily Stendall played us. And now it’s our turn to play her.”
Jack turned suddenly and winked at me. “Any questions, doll?”
My eyes widened. “At least a d
ozen.”
“Let’s take P.I. school somewhere else, then,” he said, rising. “Excuse us, Joey.”
Jack grabbed my hand and kissed it. In an instant, we were no longer in a shabby, two-room walk-up flat. Above us, the chandeliers of Manhattan’s elegant Plaza Hotel shimmered. Jack offered his arm and I took it. We glided across the carpet to a small candle-lit marble table in a remote part of the palm-filled lobby.
As we stepped past a gilded mirror, I saw my attire had become decidedly more feminine—my gray linen suit had been exchanged for a deep-green satin dress with a turned-up collar, daring neckline, and matching pumps. My auburn hair was down, falling in perfect waves around my face and looking sleeker than I’d ever been able to style it in my life.
We sat down at the small marble table, and Jack ordered champagne. It arrived in a silver bucket, poured by a white-gloved, black-jacketed waiter into shallow crystal glasses.
“Okay, shoot,” he said, after enjoying a long swallow. “Not literally, baby.” He winked. “Just ask me what you want to know.”
“First, finish the story. What happened to you and Joey and Emily?”
“I brought Emily Stendall some but not all of the photos. Remember, baby, holding on to some of the evidence is smart insurance in case something goes wrong—like that bullet in Johnny’s car.”
I nodded silently, the champagne going far too easily down my throat.
Jack continued. “Shortly after she got those photos, Miss Stendall began her blackmailing of Mr. Nolan. She also arranged for me to walk in on her and Joey together. She lured Joey to her hotel room in an apparent ploy to make up with him, but once I walked in, she began to pretend he was assaulting her. ‘Let me go. Help, Jack. He’s got a gun!’ and words to that effect.
“But I was wise to the situation. Told her maybe I should use my gun—on her. While she’d been seducing Lubrano, he’d gotten her to admit out loud to everything: the original scheme against Sarah Nolan, and the one against her husband. We’d hidden a microphone in the room, see? The police were next door, listening, with a tape recorder going.”
“Okay, first question: How did you know for sure those photos weren’t really Sarah Nolan? How could you be sure Emily was telling you lies?”
“I’d been sleeping with Emily. I knew she had an hourglass shaped birthmark on her . . .” Jack’s voice trailed off. He glanced around the elegant lobby. “Uh, derriere.”
“Okay, I see. You recognized that same birthmark in the photos?”
“Bingo, sister.”
“Sister,” I murmured, shaking my head. “I never would have suspected Emily, Jack. I never would have thought a woman was capable of perpetuating such a nasty fraud on her own flesh and blood.”
“Then you never would have discovered that Sarah Nolan wasn’t Emily’s flesh and blood.”
“What?”
“She was her sister all right, but only her sorority sister. That’s what clued me in early on. When I saw Mrs. Nolan’s birth date was barely eight months after Emily’s, I got suspicious, started looking into their backgrounds, discovered they’d gone to school together. So what lesson do you deduce from that, sweetheart?”
I blinked. “Uh . . . I don’t know.”
Jack sighed. “When you realize that a person is lying to you—or consciously misrepresenting something—you want to suspect they have more to hide.”
“Oh, sure. Right.” I gulped down my champagne in its entirety. Jack poured more.
“I kept digging and I also discovered that Sarah Nolan’s husband had been Emily’s beau for a time back during their college years.”
“So Emily was jealous?”
“She must have been—and angry, too, very angry. Emily’s own family had disowned her by then and her money was running out. Meanwhile, Sarah had a huge trust fund and a husband with even more loot. Emily obviously came downtown to hire me because she thought she’d find a low-rent dick who’d wouldn’t question the story of a woman like her—with her pedigree and pretty little pout. Especially not after she started sleeping with me, which was, frankly, the first thing that got me thinking I was being played.”
“That’s really why you slept with her? As part of your own investigation technique?”
Jack’s eyebrow arched. “What does your gut tell you, Penelope?”
“That you’re full of it.”
“I’ll tell you what, doll. Emily Stendall made the mistake of thinking that because my office was shabby that my sense of justice was, too. But she thought wrong.”
“You didn’t fall for her, Jack, not even a little bit?”
“Most men stop thinking when a dame’s perfume goes to their head. And I wasn’t completely immune. After we became intimate, I wanted to believe her pitch was innocent . . . I didn’t want to believe she was rotten to the core. But when I was presented with evidence, I let go of what I wanted and faced the music. I did what I had to do. You hearing me, Penelope?”
I swallowed hard, looked down at the dissipating bubbles in the remainder of my champagne. “You’re telling me that Johnny might be innocent like Joey . . . or that he might be as guilty as Emily. And if he is, I have to accept that. Just like you accepted Emily’s guilt.”
“Yeah, you got it.”
I drained my glass. “I don’t know if I can do that.”
“You’re stronger than you think, Penelope.”
“I don’t see how you can say that. I was such a coward out there . . . in the woods . . .”
Jack reached out, and his fingers began to tuck strands of my auburn hair behind my ear. “The woods are where the wolves live, sweetheart . . . a little fear is a smart thing . . . as long as you don’t let it keep you from doing what you need to do . . .”
My eyes met his, and I felt his hand move from my ear to the back of my neck. The light pressure was all it took for me to give in to his kiss, deep and warm and relaxing. I felt the buzz of the champagne and wrapped my hands around his neck. He pulled me hard against him.
“Baby,” he growled. “What you do to me . . .”
“Oh, Jack . . .”
“Listen . . .” He smiled. “This joint looks classy enough. Let me get us a room . . .”
“I can’t, Jack . . . I have a son . . . and I think . . . I think I’m still married—”
Jack’s kiss stopped my words. Then my alarm clock stopped Jack’s kiss. With its penetrating warmth still lingering, I opened my eyes to find the morning sun blasting through my open window and Jack’s tempting offer faded with the stars.
CHAPTER 22
Casing the Joint
My head was still booming away and I tried to fix it up with a hot shower. That helped, but a mess of bacon and eggs helped even more.
—Detective Mike Hammer in The Big Kill by Mickey Spillane, 1951
I SAT BLEARY-EYED in church that morning—so tired I hardly noticed my son’s impatient restlessness, so tired my aunt had to poke me now and again to keep me awake during the pastor’s seemingly interminable sermon.
The nightmare discovery in the woods, followed by a night of Jack’s dreams, had me crawling out of bed that morning with a feeling of impending doom. After the service I said good-bye to Sadie, reminding her to pass Johnny’s letter to Mina when the girl arrived for work.
Stuffed with hot homemade doughnuts and strong coffee—and milk for Spencer—we left Cooper’s Bakery and climbed into our mud-spattered, weed-encrusted blue Saturn for the trip to Newport. The food helped immensely, and I felt the fortifying sugar rush as I got behind the wheel.
It was a radiant morning, a cloudless azure sky, fresh cool breezes off the ocean, sunlight gold and dazzling. I snatched my seldom-worn sunglasses from the underside of the driver’s-side visor to shield my bloodshot eyes from the glare.
“You wore those last year, too,” my son remarked, tapping the dash in time to one of those boy band groups on Radio Disney.
“Wore what?”
“Your Hollywood sunglasses.”
>
I smiled. “Maybe I was wearing my contact lenses last year, too.”
“Maybe you just want to look like all the other mommies there. They all act like movie stars.”
Out of the mouths of babes. “Maybe that, too.”
Besides the shades, I was also wearing new clothes specifically purchased for this annual event—white capri pants, a pastel sweater set, and Italian sandals with a matching bag. All were expensive designer quality, which would help me blend into the McClure ranks, but bought at outlet prices, which is all I could now afford. And, frankly, I was grateful to have the long sleeves of the summer-weight sweater. It was warm, but I had some pretty nasty scratches on my arms from running topless through the woods.
Traffic was light and we were making good time as we neared the ramp to the highway. But as we came around a bend, Spencer cried out. “Look, Mom! Cops. Lots of them.”
I braked, rolling up behind several other vehicles. Squad cars were parked along both shoulders of the road, bubble lights flashing. Several belonged to the Quindicott police force but the majority were sleek silver Ford Crown Victorias with Rhode Island State Police markings.
For a moment, traffic remained at a dead stop. Several drivers were rubbernecking at the state police in their gray uniforms and “Smoky the Bear” hats swarming through the wooded area behind the Comfy-Time Motel.
“Move along, move along,” called Officer Franzetti as he waved his arms at the traffic jam. The gawkers stepped on the gas and sped away. With no cars behind my own, I stopped next to Eddie and rolled down the window. I tried to offer the handsome police officer my most clueless smile. “What’s up, Eddie?”
He motioned my car to an empty spot along the shoulder of the road.
“What’s wrong, Mom?” asked Spencer beside me.
“I just want to ask Eddie for some directions, that’s all,” I lied. From my son’s expression, I could tell even he didn’t buy that, but I told him I’d be right back. Then I climbed out of the car and approached Eddie.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“The State Police got an anonymous tip last night. A woman caller, alerting them to the fact that a corpse was in the woods behind the Comfy-Time Motel.”
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