No Way To Kill A Lady

by Nancy Martin

  But Emma had phoned him tonight when she needed help. And he’d come running.

  I wondered how soon they’d get around to discussing their baby.

  After a while, Michael came into the bathroom with Madeleine’s black ledger. He sat on the edge of the tub, unbuttoning his shirt one-handed and skimming the pages with a puzzled frown on his face. “What is this, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. It was important to Aunt Madeleine, that’s all I’m certain of. A long time ago she asked me to destroy it when she died.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He went back into the bedroom and came back a minute later with his shirt off and wearing his reading glasses. “Have you read any of this stuff?”

  My first glimpse of Michael’s naked, post-prison shoulders took my breath away. His jeans rode low on his hips, too, showing a tantalizing expanse of touchable muscle. It took all my self-control not to pull him down into the water that instant. Although my mouth had gone dry, I managed to say in an almost normal voice, “I haven’t had a chance yet. Why?”

  “It’s . . . I dunno. It’s definitely a list of transactions.”

  “What kind of transactions? Household expenses, you mean?”

  “No,” he said.

  At that moment, his cell phone rang again, and he went back into the bedroom to answer it.

  I finished my bath as he spoke to someone on the phone, then made another call. I could tell from his tone it was business. Part of me hoped he’d shut off his phone for the night and join me in the tub. We’d begun many passionate nights just that way—soaking and talking and exploring. I felt myself tremble at the memory of fierce love we’d made together. But now, he was distracted. Big-time.

  I pulled the plug from the drain and climbed out of the water, maybe not exactly fully in possession of my wits, but smelling wonderful, if I do say so. While Michael murmured in the bedroom, I wrapped myself in a plush towel. I shook my hair out, buffed it almost dry and left it tousled. I brushed my teeth and looked at my reflection in the mirror while holding the towel against my glowing body. I looked good. Maybe not like the vixenish courtesan Libby probably became when she was in the mood, or the dangerous sexpot Emma undoubtedly was in the bedroom.

  But I could hold my own.

  On the shelf over the tub I kept a collection of candles. Some of them had been gifts from Libby—probably from her peace-and-seduction-loving friends at the Pink Windowbox. With my sister’s words of wisdom ringing in my ears, I lit two of the candles and carried them into the bedroom, still wrapped in my towel. I put the candles on the bedside table and snapped off the lamp. Instant ambiance. With a bottle of lotion, I sat on the edge of the bed.

  I handed the bottle to Michael, and he pinned the phone to his shoulder while listening to his caller. He lathered up his hands and smoothed the fragrant cream onto my bare back.

  “Okay,” he finally said to his caller. “If you take any more bets, you cover them yourself, got it? We’re out.”

  When he terminated the call, then shut off the phone and dropped it onto the bed, I said, “How’s your gambling situation?”

  “It’d be easier if there weren’t so many big football games this weekend.”

  “Exactly how much money does the Abruzzo family make in the gambling business?”

  “About a million two a day.”

  I must have been out of my wits for asking the question in the first place. But when I heard the answer, I utterly forgot about seduction. I clutched my towel tight, turned around and blinked at him. “A million dollars? Every day?”

  He seemed equally surprised at having blurted out the information to me. “About that, yeah. Depends on what sports are in season. It’s divided up, of course.”

  “Divided among your employees, you mean.”

  “The employees aren’t mine.” He turned me around again and applied the lotion. “And some are more like partners. At various levels, there are street guys and management guys. And in-between guys. It’s complicated.”

  “And lucrative.”

  “Well, that’s why nobody really wants to stop doing it.”

  “I wonder,” I said tentatively, “if there’s a way to keep doing it a little bit? Just enough to fix the roof, maybe?”

  He laughed. “That’s how it starts. First it’s fixing the roof, and then you’ll want a condo in Fort Lauderdale, and next thing you know you’re negotiating the price of a compound in Switzerland.”

  “I can see how it could be very tempting.”

  “I’m pretty sure you have no idea how tempting.” Michael feathered lotion onto my skin.

  “And the stolen cars? What about that?”

  For the first time in our relationship, Michael didn’t decline to discuss an Abruzzo family business. “It’s more adventure, less payoff. Guy in Serbia wants a new Mercedes, one of my idiot cousins goes shopping at the mall parking lot.”

  “You ship to Serbia?”

  “And Libya and Turkey. A few places in between. Lots of South America. Venezuela. Haiti, too, maybe, but I’m not sure yet. Basically, the more unstable the country, the better for business. You don’t want to know more.”

  No, I didn’t really want to know more. Carrie had been right about me—I was a little brainwashed. All I truly knew was that tonight I wanted to forget it all except that Michael was here with me in the candlelight. Totally with me. His hands felt wonderful, and I could feel his attention slowly leave whatever business he was conducting and transfer to the job at hand. His touch grew more gentle, more languid. And when he finally brushed his lips to the back of my neck, I closed my eyes and released an unsteady sigh of desire.

  “I’ve missed you,” I whispered.

  “I’m here now,” he said against my skin.

  I put my hand up to his cheek.

  In my ear, he said, “I wanted to be here for you during Lexie’s hearing. Was it bad?”

  “Terrible. But I— For some reason, it was important for me to get through it alone. I owed Lexie my full attention.”

  “You would,” he said with wry affection.

  “It was difficult for me, but horrible for her. I’m not sure she’ll ever forgive me, Michael. She’d have run away rather than face the judge, say what she did, if I hadn’t insisted that she stay. So I wanted to stand with her. Take the punches, if that makes any sense.”

  He kissed my bare shoulder. “It does.”

  “But I worry she’s lost to me forever.”

  “You made the right choice.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “Lexie had to face the consequences. It’s part of the process.”

  “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time?”

  Michael didn’t respond to that banality. In a moment, he said, “She’s got to think things over for a while. It’ll be good for her.”

  “Will she think about—what? Redeeming herself?”

  “Whatever you want to call it. Changing her life. She was getting to be a powerful person. I know what that does to a soul. She’ll see that, if it isn’t too late. I don’t think she’s gone forever.”

  “Michael,” I said after a while, “Libby said something today.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  I smiled at his pretended trepidation. “No, it made me think. She said I’m the one who has to make the tough decisions. She wants me to talk to Rawlins about college. And to Emma about her baby. But I—why does it have to be me?”

  “It takes a lot of strength to make a hard choice.”

  “I’m not strong.”

  “Yeah, you are.”

  “Todd, though.” I thought of the worst failure of my life—the thing that still pained my heart. “I couldn’t keep Todd away from the drugs. I should have had him arrested, maybe, or sent to rehab—something, anything. But I—I couldn’t do that.”

  “Now you could,” Michael said. “Because he died. You’d make the hard choice now. You’ve already done it. For Lexie. With me.”

  “I haven’t
made any choices for you.”

  “You’ve given me the choices, and I had to pick. Either you or the life.” He pulled me back against him and was silent for a while, holding me snug. When he spoke again, his voice was rough in my ear. “I love you.”

  He had stopped caressing me, so I said, “Are you okay?”

  “I’m getting there.” He let out a sigh, and his breath was warm along the nape of my neck. “Look, I’m not sure I can explain it. But there’s . . . You have to keep up a lot of shields in prison. Hold yourself inside.”

  “You don’t have to do that with me.”

  “No, but—I haven’t been able to turn the switch, you know?”

  He’d always been able to burn off excess energy by going to work—immersing himself in the day-to-day management of whatever marginally criminal activities captured his creative mind at the time. He enjoyed outsmarting adversaries, took pleasure in staying just on the edge of the system.

  My sisters laughingly called him the Mafia Prince, and part of me knew that’s exactly what he was—a prince of darkness, albeit one struggling to fight off his natural tendencies and find his way into the light. I worried that trapped at home, he had no release valve.

  I had a feeling it was easier for him to tell me what was in his heart without looking into my face, so I leaned back into him. “You can’t hurt me.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I can.”

  I pushed the towel away and took his hands in mine. I guided them up to touch my body, to explore all the places that ached for his attention. He let out a shaky sigh in my ear. When I drew his hand into my warmest, most tender spot, he gave up trying to hold back. We peeled off the rest of his clothes and pushed the bedclothes out of the way for a long, slow, luxurious reacquaintance. There was a stormy interlude in the middle, but I let him take what he needed. Maybe I needed it, too.

  A couple of hours after we started, we went downstairs and made an enormous meal.

  Emma and Hart were gone. Emma had left a note. She’d call tomorrow. While the food cooked, Michael pulled me into the scullery and stripped off my bathrobe again just to kiss me all over. We ate as if famished for more sustenance than mere pasta and went back up to bed to sleep wrapped tightly together, as if to prevent ever being apart again. For a few hours, it felt good to forget about our complicated lives.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In the morning, I took care not to wake Michael when I slipped out of the bedroom.

  I carried Madeleine’s book downstairs and found the drafty old kitchen as cold as a cave and cluttered with the dishes we’d abandoned during the night. I reread Emma’s note. She had gone off with Hart, she wrote. She’d call later. Emma’s absence had given us the privacy of the house, but I wondered where she had spent the night. And how.

  I lit the oven and left its door open to heat the room while I brewed coffee. Since the oven was already warming, I decided to bake muffins. As I worked, I thought about my little sister and what a disaster she could make of her life if she didn’t think things through.

  My thoughts traveled back to last night’s encounter with the bones in the woods. I washed the dishes while the muffins baked, considering my options.

  As I dried my wooden mixing spoon, I gathered my courage. After tucking the spoon into its slot in the drawer, I phoned the police.

  The state police arrived around nine: a plainclothes detective and a stern state trooper in uniform. The uniformed trooper was the same one who’d followed us home from the church, so I assumed he had tagged along with the detective to check up on Michael. I let them in and poured coffee.

  Setting a plate of muffins on the table, I told them I’d found a skeleton in the woods near Shirley van Vincent’s house.

  They stared at each other, clearly unprepared for this bit of news.

  I didn’t bother to explain why I was wandering around at night, and maybe they were too surprised to ask. I told them in detail what I’d found and where.

  The trooper jotted notes and stepped outside to make a call.

  While he spoke on his cell phone, the detective finally noticed my trembling hands and made the effort to assure me that bodies were frequently found in the woods. “It was probably a homeless person or a hunter or maybe someone with dementia who wandered away from home. Sometimes people just disappear. It happens all the time.”

  “But,” I said, “surely somebody reported this person missing?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, but the body wasn’t found until now. Who knows how long it’s been there? Don’t let it bug you. We’ll check it out.”

  When the trooper returned, we sat at the kitchen table. The detective questioned me for nearly an hour about the case on their front burner—relentlessly going over the details of what I’d seen at Madeleine’s house when the body in the elevator was found. Feeling guilty for having left the scene of the crime—even one that had been committed twenty years ago—I patiently answered all his questions.

  “Have you identified the body in the elevator?” I asked at last.

  The detective told me the process would take weeks.

  Finally, I said, “Madeleine Blackbird had some very distinctive jewelry. Three diamond rings she always wore.”

  The two of them sat still and absorbed what I had said. They glanced at each other again.

  I had decided it was ridiculous to pretend we hadn’t guessed it was Madeleine herself in the elevator. Sutherland may have had his reasons for keeping the truth from the police, but I did not. In fact, I was pretty peeved with Sutherland.

  I told the detective about Madeleine’s postcards, and when he realized what I already knew—that someone had pretended to be Madeleine after her death—he was suddenly on my side. I handed over one of the postcards and suggested there might be a way to compare the handwriting. If Pippi had been pretending to be Madeleine, maybe somewhere there existed a sample of her handwriting? We brainstormed together quite companionably. They finally accepted muffins, and the two of them even laughed when I made a joke about Sutherland.

  I did not tell them that the black leather-bound book that lay on the table right in front of them was the one I’d had stolen out of Madeleine’s home.

  Only when they prepared to leave did the uniformed trooper ask after Michael.

  “He’s sleeping,” I said, although I’d already heard the shower turn on upstairs. “He had a long night. Can you come back later?”

  They assured me they didn’t need to, and we parted on pleasant terms.

  I was sitting at the table, sipping hot coffee and reading Aunt Madeleine’s ledger, when Libby drove up and pounded on the back door. Against my better judgment, I let her in.

  She blew in like a storm, carrying her year-old son, Max, into the kitchen. “Do you know there’s a pig on your porch?”

  “His name is Ralphie.”

  “Never mind. You won’t believe this. I spent last night being interrogated by the police—and they were all business, not even a spark of concern for a private citizen’s emotional well-being. The whole ordeal was agonizing and exhausting, so I desperately need a break this morning. But my usual babysitter has cramps, which is terribly inconsiderate, so I’m throwing myself on your mercy.” She pushed Max into my arms and stopped her tirade long enough to take a long, speculative look at me. “Good heavens, Nora, you look positively ten years younger today. What have you done to yourself? A facial? Grapefruit? I hear grapefruit does wonders for your skin, but they give me heartburn. Or—oh, for the love of—! You’ve been up all night with That Man of Yours, haven’t you?”

  Since I had already baked the ultimate Libby distraction, I said, “I made muffins. Help yourself.”

  “Ooh, they smell heavenly! Here, take a quick snapshot of me holding one for my PitterPat followers.”

  I took a photo with her cell phone. While she dispatched the picture to her cyber friends and pulled butter from the fridge, I cuddled Max close and gave him kisses. The baby squirmed with delight and grabbed
handfuls of my hair. I wiggled my nose into his tummy to make him giggle.

  “My followers love it when I post food pictures! And last night after those dreadful police finally left, I posted a photo of my new pedicure, and my hits went through the roof! It’s wonderful having so many people paying attention to me. It’s like having a fan club.”

  Libby fluttered around the kitchen—selecting a mug and plate from a cupboard, pouring coffee and choosing a large muffin for herself—before settling at the table like a broody hen getting comfy on her nest. For the morning’s outing, she wore another stretchy tracksuit—ruby red this time—over a T-shirt emblazoned with the word SPECIAL.

  Libby planted her elbows on the table and blew across her coffee, eyes alight. “Now. Tell me everything about the sex. Is he taking out all his pent-up frustrations on you after the forced abstinence? Keeping you awake till all hours? Tying you up, maybe?”

  “Libby, you appall me sometimes.” I fed Max a hunk of my muffin.

  “I don’t mean tying up for real, just for play. You know—captured-slave sex.”

  “No,” I said firmly. “There’s no slave sex whatsoever.”

  “Well, that’s disappointing. I have a theory about tying up. I think some women enjoy that fantasy because it means they don’t have to be in charge for once. We’re saddled with every other responsibility—I mean, after I’ve raised the children, paid the bills, kept the house, fed the dog and made myself desirable by dieting and exercising and exfoliating until my skin literally peels off, shouldn’t I get a pass when it comes to making whoopie? Why shouldn’t somebody tie me down and bear the burden of making the sex great?”

  “That’s actually rather profound, Libby,” I said. “Almost a feminist doctrine.”

  “Thank you. Is he very demanding, though?” Her entire face sparkled. “Insisting you do everything in the book?”

  “I don’t think you and I read the same book, Lib.” Desperate to change the subject, I asked, “How about you? Making any headway with the deputy?”

  She preened, clearly happy to switch to talking about herself. “As a matter of fact, he telephoned yesterday. He asked if I’d accidentally left a spritz bottle of perfume in his car, and could he return it?”