Inherit the Shoes

by E. J. Copperman

  ‘What if I don’t?’ I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else that sounded brave, and saying ‘he’s not my boyfriend’ seemed a bit inappropriate.

  ‘Then you’ll see them flying past your living room window,’ said the voice. ‘And if you call the cops, we’ll know.’

  ‘Who’s we? Why are you—’

  The caller hung up.

  FIFTY-ONE

  The elevator didn’t go to the roof, so I took it to the highest floor, then walked up the stairs. I’d considered bringing a kitchen knife or something else to use as a weapon. I’d heard aerosol oven cleaner can blind an attacker for life, but realized I didn’t own any. Besides, the caller had said ‘we.’ I wouldn’t be able to handle more than one, and there’d been at least two men after us when we first got into the elevator.

  When I opened the door to the roof, I felt a hand behind my head immediately – one that had been expecting me, of course. It guided me to a corner away from the roof entrance.

  ‘Just keep going and do what we say,’ said the gravelly voice behind me.

  A bizarre scene had been set on the far corner of the roof: a mock living room, with an easy chair, a sofa, an end table, and a floor lamp. On the sofa were Patrick and Angie, hands held behind their heads. Patrick looked downright livid, and Angie, more than anything else, was embarrassed. She probably felt she should have seen this coming. But how could anyone? The case was practically over.

  One of the baseball cap men, the one not guiding me to the scene, was standing to one side of the easy chair, holding a gun on Patrick and Angie. With dark glasses over his eyes and his cap pulled down, he might as well have had no face.

  In the easy chair was Silvio Cadenza.

  ‘I should have realized it was you,’ Patrick was saying when I got close enough to hear. ‘You’re the only one demented enough to send these two behemoths out to kill me, and inept enough to fail over and over again! You’ve never gotten one thing right, Silvio.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Cadenza said with a reptilian tone in his voice (or what a reptile might sound like if it had a voice). ‘You give us enough tries, we’ll figure it out.’

  The hand forced me down onto the sofa next to Patrick, then the second baseball cap man, standing to Cadenza’s other side, leveled his gun at us.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Why have you been trying to kill us all this time? What did we ever do to you? You were the one who stole Patrick’s wife.’

  ‘But he stole her from me, forever,’ said Cadenza. ‘He murdered her for spite.’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ Patrick said with disgust. ‘If you’d been in court today—’

  ‘I know what you did, and Patsy’s going to get justice,’ Cadenza said. ‘I don’t care what legal technicality your little Barbie doll here managed to get you off on.’

  Barbie doll?

  ‘Did you nail a doll to my door?’ I asked Cadenza.

  Cadenza’s brows dropped a foot or so, and he looked at the baseball cap men. ‘What the hell is she talking about?’ He looked at me. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Anyway, we’re assembled here to make sure you don’t manage to get away again,’ Cadenza continued with a shrug. ‘You’re going to jump off the roof out of guilt,’ he told Patrick.

  ‘I don’t have any guilt, you idiot. I’m trying to tell you—’

  ‘Save it for the guy at the gates to Hell, if they have gates.’ Cadenza looked around at the Braves fans again. ‘Do they have gates in Hell? They have them in Heaven, which I’ve never understood. Are people trying to get out?’

  ‘What about the two women?’ Patrick asked Cadenza. ‘Neither of them had anything to do with Patsy’s death. Even you must be able to understand that.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s unfortunate,’ Cadenza nodded. ‘Very unfortunate. The lawyer, though, was helping you get away with it. But the other one – too bad. She chose the wrong guy to hang around with, and it’s gonna cost her.’

  ‘Am I going to jump from guilt, too?’ Angie asked. ‘Because I’m not feeling especially guilty.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid your pal Patrick is going to shoot you. He’ll feel even guiltier after that.’ Cadenza motioned to the two cap men. ‘Make sure you empty the gun before you get his fingerprints on it.’

  My mind was racing. There had to be some way to at least stall for time. ‘The shoes!’ I shouted out loud, not even realizing I’d done so.

  ‘Yes,’ Patrick agreed. ‘The shoes!’ He turned toward me. ‘What about them?’

  ‘Why did you bid so high on the shoes?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, why did you call me and bid such a large amount on the shoes?’ Patrick asked. He turned to me. ‘Good question.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Patsy needed money,’ said Cadenza, ‘but she wouldn’t take it from me. So I figured that if I bought something really valuable from her, and paid her all kinds of money for it, she’d have the money and I could still keep the valuable thing for her, so she could sell it to somebody else later on when she needed money again. Pretty shrewd, huh?’

  Yeah, shrewd. You overpay for something to give money to a woman who doesn’t own it and can’t sell it, so you can keep it for her and she can sell it the next time she overshoots the limit on her credit card on Rodeo Drive. That’s a masterstroke, all right. Probably best not to say that out loud.

  ‘So where are the shoes now?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘How the hell should I know?’ Cadenza told him. ‘I never had them.’

  I began realizing I wasn’t dealing with a very clever man here. Of course, I should’ve realized this after the third or fourth failed assassination attempt, but my mind was on the case, OK? Anyway, this not-so-clever thug was still going to kill me, and that, somehow, was insulting.

  ‘Listen carefully, Silvio,’ I said, my voice as calm and soothing as if someone weren’t holding a gun on me and threatening to kill me, my best friend, and my client. ‘Patrick did not kill Patsy. We know who did. It was Lucien DuPrez.’

  Cadenza shrugged. ‘If he did, we’ll deal with him, too. But you’ve already seen us, and we’ve shot at you, and tried to blow you up and slash you, so you have a little too much leverage right now. Let’s get started.’

  ‘What’s with the furniture?’ Angie asked, a little too energetically. Keep him talking.

  ‘I have such a back problem, I can’t tell you,’ Cadenza said. ‘I need a nice soft easy chair. And I figured that if we’re bringing a nice chair along for me, we might as well haul over the rest for you. You shouldn’t have to die uncomfortable. And after you’re all dead, we’ll clean up.’

  Patrick, his face a mask of rage, his arms pulled in to his sides but his hands extended, rose off the couch. ‘You’ll do nothing!’ he shouted. ‘You’ll leave them alone! Wasn’t stealing my wife from me enough?’

  ‘Like you cared,’ Cadenza told him calmly. ‘You didn’t love her. I loved her! I loved her so much I’m gonna kill you for killing her.’

  ‘I didn’t kill her!’ Patrick screamed. He took a step toward Cadenza, whereupon the guns were trained on him. Patrick smiled. ‘You can’t shoot me,’ he said, as if he were realizing it for the first time himself. ‘You want it to look like I shot them, then committed suicide. How would it look if I were riddled with bullets?’

  ‘Maybe you shot yourself,’ Cadenza replied. ‘I didn’t look that closely.’

  ‘How did I shoot myself seven times?’

  ‘It’ll never stand up in court,’ I told him. ‘The angle of the bullet …’

  ‘That’s it! Enough!’ Cadenza screamed. ‘Shoot ’em!’

  As the two men raised their guns, Patrick rushed them. He dove for their legs even as they trained their guns on him.

  ‘Spread out!’ I yelled, and Angie and I, no longer held by the two men, leapt up from the sofa and headed toward them from opposite ends of the couch. By the time we arrived, Patrick was
at their knees.

  We were enough to distract the two Braves fans, though, who didn’t know where to look, or whom to shoot. In what seemed like a slow motion instant replay, all three of us – Angie from the right, me from the left, and Patrick low from the center – hit the two men in flying tackles.

  The guns went off, each one once. Then, all I could think to do was punch, which turned out to be much more effective than my initial strategy: run and hide.

  Over and over, I hit the man I’d brought down, letting out all the frustration and fear that had been building in me since arriving in Los Angeles. I was shouting something, but I’m not quite sure what it was, or even if it was coherent. I’d heard of ‘speaking in tongues,’ but I was relatively sure my new language was Profanity.

  One gun went flying, but I heard another shot, and that shocked me. I realized I’d continued to hit a man who was already quite unconscious, and now, from my knees, I rose slowly.

  Silvio Cadenza was standing in front of his easy chair, and he was pointing a gun directly at me.

  Patrick stood, too, and Cadenza backed up one step, to hold us both in check. He stepped right next to Angie, whose man had also left the conscious world.

  The problem was, Angie wasn’t moving, either.

  She lay on her belly, flat, next to Cadenza, whose gun was still smoking from the ‘pay attention’ shot he’d fired. Had that hit Angie?

  ‘You son of a bitch!’ I screamed, and tried to move toward Angie, but Cadenza stopped me with a gesture from his gun hand. I froze, and the tears started to flow.

  ‘What did you do?’ Patrick snarled at him.

  ‘Don’t worry about what I did. Worry about what I’m gonna do,’ Silvio said, pointing the gun at Patrick’s head.

  Before he had a chance to pull the trigger, however, Angie’s inert figure moved. In fact, she moved just enough to reach out and bite Cadenza on the right ankle, and he screamed in pain. I tried to reach his gun hand, but he recovered in time.

  ‘Oh, that’s enough,’ he said. And he raised the gun again.

  ‘You don’t want to do that,’ came a serene, formal voice from the direction of the roof access door. Lieutenant K.C. Trench walked around the corner, holding his .38 (which, I couldn’t help but notice, was impeccably clean and shiny in the sun). Uniformed officers emerged from vantage points behind boxes and chimneys. ‘You want to drop the gun and put your hands behind your head,’ Trench continued.

  Cadenza did so, without speaking, which I considered a blessing.

  Angie got up off the cement floor and sneered in Cadenza’s direction. ‘I hope you get infected,’ she told him.

  I ran to Angie and hugged her tight. ‘I thought you were dead,’ I sobbed.

  ‘That’s what you were supposed to think,’ Angie said with a sardonic lilt. ‘Luckily, this guy couldn’t hit the broad side of Kentucky.’

  ‘How did you know where we were, Lieutenant?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Trench said as one of the uniforms cuffed Cadenza and read him his Miranda rights. Two others dealt with the supine cap men. One officer was talking into his communications link and requesting an ambulance. ‘I came to tell Ms Moss about our search of Lucien DuPrez’s apartment, and I ran the plates on Mr Cadenza’s car and a truck I assume he used to haul all this furniture here, for a reason I’m sure he’ll be happy to explain.’

  ‘You ran the plates without knowing why?’ I asked, regaining my composure.

  ‘I’m a cop,’ Trench said. ‘Consider it my hobby.’

  ‘What did you find at DuPrez’s apartment?’

  ‘Enough for me to predict that Mr McNabb will be a free man in every way come tomorrow morning,’ said Trench. ‘Besides the bow, there were financial records that could implicate him in all sorts of ways, and a pair of very expensive sneakers encrusted with mud that matched the mud outside Ms DeNunzio’s dining room window. We also have, after someone explained the definition of the word “perjury,” the testimony of Ms Melanie DeNunzio, who will report that DuPrez told her she could have half of what he’d get from Patsy’s work in exchange for lying on the stand, and also that DuPrez had given Patsy a good number of archery lessons at the Nottingham club, although she was not a member, because she wanted to impress her husband with how good she was.’

  ‘She did that?’ said Patsy’s widower.

  ‘Thank you, Lieutenant … for saving our lives.’ I was starting to sound like a TV actress myself.

  ‘That’s my job, Ms Moss. It says so on the car. Oh, and by the way, we found Mr Meadows. He was back in England, apparently fearing for his life. He felt that once Mr Cadenza here found out whose baby Patsy was carrying, he might not be safe on this continent.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Cadenza. ‘You mean the baby wasn’t mine?’

  Trench turned toward Cadenza, who was being led away past them. ‘You really shouldn’t park on the street when you’re planning on committing homicide, Silvio,’ Trench told him.

  ‘I found such a good space,’ Cadenza said with a shrug. ‘I couldn’t resist.’ As they took him, in handcuffs, past me, he said, ‘Do you think you might defend me? You’re pretty good in court.’ I was speechless.

  Cadenza was led through the door and down the stairs. In the distance, I could hear the ambulance on its way.

  Trench turned back toward me. ‘Welcome to Los Angeles,’ he said.

  EPILOGUE

  Trench questioned each of us on the roof for quite some time, then walked away shaking his head but never betraying an emotion. He did take an extra look at me before he left the roof, however.

  We walked down the steps to the elevator, and Angie got off on the fifth floor, saying she needed a shower and to brush her teeth. ‘I have to get the taste of Cadenza out of my mouth,’ she told me, but the look in her eye said something else entirely: ‘Go ahead and be alone with him.’

  I resisted that idea, and Patrick said he felt he’d like to go home now and rest before going to court to be exonerated the next morning. As I rode the elevator down with him, Patrick asked me to drive him back to the courthouse, where his car was waiting. I wondered, briefly, why he didn’t just have another one … well, you know. But I was happy to keep him company.

  We stood in front of the building, and I told Patrick what Trench had mentioned about the evidence against DuPrez. What I really wanted to do was hold Patrick close and tell him it was all over, but I knew he was still saddened by Patsy’s death, no matter how estranged they might have been.

  ‘I don’t have a car,’ I remembered. ‘I’ll have to drive Angie’s.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Patrick said. ‘I can call a—’

  ‘No cabs for you. I have keys to Angie’s rental. Come on.’

  We walked to the garage, Patrick still protesting, and I remembered something Trench had said while we were watching the EMTs take Cadenza’s men away. ‘You mustn’t think you’re still in the suburbs, Ms Moss,’ he’d said upstairs. ‘We found the trunk of your friend’s rental car open. Isn’t that odd?’

  I suspected Trench was playing a joke on me, and sure enough, when I opened the trunk to Angie’s rental, there was a shopping bag inside with a note stapled to it: ‘Ms Moss: please return this to its rightful owner. We found it at Mr DuPrez’s house. Sincerely, Det Lt K.C. Trench.’ Typed, no less.

  ‘What do you suppose it is?’ Patrick asked.

  ‘I think we both know,’ I said. ‘Let’s grab it and look at it inside the car.’

  ‘No,’ Patrick said. ‘Come with me.’

  Puzzled, I followed Patrick outside to the street, where he pulled out his cell phone, dialed a number, and said simply, ‘OK.’ Then he put the cell phone back in his jacket pocket.

  ‘Now, I know how you feel about this, Sandy, but you deserve it. I’ve had a car brought round …’ Of course he had.

  ‘Patrick, no. Patrick, I appreciate it, but no. No more Ferraris. No Maseratis. No nothing, OK?’

  ‘I refuse to take no for an answ
er,’ he said. ‘You’ll just have to accept it. Here. Look.’

  I almost dropped the shopping bag when I saw what was coming. Driving up the street was a brand new Jaguar sports car that must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  And behind it was my Hyundai.

  But it wasn’t the same Hyundai I’d cried over when it was towed to the body shop. It had been rejuvenated, repaired, and brought back to its original state, as if it had rolled off the assembly line in Seoul yesterday. Gleaming, bullet-free, and with new glass and rubber all around, it was the most beautiful car I’d ever seen. OK, maybe not the most beautiful, but it was a sight for sore eyes.

  ‘Patrick!’ I squealed, dropping the shopping bag. Then I hugged Patrick tightly, and kissed him without thinking. He responded, and we shared a long kiss that expressed a good deal more emotion than I think either of us had intended.

  ‘Oh my God, I can’t thank you enough!’ I said when we finally separated, breathless. ‘You did so much more …’

  ‘It also has a new CD changer with an iPhone dock, because I couldn’t resist, and a few other improvements.’ The driver, Rex, got out of my Hyundai and walked over to us. He handed me a small keypad, bowed just a touch, and walked away without saying a word.

  ‘It will open and lock the doors, and it will start the car so you can warm it up on cold mornings,’ Patrick explained. ‘I know how much you liked to press that button.’

  ‘This is L.A.,’ I reminded him. ‘We don’t have cold mornings.’

  ‘Well, it’ll be handy when you want to see if the car’s going to blow up. I also considered bullet-proof glass, but that seemed a bit showy.’

  Rex got into the Jaguar, lowering the passenger window. ‘Are you coming with us, sir?’ he asked Patrick.

  ‘No,’ Patrick answered. ‘I believe I’ll go for a ride with Sandy.’

  In the Hyundai, which somehow had been treated to actually smell like a new car, I handed Patrick the shopping bag, and as I drove, he opened it.

  Inside, of course, was a box that contained Jimmy’s shoes. Patrick seemed awed by the reality of them, and he rubbed the leather more than once. He stole a glance at me from the passenger’s seat.