Twice Told Tail

by Ali Brandon

  Armed. She didn’t dare try to provoke the man, not with Mary Ann still within his reach. She needed to get him down the stairs, and quickly.

  With that, she hit the “Stop” button on the lift chair, waited a few breaths, and then punched the “Down” button.

  “What the—someone’s doing that,” he yelled as the chair began moving back toward the lower level now. “I know someone’s in here. Whoever you are, you better show your face, or I’ll cut the old lady.”

  She hit the “Stop” button again.

  “Come on out,” he called, shining the flashlight down the stairs. For the moment, she was concealed behind the wall and safely out of sight. But she had to get him down those steps before it occurred to him to flip on all the lights.

  Slipping off one of her boots, Darla took a steadying breath and then tossed that shoe away from her toward the aisle, where it landed with a clatter.

  “All right, wise guy, one last chance, and then I’m coming down there.”

  Just what I want you to do.

  Carefully, she pulled off the second boot and tossed it in the same direction, wincing when the resulting clatter was followed by a small crash.

  “That does it!”

  The intruder came down the stairs . . . but not at the breakneck pace she’d counted on. Instead, he was moving with caution, one step at a time. Darla could see that he wore a full ski mask to cover his features, not that it mattered at the moment.

  She bit back a groan. If he didn’t put on a bit of speed, she wasn’t going to be able to follow through with her plan. And once he was past the bottom step, she’d be no better off than Mary Ann and at the mercy of his knife.

  Frantic, she flailed in the dark, trying to lay hands on something else she could toss.

  And then, with a guttural yowl, Hamlet came flying up the stairs in the man’s direction, taking him by surprise and sending him off balance.

  The flashlight swung wildly about, its beam bright enough that Darla could see the man stumble as the cat twisted through his legs. An instant later, he’d lost his knife as well as his footing, with the weapon cartwheeling down the stairs and clattering to the ground not far from where Darla stood.

  The intruder regained his equilibrium almost immediately; then, with a guttural sound, he was rushing down the steps like a greased pig toward her, just as she’d planned.

  Almost there. Almost there. Almost there.

  Heart slamming in her chest, Darla bit her lip and held her ground. She’d have one chance to make her plan work . . . and if it failed, she and Mary Ann would both be at the man’s mercy. She waited until the intruder reached the final step. And then, with a mighty effort, she yanked the chain she’d tied around the newel post upward. The long series of metal links tangled between his legs and sent the man crashing facedown to the floor, almost at her feet.

  Darla didn’t check to see if he was injured or simply stunned. Instead, she rushed to unfasten the chain’s end from around the newel post. Channeling her inner cowgirl, she whipped the chain around the man’s feet, then pulled his arms behind and wrapped his wrists together, virtually hog-tying him.

  Mary Ann, meanwhile, came scurrying down the steps, long flannel nightgown flying behind her. At the bottom of the stairs, she paused to flip on the overhead lights.

  “Darla,” she cried, voice quivering, while Darla squinted against the sudden illumination. “Thank goodness you and Hamlet came. This terrible man was the one who murdered Brother, and he was back again trying to find this silly book he said we sold at the estate sale. He threatened to kill me, too, if I didn’t tell him where it was.”

  “He’s not going to kill anyone,” Darla replied in an outraged voice. “Jake is on the way, and she should have already called 9-1-1. We just need to wait a few minutes, and the police will be here. But in the meantime, I want to know who this guy is!”

  With that, Darla managed to drag the prone figure over so that he was now on his back. He groaned and blinked. A faint smell of cigarette smoke emanated from him, along with what smelled like cologne or aftershave. Resisting the impulse to give him a good kick or three, she instead knelt beside him and pulled off the ski mask.

  The first things she noticed were his heavy black eyebrows and a shock of bleached blond hair. She assumed that once it had been gelled and spiked, though now it lay plastered to his skull. Perhaps it was the late hour, or the sudden adrenaline crash, but it took a moment for her to realize who it was.

  “Daniel!”

  And then another realization struck—the explanation for the alarm bells in her head a few minutes earlier—and she gasped.

  I suppose I always thought of guns and knives as the weapons of choice in a random murder, not silly embroidered pillows.

  “You knew,” she choked out as the remembered comment from the man returned to her. “You knew exactly how Mr. Plinski was murdered, when the police were keeping that fact confidential. You were the one who killed him.”

  “Yeah, you figured it out,” he said with a sneer, all trace of affectation gone from his voice, so that Darla realized why she hadn’t recognized him as he’d spoken before. “I guess you think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?”

  “I guess I am,” she replied, “because I have the copy of The Marble Faun you’re looking for.”

  Then, as his muddy brown eyes widened at that, she added, “Oh, and I also found the copy of the secret trust that your grandfather hid inside it. I know that Vinnie was supposed to get a giant bequest from his dead grandfather. But your father was the trustee, and instead of giving the money to your brother, he kept it for himself. And he planned that when he died, it was all going to you. The only thing he—and you—had to make sure of was that Vinnie never found out about the secret trust.”

  “And he’s not going to find out about it,” Daniel clipped out, abruptly struggling against his bonds. And then, with a sudden clanking of chain, he shook himself free.

  The magician’s chain, she thought in dismay. It isn’t just the locks. Some of the links must also have a quick-release trick to them.

  Looking just as surprised as Darla felt at his unexpected escape, Daniel momentarily froze. But before Darla could scramble out of reach, he recovered himself and shot a quick hand out to grab her upper arm.

  She gave a little shriek of shock and pain as his fingers clamped tightly into her flesh.

  “All right,” he snapped out as he scrambled to his feet and dragged her up after him, then bent and retrieved his knife. “You and me and the old lady are going to go get that book, and then we’re all going to take a ride.”

  “No, we’re not,” came a quavering voice behind them followed by the unmistakable sound of a rifle being cocked.

  She and Daniel glanced behind them to see Mary Ann aiming her brother’s lever-action 1894 Winchester—the one Jake had said was hidden under the counter—directly at Daniel.

  “Now, young man,” she commanded, rifle butt firmly pressed into her flannel-covered shoulder and barrel steady, “you’re going to let Darla go and sit down on those stairs until the police come. Do you understand?”

  Daniel responded with something unsettlingly like a growl but released his grip on Darla and took a seat, as ordered. And then they all heard the sudden pounding on the store’s front door, followed by the welcome call of “NYPD, open up!”

  * * *

  Jake arrived just as two of the responding police officers were walking a handcuffed Daniel out to one of the two patrol cars parked outside the antiques store. Of the two young cops who remained in the store, one was questioning Mary Ann. The other—having politely relieved the old woman of her rifle—was busy ascertaining that the weapon was indeed an antique and, thus, not subject to the local gun laws. Peering out the front window, Darla saw a long and somewhat familiar-looking dark sedan pull up at the curb. Jake hopped out of th
e backseat and came rushing up the steps.

  Darla noted in private amusement that her friend’s curly hair looked wilder than usual. Obviously, she’d not had a chance to comb it back into submission following her “date.”

  Jake rushed up the steps and identified herself to the second cop, who seemed more interested in posing as Lucas McCain than he did in securing the scene. Her first stern words to Darla were, “All I’m going to tell you is, don’t you ever pull a boneheaded stunt like that again. I’ll leave the rest of the lecture to Reese when he comes to get your statement tomorrow.”

  “I’m sure he’ll have plenty to say,” Darla agreed, finding herself shaking a little in delayed reaction to everything that had just gone down.

  Because, of course, Jake was right that she’d taken a foolhardy risk in confronting an armed intruder. Her adrenaline was still racing, even though the danger was long past, for she knew full well that her impromptu plan could have gone terribly wrong. But no way could she have waited outside the building while Mary Ann was inside being threatened.

  Working to keep her voice steady, she continued, “All that really matters is that we finally know who killed Mr. Plinski, and why. But I wasn’t alone. Hamlet was my backup—or maybe I was his. Speaking of which . . .”

  Having done his part to distract Daniel, Hamlet had vanished into the far corners of the darkened store while Darla—and then Mary Ann—finished the job. Darla hadn’t worried about him, for while they waited for the police, she had spied the wily feline perched on the shoulder of the poodle-skirt-wearing mannequin, his green gaze watchful.

  Now she called in his direction, “Hamlet, you can come out now.”

  To her relief, the big black cat promptly materialized right behind her. Darla had already retrieved her boots and his leash while the officers were taking care of Daniel. Now, she snapped the leash onto Hamlet’s harness. “I’m going to ask the officer if I can walk Hamlet back to the apartment so he’ll be safe, and then come back.”

  “I’ll go with you, and you can give me the CliffsNotes version of what went down.”

  But as they walked out of the brownstone, Darla saw that the long, dark sedan that had dropped Jake off was still parked at the curb not far from the remaining patrol car.

  “What about your date?” she asked the PI.

  Jake shrugged. “Eh, I’d say it’s pretty well over for tonight.”

  But by then the vehicle’s rear door had opened, and as she and Jake approached the car, a short, darkly handsome man dressed in a custom wool overcoat climbed out. Leaning against the vehicle’s open door, he asked Jake in an accented voice, “Stay, or go?”

  “I’ll stay, you go,” she told him as she paused at the car.

  He nodded. “And tomorrow night?”

  Jake gave him a hint of a sly smile and simply said, “Yes.”

  At that, he climbed back inside, and a moment later the sedan slipped away from the curb and purred off into the night.

  Darla stared after the car, wide-eyed, before turning back to Jake. “Don’t tell me—it can’t be—wasn’t that Alex Putin?”

  Her friend gave a careless shrug, and Darla decided it was her turn to lecture.

  “I can’t believe you’re actually dating the czar-father of the local construction industry. I know you went with him to the martial arts tournament last year, but I figured that was a one-off kind of thing. But to actually have a relationship with the guy! I mean, he’s . . . that is, isn’t he . . . ?”

  “He’s an upstanding businessman who happens to be a former client. And he and I just happened to hit it off. And, not that it’s any of your business, but we’ve been hitting it off pretty regularly the past couple of months.”

  She paused and added with another sly smile, “You know what they say about men and shoe sizes? Let me put it this way. Alex may be short, but he definitely wears size twelves.”

  “Ugh. TMI,” Darla muttered as they reached her stoop and headed up the steps. So much for lecturing, she told herself. She’d just learned more than she ever needed to know about her friend’s love life.

  “Come on in out of the cold while I run upstairs with Hamlet,” she said, quickly changing the subject as she unlocked the front door. “I’ll tell you everything I know on the way back, and maybe we’ll figure out the last piece of the puzzle—whatever happened to Vinnie.”

  * * *

  “And what is this list?” James asked the next morning once Darla had gotten him up-to-date on the previous night’s events. Indicating the paper she’d been jotting notes on, he read aloud, “The Fool’s Guide to Wills and Estates. N. C. Wyeth website: Round Table legend pictures. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. The Brothers Karamazov.”

  “That’s my official Hamlet book-snagging list,” she said with a smile and a fond look at the sleuthing feline in question, who was lounging nearby on the counter. “You know how he always seems to know what’s going on when something bad happens? I’ve been thinking back over the clues he tried to give me, but I have to say he was a bit more subtle than usual. That, or I was dumber.”

  “Well, the first one is self-explanatory, since a secret trust was at stake here,” James replied. “As for the Wyeth paintings, they were used to illustrate a volume titled The Boy’s King Arthur, which story is filled with brotherly conflict, betrayal, and abandonment between fathers and sons.”

  “I’ve got The Crucible covered,” Darla interrupted. “It was Miller’s way to illuminate the evil and absurdity of the McCarthy Communist witch hunts of the 1950s. And I’ll admit that I haven’t read The Brothers Karamazov, but I do know it’s about Russian brothers.”

  “More specifically, Dostoyevsky wrote about an unpleasant father and brothers born of two different mothers,” James clarified. “So it appears that Hamlet was once again at the top of his game. And it would seem that even Mr. Modello himself was fooled by his brother. Have they located him yet?”

  “Actually, I was starting to worry last night that Daniel had done something to Vinnie, too,” Darla replied, her words turning grim again. “After all, he’d already killed Mr. Plinski trying to get him to tell where that blasted book had gone to, and he probably would have done the same to Mary Ann if Hamlet hadn’t raised a ruckus.”

  “Anyhow,” she went on, “the whole disappearing-Vinnie thing is probably the wildest part of the story. Reese told me this morning that he’d gotten hold of Vinnie last night. He really had taken a few days off unexpectedly. Would you like to guess why?”

  When James shook his grizzled head, Darla smiled a little. “It turns out he didn’t need any of our help . . . not ours or Hamlet’s or even Reese’s attorney friend’s. Vinnie received a registered letter from the attorney’s office that had written the original secret trust twenty-five years ago. Apparently, an intern had run across the document in an old file, did the math on the likely age of Vinnie’s grandfather, and figured out that trust should have been settled. So he’s been busy with the lawyer putting documentation together to bolster his case against Daniel. Reese says there’s a good chance Vinnie will get a pretty good portion of his bequest after all these years.”

  “That is excellent news for Mr. Modello,” James concurred. “And now you do not have to concern yourself with the ethics of revealing what you found in the book. Though perhaps you will still want to drop off that copy of The Marble Faun to him at the bridal shop.”

  Darla smiled. “That’s my plan for lunch today, finally unloading that bad-luck book. The rest of the time, I’ll be keeping an eye on Pinky. He’s doing pretty well with the coffee drinks, but he’s still having problems with the early hours.”

  Though with all the previous night’s activity, she’d barely dragged her own self out of bed at eight, just enough time to get showered and dressed and breakfasted and let a yawning Pinky in at nine. Robert and Mary Ann had left on schedule, as well. The youth had
sent Darla a text thirty minutes earlier letting her know that the estate sale was off to a good start.

  “I am sure Pinky will settle in by tomorrow,” James assured her. “And I have to say I am looking forward to the engagement party. It will be nice seeing matters return to some semblance of normality again.”

  “Hey, when we’re talking about a party, who wants normality?” Darla gave her manager a smug nod. “I’m predicting on a scale of one to ten that this party’s going to be a solid eleven. Just you wait and see.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  The ting-ting-ting of a knife tapping a water glass signaled that the postsupper speeches were about to begin. The tapper was the groom-to-be, and as the din of conversation in the private banquet room of Thai Me Up settled, Reese stood.

  Darla privately thought that, dressed as austerely as he was in a white dress shirt with black tie and trousers, the detective looked more like he was observing a wake than celebrating his upcoming nuptials. The future Mrs. Fiorello Reese, however, was festive enough for them both. Her sparkly sweater dress of blue and red swirls caught the light with her every move, while her sky-high do had been sprayed into submission with a freeze-spray that contained a liberal sprinkling of glitter.

  “Everyone, I have a few announcements to make, if that’s okay with our hostess,” he said with a look in Darla’s direction. At her smile and nod, he continued, “First off, I have to say, it’s been a great party so far. Having all of you here to celebrate me and Connie like this . . . well, it means a lot.”

  He paused while everyone applauded this, and Darla spared a fond look around the room. It was a small but friendly gathering. Seated at the head of the table were Reese and Connie, with James and Martha to their right, and then Robert and Sylvie. Jake and Alex Putin—Darla couldn’t yet look at the man without thinking about size twelve shoes!—sat to the left of the happy couple, followed by Mary Ann and Hodge. The other seats were filled by Hank and Hal Tomlinson and their dates, while Doug Bates had brought along one of the co-owners of the children’s specialty toy store a couple of doors down from his doughnut shop. Darla had asked Steve Mookjai to sit in as a guest, and so he had a chair there as well.