by Nancy Martin
He tried to sound collected. “Interesting?”
“Yeah.”
She released him slowly, perhaps to prove she was still in control. And when she was behind the steering wheel again, he was left to the embarrassing business of putting himself back together. All while trying to catch his breath.
She said, “I learned something about you, Henry.”
Part of him felt as if he’d been tricked. Like his brain had been sucked dry, not the rest of him. Nervously, he wondered what exactly she’d figured out.
Another part of him just wanted to roll over and go to sleep.
13
Arden’s phone rang several times during the day, but she couldn’t manage to wake herself up in time to answer it. Finally, though, her bladder insisted she get out of bed, and when she dragged herself out of the bathroom, the phone was ringing again, so she picked up.
“Arden?” The silky voice of Hadrian Sloan-Whitaker purred in her ear. “I have some news for you.”
“News?” Arden collapsed on the bed again and racked her fuzzy brain to find some context. A sliver of sunshine glowed at the bottom of her window shades, but she had no clue what time it might be.
“Yes, I put my ear to the ground as you suggested, and there’s definitely a seismic shift going on.”
“An earthquake?”
“Nothing that significant yet. But a buzz.”
What the hell was he talking about?
He said, “Someone contacted me through my Facebook account. Someone asking about antiquities.”
“You have a Facebook account?”
“Leave no stone unturned,” Hadrian said. “I embrace all technologies that put me in touch with people. We texted for a while and I then realized I may have been inadvertently communicating with the party you wanted to reach. She’s asking all the right questions.”
Arden groped a random capsule from her nightstand and swallowed it dry.
Hadrian continued. “She wants to know about Greek statuary, perhaps second century BC. She’s very cagey, but I put two and two together. I wonder if she is someone with knowledge about your grandmother’s collection. It might be best if you were in touch with this prospect yourself.” After a pause, Hadrian sounded pained. “I sense she thinks I might be a sexual predator of some unpleasant kind.”
The information finally began to penetrate her fog. Arden dragged herself to a sitting position. “What did she say about the statue?”
“Nothing specific, but she’s definitely fishing. I suspect she’s in possession of something very valuable. Either that, or she’s looking to acquire. Either way, it’s good. For us.”
Since when were they an “us”? Arden remembered her own plan and didn’t recall Hadrian being a part of it. “What did you tell her?”
“I gave some basic historical information, but it was clear she already knew a thing or two. She mentioned Pittsburgh, and that’s when the penny dropped. Arden, if I put you in touch with this person, you’ll remember me when the time comes, won’t you?”
“When what time—? Oh, of course, Hadrian.” Suddenly she liked the note of fawning in his voice.
“I’d like a shot at placing your item.”
Arden said coolly, “With a museum?”
Hadrian barely held back a here-we-go-again sigh. “If an institution of origin is in a position to pay the going rate, of course we should consider its offers. But we’d certainly do better by—”
“You know how I feel about private collectors, Hadrian. If an important piece falls into the hands of dilettantes who simply warehouse history, the whole world suffers.”
“I know, I know,” he soothed. “Arguing is moot if there’s nothing in our hands yet, don’t you agree?”
“Ye-es,” Arden said slowly.
“So talk to my contact. See what you can learn.”
“All right. Give me the phone number.”
“Promise you’ll report back to me?”
“I promise.”
Arden copied down the phone number Hadrian dictated, then sat staring at it long after she terminated the call. Who was this contact? A collector? A scholar at the local museum, perhaps? Or someone more sinister? Sage Abruzzo. Arden didn’t recognize the name.
She would need to have all her wits when she made the phone call.
Arden began sorting through her pill bottles. If she was going to pull this off, she needed to mix the right combo to sharpen her mind.
14
After dropping off Henry Paxton at his car, Roxy discovered he had stolen the crucifix from around her neck.
Somehow during their interlude in the park, he’d managed to distract her and snitch it. And the whole time she’d mistaken him for a weakling.
“You naughty boy,” she said aloud, one hand on her throat. “This could mean war.”
Or something much more delicious.
Stealing her necklace showed he had more juice than she’d first thought. She liked the guy. Didn’t trust him—especially now that he’d paid her back for lifting his wallet—but she liked him. He had a good laugh and a nice body—two qualities Roxy especially appreciated in a man. Too bad he had a brain, but that was a fault she could overlook. The sex had been barely acceptable for her, but after all, she had ambushed him. Given different circumstances, he’d be better. Stealing her crucifix showed that, surely. A weekend in a hotel with him to find out sounded pretty damn good. Maybe after Nooch’s hearing.
Her phone beeped—a text message from Adasha Washington.
Free for dinner? Adasha asked.
With a pang of guilt, Roxy decided not to respond.
She closed her phone hastily. She didn’t want to tell her friend about car sex with Henry. She wasn’t sure why.
Shoving that uncomfortable thought down into her subconscious where it belonged, Roxy went back to the yard and switched Kaylee’s red convertible for her truck. She remembered to take Carmine’s money out of the car and stow it under the seat of her own vehicle. The Delaney gun she locked carefully in her desk drawer. Safer there. While in the drawer, she found some cash. It was only a few bills left over from lunch a few days back, but it would come in handy.
Then she checked her cell phone and found a voice message from Nooch. He’d called to say he’d been released by the police.
Roxy drove over the river to pick him up.
With the windows rolled down, she sang along with Annie Lennox. Nothing like Annie to lift a girl’s spirits.
She found Nooch in a North Side diner, a cop hangout. The place was packed with officers in uniform as well as in plain clothes. At the counter, Nooch was finishing off a double order of eggs, bacon, and pancakes with a piece of banana cream pie waiting. He spotted Roxy coming and started to wolf down the pie.
His lawyer sat on the stool beside him, awestruck by the amount of food Nooch could consume. Roxy took the stool beside Marvin Weiss.
“Marvin,” Roxy said, “is your mom still buying your clothes?”
The young lawyer glanced down at his suit—a size too big and with pants that hung down over his Florsheims. The outfit made him look like a kid who’d graduated from high school at twelve, Princeton at fifteen, and law school at seventeen. Which he had. Then, too young and socially inept to be successful in a big firm, he’d come home and hung his shingle adjacent to his parents’ dry cleaning shop.
He said, “What’s wrong with my clothes? That getting paid by my clients once in a while can’t fix?”
“Carmine doesn’t pay you?”
“I don’t work for Carmine Abruzzo,” he said quickly. “Never have, never will.”
“Half your client load comes from his recommendation.”
“I am not a mob lawyer.”
Marvin had been sitting in his little office doing a slow business in real estate transactions for people in his synagogue when Uncle Carmine called him out of the blue. Carmine liked to pretend he plucked his employees from thin air, but there were actually a lot of bac
kroom shenanigans that went on during the process of finding minions with just the right personality type. For his first gambit, Carmine asked Marvin to help out a cousin who needed a lawyer to attend his tax audit. When the tax audit turned out well, Marvin was soon getting calls from lots of Carmine’s “cousins.” Roxy thought it was cute that he continued to deny helping anyone connected with Carmine.
“Whatever you say,” Roxy replied. “Where’s your bill?”
Marvin scrawled some numbers on a napkin and handed it over. “And you can pay for your goon’s food right now, too. I know you have some cash at the moment. In fact, Carmine’s a little concerned that he hasn’t heard from you.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Right. PTA meetings and bake sales, I’m sure. You’ll be in touch with Carmine? Soon?”
“What does he want?”
“A little help, that’s all. Now that Phil’s out of the picture, there are some errands. He thought you might be interested. You should call him.”
“When I get a chance,” Roxy said, with enough edge to remind Marvin that Carmine wasn’t the only one with the last name of Abruzzo. “And not a minute sooner.”
Marvin put up both hands. “Okay, okay.”
She pulled some bills from her pocket to pay for Nooch’s dinner. “What did Nooch have to say to the cops?”
“Nothing at all.” Marvin stood up and rocked back on his heels, smug. “That’s what you pay me for.”
“He didn’t give any information?”
“He looked at some photographs and picked out the Delaney brothers, that’s it. Otherwise, you can rest easy.”
“Hey,” Roxy said. “I have nothing to hide.”
Marvin smirked. “Sure.”
“While you were in the station, did you hear anything about the Hyde murder?”
“Why do you care?”
“If the cops are interested in Nooch, I want to know what’s going on.”
Marvin grabbed a toothpick and began to use it like a pneumatic drill around his molars. “I got a gander at the homeless guy they think pulled the trigger.”
“And?”
Marvin shrugged. “They’re not so sure about him anymore. Attention is turning to the wife—Monica. But I heard your name mentioned.”
“As a suspect?”
With another smirk, Marvin said, “As someone to call for a good time.”
Roxy patted her butt. “You couldn’t handle this much fun, Marvie.”
Nooch looked up from the last crumbs of his pie. “Be nice, Marvin.”
The kid lawyer flushed at being reprimanded by a guy who had never been within a hundred miles of Princeton. He grabbed his rumpled raincoat. “In case you end up in jail, pay my bill immediately, will you? Not in cash. I don’t want any trouble with the IRS. Meanwhile, make sure Nooch stays available. The police are going to want to see him again. I’m guessing soon.”
He walked away, and Roxy spun on her stool to look at Nooch. “What did you tell Marvin?”
Nooch pushed away his empty pie plate and burped. “Why? Was I supposed to tell him something?”
“What did you tell him about the thing we did at the Hyde mansion?”
Nooch rubbed his face. “Man, I’m sleepy. What thing?”
“At the Hyde mansion. The house that was burned up.”
The carbohydrate content of Nooch’s meal began to hit him like a sedative. “Can I just go home to bed? Please, Rox?”
She settled his bill and took him outside, aware than half the cops in the diner watched them leave. They climbed into the truck, and Roxy pulled out onto the dark street. “Did the cops bring Kaylee back to talk, too?”
“I didn’t see her. Not since yesterday.”
“Did you tell them about her?”
Nooch frowned. “I don’t think anybody asked about her.”
“Because we didn’t see her at the mansion.”
“But she was there,” Nooch said sleepily.
Roxy stood on the brake. “What?”
Sometimes Nooch plucked random memories out of the otherwise pondlike stagnation of his brain.
Nooch caught his balance on the dashboard. “She was at the burned house. The night her boyfriend got shot.”
“Jesus, she said that? Why the hell didn’t you mention this before? Never mind. What did she see? Anything important?”
“I don’t know. You know, cussing just lowers people’s opinion of your intelligence.”
“I don’t care about anybody’s opinion. Did Kaylee see her boyfriend get killed or not?”
Nooch surprised the hell out of Roxy by saying, “Yeah, she did.”
She pulled over and parked before turning to her passenger. She tried to stay calm. “She said that? She told you she saw Julius die? Did you say so to the police?”
“I don’t know,” Nooch whined. The barrage of questions stymied him. “Marvin kept interrupting me. They didn’t ask about Kaylee. They asked me about you.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Nothing. Marvin kept interrupting me.”
Roxy shoved her hair away from her face and ended up holding the sides of her head. The news shook her up. It meant Kaylee had seen a lot more than she’d originally said. Maybe that explained why Kaylee had been so bitchy to her. She’d seen Roxy talking to Julius before his death.
And Trey had lied outright about his final moments with Julius, too, Roxy realized.
She pulled back into traffic again and drove the truck across the bridge, thinking it was a good thing Nooch hadn’t spilled these particular beans to the cops. She decided she needed to give Marvin an early Hanukkah present.
But Kaylee, she thought. Had the girl really witnessed the murder?
If so, had she watched Roxy and Nooch steal the statue? And had she blabbed to the police about it?
Roxy clamped her hands hard on the steering wheel. There was no use asking Nooch for more details. He had put his meaty face in one hand and gone to sleep in the passenger seat.
Roxy drove Nooch home, pushed him out of the truck, and watched him stumble through the front door. She bit her lip. If the police discovered he’d helped steal the statue out of the Hydes’ yard, his probation hearing was screwed.
Half an hour later, Roxy parked the truck by a fire hydrant in an alley in the Strip District and cut the headlights.
In darkness, she slipped out of the cab and locked the truck. A couple of upscale restaurants backed onto the alley along with a nightclub that appealed to rowdy college students. It was an appealing neighborhood for enterprising car thieves. Pricey cars belonging to the restaurant patrons who were too cheap to pay for valet parking were left in open lots that drunken students trolled hourly.
Pocketing her keys, she hustled down a cobblestone alley behind the restaurant, nimbly dodging a swampy pothole. Out front, the restaurant was very tony, but in the back, homeless guys were Dumpster diving for their evening meal. Near them, a young drunk had wandered away from the nightclub and was taking a furtive leak in a shadowed doorway.
A bright light knifed from the back door of Rizza’s, illuminating the haphazard crush of motorcycles parked in the alley by the restaurant staff. As she walked closer, luscious late-night scents from the kitchen mingled with the less appealing stench of trash.
Dougie Calderelli came out the door lugging two bags of garbage in his good hand. He grunted a greeting.
“Hey, Dougie.”
Roxy caught the screen door from him and slipped past Dougie into the kitchen, where the rest of the guys were cleaning up for the night. Already, the stainless-steel counters gleamed. The floor smelled of disinfectant. At the dishwasher, Ray rinsed a mountain of pots with his hose. He wiped sweat from his brow with his tattooed forearm, nodded at Roxy, and went back to the job.
Someone had nailed to the wall a Support the Troops ribbon. And draped an old athletic supporter from the nail. Above it hung a framed photo of the guys when they’d served in Afghanistan together. They
were all smiles then, holding their weapons lightly in the harsh sun, leaning against a battered Humvee. Dougie’s baby face bore a broad smile, but back then he’d had two good hands.
As if there weren’t enough testosterone in the air already, they were blasting rock and roll from the speaker by the walk-in cooler—harsh shouting over a screaming guitar. The Clash, Combat Rock.
Roxy let the screen door bang shut behind her.
The noise caused Carl, Rizza’s longtime sous-chef, to glance up from packing his knife kit. He was short and stocky, and his black T-shirt—the standard uniform with the restaurant’s logo printed on the chest—was still soaked with sweat. He wore lime green Crocs beneath his black jeans—one concession to a job spent on his feet. “I didn’t hear the Monster Truck pull up,” Carl said. “What’d you do, Roxy Road? Trade it in, finally?”
“Never.”
“Good. We like a little warning before you show up.”
“How was hockey the other night?”
“I didn’t play. We have a baby now.”
“I heard. Congratulations. A baby tends to change a lot of things.”
“I hear you. Am I ever gonna get a decent night’s sleep again? Or a little nooky with the wife?” Over his shoulder, he called, “Flynn! Look what the cat dragged in.”
From his executive chef’s office, Patrick Flynn scooted on his swivel chair and glanced around the doorway. He had a phone pinned to his shoulder—probably ordering truffles from France or maybe exotic fruit from the planet Jupiter. He held up one finger to Roxy, asking her to give him a minute’s patience. He’d already peeled off his bandanna, and his shaven head gleamed under the fluorescent lights.
Roxy leaned one hip against the stainless counter. To Carl, she said, “Busy night?”
Carl shrugged. “Not bad. We did two hundred plates. Only one idiot sent his tuna back for being undercooked.”
“Did you deep-fry it for him?”
Carl grinned. “You bet. And added some cocktail sauce to make him happy.” Carl shouldered his knife kit, then used a key on his ring to unlock a drawer and pull out a handgun. Casual as could be, he checked his Sig’s magazine and the chamber before tucking it into his belt at the small of his back. “Keep your powder dry, Rox.”
