I did some mental calculations. Today was the twenty-first, so counting backwards that would make the twelfth…last Wednesday. I perked up as I realized the significance. “That was before I was even in Vegas!”
He nodded again as he licked a bit of jelly off his fingers. “Exactly. So he says you’re cleared to go home as long as you make yourself available for further questioning.”
Which should have made me happy. I was in the clear, right? Only the idea of going home didn’t fill me with a whole lot of good feelings. Now that I knew not only had both of my dad’s friends been murdered, but also that the Mob was trying to frame Larry, I knew he needed help more than ever. I wasn’t sure what I could actually do, but I knew leaving town wasn’t it.
“Does the good detective have any idea who bumped off Bobbi?” I asked, hoping all signs pointed to Monaldo.
Ramirez shook his head. “Nothing concrete. At least not that he would share with me.”
I took another bite, letting the gooey cherry goodness ooze onto my tongue. Last Wednesday. Why did that date ring a bell with me? I racked my little brain as I took a steamy sip of mocha latte. Then it hit me. The eBay auction I’d swiped from Monaldo’s office. BobEDoll had listed his pair of Pradas the same day our Bobbi had bit the dust. I wasn’t totally sure what one thing had to do with the other, but it was quite a coincidence.
“I have something to show you, but I don’t want you to get mad,” I said, setting my doughnut down and wiping my fingers.
Ramirez paused, coffee halfway to his lips. “Great. What now?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Well if you’re going to be like that, maybe I won’t show it to you.”
He put down his cup and relieved a little more neck tension. “Okay. Fine. I promise not to get mad.”
“Swear?”
“I swear.”
“Double pinky swear not to get mad?”
“Jesus,” he muttered. “Fine, I double pinky swear.” He held up his little finger. “Now what is it?”
“I kind of took something from Monaldo’s office.”
“Jesus, Maddie!” he yelled, his pinky clenching into a fist. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“Hey, you promised you wouldn’t be mad.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “I’m not mad.”
“That mad vein in your neck is bulging.”
He gritted his teeth together. “What did you take?”
I crossed the room to my purse and pulled out the listing, handing it to Ramirez. “I found this in Monaldo’s trash can.”
He stared at it. Then looked back up at me as if not comprehending. “An eBay listing?”
“Not just any listing,” I pointed out. “One for Prada. And the seller is going by the name BobEDoll. Get it? Bobbi, Bob-e-doll. And,” I said, pointing to the listing date, “same day Bobbi died. Kind of a coincidence, right?”
He looked at the paper a minute longer, then folded it and put it in his pocket. “Coincidence? Yes.”
“Significant?” I asked hopefully.
He did a noncommittal shrug. “Maybe. Proof,” he added before I could question, “definitely not.”
I pouted.
Ramirez smiled and leaned in, planting a little kiss on my protruding bottom lip. “You know, you’re kind of cute when you do that.”
“I’m wearing your sweats and my hair is in a wet braid.”
He cocked one eyebrow up. “Which means?”
“This is not sexy either.”
“You know,” Ramirez said, pulling away. “A person can only take so much.”
Tell me about it.
“So what’s the bad news?” I asked, reaching for a second doughnut. Hey, if I wasn’t going to have sex I was damn well going to load up on fat and sugar.
“The bad news is Monaldo wants Bruno back at the club this morning. He’s got a meeting with a vendor and he wants his muscle there while he negotiates. Which means I want you to stay here until I get back.”
“But—” I started.
“No, no buts. For once, please just humor me and do what I say? Don’t make me come bail you out of jail again.”
“You’re not going to let me live that one down, are you?”
He grinned. “Nope.”
After he downed the last of his coffee, Ramirez left, promising he’d be back in a couple of hours and making me double pinky swear that I’d be here. I finished off the last of the doughnuts while I watched the end of The View. I was halfway into Maury’s surprise paternity show when my eyes strayed to my empty Starbucks cup sitting on the table.
The thing is, that latte had been good. Really good. And between sexual frustration torture and lack of sleep I really wanted another one. More than that, I really wanted a fresh pair of underwear. I know Ramirez had said to stay right here, but I was sure he wouldn’t mind if I made a teeny tiny little trip to the hotel for a change of clothes and a mocha whipped cream latte. Besides, it was only a couple of blocks away; I’d be back before he even knew I was gone.
So convincing was my logic that ten minutes later I was in a yellow cab pulling up to the front doors of the New York, New York. I crossed the casino floor to the elevators and pushed the up button, waiting with a family wearing matching shirts that read WHEELER’S VEGAS VACATION ’07. Finally the doors slid open and the Wheelers got in. I was one step behind them when someone barreled out of the elevator straight into me.
“Uhn.”
“Ohmigod, Maddie!” I looked up to see the someone was Dana, her strawberry blonde brows pulled together in a tight line as her voice went into dog-whistle territory again. “I am so freaking glad you’re here. We’ve got to go!” She grabbed my hand, steering me away from the elevators.
“Wait—what? Go where?”
“It’s your mom, dahling,” Marco said, hot on Dana’s heels.
I groaned. I’d almost forgotten about the post menopausal Bobbsey Twins to the rescue. “On no. Mom’s here?”
“No, that’s just it,” Dana said, her voice twinged with hysteria as she hustled us back out of the casino. “She’s not here.”
She paused, putting both hands on my shoulders and spinning me around to face her. “Maddie, she’s gone after Monaldo!”
Chapter Sixteen
“What?” I yelled so loud a passing blue-hair shushed me.
“We tried to stop her,” Marco explained, his mouth moving a mile a minute as he handed his car ticket to the valet. “But she was out for blood. She said she was going to kill Larry for turning you into a criminal.”
“But then we explained that no one knew where Larry was,” Dana cut in.
“Right, so then we told her about Monaldo and the shoes and the whole frame-up thing and how you mistakenly ended up in jail over it.”
“And that’s when Mrs. Rosenblatt had the vision.”
“Right, the vision.” Marco nodded.
The vision. This just kept getting better and better. “I know I’m going to regret this, but what vision?”
Dana took a deep breath. “Mrs. Rosenblatt said she saw an Italian guy—”
“Italian-American,” Marco corrected.
“Right. Italian-American guy. With a gun. She said he had teeny tiny eyes, a teeny tiny heart and a whole cloud of negative emotions looming over him. He was turning your aura a muddy brown.”
“Your mom was not happy about that.” Marco shook his head. “Brown is very bad for the soul. Very bad.”
“She said she wanted to teach this guy a lesson,” Dana continued. “And then my cell phone rang. It was Rico.” She paused, a goofy smile spreading across her face. “He picked up my LadySmith from Mac’s for me. Isn’t that just the sweetest thing you ever heard?”
I shook my head. “Wait, let’s get back to my mother and the mobster.”
“Oh, right. Well, as soon as I hung up with Rico I turned around and they were gone.”
“Poof, just like that,” Marco said, doing jazz hands.
“An
d you just let them?” I cried. “Where were you?” I asked, turning on Marco.
“Little girl’s room.”
I rubbed my temples, the tension headache from last night returning full force. “So let me get this straight. My mother is now on her way to teach a lesson to a member of the mafia because Mrs. Rosenblatt had a vision of my aura?”
“Kind of,” Dana said, biting her lip. “But that’s not the worst of it.”
What could be worse? “Oh, it gets better?”
“Well, see, before Rico called, your mom was kind of admiring my cell phone. And well, when I noticed they were gone I checked my purse. The phone was gone too.”
“Wait.” I held one hand up to silence her, tilting my head to the side as I tried to wrap my throbbing brain around this. “If they left while you were on the phone, how did they take it?”
Dana bit her lip again. “Um, yeah, see, they didn’t take that phone. They took the other one.”
“What other one? You only have…” And then it hit me. The stun gun phone!
I smacked the palm of my hand to my forehead. If there was one thing in the world more dangerous than my mother in lecture mode, it was my mother in lecture mode with a weapon.
I whipped out my own cell and dialed Ramirez’s number, in hopes he could head off the impetuous seniors. But, of course, it went straight to voice mail. So we all quickly piled into the Mustang and made tracks for the Victoria.
My bags were still in the trunk so while Marco navigated the Strip, I did a quick change in the backseat from Ramirez’s sweats into a pair of black cargos, a rhinestone-studded tank, and my silver slingbacks. And tried not to picture Mom being stuffed into a mobster’s freezer.
Unfortunately, there was a wreck on the 15 and it took us another twenty minutes before we pulled up in front of the club. We dove out of the car and scrambled to the front doors. Since it was barely noon, there was no line to get in, the door left unguarded by the Crew Cut gatekeeper. We quickly pushed inside, blinking as our eyes adjusted from the Vegas sunlight to the windowless interior.
The dance floor was less crowded than before, though a few die hards still shook their tushies to a techno beat from the ’nineties. The big stage was empty, save for a lone Whitney Houston look-alike doing a baritone “I Will Always Love You” to a sparely populated room of convention-goers. Half the barstools were empty, the other half filled with hardcore AA dropouts who didn’t care if it was ten in the morning or ten at night. No sign of Mom or Mrs. Rosenblatt.
“Maybe they’re not here?” Dana said.
Marco nodded. “Maybe they changed their minds.”
Maybe Monaldo already had them bound, gagged, and fitted for cement loafers.
“Come on.” I motioned for Dana and Marco to follow as I wound my way to the hallway of offices. Dana clickety-clacked on her heels, Marco did his Broadway Bond slink, and I tried to make myself small so no cranky, sex-deprived cops noticed me breaking my pinky swear. We passed the bathrooms and the first “Private” door, heading straight for Monaldo’s office. I was just about to put my ear to the closed door when I heard a loud thud on the other side.
I sucked in a breath. Oh god. Mom!
My heart leapt into my throat, pure panic racing through my veins as I grabbed the handle and twisted the door open.
The first thing I felt was relief. Mom and Mrs. Rosenblatt were standing in the middle of the room, unharmed, unshot, and generally un-victimized. (If you didn’t count the crimes of fashion being perpetrated by their wardrobes. Mom was wearing denim knee-length, elastic-waist shorts paired with a long-sleeved purple paisley printed shirt and hiking boots. Mrs. Rosenblatt had opted for her hibiscus-printed muumuu in an orange and avocado color scheme that hadn’t been socially acceptable since 1973.) My relief wavered, however, when I saw they were standing over a pile of crumpled man on the floor who looked suspiciously like one very not-nice mobster. The relief disappeared completely when I saw the stun gun dangling from Mom’s hand.
“Mom!” I shouted, rushing at her like a linebacker and tackling her in a big bear hug. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”
She was shaking like a leaf and the stun gun dropped from her hands as she hugged me back. “Oh, Maddie, I think I just killed him!”
Mrs. Rosenblatt nudged Monaldo with the toe of her orthopedic sneaker. “I don’t know. He doesn’t look dead to me. My third husband, Alf, he died on the living room sofa watching Wheel of Fortune. When he hadn’t gotten up after Alex Trebek came on, I poked him in the arm. And, I gotta tell ya, his skin was a lot more rubbery than this guy’s.”
“I only meant to scare him,” Mom muttered, her eyes kind of dazed. “I didn’t mean to kill anyone.”
“What happened?” I asked.
Mrs. Rosenblatt gave Monaldo another poke. “He was making your aura brown, so your mom and I decided someone had to talk to this punk. No one messes with our Maddie.”
I might have been touched by this had we not been standing over the motionless body of a Mafia member.
“And,” Mom added, “after we saw Dana had two cell phones, we thought we’d take—”
“Borrow,” Mrs. Rosenblatt corrected.
“Right. Borrow one just in case things got out of hand.”
“Which they did,” Mrs. R. cut in, poking Monaldo with a finger that resembled an Oscar Meyer cocktail sausage. “We told this guy to leave you alone and he says, ‘Oh yeah, and who are you?’ and we said, ‘Maddie’s mom, that’s who,’ and then he says, ‘Who the heck is Maddie?’ Okay, well, actually he didn’t say ‘heck,’ he said a word a whole lot worse than heck, but seeing as I’m a real lady, I won’t repeat what he really said. So then your Mom says, ‘Maddie, Larry’s daughter,’ and then he gets this grin like he’s got some really bad gas or something and then he just starts laughing and says, ‘You married that fruit?’ And, well, you can imagine how your mother reacted to that one.”
From the look of Monaldo on the floor, not well.
“She may have called him a couple of names.”
“Schmuck,” Mom supplied. “Putz. Jerk. Motherfu—”
“Okay, I get the point.” Apparently Mom wasn’t as worried about being a real lady.
“Any-hoo,” Mrs. R. continued, “this clown starts yelling how he’s gonna tear us limb from limb so your mom pulls out the phone to call nine-one-one and the next thing you know, he’s out like a light.” She paused to nudge Monaldo again. “That thing don’t work like any cell phone I’ve ever seen.”
“Honestly, I didn’t mean to shoot him,” Mom said, her hands still shaking.
“You didn’t shoot him,” I reassured her. “He’s just a little zapped.”
She looked at me, her voice going into soprano range. “Zapped?”
“Don’t worry, he’ll be fine,” Dana said. “Rico said the jolt only lasts for a couple of minutes. Right, Marco?”
Marco shuddered as if he only knew too well.
“Well, I’ve got a feeling he’s not gonna be too happy when he wakes up,” Mrs. R. said, scrutinizing Monaldo’s face. His legs did a little jimmy thing.
“In that case, I suggest we go now.” I dragged Mom away by the arm, her eyes still glued to the crumpled form on the floor, and ushered our little band of accidents waiting to happen out the door.
I’d like to say we made an inconspicuous group as we made a beeline for the club’s front doors, but between Marco’s slinking, Mom’s state of catatonic shock and Mrs. Rosenblatt’s three hundred-pound frame clad in shower-curtain chic, we might as well have been carrying a flashing sign that read SUSPICIOUS PEOPLE HERE. Luckily, this was Vegas, and, though we incurred a couple of stares, no one tried to stop us.
We were almost to the front doors when Mom snapped out of her stupor and yelled, “Wait!”
We all halted, Marco running into the back of Mrs. R. with a little moan.
“What?” I asked.
Mom pointed to the office. “I left the cell phone in there.”
&nb
sp; “Don’t worry, we’ll buy a new one,” I said, pushing her toward the door. Just a few more feet and we were home free. Monaldo would wake up none the wiser and Ramirez would never know my pinky swear was worth less than flip-flops on a Payless clearance rack.
“But my prints are all over that one!” Mom protested.
I paused. Damn. She had a point. Not that Monaldo looked like the type to keep fingerprint dust in his back pocket, but Ramirez might. And I knew for certain Detective Sipowicz did. Considering the way I’d already gotten on the LVMPD’s bad side, I wasn’t sure I wanted to chance another encounter with Mizz Belushi and the soda-pushers.
“Fine,” I conceded. “I’ll go get it. You guys go to the car, and I’ll meet you there.”
Mom nodded, letting Dana lead her out the front doors and into the sunlight again. I waited until I saw Mrs. Rosenblatt bring up the rear, waddling to safety, before I spun on my heels and ran as quickly as my strappy slingbacks would allow back to the office.
I paused a moment outside Monaldo’s door, putting my ear to the wood and listening for any signs of movement inside. Nothing. I did a two count before reassuring myself he was still out and slowly pushed open the door.
He hadn’t moved from his crumpled heap on the floor, though his limbs were convulsing like he’d stuck a finger in a light socket. Which, I guess technically, he kind of had. I tippy-toed into the room, carefully stepping over Monaldo’s twitching form, and grabbed the stun gun, slipping it into my purse. Then I tippy-toed back out, keeping one eye on the drooling wise guy. I shuddered to think what he’d do if he woke up. The phrase “limb from limb” came to mind.
I shut the office door behind me and skittered back down the hallway, out onto the main floor of the club again. I was just gearing up to sprint the last few feet to the front doors when I felt a hand clamp down on my shoulder.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he growled into my ear.
Oh, crud. But with the way my luck was going, I shouldn’t have been surprised. In fact, I was starting to think they should rename Murphy’s Law, Maddie’s Law. Anything bad that could happen, did happen. And usually to me.
Killer in High Heels Page 20
