Two O'Clock Heist: A Rebecca Mayfield Mystery (The Rebecca Mayfield Mysteries Book 2)

by Joanne Pence

  “No! No! Aspet’! Lasciami! Richie! Che schifozz’?! Richieeee!”

  Rebecca froze in the doorway to see Carmela Amalfi, Richie’s mother, sitting on the kitchen counter, kicking her feet to keep Spike away from her as he jumped up and down, sometimes springing so high he nearly reached the countertop, barking the whole time.

  She scooped Spike up and rushed him out the back door, then turned around. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Ma!”

  She heard Richie’s voice, spun to face him, and swallowed. Hard. He was barefoot, wearing pajamas bottoms, and pulling a big, loose T-shirt over his head. His chest, she couldn’t help but notice, was a lot more well-toned and muscular than she would have suspected.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Help me down.” Carmela ordered.

  Rebecca had to wonder how the little woman got up on the counter in the first place. She wasn’t heavy, but she wasn’t very tall and was definitely pear-shaped.

  Richie put his hands on her waist and Carmela held his shoulders as he lowered her.

  “Basta! Scorciamend’!” she cried, waving her hands, as soon as her toes touched the floor. “Ma che cozz’u fai, Richie? What’s going on here? ”

  “Nothing.” he said. “Uh…you know Reb…uh, Becky.”

  She glared at Rebecca, her lips a thin line. “Becky? I thought you said her name was Reba.” To Rebecca, the way Carmela looked at her, her name was Mud.

  “My name is Rebecca,” she said. “And I’m here because—”

  From behind his mother, Richie was vigorously shaking his head, and wildly sliding his fingers under his chin in the classic movieland signal for “Cut.” as in “Don’t tell her what’s happening.” Rebecca didn’t know why he didn’t want his mother to know, but she had to respect that.

  “Because?” Carmela asked, her hawk-like nose high in the air as her mouth scrunched and her black eyes narrowed as she took in their states of undress, then zeroed in on Richie. “Perché?”

  “Because we’re crazy about each other.” Richie scooted to Rebecca’s side and wrapped an arm around her. “That’s the way it is, Ma.”

  “Humph. There’s more going on here. I thought so when you showed up at church yesterday. Not that it wasn’t about time.” Carmela’s harsh gaze leaped from one to the other. Rebecca wondered if she’d ever worked for a CIA interrogation unit. “But I suppose you aren’t going to tell me. Anyway, I cooked osso buco for dinner last night and made extra for you. I know how much you love it. It’ll be even better today than it was yesterday. Unfortunately, though, I didn’t bring enough for two. If you would tell your mother what’s going on …” At that moment, Carmela’s eyes shifted to Rebecca. “Do you have a job? Are you living here?”

  Rebecca was so dumbfounded by the questions, she took a moment to answer. “I’m—”

  “She’s a hairdresser,” Richie said, clutching her even tighter against his side. His clothes were light cotton, and Rebecca could feel the contours and warmth of his body against her own. “She makes good money.”

  “That’s good,” Carmela said, fluffing her own dyed copper-color hair. It was cut so short it resembled a helmet. “I like hairdressers. Anyway, now I understand. It’s like they say, you can always tell who’s a carpenter because his house is the one that needs repair. But that’s all right, Rebecca. Or do you prefer Reba? Or Becky? Anyway, I’m sure you’ll have more time for yourself one of these days. Richie will see to it. My son, he’s a good boy.”

  Rebecca and Richie both gawked at each other, momentarily speechless, and Rebecca fought the urge to run her fingers through her hair to try to smooth it, wondering what Richie’s mother found so awful.

  “Okay, okay, I see you two don’t want this old lady hanging around interrupting your morning. I’ll get going. Richie, I hope you can make it to dinner next Sunday. I’m making ravioli the way Nonna Michelina used to do. Bring Reb … uh, Bec … whatever. It’s okay, even if she’s not Italian. At least she’s not another one of those horrible cocktail waitresses always hanging around you like leeches. Che brutt’! They should know my son is too good for them.”

  “Yeah, sure, Ma,” Richie said as he guided his mother towards the door. “Thanks for the osso buco. I’ll call you later on about Sunday. I’m not sure what’s happening then.” He gave her a kiss on the cheek.

  She waggled her finger at him. “Some women just want your money.”

  “I know, I know.” He all but pushed her onto the front stoop.

  “Now, don’t go—”

  He shut the door, then turned and faced Rebecca looking even more sheepish than he did the first time she encountered Carmela. He ran his hand through his hair as he walked to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water. “Sorry about that.”

  Rebecca folded her arms. “At least she decided it’s okay that I’m not Italian,” she said, trying to keep a straight face, but failing. Her mouth broadened into a big smile that ended in a chuckle.

  Richie joined in, both leaning back against the granite kitchen countertops and laughing with a mixture of humor and embarrassment over the encounter. “She’s got a key. I forgot all about it. Usually, I don’t have women here when she shows up.”

  “Unless they’re ‘leech-y’ cocktail waitresses, I take it.” Rebecca folded her arms and lifted one eyebrow as she waited for his reply.

  “I dated a couple. My mother met the last one and wasn’t impressed. She was drop-dead beautiful, but between her ears was a vacuum like shouldn’t exist outside of deep space.”

  “Poor Richie,” Rebecca said, as she let Spike back into the house. “I’m sure you cared about her brains.”

  “I did!”

  She shook her head, then turned back to the guest room to take a shower and get dressed for work. Richie followed right behind her, heading for his own bedroom.

  “I never knew a sweatshirt could look so good,” he muttered.

  As she opened the door to the bedroom, she turned and faced him. His hair was mussed with lock tumbling onto his forehead, his eyes were heavy, he needed a shave, and he was wearing pj bottoms and a T-shirt, yet he looked like the sexiest thing she had seen since she didn’t know when. All the thoughts she had about him last night as she tried to fall asleep slammed into her once more, only now the thoughts and feelings aroused were worse because he was within touching distance. No doors, no hallways, stood between them.

  She froze, and she knew she couldn’t hide the desire from her face as her gaze met his. And the maddening part was, she didn’t want to. He didn’t move, as if waiting for her.

  It seemed neither breathed, not until she said, “Time for work,” and hurried into the bedroom.

  She closed the bedroom door, leaned against it, and shut her eyes a moment. As she envisioned once more the look of surprise, curiosity, and raw unmasked passion on Richie’s face, she couldn’t help but wonder …

  o0o

  Shortly after Rebecca headed off to work, Richie sat in his living room, not sure what to do. How had he gotten himself into this mess with her? She was too complicated, too serious, and too much the cop. Maybe he should find himself another cocktail waitress. And then he smiled at Rebecca teasing him about ‘leechy’ women.

  He didn’t understand himself any more. If she was just about any other attractive woman living in his house, sleeping here … well, they wouldn’t have needed two sets of sheets, that’s for sure. Why did he treat her so differently? He knew plenty of women who were, objectively speaking, prettier, richer, more highly educated, and acted eager to jump in the sack with him any old time. Yet she was the one he most enjoyed being with, who he actually had fun with, and who, for some damned reason, even brought out a protective instinct in him that—again objectively speaking—was ludicrous on the face of it. He treated her as if she were a sister or favorite cousin, but what he most wanted was far from brotherly.

  Yet the way she had looked at him in the hallway that morning, he was afraid
he would ignite and burn up as completely as her SUV had.

  Women! He would never understand them.

  His phone rang. He was relieved to hear it—glad for any distraction from his current thoughts.

  Vito called to say he was sorry but his wife didn’t like the wine truck in their driveway. Vito was one of the toughest guys Richie had ever met, except where his wife was concerned. Then, he turned into the biggest wuss imaginable. He would ask “How high?” before Margie even told him to jump.

  He promised Vito he would move the truck. He tried to think of where to move it to. He had warehouses, but the last thing he wanted was to connect the illegal wine to himself.

  If he parked it near Shay, he’d have an even worse problem than with Vito since Shay owned a large older building in Presidio Heights overlooking Julius Kahn Park. He lived on the top floor and rented out the lower levels as apartments. His nosy neighbors would question him having a big truck in his parking space for more than a couple of hours. Besides, it would clash with his Maserati.

  Then inspiration struck and he phoned Vito.

  Before long, Richie reached Mulford Alley, where Rebecca lived.

  Vito leaned against the truck, smoking a cigarette. He was built like a fire plug with a heart as big as his waistline. In his late forties, he had receding black hair, hang dog brown eyes, and a generous nose and mouth. He always wore the same tan car coat with bulging pockets filled with food and all kinds of other things. Even Vito probably couldn’t remember what was in them.

  Richie stopped and Vito got into the passenger seat. “What do you think of that spot?” Richie asked.

  Vito had parked the truck at the very end of the street rather than taking up the red-painted sidewalk. “It’ll work okay until the neighbors get curious or until your girlfriend finds out what’s inside.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.” Richie drove towards North Beach.

  Vito smirked. “Oh, yeah? Coulda fooled me.”

  Richie scowled. “Anyway, she’s not staying in her apartment at the moment. She’s involved in a bad situation.”

  “I think I got an idea where she’s stayin’, right, boss?” Now, he was grinning ear-to-ear.

  Richie cast him a death glare. “I’m being helpful. That’s all.”

  Vito shrugged. “Like I said, coulda fooled me.”

  Richie drove them to The Leaning Tower Taverna on Columbus and Vallejo.

  Shay was already waiting when Richie and Vito arrived. They always sat at the back booth. If someone else was there when Richie called to say he was on his way, that someone else would be moved. That was just the way it was.

  Shay’s full name was Henry Ian Tate III, but for reasons never explained, he called himself Shay—which Richie thought was better than using his initials: HIT III. Richie knew women found Shay attractive, but he was surprised at the stab of jealousy he had felt over the way Rebecca all but drooled when she first met the guy.

  Shay had a cup of herbal tea in front of him. Richie never saw him eat, which was kind of freaky since Richie’s other friends loved good food as much as he did.

  Vito, for instance, ordered a liver, pepper, mozzarella, and onion sandwich with a beer. It was enough to make Richie want to cry over the boring green salad with skinless grilled chicken and iced tea, no sugar, he had ordered. Somehow, being around Rebecca made him want to eat better and not let his health or weight get out of control like he had a few years back after his fiancée died and he spent his days and nights boozing it up and doing everything he shouldn’t. If it hadn’t been for Vito and Shay, he’d be six feet under by now. He owed those guys big time.

  He even went to a gym now and then, God help him. He knew Rebecca regularly went to keep fit for duty. One look at her and a guy could tell she was well-toned. Very well-toned, in fact.

  Richie told Shay and Vito about his uncle’s wine and his troubles with the ABC. It turned out Shay was already on top of the situation.

  “Here’s what’s going on,” Shay said. “Some of your goomba friends are putting other labels on the wine.” Shay wasn’t Italian, so when he used the word goomba, it was not a compliment. “Then they charged forty-eight to sixty-four dollars a bottle.”

  “What?” Richie nearly choked on an arugula leaf.

  “You heard me.”

  “Are they f’ing crazy?” Richie would have pounded the table except he didn’t want to cause a scene. “They were supposed to pour the goddamned wine into their goddamned carafes as the friggin’ house red. Then nobody would much care, and if it was especially good—which it is—so much the better for business.”

  “They decided it was too good for house red.”

  “Jesus H.—”

  “Don’t swear that way, Richie,” Vito said. “Your mother made me promise to stop you. She said it’s bad karma.”

  Richie scowled at him, unsure whether it was stranger that his mother talked about ‘karma’ or that Vito repeated her words.

  “The problem was at Al Fenook’s place,” Shay continued. Al’s real name was Alfonse Tarantino, but he used a lot of fenook in his cooking, which was the Calabrese word for fennel seeds—and slang for something else. “One of Al’s regular customers happens to be a sister of one of the bigwigs in the ABC. She told him about the great wine being poured, but that bottle labels looked funny and peeled right off. All she wanted was to know where she could buy some. Anyway, the ABC honcho got curious, sent a couple of his goons to sniff around. They figured out the problem right away. Al was in trouble, and only got off the hook by sending them in your direction.”

  “Damned whiny little weasel!” Richie muttered.

  “Mamaluk’!” Vito added.

  “I can’t sell to them anymore—not any of them.” Richie shoved the tasteless salad away and hurled himself back against the booth seat, arms crossed. “If they’re doing that, we could all get busted. Now, what am I supposed to do? I’ve got some two hundred fifty cases left. That’s what, three-thousand bottles? For cryin’ out loud!”

  “I could talk to them,” Shay said, his tone icy cold.

  “Don’t do that. They’re friends. Or should be.” Richie ran his hand over the back of his head as he thought a moment. “They were supposed to be doing me a favor, but they got greedy. I’ve got to think what to do. All I know is, I can’t sell them any more of this stuff. How was I supposed to know Uncle Silvio’s wine was so damn good?”

  All three brooded over their drinks.

  “Enough of this,” Richie said. “Next problem: Shurik Charkov.”

  Richie gave his friends a little background, explaining how Rebecca wanted to find her murdered friend’s live-in boyfriend, a Russian named Yuri Baranski who worked in the city.

  Since Richie knew a guy who might help, he had called Nicolai Gridenko. Nicolai said he’d check around, and while he was looking into the Golden Gate Garage, a place operated by the mob, who should wander in but Rebecca Mayfield herself. Nicolai called Richie to get her out of there.

  “The next day, Rebecca came across Shurik Charkov’s name,” Richie continued. “Nicolai says Charkov is a boss in Russian syndicate, not very big or important, but he’d like to be. That makes him dangerous. Rebecca has no idea who he is.”

  Vito blanched and even Shay winced a tiny bit at this news.

  “You going to tell her?” Vito asked.

  “From what I’ve seen of her,” Shay said, “that’ll only make her more interested in tracking him down, not less.”

  Richie nodded. “That’s true. I don’t know what to do. Maybe if she pays more attention to what happened in Sausalito itself, she’ll back off the Russians. Somehow, we’ve got to make sure she doesn’t get on Charkov’s radar any more than she might be already.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Rebecca no sooner walked into Homicide than a call came in that sent her and Sutter to the home of Harlan Stegall. She and Sutter were the on-call team that week, so every case that came in landed on their laps.


  They found Mr. Stegall, age 32, lying dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs, atop a mosaic tile floor. The paramedics thought he must have fallen head first down the stairs and landed with such force his spinal cord snapped, resulting in nearly instantaneous death.

  Rebecca was dubious. The movies that showed someone sneaking up from behind and giving a person’s head and neck one hard twist, causing the victim to immediately drop dead, were just that—movies. Tearing a spinal cord in a young, healthy male took tremendous force.

  “It looks like an accident to me,” Sutter said.

  “Let’s have the medical examiner take a look,” Rebecca said. “Something here doesn’t feel right.”

  “You’re pushing, Mayfield,” Sutter said. “I think your Russian troubles have you paranoid. The guy fell. Look at the wife. She was the only one in the house, and she’s a wreck.”

  Rebecca studied Lyndsey Stegall. She sat in the living room with a female neighbor who kept handing her Kleenex, and patting her arm. Lyndsey was young, pretty, and distraught.

  Harlan Stegall’s parents had been called, and they were on their way over.

  “Keep the parents outside,” Rebecca said to the officers guarding the scene. “I don’t want anyone else in here until we’re sure this isn’t a crime.”

  “What makes you think it is?” Sutter exclaimed, sounding exasperated.

  “Because young men don’t die that easily.”

  “But it is possible. Bad luck happens.”

  “True,” she said. “And I want to make sure that’s the case here.” She couldn’t help but think of the shoddy police work going on in Sausalito over Karen Larkin’s murder based on “assumptions” being made. She could do better.

  The ME came in, and looked at the Stegall. He did appear to have broken vertebrae, but she needed to do an autopsy to determine the extent of the damage.

  As the body was taken away, Rebecca and Sutter studied the staircase and upper landing, trying to determine what had caused the man to fall. They could see nothing, but people were known to trip over their own feet, or to simply miss a step.