by Gina LaManna
Russo didn’t stand a chance. Still clutching my heels, I hightailed it across the parking lot and threw the back door open. Unfortunately, there was no hallway to shield my sudden appearance, nor was there a way to block Russo from view.
He’d broken into a run behind me and arrived at my shoulder a beat too late.
“Oh,” he murmured. “I see.”
To our right was an old podium that had probably been near the front door in the restaurant’s heyday. Before us, the room stretched open, one big rectangular space. Most of the tables were long gone, though the booths near the edges of the room were reminiscent of days gone by.
The room was coated in swatches of red—red carpeting, red vinyl seating on the booths, red tapestries. All the red was offset by dim lighting, casting a creepy sort of glow on the walls. The rest of the restaurant was tinged with shiny brass fixtures that glinted underneath the reddish tinge.
In the middle of the room was one circular table with six players and a dealer seated around it. Jimmy and Dunkirk stood before the table—Jimmy with his arms crossed and Dunkirk with that hand twitching by his waist. Strangely enough, nothing seemed to be out of order except the presence of cops at an underground poker game.
Jimmy’s eyes said everything as his gaze bored into mine, but he quickly turned back to the table as if my arrival had been expected. The eyes of every player were on me, as well, but soon enough they turned back to Jimmy when he cleared his throat and began barking orders.
“We’re just here for a quick chat,” Jimmy said. “Hannah, can we start with you?”
The dealer paled. “It’s Angel. Call me Angel.”
“Angel, you’re with him.” Jimmy nodded to Dunkirk. “Ricci, you’re coming with me. The rest of y’all, don’t get any ideas. We just want a quick chat.”
“What’s this about?” my dad asked. “We don’t have to talk to anyone.”
Jimmy’s eyes landed on him, and I could see the struggle in his expression. It was obvious he recognized my father and wasn’t quite sure what to do with him. He glanced my way.
“Your father looks like you,” Russo confirmed in my ear. “Or rather, you look like him.”
“It’s just genes,” I said. “Nothing more.”
Russo shut up.
“Let’s get a move on,” Jimmy said. “Angel... aww, c’mon. Don’t do this to me.”
Angel took off. She wore a black mini skirt and high heels nearly double the size of mine. Her shirt was a teeny crop top that barely covered her chest area, and her hair was the size of a motorcycle helmet.
She teetered straight toward us, shrieking like a banshee. I suddenly understood that the sound we’d heard initially had been nothing more than a frightened woman—not a cop in distress. Angel’s skinny arms flailed above her head, and she looked like a mix between Barbie and a bobble-head doll as she skidded toward the door.
It was the easiest grab I’d ever made. I reached out and looped my hand around Angel’s wrist. I just held on until she stopped moving.
“Whatcha think you’re doing?” She looked curiously at me. “Don’t touch me.”
“I’m a cop.”
“You don’t look like a cop.” She squinted at me. “I thought you might be a Lady of Luxury. Except I haven’t seen you there.”
“Told you,” Russo murmured in my ear. “I said you didn’t look like a cop.”
“You didn’t tell me I looked like a prostitute, either!”
“Ladies of Luxury aren’t prostitutes.” Angel snapped her gum. “Not most of them, anyway. We’re strippers.”
“Excuse me,” I said. “My apologies. Either way, you’re coming with me. Let’s have a quick chat, woman to woman.”
She shrugged. “I’m not saying nothing.”
“You’re going to make this fun, then.” I looked over her shoulder at Jimmy. “I’ll start with her, then we’ll switch.”
“This is all voluntary,” my father said. “We can stop talking at any time—none of us have asked for lawyers. Keep that in mind.”
I ignored him and steered the dealer away. “Angel, follow me.”
We found a bench near what must have been a coat closet once upon a time. I sat next to Angel while Russo leaned against the doorway.
“We appreciate your cooperation,” I started. “We don’t suspect you of anything, Angel. But we do need you to answer a few questions.”
“Who’s he?” Angel nodded toward Russo. “Why’s he listening?”
“He’s my...”
“Partner,” Russo filled in. “We make a great team.”
“Aw.” Angel sounded disappointed. “I thought he was your man. He’s cute. Speaking of, my shift starts tomorrow at five p.m. Feel free to stop by, handsome.”
“I’m flattered,” Russo said. “Unfortunately, I’m taken.”
“Shucks,” Angel said without sounding sad. “You can always look, if you’re so inclined. Just keep those hands to yourself.”
I cleared my throat. “How do you know Joe Ricci?”
“Joe?” She wrinkled her nose. “We go way back. He came to the club, saw something he liked. From there, it grew into—you know, a little more.”
“Was it a business arrangement?”
“I don’t do that sort of thing. I just dance. Most of the time I spend with Ricci is off the clock. He just comes to the club and forks over some cash as a token of gratitude. Lucky and the bosses get annoyed if guys take business from the club.”
“Well, we know Ricci is involved in some off-the-books shenanigans with the Ladies of Luxury. Any chance you know about that?”
“If you already got your facts, you don’t need another fact from me.”
“It’s not going to hurt you to tell us,” I said. “It’ll only help your case. We already have the info. We just need to know we can trust you.”
“You can trust me.” She gave a hearty nod. “Promise.”
“Yeah, we’ll need more than that,” I said. “Give us something.”
“Joe has his fingers in a lot of different pots. Is that what you mean?”
“What sort of pots?”
“The sort of pots you were talking about before,” Angel said cryptically. She glanced at my face and saw I still didn’t understand. She gave a hefty sigh. “Who made you a detective, anyway? Yeah, Joe gets a kickback if he brings guys to the bar that spend money on a woman. But he’s not, like, actually involved with the process. It’s like leading a horse to water.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, there’s horses—those’re the guys—and they’re thirsty. The girls are the water. They need to be, I dunno, dranken up. So, Joe just shows them the way. He’s not in on it or anything. You can’t arrest him for being a well-informed man.”
I looked over at Russo who was hiding something that looked like amusement.
“That’s one heck of an analogy,” Russo muttered. “Unique.”
“What about narcotics?” I asked.
“You a narc?” Angel’s voice rose a few pitches higher. “I didn’t think you were a narc.”
“As a matter of fact, I’m a murder cop,” I said. “And you don’t want to be caught up in this case I’m working. Trust me.”
“I don’t know anything about drugs.”
“Right,” I said, thinking of the safe we’d found in her room, and the half kilo inside of it. “So, if—theoretically—we searched your place, we wouldn’t find anything?”
“You can’t do that.” Her eyes shifted from me to Russo. “She can’t do that.”
Russo just flicked a non-committal smile. “Take it from me. You don’t want to test her.”
“You can’t go into my apartment.” Her eyes widened. “I live in a nice place. There’s security. They won’t let you in.”
“They have to let us in if we get a warrant,” I pointed out. “And Russo’s right. You don’t really want to test me—I’m quite determined. But I’ll tell you what. If you cooperate with us, we won’t need a warrant.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She swished her ponytail. “You can go into my apartment. You won’t find anything there.”
“Warrants can include more than you know. Private spaces, cars... safes.”
Her eyes narrowed in understanding. “What do you want to know?”
“I thought that might catch your attention,” I said. “Though I can assure you, we’re not interested in you or your part in this whole mess. We’re looking for the person responsible for killing Tony Colombo.”
“Peg Leg?” she frowned. “He’s dead?”
“You didn’t know?” Her surprise seemed genuine, which in turn threw me for a loop. “Where were you last night?”
“I was with Joe the whole night.”
“Start from the beginning,” I said. “What time did you meet up with Joe?”
“I dunno, seven p.m.?” she said. “I was supposed to work but called in sick. I got some favors Lucky owes me, and I didn’t feel like working. He didn’t seem to care.”
“I was told you had a shift.”
“I did. I’m telling you that I didn’t show up for it. I was with Joe the entire time.”
“From when to when?”
“Seven to... oh, I dunno. This morning,” she said. “He spent the night. We went out around two in the morning, stopped by the club.”
“Why’d you go out at all?”
“Joe wanted to,” she said. “He was meeting someone. I went with, got some food. I was hungry.”
“And Joe was with you the whole time? He didn’t leave, even for a few minutes?”
“No. We were busy most of the time.” She fluffed her hair. “What can I say? He likes my company.”
“I see,” I said. “Are you in an exclusive relationship with him?”
“Naw, it isn’t like that. We just enjoy each other’s company when neither of us has anything else going on. I don’t mind my work, and it’s hard to have a relationship doing what I do unless the guy really gets it.”
“I understand,” I muttered. “All too well.”
Russo chuckled darkly.
“Joe gets it, though,” Angel said. “He knows we’re not serious, and I know he’s not looking to make me his ball and chain.”
I was still processing Angel’s claims that she’d been with Joe the entire night. “Why would Lucky tell us you were at the club last night if you weren’t?”
“He probably didn’t even notice,” she said. “He’s a putz.”
“A putz?”
“Yeah. He never knows what’s going on. The girls and I run that place, he just shows his face around there, kicks a few creepy guys out now and again, and collects a paycheck. He doesn’t actually do anything. We all know it. He probably looked at the schedule, saw I had a shift, and told you that. He’s not even on the floor half the time.”
“But you called in sick?”
“Sure,” she said. “You can check my phone.”
I waited as Angel produced a cell phone enclosed in a squishy pink case and handed it over.
“Go on, look,” she said, unlocking it. “But don’t click on YouTube. And if you’re not ready for Rated X stuff, stay out of the text messages. Some of my best paying customers like a little warm up before they come to the club.”
I stayed far away from Angel’s text messages and pulled up her call log. Sure enough, there was a call to a contact by the name of Lucky early in the afternoon. I took a picture of the call log, along with Lucky’s number to match it up later and verify.
“What’s this one?” I pointed to a call slightly after. The contact was listed only as Front Door.
“It’s the front door,” she said, as if I was an idiot. “I told you, I live in a nice place. There’s a buzzer at the front, so when I have a visitor, they just dial up from the keypad, I press in a code, and it unlocks the door.”
I thought back to the Gem Industries building and the struggle we’d had to get into Angel’s apartment. “I see. And your visitor was...”
“I told you that, too.” She sounded annoyed. “Joe. He came over around seven. See, seven-oh-two. Isn’t that close enough?”
“And he didn’t leave again until...”
“We left around two a.m. Jeez. Do you have any new questions, or can we wrap this up? When was Peg Leg killed?”
I didn’t answer.
“Look, I’m not dumb. I watch cop shows. If you’re asking about last night, that must mean the guy was killed during that window. So, if you’re looking for Joe’s alibi—I’m it. He was with me all night.”
“Never once out of your sight?”
“He dipped away at the club for all of twenty minutes. He had some meeting that was private. I went and hung out with the girls in the back room. I ran into Lucky—that’s probably why he thinks I was working. He saw me, waved, moved on. That’s about the extent of his attention span anyway.”
Two a.m. was too late. If Joe Ricci had truly spent the evening with Angel—holed up in her apartment—there was no way he could have gotten to Bellini’s and back, let alone slipped into the refrigerator and pulled a gun on Tony.
“I can see you’re struggling with all this,” she said. “So how about you just let me go now? Did I help you?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Do you know any of Joe’s friends?”
She gestured toward the restaurant. “Sure. I’ve been dealing this game for, I dunno, a year or two.”
“Is it always the same crowd?”
“Not always. Sometimes there’s one or two more,” she said. “Peg Leg used to play a while ago, but he stopped coming around. A few of the others filter in and out. The regulars are Joe, Mo, Stinky, and Angelo.”
“How long has Angelo been coming here?”
“Now he’s a suspect too?”
“It’s just a question.”
“We started this particular game, I dunno, three years back. He was one of the initial guys, though I’m assuming they’d had games before. They all knew each other.” Angel smoothed her eyebrows with a finger, looking deep in thought. “I know you’re all uptight and what not. I get it, you have to be in order to keep your tough-gal cop facade. But these guys aren’t bad guys. They just like to play a game of cards now and again.”
“It seems like some of them, Joe in particular, have their fingers in a few pots. Sticky pots.”
“Well, I don’t know much about that,” she said. “But I guess a person’s gotta make a living.”
“A person’s also gotta pay taxes and report all their tips,” I said pointedly. “If we’re talking legalities here.”
“Nobody reports all their tips,” Angel said with an eyeroll. “Don’t be stupid. The IRS is fine with it.”
I inhaled a deep breath. “Don’t go telling any other authorities that.”
“Fine,” she said. “But it’s true.”
I stood. “For the record, I’m not as uptight as you might think.”
“Okay,” she said. “Sure thing. So, am I free to go?”
“How can I get ahold of you if I need to?” I asked. “We might have more questions.”
She wiggled her pink-cased cell phone. “You can call me like a normal person.”
I took her digits down. They were different than the ones Asha had been tracking.
“Is this your phone?” I asked.
“One of them,” she hedged. “I like a variety.”
Just then, Jimmy poked his head out. “You ready to switch?”
I showed Angel back into the room, then pulled Jimmy into the coat closet to join me and Russo. “Angel just alibied out Joe.”
Jimmy’s eyes widened. “I thought Ricci was telling me a story. He claimed he spent most of the night at Angel’s. That they left for only an hour—that hour being well after Peg Leg was killed.”
I nodded. “They went to Ladies of Luxury for an hour between two and three in the morning?”
Jimmy confirmed with another bob of his head. “I thought he was spinning a tale.”
“Well, it should be easy enough to check,” I said. “Angel said they ordered pizza. We can get the receipt on that. There was also a call from the front door buzzer that matches up—I’m betting you we can get some security footage on that.”
“I’m betting you can get some.” Jimmy gave me a knowing look. Then, he shifted uncomfortably as he glanced over my shoulder and saw Russo listening in. “Oops. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m gonna go talk to the rest of them.”
Jimmy disappeared into the restaurant and left me alone with Russo. The agent shoved his hands into his pocket.
“Was that supposed to mean something to me?” he asked nonchalantly. “Your pal Jimmy doesn’t have much in the way of a poker face. And there was something he didn’t want me to know.”
“I suppose I forgot part of the story,” I said. “When we went to Angel’s apartment earlier, we couldn’t get inside. Not easily, at least.”
“You called in a favor, I assume.”
“The building’s owned by Gem Industries.”
“I see.”
“It’s not...” I hedged. “Don’t read into it. It was business only. We heard a crash coming from inside her apartment, and we thought Angel might’ve been in danger. We worried Ricci had taken her and—”
Russo had both hands on my shoulders. He gave me a little shake to stop me from talking.
“I’m not reading into it. I’m secure enough for you to talk with other men and not get jealous.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Look, I know you’re friends—or something—with Gem,” Russo said. “Do I love it? Not exactly. But I think he’s a good enough guy. Don’t worry about what I think so much. We’re not even in a relationship.”
“We’re not?”
“Do you want to be?”
“No—er, not yet. I just meant, we’ve been spending a lot of time together, and—”
“We’ll be in a relationship when you want to be. If you want to be. I’ll let you tell me when that is.” Russo winked. “Until then, you’re a free bird, Kate Rosetti.”
I liked the feeling of being Russo’s sole focus. The way he looked at me, spoke to me, made me feel important and understood, whether we were at a fine dining establishment or in the lobby of an old Asian restaurant in the middle of interviews. I found myself wondering if the relationship tag would be all that bad after all.
