Starr Sign

by C. S. O'Cinneide

  “Any news on the Angela front?” I ask, eyeing the house across the street. Still no replacement for the goon on patrol. I guess they can’t be out there all the time, or the neighbours would complain.

  “We know she was in Detroit to see the old Don before he died. We’re focusing our inquiries there.” I guess Janet needn’t have bothered to keep that bit of intel to herself. The cops already knew. But then again, they’ve been monitoring the Scarpellos for years, so I suppose it makes sense.

  “We’re still working on getting your birth registration. It should tell us who attended the delivery. We might be able to get a name for our Jane Doe. Or find out what happened to the other child.” She sighs. “What I can’t understand is why the Scarpellos would bash a woman’s head in over it all.”

  “The Scarpellos? What makes you think it was them?” I try to sound my best approximation of surprised. I know the Scarpellos put that nurse in the freezer so she wouldn’t be able to tell the tale of two babies. But I don’t get how Malone figured it out.

  “The warehouse, where we found the body,” she says. “We still haven’t gotten anywhere on the ownership. But our records show it was a Scarpello safe house back in the day.”

  “Wasn’t too safe for the chick in the freezer.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “What are the Scarpellos into these days, anyway?” I ask her, all causal, as if we’re just talking shop. Back like we did when we worked on the Brent murder case together. I’m ace at making people feel at ease when I want to. It’s easier to snap their necks that way.

  “The usual,” Malone says. “Extortion, money laundering, the lot. Although they’ve branched out. They’re more into cybercrimes lately. Bilking old people out of their life savings with phishing emails. But right now, the feds are interested in a high-stakes poker game they’ve got running. No one knows how the money gets moved around, but there’s got to be a lot of it.” Malone pauses, remembering now that she’s not talking to a colleague, but a criminal.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “No reason,” I say.

  “You’re up to something. I can tell,” Malone hisses into the phone. “Listen, Candace. Leave this one to us. You don’t want to mess with the Scarpellos. We’ll find Angela, or a relative up in Canada to take Janet.”

  “Ah, Malone, you misjudge me,” I say. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  A light goes on across the street. Someone is standing at the window. “Listen, I have to go,” I tell Malone.

  “Why?”

  “I’m in the middle of playing Risk.”

  After I get off the call with Malone, I delete her number from my phone before shutting if off to save the battery. If the Scarpellos got a hold of it, it wouldn’t be kosher having a cop in my call history. I come out from behind the shadowy stone wall and stride up to the Scarpello’s front steps, pressing the old-style doorbell. It sets off a succession of deafening chimes worse than Westminster Abbey. I flick a leaf of ivy off my leather jacket, just before the door opens.

  One of Anya’s security detail from the church stands there gawking, as if he hadn’t thoroughly checked me out on the video feed long before he came to the door. He frisks me right there on the front step, but I’m clean. I left my piece back at the motel, knowing they’d just confiscate it, anyway. I tried to give Deep a brief lesson on gun mechanics and how to shoot, but he refused to touch my Ruger, offended by its violent un-Britishness. He’d claimed this was a real word, like un-American. But I think he made it up. I’d left the Ruger in the bedside table for him just in case, next to a Gideon’s Bible and an escort service flyer someone had left behind. Or maybe Deep got lonely when I went for my nap earlier.

  “I’m Candace Starr,” I say once he’s done giving me the once over with his massive hands.

  “I know,” he grunts. “Angela’s brat.” He stands aside so I can walk through the doorway. “The Scarpellos are expecting you.”

  I cross over the threshold into what might be my brother’s house.

  And just like that, I’m one of the family.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE SCARPELLO FOYER IS A LARGE ONE — marble floor, spiralling staircase, the works. The guy who answered the door has left me here under a tear-drop chandelier with instructions to wait. For what, he didn’t say. A large antique mirror reflects a tarnished image of me from where it hangs on the wall. It looks like the one that bitch of a stepmother used to screw over Snow White.

  “Candace, I’m so glad you have come.”

  Anya Scarpello is at the top of the curving staircase, dressed in a classy below-the-knee skirt, topped by a quilted jacket in gold and silver paisley. I thought you weren’t supposed to mix those two metals, but on her, it looks good. In my black jeans and scuffed cowboy boots, I guess I’m underdressed. Even the bozo who answered the door was decked out better than me.

  Anya descends the staircase, caressing the polished mahogany banister with her fingertips. When she reaches the bottom, she throws her jacketed arms around me in an honest hug. Usually, I hate that sort of thing, but she smells of Chanel N°5 and hair spray, and there’s something comforting about this combination of aerosol scents. Must be a throwback to the years my dad and I spent living above that drag bar on the strip when I was a kid. Those queens were always nice to me, babysitting me in their dressing room while my dad was out on a job, fussing over my hair in their size 14 platform heels.

  Anya stands back after the hug and holds me at arm’s length.

  “You look so much like your mother,” she says. “Yeah, I’ve heard that.” Angela was a looker, from all accounts, so I don’t mind being compared to her too much in this way. But if this woman understood anything at all about who and what I am, she’d realize it’s my father I take after.

  “She’s not here, is she?” I say. “It’s just I’m not that anxious to see her.” I figure this is a way of asking after Angela without seeming like I care. Which in some ways I don’t.

  Anya takes a step back, smooths her skirt with her hands. “She was, but she has left.” I knew it wouldn’t be that easy.

  “Oh, well. That’s good then,” I tell her.

  “I am disappointed to hear you say that, Candace. Family, as I’ve told you, is very important. Especially for us.”

  Her earlier warmth with the hug has dropped a few degrees. I’ve disappointed her. I decide I better play a different tactic if I want her to trust me. Trust, I have learned from experience, is most easily gained when you mirror back what the other person wants most to see reflected.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” I say. “I just don’t think I’m ready to see her just yet, you know? But I want to, I really do.”

  Anya nods, not convinced.

  “Besides, looks like she didn’t want to see me, either. Otherwise she’d be here.” I jut my lower lip out a bit. I’m trying to play the pity card here, hoping it’ll force Anya to show her hand. The play works. Her face and her stance soften a little.

  “Angela would be here to see you if she could, Candace. I am sure of it.” She seems really sincere and earnest about this. It makes me wonder if she knows my mother at all.

  “Then why isn’t she here?”

  A shadow passes over her face, brief but still betraying a darkness. She steps over to the Snow White mirror and checks her hair, patting down errant strands that don’t exist.

  “Your mother was very distraught after the death of her grandfather. She can be … unstable. I don’t know whether you are aware of that.”

  “I am.”

  She turns from the mirror to face me. “Alex thought it best that she get some professional care. There is a retreat, for women of a certain age, not far from here. The doctor who leads it is a close friend of the family. It is very reputable.”

  I remember the retreat for women going through the change that Deep found in his research. The one run by the doctor who’d delivered Angela’s twins and then lied his ass off about it
on the birth record.

  “There is no contact with the outside world there — no phones permitted, or internet connection,” she says. “A digital detox, I believe they call it. That is why your mother isn’t here, and why she doesn’t know that you are.”

  “Oh,” I say. “I guess that explains it.”

  She steps away from the mirror, takes my arm, and leads me down a long hallway with fake candelabra burning brightly on the walls. One of them crackles and snaps as we walk by, a tapered bulb threatening to blow.

  “I am so glad you are open to seeing your mother, Candace,” she says, her warmth returning. “Mothers and daughters have a special bond. You are aware of the saying — it is an English one — a son’s a son until he takes a wife, a daughter’s your daughter for the rest of your life?”

  “Well, I guess that means you still have your son,” I say, remembering the Murder Ink presenter’s comment about Alex being far from the marrying type.

  “Yes,” she says, staring down the long hallway in front of her as if she were still looking into the darkness of the mirror. “I do have that.”

  Dressed in a charcoal-grey suit tailored on the slim side, Alex Scarpello stands up from the head of the table when Anya and I walk into the formal dining room. He looks to be about the same height as me, same colouring, although his hair is darker. The curls we share have been cropped short since the picture I saw, accentuating his face. He has full lips, and heavy-lidded fuck-me eyes, like Mick Jagger or that Irish guy from Peaky Blinders. I can see where he’d be popular with the ladies, with his long lashes and limbs, and more than a hint of danger about him — a predatory pretty boy. Although I’ve never been into that stormy androgynous look myself. A faint hint of acne scars marks his cheeks, but not too badly. He could be my brother, but he could also be my cousin once removed, like he’s supposed to be. He smiles at me in a catfish way. You know those people online who try to pretend they’re something they’re not. It’s fucking unsettling and makes me wish I still had my gun.

  “Well, the infamous Candace Starr,” he says, indicating for both Anya and me to take our seats at the table. Our place settings have been laid out at the opposite end from him. The table is so long, it wouldn’t fit in my apartment, even if I kept the door open to my shower/ washroom as well as the hallway. The seating arrangement is designed so he can literally keep his distance.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” I say, not knowing how else to react to my infamy. I follow Anya’s lead and take my spot in front of the fancy dishes and silverware set up for me. There are way too many fucking forks. Alex sits back down again and steeples his long fingers.

  “First your mother and now you. We really are being treated to a Starr family reunion these days.”

  “My mother wasn’t much for reunions,” I say. Despite how I played it with his mother, I can’t let him think I’m too interested in what happened to mine. Or let on any of my real intentions for being here. Otherwise, I might end up being shipped off to a mysterious retreat myself.

  “Do you know where she is?” he asks me. This surprises me. I turn to Anya, but she only looks back at me with a red lipstick smile.

  “No,” I say, retuning my focus to the head of the table. “I haven’t known where she was for most of my life.”

  “No need to be coy, dear,” Anya says to me, then addresses her son. “I’ve told Candace that you sent Angela to the doctor to recover.”

  “Ah yes, the Razinski Clinic for Women. An excellent retreat. It was for the best.”

  Alex has a way of talking that comes from either a deep-seated need to look like he’s got class or from watching too many episodes of Downton Abbey. He hasn’t got the British accent of a lord, only the high-brow affectations of one.

  “Yeah,” I say. “But I don’t know where that is.”

  “It’s probably best that you don’t, Candace. But if you do hear from your mother, I’m sure you will tell us. She was quite unstable before she left here. We were all very concerned.”

  I bet they were. Concerned she’d blow their cover. This whole story sounds rehearsed, with both Alex and his mother working from the same script.

  “Candace is in town for the beatification,” Anya cuts in. She covers her wine glass when a guy in a penguin suit comes around with a bottle of chianti. I make sure my glass is open for action, even get the penguin to top up his original pour so it goes right to the top of the crystal goblet. I’m surprised an underworld boss would go in for this much flash. But I suppose he has enough legitimate businesses to launder his wealth. The Scarpellos own several casinos in the area, of which there are many, propping up the cash-strapped city of Detroit with their hefty sin-tax dollars.

  “Yes,” Alex says, taking a sip of his wine. “The beatification. I hadn’t realized you were so devout.”

  “I found religion in prison,” I say, keeping with the story I’d told Anya.

  “So my mother tells me.”

  The penguin returns, this time with a serving bowl that looks like a Victorian chamber pot. No one speaks while he doles out a thick brown soup with a silver ladle. Only when he leaves does conversation start up again.

  “Alex and I will be attending the beatification at the cathedral on Sunday night,” Anya says, daintily starting in on her soup. I dig in, as well, but the slop tastes like a bunch of root vegetables left to ferment, and there’s way too much yam for my taste.

  “It’s difficult,” Alex says, ignoring her, “to remain faithful in the world we live in. Don’t you think, Candace?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Come now, we’re all family here,” he says. “The line of work we’re in can be at odds with, shall we say, traditional Catholic values.”

  “I don’t think so,” I say, knowing this is a test.

  “No?”

  “Well, if the meek are inheriting the earth, I guess we’re in the wrong business,” I tell him, putting down my spoon. It leaves a shitty brown glob on the white tablecloth. “But you have to do what you can with the gifts you’ve been given. It’s a sin not to, right?” I don’t know whether it is, but it sounds like what a devout criminal would say.

  “And the gift you’ve been given is your ability to kill people?”

  “I don’t do that anymore.”

  “Nor do we,” Alex says, putting down his spoon, as well. “Well, not ourselves at least. It is important to outsource the more menial tasks.”

  “Menial tasks?” I’m slightly offended. While I may no longer off people for a living, I had always considered my previous vocation a skilled trade.

  “Anyone with access to a noxious substance in a spray bottle can remove a target these days, Candace.” He’s right. Two Vietnamese chicks had managed to take out the brother of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un using a discreet squirt in the face with a nerve agent. “If you hadn’t retired, the amateurs would have driven you out of the market.”

  I hadn’t thought about this, the idea that my former career as a personal assassin has been made redundant. Who needs a professional for a hit when you can pass someone death in a spray bottle?

  A woman comes to collect our soup bowls while the penguin starts laying out the main meal. Quinoa and zucchini topped with that Middle Eastern cheese that squeaks like rubber when you chew on it.

  “I’m a vegetarian,” Alex explains, digging into his meal, “as is my mother.”

  “Yes,” she says, eyes down. I gather our discussion on the compatibility of killing and Catholicism has caused her some amount of distress.

  “Still,” Alex says after the staff have left the room, “I could use someone like you in my organization.”

  “Someone who knows how to kill people without a spray bottle?” I ask, trying to saw through the rubbery cheese.

  “Someone who is both attractive and lethal.”

  I suppose that’s a compliment.

  “I told you, I don’t kill people anymore.”

  “You don’t need to kill people to get
results, Candace,” he says. “Threat and intimidation are all that is necessary to run an organization like ours.”

  “Threat and intimidation are necessary to run any organization. Haven’t you read that Steve Jobs biography?”

  He stares at me with those heavy-lidded eyes. Anya looks up nervously from her dinner. Then her son starts to laugh, so heartily I think some quinoa might come flying out of his full lips.

  “I like you, Candace,” he says, recovering himself. He dabs at the corners of his mouth with a red linen napkin. “I really do.”

  Anya smiles. I guess she’s glad he likes me.

  “I have a private function tomorrow night where I could use you in a professional capacity. Are you interested?”

  It would be a clever way to bury myself further into the Scarpello fold until Deep digs up those Russian birth records. “I could be,” I tell him.

  “Of course, you’d need to find some appropriate clothing to wear. This is a high-end event. My female staff are expected to dress,” he pauses for effect, “attractively.”

  “I don’t do the hooker thing,” I say flatly. Sex for money is not my thing. There are too many more valuable things you can trade for it.

  “Oh, we don’t endorse prostitution!” Anya startles me with this earnest outburst. She’s been pretty subdued until now.

  “You misunderstand me,” Alex says, after giving his mother a hard look. “I only mean that this is an upscale event we’re planning. A gentlemen’s game of cards. I like all my security detail to dress formally. It’s important to keep up appearances.” The gig sounds like the high-stakes poker game Malone was going on about.

  “Are you going to make me wear a tuxedo, like the penguin over there?”

  The waiter has returned with a trolley, the top of it a dull metallic surface that sizzles when he drops some beads of water on it. A portable hot plate. But he doesn’t put any food on it to keep warm. If he’s offended by my comment, he doesn’t let on as he scurries out of the room.

  “What I have on is about as formal as I’ve got,” I tell him, which is true. I’d taken the time to pick out a T-shirt without a rip in it for the evening.