Cement Stilettos

by Diane Vallere

  I hadn’t asked and was none too happy about having been given the information unsolicited.

  “Yeah, I noticed that too,” said Ragu. “You look a little pale. Like a vampire or something. Maybe you need more lipstick.”

  I picked up my coat and held it closed around me. “Or maybe it’s the fact that we’re inside an empty cement factory and because of the photo shoot I’m not wearing a coat, hat, or gloves and I’m cold?”

  The two men looked at each other. “Sure, it could be that,” the photographer said. He turned around and left me alone with the merchandise.

  Ragu brought the empty cartons from the delivery truck. “You want me to pack up so you can get out of here?”

  “No, I’m stuck here until Nick shows up.” I pulled out my phone and checked the display. There were no missed calls.

  “You didn’t get the message?” he asked. “He called the boss. Said he couldn’t make it and asked if you’d meet him at his showroom.” He picked up a pile of sunglasses that I’d packed back in plastic and dumped them into a box. “She didn’t tell you?”

  “No, but she was preoccupied with the Tradava owners.” I stared out at the empty street in front of the factory. “I could call a taxi.”

  “I can give you a ride. Nick’s showroom isn’t far from Tradava and I have to get the truck back tonight anyway.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Okay,” with slightly more conviction. Why would Pam not have given me Nick’s message?

  We packed up the rest of the merchandise and loaded the van. Ragu slammed the back doors after the last of the boxes were stacked inside, locked them, and looked at me. “That’s everything, right?”

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I climbed into the passenger side of the Tradava van and Ragu backed up and pulled out of the lot. We drove about half a mile away from the factory when Nick’s white truck rounded the corner and passed us going the way we’d come.

  29

  Friday night

  “Turn around,” I said to Ragu.

  “What? I can’t. This is a two-lane road.”

  “That was Nick. Turn around at the next turnout and go back. He must be here to get me.”

  Ragu cursed under his breath but did as I requested. We had to drive farther before the road widened enough for Ragu to safely make the turn. I spent that entire time twisted around in my seat watching the road behind me.

  Nick was headed to the factory. But I’d been told to meet him at his showroom. Did that mean somebody wanted to get him away from his showroom? Or they wanted to get him to the factory where I’d been all afternoon? Was this what happened the morning Angela was murdered?

  All along I’d been thinking that someone wanted to get me to the factory where Vito was, but maybe the goal had been to keep me away from the showroom? If the killer had been with Angela but she thought she had things under control, was it possible she wanted to make sure I didn’t get involved?

  I glanced at Ragu. He’d been the one to tell me not to wait for Nick and I was sitting in a van with him. My mind was racing a million miles a minute and I couldn’t come up with a single connection between him and Angela di Sotto but I was too panicked to think straight.

  “Pull over,” I said.

  “You wanted me to turn around, now you want me to pull over?”

  “Do it. Let me out of the van now.”

  “We’re almost there. Hang on.”

  “No! Stop the van and let me out or I’m going to jump.”

  “Carl was right. You’re crazy.”

  He pulled the van over to the side of the road. I unbuckled and jumped out. The van hadn’t completely stopped moving and I fell to the ground. My gloved hands took the bulk of the impact and a spear of pain shot through my arm. I screamed. I rolled over onto my back, clutching my left wrist with my right hand. The truck idled a few feet beyond me.

  “Kidd?” Nick’s voice carried to me.

  The Tradava van peeled off around the corner. If I had any lingering concerns about Ragu, his actions didn’t exactly assuage them.

  Sunset had turned to twilight, and the row of empty factories created long shadows that made it difficult to see. It wouldn’t be long before the natural light was completely gone and we’d be reliant on the occasional streetlamp and headlights from the few cars on the road.

  I stood up and hobbled toward the sound of Nick’s voice. “Nick?” I called out. “Don’t go into the factory!”

  Nick met me in the middle of the road. He threw his arm around my shoulders and guided me toward his truck. “Are you hurt?”

  “My wrist. It’s a long story. Why are you here?”

  “To pick you up. Didn’t you get my message?”

  “The message I got was that you couldn’t make it. That I was supposed to meet you at your showroom.”

  “That wasn’t the message. I said I was stuck at my showroom but I’d been here shortly after five.” He guided me to the truck and started the engine. The cab of the truck hadn’t had time to cool down and warmth enveloped me.

  “Either Ragu misheard the message or somebody wanted me to think you weren’t coming. They wanted to get you here alone or get me to your showroom alone.”

  “Or both.” He looked angry. “I can’t be in two places at the same time. If I came here and you went there, they could have gotten to you.”

  “But now nobody is there.”

  Nick picked up his phone and hit a recently called number. “Detective, this is Nick Taylor. I have reason to believe something might happen at my showroom tonight. Can you send someone to keep an eye on it?” He paused. “Thank you. I’m at Vito Cantone’s factory with Samantha Kidd. Yes. No. Good idea. We’re leaving now.” He hung up. “Let’s get you home.” He threw the truck in reverse. It backed up a few feet, and then stalled. He turned the ignition off and then back on. The truck sputtered and then died.

  “It sounds like you’re out of gas,” I said.

  “Can’t be. I filled up earlier today.”

  I rolled down my window and looked at the gravel where his truck had been idling. “Um, Nick? Your truck is leaking something.” I pointed at the dark, wet stain on the ground.

  Nick slammed his fist against the steering wheel. “I hate this!” he said. He pulled his phone back out and stared the display. “Loncar’s team is headed to my showroom. What if we’re wrong? If I call him back and tell him to come here, what if that’s what I’m expected to do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But we’re sitting ducks out here,” I said. “We should go inside.”

  I reached for the glove compartment.

  Nick put his hand on my wrist and pulled my hand away. “The gun isn’t in there,” he said.

  I squeezed his hand. “Then we’ll just have to defend ourselves without it.”

  In the short amount of time between me jumping out of Ragu’s van and Nick helping me to his truck, the sun had completely disappeared behind the horizon and the day had grown dark. The streetlamps had not yet turned on. My guess was that the city’s timers were programmed for six or later to conserve electricity. I wished I’d paid more attention to things like that.

  I reached out for his arm and winced as pain sliced through my wrist. Nick’s expression changed from anger to concern. “You’re hurt. How did you hurt yourself?” He pulled off his gloves and gently applied pressure to my wrist with his hands. The cool touch of his fingers felt good around the sprain.

  “I jumped out of the Tradava truck while it was still moving. I put my hands out to break my fall.”

  “Why’d you jump out of the Tradava truck?”

  “I freaked out. Ragu told me you left a message with Pam for me to meet you at the showroom, and then I saw your truck. I told him to turn around and bring me back here, but I just kept thinking why would he lie? Why would he tell me that? And I was in his truck completely at his mercy and the only thought in my head was to get away from him. I jumped and he took off.
”

  “Ragu has nothing to do with any of this. He probably went to get help. If he had some kind of connection back to me or to Angela, we would have found it. Besides, I didn’t leave a message with Pam. She was busy. I talked to Otto.”

  “Otto? As in the owner of Tradava who called in a favor to his friend Vito Cantone so I could use the factory Otto?”

  “When you say it like that it doesn’t sound so good.”

  “Otto told us he knows Vito. He arranged for us to be here today. He heard me tell Pam that the cops released your showroom. And he didn’t know we were engaged, but Vito did.”

  “But Otto has nothing to do with my business,” Nick said.

  “But he might have had something to do with Angela.” I closed my eyes. Nick Senior had mentioned the kind of life Angela would have had if she’d grown up in the mafia. Distasteful possibilities ran through my head. A parade of “uncles”—her father’s business partners—around all the time. My stomach churned with nausea. Vito had told us he kept his relationship to Angela a secret. What if one of those uncles had seen them together and had assumed something completely different?

  “The day we first found Angela’s body, Loncar told us Angela was Vito’s last girlfriend. If that’s what the cops who had him under surveillance thought, then it’s not a stretch to think other people believed it too.”

  “You think Otto made a play for Angela.”

  I got very quiet. “What would Vito do if he found out something like that?”

  “Funny you should ask,” said a voice outside of my window. It was Otto Tradava. “I’ve been thinking about that very same question since the day I discovered she was Vito’s daughter.”

  30

  Friday night, after dark

  “Get out of the car,” Otto said. He pointed a gun at me, and then at Nick, and then back to me.

  I looked at Nick. His hand was still on my wrist. He slid it to my hand and squeezed gently. I squeezed back. Whatever the outcome of tonight would be, we’d go through it together.

  Otto walked around to Nick’s side of the truck. I opened my door and climbed down. The pulsing pain from my wrist had become a constant, but I blocked it out. I didn’t want to give Otto any reason to believe I was hurt.

  “Get inside the factory,” Otto instructed.

  With the gun aimed at close range, I wasn’t about to argue. I led the procession into the cavernous structure. I got inside and turned around. Otto stood behind Nick. He stepped closer and pointed the gun at me. “You don’t seem scared,” he said.

  “You’re either going to shoot us or not. The choice is yours,” I said with false bravado.

  I’d had way too many guns pointed at me since my last birthday and I was starting to wonder about this whole older-and-wiser Samantha 2.0 thing. Inside, I was crying, screaming, and bargaining with the powers that be to show me and Nick a way out. I thought the path to maturity would lead to some peace in my life. No dice.

  Otto put the muzzle of the gun on the side of my cheek and applied enough pressure to make me turn my head toward Nick. His jaw was clenched and his body was rigid. Whatever he had in mind, it wasn’t just sitting there and watching Otto shoot me. That gave me the tiniest glimmer of hope.

  “You went after Angela but she wasn’t interested,” I said. The pressure of the gun on my cheek made it difficult to talk.

  “I convinced Angela to do some work for me on the side,” he said. “Pretty girl. Hard not to notice.”

  “You didn’t know Vito was her father. You made a play for her and she turned you down. But you didn’t accept it when she said no, did you?”

  “How was I to know? Nobody knew. Vito should have come clean with us. We all thought she was Vito’s cupcake. I’m not the only one who thought he didn’t deserve a woman like her.”

  “He was her father. They were family,” Nick said. “Do you get that? Do you even understand what that means?”

  “Sure, I know all about family. I know about my brother Harry inheriting the company and keeping me on with a job title and a yearly stipend one-tenth the size of what the company is worth. How do you think I got involved with Vito in the first place? I’m worth more than what my dad thought when he wrote out his will. My profits from side investments with Vito made up for what I was owed.”

  “You have quite a way of saying thank you,” I said.

  “If I’d have known Vito was her dad, I would have backed off,” Otto said.

  I glanced at Nick. His anger was barely concealed. “But you did know,” Nick said. “Maybe not at first, but somewhere along the way, after you crossed the line with her. She said no and you wouldn’t accept that. That’s the only reason she’d tell you. It was the one thing she could say that would make you leave her alone. She told you her deepest secret to buy herself some protection and you killed her to save yourself.”

  “I offered her an alternate career path and a whole new life. She already knew how this life worked. If she joined me, nobody would have touched us. Not even Vito. She should have been grateful, but she wasn’t. I had to show her what she was missing out on. She said she would tell Vito what I did if it killed her. Turns out I killed her first.”

  Nick stepped forward and punched Otto. The knockout was about as expected as the punch Jimmy the Tomato landed on Nick in the parking lot outside of Brother’s Pizza. Otto stumbled backward a few steps and waved his hands to regain his balance. The gun went off and a bullet fired into the ceiling.

  I grabbed Otto’s leg and tried to yank it out from under him. He looked down at me and Nick landed a second punch. Otto fell to the floor. He grabbed my ankle and twisted and I fell next to him. Something in my left arm snapped on contact with the floor and I screamed with pain. I didn’t need to look at it to know it was broken.

  Nick rushed to me. He applied gentle pressure around my forearm. I felt tears stream down my face and drip on my light blue suit. “We have to get you to a hospital,” he said.

  “She won’t need a hospital,” said Otto from the ground. I looked at him. He still held the gun, this time pointed at me. Slowly he stood up. “Once she’s dead she won’t feel any pain.”

  “Samantha’s not going to die,” Nick said.

  “Oh, yes, she is.” Otto grinned an eerie grin. “And you’re going to be the one to kill her.” He waved the gun back and forth between us and stepped forward. Nick had his arm around me and I clutched my broken arm to my body. Pain clouded my thoughts and turned my stomach. Black dots danced in front of my eyes. I felt limp and leaned against Nick for support.

  “The way I see it, Mr. Taylor, you’ve been torn between two women: Angela di Sotto and Samantha Kidd. You killed Angela and now you realize you chose the wrong one.”

  Nick kept his arm around me. The physical contact was the only thing that let me know he was there, right there. “Nobody will believe I killed Samantha.” His voice sounded like it was far away, in a tunnel, or on the other side of the room.

  “Nick was here with Vito the day Angela was killed,” I said between labored breaths. “I found her body.”

  Otto looked at me. He was quiet for a moment, and through my haze of pain I could tell he was thinking about that one small fact. If Nick had been here with Vito and I’d found Angela’s body at Nick’s showroom, then how could Otto make people believe Nick was the one to have murdered her?

  And then the smile returned. “Samantha, you underestimate me. I was here with Vito that morning. You didn’t know that, did you? I knew Nick was on his way. I had it all planned. Confront him about his relationship with Angela and tell Vito. Vito would have done the job himself and I would have watched. I would have made a very credible witness.”

  “Angela knew what you had planned. That’s why she told me to get to the factory. She sent me out here to warn Nick. Were you hiding? You probably heard me mention Tradava.”

  Otto laughed as if we were reliving good times and not the morning he murdered Nick’s showroom manager. “I was
here when you showed up. When you mentioned Tradava, it was too much of a coincidence. But you being here gave me the perfect opportunity to get to Nick’s showroom and murder Angela. She was no good to me anymore.”

  Nick’s face was red with anger. “And committing murder wasn’t enough for you? You had to smash my window and destroy my business?”

  “It helped build my case. You killed Angela. Vito found out and retaliated. That’s how he does things. Taking Angela’s files was the simplest way to send a message that this was about her.”

  “But you couldn’t have done that by yourself,” I said between labored breaths. “Concrete—too heavy—needed help.”

  “Help is easy to come by when you’re willing to pay. I consider it the cost of doing business.” He looked away and stroked his chin. “Maybe I can deduct that on my taxes.”

  Nick’s arm tightened around me and something hard jabbed into my thigh. I’d been holding my broken arm, but I dropped my right hand down into Nick’s pocket. My fingers closed around the cold steel of a gun. The gun hadn’t been in the glovebox because Nick had already put it in his pocket.

  There was no time for questions. I pulled the weapon out and aimed it at Otto. I needed both hands to steady it but even so my fingers didn’t want to work.

  A shot rang out. Nick shielded me. The gun dropped from my hand. I fell sideways.

  Otto crumbled to the ground. A blossom of red spread over the front of his shirt. His feet twitched once, and then he was motionless, his own gun still caught in his hand by his side.

  Footsteps crossed the catwalk above us. “Move,” Nick said. “We have to get out of here.”

  He pulled me to my feet and I stumbled out of the factory. We were halfway to Nick’s truck when a voice spoke behind us.

  “Mr. Taylor.”

  We stopped and turned around. Vito Cantone was framed by the doorway to his factory. The darkness of the interior surrounded him like a shroud. He was dressed in a suit, tie, topcoat. His hands were in his coat pockets. I didn’t doubt for a second that one of those pockets held the gun that had shot Otto Tradava.