She's No Angel

by Leslie Kelly

  Mike’s expression never changed. She wondered if that was what people called a cop face, because his eyes remained locked on hers, penetrating, unblinking. He didn’t frown, though of course, he didn’t smile either. He simply looked interested—and determined to get answers to his questions.

  Not that she had any. Not real ones, anyway.

  “I remember that other lady who was at dinner the other night, Emily Baker, mentioning something about your aunt Ivy being widowed at a young age. She’d been married to a wealthy early rock-and-roll producer back in the sixties?”

  She should have known rumors like that would still be flying around Trouble. The town hadn’t had anything new happen since the invention of the microwave oven. Well, that and Mortimer Potts. And he couldn’t very well be gossiped about to his own grandson. “Yes, she was.”

  “In the book, the record producer was murdered and his home set on fire to cover it up…. Was it your aunt’s husband?”

  Damn. A direct question. One she couldn’t hem and haw over. “More like based on him,” she admitted, opening another pack of sugar and dumping it into her half-empty cup of coffee, “I, of course, use some creative license in my books and emphasize what I want to in order to make a point.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m not writing rocket science. Or even real self-help books. There’s no M.D. after my name or expert before it. Readers know I’m a humorist.” If only more men did. Yeesh. You did some fantasizing in print about murdering a few cheating bastards and suddenly you were public enemy number one of men worldwide.

  “How’d you find out about your late uncle?”

  “Aunt Ivy talks to herself a lot.” Aunt Ida Mae had talked, too. And the townspeople. And Jen’s own father, who’d told Jen’s mom about his sister’s husband and his unsolved murder. Never knowing that a twelve-year-old Jen had been hiding under the stairs.

  “Did she share the whole story?”

  “Not a lot. I just know the basics,” she admitted. “But, to answer you, yes, Aunt Ivy was married to a producer named Leo Cantone, and he died tragically forty years ago.”

  “It’s funny, when I Googled the names, I saw there was a special on VH1 not one month ago about rock scandals and mysteries. Cantone’s story was in it, along with mentions of the musicians he swindled, some of whom have disappeared, too.”

  Googled? He was Googling things she didn’t even want him thinking about? This was not good. “Why would you do that?”

  “Just curious,” he admitted. “It’s an interesting story and Miss Baker’s comment made me realize it had happened here. When I looked online, your aunt turned up, too. Did you know there’s a rumor that she inspired the Coasters song ‘Poison Ivy’?”

  Jen couldn’t contain a grin of amusement. Because it made such perfect sense. “She knew everybody in those days.”

  Mike swirled his coffee cup, gazing at the scant inch of brown liquid left in the bottom of it. As casually as he would ask how she liked the weather, he said, “Do you think she had something to do with Cantone’s murder?”

  Jen froze in shock. Not just because of how ridiculous the idea was, but because of how quickly Mike had come up with it. After all, it had taken a few years of eavesdropping for Jen to come to the conclusion that Aunt Ivy knew more about her husband’s death than she’d ever told. Not to mention how long it had taken Jen to realize the woman probably was capable of murder. So how had Mike stumbled upon the possibility so soon, especially when any articles on the case should have mentioned the fact that Leo Cantone’s wife had been cleared?

  “Are you asking as a cop?”

  He shook his head but still stared into his coffee. “I told you, I’m curious. Honestly, I’m more interested in knowing if that old story helped you come up with the theme for your book. Isn’t it about why murder is better than divorce?”

  “Only in the most general terms,” Jen insisted. “It’s really about the stupid things men do that drive women crazy. There are dozens of books on the subject coming at it from the male perspective, that bestseller from a couple of years ago about guys not being ‘into you’ among them.”

  He nodded in concession of the point. “True.”

  “Ivy has lived under suspicion for years,” Jen said firmly, “but she had an ironclad alibi. She was at a dinner party with a group of ten people, including a few celebrities, when neighbors heard Leo fighting with someone in their house.”

  He nodded again.

  “Besides, she was tiny and couldn’t even have lifted the statue he was killed with, much less whacked him in the head with it.”

  Jen lifted her coffee cup, not meeting Mike’s eyes. This was the stickiest part—the part where the reported story and the one Jen had put together with her research and her memories went their separate ways. “The firefighters were even on the scene when she got back to the house.”

  “I know,” he said simply. “The articles made that clear.”

  Jen regretted letting herself get on the defensive, relaxing at his laid-back tone. “So why did you ask if she killed him?”

  “I am a cop. Suspicious by nature.”

  “But you know she didn’t, right?”

  Laughing at her persistence, he held his hands up, palms out. “I got it, I know.”

  “Good, just so we’re on the same page.”

  “Same page, same playbook.”

  “And also so we’re clear on something else. The stories I use in the books are meant to be humorous moral advisory tales, not deep evaluations of real old murders.”

  “It worked. That’s a pretty strong cautionary tale…. A record-producer husband who cheats on his wife, steals from his clients and ends up bludgeoned to death on the living-room floor before his house is burned down around him.”

  Jen didn’t remember putting that much detail in her book. He must have done more research than he’d let on. But she didn’t panic. Because she knew Ivy hadn’t killed Leo; the woman had been exonerated by the police. So it didn’t matter what a present-day cop thought, if he was investigating the case, which Mike insisted he wasn’t. After all, why would he? It had nothing to do with his former assignment catching dealers and pimps, or his new one, which he’d admitted was a desk job at police headquarters.

  Finally, no matter how good Mike might be at his job, he didn’t chase after killers, and he was not a mind reader. He couldn’t possibly know the whole story. How could anyone who didn’t know Aunt Ivy know the truth? Only someone who’d been around the family for years could come to the same conclusion Jen had: that Ivy had been cheating, too, with one of her husband’s clients—a young, unknown singer-songwriter named Eddie James.

  And that her husband had likely been murdered by her lover.

  “Frankly, a man like Leo Cantone would drive any woman to murder,” she mused. “Which is the only reason I included the story in my book, even though I am certain Ivy had nothing to do with his death.”

  She was. Pretty certain, anyway.

  Jen did, however, wonder if her aunt had helped her lover escape and was, therefore, an accessory after the fact. The police had certainly suspected James—she knew that from the research she’d done on the case. But they’d suspected him as being one of Cantone’s bilked clients, not Ivy’s lover.

  Jen knew better. She’d grown up hearing Ivy talk to her one true love, the only person her aunt had ever seemed to care about, besides her parents and Jen’s own father. Ivy used to reminisce with Eddie, tittering and flirting, reliving old conversations and sharing secret plans to run away from her husband. Then there would come the mumbles—the cries of fear, the moans of anguish, the terror of the flames—and the confessions.

  Jen’s suspicions had been confirmed when she’d gone through the contents of Ivy’s precious knitting box. The passionate love letters, photographs, hotel receipts and journals had made the affair indisputable.

  Ivy’s affair with Eddie, Jen believed, had been discovered by her husband. Leo had been ki
lled in an ensuing fight between the men, while Ivy had been out of the house. When she’d returned home and seen what had happened, she’d helped Eddie escape. It was even possible, though Jen was only speculating, that Ivy, herself, had set her house on fire to hide the evidence in order to protect Eddie. Since Ivy had been a very wealthy woman at the time, she could even have taken care of her lover financially, letting him get away and make a new start somewhere else.

  At least, that was what Jen thought had happened. She doubted anyone would ever know the truth. Even if Ivy admitted it, she couldn’t be counted on to remember the details. And her aunt’s journals ended abruptly a few days before Leo Cantone’s murder.

  One thing was clear—the woman had never gotten over the tragedy. One man dead. Another on the run. Her home destroyed.

  All for the love of her.

  It was the one reason Jen could never quite maintain her anger at her aunt. Ivy had gone through so much trauma in her life and it had left her more than a bit fragile.

  None of which Jen was prepared to share with Mike. She’d alluded to the unsolved case in only the roughest of terms in her book. The only reason he’d put it together was that he’d happened to attend a party with both Ivy and with someone who knew about her past, Emily Baker. And he was a cop—with a suspicious nature. One who Googled.

  It had been bad luck all the way around. But now that it was over, she didn’t intend to talk to him about it anymore.

  “You know, I’m feeling better now. The coffee did the trick. I should probably go home,” she said, suddenly rising from her chair. She didn’t truly want to leave. What she wanted more than anything was to stay and get back to their earlier conversation. The one where Mike had admitted just how crazy he’d been going whenever he’d pictured what he should have been doing Monday morning at that roadside hotel. But she didn’t feel up to continuing to fend off his questions or turn aside his suspicions about her aunt.

  He rose, too. “I’d like to know more about this.”

  “No.” Her voice was firm, betraying none of the nervousness Jen was really feeling about the whole subject. “It’s in the past, I don’t know much of the story and if I thought you’d come over only to pump me for information about something that happened forty years ago, I’d be pretty annoyed.” And her ego would be seriously bruised. Not to mention her libido, which would scream and take hostages at the injustice.

  “Of course I didn’t. I wanted…” he began to say, then he looked past her, over her shoulder at the street. Muttering, “What the hell,” his eyes grew wide and his jaw dropped.

  Jen began to swing around to see what had caught his attention, but before she could do it, he barked, “Get down!”

  Not waiting for her to obey, he grabbed her by the shoulders and launched both of them to the left. They flew through the air, landing against the outside wall of the bodega. He obviously tried to protect her with his own body, tucking in behind her as they hit the bricks with a bone-crunching thud that hurt like hell and immediately brought tears of agony to Jen’s eyes.

  It probably, however, didn’t hurt as much as it would have if they’d remained where they were. Because before she had even caught her breath between what felt like broken ribs, Jen saw a black van careen out of control and crash up onto the sidewalk. It smashed the table and chairs where their coffee cups had been sitting.

  And wiped out the whole area where they’d been talking just a few heartbeats ago.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I once read a survey in a men’s magazine where they asked men and women to name the top five things they look for in a member of the opposite sex. Women said things like nice eyes, great smile, easy to talk to, muscular, good with kids. Men’s lists usually read: big tits, big tits, big tits, good cook, big tits. And they wonder why we sometimes want to kill them?

  —I Love You, I Want You, Get Out by Jennifer Feeney

  "I’M GOING TO KILL THAT son of a bitch.”

  Mike’s hands clenched and unclenched, fisting by themselves as they had for two days, ever since he and Jen had nearly been pureed by a mysterious black van. His body was sore, as he imagined hers must be, but he’d been too furious and wired since Saturday to let that deter him. Ever since dropping her off at her place a few hours after the incident outside the bodega, he’d been focused on one thing: finding out who’d tried to kill them. Even if he had to step outside his job to do it.

  “You know, considering eighty percent of the people here are on the job, this probably isn’t the best place to make death threats.”

  Mike glared at his buddy Tom Finnegan, his former partner in vice. Though they hadn’t worked together since Mike’s transfer, they remained close friends, often getting together for a beer at the cop bar on Thirty-eighth Street. Tonight’s meeting was also about business, however. Mike wanted his friend to find out whatever he could about Saturday’s incident. Since he still worked vice on the Upper East Side, Tom knew all the shit going on in that underground world, including rumors on the street regarding one rich thug named Ricky Stahl.

  “You mean you wouldn’t be ready to kill someone who’d put a hit out on you?”

  Tommy shook his head. “You can’t be sure of that. Maybe some drunk went on an all-nighter and was heading home early Saturday morning when he nearly took you out.”

  “Yeah, right,” Mike insisted. “Come on, Stahl loses in court because of my testimony last week. And a day later a black van with tinted windows and no tag almost runs me down in broad daylight, then disappears into thin air?”

  “I ain’t saying you’re wrong. Just that you need to keep cool, keep your head down. Don’t be drawing attention to yourself.” Tommy looked around, side to side, his normally smiling face appearing tense. He leaned across the table. “Everybody knows Stahl has people inside the blue line. Some say that’s why you got shit-canned down to 1PP.”

  Mike shook his head, still not wanting to believe someone like Stahl could have cops on the take, though he knew it was true. Rumors had been thick about Stahl’s arm of influence worming into the NYPD. His one regret at being forced to move on Stahl to prevent a murder was that he hadn’t caught the rats.

  “I still say you should have fought it.”

  “Miss my cheerful presence, huh?”

  His friend grinned, that easygoing Irish demeanor never revealing that Tommy could kick a perp’s ass through his nostrils in under a minute if he had to. “Gotta tell you, that new kid they stuck with me smiles so much I just want to shoot him. I miss your glares.”

  “I don’t glare.”

  “Okay, if you say so. But I definitely miss your silence.”

  “The silence you filled with nonstop bullshit.”

  “Exactly,” Tommy said, sounding mournful. “My new partner never shuts up. I can’t get a word in.”

  Mike lifted his beer, missing his days with Tommy more than he’d thought. It wasn’t that he didn’t like what he was doing on a daily basis—digging through old cases to try to find answers other cops had given up on years ago. Solving those cases when others had not gave him a real charge, a sense of satisfaction he hadn’t found when working Vice. But he did miss the action of being on the streets, making a real difference now, today.

  Then he thought of the parents of those teenagers whose murder he’d been investigating, and knew giving them peace would be more fulfilling than anything he’d ever done before.

  “Your family’s been here for a few generations, running the store in the village, haven’t they?” Mike asked, thinking of one case that had caught his attention recently. Ivy Feeney’s. “You know anything about the rock scene from the sixties?”

  “You planning to become an Elvis impersonator?”

  “Funny. So funny,” he said with a grunt. “I’m interested in an old case. I heard about it from a friend….”

  “You don’t have friends.”

  Mike ignored him. “And did a little digging until I found the file. A record producer was mur
dered in his home in the East Village back in sixty-six.”

  “Doesn’t sound familiar. That’s a pretty ancient one. Assignment? Or something you’re playing around with?”

  Tommy knew the way it worked. Some files were handed to the cold-case team—some came up as new evidence was developed, often during the investigation of another crime. Sometimes it was an investigator who dug the file out simply because it sounded interesting. This was a case like that.

  “Playing with it, that’s all,” he replied.

  “I’ll ask the old man,” Tommy said as he finished his beer. “My grandfather has a herd of elephants living in his head, every one of them full of memories he can pull out on a dime.”

  Nodding his thanks, Mike wondered if he’d done the right thing in looking into this case. There was no reason for him to have gone hunting for Leo Cantone’s file at work today—he’d done it because he’d been interested by the story in Jen’s book and by their conversation Saturday. And he hadn’t forgotten his grandfather’s kidnapping.

  The file had made for some interesting reading today. Though Jen didn’t seem to want to talk about it, he figured she had to be interested in the whole thing since she’d included it in her book. She might like to know what her crazy old aunt had been like in those days, what the report said about her. He wanted to tell her what he’d learned. And he wanted to see if she could offer more information. Not to mention he just wanted to see her again.

  Soon. Like, maybe, tonight.

  He hadn’t seen her since Saturday when they’d both nearly been pancaked by that black van. Frankly, Mike had felt guilty as hell for bringing that kind of darkness around her and putting her in such danger. So guilty in fact, that he hadn’t even tried to contact her since.

  Time to end that, however. He just needed to be more careful, alert. The incident Saturday morning may have been an attempt on his life, but it was at least possible it had been a freak accident involving a stupid driver too scared to stick around afterward. He wasn’t laying any money on that possibility, but it was at least an option.