No Way To Kill A Lady

by Nancy Martin

  My cool politeness had shamed them all into an uncomfortable silence. Finally, Kuzik said, “My apologies. And sorry about the broken glass, too. Bergamunder will clean it up. We’ll be out of here in a jiffy.”

  The rest of the officers had finished their drilling and pulled the leg of Michael’s blue jeans down over the blinking device they intended to leave behind. As they packed up their tools, they studied me with sidelong glances. Perhaps they’d assumed I’d be some kind of mob moll with a pistol in my garter.

  I didn’t speak as they gathered up their equipment, swept up the broken bits of glass and tromped out of the kitchen.

  Another man materialized from the scullery, where he’d been muttering into a cell phone. I recognized him as one of the more recently hired minions who did Michael’s bidding at any hour of the day or night. He must have been summoned by Michael. His name was Bruno Something, and unlike the usual suspects in Michael’s employment, he wore a suit and tie. He had replaced Michael’s last right-hand man, Delmar, who’d gone to jail for assault. Before that, it had been Aldo, who disappeared after being named the lead suspect in a gangland shooting. The turnover of Michael’s personnel was usually six months or so. I didn’t expect Bruno to last long.

  Bruno must have also sensed his limited employment. Either that, or he didn’t like the idea of his boss’s activities being slowed down by the presence of a woman in his life. Since our first introduction, he had pretended I was invisible. He terminated his call, then pulled two more cell phones from his pockets and laid them on the kitchen table before Michael, who gathered them up without a thank-you.

  “Five o’clock and ten p.m.,” said the well-dressed thug. “Plus seven and eleven in the morning.”

  Michael got up from the table, tall and in command, checking the screens of both phones before tucking them into his pockets. He gave a nod of dismissal, and Bruno went out of the house. The kitchen door closed quietly behind him. We could hear the engines of various vehicles start up outside.

  Emma said, “C’mon, Rawlins. I’m starving. I gotta pee again, and then you can take me out for an ice cream cone. I’m feeling low on calcium. Unless you want to go back to school?”

  “No way. But—”

  She grabbed the collar of his sweatshirt. “It’s time to clear out, kid. Four’s a crowd.”

  I said, “Before you go, grab the blunderbuss, will you?”

  “Gotcha. We’ll go out the front door.”

  Over his shoulder, Rawlins said, “I’m glad you’re home, Mick.”

  “Thanks, kid.”

  “And I’m really glad you thought you could call me for the house key, too. Call anytime.”

  “Sure.”

  Emma dragged Rawlins out, and they disappeared.

  Still seated at the table, I tried to say calmly, “What’s at five o’clock?”

  “Mass at Saint Dominic’s.”

  “Who’s going to mass?”

  With a warm hand, Michael pulled me to my feet. He wasn’t handsome—his battered face had a fallen angel roughness that sometimes frightened people, and he tended to keep his thoughts secret. But a smile played at the edges of his mouth and there was a teasing light flickering in his blue eyes. He said, “I’m allowed to leave the house for church services.”

  “Oh, Michael, you’re not going to take any chances, are you? Surely house arrest means—”

  “I can’t be denied my religion.” He wrapped both arms around me. “Or dentist appointments, come to think of it. I feel a cavity coming on.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t worry,” he murmured. “Here with you is where I want to be.”

  He hugged me close and squeezed. His body felt delicious, but it was the sure beat of his heart against my breast that lit my fire. I put my arms around him, holding a deep breath but feeling on the brink of being swept away on a giddy surge of something I was almost afraid to call happiness. He was a man of dark depths I didn’t always understand, but he was all the man I wanted—smart and witty and protective of me and so sexy I couldn’t see straight sometimes. And he was home.

  I whispered his name and released the breath of tension—one I realized I’d been holding for months. I probably wept, too, but soon we were laughing as he spun me around—as giddy as teenagers cutting school together. Looking up into his vivid blue eyes, holding him close, I felt as if my heart might burst out of me.

  Spin over, he backed me gently against the refrigerator and kissed me until my knees went weak.

  As kisses went, it was pretty great. Then we smiled at each other and said a few things that hadn’t been said in a while.

  Later, we sat side by side on the back porch steps, breathing fresh air and sharing a peanut butter sandwich. Michael stretched his long legs into the sunshine and tipped his face up to the sun. Overhead, the oak trees whispered with drying leaves. It was a lush November day—no nip of frost in the air yet, just warm sunlight and crisp wind. Emma’s speckled spaniel, Toby, rolled contentedly in the grass in front of us. Out in the pasture, Emma’s latest herd of ponies bit and kicked at one another.

  I hugged my knees, and couldn’t keep my eyes off Michael. He looked pale and a little thin through his face, but his shoulders were laced with new muscle, as if he’d spent his time in jail burning off his frustrations with exercise.

  He said, “Sorry about the broken glass.”

  “What happened?”

  He shrugged, playing casual. “I lost my temper. I came down from the shower and one of Kuzik’s guys was acting like he owned the place. Using your telephone, hanging around, filling a drink from your faucet.”

  “You hit him.”

  “No big deal.”

  “They could have carted you back to prison for that.”

  “Kuzik saw it my way. He’s not a bad guy. So tell me what happened this morning. You came in the house white as a ghost.”

  I licked peanut butter from my fingers. “I was happy to see you.”

  He smiled. “I’m glad. But that wasn’t all of it. Something’s up.”

  “All right,” I agreed. “My aunt Madeleine died last week.”

  “Rawlins told me that much. I’m sorry.” His brow twitched into a frown. “Were you close to her? I don’t remember you saying much about a Madeleine.”

  “I wasn’t close, no. In fact, I hadn’t seen her since I was a child. But a funny thing has happened. She left her estate to me and my sisters.”

  Michael looked surprised. “That’s good news, right?”

  “It would be good news indeed,” I agreed, “except other family members object.”

  “She had kids of her own?”

  “A stepson,” I said. “Her husband’s child. Her husband was a distant cousin of mine, also a Blackbird.” I saw Michael’s expression and laughed. “Yes, it’s very complicated. They were not exactly related to each other, but kind of.”

  “I’ve got a few cousins like that myself.”

  “Then you know what I mean. Anyway, the stepson—my cousin—has already fired a warning shot. And there are other cousins who may come out of the woodwork, too.”

  “So maybe you won’t inherit after all?”

  “My guess is the pie will be cut into very small pieces.”

  “Damn. The money would have solved a lot of problems around here,” he said. “Listen, I didn’t want to come through your door with this news, but as long as we’re talking finances, this seems like the right moment to tell you. I’m broke again.”

  When I first met Michael, he was building a scattershot business empire that included a limousine service, a fly-fishing outfitting store, a garage that supposedly fixed cars but seemed to be more a source of hard-to-find secondhand parts, and a used-car dealership that he plunked on a portion of Blackbird Farm that I’d sold to him in a moment of financial desperation. That’s how we’d first met—with me trying to dig myself out of my tax troubles by selling just a couple of acres of the farm. The endeavors were all passions o
f his, and he was trying out things that suited his nature. None of them had been particularly successful at first, but they got him interested in business. And once Michael’s interest was engaged, he became tenacious.

  At the time of our meeting, Michael had also still operated in a peripheral part of his father’s business. How the Abruzzo family made their money was a tightly knotted web of crime often covered in the newspapers along with pictures of his father and half brothers in handcuffs and covering their faces with magazines. To his credit, Michael had quietly begun to untangle himself from his family. As for whether he had entirely separated from Abruzzo affairs—well, his recent guilty plea told the tale.

  All along, Michael had been expanding his legitimate ventures to include a couple of gas station–convenience stores with the unsavory name of Gas N Grub. As the price of gasoline soared, so had his profits. He built a couple more Gas N Grubs, and a few more after that. Wheeling and dealing in gasoline required not just a ruthless streak but the kind of immunity to intimidation that he’d earned in spades while working for his father. He’d made his first million about a year ago.

  “How broke?” I asked. “As broke as me?”

  “Sweetheart, nobody is as broke as you.” Fondly, he ruffled my hair. “One of my employees seized the moment when I went to jail. He embezzled just about everything I had, including the petty cash at the garage. Then he took off.”

  “Where did he go?”

  Michael smiled. “I’ll work on that, don’t worry. Trouble is, the money could be gone for good—up his nose, or maybe he blew it at a dog track.”

  “You’ve called the police, right?”

  He shook his head. “The cops aren’t going to be sympathetic to me. I’ll take care of this myself.”

  “Oh, Michael. I can’t stand it if you—”

  “Take it easy. No knee breaking.”

  “Promise?”

  He didn’t promise. Instead, he said, “There’s more. Family stuff. I— We can talk about it later. Thing is, until I figure out what I can get back from the moron, I could start selling off assets to put some cash in my wallet. But that may take a while. Right now, I don’t have enough dough to buy us another jar of peanut butter.”

  But he had enough money to buy a couple of cell phones, I thought to myself. Or perhaps those phones had come from his father? And what “family stuff” was there to talk about that he couldn’t say to me now, in the light of day?

  But so far, our relationship had two unspoken truths.

  First: He would do his best to extricate himself from the Abruzzo family.

  Second: I wouldn’t ask questions concerning how he managed the extricating.

  But sometimes I ached with the uncertainty.

  Today, I said, “I can afford plenty of peanut butter.”

  We got up from the porch steps and strolled out to the pony pasture, hand in hand. Toby scrambled up and followed. Emma’s herd of Shetland ponies rushed over to investigate us, biting one another to get close. They shoved their shaggy heads through the split rails. One particularly nasty black beast tried to muscle his way through the fence.

  “That’s one funny-looking pony,” Michael said.

  “It’s not a pony. That’s your Christmas dinner.”

  “A pig?” Michael looked more closely. “Emma’s into pigs now?”

  “No, someone dropped him off. It happens all the time—people abandon unwanted pets here, thinking we’re a working farm and won’t mind. Don’t get attached to this character. He’s going to the butcher in a few days.”

  Michael tossed the last crust of his peanut butter sandwich to the pig, and the scrap disappeared in one gulp. The pig was big and bristling with black hair. The ponies tried to bully him, but he stood fast. Michael leaned down and scratched the animal behind his ears. The pig cast a lively, curious eye upward, and Michael said, “What’s his name?”

  “We don’t name animals we’re going to eat.”

  “He’s kinda lovable, though. And his nose makes him look a little like my uncle Ralphie.”

  “Michael, do you like pork chops?”

  “Okay, okay. See you at Christmas, Ralphie.” He gave the pig one last pat and turned around to look at the house. “Wow. Is the roof looking weird to you? Over by that set of chimneys?”

  “I’m not looking.”

  “That’s one strategy, I suppose. Maybe you better fight hard for Aunt Madeleine’s money.”

  “I’d like to. Trouble is, she mostly invested in beautiful things—art and antiques. And they’ve disappeared.”

  Michael’s interest sharpened. “Poof?”

  “Like Houdini pulled his best trick. The house used to be filled with a priceless collection. But we took a look around today, and most of it’s gone. Including a Fabergé egg.” I glanced up at him. “Do you know what that is?”

  He didn’t take offense at my question. “Russian, right?”

  “Yes. Beautifully enameled and decorated with gold and jewels. It’s gone. All that’s left in the house is either falling apart or ruined.”

  “Where’d the good stuff go?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “You gonna call the cops?” Michael asked. “Looking for pretty stuff makes them happy—no danger involved.”

  Michael’s opinion of police work was biased, and I didn’t take him seriously. Instead, I put my hand on his arm and squeezed. “We’ll talk to the police once we get a list of missing items worked up. Any other tips?”

  “You’ll need good lawyers where the will is concerned. Not the polite kind who play golf.”

  “I can only imagine your kind of lawyer up against the ones Sutherland can surely hire.”

  “Sutherland?”

  “That’s Aunt Madeleine’s stepson.”

  Indulgently, he said, “How come nobody you know is ever named Joe Smith?”

  We smiled at each other.

  “Aunt Madeleine’s dying isn’t the big headline today,” I went on. “We went over to her house this morning. Quintain is amazing—”

  “Who?”

  “Quintain is the house, not a who. It’s a castle, really. But tumbling into ruin. It’s worse than Blackbird Farm.”

  “Hard to imagine.”

  I poked him with my elbow. “Maybe with all the time you’ll be spending around here, you could learn a few carpentry skills.”

  “You have a hammer I can borrow?”

  “There are tools in the cellar. Surely some of them were made in this century. Thing is, when we were looking around Madeleine’s estate, we discovered a dead body. It was in the elevator of the house, nothing left but bones.”

  Michael touched his hand to my cheek. No longer teasing, he said, “You okay?”

  “It was a shock,” I admitted.

  “Aunt Madeleine?”

  “We think it must have been Madeleine’s housekeeper, Pippi.”

  “How’d she die?”

  “Sutherland suggested the electricity might have gone off while she was in the elevator. She must have been trapped and . . .”

  When my voice trailed off and I struggled with my emotions, he said gently, “It happened a long time ago, Nora.”

  “Still, it’s awful to imagine how she suffered. The estate’s been vacant for twenty years. Aunt Madeleine left, locked the door and went on a world tour, and nobody ever guessed there might be someone trapped in the elevator.”

  “So nobody missed the dead lady? What about her family?”

  “Pippi was her name. I don’t know if she had family. She was very close to Madeleine. She baked cookies a lot. That’s about all I can remember.”

  I told Michael about our trip to Quintain—the lawyers, the tour of the house, the fantastic treasures that had once been inside. And about the sheriff deputy’s taking charge of the crime scene.

  “So you’ll have some answers,” Michael said. “Maybe not soon, but eventually.”

  “I hope so.”

  The pig poked Michae
l’s ankle monitor inquisitively with his snout. Michael crouched down and scratched Ralphie’s head again. I thought I heard the pig give a little sigh. Michael said, “I bet your sisters are excited as hell about inheriting big bucks.”

  I couldn’t prevent a smile. “Libby’s already thinking up ways to blow her share. You’ll be delighted. It involves the Super Bowl.”

  “I can’t wait to hear the whole story. And Emma?”

  “Emma’s being . . . cautious.”

  “That doesn’t sound like her.” He slanted a look up at me. “How’s she feeling?”

  “Fine. She quit smoking. That was an ordeal. Hasn’t had a drink in a while, either, as far as I can tell.”

  “That’s great. And her baby?”

  “It’s a boy.”

  Michael waited.

  Here, at last, was the elephant on the table—the subject the two of us had endlessly discussed before he went to jail. The issue that was never far from our thoughts.

  I said, “She hasn’t decided what she’s going to do after the baby’s born. I mean, she hasn’t decided whether she’s going to keep the child or not. She knows she’s not a candidate for Mother of the Year. She even jokes about it. She and I talked seriously about—well, we discussed whether you and I should take him, raise him. Adopt him. And she was thinking it over. At first, it seemed like a logical choice to her—best for her. Best for the baby.”

  Michael nodded. Before he’d gone to jail, we’d decided we’d like to adopt Emma’s child. It had been Michael’s suggestion, and I’d jumped—perhaps too eagerly—at the possibility. Michael said, “But now?”

  “Well, Emma has had second thoughts.”

  He stood up again. “With me in jail, you mean.”

  “She didn’t say that—”

  “But it had to figure into her thinking. Why give her kid to us if I’m not around to do my part?” Michael looked up at the sky. “I’m sorry, Nora.”

  I took his hand and laced my fingers with his, trying to ease his regret at spoiling our chance. “She’s still thinking.”

  “What about the kid’s father? Has he resurfaced?”

  “Hart? No. He’s going to marry someone else. For a while, he broke off his engagement, but it’s back on again. He’s marrying a very wealthy young woman from a wonderful family. She can do a lot of good for his career. It’s like a royal alliance. Emma’s not talking, but I think she’s crushed. She really cared about Hart, and now—well, if he’s chosen someone else, you know Emma. She’s going to reject him even harder.”