“I’ll read about you in the news, right? Never mind. I can let you have this 1961 Austin-Healey Sprite roadster I’m restoring.”
He gestured, and I eyed the miniature car he’d indicated in disbelief.
“Where do you put the key to wind it up?”
“Hey! You drive a VW Bug!”
“Binky isn’t green.”
Not just green. Brilliant, electric, in-your-eye, lemon-lime, here-I-am-stick-out-your-tongue-and-barf green.
“It runs.”
I shook my head. “Do large dogs play fetch with it?”
“Do you need a car or not?”
I groaned. “I need a car. I’m not sure that qualifies.”
“Everything important works. It just needs a top.”
“There’s no top?” I squeaked.
“It’s not supposed to rain for a couple of days. I’ll get the keys.” He paused. “Are you still mad at me?”
“You give me a car that looks like this, don’t you think I’m the one who should be asking that question?”
Teeth flashed in his grease-smeared face.
“Do you need a date for Lorna’s wedding on Saturday?”
I thought about Brandon and shook my head.
“Billy, right? I knew I should have called you last week.”
I didn’t disillusion him, but I felt strange. It was sad to realize a part of my life had just ended. While nothing permanent was likely to come of my relationship with Brandon, I knew in that moment I wouldn’t be dating Ted anymore. It wouldn’t be fair to either one of us to continue on the way we had been. We could never be what the other one needed, no matter how hard we tried.
I think Ted sensed some of what I was thinking, because he looked at me with a funny expression when he came back outside and exchanged keys with me.
“Be careful, Dee,” he said.
“You’re a good friend, Ted. I won’t destroy your latest masterpiece, don’t worry. I’ll bring back your little green frog as soon as I can.”
The grin flashed, a little sad this time, and he nodded.
“Hey! Wait a minute,” I called in panic as I studied the car. “Where’s the trunk? There’s no trunk!”
“The front seat backrest is hinged. See? There’s storage space.”
“For a toothbrush!”
“It’s for driving around town, Dee. Or it was, back in the fifties and sixties. Just don’t push it too hard. It’s only got a top speed of seventy-five miles per hour.”
“Terrific.”
“Well, you aren’t planning to race him, are you?”
“No.” And I wouldn’t be trying to outrun any police cars in this matchbox-size car, either.
Instead of going straight back into work, he waited while I transferred the laptop, the keys and my purse to the car. Binky was small, but somehow Frog, as I’d decided to call him, seemed so much smaller—and lower to the ground. I kept feeling as though I should be pedaling or something. I managed a wave as I drove off with only a minimum of grinding gears.
Now all I had to do was figure out where to go next. Neither Rocky River nor Lakewood had big enough police forces to cover my apartment 24-7, so going there seemed safe enough. They wouldn’t be looking for me to drive up in something as brightly gaudy as Frog. Hopefully I’d see the police before they saw me.
Still, I parked down the street from my apartment just to be safe. There was no sign of any unmarked cruisers, and I didn’t run into anyone as I hurried up to my apartment.
No doubt going there was an idiotic thing to do. I was cursing myself for ten kinds of a fool as I made my way inside the building. I did not want to go in there with every fiber of my being, but I needed clothing and my cell phone charger—and my gun.
People were getting killed around me. I didn’t want to be one of them. I think I’m allergic to the idea of dead people. Not that having a gun would protect me. But just maybe it might make someone think twice about shooting if they knew I could shoot back.
Yeah. Right. If they’d ever seen me on a practice range, they’d have a fit of the giggles. And if my heart beat any harder, something would rupture. My hand shook so badly, it took me three tries to get the key in the lock.
“It’s about time!” The woman standing in my kitchen doorway said impatiently.
A tiny scream erupted before I could stop it. I couldn’t help it. All that suppressed tension had to go somewhere, so I screamed and dropped my keys.
“What are you doing? Stop screaming! Shut the door! Do you want your neighbors to come running?”
The woman strode forward with total arrogance and yanked me inside, closing the door at my back.
“What are you doing here?” I managed to demand of the woman I had followed to the shopping center and across state lines into Pennsylvania with Brandon. I was shaking all over in reaction, but Nicole Wickley was definitely not dead. She was standing in my apartment minus the blond wig and she looked far better as a brunette.
Her tailored, short-sleeved blouse and matching slacks in splashy bright red were the perfect color for her carefully made-up features. Her hair was piled carelessly on top of her head and still managed to look good. The lipstick and polish matched her outfit, as did her open-toed high-heeled shoes. A dainty black onyx teardrop hung from a silver chain around her neck. Matching drop earrings graced her ears. She looked expensively chic and as out of place in my apartment as any human could have looked. I disliked her on sight.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said, making it sound like a serious hardship. “The police have been here twice.”
I wasn’t at all surprised.
“So, what are you doing here? And how did you get in?” I could not imagine my nosy superintendent letting her inside.
“You have lousy locks.”
“I’ll be sure and tell the management. You are Nicole Wickley, aren’t you?” I asked, still trembling in reaction. I couldn’t think of a single good reason for the woman to be standing in my apartment, but several disturbing ones were skittering through my brain.
“Of course I am!”
“There’s no ‘of course’ about it. The last time I saw you, you were pretending to be Elaine Russo.”
“I can explain.”
“Good. The police will be very happy to hear that.”
“We can’t go to the police! He’ll kill me!”
“Who will?”
“Al,” she said as though it was perfectly obvious. “Why do you think I’m here?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t a clue.”
“I thought you were a hotshot detective. I have to admit you don’t look like much, and this apartment…”
She waved an elegant hand to encompass my pink drapes, green couch and orange cat tree.
“You really could use a decorator, you know. But you certainly have got Al’s shorts in a twist.”
The slights to my apartment evaporated under the sudden thunder of my heartbeat. “Al being Albert Russo?” I asked.
“Who else?”
Who else indeed? I wanted to sit down—or maybe throw up. What the heck, I could manage to do both. It wasn’t bad enough I had Cleveland’s biggest gangster mad at me, now I had his shorts in a twist. There was something to make me feel good.
“Look, do you have anything to drink in this place? I couldn’t find a thing except diet soda.”
She’d been going through my kitchen?
“I don’t have any alcohol, if that’s what you were looking for.”
She pouted. “Isn’t that just my lousy luck?”
I didn’t know about hers, but lousy certainly summed up my luck of late. On jelly-rigged legs I walked to the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of diet cola. Opening it, I offered it to her. She frowned and reluctantly took it from me, careful not to actually touch me.
Great. She thought I had cooties. I was feeling better by the minute. I let her get her own glass. She seemed to know where they were. I unscrewed the lid on a se
cond bottle and skipped the glass. Taking a long swallow, I regarded her. It was past time to get a handle on this situation.
“Okay, let’s start from the beginning. Why are you here?”
“I want to hire you and Brandon Kirkpatrick.”
I choked on my soda. She took a dainty sip of hers, then crossed to the dining room table, opened an expensive designer purse I hadn’t even noticed sitting there, pulled out a wad of bills large enough to boggle my mind and peeled off ten one-hundred-dollar bills, handing them to me as if they meant nothing.
“Will this do as a retainer?”
Somehow I kept my face impassive. “That depends. Exactly what do you want to hire me—us—to do?”
“Keep me alive long enough to get out of town.”
“You had a plane ticket to New York,” I pointed out.
Her eyes widened in surprise. “You know about that?”
“I am a private investigator,” I reminded her.
Nicole shrugged. “Yeah, well, I was supposed to have a ticket there, courtesy of Al, but that didn’t exactly pan out.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, watching her closely.
“Even if he’d given me the ticket, like he promised, when everything started going wrong I realized if I went to the airport, I was as good as dead.”
“Hold it. Let’s start at the beginning, all right?”
She brushed that off with a wave of her perfectly manicured hand.
“Do we need to do this now? The police could come back here any minute, you know. Why do they keep coming here, anyhow?”
I smiled without humor. “They think I had something to do with the murder of Hogan Delvecchi.”
Chapter Thirteen
“Delvecchi’s dead? Oh, God, Al really is going to kill me! We have to get out of here!”
“Relax. This is the last place your boyfriend is apt to come.”
“That’s what I thought when I came here, but if Delvecchi’s dead… You didn’t kill him, did you?”
I was glad I wasn’t swallowing when she asked that question.
“Hardly.”
The light on my answering machine was blinking a summons, probably from Detective Martin. I ignored it and tried to ignore my instinct, which was screaming at me to grab my stuff and go. The question was, go where? I needed to know what the heck was going on before something else happened.
“Let’s go in the bedroom. You can talk to me while I pack a few things.”
“You have cats in there!”
She made them sound like poisonous snakes. I forgot I wasn’t a cat person and smiled with a lot of teeth. “Cute, aren’t they?”
She drew back a step. “I don’t like animals.”
“That’s okay. I’m sure it’s mutual. As I was saying, we’ll go in the bedroom and you can explain to me why Albert Russo wants you dead and why you’ve been pretending to be his wife.”
“That’s why he wants me dead.”
“He doesn’t know you were pretending to be his wife?”
“Of course he does. That’s why he hired me in the first place.”
I shook my head and I swear I heard my brain rattling.
“The bedroom,” I said coldly. “Now.”
I’m not sure which of us was more surprised, but she preceded me into the bedroom and I closed the door behind us.
“If the police come, we don’t answer the door,” I told her.
“What if they come inside?”
“We’re only three stories up. We go out the window.”
She stared at me like I was crazy. I was feeling pretty crazy at the moment. There was no way I was jumping three stories down, but she didn’t have to know that.
“So you were simply working for Albert Russo. You weren’t having an affair with him.”
“Of course I was. That’s why he hired me.”
There went that rattling noise again. All my marbles must be escaping through the multiple holes in my head.
“Explain,” I said, going to my closet and taking down my small overnight case. Mama glared at me. One of the baby kittens hissed. I apologized to all of them. Nicole stared at me as if she was having second thoughts about jumping through the window.
“What’s there to explain?” she demanded. “Al came backstage one night after a performance. He said he’d seen me in those Jerry’s commercials I’ve been doing and he wanted to meet me in person. I knew who he was, of course, so I played up to him. I mean, the man’s as rich as Croesus and he’s telling me what a fabulous actress I am and how I’m wasted in that two-bit production. Only a fool wouldn’t eat that up, right?”
I’d put two T-shirts and some underwear into the case when I realized there was no way in heck it was going to fit in the minuscule storage space behind the driver’s seat in Frog.
“Hold on a minute. I’ll be right back.” I went out to the kitchen, found a paper sack with handles one of the department stores had given me and returned.
“So you two started an affair and then he hired you. To do what?” I transferred the clothes to the sack and added a pair of slacks.
“To pretend to be his wife. See, everyone had told him I looked like her. I don’t see it myself, other than our general size and shape, but I’m an actress, right? I know about makeup and costuming and I’m good with voices. So he tells me how he’s got this prenup thing that says if either of them are unfaithful they can get a divorce right away and she isn’t entitled to anything. He says he knows she’s been having an affair with someone only he can’t prove it. He wants my help getting some compromising pictures of her so he can divorce her.”
Daintily she sat on the edge of my bed as if afraid of contamination.
“His wife’s been trying to cause him some grief with this detective, so he figures to get them both back. I mean, it made sense, right? All I was supposed to do was call Fitzpatrick, arrange a meeting, let you follow us—only I don’t know it’s you personally, just that he hired another detective to take pictures of the two of us looking chummy. The next day I’m supposed to come to his office still pretending to be her and raise hell over the pictures. In return he said he’d set me up in an apartment in New York and get me an audition with this Broadway director he knows. If the guy agrees, Al would back this play with me in the starring role.”
“All for a few pictures?” I asked skeptically.
Her eyes went huge as I pulled my nine-millimeter semi-automatic out from under the bottom of the mattress.
“Hey! It’s the truth! I swear!”
I set the gun in the bag under my slacks and managed not to smile at her expression.
“So, okay, I knew there had to be more to it than that,” she continued quickly, “but hey, a starring role on Broadway? I mean, even if he only arranged an interview with the director and gave me a year’s lease on the apartment, I figured it was worth it. Except at the last minute he tells me I’ve got to meet some women his wife was supposed to have dinner with that night. I mean, I’m good and everything, but nobody’s that good. But he swears they don’t know Elaine very well. All I had to do was tell them I just had a Novocain injection or something and I’m in a lot of pain and ask for a rain check.”
“Why not have you call them and beg off?”
“It was too late when he found it on her schedule. He didn’t know how to call them to cancel.”
“Where did he tell you his wife was while you were pretending to be her?”
She watched nervously as I added two spare clips to the bag with the gun.
“He said she’s supposed to be out of town visiting family. He swore she’d never know about any of this. I figured maybe she was off shacking up with her new guy and he was just ticked because he couldn’t find them or something.”
I couldn’t believe she was serious. “You didn’t think all of this was strange?”
“Hey, it’s none of my business. You don’t ask someone like Al a lot of questions, if you get my drift.”
That much I could believe. Just thinking about those eyes of his made me want to shiver.
“Wait here a minute.”
I went into the bathroom, scooped up a few toilet articles and returned. She was eyeing the cats in the closet with a frown. I wanted to tell her she’d get wrinkles that way, but she probably wouldn’t care. She’d just get a face-lift anyhow.
“So why did you call Brandon to meet you at Russo’s?”
“See, that’s the thing. That’s when I started getting scared. I mean, why would Al want me to give the guy something? It didn’t make sense, but I’m still thinking, okay, he’s willing to back a play with me in the lead role. This is my big break. In my line of work you do what you have to do or you don’t get anywhere.”
“Uh-huh. What was Al’s explanation?”
For the first time her face took on a scared look.
“Al doesn’t give explanations. They were moving my furniture out and Al called me on the cell phone and said there was one more thing. I was to call the detective and arrange to meet him at the house and give him some papers. Hogan Delvecchi would be there with my ticket. He’d tell me where the papers were and make sure everything went smooth. Afterward I could board the plane and go to New York, as scheduled.”
Remembered fear flickered in her dark brown eyes. “Have you ever met Delvecchi?”
I nodded but suppressed an instant flare of sympathy.
“Oh, right. You’re supposed to have killed him.”
She eyed the brown sack with the gun nervously.
“Look, I’m not going to pretend otherwise—it didn’t feel right to me, you know? Especially when Al had Delvecchi pick me up at the last minute and drive me over there. Frankly that man gives me the willies.” She swallowed. “I guess that should be past tense now, huh?”
I nodded. She no longer looked quite so in control.
“See, Delvecchi told me to go upstairs after the detective got there and the papers would be on the dresser in Elaine’s bedroom. I had a real bad feeling, but I figured, what could I do? I couldn’t tell Al no and I sure as heck wasn’t going to argue with Delvecchi. There was a chance Al was playing straight with me, but it didn’t feel good. You know what I mean?”
D.B. Hayes, Detective Page 20