“Maybe they’re taking a nap or something. I don’t want to bother them,” I said.
Roz thought we should try one more time, so I knocked again, louder this time. This time we heard shuffling behind the door. They didn’t own any pets, so we knew at least one person was in the house.
“Mrs. Perkins?” I shouted. “Mr. Perkins? It’s Barb and Roz!” More shuffling, but the door didn’t open.
“Maybe we caught them in the middle of a little afternoon delight,” Colt proposed.
Roz and I scrunched up our faces at that thought. Reaching past me, Roz rapped again and called out. “Hello! Hello! Is anyone home?” Finally, the door opened a crack—just enough to expose a small portion of Mrs. Perkins’ tiny, round, spectacled face and nothing more.
“Hey, Mrs. Perkins. How are you?” Roz said as she looked way down at the little lady behind the door. “We didn’t catch you in the middle of anything, did we?”
“Nooo . . . ,” Mrs. Perkins said, hesitating in a very obvious way.
“We were wondering if we could ask you a couple of questions,” I said.
“About what?” She was still hiding halfway behind the door. Any day of the week, squatty Mrs. Perkins was the very definition of the friendly neighbor. Always smiling when she greeted people—always ready to stop and chitchat. She’s even been known to drop by with a plate full of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies or a yummy batch of lemon bars. Now she stood cowering behind her door with a suspicious scowl. It didn’t appear that an offer of cookies or lemon bars was forthcoming. I was perplexed and bewildered. What had happened to this sweet woman?
I continued, despite her scowl. “About the vacant house,” I said. “I suppose you saw the activity over there a couple of days ago—my friend here . . .” I was about to introduce Colt, but she cut me off at the pass.
“Why can’t you just leave well enough alone!” she shouted. I was taken aback. “You should never have gone snooping over there, you nosy . . . nosy . . . ,” she was shaking and stuttering and looking most suspiciously at Colt. Then she looked me in the eye. “You nosy little slut! You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. Just stop! You’ll ruin it for us all!” She slammed the door in our faces. We heard the dead bolt turn and snap.
“She called me a slut!” My feelings were hurt. “How does being nosy make me a slut?” I turned to Roz accusingly. “Did you tell her that Howard moved out?”
“No!” she said crossing her heart. “I swear.”
Colt put his arm around my shoulder. “I wouldn’t take it personally, Curly,” he said. “She was obviously upset. It probably didn’t have anything to do with you. However, we must be on the right track. These people obviously know SOMETHING.” I was still stewing over being called a slut. I didn’t think that was necessary. All I’d done was look in an empty house, find a rotting human head, and faint. I didn’t have an orgy in there. Geez! Roz, however, seemed to be enjoying herself, and since no one had called her a slut, she felt like moving right along.
“Maybe if the Perkins know something,” she said, “someone else does, too. We can probably find someone willing to talk. How about the MacMillans?” They lived next to the Perkins.
“They’re out of town,” I said, still sulking.
“Since when?” she asked.
“Since yesterday morning. I saw them pack up their RV and drive off.”
Roz put her hands on her hips and a questioning look crossed her face. “That’s strange—they usually let me know when they’re leaving and ask me to pick up their papers.”
Just then, we saw Maxine, huarache sandals and all, being towed down the street by Puddles the poodle. Maxine lived one street over on Red Maple Leaf Lane. According to Maxine, she and her now-deceased husband had been the first to build a house on their street over thirty years ago. Roz and I looked at each other. Maxine knew everything there was to know about anything in this neighborhood. She smiled when she saw us, and stopped. We introduced her to Colt.
“I see you are monkey-free today, eh?” she said with a smile. “Monkeys in Rustic Woods—I’ve seen it all now.”
We questioned her about House of Many Bones while Puddles yapped and tugged in an attempt to move on. With all of his ten pounds of gray, curly-furred fury, he was going nowhere fast and let everyone know as much. Maxine said she had no idea who owned the house, but she had heard about our little fiasco and she was quick to give us an answer about why the Perkins wouldn’t talk, why the MacMillans had suddenly left town, and why no one else on White Willow Circle would cough up information. She shook her head at us. “Girls, girls, girls. You are stirring up some very old and very scary history here.”
“Scary, like ghost scary?” I asked.
“No, honey.” She yanked on Puddles leash. “Scary, like, anyone talks, they get kneecapped scary,” she said. The three of us took turns looking bug-eyed at each other.
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” asked Colt.
“You ever see that movie. . . what was it called?” She was sniffing the air to remember the word. “Oh, it had that handsome Robert De Niro. Good People? Good Men?”
“Goodfellas?” I offered. I knew my Robert De Niro movies.
Maxine shot her arm in the air. “That’s it! Well, think along those lines. Capishie?”
“Are you saying,” Roz said, “that people are afraid of the Mafia? In Rustic Woods, Virginia?”
“You said it, honey, not me!”
Chapter Eleven
ROZ AND I STOOD THERE with our jaws hanging like droopy drawers on a toddler. Colt was silently cool as a cucumber, which had me wondering. Puddles was yipping up a storm so Maxine had to move along. “Listen,” she said, being tugged away, “there’s not much more I can tell you, but honestly, be careful. My suggestion is to leave well enough alone. Drop the whole thing. Forget it ever happened. The stuff I’ve heard was through the grapevine, but I never thought it was idle rumor. People were scared—for real.”
We thanked her for the information.
“Wow,” said Roz.
“Holy cow,” I said.
“Mamma mia,” said Colt.
I started shivering again. Colt peeled off his leather bomber jacket and slipped it over my shoulders.
We stood in the middle of White Willow Circle, stupefied. Honestly, I couldn’t get my mind around the idea of the Mafia in sleepy little Rustic Woods. It seemed too absurd to be true—as if someone had just told me Arnold Schwarzenegger was set to play the lead in Brokeback Mountain II. The two just didn’t go together. I was about to express my doubts when I caught sight of Howard’s black Camry rounding the corner. It moved slowly toward us. Lovely, I thought. The last thing I wanted to witness was a sequel to the Battle of the Manly-Men played out in the middle of my street. I wasn’t in the mood. I turned to Colt, wagging a harsh finger in his face. “Don’t tell him what Maxine just said, okay? He’ll get all weird—weirder than he’s already acting. I’m just not up for it.” Frankly, I was seething mad that he was ignoring my edict from last night. He sure had a lot of nerve.
“Sure. Whatever you say,” he said seriously. Geez. He wasn’t even smiling. Colt would smile through a 9.0 earthquake that was happening in the middle of a category five hurricane during a nuclear meltdown. Something wasn’t right.
Howard pulled the Camry into our driveway, got out of his car and moved intently toward our little huddle in the street. I knew this was a visit with a mission—he wasn’t just in the neighborhood. This was fishy behavior—the middle of the day? I looked at my watch. Ten forty-nine. Still morning, actually. Too early for lunch. Howard never left work during the day. To be sure, the bugger was up to something.
He walked right up to us, barely acknowledged Roz, much less me, his wife. Today must have been a no-suit day because he was decked out in his jeans and tennis shoes, topped off with his ratty Redskins sweatshirt. Some days Howard had to sport a suit to work, and others he was able to do the casual jeans th
ing. I was never privy to the whys of suit day or no-suit day.
I got a grim look and terse nod of the head. He was still mad. Whatever. I had Mafioso problems. He could go fly a kite for all I cared. He held his hand out to Colt for a friendly shake. “Hey, buddy, I want to apologize about last night,” he said. What?! He hadn’t called Colt “Buddy” since 1983. Douchebag, maybe. Peckerbrain, possibly. Definitely not “Buddy.” Fishy had just got a whole lot fishier. I crossed my arms suspiciously.
“Sure, dude,” replied Colt in kind. “I understand. No problemo.”
“So, can I talk to you for a minute?” Howard asked him. “In private?”
“Sure,” answered Colt. “Step into my office.” And he pointed to my backyard! Off they walked, like I wasn’t even there.
“Hey!” I shouted. “What about me? Don’t you want to talk to me?” Howard looked back and answered without batting an eyelash. “No.”
I threw up my arms.
“I thought you told me they didn’t even like each other,” said Roz. “Doesn’t Howard, you know . . . hate Colt?”
“He sure did last night!” I said.
“Maybe it’s a trap. Maybe Howard’s planning on jumping him when they’re alone. Should we call the police?”
“And say what? That two men are being civil toward each other in my backyard? I don’t think so.” Besides, with my luck, Officer Brad would show up again. And quite truthfully, I’d had enough of police and FBI agents in the last few days to last a lifetime.
Roz and I stood like goons in the middle of the street while I pondered possible reasons for the frat boy reunion. Curiosity eventually got the better of me, and I left her to wander around the side of my house just far enough to peek at them, hopefully without them seeing me. There they stood—Colt with his hands in his jeans pockets, nodding, while Howard seemed to control the conversation. He wasn’t yelling or moving his arms around wildly like a madman. It was, in fact, two men, acting civil toward each other in my backyard.
I looked back to Roz. She had moved to the side of the road because Peggy was pulling up in her van. I walked back to where they had convened, Roz talking to Peggy through her rolled-down window while her engine idled. Peggy’s red hair was pulled up haphazardly in a high pony tail that sort of flopped to one side, and I could see through the window that she was wearing her favorite sweatshirt declaring, “Kiss Me, I’m Italian.”
“Holy cannoli!” she cried when she saw me. “I was just telling Roz—you’re not going to believe this! I don’t have long—gotta run and get my dry cleaning and supper for tonight before the kids get home—but I just had to tell you!” She was revved up in major excitement mode. “So,” she continued, “I was talking to my sister, whose cousin-in-law was the maid-of-honor for the Rhineholds’ daughter.”
“Who?” I asked, my head swimming from trying to connect the dots.
“Which one? My sister or her cousin-in-law?”
“The Rhineholds.”
“Oh, them,” she said. “They used to own your house!”
“That’s not who we bought it from,” I said.
“That doesn’t surprise me. They moved out, according to my sister, a really long, long time ago.”
“You mean, like maybe twenty-nine years ago?” Roz asked.
“Si, Signora! So anyway, Annie—my sister—says that her cousin-in-law—Mary Alice I think her name is—told her that the old lady Rhinehold got really drunk at the wedding and started burbling something about how moving to White Willow Circle was the worst mistake they’d ever made, and she was rambling on about crooks. She kept repeating it, crooks, crooks, crooks, and about how everybody’s lives had been ruined “that night,” and she had to move all those years ago because of “that awful night” and “that awful man.” They had to sedate her and carry her out of the wedding reception. Poor Maggie.” She shook her head.
“Who’s Maggie?” I asked
“Maggie Rhinehold—the bride. So anyway, it gets better. I know Maggie because we went to school together and she used to date my brother’s best friend, Leo, until Leo went to juvy for trying to rob a hot dog stand . . . or was it a drive-thru Fotomat?” Peggy had her index finger on her chin, attempting to sort out her own confusion, while Roz and I tried our best to be patient with her. Finally she shook her head and waved her hand as if ridding herself of that thought. “Anyway, this was too good to pass up, so I called her. Maggie, I mean. Although she’s Maggie Temple now.” Leave it to Peggy. No story left unturned. “Well, she started crying as soon as I asked her about it because I guess it was like opening old wounds. She said her mother told her years later that they had left this neighborhood because something ‘scandalous’ and ‘dangerous’ had happened over there one night at your Boney House. Something no one will talk about, because the next day, a bunch of sleazy, mean Italian-looking guys came around threatening them that if they said anything, bad things would happen. She said she was standing back in the hallway where her parents couldn’t see her while these thugs sat in her living room talking to her parents. She said her mother was crying when they left.”
“Wow,” said Roz.
“Holy cow,” I said again. “Does she know who they were?”
“She said she vividly remembers the face of the head honcho—and that she saw his picture in the paper a few years ago as part of an article about infamous men in the—get this—the Mafia. Some guy named . . . oh, geez, what did she say his name was . . . Jackson Five.” She clicked her fingers as if the name would magically appear. “It was like one of the brothers in the Jackson Five . . . Lito . . . Frito . . .”
“Tito?” I asked, nearly ready to lose it.
“That’s it! Yeah! Tito . . . Tito . . . Tito Buttaro! That’s it!” She looked at the clock on her dash. “Oh, no! Gotta go! I want to be home when the kids get off the bus and I’ve got so much to do. I’ll call you later! Isn’t this cool?” And she whipped out of my driveway, speeding off to the dry cleaners.
I felt a little dizzy.
Roz looked at me. “Are you okay? You’re white as a sheet. What did she say?”
“Tito Buttaro,” I said.
“Yeah, so?”
I gave her the low-down on my morning visit from the lady FBI agent posing as a PETA rep. Roz stared at me gaped-mouthed as I reiterated the living room questioning and how Colt made his discovery that the lady wasn’t on the up and up. “The last question she asked me, before she left, was did I know about a man named Tito Buttaro?”
“Get out!” she shrilled. “This is . . . I mean . . . I don’t . . . Omigod.”
My thoughts exactly.
Roz and I didn’t have time to ponder Peggy’s new boatload of neighborhood history since Howard and Colt were coming back from their male-bonding experience. They both had their hands stuffed in their pockets, heads dropped pensively, examining the tops of their shoes. Serious was stamped all over their faces. They stopped in front of us and Howard looked up. He gave me a weary sort of tentative smile and then looked at Colt.
“So, it was good talking to you again. Have a good trip back and good luck.” He extended his hand again for a final shake goodbye.
“What?” I asked. “What trip back?”
“Oh. Yeah, well it turns out,” Colt stammered, “I have to go back. Just got a call on my cell while Howie and I were chewing the fat—there’s a, uh, problem, sort of, on this case I was working on in Century City. Gotta get back.” He put his arm around me, and shook me around like I was his little sister. “But it’s been real fun, Curly.”
“I thought you said anything you needed to work on there you could do here,” I said. I didn’t know if I was sad, or mad that Howard had obviously scared him off. I was enjoying having him around and we were really on a roll with our investigation. Things were shaking up.
“Yeah, I know. Not this, though. Sorry,” he shrugged. “I’d better go in and make flight arrangements.” And he was gone. I crossed my arms and shot Howard the evil eye.
It was the evilest evil eye I could muster. Beelzebub would have cringed.
“What?” he whined.
“You know what! What did you say to him?” I shouted. Roz, not wanting to be in the line of fire, excused herself. “Call me later, Barb! It was good seeing you, Howard.” She scooted off.
“I didn’t say anything to him. I mean, I did, but I was just mending fences. I felt bad. We were best friends once, you know? I thought it was time. He’s a good friend to you, and so I decided to make things right. That’s all. He got the call while we were talking, like he said.”
“Set things right? At eleven o’clock in the morning? You just left work to do that?”
“I’m not going to do it this time,” he said.
“What?”
“Get in a fight with you. Not gonna do it.” Then he did that George Clooney thing he does, where he kind of tilts his head and looks all cute and everything, and he smiles a little, but not a lot, and then I get all melty and woozy. He leaned over and kissed me softly on my neck. He lingered there just long enough for me to start feeling warm and tingly.
“I want to take you out to dinner tonight. Fiorenza’s? I’ll pick you up at seven.” Then he kissed me on the lips. Ay caramba. My poop-or-get-off-the-pot ultimatum was losing its force. Could I be strong? More importantly, would he really kiss me like that if he was in love with some other woman?
“I might have something to do,” I said. Of course, I didn’t have anything to do.
“Seven. We’ll talk. We won’t scream. I’ll set things right with you, too,” he said with a smile as he got in his car. I watched him drive off while I stood alone in my driveway in a neighborhood riddled with death and deception and God knows what else.
A warmer than usual breeze blew through, tossing the trees around ever so slightly. I looked at the sky—a few puffy gray and white clouds were moving in from the west, adding texture to the clear blue sky. I wondered if rain might be coming.
I was startled by a vibration against my hip and the faint sound of the Mission Impossible Theme song. It was Colt’s jacket pocket. His right jacket pocket. I had forgotten I was still wearing it. I reached in and felt the vibrating object. I was pretty certain I knew what it was, but I pulled it out for a look-see, just to verify my suspicions. Bingo! Colt’s cell phone. Now, how could he take a call on his cell phone when he didn’t even have his cell phone with him? The sneaky creep. What was he up to?
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