Agnes and the Hitman

by Jennifer Crusie

  “Yeah. Big damn thing almost six inches long. He kept it next to his gun.”

  No stairs. The entrance covered. The blood trail. The bomb shelter with only one key. Shane thought about strangling Joey with his bare hands. “Four Wheels is coming for the necklace because he thinks Agnes opened the bomb shelter and found the five million bucks from the robbery. That’s why you called me in. You knew it wasn’t a dognapper and you knew it wasn’t just anybody thinking maybe the five million was here. You knew exactly what it was.”

  “Maybe,” Joey said.

  “Maybe we need to open the bomb shelter,” Carpenter said, and they both looked at him in surprise, Joey probably because he was talking, but Shane because opening a bomb shelter was not in the mission statement.

  “Wilson,” Shane said to him.

  “I am a curious man,” Carpenter said.

  “You can’t do it without the key,” Joey said. “That door is thick. And the lock-”

  “Eat your breakfast,” Shane said, knowing Carpenter could open anything he damn well wanted to. “We need to go look for a tunnel.”

  Agnes and Lisa Livia had taken their coffee out onto the back porch and sat down on the swing.

  “So how about this,” Agnes said. “Traditional wedding cakes had white icing because refined sugar was the most expensive, so white cakes were the most expensive. Now the most expensive ones are the elaborate ones that come in all different colors. Irony. Great column hook, huh?”

  “Taylor’s my fucking stepfather?”

  “Yep.” Agnes gave up on her column, put her coffee on the table, and turned to face Lisa Livia, prepared to be supportive in the fury to come. “He married Brenda the day before we signed the house papers.”

  “That makes sense,” Lisa Livia said.

  Agnes looked at her in disbelief. “That makes sense?”

  “Well, yeah.” Lisa Livia gave the swing a shove and they began to move back and forth, creaking in the summer breeze. “If you accept the insanity that my mother sold the two of you this house with the intention of swindling you out of it and he was in on it, he’d have to marry her. That way when he lost the house to her, he’d get it back because he was her husband. It’s the only way he profits from the deal.”

  “Jesus wept,” Agnes said, feeling her rage rise again.

  Angry language, Agnes.

  It’s a Bible verse, Dr. Garvin.

  “So of course he’s married to my mother,” Lisa Livia said grimly. “But he’s gonna pay in ways he can’t even begin to dream of. She’ll probably kill him, too, just like she killed my daddy. So if you’re thinking revenge, just wait. It’s coming right up on its own.”

  “You really think she killed your dad,” Agnes said, more willing to believe it today than she’d ever been before.

  “He’d never have left me,” Lisa Livia said. “He loved me.”

  “Well, you were right about the swindle, so I’m inclined to believe you about this one.” Agnes picked up her coffee and blew on it and then sipped it. “Poor Taylor. I almost killed him last night and now Brenda’s going to off him anyway.”

  “You almost killed him?” Lisa Livia’s eyes widened. “When he told you about Brenda?”

  “Went for him with a meat fork.” Agnes shook her head at her own insanity. “Shane took it away from me. Thank God.”

  “You owe Shane big,” Lisa Livia said. “You realize that if you’d killed Taylor, Brenda would have inherited half of this place back?”

  Agnes sat up. “Oh, God.” Then she stopped. “No, she wouldn’t have. I would have. We have a survivorship agreement. If one of us dies, the other gets everything. We have to survive the other one by twenty-four hours and then we inherit, so if Brenda had managed to off me, she’d have gotten the whole place but-”

  “You wouldn’t have inherited.” Lisa Livia shook her head over her coffee. “You’d have killed him and you can’t profit from your own crime. So she’d have gotten it.”

  “Oh,” Agnes said, deflated. “Oh, crap. There really wouldn’t have been an upside to forking him, would there?”

  “Aside from the simple pleasure of the act itself, no.” Lisa Livia gave the swing another push. “We have to figure this out. This is bad. We need a plan.”

  “A plan.” Agnes nodded, trying to relax with the swing as she thought. “A plan is good. Something that puts the house in my name, not in Taylor’s.”

  “Yep.”

  “And that makes it mine permanently, so Brenda can’t ever have it.”

  “Yep.”

  “What would do that?”

  “Taylor and Brenda dead.”

  Agnes stopped the swing. “LL, get your mind out of the mob. We’re not killing anybody.”

  Lisa Livia looked at her, her big brown eyes wide with innocence. “It’s efficient. We’d have to pin it on somebody else so you could keep the house, but there are a lot of people I’m annoyed with we could stick with the blame. Palmer’s best man and his damn practical jokes are bugging the hell out of me. Some jail time would do him a world of good. What’s his name? Downer. Downer is an idiot. Let’s send him to the slammer.”

  Agnes started the swing again, fairly sure Lisa Livia was kidding. “Okay, put it down as a backup plan.”

  “Yeah, we have to wait until the cops are out of here anyway, you can’t throw a rock without hitting one. That Hammond kid even came out to the boat to ask Maria about the wedding, although I think that was just an excuse.”

  “Oh, hell,” Agnes said, “he’s not going to confuse Maria and make her cancel the wedding, is he?”

  Lisa Livia shook her head. “My kid is not that dumb.”

  “Okay.” Agnes went back to stopping Brenda. “What else is there?”

  “Blackmail.”

  “I like that. They’re scum, they’re bound to have done something horrible.” Agnes slowed the swing again. “You really think your mom killed your dad?”

  “I know she did. That night he disappeared? I saw her drive his Caddy away. She was the only one in it. They said he ran away because they found his car at the airport, but she was the one who drove it away.”

  Agnes sat very still. “You were thirteen, LL. How can you-?”

  “Yeah, but I was a thirteen-year-old Fortunato,” Lisa Livia said.

  Agnes nodded, dying to be open minded. “What if we found proof? We could blackmail her with that. Unless you wanted to turn her in to the cops now.” It did seem odd, talking like this about Lisa Livia’s mother, until you remembered that Lisa Livia’s mother was Brenda Fortunato. Rasputin’s kid probably had the same conversations.

  Lisa Livia was shaking her head. “I couldn’t turn her in. They’d prosecute her, and it would be in the papers.”

  “So?”

  “My uncle Michael would find out,” Lisa Livia said with obvious patience. “You know, my uncle Michael, the Don?”

  “Yeah,” Agnes said. “So?”

  Lisa Livia looked at her as if she were insane. “My daddy was the Don’s brother. That means my mother whacked the Don’s brother. You know how long she’d live once he knew she killed him? Maybe ten seconds. I don’t like my mother, but I don’t really want her dead.” Lisa Livia looked out through the screens to the Blood River. “I just want to know for sure.”

  “Okay,” Agnes said, suddenly feeling better about her own parents. They’d been neglectful and deceitful and they’d deserted her at ten, but they hadn’t murdered anybody. Point in their favor. “So where do we look for evidence that your mother, uh, whacked your father?”

  “The boxes on the Brenda Belle,” Lisa Livia said. “Everything she owns is on that damn boat.”

  “You think she’d keep evidence? That sounds dumb. Brenda is a lot of things, but dumb isn’t one of them.”

  “I think she wouldn’t know.” Lisa Livia put her coffee cup down. “She has all her papers packed into boxes and I think she doesn’t even know what’s there. She’ll leave the boat sometime today, she’s g
oing stir crazy on there, pacing back and forth, making phone calls and then slamming down the phone, cat on a hot tin boat. The only thing that’s keeping her together is the knowledge that she’ll be evicting you on Sunday and moving back here. She can’t wait to get back here. As soon as she leaves again today, I’ll go through as much of it as I can.”

  “I owe you,” Agnes said.

  Lisa Livia shook her head, a little sadly. “No, I shoulda done this a long time ago. Besides, you’re putting on my kid’s wedding. I owe you. I-” She stopped as they heard two sets of car doors slam, and she got up and craned her neck to see who was coming around the corner of the house through the porch screen. “Oh, God, it’s Evie and Maria,” she said after a moment, dread in her voice. “I gotta eat crow here and get my kid her white wedding back.”

  “No, wait.” Agnes shoved her glasses up the bridge of her nose and stood up, too. “I think I can do it. Let me do the talking this time. My trade for you getting me the stuff to blackmail your mother.”

  “That’s fair,” Lisa Livia said, and then she put on a smile as the screen door opened and Maria came in, followed by Evie with a dress bag over her arm.

  Dress bags, the new hot accessory, Agnes thought, and plastered a smile on her face as she thought fast about how to get rid of the flamingo theme.

  Maria said, “Evie called me to meet her here. She has a surprise to show us.”

  Evie looked like six kinds of hell. “I’ve come to apologize. Palmer scolded me last night for being overbearing and rude, and he was right. If Maria wants a flamingo wedding, then she should have a flamingo wedding.” She reached for the dress bag and unzipped it.

  “Well, actually,” Maria said, looking jolted.

  “I think we can talk about that,” Agnes said, stepping forward. “I’m sure we can compromise-”

  “I shouldn’t have opened my big mouth,” Lisa Livia said.

  “So I went to my dressmaker last night, and we worked on the dress,” Evie said as if they hadn’t spoken, pulling a lot of pink fabric out of the bag again. “Maria, would you please try Brenda’s wedding dress on for us?”

  Maria took a deep breath and look the dress, which looked a lot lighter, and went inside, detouring into the housekeeper’s room. “Really, Evie,” Lisa Livia began.

  Evie turned to her. “I did not appreciate what you said to me, Lisa Livia, but if someone had spoken to my son the way I spoke to your daughter, I would have felt the same way. I apologize, I sincerely do.”

  “Oh, don’t,” Lisa Livia said miserably. “I apologize. I was completely out of line.”

  “We’ve been talking,” Agnes said. “And we’re really both sure Maria will be fine with a white wedding. We think you were right to insist on something classic, like daisies and butterflies, Maria has always loved those, maybe with tiny flamingo accents and then a flamingo groom’s cake-”

  “No, no,” Evie said. “A girl should have the wedding she wants. I made a mistake. I was glad to spend last night fixing it. My dressmaker is a genius. You’ll see.”

  “Oh,” Lisa Livia said.

  Agnes looked at Lisa Livia and knew she was thinking the same thing: How do you tell a woman who has stayed up all night and spent a small fortune in dressmaker overtime fees that the flamingo thing was a joke her future daughter-in-law played to teach her a lesson about meddling?

  Agnes and Lisa Livia looked away from each other and shut up.

  “So have you talked to Maisie Shuttle?” Evie said to Agnes, after they’d discussed the weather and hoped it would hold for the weekend, and how the weatherman was predicting that it would, and how the gazebo was certainly looking lovely.

  “Who’s Maisie Shuttle?” Lisa Livia said.

  “Florist,” Agnes said. “Not yet, I’m still getting her machine. Don’t worry. Maria will have her flowers, which I’m thinking will still be white, with maybe tiny pink accents-”

  The screen door slapped open, and Maria came out in Brenda’s dress, but it was Brenda’s dress reborn, the hoop skirt and lace overlay gone along with the meringue sleeves and poufy overskirt and all the other froufrou. It was still flamingo pink, but lighter. Evie must have soaked it forever to rinse out part of the dye and now the cut was streamlined and strapless, with just an edge of netting along the top of the bodice, the skirt still full but with a crinoline not a hoop. Maria looked lovely. Pink as all hell, but lovely.

  “That really did take you all night,” Agnes said, looking at all the work that must have gone into just removing fabric.

  “I wanted to apologize today,” Evie said. “I didn’t want Maria to think I wasn’t… I didn’t want her to feel… I…” She looked at Maria. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what got into me. After Brenda and I went to lunch yesterday and talked, I-”

  “Brenda,” Agnes snarled, imagining what that lunch had been like, Brenda dripping poison into Evie’s ear.

  Maria took a deep breath. “Thank you, Evie, this is a beautiful dress and I’ll think of you when I walk down the aisle.”

  Oh, hell, Agnes thought as she heard somebody walk through her kitchen. “You know what would make this dress perfect? An all-white backdrop with just tiny pink accents-”

  Maria turned to her eagerly, and then the screen door from the kitchen slapped and Brenda stepped onto the porch, invading from the house. “Well, here I am, Evie,” she said, looking like she hadn’t slept well. “What was so important?” She caught sight of Agnes and smiled, looking predatory. “Agnes, sugar, you had the front door open again, and you know that’s bad for my clock, so I just closed it for you. And you’ve got a big ol’ truck coming across the bridge, too. Is that a good idea?”

  “It’s about time you got that clock out of my hall,” Agnes said, and watched Brenda’s face sharpen, and then a beat later, she thought, A truck? The bridge can’t support a truck. “No,” she said, and started for the door, only to be blocked by Brenda, staring at Maria’s dress.

  “Where did you get that?” Brenda said to Maria.

  “It’s your wedding dress, Grandma,” Maria said, smiling bravely. “I’m wearing it for my wedding.”

  “My wedding dress?” Brenda said, her pretty face darkening.

  “Where’s my Italian lace? Where’s my bouffant sleeves? Where’s my goddamn hoop skirt?”

  The same place as your goddamned morals, you worthless tramp. “It’s been modernized, Brenda,” Agnes said. “When you pass something on to someone else, you have to expect changes. You don’t get it back.”

  Brenda glared at Agnes. “I can expect my wedding dress to stay my goddamn wedding dress.”

  “Ma, it’s beautiful,” Lisa Livia said. “Evie and her dressmaker worked on it all night. We’re really grateful. All of us.”

  Brenda turned on her, glaring. “Well, I’m not grate-”

  The air was split with the sound of honking, frantic honking, as if a giant duck were being turned inside out, and Agnes said, “What the hell?” and shoved Brenda out of the way to see what was going on.

  There was a deliveryman on her back lawn setting loose a large pink bird.

  “What is that?” Agnes went out through the screen door and down toward the bird as it broke free of its crate and bolted for the river. It was at least five feet tall, and while she actually did know what it was, she was having trouble accepting the fact.

  “Delivery for Maria Fortunato and Palmer Keyes,” the delivery-man said, giving up on catching the bird. “They here?”

  “Maria!” Agnes yelled, but Maria was right behind her. “Did you order a flamingo?”

  “No,” Maria said, staring at the bird as it loped, honking, toward the water, but she signed for it when the uniformed chinless wonder with the blond crew cut jabbed the clipboard at her. Then he handed her an envelope and drove off, leaving the crate and the bird behind as he made Agnes’s bridge groan again in his getaway.

  “That’s a flamingo,” Lisa Livia said, coming up behind them as Maria opened the envelope, a
nd Agnes said, “Yes, it is,” staring in equal disbelief.

  “It’s a wedding gift from Downer,” Maria said, reading the papers from the envelope, and her inflection on “Downer” told them all they needed to know about how she felt about Palmer’s best man. “Its name is Cerise.”

  “What in God’s name?” Doyle said, and Agnes turned to see him and Garth crossing the lawn, gaping at the bird, which was still honking frantically, now knee deep in the Blood River.

  “Flamingo,” she told him. “How’s that house painting coming?”

  “We need sprayers,” Garth said. “That’s a flamingo. Hot damn.”

  “They eat shrimp,” Maria said, still reading the papers. “What are we going to do with a flamingo?” Her voice quivered on flamingo, and Agnes realized that after the dress and her grandmother, the big pink bird was probably the last straw.

  “Jimbo can get us all the shrimp we want,” Garth said, and Agnes took the papers out of Maria’s hands and gave them to him.

  “You are now chief flamingo wrangler,” she told him. “Take care of Cerise until we figure out where she belongs so we can send her back. Feed her lots of shrimp. Maybe that will shut her up.”

  “Cool,” Garth said.

  “And paint the house,” Agnes added.

  “On it,” Garth said, and was gone.

  Agnes turned to Maria. “You really do look beautiful in that dress, honest to God, and the flamingo will be gone by your wedding, I swear.”

  Maria nodded, trying to smile, and then Agnes turned to the rest of the group, raising her voice to be heard above the honking.

  “So, who’s for a mint julep?” It wasn’t quite ten yet, but it was definitely turning into a drink-your-brunch day. If Cerise didn’t shut up soon, she was going to get a julep, too. With a syringe if necessary.

  Evie shook her head, trying to look away from the flamingo and failing. “Thank you, Agnes, but I’m going home to bed.” She finally tore her eyes away, kissed Maria on the cheek, halfway between a real kiss and an air kiss, smiled weakly at Lisa Livia and Brenda, and tottered off to her Lexus.

  “She’s startin’ to show her age, bless her heart,” Brenda said with satisfaction.