Little Black Book of Murder

by Nancy Martin

  In another moment, Michael was easing the bodice down around my waist. He was quick and sure with the clasp on the front of my bra, too. I leaned back and let him get away with it—­watching his eyes and smiling. “Michael—­what do you think you’re doing?”

  “If you can’t figure it out, I’m doing it wrong.”

  “You’re acting like a caveman. We can’t—­no, hang on a minute.” I tried to fend off his roving hands—­not very firmly. “Stop. Gus will see us through the windows.”

  “Ralphie will keep him on the porch.” Michael hiked my skirt up higher and started to ease my panties down. His hands were warm, and his voice was barely a whisper in my ear. “I missed you this morning.”

  When Michael thrust his way into my world, a refined part of my upbringing blew away like a leaf borne on a hot summer wind. Up until then, I had been a good girl all my life. Right out of college, I married my husband, Todd, who was the kind of man my family expected me to settle down with. He’d been finishing med school, intending to be a researcher who specialized in transplants, and we thought we’d have a peaceful life together. We went sailing and bought antiques and took trips to Paris, holding hands on the airplane. But cocaine came along. Drugs drove Todd to his eventual death and me beyond what I thought was the limit of my strength.

  Now? Now I knew life was short. And I didn’t want to waste a minute of it.

  Michael and I shared stormy emotions and a lot of laughter and physical cravings that sometimes felt wanton, but our relationship had become anchored in the knowledge that we weren’t going anywhere without each other. Maybe it was strange that I trusted a convicted criminal over any number of yacht-­hopping potential husbands from my own world. I knew he wasn’t going to ruin his life with drugs, though, or take me down with him.

  Even though he’d been the one to initiate a lot of sexual congress lately, I was the one who unsnapped his jeans. The afternoon had been long and trying, and I wanted to be wrapped up in the man I loved.

  He pulled back, laughter in his gaze. “Are we really doing this?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

  Emily Post, forgive me. Other people didn’t understand why we were together. But being with Michael felt like thumbing my nose at all the constraints—­the people of my so-­called social class, the rules, the strangling and antiquated edicts of civility, the tired idea of what a family ought to be. His criminal past worried me sometimes, but he had won my trust. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and held on tight. He knew exactly how to coax me to the brink of life. Even when he turned me around and I braced both hands against the sink, I was laughing, loving. He made me close my eyes and gasp. Made me forget myself. Made me feel as if I had the power to be something strong and willful and complete. He was hot inside me, a life force too strong to doubt.

  It was over in minutes. I came first, barely holding back the cry in my throat as the spasms racked me, and Michael climaxed seconds later. When we could breathe again, he tugged my skirt back down, smoothed it, pulled me around against his chest and kissed me—­gentler this time, one hand in my hair.

  “You like it, don’t you?” he murmured against my mouth. “On the edge with me.”

  “Yes,” I whispered back. “I love you.”

  He bumped his forehead against mine and looked into my eyes. “Me, I’m feeling kinda enchanted.”

  I laughed. He didn’t have the poetry of a more-­educated man, but he knew when to use the right words.

  We kissed again, long and gently, murmuring the magic words a few more times.

  When he tried to help me put my clothes right again, I pushed his hands away. “Here, let me do that.” I tried to refasten my bra, but it was tight. I rolled my eyes. “I’ve put on a couple pounds. Too much pasta.”

  He smiled. “If there’s one good thing that comes out of being broke, this is it.”

  I let him cup my breasts for a second, then snapped my bra. “You won’t say that if I outgrow all my working clothes. Button me up?”

  I turned around so he could fasten my dress.

  “We won’t be broke forever,” he said, dropping a kiss on my neck. He hugged me from behind, and I leaned against him, eyes closed for another moment to absorb his strength. If all the people at Starr’s party had felt false and posturing to me, this was what I needed most—­honest love and something else that calmed my soul.

  In a while, Michael opened the door. He went out into the hallway first. I tottered past him into the powder room. In the mirror, my cheeks were glowing.

  When I emerged from the powder room, Gus had come back into the house. He pocketed his cell phone.

  Michael was reaching for his car keys.

  Gus said to him, “I heard you’re under house arrest.”

  “You heard right.” Michael grabbed his leather jacket off the peg by the door.

  “You making a break for it, mate?” Gus asked jovially.

  Michael said, “Parole appointment.”

  I came up behind Michael and said, “We need milk.”

  He turned and gave me a last kiss. He winked. “See you later.”

  “Put Ralphie in the barn before you go?”

  “He won’t stay there.”

  I handed Michael another apple. “Give him some incentive.”

  Michael tossed the apple up and caught it, then turned to Gus. He surveyed our guest, clearly debating whether or not to encourage his departure. Gus merely smiled at him, holding his ground. At last, Michael gave a grunt and went out the door. When he was gone, Gus turned to me.

  “Well, well,” he said. “A cool customer, isn’t he? Not what I expected.”

  I didn’t ask what he expected. “That’s why you brought me home, isn’t it? To get a look at him.”

  “Can you blame me? He’s a newsman’s Holy Grail. Mick Abruz­zo, Mafia Prince, the stuff of screaming three-­inch headlines. I’ve heard what he’s done, the crimes he’s been convicted for. And the things he’s apparently gotten away with. He hardly seems your type.”

  “My type?”

  Gus laughed uneasily. “I didn’t expect a good girl like you to go for—­never mind. I’m just going to dig this hole deeper, aren’t I? I’m sure the two of you have long, romantic discussions about John Donne and Schopenhauer.”

  “He’s smarter than you think.”

  “I hear he’s plenty smart.” Gus stopped smiling. “I just wonder if you are.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  Gus suddenly wasn’t my pushy, egotistical boss anymore. He had puzzled concern written on his face. “Are you safe in this house, Nora?”

  “Safer than anywhere in the world.”

  Gus mustered another smile and straightened his shoulders. “In that case, I stand corrected. I’d better be going. My phone call came from the office. We’re moving up your Starr article to Friday, the day of the Farm-­to-­Table event. You’ll have a draft ready for me tonight? Just a draft, a little something I can sink my teeth into. If I see it, I’ll be better able to point you in the right direction where Zephyr is concerned. I want our circulation numbers up, and that kind of article will do it.”

  “I’ll e-mail you this evening,” I said with more confidence than I was feeling.

  He gave me a longer look, assessing something. Then he nodded shortly. “Good. Then I’ll see you in my office bright and early Monday. Say—­seven?”

  “Sunday and Monday are my days off.”

  “Not this week.” With a jaunty salute, he took his leave. “Remember, you owe me your life now.”

  I wanted Ralphie to run him down and stomp him into the grass, but Gus hot-­footed it to his car unscathed.

  Alone, I wobbled over to one of the kitchen chairs and sat. I held very still, thinking.

  The new twist in my career wasn’t my only worry.

>   Michael had left almost an hour earlier than usual for his parole appointment, and he’d gone off happily. I hadn’t asked him where he was going, because Gus was in the room. If I were honest with myself, I’d admit I might not have asked him even if we’d been alone.

  While his father, the infamous Big Frankie Abruzzo, was serving time in prison, Michael had told me he was devoting himself to dismantling the Abruzzo crime family’s gambling empire. Two of Michael’s three brothers were also incarcerated and temporarily out of the way. The oldest brother, Little Frankie, was presumed dead, and nobody seemed sorry about his disappearance. While they were all safely out of the picture, Michael was dealing with furious former partners who used every technique in the criminal repertoire to get around his edicts. It had gotten bad enough that we sometimes had the protection of an Abruzzo family roadblock at the bottom of the lane, and Michael kept a rotating number of cell phones to ensure that his communications were not overheard by his many enemies . . . or by law enforcement.

  I knew he had good intentions. I also knew he was enjoying himself.

  The way Todd had been drawn to drugs, Michael was pulled by some instinctive urge to rejoin his family in their illegal activities. He loved outsmarting the law, skirting the edges of criminality. Now he was trying to outsmart his own family, too. I hoped that was enough of an intellectual challenge for him.

  Eventually, I worried he was going to do something truly bad—­and get caught.

  I heard a vehicle in the driveway, brakes squealing. I got up and took a peek out the window. Libby’s minivan. She hopped out and left the door open, the engine running.

  “It’s me!” she sang as she burst into the kitchen. “You must have dropped your cell phone in Emma’s truck. I passed her in town, and she gave it to me. Here you go. I can’t stay. I’ve got Lucy and Max and the twins in the van, and the twins are in an instigating mood. My word, it’s freezing in this house!”

  “The furnace is on the fritz. Thanks for my phone. You’re a lifesaver.” I was always leaving my phone places I shouldn’t, and it made Michael nuts. “How did the audition go?”

  She blew a gusty sigh. “It was hours and hours of little girls yelping that awful song from Annie! I’ll never get it out of my head.”

  “Did the twins sing?”

  “No,” she said with a shade of relief.

  “What did they do?”

  “Well,” Libby said, “they did magic tricks.”

  “That sounds like fun!” I remembered her wish that we should all be more supportive with one another, so I mustered some auntlike enthusiasm. “What kind of tricks?”

  “First they made the director’s car keys disappear.”

  “Oh.”

  “Then a twenty-­dollar bill.”

  I could sense where this was going. “They reconjured everything, right?”

  Libby beat a path to my refrigerator and opened it. “Do you have any of those yummy wine coolers? Or the fruit thingies with the vodka? Those are so refreshing.”

  “Libby, you’re driving.”

  She sighed and closed the fridge. “It was just a passing impulse. Actually, I was hoping I might catch my son here. Have you seen Rawlins?”

  “Yes, I bumped into him at a party at the Starr farm.” I went over to the Aga stove and opened one of the vents to warm up the kitchen.

  “Really?” Happily surprised, she forgot about needing a drink. “You mean, he was invited and everything?”

  “Yes, of course he was invited. He looked terrific, by the way. Very grown-­up, wearing a sport coat. But I lost track of him. Michael said he stopped here, before I got home.”

  “Why?” Libby’s expression changed. “What was my son doing with That Man of Yours?”

  “I don’t know, Lib,” I said, a little sharply. “If either of them was here at the moment, you could ask them.”

  She seemed to sense my annoyance. “Rawlins is being so secretive! And I can’t find him half the time. He never answers his cell phone when I call. I assume he has a girlfriend, but does he bring her home to introduce me? No, he just spends every waking minute with her.” She sighed again and slumped into one of my kitchen chairs. “He’s probably embarrassed by his mother.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Maybe I should just go home and make a pitcher of margaritas and resign myself to watching that show on the BBC with Judi Dench playing a boring gray-­haired divorcée. Spending every Saturday night with my children isn’t the kind of action I was hoping I’d have at this stage of my—­oh, never mind.” Wistfully, she propped her chin in one hand, elbow on the table. “Do you have any chocolate? I know you keep a stash for emergencies.”

  “I’m fresh out.” I patted her shoulder. “You’re anything but boring, Lib.”

  “Rawlins is worrying me,” my sister admitted.

  “He looked fine. Better than fine. But when Michael said he stopped here with Porky—­I mean, Porter Starr, I—”

  Libby sat up. “He was with Porky? How nice.” Her funk began to clear. “I don’t need to be worried at all, do I?”

  “Are they friends? How did that happen?”

  “Oh, a few weeks ago after an appointment for the twins, I asked Rawlins to take Porky—­that is, Porter, back to his mother’s place. Porter had wrecked another car, you see, and needed a ride. Why didn’t one of his parents teach that young man to drive properly, I wonder? I thought Rawlins could earn a few dollars by taking Porter where he needed to go. But that was ages ago. I never thought they’d become friends. Pork—­er, Porter is several years older, and much more sophisticated.”

  I decided not to debate the level of Porky Starr’s sophistication.

  I felt a certain loyalty to Rawlins. I didn’t want to rat on him if he was simply being a high school senior, straining to get through his last semester of high school and bending a few rules along the way, so I simply said, “Don’t worry about Rawlins. He’s a nice kid. His head is screwed on straight—­at least, most of the time. If he has a new girlfriend, that’s a good sign, too, right? He’s just got a little senioritis. Give him a break.”

  “That’s the difference between you and me. You’re too trusting.” Libby got to her feet and headed for the door once more. “I have a mother’s instincts.”

  I tried not to be hurt by her remark. She knew Michael and I had been trying to have a baby for a long time. But her wisecrack cut deep.

  She prattled on. “If I didn’t have a dog at home, there would be nobody at all to appreciate me.”

  “Max loves you to pieces. Lucy, too.”

  “Max is having second thoughts since I stopped breast-­feeding. And Lucy’s imaginary friend calls me the Wicked Witch of the West. She finger painted it on my bedroom door.” Libby pulled herself together. “The twins need head shots, so I’m researching photographers. You know that glamour shots booth at the mall? Do you think they could do something to—­I don’t know—­glamorize the twins a little?”

  “Do they need to look glamorous?”

  “It couldn’t hurt. I thought I’d go first—­to make sure it’s quality photography.” She touched her hair. “They also do lingerie photos for women. They pose you on red velvet cushions. Do your hair and makeup, too. I love being fussed over. Maybe someday I’ll have a man in my life who’d enjoy a few sensual photos of me.”

  I could imagine Libby posed on velvet in her best lingerie. With the gleam in her eye that was glimmering at that moment, she’d look like a king’s mistress.

  She shook herself out of her fantasy. “Well, I’ll look into what Rawlins is up to. Bye-­bye!”

  “Good luck,” I said, but she was already gone with a slam of the door that rattled the windows.

  Under my feet, I heard the furnace give a plaintive moan. I almost ran after Libby and asked her to share that pitcher of margaritas.
/>   CHAPTER FOUR

  By the time Michael came home, I had changed into jeans, a warm sweater and my sheepskin-­lined slippers. I had also put a load of delicates into the washer and spent a couple of hours at the kitchen table working on my profile of Swain Starr. The kitchen was the warmest room in the house, and I sat close to the stove. Michael walked in with his cell phone pressed to his ear and a modest bag of groceries in one arm.

  He gave me a kiss on the top of my head and kept listening to his caller while he put the milk in the fridge. I knew he was doing family business, because his answers to all the questions were a monosyllabic “No.”

  “No,” he said while I e-mailed the profile to my editor.

  He flipped open a cookbook and started dinner with the phone still pinned to his shoulder, saying, “No.”

  He used his favorite knife and said, “No.”

  He slipped a pan under the broiler, and listened another minute before he finally said, “Okay, do it.”

  He terminated the call and tossed the phone onto the kitchen counter.

  I finished reading e-mails and closed the program. “Something brewing in the underworld?”

  “A feeble attempt to con me, but that’s nothing new. It’s insulting, though, guys thinking I’d fall for an old scam.” Michael came to me and rested his hands absently on my shoulders. But I knew he was thinking. Deciding his next move? Calculating collateral damage? Or considering our dessert options?

  In addition to initiating sex more frequently than was surely natural, Michael had been cooking like crazy during the last several months. Maybe it was boredom or a manifestation of how much he loved me, but he made enormous quantities of food two and three times a day. We may have been broke, but we certainly weren’t missing any meals.