Toured to Death, page 26
“Ooh.” Frank was holding his temples in place with his fists. “Who was sitting across from Georgina?”
“The people on her left and right were too far away to do it unnoticed. Frank knows. He was there. But we always reach across the table for a glass. It’s natural.”
Rawlings gazed down at the wet marble, rolling it along the placemat with a fingertip. Amy knew enough not to push it further. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me.”
“Shouldn’t we order first?” Amy asked with an eye cocked toward Lou, now a brooding presence behind the counter.
They ordered. And while they waited for, then ate their muffins, Amy explained her theory, everything from Fabian’s death to Otto’s shooting and Georgina’s poisoning. It all sounded good, Amy felt, until the moment when the big hole started to become apparent.
Rawlings saw it soon enough. “The murders aren’t connected,” he interrupted. “How is Carvel’s killer, this Leonardo character that no one knows about . . . how is he connected to your poisoner?”
“I’m not quite sure,” Amy mumbled. “But there’s a connection.”
“Connection, hell. It makes sense only if they’re the same person.”
“Not really. They could be related. You’ll never know until you check it out.”
“We did checks on everyone.”
“Well, check this one again.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
The two of them kept at it, with Frank sitting quietly by. Amy tried to emphasize other aspects, the logic, the personalities. But Rawlings kept returning to the hole, like a dog with a bone.
“All I’m asking for is a search warrant.”
“That’s all?”
“You’ll find the gun that killed Otto.”
Rawlings wiped his mouth. “Ms. Abel. This is not something I’m willing to act on right now. I appreciate your help, and I loved the magic trick. I really did. Lou, my man, the muffins were great.” He slapped down a twenty and headed out the screen door.
Frank followed.
Lou crossed to the booth, took the bill, and began to wipe down, brushing the muffin crumbs into Amy’s lap. “You and your pals might want to look for another spot. I got a reputation.”
“Sorry, Lou. It won’t happen again.”
So that was it? Her great breakthrough? Amy knew she was right, but what good would that do her now?
Back out on the street, she was surprised to find Frank Loyola leaning against the shingle-sided building. Alone. “I told the sarge I had an errand to run.”
“That’s nice,” Amy said, still mindful of their last encounter.
“Him and me came in separate cars, so . . .” Frank pointed to his green Camaro, parked by a hydrant. “You really think that’s how it happened?”
“You were there.”
Frank rubbed his chin. “It’s possible. A couple of people picked up their king of Sweden wine and sniffed it. The pill could have gone in then.”
Amy looked at the Camaro, then back at its owner. “So what’s this errand?”
Frank kicked an old candy wrapper into the gutter. “I was thinking we might go visit someone. Nothing official. But I’m pretty good at throwing people off guard. What do you say?”
Amy shook her head. “I thought you were after Marcus.”
“Yeah. But if Rawlings is right, then it’s his collar and I’m still a flunky. If you’re right . . .”
“Then it’s your collar. No, thanks.”
“Ah, come on.” He was practically pleading. “If you must know, the sarge hasn’t been too encouraging. Sure, he confers with me, but more like a witness than a fellow investigator. So, I was thinking if I showed a little more initiative . . . you know?”
“Unofficially? Without a warrant?”
“There are things we can do.”
“Like making people vomit their muffins?”
“You’re not making it easy.” Frank bit his lower lip. “I’m sorry about that. But look what you got here. I’m an on-duty cop who half believes you, who’s got a legal sidearm and knows what he can and can’t do. You’re not gonna do better. Not today.”
“You’re just doing this to get your gold shield.”
“Yeah? Well, so what? I mean, so what?”
“So . . .” She mulled it over. “So you’re right. Let’s go.”
For most of the drive they stayed silent, except for Amy’s suggestion about the best approach to the Holland Tunnel, which Frank appreciated. Once in New Jersey, he headed north on the turnpike, weaving through steady traffic until the Palisades. From there on they expected clear sailing, and were surprised when the cars began slowing down and backing up.
Frank leaned out his window, regarded the flow with a practiced eye, then strained his neck to gaze at the nearly empty southbound lanes. “Feels like a rubbernecking delay.”
The minutes crawled along with the traffic. Two miles later an access break between the wooded medians gave them a clear view. It was rubbernecking, as Frank had figured, caused by an accident in the southbound lanes. Everyone was ogling two highway patrol units, their reds flashing as they straddled an exit leading onto a dirt road. In the middle of the exit stood a battered Volvo sedan. A plume of light steam rose from its hood, and shrubs seemed to be growing out of the grille. Three windows had been broken or severely cracked, and all four tires were flat. A sign, EXIT GREENBROOK POND, lay crumpled nearby.
“How the Hector . . . ?”
Amy stared past Frank’s head. “It’s a Volvo like mine,” she said as they crept toward a closer view. It had a Rye Playland bumper sticker, too. And the license plate . . . “Holy crap, it’s my car.”
Frank winced. “Are you sure?”
“It’s my car.”
Frank began to ease the Camaro across a lane and through the access break. They pulled in behind the patrol cars, and while Frank was busy showing his badge to an officer, Amy jumped out and ran to the injured Volvo. It was empty, with streaks of blood across the driver’s seat.
A minute later Frank joined her. “Someone dialed nine-one-one about gunshots along this stretch. That was maybe ten minutes ago. They say it probably got run off the road. The boys are waiting for the locals. This isn’t really your car?”
“It is.”
“Holy Hanna. Who else has keys? Your mom?”
“Yeah.” Thirty yards in, the dirt road vanished around a leafy bend. “I can’t believe she . . . Can we drive back in there?”
Frank shrugged. “It’s a jurisdictional thing, you know?”
“It’s my mother.”
“The Volvo’s blocking the way. And we can’t drive up and around, ’cause my Camaro doesn’t got enough clearance.”
“My mother gets run off the road, and you’re talking about clearance? She’s in there.”
“Not necessarily.” But Frank was already talking to Amy’s back. “Hey!”
Amy had almost reached the bend in the dirt road when the patrolman caught up. “All right,” he hissed as they fell in beside each other. “I guess there’s nothing wrong with an off-duty New York cop taking a walk in the New Jersey woods.”
“You’re on duty.”
“Sugar!” Frank stopped in his tracks, then started again. “Oh, what the Hector! But you follow my lead. This is my show.”
It was Amy who first saw the Grand Cherokee parked in the middle of the road, near the spot where a footpath branched off and meandered into the brush. The two of them gazed silently. A breeze stirred the leaves at their feet, and Amy could swear she heard footsteps not far off, rhythmically crunching through the autumn debris. Frank heard them, too. He drew his service revolver and motioned for Amy to stay with the Grand Cherokee. Amy nodded.
She waited until Frank had turned down the footpath, not a second longer. Then she took the only other route, the dirt road beyond the Jeep, walking softly and listening through the dying breeze for the footsteps that might have been nothing more than the breeze. The road curved up an incline, and from the top Amy thought she could see the faint outline of the Empire State Building across the woods and the river.
Taking the curve down the other side, she was immediately faced with the kidney-shaped expanse of Greenbrook Pond. The road ended at the pond’s edge, in a small gravel patch. Nearby, a graffiti-riddled storage shed leaned into a weeping willow, its chained and nailed-up boards serving to hold the structure together as much as to keep out intruders.
Amy felt a touch on her ankle, like the landing of an insect on skin, except that she was wearing trousers, not shorts. As she passed within a few yards of the shed, she felt another touch, this time more like a sharp pang, hitting her on the right hip. Amy stopped and inspected the spot and rubbed it.
“Amy,” a voice whispered. She started, then spun clumsily in a circle. There was no one in sight, and she spun again. A third stone, this one too large to be a pebble, arched past her head and hit the ground. “Amy. The shed.”
She hadn’t even considered the shed. There seemed to be no way in and barely enough of it standing to accommodate a human being. As she stared, a narrow plank of rotting wood was lifted and moved aside, leaving a black hole about four inches wide. “Marcus?” Amy looked into the hole. “What are you doing in there?”
A pair of eyes inside the wedge of darkness reflected the cloudy daylight. “Get out of here now. Go.” His voice was weak and shaky.
“Where’s Fanny?”
“At home. I borrowed the car.”
“Thanks for taking such good care of it.”
“Amy, I’ve been shot.”
CHAPTER 37
This had started out as a drive, going out to New Jersey to intimidate the Mrozeks and see what happened. Now, suddenly, it was a wrecked car—her car—and gunshots and the man she cared about, shot and bleeding in a tumbled-down shed.
“I’m bleeding like hell.” Marcus moved his arm so that Amy could see it and the blood. So much blood.
“You should tie a tourniquet.” Amy started unbuckling her belt. “Can you get out of there?”
“I’ll take care of myself. Get help.”
“I am help,” she replied. “Frank’s around, too. Somewhere.”
“Does he have a gun? Nardo has a gun.”
“Nardo shot you? He’s here?”
“I recognized him in the Rome photo.”
“I thought you never met him.”
“I knew his mother. They look a lot alike, especially now. Oh, shit!” The hazel eyes had refocused somewhere behind Amy.
Too late she heard the crackling of leaves. “Turn around slowly,” a voice said.
Amy obeyed and fixed her gaze on Jolynn Mrozek, walking down the slope, a tiny but lethal .22 pointed relentlessly at Amy’s chest. Well, this solves one problem, she thought. The murders are officially connected.
“Leonardo Gray,” Amy said, moving to her left, trying to cut off Jolynn’s view of the hole between the boards in the shed.
“Jolynn Hanover Mrozek.” Jolynn said the words with slow authority and kept coming up the slope. “Very much a woman, thank you. Of course, I can’t have kids, which I call a blessing.”
“Does Vinny know?”
She laughed. “Would you marry a transgendered? Well, maybe you would, but not Vinny. I know he’s in the shed, so just step aside.”
Amy held her ground and played for time. “Why did you kill Carvel?”
“So long ago,” Jolynn said. “A lifetime.” The small, bony woman glanced around, then shrugged. “It was more or less accidental. One thing leads to another. Events take on a life of their own, you know?”
“You sabotaged his food. He came back to the kitchen and found you.”
Jolynn stopped in her tracks. “I knew it was just a matter of time. Either Otto would figure it out or Marcus would remember.”
“What happened in the kitchen?”
“Questions, questions.” Part of Jolynn seemed annoyed, and part of her seemed pleased. “I’ve never, ever talked about this. For obvious reasons.” She settled gently onto a stump ten feet away, so feminine and proper, the muzzle of the .22 still trained on Amy’s chest. “That bastard. If it wasn’t for Mama . . . She was responsible for his success, you know. Of course you know.”
“Sour cream and the prefolded taco.”
“It was more than that,” spat Jolynn. “She created all the early recipes. Everything. He promised to make it up, give us lots of stock. I was counting on that money for my operation.” Here she smiled. “I told Mama I needed it for college.”
“And then Carvel’s family talked him out of it.”
Jolynn’s eyes narrowed. “Mama took it so good, like she was expecting it. That old Italian fishwife attitude where you figure you’ll probably get screwed, anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”
“So you played a little prank on his food.”
“That’s all it was. A prank to get his attention.” Jolynn was distracted now, waving her free hand at a persistent fly that was orbiting her black, lacquered hair. Amy felt an opportunity. But what could she do? A second later and the fly buzzed away.
“Anyway, he came fuming into the kitchen, yelling at Mama. I was yelling at him. Of course, that’s just what he didn’t want, someone yelling about his thievery. So, Mama stays to serve the next course. And he takes me by the neck and drags me off to the apartment above the garage. By now the asshole’s threatening me with assault and battery charges. Assault with milk.”
“And then he had his attack.”
“You know a lot.” The words were spoken as a threat.
“What’s to know? He eats dairy. He has an attack.”
Jolynn nodded. “It was damn scary. The mean old bastard is moaning, all bent over with cramps. And outside the window I see all these people running around, calling his name. I thought he was gonna die.”
Yes, Amy thought, events do take on a life of their own. “So you got scared and hid out. And somehow that led to kidnapping him and driving cross-country.”
Jolynn bristled, holding the pistol at arm’s length and pointing it for emphasis. “It wasn’t dumb. I’m not dumb.”
Amy raised her hands to chest level. “I’m just trying to understand.”
“Getting to San Diego was the only leverage I had. Mama left some stuff in the attic where we used to live. A diary, some old recipes, a thank-you letter from Fabian. Proof the inventions were really hers.”
“You thought they’d still be in the attic?”
“It was a rental. No one used the attic. Anyway, I had no choice. This stuff would give me leverage. He’d have to forget about the kidnapping. And he’d give me money for the diary, just to not have it hanging over him. Mama would never do it. Too much of a victim. Well, Nardo wasn’t gonna be a victim.”
“So you had to get to San Diego and had to keep Carvel out of commission until you got there.” Amy was beginning to fall in with the crazy logic. “I guess a car would be the only way. What? Tied up in the backseat?”
Jolynn regarded her with bemused disdain. “In the trunk. I’d buy ice cream cones along the way and feed them to him. God, that trunk smelled. I’d take him out at truck stops and try to clean him up. Poor slob barely knew where he was. We got to San Diego, and the stuff was in the attic, right where I knew it would be.”
“Then you contacted Stu Romney.”
“I figured he’d be the one to negotiate.” Jolynn’s eyes looked straight into Amy’s, as if seeking approval or at least understanding. “I never meant to kill him. We were in our motel, and somehow he got out. I barely caught him. Sure, he was sick, but not as sick as he pretended. All I had on me was this pocketknife.”
“You stabbed him to death with a pocketknife?”
“What else could I do?” She smirked, still a little proud of herself. “It wasn’t easy. Afterward, I sold his watch and ring and cashed out as much as I could on his bank cards. Maybe a year later Mama moved back to Elba to live with her cousins, and I started to come out of my cocoon.” Her free hand flew up in an almost joyous flourish. “Jolynn Hanover. On the prowl for a big brute of a man to make her happy.” Her hand lost its flourish and fell to her side. “It’s worked out okay. Once the twins get out of our hair.”
The shrill call of a bird played in the empty air. Amy had warned herself not to let this happen, not to let the conversation lag. But her mind had been too busy weaving together the last of the threads.
Nardo Gray had been replaced by Jolynn, who, with each passing year, felt safer from Nardo’s homicidal past. Until the rally, when she heard that Marcus was nosing around. Otto’s involvement was a threat she couldn’t ignore. What seemed like an unfathomable mystery to the overworked police might turn out to be child’s play to a creature like Otto.
When Amy refocused her attention, Jolynn had just finished screwing a long black cylinder onto the pistol’s snub nose. “I think this will be the end of it,” Jolynn said, almost to herself. “Mind stepping aside? First come, first served.”
“No.” Amy stood her ground, squaring her body to block the shed’s slab of open darkness.
“C’mon, girl. Move.”
But Amy was frozen. Just like Monte Carlo. Like Minetta Lane two years ago. But now her inaction meant something different. It meant standing up to a cold-blooded killer. There was defiance in this frozen inaction.
“Well, have it your way.” Without warning and in rapid succession, Jolynn fired four breathy, muffled shots.
Amy shut her eyes and heard a scream, unable to tell if it was her own or Marcus’s. Shards of rotting wood splintered and flew, and she opened her eyes and turned to see two splintered, gaping holes on either side, waist high, just inches from her own trembling torso.
Jolynn cackled. “Believe it or not, I was aiming at you.” “Marcus!” Amy turned her back on the gun and started clawing at the gap in the boards, desperate to see if anything in the shed was still standing. “Marcus!” She looked downward into the shadows and saw nothing.
Jolynn stepped closer. “Bye-bye, Amy.” Her tone was controlled and chilling.
