The Sassy Suspect, page 17
She hopped off the handlebars with ease, since the bike was moving slower than the average sloth. "I thought you were in some kind of shape."
"I am." I handed it over to her. "The wrong kind."
We switched places. Maizy rang the bell, and we were off, breezing smoothly down the street in a straight line. The wind riffled my hair. The blocks ticked past with no sign of Z or the Vega, and Maizy wasn't even out of breath. I glanced over my shoulder to tell her how deeply I admired her when I saw the glow of her cell phone screen.
"Seriously?" I asked her. "Didn't you take driver's ed? You're not supposed to do that."
She glanced up. "Do what?"
"What's so important that it couldn't wait until you got home?"
"I could wait." She shrugged. "But P.T. couldn't. He just sent a text message."
The bike's rear fender fell off.
"We didn't need that anyway," Maizy said. She stopped to scoop it up and hand it to me. "We'll recycle this."
"What'd he say?" I asked her when we got rolling again.
"Thanks for the business." She sounded pleased. "Now, that's good customer relations. You don't see that anymore. Maybe he should give away a free blender with every—"
I heard a pfffft and the front tire blew out, skewing the bike sharply to the right before dumping me onto the curb. Maizy landed beside me. The bike crash-landed in the gutter and died.
"We didn't need that anyway," Maizy said.
I sat up, my legs bent, my arms on my knees, and my head in my hands. "What have we accomplished tonight?" I asked her. "We lost Vern. Our car was stolen. We don't know who Z is, and I think I broke my backside."
Maizy hauled me to my feet. "We learned we always need to pay Honest Aaron the do-not-return fee."
"What a night," I said as we began walking. It was getting colder. Maizy didn't seem to notice, but she was encased in forty yards of black hoodie. Shivering, I stuck my hands into my jacket pockets. And immediately pulled them out again, holding a business card. The card Maizy had found in Kay Culverson's car. Fast Track Productions, Thomas G. Casaviti.
I looked at Maizy. "I think I just found Tommy."
CHAPTER THIRTY
There wasn't much else to be done that night but go home. Maizy needed to find out if Thomas Casaviti was Tony's cousin Tommy, and I needed to start an online job search, because the way things were going, I wasn't going to be able to stay at Parker, Dennis for much longer. I didn't have Janice's nerve, Donna's smarts, or Missy's looks. All I had to offer beyond mediocre secretarial skills and a generally surly attitude was some experience in playing detective, yet all I'd been able to detect so far was a clown car of suspects from Butternut.
By the time I got to my apartment, my feet were killing me. I was chilled to the bone, and Ashley was full of recriminations over her empty food bowl. I gave her an apology cuddle and some dry food and fresh water, then stood in the shower for the next fifteen minutes trying to get some feeling back in my fingers and toes.
I'd just settled in front of the television with a mug of hot chocolate when my phone rang. The battery was dead on my caller ID, so I took a chance and answered it.
"I'm sending Howard back to work." Ellen Dennis. "I can't take it anymore. I just wanted to warn you, he's not himself. I don't know how to get through to him."
"Can't you keep him home for another few days?" I asked her. "I think I'm finally making progress." Not in solving the case, just in telling fibs. That one was a whopper.
"The truth is," she said, "work is good for him. Being at the office might bring back the Howard I married and take away this…"
Sniveling girly-man?
"…misanthropic stranger," she said.
I wasn't sure what misanthropic meant, but I got the stranger part. I'd seen that side of Howard before his sabbatical began. Still, flowery language or not, the bottom line was that Ellen was kicking Howard out the door and back into my daily life. Which meant my sabbatical was over too.
"I have to go," Ellen said. "He's trying to break the child safety seal on my sleeping pills."
Oh boy. If that wasn't misanthropic, I didn't know what was.
Someone knocked on my door as soon as I hung up. I opened it to find Curt on the landing, holding a lidded cooking pot. "Hey, I've got some leftover meatballs, and I thought—"
"Come on in," I said immediately. "I'll put them in another container so you can have your pot back."
"No rush," he said. "I've got more than one."
What a show-off. I had one saucepan, one baking pan, a small but curious array of cooking utensils, and a cheap ten-year-old set of serrated knives. Curt had the Galloping Gourmet. But I'd bet he didn't have the three dozen Tupperware containers that I had, thanks to my mother and her relentless attempts to domesticate me.
While I transferred the meatballs to a container, Ashley strutted past me to wind herself around Curt's legs, wrapping her tail around his calf while she leaned into him. Curt scooped her up to snuggle her against his chin, and I could hear her purring from across the room. If Ashley ever learned to cook, I didn't stand a chance.
He took his nose out of Ashley's fur. "So where's Vern?"
Good question. "Maybe he had a date. There's a hot little number in the window at Macy's that's just his type." I washed out the pot and ran a towel around it, careful not to look at him. "Hot chocolate?"
"Maizy told me she'd bring him back by nine," he said. "Did something happen?"
I was pretty sure Maizy wouldn't have said anything about Z. Although maybe if she had, we'd have found out who Z was. Despite Vern's kidnapping and the Vega's theft and our crash-and-burn with the rusty bike, nothing had happened. We still didn't have that answer.
I slid a mug of water into the microwave to heat. "Not a thing. Been a pretty quiet night."
"Uh-huh." Curt regarded me with suspicion. "You know, it's possible I might be some help with all of this, if you'd trust me."
I turned to him, surprised. "I do trust you."
He stroked Ashley's fur one last time and gently put her down. She gave me a baleful look over her shoulder and headed for the living room with a flick of her tail. Then he had me backed up against the counter, his arms to either side of me, standing so close that I could count the little specks of black in his dark brown eyes. I loved dark brown eyes. And I could smell the Old Spice aftershave. I loved Old Spice aftershave.
"Did something happen?" he repeated.
I meant to assert plausible ignorance, but the Old Spice made me a little crazy, so what came out instead was: "Vern got kidnapped, and his car got stolen, and Damian got arrested, and Rod's show got canned. Oh, and Howard's wife is sending him back to work."
Curt took a step back, and I took a deep breath.
"Vern had a car?" he asked.
I shook my head. "Not important."
The microwave dinged. I took out the mug and stirred some hot chocolate into it and handed it to him. "Why don't we go into the living room, and I'll fill you in."
When we'd settled onto the sofa, Ashley materialized next to him, climbed onto his lap, and curled up in a little ball. "Tell me one thing," he said. "Is Maizy safe at home?"
I nodded. "As far as I know."
Curt blew out a sigh. "That's the important thing. But I can see I'm missing a few details. Fill me in."
So I talked, about the Butternut staffers and about Millard and P.T. and Z, because despite what Maizy thought, Curt needed to know. Probably he'd needed to know before we'd gone to the empty house with Vern and the Vega. When I was done, we drank our hot chocolate in silence for a few minutes, considering. At least I was considering. Curt was imploding. His mouth had compressed into a hard slash, and his jaw muscles were bunching and relaxing, and his eyebrows were in the vicinity of his cheekbones.
Finally, he said, "I don't know where Maizy comes up with her ideas or why you go along with them. You two could have gotten yourselves killed tonight."
"I wasn't going to let her confront Z," I said.
"What if he'd heard you two in the backyard? He could have confronted you."
Huh. I hadn't thought about that. And I didn't want to think about it after the fact. "Maybe it wasn't the smartest thing we've ever done," I admitted. And that was saying something.
"Maybe?" He put his mug down a little too hard, causing Ashley's head to snap up in alarm. "You promised me you'd let me do the heavy lifting. So why am I not doing it?"
"You're doing it," I said. "And you're great at it."
His eyebrows managed to draw even lower.
I hesitated. "Would it help if I told you I was sorry?"
"Are you?"
I only hesitated a little before nodding. Truth was, Maizy and I had a kind of symbiosis when it came to investigating. The Z plan might not have been our finest hour, but the Z plan was an outlier. Everything else we'd done had had some use. Curt might not have gone along with the everything else. He was more of a linear thinker, an A to Z guy, where Maizy and I tended to subscribe to the chaos theory of detecting.
Curt petted Ashley in long, gentle strokes. If he noticed the hesitation, he didn't call me on it. "When I mentioned looking around corners," he said, "I meant you too."
"I know," I said. I realized there was real concern and maybe even fear behind his anger. I couldn't fault him for it. Maizy had some crazy ideas, but I was the adult in the relationship and probably I should have pumped the brakes on the whole let's-kill-Vern thing. "I'm really sorry," I told him. "I'll think things through a little more from now on. In fact, I've already started. I'm thinking everyone got together and killed Kay. They all had their reasons."
"Including Howard," Curt agreed. "Although he'd be my last choice. Murder's not really his style. Bleeding someone dry financially, that's his style."
I had to agree. I just wish he hadn't made his if you pursue this, you'll regret it remark. I couldn't remember to put gas in my car or how to buy the right size bra—I just had to be measuring wrong when I came up with negative numbers—but I vividly remembered his last words to Kay. And so had the killer, who'd used them to good advantage.
I gnawed on my lip, trying to remember if Millard Parsons had left the studio before Kay and Howard's fight. He'd left our sight, but could he have been lurking somewhere out of view, listening? I couldn't recall if I'd actually seen him leave. I couldn't recall if I hadn't either. But if Millard was unethical enough to claim that his relatives were clients, he was sneaky enough to hang around for another chance to wheedle money out of Kay after Howard was through with her.
I sighed. "This is so unfair to Howard. And I can't even visit him."
Curt's eyebrow rose. "Why not?"
I took a sip of hot chocolate. "Ellen said it would only humiliate him."
"Is that our chief concern?" he asked.
He had a point.
"Seems to me we need a little more inside info on Butternut," Curt said. "And Howard might be the one to have it."
He was right. We did need more information than we could get by sneaking around the studio or in backyards. It was entirely possible that Kay had dropped some useful nugget about someone who could give us a whole new perspective. Still…
"I'd rather talk to Thomas Casaviti first," I said. "If he's Tony's cousin, Tommy, he might have inside info too." I hesitated. "Plus I'd really rather not see Howard." Mostly because I had absolutely nothing positive to offer him. And while I'd been busy uncovering nothing for Howard, I'd also failed Rod, who'd wanted me to talk to Damian. But that wasn't going to happen thanks to Damian's little issue with the law.
On the bright side, when Howard fired me, I might be able to get a job as the new scriptwriter for Petal Patter.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The office of Fast Track Productions was on the top floor of a Center City high-rise with panoramic views of the Philly skyline in all directions. Lots of glass and marble and abstract washes of color in large frames. The elevators opened onto the lobby where a well-dressed, twenty-something receptionist sat smiling behind a horseshoe-shaped desk. The place reeked of wealth and class and success.
Until you got to Thomas Casaviti. He was a troll. His hair, black on top, gray at the sides, was bushy all over, both on his head and on his stomach, where it poked out of an unbuttoned gap in his shirt. He wore big chunky rings on little fat fingers and a gold watch that could probably pay my rent for a year. His office, while enormous with a stunning view, reeked of cigarettes layered with bad cologne. If my sense of smell hadn't been already deadened by daily exposure to the Mothball Mobile, I might have found it distasteful.
Maizy didn't seem to notice, and Curt didn't seem to care. We sat on one of two matching leather sofas arranged to face each other over a low coffee table, while Thomas Casaviti sat alone on the other, his legs spread in the way that men do when they want to discourage encroachment into their personal space. His pants legs rode up over fat ankles. He wasn't wearing socks with his loafers, and his ankles were threaded with blue veins. Another ashtray sat on the coffee table along with a bronze statue of a thoroughbred in full stride. My guess was that's where Fast Track Productions had gotten its name.
Casaviti shook a cigarette out of its pack, stuck it between thick lips, and held a gold lighter to it. His cheeks hollowed in and billowed out and a cloud of smoke rose like a thought bubble over his head. "I'm told you've got a project you want to talk about."
Maizy shook her head. "We want to talk about your cousin, Tony Sabatini."
"So you lied to Candy," Casaviti said.
Give me a break. Candy? It was straight out of the midlife-crisis handbook.
"It's not my fault if she misunderstood," Maizy said. "I'm often misunderstood."
A trace of a grin touched his lips and was gone, having left him no better looking for its appearance. "How much he owe you?"
"I don't think you understand," I told him. "We're not—"
"He understands," Curt cut in. His tone was flat. His expression was grim. He was sitting in a relaxed position, his ankle on his knee, but he didn't look relaxed to me. He looked like a cobra poised to strike.
Casaviti blew out another stream of smoke, this time through his nose. "Yeah, I understand. My cousin's stupid. Been stupid all his life."
Stupid didn't fit the Tony I'd known. Of course, I'd only seen him once every week or two for a couple of hours. And once, after hours, with Petal Peterson. Although in that case, I'd heard more than I'd seen.
"He could be sitting pretty," Casaviti said. "But no, he still thinks being the bully in the schoolyard's gonna get him somewhere. Now he's forty-four years old, and he ain't got enough to buy the Sunday newspaper."
"I don't think directing Dishing with Kay would leave him sitting pretty," I said.
Casaviti conceded the point with a minuscule tilt of his head.
"Did he ever mention anything about Kay Culverson?" I asked.
More smoke. I was going to have to do a load of laundry to get the smell out of my clothes. I didn't like doing laundry. And speaking of clothes, was this guy missing a couple of buttons on his shirt or what? His belly hair was practically waving at me.
"Yeah, he told me about her," he said. "And he wasn't wrong. Tough broad." He tapped his head. "But a smart one."
I wasn't sure I agreed with that assessment either.
"You met her?" I asked, surprised.
"Talked to her onna phone. When she called about the other guy."
Wait.
"What other guy?" Maizy asked. "Was it a creepy little dork named Damian who liked to play with guns and planned to overthrow the government?"
Casaviti waved a hand. "They're a dime a dozen. According to the broad, this guy was gonna be something special in the sack."
"Was it Rod Cameron?" I asked. It wasn't exactly a shot in the dark. No one else at Butternut qualified as something special, in the sack or anywhere else.
Curt slid me a sideways look that I also pretended not to notice.
Then it hit me. In the sack? Rod had slept with Kay? How was that possible? Well, of course, I knew how it was possible. I'd gotten the booklets in school, but why? Was there anyone at Butternut not diddling someone else at Butternut? Honestly, management needed to pass out an employee handbook. They were like feral cats over there.
"Yeah. That's it. Ron Cameron." Casaviti crushed out his cigarette and immediately lit another one. "He had some show in the works."
"In Tune," I muttered. I was a little put off because Rod had slept with Kay when he had that adorable blond pregnant wife at home. While I'd been admiring him from afar, he'd been busy spreading more seed than a rototiller.
Casaviti squinted through the smoke column. "Yeah. That's it. My stupid cousin talked me into producing it, and then she talked me out of it. Had a lot to say on the subject. Had a lot to say about everything. All of 'em beneath her, she thought. Said she had something was gonna blow it up over there and good riddance. Thought she was headed for Hollywood, I guess."
"What did she mean?" I asked.
He shrugged. "Didn't say and I didn't ask. My interest was Mr. Special's television career, but it sure wasn't hers. She was backing off, and she wanted me to back off too. Broad can be pretty persuasive."
"Broad's dead," Curt told him.
Casaviti shrugged. "Guess she's not persuasive anymore."
"Backing off of what?" I asked. "What did she have to do with the show, exactly?"
He held up his hand and rubbed his fingers together. "What else? Cash."
I sat up straight. "She was funding his show?"
"Better her than me," he said. "The broad was loaded."
Yet she wouldn't pay Millard Parsons four grand.
"But why would she change her mind?" I asked. "She didn't have any problem with Rod."
Casaviti snorted. "Right. I'm sure she had no problem with him turning her down cold."
He'd turned her down? That pleased me way more than it should. Enough that I took back all my evil thoughts about Rod. I'd never have believed it in the first place, except we were talking about Rod, and anyone with working parts would have the hots for Rod. Vern would have the hots for Rod.
