Читать книгу I'll Be Seeing You - Beverly Bird - Страница 7

Perfection had its own kind of rush, Kate Mulhern thought. It was a tingling flow of adrenaline that made her want to hold her breath in anticipation of the final result.

She stopped moving for a split second in the kitchen of one of Philadelphia’s finer Society Hill brownstones and looked—just looked—at what she had created. The china she’d selected for Dinner For Two, her unique catering business, was a fragile ivory with gold trim. On each plate a filet nested among roasted scallions with a touch of potato thins to the side. Perfect.

Kate smiled and got back to business.

She’d left the couple she was catering for alone for eight minutes now. They had their wine to keep them company—an excellent South Australian ’84 Pinot Noir—but the man was rapidly moving through that. It was time to get on with the meal’s centerpiece. Kate left the plates on the kitchen’s center island and turned away to retrieve the orange béarnaise and julienne rind that would top the steaks.

A crash splintered the kitchen’s quiet.

She let out a yelp of surprise and whirled around, her hand pressed to her chest. What she saw was preposterous! “Hey!” she yelled. “Hey, you! No, wait, stop!”

And the dog did.

It was a dog! In the kitchen? Her client hadn’t mentioned that he had one. But she’d left the back door open a crack while the broiler had done its business—it was August, and Kate considered it to be in poor taste to hike her client’s air-conditioning up without asking. So she’d left the door slightly ajar to let in what scant breeze there was, and a dog—some scrappy little Chihuahua type thing—had come in instead.

Kate’s skin pulled into gooseflesh. Not just any dog, she thought. That dog.

It looked back at her and wagged its tail. Kate let out a strangled sound. The dog dropped the filet that was clamped in its jaws to bark once, a cheery hello, then it snapped the meat up again and trotted out.

Twelve and a half minutes down the drain, she thought, her blood still jittering with astonishment. So there was no time to dwell on the dog or what it had done. She was prepared—of course, she was prepared for any contingency, even this, the outrageous. She had two more filets in the fridge. There go my profits. Reputation was everything. She could salvage this. Twelve and a half minutes behind schedule. She had to move, had to get two more steaks in the broiler wrapped with the bacon she’d take off before serving them.

Instead, she rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.

It had not been that dog, she decided, finally turning back to the broiler. The dog she was thinking of had disappeared into Manhattan four months ago after turning her old roommate’s world upside down. What had Shawna named the mutt? Belle. Belle had blasted into Shawna’s life for two short weeks, leaving love, murder and mayhem in her wake.

Kate cooked new steaks, watching the timer impatiently. She wondered if she should make an excuse for the delay or just proceed blithely and hope no one noticed. She slid the filets onto two new plates, abandoning the filet that the dog hadn’t eaten. Then she took a deep breath. She felt perspiration slide between her shoulder blades and hoped it didn’t show. She picked up both plates and stepped over the shattered china on the floor. She didn’t even want to consider what that plate had cost her.

She pushed through the door into the dining room, a smile pasted on her face. The sight in front of her made her pulse give another hitch. The man, her customer, was laying facedown in his hearts-of-palm salad.

His date—a voluptuous blonde in shimmering silver—came through the opposite door at the same moment and started screaming.

“Wait a minute, just calm down,” Kate murmured. She eased the plates onto the table. Maybe he had just passed out. Please, don’t let it have been the food.

But it wasn’t the food. Kate’s biggest weakness was detective novels, and cop shows. It was the only vice she indulged in, but she did it with fervor. A thin ribbon of blood ran down the back of the man’s neck. She knew what blood like that meant. It was a gunshot wound to the back of the man’s head.

This job was turning into a nightmare!

Kate forced herself to touch the man’s wrist, even though her fingers shook. His skin was warm and she felt hope shoot into her blood. Then everything inside her recoiled.

No pulse. Kate tried again, and her heartbeat took off. No pulse!

The blonde’s cries changed to howls. Kate did the only thing she could. She stepped around the dead man and slapped the woman hard.

When the blonde’s wails had subsided to hiccups, Kate ran to find a telephone. She fumbled with the buttons twice before she managed to punch in 911. A voice answered immediately—cold, detached, almost mechanical. Kate cleared her throat.

“Uh, yes. Please send someone immediately. There’s a dead man in my salad.”

Lieutenant Detective Raphael Montiel preferred to think of adrenaline as something hot and sharp that hurt the underside of his skin. It was rarely a pleasant feeling.

It drove him hard as he shot his aging Explorer around the corner of Third into Willings Alley. His left shoulder rammed against the window when he jerked the SUV straight again. He didn’t have to look for the address. He knew the brownstone without the police cruisers that hurled red and blue light up against the walls of brick that bracketed the alley. He’d had his eye on the home’s owner for a while.

Phillip McGaffney was dead.

Raphael cursed roundly, most of his fury aimed at whoever had taken McGaffney out—not that the killer had done so in the first place, because that had been inevitable for months now—because the SOB hadn’t waited three hours and forty-two more minutes to do it. Raphael’s suspension from the force lifted at midnight. Now, twenty minutes after the 911 call had come in, his dashboard clock remained stubbornly stuck at eight thirty-eight.

He’d flatten the man who called him on it. McGaffney was his. Two warring factions of Philadelphia’s powerful Irish underground had just begun sniffing around each other thirty days ago when Raphael had taken his suspension in the teeth. He’d spent the last month staving off boredom by continuing to track every move the family made. Lou O’Bannon, the mob’s kingpin, had died ten days into Raphael’s suspension—of cancer, a virtual anomaly in his world. It had been a slow, natural death that had given Phil McGaffney and Charlie Eagan plenty of time to begin recruiting their supporters. Both of them fully intended to take over O’Bannon’s throne.

It had been only a matter of time before full-fledged war broke out between the groups. But Raphael hadn’t expected it to start this way, with Eagan’s boys shooting right for the other guys’ top dog.

He drove the Explorer into half a space between two black-and-whites. The SUV braked to a hard stop, and Raphael was out before it had settled back on its shock absorbers. He jogged across the alley and up the steps to McGaffney’s front door.

“Where’s Plattsmier?” he demanded of the cop manning the entrance.

“Not here yet.”

But his captain would probably be here soon, Raphael thought. “Who’s in charge?”

The officer grinned. “Fox.”

Some of the constriction eased across Raphael’s chest. Having C. Fox Whittington catch this stiff was good. It was very good. Fox was his partner.

Raphael passed the cop and went inside. He began stalking the first floor of the brownstone looking for Fox. Then he stepped into the dining room and his jaw sagged.

It was a long, narrow room with a cherry-wood table in the center. Dark wainscoting traced around the ivory-papered walls. The chandelier in the center of the ceiling was heavy with too much bronze that robbed the sparkling white light of its innocence. There was a door to the kitchen on one side of the room, a door to a hallway on the other.

McGaffney was facedown at the head of the table.

The blood that seeped from the gunshot wound at the base of the man’s skull was congealing now, going tacky and brown. It was nothing Raphael hadn’t seen before. The scene on the floor, however, rocked him a little.

The woman at the bottom of the pile was leggy—very leggy, he thought, given that the metallic fabric of her dress was pushed up nearly to her backside. It was all Raphael could see of her because there was a brunette sitting on top of her, deposited right on the small of the other woman’s back. Her knees were drawn up and her chin rested in her hand. Every once in a while, the leggy woman kicked, but the brunette wasn’t budging.

Raphael had no idea if the brunette was leggy or not. She wore navy blue trousers and a starched white shirt. Raphael had spent his childhood in parochial schools. He hated starch, despised it on mere sight.

“What the hell?” Raphael muttered.

The brunette’s head came up at the sound of his voice. He had never seen hair like hers in his life, Raphael thought. It was a million shades of onyx shimmering to deep copper in the chandelier’s light. He thought maybe it was supposed to be tied back or something, but who could tell? It was wild, with corkscrews zinging everywhere.

She reached a hand up to smooth it as though reading his opinion of it in his eyes. “She’s bigger than me,” she muttered. “It was a fight.”

Raphael cleared his throat. “Come again?”

“It was a fight to keep her away from the table. From him. To keep her from messing up your evidence. Aren’t you a cop?”

“Yeah.” He’d even be an employed cop in another three hours or so.

The woman gave a heartfelt sigh. “It’s about time you got here. She’s all yours.” And with that statement, she stood. The woman beneath her let out a yowl that stirred the hairs at Raphael’s nape. Then she rolled onto her back, sat up and sprang to her feet.

“Philip!” she cried.

Finally, too late, Raphael understood why the brunette had been sitting on top of her. This came to him in the split second before he recognized the other woman. He should have known her from her legs.

Allegra Denise.

She hurled herself in the general direction of McGaffney’s corpse in that long, ankle-length dress that draped her like a second skin and caught the chandelier’s light. Raphael stepped quickly to block her. She hit his chest like a battering ram, and she had arms and legs that were everywhere.

“Whoa,” he murmured. “Let’s ease up here.”

“That’s what I told her,” said the brunette.

“Phillip!” the blonde wailed again.

Raphael took an elbow in his gut, and one knee came perilously close to his groin. He tucked one of Allegra’s arms behind her. He used it to lever her into a dining room chair, then he leaned close enough to her ear to inhale the sweet, clinging scent of her perfume. “Quiet now, or I’ll let the lady sit on you again,” he whispered.

“Phillip,” Allegra whimpered.

“Cut me a break. You had dinner with Bonnie Joe Donnelly last weekend. How attached to Phil could you have gotten in, what, six days?”

Allegra blinked up at him, her eyes swimming. “How do you know?”

“I know.” Raphael straightened away from her and looked at the brunette again. “And who the hell are you?”

He watched everything about her draw up and in. She couldn’t be more than five foot four, but for a second she reminded him of his second grade teacher—a behemoth, stern, unforgiving and wicked with a ruler. Then he blinked, and she was petite again.

A voice came from behind him. “She’s the caterer. Allegra here was having an intimate dinner with our pal.”

Raphael turned to find C. Fox Whittington grinning at him. He grinned back. They just barely restrained themselves from several hearty slaps on each other’s backs.

“You ready to get to work?” Fox asked, laughing.

“Better check with Plattsmier on that one.” But a smile kept twitching at one corner of Raphael’s mouth.

“No need. I’m wearing a watch.” Fox looked at it and gave a groan that almost vibrated with pleasure. “Three more hours with the rookie.”

The brass hadn’t broken up other partnerships to cover a one-month suspension. They’d brought up a Homicide wannabe to replace Raphael during his time-out without pay. Raphael knew all about it. He and Fox spoke every other night or so.

There was an odd sound from the brunette. They both glanced her way.

“What?” Raphael demanded. Starch, drawn-up shoulders and that sound she’d just made. Like a tsk. All of it was like sandpaper on his nerve endings. “What’s the matter?”

“You’re having a kaffeeklatsch,” she murmured. “But a man’s dead.”

“We’ll take care of him, ma’am,” Fox said politely. He looked at Raphael, then he tilted his head in the direction of the brunette. “She was in the kitchen when it went down. Why don’t you deal with her? Under the circumstances, I’d better handle the scene myself.”

Raphael nodded. Anything he found in the house would be inadmissible in court. He wasn’t back on the payroll yet.

“An excellent approach,” said a baritone from the doorway.

Raphael felt something wither deep in his gut. It was Plattsmier. He turned slowly, edgily, to face his captain.

“I could order you off the scene,” the man said.

Raphael gritted his teeth. “What would be the point?”

“I’d make the commissioner smile.”

Raphael snarled. The sound was out before he could bite it back. Fox put a warning hand on his shoulder, but Plattsmier only nodded sadly.

“You still don’t get it,” his captain said.

“Sure I do. Thirty days.” Raphael bit out the words. “A chunk of change. What’s not to understand?”

“I supported you.”

Raphael was too angry to answer.

“I may well have done what you did, Montiel, in my younger days,” Plattsmier said. “However, I would not have done it in front of an Eyewitness News Action-Cam. That’s why the commissioner was distressed with you.” He paused, then his temper showed. “It’s why I couldn’t save you a suspension. Damn it, do you think I wanted you out? If I’d wanted you out, you’d still be out. Internal Affairs wanted to suspend you for three months. And I wouldn’t have let Fox catch this case. Then you’d have no way in on it at all. As it is, you’ve just got to cool your heels for another few hours and you guys will be a team on it.” He paused, and some of the anger went out of him. “Between the two of you, you’re the best I’ve got in the area of organized crime. So let’s let bygones be bygones and do our respective jobs here.”

Raphael heard what Plattsmier didn’t say. The case was going to blow wide open. The city of Philadelphia was on the verge of an ugly mob war. None of them doubted it.

Which made Plattsmier right. They had work to do.

“Take her for now, like Fox said.” Plattsmier thrust a thumb at the brunette.

Raphael glanced her way, and damned if she didn’t do it again, that deep indrawn breath, that squaring of her shoulders. “I have a name,” she said stiffly.

Plattsmier wasn’t impressed. He rarely was. “Good,” he said. “Give it to him.” He pointed at Raphael and left the room.

Raphael looked at Allegra. He wanted to talk to her. Allegra traveled in these circles. She’d probably know more about this murder than Charlie Eagan and his supporters had forgotten. And all of that information would be pertinent to the case.

Three more hours.

While he chilled, waiting for the clock to chime midnight, he’d have to see what he could do with this shoulder-squaring brunette with the wild hair. “Let’s go into the kitchen,” he suggested.

He went ahead of her. As Kate followed him, her chest began to hurt and it felt hard to get air. A man had just been killed! She’d held herself together, had called the cops, had kept that crazy blonde from ruining any evidence the authorities might need. She’d done everything right! And this cop, this Montiel, seemed to think it was all just some kind of reunion with his pal out there in the other room.

Kate’s stomach felt sour. If she didn’t keep her hands tightly fisted, she knew they would begin to shake again. She bit back a groan as she stepped around the broken china on the floor and sat on one of the stools next to the kitchen’s center island. She was cold to the bone in spite of the heat. Maybe the dead guy’s air-conditioning had finally kicked on.

To keep her teeth from snicking together, she asked, “What did you do?”

Montiel glanced at her, then he poked his nose into the baking sheet with the potato thins. To Kate’s disbelief, he popped one into his mouth.

“Stop that!”

He looked at her again. “What, you’re saving them for McGaffney?”

“No! No, of course not. It’s just…”

He watched her levelly. Kate found she couldn’t explain why she was so appalled.

It was his irreverence, she decided. He stood there, not so much tall—maybe five foot eleven—but with the kind of presence that seemed to bleed life from everything else in the room. He had dark blond hair, golden really, and it was unkempt and too long. She doubted if he had shaved since morning. The T-shirt he wore, a well-washed and faded blue, was untucked. He had bottle-green eyes, but as he waited for her to finish her perusal they went to the color of the sea on a cloudy day. They’d hold secrets, Kate realized.

Where had she gotten that from?

The answer was there beneath his infuriating indifference to what had just happened. It was at odds with it. Kate had never had a talent for nuances, except maybe in recipes. She had never been very good with people, or with reading them. Yet she felt a certain intensity beneath Montiel’s who-gives-a-damn manner.

He’d come to investigate a murder and he was eating her potato thins. But his eyes were darkening and turbulent.

“What did you do?” she asked again, more softly.

“With what?” he countered, moving on to munch a scallion.

“What did you do to anger the commissioner so you can’t work until midnight?”

“Doesn’t matter. We’re here to figure out anything you saw or heard tonight.”

He was eyeing the one remaining filet now. “Miss dinner?” she asked.

That brought his gaze to her again sharply. “What?”

“If you’re that hungry, I’ll reheat it. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just…stale.”

“Stale.”

“Prepared, then permitted to return to room temperature.”

Permitted? Who used words like permitted in casual conversation? The fact that she did irritated the hell out of him. Coupled with the fact that he was exiled with her in the kitchen, it made Raphael’s voice rough and gravely. “I coldcocked Gregg Miller on Eyewitness News.”

Kate felt something like shock move through her system, feather-light and cold. She’d almost forgotten her question. “That killer? The one…”

“The one,” he agreed flatly. “Then I caught a thirty-day suspension from Internal Affairs for my trouble.”

“Why? Why did you hit him?”

“What he did wasn’t enough?”

As near as Kate could remember, Miller had killed four women, had held the entire city in the grip of terror for the better part of a month. She hadn’t really followed the news broadcasts all that closely. Between her catering business and her second job cooking at a diner, between all the chores one had to do in order to keep on top of life, there’d been precious little time for her to peruse the media accounts of the murders. But she knew Miller had been preying on single women in their late twenties and early thirties.

Kate frowned. “You’d need more,” she decided.

“Who are you, Freud?”

That snapped her spine straight again. “You’d see death in your line of work nearly every day, I would imagine. But you don’t run about—what did you call it?—cold-cocking suspects all the time. Or do you?”

“Tell you what, you’re better with these crunchy things than you are with analysis.”

Her stomach rolled again at the bite in his tone. “You don’t like me.”

“Do you like me?”

“Not particularly.”

Well, she was honest, he thought. He almost grinned. But she’d done it again. Words like particularly didn’t belong in general conversation. Then Raphael heard himself answer her and he felt a dull inner pang even as his words hit the room.

“We were bringing Miller out of the van,” he said, “for his arraignment. I’d taken him in the first place, so I wanted to be part of the detail. He knew all about me through his spree, during the whole investigation. He made it his business to know who was closing in on him. So he turned around just as he was being led through the courthouse doors. He looked at me, and he said—”

Miller had said what Raphael hadn’t yet told anyone.

Raphael hadn’t made excuses for his behavior that day. What he’d done, he’d done. And he’d taken the fall. He clamped his mouth shut.

This had all the melodrama of an excellent story, Kate thought. “He said what?” she breathed.

“Don’t tell me,” Montiel drawled. “You’re heavy into cop shows.”

Kate blinked. How had he guessed? She almost denied it, but what would be the point? “Books, mostly. There’s a certain element of escapism there.”

“Element? Damn it, can’t you just talk?”

“I am talking!”

“No. You’re giving a lesson in vocabulary!” And he didn’t know why it bothered him so much. Maybe it was just his overall mood. But he doubted it.

“I was just asking a question.” She sniffed.

Raphael found himself answering her—again. “He told me that Anna was the best of the lot. He told me how she screamed. Damn it, he picked her because she was associated with me!”

There was a stretch of silence in the kitchen, drawn out enough to thin the air. Kate’s heart hurtled over a beat. “Anna Lombardo?” One of Miller’s victims, she remembered. Maybe the last. And then Kate understood. She cleared her throat carefully. “You knew Anna.”

“Yeah.” He took a knife from a drawer and cut into the steak. “I knew Anna. We’d been seeing each other.”

“You loved her.” It was, she thought, a heartbreaking story.

But Montiel laughed in a raw sound before he chewed and swallowed. “Not yet.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’d only met her two weeks before she died.” But maybe it could have been something, he thought. They’d never know. Miller had strangled her with piano wire.

“Montiel.”

The voice came from the kitchen door. They both turned sharply, almost guiltily, as though they’d been caught in the act of something they shouldn’t have been doing. It was that man, Kate realized. Plattsmier. And the other one, Fox. Both stepped into the kitchen. Kate watched the three of them confer near the doorway.

Something was happening.

There was a lot of gesturing. Then something changed in Montiel’s expression. His jaw hardened. His eyes went thin, but just before they did, Kate saw them shine like glass.

He turned to her. “Clean up your stuff, Betty Crocker. You’ve got five minutes, then I’m taking you home.”

Kate came off the stool. “I don’t need a ride.”

“Good. Because you’re not getting one.”

Her heart was hammering almost as hard as it had done when she’d found the body. The air in the kitchen felt suddenly humid and heavy, and it made it hard for her to breathe again. “Then I don’t understand what you’re implying.”

“I’m implying that I’ll follow you in my own vehicle.”

“To where?”

“To your home. We just covered that.”

“But it’s not necessary.”

“It is if I’m going with you. I’m not leaving my Explorer here. And it looks as though you’ve got yourself one damned overqualified baby-sitter.”

With that, he threw the fork he had been holding into the sink. It bounced right out again with the force of his strength. Impossibly, it landed prongs-down in a single scallion.

Kate closed her eyes briefly. It was that kind of a night.