Blind Dates Can Be Murder (14 page)

“What are these?”

“Property crime, racketeering, possession…”

He went on to explain a whole variety of crimes, some violent, some not.

“The important thing here, Jo, is that many of these crimes were mafia related. From what we’ve been able to turn up, Frank Malone was closely linked with the mob.”

“The mob! In Mulberry Glen?”

“No, in Moore City. We think the only reason he came to Mulberry Glen was to get to you.”

“Get to me…in what way?”

“We still don’t know.”

Jo took a deep breath and let it out slowly, suddenly realizing that for him to have been a stalker would be the best-case scenario of all. Otherwise, what could all of this mean?

“Jo, I need you to tell me if you recognize this man.”

He pulled out a mug shot of a man in his fifties, grizzled and angry-looking, with reddish-blond hair and a strong, square jaw. She tried, but she could not recall ever having seen him.

“I’m sorry, Chief. I don’t. Who is he?”

“Name is Mickey Paglino. He owns a strip club in Moore City, but the police there feel he’s running plenty of other things on the side—drugs, prostitution, illegal gambling. His rap sheet is longer than Frank Malone’s.”

“What does he have to do with me?”

“Frank Malone was closely associated with this guy. They were partners in crime, so to speak. It appears that they’ve shared a number of ventures over the years, both legal and illegal.”

Jo sat up straight, her eyes wide.

“Has he been questioned about Malone? Maybe we can get the truth about what was going on through him.”

“We’ll find out soon enough. Two Moore City detectives are interviewing him right now.”

Chuck sat in his locked cell for afternoon count, listening as the C.O. worked his way down the line. The noise was always deafening, but more so at count times. When men were locked in cages like dogs, they had to do something free, so usually they used their voices. The real jitterbugs talked smack at the top of their lungs all day long.

Chuck couldn’t wait to get away from the noise.

He knew he wouldn’t be released until Monday, but he was already ready to go. As the count progressed, he sat on the side of his bunk, pulling out the only picture of Lettie he had. It was just a snapshot, taken years ago, when she was a soft-spoken girl of 16 and he was working a construction job down the street from her house. At that age, Lettie had seemed like such a paradox, with the burdened posture and weary eyes of an old woman but the unlined, innocent face and body of a young teen. From the first time he spoke to her and understood the gentleness of her spirit, he knew they were soulmates.

Of course, they’d had some rough times since they ran away together. Over the next few years, he had taken a hand to her a time or two. Or three. Sometimes he had no choice but to be with other women. To make matters worse, he just couldn’t seem to catch a break in life. Money was tight, but if it wasn’t the boss that was riding him to work harder, it was the landlord holding his hand out for more rent. It seemed that every way Chuck turned, the world was against him.

In a way, he understood why Lettie had cut him off after he was sent to prison. But the thing she didn’t know was that the situation had changed.

Chuck had seen the light.

It wasn’t a holy light, like the born-agains had claimed to find. It wasn’t a drug-induced light, like the sharks with their contraband bags of smack promised. It was the light of comprehension, of clarity. Of understanding.

The light had come to Chuck at the lowest point of his incarceration, during fifteen minutes at the hands of Umberto Zabaglione, aka the Torturer. The two men’s sentences had overlapped by merely a week, but that was time enough for the mafia to get word to the Torturer—not to mention the C.O. who was on their payroll. Showers were supposed to last five minutes, five men at a time, but one day Chuck found himself alone in the showers with Zabaglione for what felt like an eternity.

At first, Chuck just thought it was another attempt by an old-timer to make the new fish his woman. Instead, there were questions, lots of questions, each one punctuated by a vicious blow to Chuck’s head or body. He had been in fights his entire life, but the force behind the Torturer’s punches was like nothing he had ever felt. To make matters worse, Chuck hadn’t even comprehended what the guy was asking of him. But the Torturer kept asking and kept punching, and by the time Chuck had put two and two together and figured out what was really going on, he was a pulpy heap on the wet, dirty floor, bleeding so profusely from the side of his head that he felt certain he was going to die.

Through sheer force of will, he managed to survive. In the end, he lost the hearing in one ear and, eventually, his spleen. But he had kept his revelations to himself and made it through recovery. The Torturer never got his answers, and a week later the man was paroled. Now that Chuck was getting out, that encounter was finally going to pay off in a big way.

Chuck shuddered, shaking away the memories of that time, trying not to recall the pain or his helplessness at the hands of his tormentor. He remembered begging for his life, and then he thought of Lettie, who had also begged for hers from time to time.

Chuck’s fist clenched and unclenched just thinking about it. She was such a
victim
, such a punching bag. It was her own fault, and yet still he loved her. Once he got out of prison, he would find her. He’d have to punish her for abandoning him, but then they could move on. She didn’t know yet, but their lives were about to turn around.

Finally, they were going to be rich.

7

T
his is it,” the chief said to Jo. “This is the house where Frank Malone grew up and where he’s been living, off and on, for a number of years.”

They were about thirty miles from Mulberry Glen, having driven directly there from the police station. The chief turned from the highway onto a gravel road and followed it to where it ended at a small farm. He had brought Jo there so that she could look around and see if anything seemed significant to her in any way. Now, as the car came to a stop, she found herself wishing she hadn’t let the chief talk her into this. She’d much rather have been at home right then, soaking her coffee-stained shirt and letting the issues of the day roll along without her participation.

“This isn’t what I expected,” she said lamely as the two of them climbed from the car. This looked like a place where an old couple in overalls and a housedress might live, not a henchman for the mob.

There were two other police cars already there, and a uniformed cop emerged from the house to greet them. As the cop and the chief talked, Jo stood rooted to the ground, taking it all in. The yard was filled with oaks and maples, lending a pastoral beauty to the scene despite the overall run-down appearance. The house was a simple ranch style, with chipping paint, rotted front steps, and an abandoned garden along the side. Several outbuildings were in the distance, including a detached garage and what looked like a barn in the middle of a pasture. There were no animals in sight, though Jo was wishing she had brought Chewie along so he could run and play. He would have loved it there.

“Might as well do this,” the chief said to Jo as he gestured toward the house. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” she lied, moving forward and taking the slanted steps with care.

Inside, the house was musty and warm, with faded wallpaper, a few doilies, and ragged furniture. There were some family photos propped along an old piano. Jo studied them with care, but she didn’t recognize anyone except Frank Malone.

As they proceeded slowly through the house, she had to admit she didn’t recognize anything that might be of significance. Her mind carried a running dialogue of household hints—how to get the mildew from the shower curtain, how to remove the grease from behind the stove, how to put a shine to the faded wood floors—but nothing spoke to her personally at all.

They ended their tour down in the basement, which featured a hefty furnace on one wall and a row of empty shelves on the other. Each shelf was coated with thick dust, except in large circles all along a row, where something had long sat and recently been removed. The whole room smelled like oil and must.

Back upstairs, Jo listened as the cops described the items they had unearthed in their search of the house, none of which had anything to do with Jo Tulip.

“Jo, are you absolutely sure that nothing in this house relates to you in any way?” the chief said.

Jo took a deep breath and held it in. The chief had no idea how much she wanted to be able to answer that question the right way.

“Nothing,” she said, “unless you turn up something on the computer.”

“There was no computer,” one of the cops replied.

“Yes, there was,” Jo said, moving to a corner table. “Right there. You can tell by the shapes in the dust.”

Lettie sat at a table in the Dates&Mates Internet café, where she had earned two free hours of computer time when she registered for the dating service. Though most of the people in the café were sprinkled around the room using their own laptops, she was at the mercy of one of the large PCs at a table along the wall.

Lettie didn’t have e-mail access—not that there was anyone who would write to her if she did—but she liked the web. She could spend hours surfing travel sites, airlines, and Central American Realtors. Through digital magic, she lived her dreams of flying away, of making her escape, of buying a house and settling down with her sister.

Now, though, before she visited the usual sites, she thought she ought to do a search for “Jo Tulip” just to see what would pop up. As it turned out, Jo had her own website, so Lettie took a look. It was cute, all pink and green with little tulips as buttons. Just reading the blog and the tips made Lettie feel, for a moment, like a normal person, like someone who might care about how to clean grout or stake tomatoes. After going through “10 Ways to Clean with Baking Soda” and “20 Uses for Vinegar,” however, she’d had enough, and she could feel a dark despair begin to lap at the edges of her brain. Hers
wasn’t
a normal life. She’d never owned any grout. She’d never bought a bottle of vinegar
or
a box of baking soda. She’d spent the twenty-three years of her existence simply getting by.

Lettie logged off the computer and moved to a secluded table over in the corner, dialing Mickey’s number on her cell phone. Though she didn’t feel like talking to him—or to anyone—she thought she ought to let him know that she had started the ball rolling with getting a job and signing up for the service. She dialed the number for Swingers, but the girl who answered the phone said Mickey was out.

“No, wait, I think that’s him now,” she amended. She set the phone down, and after a few moments Mickey’s voice barked a brusque “hello” into the phone.

“It’s Lettie,” she said softly. “I was just calling to give you an update.”

“Hold on.”

After a brief interval and some clicking on the phone line, he spoke again. From what she could tell, he had switched to the phone in his office.

“What’d you figure out?” he demanded.

“Uh…I…uh…nothing yet. I just wanted to let you know that they’ll be calling for references. They couldn’t hire me right away, not until this girl Viveca goes on maternity leave. So I signed up for the dating service instead, like you said.”

“Maternity leave! When’s that supposed to happen?”