Killer in High Heels (27 page)

I was just wondering exactly when the sales clerk
had
said those wedges would be on sale when a blue Dodge Neon pulled into the parking lot and killed its lights. I waved the best I could with my foot (since in addition to being immobilized, my hands had completely fallen asleep), and finally Felix spotted me. He pulled the Neon into the empty space beside the SUV and got out. He allowed himself a little smirk for my benefit before trying the door handle. Not surprisingly, it didn’t open.

“It’s locked!” I shouted through the tinted windows.

Felix nodded. Then he went back to his car and returned with something that looked like a long nail file. With a little maneuvering, he wedged it between the doorframe and the window of the passenger side. I kept one eye on the back door of the club, knowing that if Ramirez caught him tampering with his car, Felix was a dead man.

The nail file wiggled and twisted, making a couple of awful grinding noises that I prayed weren’t the sounds of black paint being chipped away. Finally the door locks popped up. I was so happy I could have laughed.

Felix opened the door. He took one look at the handcuffs and
did
laugh.

“It’s not funny.”

“No, not at all,” he responded, starting to snort again.

“Just get them off, smartass.”

He pulled a pocketknife out of his khakis and flipped it open. To my surprise, it didn’t contain scissors and bottle openers, but a series of different sized and shaped files. He fit one in the keyhole of the handcuffs and after doing the same sort of shimmy and wiggle thing he’d done with the giant nail file, one metal bracelet finally popped off my wrist.

I could have hugged him. That is, if I’d had any feeling left in my arms whatsoever. I shook my hand, feeling little pins and needles race over my skin as the blood surged back into my limbs. Felix made short work of the second bracelet and as soon as I was accessory free, I jumped out of the SUV and into the Neon’s passenger seat.

“Let’s go!” I shouted as Felix tucked his handy-dandy lock picks back into his pocket. “Trust me, you do not want to be here when Bruno sees this.” While no paint had been actually chipped in the making of this great escape, the little rubber strips between the car door and his window were kind of stretched out. And bulging. And there might have been one or two teeny tiny marks on his windows. Those, coupled with the fact that an empty pair of handcuffs was dangling from his passenger seat, were enough to put Bad Cop in a really bad mood. We’re talking back-in-a-holding-cell bad. Not something I wanted to be around to witness.

Felix seemed to get my drift, sliding behind the wheel and gunning the engine. I kept my eyes on the back door, chanting “please don’t open, please don’t open, please don’t open,” as Felix flipped on the lights and pulled out of the parking lot, heading west on Fremont.

I heaved a sigh of relief as the Victoria shrank in the rearview mirror, glad that at least one thing had gone my way today.

“So was that a reporter thing back there?” I asked, rubbing the feeling back into my hands.

“What?”

“Breaking into cars. Picking locks.”

He grinned. Then did a noncommittal “Maybe.”

“Not that I’m being judgmental or anything. I’m actually quite impressed. I know how hard it is to open a locked door. Trust me, that whole credit card thing they do on TV doesn’t work.”

Felix raised an eyebrow at me. “Been doing some breaking and entering of our own lately, have we?”

I shrugged and mimicked his “Maybe.”

“Touché,” he muttered.

“So where
did
you learn how to do that?”

“Liverpool.”

I gave him my “and…” look, gesturing for the long version of that answer.

“Tell you what,” he said, turning to face me as we stopped for a red light. “I’ll answer your probing question if you answer one of mine.”

Uh oh. Never good when a reporter used the word “probing.” But, then again, I reasoned, what did I really have to lose? This guy already knew everything about me. Besides, it wasn’t every day a girl ran into someone with his very own lock-picking set outside of HBO’s primetime lineup. I admit, curiosity won out over good judgment. (And for those of you keeping track, yes, this was a recurring theme in my life.)

“Deal,” I said.

Felix swiveled back in his seat as the light turned green. “All right then. When I was a kid, my friend Rodney’s father owned a towing service. When we got bored we used to borrow his tools and break into parked cars.”

“You’re a car thief?” Okay, I knew tabloid reporters were pretty low on the food chain, but hadn’t figured I was actually riding with a criminal.

“No, no, no.” He shook his head. “We just borrowed them for a bit. Always put them back.”

“More like a car borrower, then?”

“More like, yes.”

“Did you ever get caught?”

Felix shook his head at me, doing a tsk, tsk, tsk thing with his tongue. “That’s two questions, love.”

“Hmmm.” I sat back in my seat, pretty sure I wasn’t getting the whole story out of him.

“My turn,” Felix said, his eyes twinkling.

“All right, what do you want to know?”

“You and that Bruno fellow. What’s really going on there?”

“Nothing,” I said, a little too quickly.

“Nothing?” Felix gave me a sidelong glance.

“Absolutely nothing,” I replied. Which was almost the truth. (Almost.) From Ramirez I got no sex, no trust, no respect…see? Nothing.

“So,” Felix prodded, not any more satisfied with my answer than I had been with his. “The words ‘boyfriend,’ ‘dating,’ not entering into this situation at all then?”

I shook my head until whips of blond hair smacked against my cheeks. “Nope. Not at all.” The whole truth and nothing but the truth this time. Ramirez hadn’t uttered either one of those words. And I had a sinking feeling it would take an event more miraculous than the Red Sox winning another World Series to make it happen. Bad Cop didn’t have happily-ever-after in his repertoire. Hell, we couldn’t even do happily-sleeping-together-just-once.

“Hmmm,” Felix said, taking his eyes off the road to give my barely-B-hugging tank top a healthy stare. “Interesting.”

I shifted in my seat, not sure I wanted to probe what that “interesting” might mean. “So, uh, where are we going anyway?” I asked instead, clearing my throat.

Felix gave me a little half smile and I could swear he was enjoying how uncomfortable his attention made me. “The New York, New York. Larry’s waiting for us in my room.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“He called me about an hour ago, trying to get a hold of you again. Said he needed to see you.”

“Any idea what about?”

Felix shook his head. “No. But he seemed rather shaken up about something. I almost didn’t want to leave the poor fellow alone, but he said there was no way he was going near the Victoria again. Apparently some bad blood there.”

I cringed, thinking of Hank’s swan dive. Felix didn’t know how true that statement was.

Ten minutes later we pulled up to New York, New York. Felix, slowed down at Tropicana and I could see him mentally debating between the valet and the milelong hike in from self-park that would save a whopping two dollars.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “You can afford the Marquis suite, but you’re too cheap to pay for parking?”

Felix shot me another one of those crooked smiles. “What can I say, Maddie? I’m an enigma.”

“Hmmm.” I narrowed my eyes at him.

“Family money,” he confessed, pulling to the right as he opted for the valet after all. “From my father’s side,” he explained. “The
thriftiness,
” he emphasized, with a look that said he did not appreciate my cheap comment, “is from my mother’s side. She’s Scottish.”

“So you’re a stingy rich guy?” Okay, I admit, I kind of enjoyed making him uncomfortable too.

He let my question go without comment, instead handing his keys over to the valet as we got out of the car. He didn’t wait for me to follow before making quick strides through the casino to the elevator doors. We rode up in silence. Once we got to the fifteenth floor, Felix unlocked his door with a key card and I got my first glimpse of Larry.

He was sitting on the edge of Felix’s bed, fidgeting worse than a heroin addict. He looked like he’d aged fifteen years in the last three days. His eyes were bloodshot, his girdle twisted around his waist to revealing an unflattering pooch (that made me instantly suck in), and his pantyhose were running a marathon all the way down to his scuffed heels. All in all, he looked so pathetic I couldn’t help myself. Despite my earlier vow to let all men rot in Hades, I ran over and gave him a big hug.

Larry hugged me back, his arms wrapping tightly around my middle, and I got a warm, fuzzy, Hallmark moment feeling.

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” I said, my voice threatening to crack as I pulled away. Only he didn’t look all that okay. To be honest, he looked terrible. “Larry, what’s going on?”

He did a deep sigh. Then looked from me to Felix.

“I’m in big trouble, Maddie.”

Well, duh. “Tell me,” I said instead, sitting down on the flowered bedspread beside him.

He sighed again and looked down at his hands as he spoke, picking at his flaking ruby red nail polish.

“I don’t even know where to begin.”

“Start with what you told me,” Felix prompted.

I shot him a hurt look. My dad had confided in Tabloid Boy first?

Larry nodded. He took a deep breath, picked a little more nail polish and finally started in a shaky voice. “I’ve been dancing at the Victoria Club for about five years now. Before that I was on the Strip, but, well, you know how it is when we girls get older. Weight starts climbing, things start to sag, there’s more shaving…”

“Got it, moving on,” I interrupted, fighting the urge to stick my fingers in my ears and chant, “I can’t hear you! I’m doing denial!”

“Right. Anyway, Hank and I both moved to the Victoria. The pay was all right, not Strip good, but all right. It might have been enough but…well, see, I’ve got this little problem.”

Uh oh. Here it was. I was going to find out I was genetically predisposed to alcoholism or a gambling addiction. “What kind of problem?” I asked. “Drugs? Gambling? Booze?”

“Shoes.”

Mental forehead smack.

“Shoes?”

Larry nodded. “I can’t help it, I just love shoes. I see a pair of heels and I can’t stop myself. I need to have them. Pumps, slingbacks, mules—it doesn’t matter. I love them all. And let me tell you, finding heels in a size eleven wide is not cheap. But I can’t stop. You don’t know what it’s like. I buy them and it’s like a rush of happiness just courses through me.”

Sadly enough, I did know what it was like.

“Okay, so you were in debt over shoes. What happened next?”

“Well,” he said, “one day Monaldo said he had a delivery to make and would Hank and I like to do it for a little extra cash. I was about to have my car repossessed over an adorable pair of ballerina-strap wedges in lime green, so I jumped at it. It was simple, really. Monaldo gave us a handbag that we took to one of his warehouses out in the desert. We handed it off to these two Italian guys in business suits, then we came back to the club. Simple.”

Right. Simple. Somehow the Italians in business suits would have tipped me off, but then again, I wasn’t in shoe debt. (Okay, at least not
that
much shoe debt.)

Though I had to hand it to Monaldo, the plan was brilliant. The last place Ramirez and the Feds would be searching for Monaldo’s payoff to the Marsuccis was in a bunch of drag queens’ handbags.

“What then?” I asked, almost giddy that I’d finally found the proof Ramirez needed to put Monaldo away for good.

“Well, the next week Monaldo had another errand for us. This time he sent me and Bobbi. Pretty soon it became a regular thing. We’d trade off; whichever of the three of us wasn’t on stage that night, we’d go make the run. Worked out great for a couple of months.”

“So what went wrong?”

Larry shook his head and sighed again. “One day the guys in suits were late. It was Bobbi and me out there. We got bored waiting, so we started looking around the warehouse. We opened a couple of boxes and found out they were all filled with shoes. Bobbi and I…” He paused, looking sheepish. “We each took a pair. I know it was wrong, but we honestly figured no one would miss two little pairs. The place was filled with them. I mean, thousands of designer shoes, Maddie. Can you imagine?”

I tried not to salivate, reminding myself they were probably all fakes. “So you took the shoes?”

“Yes. I took a pair of Dior pumps and Bobbi chose some black Prada stilettos. Then when the suits showed up we gave them the bag like always and went home. It was a couple of weeks later that Bobbi decided he could raise some extra money by selling his pair on eBay. Being that they were Prada, he figured he could get a whole month’s child support out of them. Only when he put the auction up, the lady he tried to sell them to said they were knockoffs. I looked more closely at my pair and sure enough, they were fake too. Look, if we had known that Monaldo was dealing in fake designer shoes, we never would have gotten involved.”

Mobster he didn’t blink an eye at. But fake shoes were where he drew the line. I would have rolled my eyes if deep down I didn’t kind of agree with him.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing,” he said, his eyes filling with tears. “Bobbi disappeared the next day. I didn’t know what to do. I filed a missing persons report, but the officer didn’t seem to think anything had happened to Bobbi. He said these deadbeat dads skipped town all the time. So I told Hank everything we’d found and told him I was going to tell the police about the shoe warehouse. Hank didn’t want me to do it. He…” Larry paused. Then looked down at his hands again. “Well, Hank liked the money too much. He didn’t want it to stop. That’s when I decided to call you for help. I’d seen your picture in his paper.” He gestured toward Felix, who had been silently standing near the door this whole time. “I read how you got that lawyer out of trouble last summer and helped put a murderer behind bars. I thought maybe, well, maybe you could do something here. Only as I was dialing, Hank came into the room waving a gun. He was talking crazy, about how he couldn’t afford to go back to a dancer’s salary. We fought and the gun went off. Blew a hole right through Hank’s favorite chair.”