Trueish Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel (27 page)

He sighed and perched on the edge of the chair, his leg jiggling to an inaudible beat. “Couldn’t we …”

“Go into the kitchen?”

He nodded.

Why not? If he’d get to the point faster it was worth a shot. I was about to agree when I heard the sound of tires spitting dirt and pebbles. A moment later the driver cut the engine and a door slammed. Somebody was here and they weren’t happy. A moment later Melas appeared through the arch. His face was a perfect storm. His fingers had a death grip on a manila envelope. Whatever he had to say it was bad news, not sad news; otherwise he wouldn’t be wearing that mega-scowl.

“Uh oh,” Aunt Rita said, scooting behind me. “Somebody peed on his baklava.” She grabbed the butcher and they bolted, leaving me to deal with Melas and his mood.

“Katerina,” he said, nodding curtly.

“Detective Melas.”

He opened the envelope, slapped a couple of photos in front of me. “Ever see her before?”

For a moment, I mistook the photograph for a picture of a goat in frizzy black wig, then I realized that was no goat. She was bug-eyed, needle-nosed, and she was sprouting peach fuzz on her pointy chinny-chin-chin.

With one finger he pushed the second picture into my line of vision. Same woman, brand new bruises, including a couple of shiners that came close to fixing the bug-eyed problem.

“Holy cow,” I said. “What happened to her?”

“Stairs. She says her boyfriend’s wife pushed her. The wife has an alibi. So does the husband.”

A little bell went
ding-a-ling
in my head. “Huh. That’s some bad luck. I don’t know her.”

“A funny thing, the wife knows your grandmother. Her name is Varvara Koufo.”

Oh boy …

“Everybody knows my grandmother.”

“They’re old friends.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, Grandma is about as old as the Parthenon. All her friends are old.”

“She’s a middleman. A drug supplier. One of your grandmother’s.” He gave me a look loaded with meaning—and the meaning was that somewhere, somehow, by not too far of an imagination stretch, the Family was involved.

“You think Grandma pushed her down the stairs?” I asked.

“No.”

I relaxed.

“I think Baboulas had somebody shove her.”

Oh. Damn. He was probably right, but I wasn’t going to say so.

“Sometimes bad things happen to bad people,” I said. “If she was doing the horizontal mambo with a married man, it’s not that much of a surprise. Karma can be like a bitchy schoolgirl.”

“She said it was a man dressed in black.”

“There you go,” I said. “Lots of people wear black. It could have been anyone.”

“She said he looked shady.”

“
You
look shady when you’re in a bad mood. You look shady right now.”

There was a long pause while he scratched the back of his head.

“You think bad things should happen to people who cheat?”

Yes. No. I wasn’t sure. I had, after all, caught my fiancé bobbing on another guy’s knob, not long before our wedding. Had I wanted them to fall down the stairs?

No.

But I wouldn’t have cried if they’d both tripped and fallen a terrible bonfire. And maybe I would have thrown a courtesy gallon of gasoline on them while they burned.

Then I remembered that Melas himself had been hiding the pepperoni in a married woman’s drawers. And not any wife: she was Family. So he was probably sensitive about things like infidelity. Falling down the stairs would be the least of his worries if anyone found out about his affair and the secret baby that had resulted. It was more likely they’d cut him up into pieces and ferry his parts to the corners of the world. And when they reached shore, that’s when they’d set his chunks on fire.

That, I figured, was the best-case scenario.

“I don’t know,” I mumbled. “I’m not really qualified to judge.”

He chewed on that a moment before speaking again. “You want to hear the funny part?”

I glanced at the woman’s
After
portrait again. “There’s a funny part?”

“You know who the husband is?”

“Kyrios Koufos?” Mr. Koufos.

“A Greek woman doesn’t always take her husband’s name. Things have changed. Her husband’s name is Katsikas.” He waited for the penny, the cent, the drachma to drop.

Katsikas. Goat. “Tony Goats.” I groaned internally. “Please don’t tell me the husband is Tony Goats.”

Two palms up. “Greece is a small country.”

“She’s got ten years on him—easy.”

“Trophy husband.”

“But he’s a dentist.”

“She funded his new clinic, at first. But turns out he’s a good dentist, so now he’s doing okay.”

“Tomas does love him.”

“Kids love the guy. Parents do, too.” He hung his head, rubbed the back of his neck, looked up at me through his unruly hair. “When I was kid, Mama used to take me to this old man who also doubled as the town’s blacksmith. If you had a bad tooth he’d yank it out between shoeing donkeys.”

“They shoe donkeys?”

He nodded.

“Huh,” I said. I figured that was only a horse thing. Live and learn.

“Used to be little Greek kids got a lot of rotten teeth. Too many sweets, like vanilla submarines. That stuff eats teeth.”

“Vanilla submarines?”

“It’s a spoon sweet. They mix mastic resin with sugar. Scoop up a spoonful. Drop the spoon in a glass of ice water. It hardens the mastic, then you slowly suck and lick it off the spoon.” He looked at my mouth as he said it. I wondered if he was thinking what I was thinking.

Probably not. I was thinking I’d really like to try one of those vanilla submarines.

“Look,” I said. “Grandma’s locked up, so I know she didn’t authorize anything. And I … I wouldn’t.”

“Kyria Koufo said it was your idea.”

“What?” I shouted.

He pulled out his notepad, flipped through the pages. “She said pushing her husband’s
putana
down the stairs was your idea, and that you maybe took it upon yourself to carry out your plan to impress your grandmother and prove you’re part of the Family.”

“Of all the stupid things I’ve ever heard, that’s definitely one of them.”

He shoved the notepad back into his pants pocket. “I don’t think you did it. But somebody did.”

“You said Kyria Koufo has an alibi. Who is it?”

“Her girlfriend.”

The laugh sort of fell out. “She’s a lesbian? Then why does she care who her husband sleeps with?”

“Appearances,” he said. “You know what it’s like here.”

“I’m getting the picture. Who’s the girlfriend?”

“You’re going to love this,” he said. “It’s her husband’s receptionist.”

A small flame began guttering in my head, and the shadows on the walls turned ugly. Witches—the warty-nosed kind—and demons danced. I remembered now where I had seen the snooty receptionist before. Behind me. Following me everywhere, except during the mornings when she was working for Tony Goats.

The receptionist was Cleopatra.

Cleopatra was the receptionist.

Once that particular penny dropped I felt stupid. I’m one of those people who screams, “How can you not know Clark Kent is Superman?” at the TV screen. Bad makeup and big hair was Cleopatra’s nerdy glasses.

“I met her,” I said slowly, trying not to give away the current location of my brain wanderings. “She’s sour.”

“Sour or not, she swore up and down that she was with Kyria Koufo when the victim had her accident.”

“Maybe they were together.” I raised my eyebrows, gave him a meaningful stare. “Maybe they pushed her together.”

“We’re considering all the angles,” he said. “I wanted to know where you fit into this.”

“Nowhere,” I said. “I made one joke about pushing her down the stairs, because she was spinning some story about how her husband and his girlfriend were going to kill her for her fortune. I even said it was a joke.”

His eyebrows shot up. “So you
did
tell her to do it?”

“No. I cut into a conversation that was none of my business and made a stupid joke, then followed it up with a legal disclaimer. I live in a litigation-obsessed country, so I covered my ass.”

“That doesn’t work here. We know not to shower with our hairdryers.”

“When you shower,” I said, remembering how Dad used to talk about how they got a bath on Saturday, one after the other, all in the same bathwater. As the eldest he got to go last. The cleanest water was for the littlest.

“I shower every day. Want to join me?”

Yes. “No. Don’t even try and pin this on me. Ask Grandma—she heard me say it was a joke. It’s not my fault Kyria Koufo is a nut.”

“You keep calling people nuts. That an American thing?”

“Nuts. Crazy.
Trelos
. You don’t have that saying here?”

“No. We put serious muscle into our insults.”

“So I’ve noticed.” They put muscle, and everything else they could fit, into insults—the more offensive the better. It was a wonder the Greek Orthodox Church didn’t pack its gold and abandon ship.

“Backing up … you said she claimed her husband and his girlfriend were trying to kill her?”

“That’s what she said.”

“Did she say anything else?”

I shook my head. “That was it. My mind was on other things. Where is Kyria Koufo now?”

He shrugged. “At home, I guess. Why?”

“No reason.”

“Katerina …”

“I want to talk to her, that’s all. She dumped me in the shit and I want to know why.”

We were going to have words. Big ones. And if she brought out the flamethrower I was going to break it over her head.

“I can’t stop you, but—“

“You’re right,” I said. “You can’t. I don’t know if this a free country, but I’m going to act like it is until someone tells me otherwise.”

A
unt Rita was out front
, sliding through a gallery on her phone. She waved goodbye to Melas, then pulled me into the shade with her.

“Look.” She handed me her phone, pointed with a shiny fingernail. Today it was a French manicure. “Those are my boys—your cousins.”

They were teenagers. Good-looking kids with the family nose and our dark coloring. “I can’t wait to meet them,” I said.

“One night a month, that’s all she gives me with them. I tried to get more but the courts … They know what I do—what we do. The papers say I get every other weekend, but they won’t enforce it when she refuses to honor the decree. What can I do? I take whatever I can get. It’s better than nothing.”

“Is there anything Grandma can do about it?”

“There are very few people in this country who want nothing from Mama. I am one of those few. I will never ask her for anything. I’m not much of a man—but this is my business and I handle it like a man.”

“Maybe you’re not much of a man, but you’re one heck of a woman.”

She tipped back her head and laughed. She put her arm around my shoulders. “The circumstances of you coming here are the worst. But I’m glad you came.”

My nose began to clog as tears gathered behind my eyes. But before they could roll out I remembered something.

“Where’s Kyrios Spiros?”

“He had to go. Meat delivery.”

I
had a bone to pick
, and the person I had to pick it with was Kyria Koufo. But first I needed to cover my butt. Somebody had pushed that woman down the stairs, and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t Team Makris, before I went in swinging.

Who was I kidding? I was going to ask politely why she had knifed me in the back. Then I’d swing. Maybe. So I sent word out for the entire family—husbands, wives, kids, employees—to assemble in the courtyard. It took about ten minutes for the slow pour to stop. Then we stood there, all of us slowly baking under the Greek sun.

“This is a lot of family,” I said to Aunt Rita. “Do we have a megaphone or something?”

She looked puzzled. “What’s wrong with your voice?”

“Not Greek enough, I expect.”

“You are plenty Greek. All you need is a husband and children to practice your yelling.”

It was true: the Family’s women knew how to screech. Their blood-curdling cries could slap birds out of the sky, peel paint, shatter glass.

My aunt squeezed my shoulder. She had big hands, didn’t realize her own strength, so I came this close to wincing. “I will do it for you. Tell me what you want me to say.”

I told her I wanted to know if anyone was responsible for carrying out Kyria Koufo’s wishes by pushing a woman down some steps.

“Varvara,” she muttered. “That woman … We should have set a fire.”

“You might get your chance,” I said. She brightened at the thought, then did my yelling for me.

Mid-crowd a hand waved an invisible banner. Aunt Rita ushered its owner closer. It was my cousin (second cousin, third cousin, who knew?) whose name I couldn’t for the life of me remember.

He worked his way to the front. I flipped a small wave. He flipped one back.

“What’s the story?” I asked him. “Did you do it?”

“Baboulas said she would have a task for me soon, involving Kyria Koufo, but it didn’t involve pushing anyone down any steps.”

Curiouser and curiouser. “What was the task?”

“She didn’t say. But I had the feeling it was a hit on Kyria Koufo herself.”

That couldn’t be right, could it? The women were friends. What possible reason could Grandma have to wipe her off Greece’s face? It couldn’t be the rising pharmaceutical prices. They were a new development, a direct result of Grandma’s absence.

I needed to speak with Grandma. Now. Or, as close to now as possible.

“Okay,” I said, not really sure if anything would ever be okay again. I felt like I was blindfolded at a circus, and occasionally I managed to sneak a glimpse, a swirl of colors, flashes of scenery and cheering crowds, but never enough to form a solid picture. Sands were shifting beneath my feet. And I was drowning myself in metaphors and descriptions of things that didn’t matter.

I dialed Grandma’s lawyers, asked if there was any way they could finagle a visit. They made all kinds of “Gee, we don’t know noises” until I snapped.

“I’m driving up there now. Get me in.” Then I felt bad and tacked on a soft “Please.”