Six

The foyer of the Beteo County coroner might have been trying for Holiday Inn Express, but the morgue itself—in the basement, since heat rises and cold sinks—was the real, green lino, crackling strip-light, whiff of formaldehyde deal. A short, taciturn man in grey scrubs and squeaking wellington bootees led us along a corridor into colder and colder air and then ushered us into an operating theatre. Of sorts. The more I looked around, the more of sorts it got. The floor drain didn’t help. The rotary saw sitting on the side didn’t spark thoughts of bunnies making daisy-chains either. But worst of all was that some of the equipment was draped in sheets. My mind boggled. What were they covering if they let us see the saw?

In the middle of the floor sat a gurney with a sheet-covered object we all knew wasn’t a power tool. The topography of his toes, knees, belly, and nose was unmistakable. Here was Clovis “Boom!” Bombaro. Visalia let out a soft whimper and I put my hand under her elbow.

“Mike?” I said. “I’ve met Mr. Bombaro fourteen times. I could ID him, couldn’t I?”

“We’d rather have Mrs. Bombaro’s word on it,” Mike said.

I frowned at her. He was clearly in one piece despite the cause of death. It wasn’t as though she’d need to navigate by birthmarks. I didn’t understand why she had to be put through it and I said as much, with my face. Mike returned a flat stare, her mouth a line.

Then I got it. If Mizz Vi was under suspicion, her reaction to Clovis’s body was evidence. And once I’d thought of that, I kind of wanted to see it too. Her reaction. Looking at the body was the price I had to pay.

The little orderly in the grey scrubs didn’t get any friendlier, but there was a comfort in his deftness. He had done this a thousand times and nothing had ever gone wrong, his spare movements seemed to say. The body was his business and he could handle it. We had one tiny part to play and he wouldn’t let us fluff it and cause him any trouble.

As we walked forward, Visalia’s steps getting shorter and shorter, the orderly folded the sheet back in a crisp V-shape so that only the face of the corpse could be seen, inside a sort of reverse wimple.

I glanced at it and had to smother a giggle. Horrified, I felt another one bubble up behind it and smothered that too. I wish I could say it was shock. But really, it was because Clovis looked so … surprised. So very, very, very surprised. His eyebrows were arched, his brow furrowed, his eyes wide open, and his mouth a perfect O.

“Can’t you—” Visalia said and reached out a hand. Mike cleared her throat. “Can’t you close his eyes at least?” she asked, although she drew her hand back again.

“The next time you see him, he’ll be more peaceful,” Mike said. “For now, can you confirm that this is Clovis Bombaro?”

“Oh!” said Visalia. The coffee had worn off; the yelp and the tremor were back in her voice. “Yes, of course. Yes, that’s Cousin Clovis. We met when we were twelve. At a family picnic at the Creek House. Such a pretty day.”

It seemed like a bit of a tangent and I had no reply, but Mike stepped in with a good old “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“I want to go home,” said Visalia. “Lexy, will you take me?” She turned to me with a searching look. She had always been a big eye-contact kind of client. And she had great eyes to work with. The brows were drawn on in dramatic slashes with an eyebrow pencil that must once have matched her hair but now bore no relation. Her lashes were short and stubby and she gunked them up with thick blue-black mascara. The eyelids were hooded, with prominent blue veins. Somewhere between Bette Davis and Garfield. Right now, they swivelled back to take another look at Clovis.

“Can I go home?” she said. “Is it covered up with yellow ribbons?”

“Crime scene tape?” said Mike. “No, they’re through. You … You don’t want to go in the garage until the cleaners have come. You got the card for the cleaners, right? But sure, go home. Rest up. I’ll speak to you later.”

But when we got in the cab, Visalia gave the driver not the address of Casa Bombaro, but the name of a bar in what passed for Cuento’s financial district. That is, three real estate agents and a CPA.

“We need to send him on his way,” she said, sinking back into the taxi’s split vinyl seating. “With a daiquiri.”

Mizz Visalia Bombaro clearly marked more things than the death of a spouse with daiquiris. As soon as we pushed open the door and stepped into the cool dark, the barman was reaching for his shaker.

“Watermelon times two, Chico,” she called to him. “What are you having, Lexy? I recommend the watermelon daiquiri, but Chico can make anything you’ve ever heard of and a few you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

“Can you call people ‘Chico’?” I said.

“That’s his name,” said Mizz Visalia. She shrugged off her little pale pink cardigan and dropped into an armchair. “Two each and keep ’em coming.”

The cocktails arrived quicker than seemed possible and the first sip turned into a glug that left me tingling from lips to hips to fingertips.

“I didn’t do it,” Visalia said.

“Of course not.”

“They think I did it. I don’t want to go to jail, Lexy. Last night was enough.”

I didn’t want to remind her that jail wasn’t the only possible outcome. This was America and one of the biggest chasms between the old country and the wild west was staring Visalia in the face. Bigger than the missing walls, bigger than the paper plates, bigger than Christmas being flavoured with peppermint, even. She could fry.

“So, who do you think did do it?” I said.

Visalia shivered. It might only have been the crushed ice in the daiquiri, but she rubbed her gnarly old hands, bristling with diamonds, up and down her scrawny liver-spotted arms. She was California through and through: no truck with the idea that an old broad’s arms should be covered.

“Barbara?” I said. Visalia hissed while drinking and made herself snort. She coughed her airways clear and glared at me. “I mean, if he dumped her, she must be angry.”

“Are you kidding me? I bet she heaved a sigh of relief that changed the tides in Hawaii.”

“What about the what were they called … the Dolshikovs?”

“Oh that man and his goddamn conspiracy theories!” said Visalia. “If I’ve told him once!”

The Dolshikovs were well-known to me after fourteen sessions. They lived in New Jersey and they manufactured fireworks there. They had field offices and outlets all the way to Colorado. Bombaro Pyrotechnics (Nothing goes Boom like Bombaro!) had the West Coast in hand. Then Dolshikov’s Pyrotasia opened a Dallas branch and Clovis Bombaro doubled his order of Pepto-Bismol.

“Dey own da whole a da Eas Coas,” was how Clovis explained it to me. His birth in the Sisters of Mercy hospital in Bakersfield and the certificate that declared him one hundred percent red, white, and blue went right out the window when he talked about the firework business. It was bye-bye Bakersfield and ciao Sicilia. “I own da whole a da Wes Coas. Texas is da Wes.”

“Well,” I had said once, “Texas is east of Colora—”

“You’re wasting your time,” Visalia had said.

“You gonna go downa Texas and tellem dey not in da Wes?” Clovis demanded.

“Better take backup,” said Vi.

I stared at her now over the rim of my daiquiri, mildly astonished by how far I had to tip the glass to take a sip. I had really chugged this. Chico put another one in front of each of us and melted away.

“Clovis and his Dolshikov obsession!” Visalia said. “You only had it an hour a week, Lexy. I had it all day every day.”

“But the thing about a conspiracy theory,” I said, “is that being murdered kind of adds a bit of weight, wouldn’t you say?”

She stretched her neck hard one way and then the other. I thought she was trying to get out the kinks of a night with a jailhouse pillow, but then she scooted forward on her chair and gestured to me to do the same.

“I know who did it,” she said, once our faces were inches apart. “I just don’t know how they found out so fast.”

“How who found out what?” I said. “Wait. I mean, how who found out what. Oh, I was right the first time.” I blinked. What exactly was in a daiquiri anyway?

“This has got Poggio written all over it.”

“What does that mean?”

“The Poggios killed Cousin Clovis,” said Mizz Vi. “They heard we were coming back to Sicily and they sent a message.”

“That,” I said, after taking a moment to look as if I was considering it, “sounds quite a bit more mad than the Dolshikov theory.”

Mizz Visalia sipped her drink a while then sighed and set it down.

“I should be flattered,” she said. “I remember when that would be the first thing anyone thought about any Sicilian American dying suddenly. The first and last thing the cops thought. I should be happy it’s changed.”

“It’s just … When did your parents come to California? And Clovis’s parents?”

“Our mothers came together when they were six and seven. They were sisters. You know that.”

Of course I did. But I didn’t dwell on it because, to use the formal language of my clinical psychological training, it was icky.

“That was 1912,” she went on. “The blink of an eye. And my grandfather didn’t give up his interest in the farm when he left. Cousin Clovis still owns—owned—a sixteenth share. Say what you like about America, but we managed to buy out all of our cousins here until we owned the Creek House outright. No such luck in Sicily.”

“I dunno,” I said, draining my glass. Again. “It’s just … the way he died. I don’t want to upset you but, the way he died, it seems more likely that someone who knew something about the firework business would have done it.”

“Lexy, how much do you think you need to know about the firework business to … to … ?” We stared at one another for a while trying to think up how to refer to his cause of death with even a pinch of dignity. Unfortunately, running through the options made me remember the look on his face—the O!—and I could feel my cheeks begin to twitch again.

“To … ” I said. I could think of nothing even vaguely useful. Phrases like park a stick and sun don’t shine weren’t going to help.

“To … ” said Visalia, “place a lit firework too close for comfort.”

I knew I clenched my buttocks and I thought I saw her tilt a little as she worked her own.

“Only it wasn’t lit,” I said.

“Well, introduce it, light it, and run then.”

“No,” I said. “The cops think it had a timer on it. Didn’t they say that to you?”

“They think?” said Vi. Then she added, “A timer?”

“They think someone removed it afterwards,” I said. “That’s why … I can’t believe they didn’t tell you this! That’s why you’re out. Because you had three firefighters to vouch for you when Mr. Bombaro went b—Um, at the time of death, I mean. And you had an alibi from then on in.” She was staring at me as if her two double daiquiris had been little cups of Earl Grey tea. She was steady and clear-eyed, and behind her gaze I could see a thousand little sparks firing, a tiny firework show going on right there in her head.

“A timer?” she said again. “And then someone removed it?”

“So,” I repeated, thinking she might look steady but she was eighty-six, she’d spent the night in jail, and I could attest to the daiquiris. “So it seems much more likely to me that someone who knows something about pyrotechnics is involved.”

“Like who?” she said. “Did the cops tell you that?”

“No,” I said. “But it’s got to be either someone from Bombaro’s, someone from Dolshikov’s, or someone close enough to Clovis to have picked up the basics. During pillow talk, for instance.”

Her eyes opened so wide that I could see the whites (the pinks, actually) all around the warm brown irises. The usually warm brown irises. Right now, they were as cold and black as two lumps of coal that had fallen off the lorry and rolled into a puddle of slush at the side of the road. I blinked. Puddle of slush was right. Her face had gone grey.

“Pillow talk?” she said. “You think it was me?”

“Barbara,” I told her. Now her lips were blue. “Are you okay?”

“I think it’s just hit me,” she said, hoarsely. “I need to go home.” She rallied a little and called over to the bar. “Put it on my tab, Chico, and call a cab for me.”

I helped her out and into the back of a taxi. I had never wished so hard for a proper black London taxicab. They’re so roomy. As I stuffed Mizz Vi into the back of the low-slung Chevy that had turned up to take her home, I didn’t see how she would ever clamber out again. So I got in after her and went along for the ride.

∞

Casa Bombaro was in The Oaks—Cuento’s ritziest neighbourhood, comprising six blocks of stucco wonders and other assorted McMansions, right at the edge of town, just before the start of the dusty tomato fields.

Clovis’s garden gates were visible as soon as we turned onto the block. They had obviously been commissioned by Clovis himself; perhaps even designed by him, judging by the fountains of enamelled iron on them. They looked like whale-spouts, maybe badly uncorked Champagne depending on how the light caught them, but I guessed that they were fireworks.

“Pull forward,” said Mizz Vi weakly. “Lexy, key in the code.” She leaned towards me and whispered it into my ear, earning a look of disgust from the taxi driver.

“I know key codes for bigger estates than this,” he muttered and he turned his wheels away from the box so that I had to take off my seatbelt and hang out of the window to enter the PIN.

Inside the gates, against a background of pillowy green lawns and perfectly kept paths was a display of every plant that either already looked or could be trained to look like a firework. There were palm trees, yuccas, and agaves, naturally, and—less naturally in every sense—roses pruned to the shape of fright wigs and bougainvilleas cascading from pots held up by wires so they looked as though they hung in mid-air. And, of course, the fountains. Coloured water fired up and out from an elaborate system of jets and spouts and foamed and fizzed down from an even more elaborate system of chutes and funnels.

“He called it his Garden of Eden,” said Mizz Vi.

“If God puked Eden,” I said.

The taxi driver snorted and Mizz Vi nodded her head, unable to disagree.

The house, hidden from the gate by an unnecessary curve in the short drive, was another terra cotta, cream, and verdigris extravaganza. Bigger than the morgue, bigger than any of the missions I had visited so far, and with cathedral windows and a quadruple garage, it didn’t look like the sort of place a tired and lonely old lady could be abandoned. The tatters of crime scene tape still clinging to either side of the roll-up garage doors didn’t help.

“Are you going to be—” I got out, but then the door opened and a middle-aged woman stepped out. She didn’t look like a housekeeper. She was wearing a dress. She looked slightly firework-related, actually, from the way her hair was gathered in a ponytail right on top of her head, exploding in all directions. Under it, her face was blank.

“My niece is here!” Mizz Vi said. Then, “I didn’t think she’d be able to get a flight this soon. I only called this morning!”

“That’s wonderful,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

But Visalia didn’t seem so much soothed or comforted by the sudden appearance of a loved one as she seemed …

“You seem … ” I said.

“That’s my niece, Sparky,” said Vi. “She was very close to Cousin Clovis, Lexy. You should probably try not to mind what she says.”

“Seriously?” I asked. “Sparky?”

As I got out and walked around to help Visalia, the woman came plodding down the steps. Plodding was the only word. I stretched out a hand to greet her.

“I’m Lexy Campbell,” I said. “I’m your aunt’s therapist. I’ve been looking after her.” This I delivered with a ghost of a glance backwards to where Mizz Vi, half-cut and dishevelled, was beginning to wriggle out of the car. The driver, not trusted with the code, was looking stolidly forward and offering nothing.

“Serpentina,” said the woman.

“How did you get here so soon, Sparky?” Mizz Vi called over.

“We were coming anyway,” Serpentina said.

“Who’s we?”

“I’ve got some news, Auntie.” She turned back towards the open door. “Allow me to present my husband, Jan.”

A tall, slim, kind of catalogue-modelly man in overstarched casuals came out and stood frowning on the doorstep. “Call me Bang-Bang,” he said. His shirtsleeves and chinos crackled as he moved towards me and shook my hand.

“You’re married?” said Vi. “Oh, Sparky. That’s … Oh, that’s … Bang-Bang, come and kiss your auntie!”

Jan went trotting over to the taxi with his clothes crunching.

I didn’t know what was causing her such surprise, but using my professional experience, I found this couple way bogus. Bang-Bang-Jan should have had a skinny wife with life goals and two hundred dollar flip-flops. This dumpy woman in the muumuu with the comedy hairdo wasn’t in his league.

“And these are Jan’s cousins, Alex and Peter,” Sparky-Serpentina went on, as a pair of thugs from central casting sidled out and stood with their hands clasped behind their backs watching me from behind sunglasses.

The starched man had plucked Mizz Vi out of the taxi and was ushering her—practically carrying her—past me, into the house.

“Lexy,” she said. “Thank you again. I don’t know where I would have been without you today.”

“Please stop thanking me,” I said. “You need to rest. I’ll see you soon.”

“Yes,” she said, turning to face me while Bang-Bang-Jan kept pulling her, backwards now, into the house. “Maybe tomorrow. I can come to you or you—”

“I’ll come here,” I said. “In case you’re tired. After lunch? Two o’clock?”

“You remember the key code?” she said as she disappeared into the shadows of the dim hallway, with Bang-Bang’s arm firmly around her.

“I remember,” I said. “I’ll see you soon.”

The two thugs turned smartly and disappeared after her. Jan came back out and sort of bowed. He might even have clicked his heels, except that he couldn’t possibly have clicked his heels, could he? Then he gave his bride a look and once again disappeared.

“Thank you again for everything you’ve done,” said Sparky, her face about as sparky as a dead halibut. She looked numb with misery.

“Are you okay?” I asked. Occupational hazard.

“Not really,” she replied. “I loved Uncle Boom. I owed him everything. And I … ”

“What?” I said. Killed him, I thought.

“I betrayed him.”

“Oh?” I said. “How’d you do that then?”

“I hope you’ll forgive me being rude, Lexy,” she said, “but this is a time for family.”

“Of course,” I said. “But let me give you my card.”

I had about five thousand of them left and anyway it wasn’t as crass as it seemed because Americans give you their card all the time. I’ve been given cards by taxi-drivers whose sisters-in-law run scrap-booking classes and by pizza delivery guys whose college roommates are trying to kick-start climbing gyms and by antique dealers who sat next to me in the hairdressers and by hairdressers who outbid me at antique auctions and by the sisters-in-law of climbers who were raising money for pizza ovens by auctioning scrapbooks. When I shared a taxi with them.

Sparky pocketed mine and handed over hers. See? She was at her auntie’s house to console the old lady about her new widowhood, but she had a few business cards on her.

She stretched her lips at me and then stepped inside and shut the door. It was spring-loaded and well-insulated so, despite her determination to make her meaning clear, it closed with a soft pafp rather than a slam, but I got the message. I felt as if I’d just watched a little fish swim into the mouth of a shark and heard its teeth mesh.

Even the taxi driver, not Visalia’s biggest fan, looked worried.

“Bet you twenty that key code’s changed before tomorrow,” he said. He was right. Hell, he was more than right. We stopped and checked on the way out and the gate remained closed, telling me I had two more tries and one more try and then I was out of tries and my license plate had been photographed and would be held on file.

∞

Back at the Last Ditch, Noleen was backing out of the room underneath mine with a maid’s cleaning cart.

“Cops have been back,” she called in greeting as I was paying off the cab. “They were in your room.”

She strolled over to the rank of dumpsters that cut off the view of the pool from the street (Feng Shui wasn’t the Last Ditch way) and tossed two empty Clorox bottles into the blue one. “I tell you,” she said. “Every time I think I’ve seen everything … ”

I didn’t want to know what a motel guest might have done that needed two bottles of bleach and surprised an old-timer like Noleen, but before I could escape, someone shouted from the open door of the Skweeky Kleen.

“Did it come out?”

“My partner, Kathi,” said Noleen, then called back. “Like a dream. Still no clue what it was, but it washed out.”

“Some people!” Kathi called back and then withdrew as a telephone rang inside.

“I thought it was a menstruation incident,” Noleen said. Not that I asked. “Or it could have been beetroot,” she went on, even though I had started backing away. “Plus a blocked drain,” she added, despite the fact that I have never had a less interested look on my face in my life. “But I tell you … I don’t know what it was,” she concluded.

“Good,” I said. “I mean, oh. I’m glad to hear it came out. So, anyway, it’s getting kind of warm for standing around.”

Noleen looked at me and then at the sun, beating down mercilessly onto the concrete. “Warm?” she said. “It ain’t even ninety.”

I turned and headed up the iron staircase towards my room. After a day of court, morgue, the empty midday bar, and those creepy nieces and nephews, I wanted nothing more than its blankness and the chance to wash my single pair of knickers so’s I didn’t have to wear them for a third day.

I was in for a surprise. First off, someone—I guessed the Cuento cops, on a break from their prostitution-ring stakeout—had sprung my suitcases from the office where I’d abandoned them the evening before and left them sitting just inside the door. The door of the unrecognisable Room 213. It was transformed. There was a pale pink velvet chaise longue scattered with silk cushions. More silk cushions in pink, grey, and blue covered about a third of the bed, heaped up on top of a dove grey coverlet. The lamps had birds on the bases and clouds on the shades, and an oil painting of a foggy lake with ripples spreading out calmly from behind a solitary swan was on the wall.

I sank down on to the chaise just as the door opened and a strange man walked in as if he owned the place. Or me. Or both.

“Lexy, isn’t it?” he said. He was chiseled and gleaming, his hair shaved down to no more than a shadow on his mahogany skull and his perfect teeth almost blue as he flashed me a perfunctory smile. He wore a pink shirt cut like ice-skater’s spandex and grey trousers I could tell cost more than my entire wardrobe.

“It is,” I said.

“I’m Roger,” he said. “I understand you had some trouble earlier.”

“Are you a lawyer?” I said. It was partly the trousers but mostly the brisk confidence.

“I’m a pediatric surgeon,” he said. “Why?”

“I … ” I said. I’ve had a lot of communication training one way and another, besides starting out pretty gobby. I don’t think I’d ever been at a loss for words so often in my life before as the last twenty-four hours.

“Todd said there was a spider?” Roger went on.

“A tiny little one,” I said. “It was nothing.”

“Right,” said Roger. “Exactly. You see,” he went on, with a look over his shoulder, “Todd is halfway through a program and whilst I understand that you meant to be kind, we’re trying—his doctor and I—to challenge the confabulations rather than confirm them.”

“What?” I said.

“I know there was no spider,” Roger said.

“Oh!” I said, light dawning. “Cleptoparasitosis?”

Roger sat down—flump!—onto the grey silk coverlet as if I’d punched him in the solar plexus. “Glory be,” he said.

“I’m a clinical psychologist,” I told him. “Well, in Dundee I am. Here I’m a generic therapist working towards a licence. But see, the thing is there really was a … Wait though. He said there was a great big hairy one in army boots, in the bath. And I found a tiny little brown one like a gnat with spare legs, on the windowsill. Coincidence, probably, eh?” I kicked my shoes off, but Roger glanced at my feet and I’m sure his nostrils flickered so I wriggled them back on. “So how bad is he?”

He rubbed one of his perfect hands, Rolex just peeping out from a pink cuff, over his perfectly stubbled jaw and groaned. “Well,” he said, “we’re living in the Last Ditch Motel. We left the house about a year ago. We rented an apartment, then a suite at the Hilton Garden, Best Western, DoubleTree, La Quinta, and … here we are. If this goes toes up, we’ll be camping.”

“Doesn’t medication—” I began, but Roger knew the Last Ditch’s noises better than me and shushed me as Todd appeared round the open door.

“You’re back!” he said. “I came to leave your key. Tah-dah! What do you think?” He did a slow turn in the middle of the room, showing off the painting, the pillows, the lamps, and then stepping off the Aubusson carpet—I hadn’t even noticed that!—and tidying the fringe.

“Where did you get it all?” I said.

“I had it in storage,” said Todd. “We’ve got tenants in our house and they wanted it unfurnished. You’re doing me a favour, really. This way if I come to borrow a cup of sugar I get to see all these pretty things.”

“Are you a designer?” I said. “It really is gorgeous.”

“A designer?” said Todd. “No. I’m an anesthesiologist.”

“Sorry,” I said. “God, I’m sorry. That was really offensive.”

Todd waved it away. “And so anyway,” he said, “what happened with your friend? Is he out? Is he with you?”

“She,” I said. “Yep, she’s bailed. No, she’s gone home.” I think my face must have clouded as I remembered the door closing on Mizz Vi, the instant change of the key code at those towering gates.

“What happened?” said Todd.

“Her husband was killed last night. Don’t ask me to tell you how. You really don’t want it in your heads, believe me.”

“Get out!” said Todd. “Is your friend the firework lady? Oh Em Gee. It was all over the front page of the Voyager. She murdered her husband, and she’s out on bail?”

“I cosigned the bond,” I said.

“You … ?” said Todd. “Well, for God’s sake pour us a glass of Chablis and tell us all!”

“I haven’t got any Chablis.”

“He’s probably filled your refrigerator,” Roger said. “As you see, Todd doesn’t really do boundaries.”

“As you see, Roger tends to overpsychologize everyday life,” Todd shot back.

“My apologies,” said Roger. “As you’ll find out, Todd likes to take care of people.”

“As you’ll find out, Roger is troubled by normal amounts of everyday kindness.”

“Normal?” said Roger. “What about when you fostered those hedgehogs?”

“What about it? The PETA website linked to my Facebook post.”

“Todd, you bought a stroller.”

“I customized a stroller,” said Todd, reaching his phone out of his back pocket and scrolling through the photographs. “I Bento-ized it. Six little compartments. It was adorable. It went viral.”

That was when I stopped listening. I had opened the fridge and my eyes filled. There was a bottle of Chablis, that was true. And on the counter above the fridge there were six beautiful wine glasses with spindly stems and the soap-bubble irridescence of really good crystal. But what had put the lump in my throat was the six-pack of pork pies and the three bars of Cadbury’s Whole Nut.

“How did you find … These are genuine Melton Mowbray.”

“I have connections,” Todd said, sepulchrally. “But they’re all pharmacists. When it comes to charcuterie, there’s a deli in Sacramento.”

So, over pies, chocolate, and Chablis, I told them everything.

Halfway through, Kathi from the Skweeky Kleen joined us. She was pretty much identical to Noleen, only years younger: her grandma haircut still dark and nothing on her t-shirt but a small sk logo. I looped back to clue her in and she listened, nodding all the time and showing, from a couple of short questions, that she was as sharp as a shiv.

Later, as the sun sank, Noleen followed the squawks and shrieks to their source, and made a fifth, bringing a jug of margaritas with her. So I had to go back over it again. Noleen said plenty: Vi was a fool, Clovis was an asshat, Sparky was a bitch, Bang-Bang was a creep, Sicily was a dump, love was a mug’s game.

By the time they left, some things seemed clear. Clovis “Boom” Bombaro was planning to skip out on his wife without even signing his divorce papers. Of course he was. He had fooled her into believing they’d start again in Sicily and she’d swallowed it whole. There was no age-old Sicilian family feud at the heart of this. Of course there wasn’t. What there was was a woman still in love after sixty-odd years and an old man too cussed to split his wealth with her. As to who had killed him … I couldn’t get past the idea that if Sparky was Clovis’s heir, she came to Bang-Bang with a hell of a sweetener besides her well-hidden charms. And he’d got that perfect nickname up and running pretty sharpish. Plus there was the two nightclub-bouncer cousins too.

Because what kind of family goes to the house and waits for a therapist to bring their dear old auntie home? Why weren’t they at the courthouse, paying for a swanky lawyer for her? Why weren’t they at the jail, pounding on doors and demanding that she be set free?

And how could I get her to wise up before they got rid of her too?