Sticky Fingers
Authors: Nancy Martin
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Deborah Harding from the Carnegie Museum. I love my lunch buddies Lila Shaara, Kathleen George, Rebecca Drake, Heather Benedict Terrell, and Kathryn Miller-Haines. (Welcome, Little G!) Thank you, Nancie Hays, Ramona Long, Terri Sokoloff, Mary Alice Gorman, and Richard Goldman at Mystery Lovers Bookshop. Kisses to Kathy Sweeney and my wonderful blog sisters at TLC—Sarah Strohmeyer, Hank Phillippi Ryan, Elaine Viets, Harley Jane Kozak, Margaret Maron, Nancy Pickard, Brunonia Barry, Cornelia Read, and Diane Chamberlain. I’m waving to the backbloggers at the Lipstick Chronicles and my Sisters in Crime. And I owe Deb and Bill Foster for Shelby. As for Meg Ruley and Kelley Ragland—I’ll see you at the Love Shack, ladies!
Contents
1
The first thing I noticed as I was sitting in a squad car was that police cruisers don’t have seatbelts in the back. Me, I’m used to traveling through life without a seatbelt. I’m a no-retraints kinda girl. But today my wrists were in handcuffs so tight I felt like a Christmas turkey, and I planned on bringing up the issue with my arresting officer.
Trouble was, Detective Duffy was already plenty ticked off at me. Behind the wheel, he snapped his cell phone shut, turned around, and said through the screen, “Roxy, behave yourself. I gotta take a detour.”
“What? You gonna show me all the romantic sights of Pittsburgh before you book me?”
“Shut up,” he said. “Or I’ll drop you in the river.”
I’d met Bug Duffy years after he earned his nickname eating crickets on the playground of St. Raphael Elementary. He’d been a year ahead of me in high school, when we’d both done time wearing our respective Catholic school uniforms. Back then, he was vice president of his class, and I was a member of an unofficial club called Future Delinquents of America. Things hadn’t changed much.
He made a U-turn in front of a convenience store and cut down through the North Side—a maze of cobblestoned streets lined with boarded-up storefronts and magnificent old houses either crumbling to bits or under rehab by hopeful do-it-yourselfers. A pair of stone-faced teenagers melted back from the curb at the sight of the cop car. On the next block a young woman in a ponytail and expensive sneakers briskly jogged behind a high-tech baby carriage. Funny thing was, I knew the teenagers, not the mom.
In a few minutes, we were bumping along a deserted stretch of road that ran parallel to the Ohio River. It wasn’t exactly scenic there, and like most old Pittsburgh industrial sites, the ground probably hadn’t passed an EPA inspection even back in the day when bribes made a difference.
A river patrol boat bobbed offshore with its crew leaning on the rail to watch. A tug cruised past, engine low, pushing six empty barges, going downriver fast. On the shoreline, a couple of crime-scene guys stood hunched against the November wind, hands in their pockets, looking down at a sodden, rolled-up carpet that had clearly just floated up on the river.
A police photographer snapped pictures of it.
Bug shut off the patrol car’s engine, got out, and came around to the rear door. He pulled me out and unlocked the cuffs. He was just about my height, and I could have kicked him in the nuts and made a break for it, but he gave me a look and said, “What do you bet this is her?”
I saw what he meant and said, “Oh, shit.”
We walked across a stubbly field that had once been a steel mill, and he said hello to the crime-scene guys. I looked at the foot sticking out of one end of the carpet—a woman’s bare foot with a pink pedicure. I felt the wind bite through the layers of my sweatshirts, but the cold wasn’t the reason I suddenly had to clench my teeth to keep them from chattering.
Bug hunkered down over the carpet and used a pocketknife to cut the twine. Somebody had tied it with Boy Scout precision—little loops and knots every twelve inches or so. Like a rolled steak braciole, I thought. Bug handed the twine to one of the techs, who put it into a plastic bag. Then Bug unrolled the rug—a lot more gently than he’d handled me.
“This her?” Bug looked up at me when the gray, flattened face came into view.
“That’s Clarice,” I said, although I hardly recognized my own voice.
Clarice Crabtree had been shot a couple of times in the head—not the way you’d expect a distinguished museum curator to die. She probably never broke a sweat doing her work—but it was work that a lot of people seemed to think was valuable. In the last second of her life, I bet she’d been surprised to feel the barrel of a gun against her skull.
As I looked at Clarice, my own mother’s death swam up in my head. I tried to shove it down into the blackness where all bad memories belong. But it was the sight of Clarice’s ear—the one that was now missing a sedate gold earring, the mate of the one that remained clipped to her other lobe—that took me fast into a shadowy kitchen with blood on the floor next to a dead or dying woman whose earring—not gold, but a cheap one–had been torn from her by a glancing fist. I had hidden in another room while my parents shouted. While he beat her. As he killed her. A day later, while packing up some clothes and books for foster care, I’d found the missing earring embedded in a loaf of moldy bread on the kitchen counter.
I doubted Clarice Crabtree’s kids ate moldy bread.
Still kneeling, Bug said, “I don’t like that look on your face, Roxy.”
Too late, I wiped away all expression and turned away, shaking and sick.
Bug said something to the techs, then came over and put one hand on my shoulder. “Don’t even think about it.”
I pushed his hand away. “About what?”
“Doing something about this on your own.”
I said, “She has two kids.”
He sighed. “Oh, hell. Look, I know how you get about mothers and kids, but this is my case now, Rox. I don’t want to be tripping over you for weeks while I figure out who killed this lady.”
“I won’t get in your way.”
“Better not,” he said.
2
A few days earlier on a sunny November day, I had strolled into a noisy Strip District deli to meet Marvin Weiss, my uncle Carmine’s lawyer. The deli specialized in sandwiches with hot fries and drippy coleslaw smashed between the meat and thick slices of Italian bread. The lawyer specialized in doing Carmine’s dirty work.
I put my sidekick Nooch onto a stool at the counter and handed him enough cash to buy a sandwich and a Coke. “Chew your food,” I told him. “Make it last longer than two minutes.”
Then I threaded my way through small tables still crowded with guys who worked in the neighborhood.
Marvin sat in a back booth, already halfway through a corned beef big enough to choke a bull. He had his lunch in both hands, but the sandwich was dripping all over the waxed paper in his plastic basket. Those sandwiches had once made for a quick workingman’s lunch for guys who labored in the nearby warehouses, but eventually the after-midnight club crowd in search of munchies found the restaurant to satisfy late-night cravings. Now tourists flocked to the place, and it was busy day and night.
I slid into the booth across from Marvin, unzipping my sweatshirt and peeling the scarf from around my neck. “This is your idea of a secure meeting place, 007? Half the guys in here are on lunch break from the newspaper.”
Marvin had a long, bony nose and a receding chin, which made him look like a bunny rabbit in a striped tie. He dropped his sandwich and mopped his hands with a fistful of napkins. “How do you know? Have they all slept with you?”
“I bet they slept with your mama,” I shot back. “Shut up and get down to business, okay? I’ve got work to do.”
Some kind of child brain prodigy, Marvin had graduated from law school before he got through puberty, and he still looked like he played video games. He also still lived with his mother, who cooked his meals, washed and ironed his shirts, and maybe tucked him in at night, for all I knew. She hadn’t given him many social skills. I figured he was destined to be president of the
Star Trek
club until he qualified for AARP.
He wiped his mouth and said, “You’re late. What happened? You break your vow of celibacy already?”
Time stood still when I heard that. Like, all sound evaporated except for the rush of blood pressure in my ears. I grabbed the edge of the table to keep myself from falling over. “What did you say?”
Marvin smirked. “I heard about your pledge of abstinence. Everybody has. What happened, Roxy? Did you finally get scared straight?”
“Who the hell told you–”
“It’s all over the neighborhood. You decided to give up sex, right?”
“Keep your voice down!”
“What’s the matter? Afraid somebody hasn’t heard yet? Believe me, the whole city knows you’ve had a change of heart.”
I reached across the table, grabbed a fistful of Marvin’s tie, and jammed it against his protruding Adam’s apple. “Listen up, Marv. You say one more word about my sex life, and I’ll put your head on a sandwich and slather it with mustard. You hear me?”
“Take it easy!” he yelped. “This is my favorite tie!”
“Your mom can get another one next time she visits Kmart.” I released him.
“Okay, okay! Jeez.” He patted his tie back into place. “I’m the last to know, anyway. If the story trickled down to me, even the mayor has probably heard by now.”
A couple of factors had pushed me to make the decision to straighten out my bent life a little. First, my teenage daughter had a pregnancy scare that made me think maybe I wasn’t the best role model going. I’d managed to enjoy a lot of guys over the years on my own terms, but maybe that wasn’t the right message for a kid to learn about her mom. And second, I’d recently gotten naked with a man who turned out to be a murderer.
An awful thought hit me, and I said, “Has my uncle Carmine heard?”
Marvin mustered some dignity. “Usually, I’d deny any association with Carmine Abruzzo.”
“Yeah, I’m kinda surprised you actually said his name in public.”
“I’m not a mob lawyer,” he said firmly. “How should I know what’s on his mind? We barely speak.”
Marvin had come home from law school and hung his shingle on the second floor above his parents’ dry cleaning shop. He didn’t attract many clients until my uncle Carmine plucked him from obscurity to do some transactions for a couple of sham businesses that shielded Carmine’s real line of work. Only in the last year or so had naive Marvin finally figured out he was working for one of the last old-time crime bosses in the city of Pittsburgh.
I said, “How’s the old crook doing these days?”
“Watching too many game shows, if you ask me. He’s hooked on
Let’s Make a Deal.
He likes the costumes, I think. He’s happy with the way your last job turned out, though.”
“Huh,” I said. “Does he know the details? I got a little carried away.”
Marvin raised his eyebrows. “You? Carried away?”
A day earlier on a mission to collect a gambling debt for Carmine, I’d busted into an apartment in the Oakland neighborhood and rousted scrawny Gino Martinelli out of bed—a bed he was rocking with the help of a fifteen-year-old girl who was late for her after-school babysitting job. For his day job, Gino ran a corrupt city tow truck business, which gave him plenty of free time to prey on teenagers who didn’t have sense enough to stick with the sex maniacs in their own age group.
I had grabbed Gino by his hair—a mistake, because turns out he must be one of the last men on earth who wears a toupee—then by the scruff of the neck. I pulled him off Kiley Seranelli and threw him on the floor. Bare-assed and furious, he’d come up fast and tried to punch me, but I’d brought along a baseball bat and managed to chase him out onto the porch. Despite my finely honed powers of persuasion, Gino scrambled into my truck, where we tussled a while longer and I maybe broke his nose.