Клэр Донелли - Catch As Cat Can

Abby froze in mid-step, reeling back as if she’d been struck. If not for Helena’s grip, the younger woman might have taken a tumble to the pavement.

“Are you okay?” Sunny hustled to take Abby’s other arm.

In spite of looking as if she were about to collapse at any moment, Abby hauled them away from the store window and back to the MAX office. “That man in there.” She nodded back toward Kittery Harbor Fish, her voice a harsh whisper, her face looking as if she’d just seen a ghost.

“You mean Neil Garret?” Sunny said.

Abby shook her head. “That’s not his name. I know him—I’d know him anywhere. And he’s supposed to be in jail.”

7

“In jail?” HelenaMartinson echoed, looking shocked. “What do you mean?”

The same questions were floating around in Sunny’s head, but she had some practical matters to take care of—like getting Abby seated before she fell down. She unlocked the office door and maneuvered Abby and Helena inside, bringing the younger Martinson down for a landing on one of the office chairs. “Coffee?” she asked.

Abby silently nodded. She looked as if she’d just received a serious jolt. Her perfect princess face was pale, her jaw hung loose. She swallowed hard a few times before she was able to thank Sunny when she returned with a cup.

Sunny managed to get Helena into a chair rather than fluttering over her daughter like a mother hen. After Abby had taken a couple of sips of coffee and a little color had reappeared in her cheeks, Sunny said, “Now do you want to tell us about it?”

“That man in the store,” Abby began.

“The one behind the counter?” Sunny asked. After this buildup, it would be a heck of a thing if one of the customers had gotten such a reaction from Abby.

She nodded. “The one you called Neil Garret. That’s not his real name. He’s Nick Gatto—and he’s a crook.”

Now that Abby had begun to calm down, Helena started getting agitated. “How do you know that?”

Abby took a long breath. “Mom, I guess there are some things you have to know. The streets in California aren’t paved with gold, you don’t get discovered by Hollywood while sitting at a soda fountain . . . and I wasn’t living in a convent the past few years.”

Just the words to gladden any mother’s heart, Sunny thought. “So how did you meet this Nick Gatto?”

“‘Nicky Suits,’ they used to call him. He was always beautifully dressed.” Abby actually smiled at the memory. “And I worked for him. I know it’s a cliché, but I was supporting myself between acting jobs by waiting tables. There’s a reason—you can set your own hours to accommodate auditions or rehearsals, even open up your schedule for filming something. I was good enough that I got offers to work in the front of the house, as a hostess, and let’s face it, my career wasn’t exactly setting Hollywood on fire. A lot of the stuff I did, I was just an extra—walking scenery.”

“I’ve seen movies and TV shows where you acted,” Helena loyally disagreed.

But Abby shook her head. “Usually about five lines, maximum. Anyway, when I heard about this upscale Italian place opening, I applied for a hostess job, and I got it. That’s where I met Nicky. It was his restaurant.”

“And this restaurant landed him in jail?” Sunny asked.

“No, the way he got the money for the restaurant put him in jail,” Abby said. “He was manipulating stocks.”

“A guy named Nicky Suits was messing with Wall Street?” Sunny didn’t have much to do with high finance, just an anemic 401(k) from her days at the Standard . But the idea of an apparent mobster muscling into the stock exchange made her stare.

“It’s not the big corporations that you hear about all the time,” Abby explained. “It’s what they call the small cap market, small companies trying to raise capital or going public. Nicky figured out how to use investment firms and force dealers to push up the prices of some stocks that he and his boss bought into for pennies and sold for big bucks. It’s not all that well-regulated, and he was doing pretty well.”

“Well enough to buy a little respectability with a restaurant.” Mrs. M. didn’t sound happy. “And you worked for this man?”

Abby nodded. “He was a good guy to work for, and the restaurant took off—until his, um, associates started hanging around. Nicky’s boss Jimmy just about turned the place into his private clubhouse. Then Jimmy started taking an interest in me.”

“Oh, yes?” Helena’s approval reading was way down in the negative numbers by now.

Abby looked as if she’d just taken a dose of very unpleasant medicine. “That’s not the point. What’s important is that Nicky helped me. When he saw that Jimmy was after me, he got me a job in a completely different business and helped me to move out into the Valley. I’d seen the handwriting on the wall for my acting career for a while. Nick got me working for a law firm, and I’ve moved on and up from there.”

“And he did all this just because you worked for him?” Helena’s tone reminded Sunny of her own mom’s approach when digging into some messy situation in her teenage life.

Except this is a lot more serious, she thought. It’s not promising when the good guy in the story is a gangster, saving Abby from a worse gangster.

“We were—involved,” Abby admitted. “He was going through a messy divorce, and he really is—was—a nice guy, Mom.”

“Mmmmm-hmmmm.” Helena was definitely reserving judgment on that score.

“Anyway, he made a clean break when he got me the new job. The next thing I heard about him was when he got arrested. He pushed his luck on a deal and it blew up on him. The feds got involved, charging him with securities fraud, wanting to make an example out of him. The last I knew, he was supposed to be going off to federal prison.”

“And instead he ends up in Kittery Harbor, selling fish.”

Sunny could have smacked herself in the forehead. She should have seen the signs—Will’s interest in the incident with Shadow. He didn’t check into it because Shadow was her cat, but because it took place in front of Neil Garret’s or rather, she corrected herself, Nick Gatto’s store . That also explained Val Overton’s sudden appearance, chatting with her about Shadow’s misadventure. Sure, federal marshals delivered writs and chased fugitives. But one of their big jobs was running the witness protection system.

Well, Val’s job had just gotten a lot harder, with a murder happening in her witness’ place of business. And Ken Howell was begging me for something juicy . . .

Sunny quickly shook that thought away. Abby had stumbled across a dangerous secret, something with possibly fatal consequences, and now the three of them knew it.

The situation hadn’t quite penetrated for Helena Martinson. She was still preoccupied with her daughter’s unwise life choices. But it had started to sink in for Abby. She was going from shocked to sick.

Sunny spoke up in a firm voice. “Now, listen,” she said. “This story does not go beyond these four walls. It involves gangsters, and now murder.”

She knew how Mrs. M. loved a good secret to spread around the gossip grapevine. The fact that it didn’t do her daughter much credit should dampen her usual enthusiasm—or so Sunny hoped. “So we’ve got to keep this under wraps,” she went on. “It may have already gotten someone killed.”

That finally got through. “Subject closed,” Helena Martinson said. But judging from the look she gave Abby, they would be discussing many other matters soon.

Abby simply looked apprehensive, whether from her discovery or from her mother’s reaction, Sunny couldn’t say.