Клэр Донелли - Catch As Cat Can

After a moment, Helena turned to Sunny. “I’m sorry, dear. With all of this. . . .” She made a vague gesture with her hand to include the whole mess. “Maybe we should take a rain check. Would that be all right with you?”

“Don’t worry about it, I understand perfectly,” Sunny assured her neighbor. “There’s always something I can do around here to fill the time.”

Silently, she added, Maybe I can get Will over for lunch instead. I definitely have a bone to pick with him.

She got the Martinsons out of the MAX office, watching them set off in the opposite direction from Kittery Harbor Fish. Then Sunny went to the phone on her desk. She got through to Will’s cell phone and suggested lunch. “Unless you’re busy with Val Overton,” she teased.

“No, no,” he said. “Where would you like to go? I’m up in headquarters—”

“I was thinking of something simple,” she said. And private , she silently added. “Why don’t you pick up some sandwiches and lemonade? We can have a picnic in my office.”

“Well, I guess that beats getting frostbite outside.” From Will’s tone of voice, the office sounded only marginally better. “What kind of sandwich would you like?”

“Surprise me,” Sunny said. It’s only fair. I’m going to surprise you.

Will arrived about fifteen minutes later with a paper sack. “Hope you don’t mind lemonade out of a bottle. I stopped off in Saxon and picked up meatball sandwiches at Avezzani’s.”

“One of the fanciest restaurants in the area, and you pick up a meatball sub?” Sunny shook her head.

Will grinned. “Before it went all fancy, Gene Avezzani’s folks ran a deli—and they made meatball parm sandwiches on garlic bread—best I ever ate. You should just count yourself lucky that I’m pals with Gene, and he still makes these things for me.” The smells seeping through the slightly greasy paper reminded Sunny that it had been a while since breakfast. She almost regretted what was going to happen next.

Sitting down across from Sunny, Will spread the wrapped sandwiches on the desk she’d cleared. Soon they were hard at work on their lunch.

“You know, I got my job at the Standard because of a meatball sub.” Sunny took another appreciative bite and chewed. “I was interviewing with the editor—”

“Randall McDermott,” Will put in.

“Yes. Randall took me out to lunch. He said he hired me because I had the nerve to eat such a sloppy sandwich at such a crucial meeting.”

“You still have plenty of nerve,” Will said.

“I sure do,” Sunny told him. “That’s why I’m asking how come you never told me about Nick Gatto.”

Will made some interesting noises. Whether it was meatball getting caught in his throat or lemonade coming out his nose, Sunny wasn’t sure. He went through a couple of napkins wiping his face while Sunny glared at him.

“I can see you’re trying to come up with something, but at least pay me the courtesy of not saying, ‘Nick who?’ I’m talking about my next-door neighbor here, Neil Garret, aka Nicky Suits, California man-about-town and supposed securities fraud convict.”

Will was pretty quick on the uptake. “California,” he said. “Damn. Abby Martinson recognized him?”

“She worked for him, and nearly fainted when she saw him.”

Will shook his head. “Of all the lousy luck.”

“Your luck’s about to get lousier,” Sunny warned him. “I’m furious at you. How could you lie to me?”

“I didn’t lie,” Will said carefully. “I didn’t tell you anything, because it wasn’t my secret to tell.”

“So you just strung me along ever since that shop opened last summer,” Sunny accused.

“I didn’t know anything myself until after the November election when the sheriff made me her chief investigator,” Will said. “Then I got brought in on this whole WITSEC thing.”

“WITSEC?” Sunny repeated.

“Witness Security,” Will explained. “It’s what the marshals call the witness protection program these days.”

“Well, you’d better get used to being called mud, because that’s what your name is gonna be.”

“Right, because the first thing I should do with a witness hiding from the mob is to talk all about him to my girlfriend, the newspaper reporter.”

“I’m not a newspaper reporter.” The denial burst from Sunny’s lips with enough anger to surprise her. Keep this up, she thought, and I may not be a girlfriend much longer, either.

“You write stories for the Harbor Courier ,” Will said. “And I can imagine how Ken Howell would react to a story like this.”

Sunny was ready to give him an argument about that until she remembered Ken’s voice trying to wheedle something out of her for the paper. “Maybe you have a point,” she admitted.

“And this is the kind of thing that, if it got out, could get someone killed.” Will paused for a second. “Maybe it did.”

“You mean that guy you tried to claim you couldn’t identify?” Sunny said.

“We couldn’t, until the prints finally came back this morning.” Will sighed in defeat. “His name was Phil Treibholz. He was a Los Angeles private detective, a would-be peeper to the stars.”

“Sounds pretty high-end.”

“Maybe ‘extortionate’ would be a better word.” Will looked grim. “From what I was able to find out about him, he collected big bucks from lawyers to help with their cases. One witness complained that Treibholz tried to intimidate him by hanging a rat from the rear-view mirror of his car.”

“So the guy who tried to put the noose around Shadow’s neck—”

“Was almost certainly Treibholz,” Will finished the thought. “When you consider that ‘gatto’ means ‘cat’ in Italian, it’s kind of obvious that Treibholz was trying to send a message.”

“A message that wouldn’t have done Shadow much good.” Sunny sat for a moment. “You know, I’m having a really hard time scraping up any outrage over this guy getting shot.”

“I can understand that.” Will shrugged. “Other folks, though, take a dim view of murders happening in these parts.”

“Sounds as though the new Sheriff Nesbit is a lot like the old one in that respect,” Sunny admitted. “Well, your job can’t be that difficult. Treibholz turns up from California and threatens Neil—we’ll call him Neil to keep the secret. That’s motive. Treibholz gets two bullets in the back of the head in Neil’s freezer. That’s opportunity. You’re two-thirds of the way to making a case.”

Will hesitated for a moment before he answered. “It’s not that simple. There’s a big racketeering trial due to open soon against Neil’s boss.”

“And the federal prosecutor wants Neil’s testimony.”

“It could put a dangerous criminal away for life,” Will said.

“You mean, somebody better known than Nicky Suits,” Sunny corrected. “I used to help cover some of the federal trials in New York. The prosecutors knew that nailing big names meant career advancement.”

“That doesn’t mean that Jimmy DiCioppa doesn’t deserve prison time,” Will argued.

Sunny gave him a disgusted laugh. “Yeah, having a colorful nickname like ‘Jimmy de Chopper’ because of what happened to the fingers and toes of people who owed him money—that didn’t enter into the equation at all.” She paused for a second. “So what’s the deal? Is Val Overton trying to save her witness? I thought that if you broke the witness protection rules, you got kicked out of the program.”

“There’s the question of innocent until proven guilty,” Will said. “And Neil keeps swearing that he’s innocent.”

Sunny took a moment to digest that, contrasting the Nick Gatto she’d heard about with the Neil Garret she knew. On one side was the guy who’d broken the law and gone to prison. On the other was the boss that Abby Martinson had more than liked, the pleasant store owner that Sunny had come to know . . . the rattled guy who’d opened the freezer and let a body out of the bag.