Клэр Донелли - Catch As Cat Can

“Suppose I wasn’t in town that night,” he finally said.

Bingo! Sunny silently cheered, but she kept all trace of celebration out of her voice. “And whatever you were doing out of town was worse than being accused of murder?”

“If Val heard about it, I might get yanked—or maybe dumped out of the program,” Neil confessed. “You can’t tell her.”

“How do I know until you tell me?” Sunny said.

“Technically, I’m still on parole,” Neil said. “Which means I can’t hang around with criminal types. But I had to.”

“Had to?” Sunny repeated.

“If you can’t get money from banks, and nobody in the area knows you, the only place you can get money is from criminal types,” Neil explained. “Also known as loan sharks.”

“I know a little bit about them. Not from personal experience,” she hastily added. “But from working with Will.”

“I had to go across the river into Portsmouth to find somebody who could handle the amount I needed.” Neil shook his head. “I spun my case as best I could, but in the end they turned me down. Between the talking and the traveling, I was there a good part of the evening—the evening that Phil Treibholz was murdered.”

“So you do have an alibi, but the alibi will get you in trouble with the marshals and WitSec.” Sunny shrugged. “Will is looking at a murder, and he wants to eliminate you as a suspect. Maybe we can have a private chat with these loan sharks.”

Neil looked a little nervous. “I don’t think they’d like having any police looking into their business. And I don’t want this to blow back on me. One of them was as big as a house. The strong, silent type who could twist me into a pretzel.”

That sparked a memory for Sunny. “A foreign gentleman?” she asked.

“Ukrainian,” Neil said. “They have a reputation for playing rough. But the one who did the talking was fairly decent with me.”

“Dani.” It was a good year ago now, but it was hard to forget the Ukrainian loan sharks she’d met while trying to save a friend from getting arrested for murdering her former husband. “And Olek. Danilo Shostak and Olek Lipko.”

Neil stared at her with new respect. “I heard that you helped Will Price investigating crimes, and wrote about them for the paper. But you know these guys?”

Sunny shrugged. “You do that kind of stuff, you get around. Where did you meet them?” The last time she’d seen Dani and Olek, they were getting out of town because things had gotten a little too warm for them. Supposedly, they’d gone back to Montreal. Now it looked as though they’d returned to reestablish themselves in this territory.

“Shostak had me meet him in a little hole in the wall down in the artsy-fartsy part of town,” Neil said. “A place called the Cafe Ekaterina.”

Then that’s where I’ve got to go, Sunny thought. And the sooner the better. Problem is, how do I get out of here gracefully?

Neil must have seen the change in her expression, because he asked, “Now that you’ve wrung everything you can out of me, can I interest you in some skate wings?”

“Only if they’ll keep till tomorrow,” Sunny told him. “I’ll be in to get them then. This evening—well, I’ll be busy.”

She escaped from the fish store, got back to her office, and dealt with a few small-scale emergencies while also getting the address for the Cafe Ekaterina. Sunny closed down the office as early as possible, got aboard her Wrangler, and joined the slow stream of traffic to one of the bridges over the Piscataqua River. She crawled along through greater downtown Portsmouth to an area of old factories repurposed as artists’ studios.

Driving around through the neighborhood, she finally found the Cafe Ekaterina. It was in a dingy-looking brick building that had probably gone up in seventeen-something, with dim lighting that made it difficult to see through newer but still pretty old plate glass windows. Sunny pulled up by a fire hydrant across the street to check the place out. Obviously, the landlord hadn’t done much to maintain the place, saving his money for when the rush of gentrification drove the artists out and put tenants willing to pay big rents into the property. By then the Cafe Ekaterina would probably be pushed out by a Starbucks or some similar chain operation. For the present, it offered a whimsical sign with its name in mismatched letters.

Like a ransom demand. Sunny pushed that thought out of her head. She was spending way too much time with Will and his investigations.

The door to the cafe opened, and a figure stood silhouetted, blocking most of the doorway. Olek, the muscle end of the loan-sharking operation, had apparently shrunk in Sunny’s memory. Looking at him now, the big man seemed even more enormous. He stepped to the side, reaching into the pocket of a coat that looked like a tweed circus tent, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. The brief burst of flame illuminated a face like a kid’s drawing, all squares and angles.

So, Olek keeps up his bad habits, Sunny thought. She’d originally managed to track down the Ukrainians because Olek smoked a brand of cigarettes from the old homeland, available only in one store in the area.

He took a deep drag on his cigarette, blew out a cloud of smoke, then abruptly dropped the butt, stubbing it out with his toe. Olek returned inside the cafe. A moment later, a smaller, slimmer figure appeared in the doorway, making a beckoning gesture. Dani. And from the way he was looking at her car, he knew she was there.

Looks as though I have to brush up on my surveillance techniques. Sunny lowered the passenger side window and waved an acknowledgment. Then she pulled out to find a legal parking spot.

Arriving shortly afterward in the cafe, she scanned a sparse crowd and spotted the Ukrainians sitting at a corner table where Olek had a clear view both of the front door and the entrance from the kitchen. Dani Shostak politely gestured toward a seat. Polite, but judging from the look on his face in the dim lighting, not delighted to see her.

Sunny sat. Like the letters on the sign outside, none of the chairs in the cafe matched one another, and this one wobbled alarmingly when she rested on it. The walls were exposed brick, and a designer might call the tables “distressed.” To Sunny’s eyes, they looked just plain worn.

“Miss Sunny Coolidge,” Dani said when she was seated. “Why you come to visit us? I don’t think it’s because you need money. I think it’s because you give something to Olek and me.” His face got cold. “Trouble.”

Sunny shook her head. “Actually, I’m trying to keep trouble away. Unless you want police coming around to ask you questions.”

Dani sat for a second, then said, “Then you are less trouble, Miss Sunny. What questions do you want to ask?”

“I want to ask about a customer.” She raised a hand as Dani began to shake his head. “A person you turned down.”

“The fish man,” Dani said. “I read about the body in his shop the day after he comes here. ‘Oho,’ I think, ‘he finds another way out of his trouble—by making worse for himself.’”

Sunny nodded. “The thing is, we do have a time of death. And Neil Garret told me he was here with you when the murder happened.”

Dani scowled down at his cup of cappuccino. “You get people to tell you the craziest things.”

“Believe me, he didn’t want to talk about it,” Sunny said. “But being charged with murder was worse trouble.”

Dani exhaled heavily. “All right, then. He comes to me Wednesday evening. Not last night, but a week ago. He asks for twenty thousand. I say no. He says how about ten. Again, I say no.”