Lisa Scottoline - Lady Killer

Mary didn’t know what to say. She felt her chest tighten but she couldn’t speak. She didn’t want to cry. She had worked for Bennie for as long as she could remember, but she couldn’t turn her back on Trish, not again. She looked from Bennie to Judy and back again, then decided. She slipped her bag on her shoulder, turned, and left the office without another word.

“Mary!” Judy called after her.

But she didn’t look back. She hurried down the hall, her eyes filling with tears.

M ary grabbed the stiff hand strap as the Yellow cab lurched down Market Street and around City Hall in stop-and-go traffic. She had to pick up her car from the impoundment lot; she’d need it for her next move. The morning rush hour was coming on, and the sky was clouding up, as if heaven and earth were on nasty parallel tracks. Mary tried not to take it as a bad sign. Or maybe you saw bad signs everywhere after you’d walked out on your life.

“Reg?” she said into the cell phone, having finally reached Brinkley. “First, I want to explain about last night, about me and Bobby Mancuso.”

“No need.”

“I dated him in high school, and that’s it. I would’ve mentioned it to you but didn’t get the chance, and it’s kind of personal. It really didn’t-”

“No matter, thanks for the tip,” Brinkley said coldly, so Mary moved to her next point.

“Anything new on Trish?”

“No.”

Mary could’ve guessed as much. She’d been checking online like a fiend. “I assume Ritchie and his father didn’t tell you anything last night.”

“Can’t go into that. By the way, I hear you talked to the feds.”

“I thought it would help the cause. I hope that was okay.”

“Sure,” Brinkley said, but Mary wasn’t convinced.

“Did you learn anything from Mancuso’s autopsy?”

“I can’t discuss that with you.”

“I swear, Reg, the more I know, the more I can help.”

“Don’t help. Sorry. Listen, I gotta go.”

“But what about Trish?”

“Mary, we’ll follow up.” Brinkley’s tone softened a little. “We’ll do our job. Go back to work. Make like a lawyer.”

Gulp. Mary pushed those thoughts away. “Just tell me, what did the trace evidence show? I would assume there’d be dirt on his shoes, threads on his clothes, stuff that would show where he’d been and where the house could be-”

“That’s for us, Mary.”

“The feds know who Cadillac is, but they wouldn’t tell me.”

“Please, God in heaven, don’t go anywhere near the Mob.” Suddenly Brinkley sounded like himself again, her pal of old. “If anything happens to you, your mother will never forgive me.”

“Okay, but I thought of something else.” Mary had a new idea this morning. “A good place to look around would be his old friends. Trish’s diary doesn’t mention any old friends, but everybody has old friends. He needed a friend, that’s what his sister told me. If he were going to confide in someone about his house, obviously it wouldn’t be someone in the Mob. It could-”

“Mare, I gotta go. Stay out of it. We’ll find Trish, one way or another. See ya.” Brinkley hung up, and the cab stalled past the federal courthouse, heading east toward the Delaware River.

Mary pressed the button to end the call, feeling suddenly at a loss. She inched farther from Bennie, Judy, and her job, and watched traffic fill Market Street. She was unsure where she was going, even where she’d been. A white SEPTA bus rocked side to side in front of the cab, then took a right turn, unblocking the orangey sun that rose at the end of Market, bathing the street momentarily in a golden light. She squinted at the momentary brightness, then held on tight as it flickered away, thinking to herself.

And planning her next move.

Half an hour later, Mary had parked outside the main entrance of her old high school, St. Maria Goretti. The school occupied a three-story yellow-brick building in the heart of South Philly, at Tenth and Moore Streets. It had since been renamed Neumann-Goretti High School, having merged with its brother school, but it was housed in the same building, remarkably unchanged paneled windows with steel sills and a bank of stainless-steel-framed glass doors. A tall concrete statue of St. Goretti watched over Tenth Street, and Mary hurried past her up the steps, an unexpected lump in her throat as she pulled open the door and stepped inside.

The school was smaller than she remembered, but it smelled the same, an overheated mix of city street, floor wax, and drugstore hair product. It was characteristically quiet because classes were in session; an empty, glistening corridor with tan floor tiles extended ahead of her and to her left. The cinderblock walls had been repainted beige, and the lockers that lined the hall were a matching color. Inside was the same as when she’d been here, except that the walls had been white, and when she turned the corner she stopped short at the sight of the old school uniform, displayed in a glass case, as if she herself were an artifact.

Mary felt a pang, standing there in the fluorescent lights, eyeing the heavy blue jumper with the SMG emblem displayed next to a set of four ribbons, each a different color. The ribbon used to be fastened to the uniform at the underarm, to hold her locker key in her jumper pocket, and they all used to twirl it endlessly, a Goretti trademark. For a minute, she couldn’t leave, standing in front of herself, her emotions rushing back at her, all the joy and shame of her senior year.

Then she straightened up and willed the feelings away. She had to get to work.

Not long after, Mary was sitting in the cozy Development Office, at a spare desk near a turquoise tin of imported almond biscotti, neat piles of the school’s promotional materials, and a coffeemaker. Carolyn Edgar, the development officer, was an attractive middle-aged woman with a warm smile, a chic brush of grayish-blond hair, rimless glasses, and a camel-hair sweater she wore with herring-bone slacks. Mrs. Edgar was new to the school, and her position hadn’t existed when Mary had gone here, before God needed marketing.

“Here we go, dear.” Mrs. Edgar set the two Bishop Neumann yearbooks in front of her, one padded green, with the Crystal and Crossroads crossing over each other like an X, embossed with the old Neumann logo. On top, Mrs. Edgar set a red yearbook that read Goretti Graffiti. “I thought you might like to see yours, too.”

“Good idea.” Mary smiled, though it wasn’t on her agenda. She picked it up and opened to a page of black-and-white photos, big-haired girls in itchy jumpers, recognizing the faces right away. Joyce DelCiotto, Madeline Alessi, and Eileen Duffy, all wearing their NHS pins proudly as a cartoon sheriff wears a badge. “I remember the dress code. Earrings no bigger than a quarter.”

“We still have that rule.”

“Good. I suffered, so should they.” Mary skipped ahead to her own picture in the seniors section. “Oh, no.”

“Everybody says that.” Mrs. Edgar smiled, taking a seat behind her orderly desk and hitting a few keys on the computer.

Mary cringed at the way she used to look. Her eyes were tiny behind thick glasses, her curled hair stiff with hairspray, and her teeth a tangle of braces. It wasn’t until then that she remembered Trish used to call her Tinsel Teeth.

“Why is it you needed those Neumann yearbooks again?” Mrs. Edgar asked, looking through her bifocals at the computer monitor. A large wooden crucifix hung on the cinderblock wall, and behind her were bookshelves and an air conditioner wrapped with a Hefty bag and duct tape.

Mary tried to think of a good reason. “I’m doing a reunion party, and I just want to jot down a few old addresses.”