Vicki Pettersson - The Given

Sipping now, Kit decided she’d tell him enough to assure his help, but she wouldn’t reveal all of her actions, her life, herself. Never that again.

“I located Barbara McCoy about four months ago, though didn’t approach her immediately.”

She let that sit between them, a loaded moment. Barbara had first popped up on Kit’s and Grif’s radar while they were investigating Grif’s murder in 1960. She’d become Barbara DiMartino not long after that by marrying Vegas’s most infamous mobster. Sal DiMartino was up there with the greats—Spilotro, Siegel, Lansky, and Berman. Names that were like royalty in Vegas. “I told her straight out that I was press, though she remained suspicious.”

“Just suspicious?” Grif asked.

She huffed at his knowing look. “Downright rude. Regarded me like I was a fly to be swatted, and looked more than willing to do it herself.”

Kit could usually charm her way into a story with honest gregariousness or genuine interest or effusive charm. She didn’t often elicit a death glare from anyone . . . never mind from a woman close to her eighth decade.

“She finally agreed to meet me in person seven weeks ago. Said she’d had time to suss me out.”

“How?”

“Given her background? I was afraid to ask.”

So they’d met at the Bootlegger Bistro, the successful offshoot of a downtown restaurant that’d been serving Italian-style family fare since 1947. Those recipes and the bistro had moved to the south end of the Strip since then, but the interior paid homage to Vegas’s golden era. “Barbara was seated in the back of the room in a booth all by herself. I knew she was waiting for me, but she watched everyone. The singer crooning Sinatra. The waitstaff, who were wary of her. The bartender. The women.”

Especially the women.

In fact, she’d taken one look at Kit, narrowed her eyes and licked her over-dyed lips, drew in a deep breath of smoke from the mother-of-pearl cigarette holder cocked in her right hand. “You’re not like the other girls, are you?”

“What do you mean?” Kit asked politely, removing her gloves. She’d been especially careful in dressing for the occasion. After all, this woman had actually lived—had thrived—in the era Kit most revered.

“Because you can’t wrap these girls in fur.” She waved her hand in the air and sent ash scattering. “Bacon, maybe, but not fur.”

Kit clenched her jaw but couldn’t risk calling the woman on it and running her off.

“She was bitter,” Kit told Grif, because she knew he’d been wondering about Barbara for so long. He knew that she thought he’d deserved to die fifty years earlier, and she hadn’t changed her mind in the ensuing years. Not that Kit could tell. “She smoked. Said she was dying of emphysema. Said that her neck was draped in pearls, but what she really needed was a pair of good lungs.”

“Why, so she could continue spewing more of her filth?”

That’s exactly what Kit had thought, though she didn’t say it then or now. “You know, it’s not rare to see someone surrounded by so many things still so indelibly unhappy, but it felt like it was more than that. Like she had greater regrets. Things that were so far in her past that she knew she’d never be able to touch them again.”

Grif nodded briefly, not looking at her. Of course, he’d know about that. He swallowed hard. “Did you ask her anything about, you know . . . me?”

Kit wanted to say that it— he— wasn’t why they’d met, though again, she wasn’t ready to share that with Grif. He was just an interloper here, right? A footnote in her past.

“No,” she said, and watched Grif’s jaw turned to granite. “Not the first time.”

His eyes brightened at that, and though braced for it, Kit felt an old emotion break through her shock. One that hardened in an instant, giving her purchase and making her feel like flint. He was still obsessed with the past, she thought, shaking her head. Still so consumed with it that he couldn’t see her sitting right in front of him.

Maybe it’s the lack of light, Kit thought wryly, sipping at her drink.

“So you met more than once.” It wasn’t a question. How else would she have ended up at Barbara’s home?

“Not willingly. She was just so obstinate. One of those people who answered every question with one of her own. I wasn’t going to say anything about you but . . .”

“But?” He had the nerve to look hopeful.

“But she was just so damned nasty,” she said, and it was true. Kit hadn’t done it for him. She didn’t owe Griffin Shaw a thing, and something of her anger must have rolled across her face, because he leaned back like he was giving her space. Not wanting to let on that she needed it, Kit just shrugged. “So I decided to give her a jolt. I spit it out, just to see the look on her face.”

“Griffin Shaw is still alive,” Kit had said then, and watched as Barbara McCoy choked on her martini olive. Kit hid her smile behind her old-fashioned. She was actually matching Barbara drink for drink, a woman’s duel, unspoken as all duels between women are. And now she was winning.

When the choking had subsided and Barbara had wiped her chin and fortified herself with another sip, Kit added, “So is his wife, Evie.”

“Well, I knew that,” Barbara snapped, splashing gin. “But no way is Shaw still alive. No way in hell.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I spit on his corpse myself.”

And she threw back her head and laughed like it was the funniest thing she’d ever said or heard. Laughed like it fed her soul. The sound sawed through the air, and Kit realized she was wrong. This woman wasn’t just bitter. She was vile.

“But now you’re digging up really old corpses,” Barbara said, flaring her eyes. “And you don’t want to do that. Trust me, the boys may not run this town anymore, but they still guard their secrets carefully.”

Kit couldn’t help herself. She was shaking so badly, and she wanted to shake Barbara, too. “But this was no secret. We already know you hated him.”

“We?”

“Grif and me,” Kit said, because they were still united in this at least. A broken heart was one thing; darkness and cruelty and obsession that fed on itself for decades was quite another.

Barbara leaned incrementally closer, her gaze running over Kit’s face like darting fish. Finally her nostrils flared and she pulled back, giving Kit a brand-new head-to-toe appraisal. She took her time studying Kit’s vintage swing coat and scarf. She traced the outline of her cat’s-eye glasses with cold regard, upper lip curling as she took in the matching black eyeliner. She tried on another laugh, but this one didn’t flow as freely. “Why, you got that sheen in your eyes, my girl.”

“What sheen?”

“That hazy-dazy look of love. Don’t tell me . . . you and Shaw ?”

Kit’s mouth firmed into a thin line, saying nothing. Barbara was picturing Grif near the same age as her, an octogenarian battling gout and the ability to stand to his full height. Yet Grif was eternally thirty-three, stronger than this woman could ever imagine, and with wings that rose well above any doorframe to boot.

He also wouldn’t stop until his murderer and his wife were found, though she didn’t tell Barbara that. “He just wants to find Evie Shaw. Truthfully? He wants nothing to do with you.”

And neither did Kit. Not anymore. This woman’s mind was as toxic as stagnant water. No matter what information might be stewing inside of it, the attached lethal tongue could only spread disease.

“Why?” Barbara finally asked.

“Why what?” Kit replied coolly.

“Why does he want to find Evelyn?”

Because he needed closure, but Kit wasn’t going to give Barbara any ammo for that shotgun mouth. So she just shrugged.