Jennifer Crusie - Agnes and the Hitman

Shane was impressed. “Did your mother teach you to cook?”

“Oh, please,” Agnes said, taking down a knife. “My mother barely ate. She had a waistline to maintain. I didn’t taste butter until my best friend’s mother melted a chunk of it in a pan in front of me right here in this kitchen when I was fourteen. After that, there was no turning back. Any boy with a milk shake and a cheeseburger could have me.”

“That explains Taylor,” Shane said.

“Humor. Har.” Agnes began chopping the pepper with machine gun-like efficiency.

“A catering business. I thought you were a newspaper columnist.”

Agnes shot a guilty glance at her laptop, and kept chopping. “I am. But Taylor wanted the catering business and I wanted Two Rivers. So we bought it from Brenda together. I can write anyplace.”

“Brenda,” Shane said, remembering Joey last night on the phone saying, “the old Fortunato place.”

“Brenda Dupres,” Agnes said, introducing the pepper to the butter. “The Real Estate King’s widow and the closest thing to a mother I ever had. Closer than the one I did have, anyway. She’s the one who fed me butter. Fabulous cook, throws terrific parties, knows-”

“Brenda Fortunato,” Shane said.

“That was before the Real Estate King,” Agnes said. “And before I knew her. Mr. Fortunato was sleeping with the fishes by the time Lisa Livia brought me home with her.”

Cousin Lisa Livia. Vague memories of an intense dark-haired girl time back. And Aunt Brenda. Good food, he remembered. Fancier than Joey’s, but that was before Joey had sent him to military school and everything in his old life had stopped like a slammed door.

Fuck that. He inhaled the melting butter and put his mind back on the problem at hand. “But this wedding will be Fortunato not Dupres. The bride’s mother is a Fortunato.”

“Lisa Livia? Yes.”

“What about her father?”

Agnes hesitated and then said, “He’s not around. LL never married him, so Maria’s a Fortunato, too.”

Great. All Fortunatos, all the time. “What happened to him?”

“Nobody knows,” Agnes said, turning away. “He was a bad choice. Twenty-seven-year-old wiseguy meets an eighteen-year-old high school senior. Lisa Livia went bananas for him until she caught him cheating. Then she went off on him and he hit her and that was it for LL.”

Shane felt pretty certain he was missing something. “That was it?”

Agnes nodded. “I had a scholarship to a college in Ohio, and we were graduating, so she decided to come with me. Johnny disappeared and we went to Ohio and Maria was born. The two of us raised her together until she was three and LL’s boss moved his company west and she went with him. It about broke my heart when they left.”

She looked bereft for a moment, and Shane wondered how many times people had left Agnes and how the hell she had the courage to keep inviting them back into her life. Once had been enough for him. “And nobody ever found out what happened to Johnny?”

Agnes turned back to the sink. “Nobody looked too hard. You could say he was a missing person who nobody missed at all.”

He was definitely missing something, but since it had happened eighteen years ago, it wasn’t something he cared about. “How many people are coming?”

“Not that many. About a hundred.”

“That’s a lot. And half of them are from Maria’s side of the family, right? Fifty Fortunatos? And Maria’s father’s family?”

“Maria’s father is not around. It’s just the Fortunatos. But it’s not like you think. I know Maria. She’s not a mob princess. Lisa Livia raised her away from all that. She’s just a nineteen-year-old girl in love with a preppie golf course designer who’s got more money than God, and they’re going to have a nice wedding on my lawn and then go have babies dressed in Ralph Lauren. Nobody will be kissing the Godfather’s ring or whatever the hell that is. He’s going to have cake like everybody else and then leave.”

Shane went very still. “The Don. Michael Fortunato. He’s coming?”

“He’s Maria’s great-uncle, of course he’s coming.”

Shane rubbed his head. Fucking Joey. “You didn’t mention that.”

“Shane, I don’t think the kid last night wanted to take Rhett because the Don is coming. The Don’s never even met Rhett. They don’t move in the same circles.”

Shane took a deep breath, but then the coffeemaker beeped, and he took a Cranky Agnes mug from a hook under the cabinet and poured out a cup, deciding he’d said enough. “Coffee?”

Agnes looked over at his cup. “That looks like mud.”

“I like it strong.” He sipped the brew, heartened by the way it reached up into his brain and pressed go, and then he took his cup back to his seat at the counter, where he had a better view of Agnes, which was the only thing about this mess that was any good at all.

So there was another question for Joey. After You know anything about that old mob gun at Agnes’s, Joey? and You acquainted with that Thibault family, Joey? and Why did you ask Agnes about Rhett, Joey? he was definitely going to mention You think maybe the Don coming has something to do with this, Joey? Jesus. “Okay, anything else happen this week you want to tell me?”

“Nope.” Agnes stirred the red pepper in the butter, and the smell made Shane dizzy, sharp and sweet and pungent. I want eggs, he thought, and tried to get his mind back on the job.

“Think harder,” he said. “Anything this week that was out of the ordinary?”

“Sure, lots.”

Agnes was driving him crazy with the buttery pepper and sausage smells. She frowned down at the pan as she talked, her cheeks flushed from the heat from the pan, her sweats sticking to her with the humidity, and that wasn’t helping his concentration, either.

“The baker quit yesterday, so I’m making a wedding cake,” she was saying, “Golf Magazine did a rave article on Palmer’s latest golf course, the Flamingo, calling him a genius of green design, and he’s only twenty-eight, so we’re all very proud. Doyle told me I was going to have to replace the driveway bridge pretty soon or learn to swim, and I told him I have no money and to shore it up with whatever fell off the house next.”

“Doyle?”

“Handyman.” Agnes peered over her steamed-up glasses at the pepper. “I moved in and he showed up.” Shane focused. “How long ago?”

Agnes used the back of her hand to push her glasses back up her nose. “About three months. I don’t think he’s spent them sneaking up on Rhett, if that’s what you’re getting at.” She tipped the eggs into the pepper and butter and then picked up the pan, tilting it so that the egg covered the bottom. Then she looked up. “Listen, nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Well, except for the kid with the gun. And you.”

The phone rang and she answered it. “Good morning, Reverend Miller. Yes, I’m sure Maria’s a good Christian girl. What?” Agnes scowled, her face twisting behind those big red-rimmed glasses. “Of course she’s been baptized-she’s a Catholic. Yes, I know for sure, I’m her godmother, I was there.” She listened another moment, shaking her head the entire time. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Right. You bet. You’re welcome. See you Saturday. Good-bye.” She hung up and said, “Moron,” and turned back to her eggs.

Shane decided to let that conversation pass. “Okay, let’s go back to the dog. How many people know Rhett is here?”

“Anybody who read the flyers I put up when I found him on the front porch. Anybody who’s been outhere in the past four months. Anybody who gets the County Clarion.” She stuck a spatula under the slowly cooking egg and lifted it so that the uncooked stuff ran underneath it, concentrating on it as if it were the most important thing in the world.