A Match Made for Murder by Iona Whishaw (top 10 best books of all time txt) 📗

comforted by the redolence of stale cigarettes and liquor that spoke of the restaurant’s popularity. He lit up a Fonseca cigar and leaned back in his desk chair and contemplated the ceiling.

He’d have to lie low for a bit and not move any money around—he’d have to lie low for a bit, period. He was pretty sure he’d closed the tap at the nursing home. His man on the inside had taken care of the other. The only fly in his ointment, really, was his wife. He always hated this part of the business—her being with someone else. Of course, she was loyal as loyal as could be and always glad to be back with him, and maybe he shouldn’t be going out to see her as much as he did. He was doing it more than he had in the past. He should stop. It was just making him mad.

The knock on the door made him jump. “What?” he barked.

Hidalgo came in and shuffled in front of the desk.

“Spit it out,” Griffin said. “You have something to report?”

Opening his notebook, Hidalgo began to read. “At two forty-five today, a cab pulled up to the back gate—that one you go to, sir. A young man in a white suit got out, entered, and approximately ten minutes later emerged with Mrs. Holden, your good wife, sir, and entered the cab. They drove east and then turned south at the corner.”

“Come again?” Griffin said, leaning forward.

“At two forty-five, a cab pulled up—”

“I heard you, you moron!” Griffin shouted, standing up. He began to pace behind his desk, and then wheeled on his henchman. “It didn’t occur to you to jump in that car I provided and see where the hell they were going, I don’t suppose.”

Hidalgo gulped. “I thought it might be something to do with you, you know, like you’d sent someone to pick her up.”

“Is it likely I’d send an oily, overdressed gigolo to pick up my wife?”

Hidalgo could think of no safe answer.

“I’m surrounded by idiots! You go back out there, and you follow next time that happens. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

Hidalgo drove back to the street around the corner from the hotel and parked, and then sat and lit a cigarette, relieved to be out of the storm front in his boss’s office. And there was a lot to think about. If the man in the white suit wasn’t one of Mr. Griffin’s men, who was he? He tried to remember what he’d seen between them in the brief period between her coming through the gate and getting into the cab. Was she running something on her own? He smiled briefly at the thought of Mr. Griffin getting bested at his own game by his own dame. He was aware that his admiration for her had been growing, just on the basis of her looks, but this thought of her on the make behind her husband’s back made him almost proud.

Before dinner, hotel management invited guests to watch the sunset from the roof of one of the buildings while staff served drinks. Darling and Lane, along with Ivy and Jack Renwick, stood looking west, holding martinis. The sky overhead seemed huge, and Lane could imagine the turning of the earth away from the sun. Bands of orange and gold stretched across the sky over the distant Tucson Mountains. As the sky darkened, the temperature dropped. Lane was glad of the cardigan she’d brought. She noticed some of the other women wearing shawls, elegantly slung across their shoulders. I must look into that, she thought.

Ivy Renwick, like Lane, was wearing a cardigan. “I never tire of the sunsets here,” she said. “I mean, the sun goes down in Winnebago County, too, but it’s just not the same. Of course, I don’t usually have a martini in hand, either. I’m usually in an apron making Jack’s dinner!”

“She makes a fine dinner, my Ivy,” Jack said, putting his arm around his wife’s shoulders. “I’m getting cold. What say?”

“Yes, do let’s go down,” Lane said. “I’m famished, though I’ve done nothing all day but lie around.”

“I love your accent,” Ivy said, as they came down the outside stairs to the poolside patio. “It’s very sophisticated.”

At their table, the waiter startled Lane by taking up her napkin and placing it on her lap for her. She glanced at Darling, and then looked away, afraid she would laugh at his discomfiture.

“Tell me, Fred, what do you do up in Canada?”

“I’m a police inspector in our tiny little town. You?”

Jack sat back and smiled. “I just got made president and chairman of my electronics company. I mean, it wasn’t meant to be mine, really, but when my dad died, he left me in charge. I just concluded a big contract with a local hotel that is adding a big convention centre.” He looked down, turning his fork over and over, and then sighed; he seemed to be considering his next words. “I’m lucky, I guess, but it’s sort of at my older brother’s expense. He was supposed to be the one to take over the company, but he came out of the war a little funny, and I guess Dad didn’t want to put him in charge. Honestly, I don’t know how to square it, in some ways. All my life he’s been the one. I was just going to go into engineering, maybe start a small firm of my own. The war changed everything.”

“What about you?” Lane asked quietly, turning to Ivy, surprised by what looked like a momentary flash of . . . flash of what, anxiety perhaps, on Ivy’s face as she watched her husband talking. But it disappeared as she spoke.

“Well, I’m obviously a housewife now, since we married, though in the war I taught wire communications. That’s how I met Jack originally; his dad’s company hired me to coordinate the communications offices. He was a nobody then. His dad believed in starting his sons on the factory floor.” She laughed