Angelina Bonaparte Mysteries Box Set by Nanci Rathbun (surface ebook reader TXT) 📗

already printing them out. He’d apparently heard our exchange. He handed me a file folder with about ten pieces of paper inside. I raised an eyebrow.

“She said ‘records,’ didn’t she?” he asked. “Well, that’s the lot.” We exchanged conspiratorial smiles, both of us knowing that Jane hadn’t intended for me to see all of Elisa’s records.

Chapter 7

While all deception requires secrecy, all secrecy is not meant to deceive.

—Sissela Myrdal Bok

Wearing pantyhose for six hours in the damp heat of a Milwaukee August is inhuman torture. I drove home to change into linen walking shorts and a cotton camisole, topped off with a raw silk jacket. A quick spritz of facial freshener as I slipped bare feet into Prada slides, and I was ready to meet Bobbie at the Blu cocktail lounge on the twenty-third floor of the Pfister hotel.

The Pfister is an old Milwaukee gem, an 1890s Victorian built of local stone and graced with bright red awnings on the sidewalk level. Inside, a permanent art display decorates the walls of the five-star hotel. The builder, Guido Pfister, was a German immigrant who envisioned a “palace for the people.” Guido died before the building was completed, but his son Charles finished the father’s dream. Even today, guests claim they can see the portly, well-dressed Charles patrolling the halls.

The after-work crowd filled the elegant Blu lounge. I stood just inside the doorway and scanned the room. No Bobbie. As my eyes made a second circuit, they passed over a woman at a table for two on the perimeter of the room. The back of her head looked remarkably like my Aunt Teresa’s. Even her shoulders reminded me of Aunt Terry’s, set comfortably square on a rather stocky body. I looked again. Good lord, it was Aunt Terry! And a man! In a bar!

You have to understand my family history to know why this was so extraordinary. My mother died from complications of the flu when I was barely one year old. Papa’s sister Teresa, at the time a novice in the religious order of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, left the convent and moved into our home to take care of us. This was in the fifties, before the feminist movement, and no one in the family seemed to think it strange that a woman destined for a life of “charity, freedom, education and justice,” as the BVM’s core values statement avers, would give up her vocation to keep house for her brother and raise her baby niece.

Aunt Terry never really cut ties with the order, however. She attended Mass at Gesu church every morning and worked with the BVMs who staffed the grade school until it was closed in the sixties. She wore her hair short, declined to use makeup and generally dressed in white, black or gray, with sensible shoes and hose. To my knowledge, she’d never been on a date or even alone with a man who wasn’t part of the family. In short, she looked and acted as if she were still a nun.

Which made seeing her in the Blu lounge with a man akin to seeing the pope slow dancing with a woman in a honky-tonk. I sat at the bar, watching her table in the plate glass window with its spectacular view of the Lake Michigan shore. The guy seated across from her was no one’s prize. I don’t mind bald, but his remaining circle of hair looked greasy as it hung over the collar of his rumpled suit. If you’re going to kick over the traces, Aunt Terry, why not start with someone better looking? On the other hand, maybe all the years of determined singlehood had left her unable to recognize his shortcomings. She obviously needed help.

He left a bill on the table as they rose and he guided her from the room with his hand on her elbow, rather than the small of her back. I angled my head away, still watching the mirror. I didn’t want to embarrass her.

I sipped at my White Russian and waited for Bobbie. A fellow at the end of the bar was trying to catch my eye, but I concentrated on my drink and avoided his stares by watching couples in the mirror. I sometimes play a game while I’m on surveillance—who’s involved, who’s trying to cross the line to involvement, who’s just friends? Of course, I never get to find out the accuracy of my guesses, but it passes the time.

As I scanned the couples in the room, the low-level hum of conversation dropped to silence. Bobbie stood in the entry, all eyes upon his gorgeous face, form and clothes. He spotted me and strode purposefully to the bar, placing a hand on my back as he kissed my cheek. “Nice entrance for a gay guy, huh?” he whispered into my ear.

I smiled. “Every woman in the room wants to be with you. Come to think of it, probably some of the men do, too.”

“You better believe it, honey.” Slipping onto the bar stool next to me, he angled his body toward me and motioned to the bartender. “Bitburger, please.” As he waited for his pilsner, he noted, “There’s a guy at the end of the bar looking very dejected. I can stop acting straight if you want me to.”

“Please, don’t do me any favors. I’ve been studiously avoiding eye contact with him for ten minutes.”

“I didn’t see him as your type.”

“What’s my type?” I was intensely interested in his assessment.

“Sure you want to know?”

“In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say in England. Yes, I want to know.”

He allowed his gaze to travel from my toes to the crown of my head. It was curiously clinical. Then he leaned back and smiled. “You like the younger guys for the thrill, but it doesn’t last. You need an equal, Angie, not someone you can lead or, worse, intimidate. But a woman like you doesn’t find many