Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #2: Books 5-8 (A Dead Cold Box Set) by Blake Banner (best desktop ebook reader .TXT) 📗

October was feeling too lazy after the long, warm months to move over and let in the cold. The leaves on the trees were turning copper, but were in denial about their age, and the whole of New York was pretending it was still summer. So we decided to walk the half-mile to Commonwealth Avenue at an easy stroll. Along the way Dehan talked.

“So. She lives in the Bronx but she dies in the Rockies. Is that a random event, or is there a direct causal link? Her husband is from Colorado, she claims she is going to see his parents…” She shrugged and spread her hands while making a ‘what can I say?’ face. “Maybe they got on well. She has her own mother here, but maybe she gets on with the in-laws. It’s not common, but it happens. However that may be, the fact that she never turns up has got to raise the question, was visiting the in-laws just an excuse? Was she really going to meet somebody else?”

“That’s two questions.”

“Don’t interrupt me, Stone. I’m having a flow. We need more facts. We need to know, what was her relationship like with the in-laws? Did she meet her husband in Colorado, or here in New York? If it was out there, who else did she meet?”

“Whom.”

“What?”

“Whom else did she meet?”

“Uh-huh… Also, her depression.” She shook her head.

“What about it?”

She sucked air through her teeth. “You can’t generalize, I know, but the normal thing is, if a girl is depressed after childbirth, she turns to her mother. She doesn’t put one and a half thousand miles between herself and her mother. Know what I mean? I mean, if her and the in-laws live that far apart, how close can they be, right?”

“Fair point.”

“So, my gut, which you are always saying I should listen to, is saying this was not a random killing. She was in Colorado not for the in-laws, but for somebody else.” She raised an eyebrow at me. “Cherchez l’homme.”

I smiled. “Unless she was a lesbian. In which case cherchez la femme.”

“Right. Here we are. It’s that one over there.”

It was basically a large, red brick box with a very small patch of garden out front, sitting behind a very large, old chestnut tree. Directly opposite there was a row of much bigger red brick boxes, in the form of a complex of apartment blocks that were probably about a hundred years old. They were surrounded by wrought iron fences that hadn’t stopped kids from spraying the old walls with ugly, uninspired graffiti. They thought of themselves as artists, but most of them seemed capable only of painting their signatures.

I had stopped to look around while Dehan climbed the steps and rang on the bell. It had once been a solid, working-class area. But decades of Don’t Give a Damn had reduced it to a dystopian wilderness where adults hid indoors from a world they no longer understood, while their kids bought into the myth that, in an ugly world, the smartest thing you can do is make it uglier.

The door was opened by a dark, frowning woman in her fifties. Dehan showed her her badge as I climbed the steps.

“Mrs. Vuolo? Melanie Vuolo?”

The woman shook her head. “No, she don’t live here no more. She ain’t lived here for maybe four years.”

Dehan smiled and put her badge away. “Really? Do you know where she’s gone?”

“Yeah, she was buying a place up in Morris Park. I got the address somewhere, to forward her mail.”

She stared at us a moment, while we smiled politely back. Finally I said, “Could you let us have it?”

“Yeah, is nine-twenty, Van Nest. She say is a nice big house, but she never invite me to go see it. She in trouble? I know her daughter died. And the baby was just a few weeks old. That was a big tragedy for her.”

I nodded. “Were you friends?”

“No.”

“Do you know if her son-in-law moved too? Or are they still here?” I glanced at the block behind us.

“No. They all gone together. Whole family.”

Dehan frowned. “The son-in-law moved with the mother?”

“All of them. They all gone together.”

We thanked her for her help and started back up the road toward the station, under the big chestnuts and the lazy blue sky. After a while Dehan said, “Catholics and Jews.”

There wasn’t much I could answer to that so I smiled benignly at the trees instead. She considered me a moment. When she saw I wasn’t going to ask what she meant, she told me anyway. “The whole family thing. With Jews and Catholics, the family acquires an identity all its own, above and beyond the people who constitute it. It’s like a corporation. In law, a corporation has its own, separate identity. Catholic and Jewish families are like that. Each family has its own, unique identity. When a tragedy happens, the family takes over. Something great happens, the family takes over. Birth, marriage, death… the family.”

She paused, stuck her hands in her back pockets and watched her feet moving beneath her. “Kathleen died. If she hadn’t died, she would eventually have become the matriarch, the family figurehead, and people would have said, ‘Oh, she’s just like her mother!’ Instead of that, she died, so her mother took over. And when she moved, I guess she took the whole family with her. Loyalty. Loyalty to the family. It’s a big deal for Catholics and Jews. It can be a thing of beauty, or it can be a nightmare.”

My car is a thing of beauty. It’s a burgundy 1964 Jaguar Mark II, original right-hand drive, 210 bhp. I observed it fondly now as we approached and asked Dehan, “You think that might be relevant?”

She walked around to the passenger