Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set) by Blake Banner (read aloud books TXT) 📗

else remarkable happened? Nobody new joined the group? Sue didn’t seem different in any way…?”

He shook his head. “No, no, nothin’ like that. Everything was normal.”

I said, “Who were the people she was closest to, Juan?”

Now he smiled at his coffee. It was a lopsided smile and after a moment, he looked up and met my eye, then Dehan’s. “She like Giorgio. A lot. She use to tell me, ‘Oh, Juan, I am crazy about Giorgio! But he don’t see me at all! Is like I am no here!’” He laughed. “She really upset when Giorgio was comin’ on to the model. I tell her, ‘No! You are wrong! He like you, but he playing hard to get. You should be cool with him!’ But she don’t listen. Until…” He paused for dramatic effect. “Fernando join the group.”

“Who is Fernando?”

“Fernando Martinez. He is an ol’ friend of Giorgio. He is also from Mexico. Women also like him. He is good artist, better than Giorgio in my opinion. So when he is joining the group, Sue is not knowing which way she wanna go: to Giorgio who is ignoring her, or to Fernando who is comin’ on strong?”

I laughed. “So what happened?”

He spread his hands, shrugged and nodded in a way that could only be Mediterranean. “Immediately this happen, Giorgio is all over Sue, and Giorgio and Fernando are competin’ with each other for her attention. It was the stupidest thing I ever seen in my life. They was like fifteen year-old teenagers, you know?”

Dehan drained her cup and set it down on the table, frowning to herself. “When did this happen? How long before she was killed?”

“Oh, very short time, I think like the month before, or two months. I think about it many times because it was sad. He only realize he have to fight for her, when it was too late.”

I examined the dregs of black liquid in my own cup for a moment and asked, without looking up, “Juan, did you ever form an opinion about who might have killed Sue?”

He made a long, ‘pfff…’ noise. “My opinion is only my opinion. You cannot send a man to prison because of my opinion. But, you know this because you are cops, so this is my opinion! People kill for money and sex. I don’t know about any money problems with Sue. Maybe she have them, I am not saying she didn’t have money problems with somebody! I don’t know. I just saying I didn’t know about any. But…” He nodded a lot, using his whole body, “I do know about sex problem, with Fernando and Giorgio. Mexicans, like Spanish, are very jealous people. The night she is kill, she is at a Halloween party with Fernando and Giorgio…” He held up his hands like somebody was pointing a gun at him. “You can take out your own conclusions from this. I don’t wanna say nothin’. But sometimes, when two men are real close, an’ a woman is come between them, they can punish the woman, instead of kill each other.”

“Point taken. Was there anybody else close to her at that time that you noticed?”

“Not that I can remember. Better you ask Giorgio. He still livin’ here, still doin’ the classes.”

I looked at Dehan. She shook her head and turned to Juan.

“Thank you, Juan, you have been very helpful. Stay here in the warm, we’ll see ourselves out.”

As we stood, he watched us a moment. “You openin’ the cold case, huh? I hope you get him. She was nice girl.”

Dehan nodded. “We’ll get him. Don’t you worry.”

We let ourselves out and closed the door behind us, then crossed the long, dark nave toward the gray, icy day outside.

Two

It was walking distance, but with the wind picking up and whipping sleet and tiny shards of ice off the East River, and burying them in our skin like frozen shrapnel, we got in the Jag and drove the two hundred yards to Patterson Avenue. Two right turns and another hundred and fifty yards saw us parked outside something that looked like a giant boathouse. It was tall—four stories tall—and narrow: not more than twenty-five feet across. Like many of the houses in that area, it was clapboard, with a long, sloping, gabled roof and tall, narrow windows on the upper floors. There was a garage facing the street on the first floor, and a flight of ten stone steps led up to a kind of veranda at the side of the house, and what looked like the front door.

Dehan led the way, still stamping and clapping her hands, picked a path through half-carved hunks of tree, and rang on the bell beside the blue door. It was opened after a couple of minutes by a man in his late forties. What had once been thick, curly black hair was now going gray and thinning on top. He had large brown eyes, a heavy moustache and gray stubble on his cheeks. He gazed at Dehan a moment like he was thinking there might be an attractive woman underneath all those clothes. Then he gave me a careful once over, like he was wondering if I would stop him from removing all those clothes. My face and my badge said I would.

“Mr. Gonzalez? Giorgio Gonzalez?”

“Yeah, that’s me. Why?”

There was a trace of an accent. I told him who we were, then added, “We’d like to ask you some questions about Sue Benedict. May we come in?”

He sighed. “Sue?” He looked Dehan over a couple of times and stepped back. “Yeah, why not? Come on in.”

We stepped over the threshold and directly into a large space with wooden floors and a high ceiling. A fire was burning in a huge, six-foot square fireplace with a bare-brick chimneybreast. There were rugs and skins strewn across the