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

couldn’t see any way to avoid it and still keep my word to Gracie. Crap.

Chapter 4

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there.

—Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

At noon, I drove over to the Milwaukee County Criminal Justice Facility—the jail. In my experience, those who wear uniforms respect others in uniform, so I wore my best business attire—green pinstriped navy blue skirted Nine West suit, plain white button-up blouse, plain hosiery, low-heeled navy pumps. After seeing a female attorney humiliated by having to remove her bra in order to pass through the metal detector, I now took care to only wear a sports bra for jail visits, one with no metal hooks, eyes or underwires. I waited for Tony in one of several interrogation rooms. I’m not really intuitive, except where my kids are concerned, but these rooms always evoked feelings of desperation, fear and anger. The smell of bodily secretions was palpable.

I stood when the door opened and Tony entered, escorted by a jail deputy. Tony still wore the clothes he’d hustled into when the cops came to the house in the middle of the night, and his hands were handcuffed behind his back. The deputy unlocked the handcuffs and gestured Tony toward a chair. “Ring when you’re ready to leave,” she told me, and pulled the door closed as she left.

I gestured at a chair across from me, and Tony slumped into it. “Do you remember me, Tony? Angelina Bonaparte?”

“Yeah, I know you. Your old man runs Bonaparte’s Fruits and Vegetables, right?”

“Right. I’m a P.I.” Bart had told me that Tony and Gracie had a heart-to-heart last night, before the arrest, so I thought I might as well lay my cards on the table. “Gracie hired me to find out if you’d been cheating on her after she found the credit card items. I’ve done some work for Bart Matthews in the past, so when the cops showed up at your door, Gracie and Bart agreed to hire me to help clear you.”

He just stared at me. The cops had picked him up and booked him at about two in the morning. He’d been parked in one of the forty-eight bed “housing pods” for ten hours. His hair was sticking up at crazy angles, his eyes were bloodshot, his beard was a shadow of stubble, black mixed with gray. In short, he looked like hell. I waited.

“Can I call you Angie?” he finally asked.

“Sure.”

“Angie, I didn’t do this thing.” He leaned across the table, put his right hand on his chest and held my gaze. “I swear, I didn’t kill her. We hadn’t even seen each other for three days.”

“But you were making it, right?”

“Yeah.” He ran his hands through his hair. “But that doesn’t mean I killed her.” He looked down at the table as he continued. “It wasn’t a romance, not for either of us. It was just a sideline for me and a business proposition for her. She never expected more than some presents and a nice time while it lasted.”

“You sure about that, Tony? Women have a way of getting involved even when they know it doesn’t make sense.”

“Not Elisa. She was pretty, she was fun, she was good in bed, okay? She had a way of making you feel more important, more manly, than you knew you really were. But deep down, she was only out for herself. Like when she opened a present, you could almost hear the calculator working.”

And you found this attractive enough to betray your family? My emotional danger bells started to ping. “Did she see other men, or just you?”

“Hell, I was paying for the apartment, all the expenses, gave her an allowance. She damn well better not have been seeing anyone else.”

Did he really believe that he could buy loyalty? That his money guaranteed her faithfulness? Especially since the relationship was founded on his own adultery. Denial reigns, I thought. “Okay, let’s start at the beginning. When and where did you meet?”

“It was last March. She was a receptionist at Dunwoodie’s—they handle my real estate insurance. I went in to meet with John Dunwoodie, and there’s this stunner sitting at the front desk. We flirted a little, you know, while I waited for John to get off a call. Then afterwards, I asked her out to lunch.”

The little mental pings grew louder. I didn’t say anything, but my disgust must have shown on my face.

“Look, the new baby was making Gracie sick every morning and tired every night. I just wanted someone to enjoy some time with. I’m not proud of it.”

“You know, if you walk away from this, you better think twice about how you behave. A stay-at-home wife and mother of five could get a whole lot of your personal income, and I know how to find it for her.”

He blanched at that and leaned back in his chair. “Hey, it won’t happen again. I already promised Gracie.”

“Did it ever happen before Elisa?”

“Once, just once, a lot of years ago.” Tony squirmed in his seat, refusing to meet my eyes.

Probably a lie, I thought, but I decided to get back on track. “After your lunch with Elisa, then what?”

“We went out for a couple of dinners, dancing. She complained that Dunwoodie’s wasn’t a very nice place to work, that John’s wife, Jane—you know she’s a partner?—was always on Elisa’s case and Elisa couldn’t do anything right. So I offered her a job managing the Concord Building.”

“Was she qualified?”

“All she had to do was collect the rent checks and make a call if something broke down. I advertise that there’s an on-site manager, but