Melissa Bourbon Ramirez - Lola Cruz 01 - Living the Vida Lola (26 page)

She straightened, her own tiger eyes suddenly glowing. “I can’t see my dad denying Emily money if she’d asked. Something went down between them, but I think he still cared about her. And if it would have helped Sean…”

She trailed off, and I felt for her. She wanted to believe the best about her dad, but at the moment, she didn’t know how. I let Mary talk, still looking for that big break—that moment of clarity—but it didn’t come. “And your mother?”

“My mom passed away a few years ago.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” So much for Emily threatening to tell Bonatee’s wife about Sean. “Did you ever tell Emily you knew who Sean’s father was?”

She shook her head. “I wanted to, but I—I just couldn’t.
My dad didn’t tell me, so I wasn’t going to be the one to bring it up.”

So Sean was a gigantic white elephant standing between Mary and her father. “Your dad said you went to kindergarten with Emily’s daughter. Does she still call? Do you still talk?”

She looked uncomfortable. Almost guilty. “Sometimes. We drifted apart.”

“Why?”

She paused as if she were considering how to answer that. “We have a friend who works at a tattoo place,” she finally said. “Ally started getting tattoos, kind of obsessively—then her brother got a few. They all started doing ecstasy and smoking pot. It wasn’t my thing, so I stepped back.”

Smart girl. “Did Allison know your dad and Emily had an affair?” I asked.

Mary’s black hair stayed perfectly in place as she nodded her head. “Oh yeah, she knew. We were both horrified. We used to stay up at night and talk about it.” Her eyes darkened. “But she never told me about Sean.”

I remembered how Allison had flung herself out of my car in order to see her younger brother. Her words hurtled through my mind. “She shouldn’t have kept Sean from his dad,” she’d said. That secret had driven a wedge between Emily and her daughter, but
why
Emily kept Sean to herself might always be a mystery. Maybe Lucy had been right and the secret had been fueled by fear that Bonatee would win a custody battle if it came down to it.

I went back to Emily’s obsession. “Did she talk about Garrett’s death?”

“Not much. She hated how he’d changed. How he’d been influenced by Ally and had started getting tattoos and doing drugs. It seemed better not to talk about it.”

She’d said the magic word—
tattoos
—and I jumped. “What did you think of his tattoos?”

She frowned. “One was a cross. It was okay. A little big. One was a yin/yang. It wasn’t as good. Kind of small, and the black smeared into the white.” She thought for a second. “I can’t remember the others—Oh! He gave himself one. It was new, I think. I saw it at the funeral. It was on the top of his hand.” She shuddered. “It looked awful. Pretty rough.”

“How do you know he gave it to himself?”

“Ally told me. This guy we know showed Garrett how to do it. Apparently it’s supposed to look like—” She made air quotes with her fingers. “—a ‘prison tattoo.’ ”

“Huh,” I said, but inside I cheered. This corroborated Emily’s suspicions and what Zod had said. It didn’t point a finger at the killer, but with the doctor’s statement that a tattoo
could
actually cause a heart infection, it seemed like Emily had been right about Garrett’s death. “What did Emily think of the tattoo?”

Mary’s eyebrows pinched together as she thought. “I think she blamed Ally for getting Garrett into all that stuff. They never got along, but Garrett was like the final nail in the coffin.”

I asked a few more questions, but Mary had nothing else to offer. “Can I take some of Sean’s things to him?” I asked, remembering the other reason I’d come.

She nodded. “My roommate came back. I packed Sean’s stuff up so she could get settled again.”

Ah. Now I noticed two produce boxes sitting off to one side. I chided myself for not spotting them earlier. Notice the details. It’s what any good PI did. How many years did I have to have under my belt before I didn’t feel like a rookie anymore?

I picked up the box with a baseball bat sticking out the top. Mary followed me outside with the other. “Mary,” I said,
nudging my box into the back of my car, a sudden thought occurring to me. “Was your dad seeing anyone before Emily showed up?”

Her lips thinned, and she squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. “He’s always dated on and off.”

“Anyone particular?”

She hesitated for a second, and I thought she was going to clam up. “Maybe. I went to his office a couple weeks ago. He was with someone.” Her voice broke. “It seemed like they were—” She hesitated. “—pretty close.”

“Do you know who it was?” I asked, probably a bit too eagerly.

“No.”

“What were they talking about?”

“I didn’t hear much. The woman was sort of crying. He was telling her that it wasn’t her fault and that everything would be all right. Then he said that they weren’t meant to be together, and she started crying more. That’s when I left.”

Mary helped me load the boxes with Sean’s stuff into my car, and I drove away. My cell phone, barely audible, played “La Bamba” before I’d gotten out of her neighborhood.

I flipped it open. “This is Dolores.”

“I got your corporation for you,” Sadie said. Her voice was completely professional. I had a feeling Manny wasn’t around, since his presence seemed to send her off the deep end.

“Okay.”

“Not over the phone. Come into the office, and we’ll talk.”

It was all about control with her. She wanted to be the boss. “It’s not like my phone’s bugged, Sadie.”

Click. She hung up on me. “Fine,” I barked at the phone. “I’m on my way.”

Ten minutes later I walked through the banal lobby of Camacho and Associates and into the meeting room. Reilly gave
me a dopey, lovesick look. I hadn’t had the chance to talk to her since I’d left her at Denny’s.
Pobrecita
. I hoped Antonio wouldn’t break her heart too badly.

I hurried past her with a quick smile and stood next to Sadie in front of the whiteboard where I’d recorded all my case notes. My nostrils flared when I saw she’d changed the timeline. Damn it. How dare she butt in.

Then I gasped at what she’d added.

•
Ryan Case and George Bonatee, owners of My Place, Just Because, and Tattoo Haven. Corporation name: B.C. Incorporated

•
Businesses managed by Muriel O’Brien

•
Todd Case is tattoo artist at Tattoo Haven, son of Ryan Case

“No, the tattoo guy’s name was—” I slapped my hand over my mouth. Todd. Zod. The photograph I’d seen of the Case family in the newspaper appeared in my mind. If the clean-cut kid in the picture was the pierced and tattooed Zod, that was some transformation.

Sadie shuffled and took a step closer. One side of her mouth curved up. “Vital information, right, Sherlock?”

I let the nickname go. “The tattoo guy at Tattoo Haven is Ryan Case’s son. Bonatee and Case own the businesses… .” My mind reeled back to something Mary had said when I’d first met her. Her roommate’s name had been Joanie. As in Case. I’d been so wrapped up with learning about Garrett and the tattoo he’d done on himself that the name hadn’t registered. It wasn’t just Allison and Zod that knew each other, and it wasn’t just the Diggs and the Bonatees that were connected. It looked like the Cases were old friends, too.

My questions were whether or not the assemblyman believed Emily’s claim that Garrett died from a heart infection
that stemmed from a tattoo, and whether or not he knew that Todd had taught Garrett how to tattoo himself. “Are you sure about this?” I asked, feeling new respect for Emily and the mission I thought she’d been on.

“Positive.”

Sadie’s smug attitude didn’t even bug me at the moment. I was too busy being surprised by the fact that George Bonatee was part owner of the tattoo shop. If Emily had come to him for help, it was like the gingerbread boy asking the wolf to get her across the river. By helping her pursue a case against Tattoo Haven, he’d have implicated himself as a responsible party.

Sadie leaned her backside against the table with her ankles crossed, watching me. “Epiphany?”

“Sort of,” I answered. “This helps, thanks.”

Sadie frowned, her eyebrows pinched in confusion. She wasn’t in the practice of saying thank you to anyone, and I didn’t often say it to her. “You’re welcome,” she murmured, as if she couldn’t quite say the words at full volume.

She ambled to the whiteboard and studied it, still looking puzzled. I couldn’t take pleasure in flustering her right now. I needed to reflect on how intertwined Bonatee and Case were. I ticked the connections off on my fingers.

1. Bonatee and Case were partners in three small businesses.

2. Case’s son showed Garrett how to tattoo himself, the same tattoo that was potentially responsible for Bonatee’s ex-lover’s son’s death. That was big.

3. I mulled. Joanie, Case’s daughter, lived in the house Bonatee owned and was friends with Mary, and Todd Case had to be the tattoo guy Mary had referred to.

4. My mind was blank, and I couldn’t come up with a fourth connection.

I didn’t need another one. Three was enough.

I didn’t know what any of it meant yet, but things were starting to make sense. Sort of.

Manny sauntered out of his office, his limp altering the thud of his boots against the carpet. Sadie’s body reacted to the sound of his approach, her spine almost crackling as it straightened. She stood tall, all five feet three inches of her.

He leaned back against the conference table, crossing his ankles and posed exactly as Sadie had been a few minutes ago. Her expression grew tight as she turned around to face him.
“Boss.”

He nodded stiffly at her then turned to me, his gaze slow and steady.

I swallowed, uncomfortable under the scrutiny.

“Fill me in—” He paused, and I thought he sent a coded look toward Sadie. “—
poderosa.”
My eyes crossed. He’d called me “strong woman” just to irk her. These two were ready to do covert battle, and I was a pawn. What the hell was
that
about?

Sadie seethed. She sure as hell didn’t know what Manny’d called me, but whatever tone she’d heard in his voice was apparently enough to piss her off. She fixed her steely eyes on him, then at me. “Yes. Come on, detective. Fill
the boss
in.”

I should have taken my pleasure in throwing her off balance earlier, because now the tables had turned again, and she wasn’t going to be placated by my thanking her. I worked to keep my tone even and explained the latest developments to Manny, ending with the surprise connection between the Case, Diggs, and Bonatee families.

He rubbed his thumb over the cleft in his chin and summarized. “So, presumably, Emily thought her son died as a result of a tattoo given by Todd Case, but most likely cause of death was directly related to the tattoo he gave himself.”

I nodded. “Right.”

“And the death-by-tattoo thing can really happen?”

“Apparently it can, although it’s not common. Most likely there had to have been some underlying heart condition”—just like Bonatee had said Garrett had—“in order for an infection to take hold.”

Manny’s gaze didn’t waver. “So what now?”

“If Emily went to Bonatee for help and
if
she figured out that he and Case owned the tattoo place, she may have tried to appeal to their compassion. If that’s the case, she walked into a minefield instead.”
Ah!
Another blackmail theory struck. “She obviously wanted somebody held responsible for Garrett’s death. Maybe she decided to use Sean as leverage. She could have introduced Bonatee to him and then threatened to take him away if he didn’t help her. But if Bonatee didn’t want to help her, then Emily was a liability to him.”

“We need to tag-team Bonatee and Case,” Sadie said. “I’ll take one, and Dolores can take the other.”

Manny turned to her. “No.”

“No?” She tensed, a vein popping on her forehead.

“I said no. Dolores has already established contact. She’ll continue her own way.”

My cell phone blared from the depths of my purse. I grabbed for it, almost deaf from the suddenly high volume but content to let Sadie and Manny duke out whether or not I needed help. “Hello?”

“Lola?” Jack’s voice on the other end of the line threw me off-kilter.

“Jack. Hi.” I sensed Manny’s attention shift. His intense gaze was on me. I moved to the corner and turned my back on him and Sadie.

“You there? Hello?” Jack said.

“I’m here.” Just the sound of his voice shot my blood pressure
sky high. If salsa dancing were sex, I’d be completely ruined for any other man.

“You busy?”

“I’m at work.”

“I’ll be quick, then. Dinner. Tonight. My place.”

Be still my heart. Could I wait that long? I turned my head and dropped my voice. “You’re going to cook?”

“Yep.”

Ooh, I couldn’t remember the last time a man cooked for me. “And you’re not going to run out on me before dessert?” I asked coyly, only slightly embarrassed at my nerve.

“Dessert is going to be better than the main course, and there’s no way I’d miss it,” he said, his voice laden with innuendo. “Seven o’clock.” And he hung up.

I slipped my phone back in my purse, smiling to myself. I was already counting the minutes.

Reilly spun around on her chair, her eyes saucer wide, as I came back into the main room. She’d been so quiet, I’d forgotten she was there. “He’s seriously cooking for you?” she whispered. “And dessert, too? So cool, though not surprising after seeing you two dance last night. Do you think Antonio would make me a meal?”

I bugged my eyes, trying to signal her to stop, but she just kept blabbing. “He sure did warm up to me,” she said. “Ordered me extra waffles.”

“Reilly,” I snapped when I could get a word in. “Not now.”

She flicked her gaze to Manny and Sadie, clamped her mouth shut, and zipped her lips before spinning her chair back to face her computer.

Manny’s look turned dark and angry, and Sadie’s matched it. Neil lumbered into the room from the direction of his lair. He dropped a computer printout on the table. “The ex-wife is definitely dead,” he said to me.