Unbinding Love: An Angela Panther Mystery Novella (The Angela Panther Mystery Series) (6 page)

Ma hovered next to Mel, eyes wide, nodding repeatedly. “Yeah, I remember mine. Wasn’t all that and a bag a chips, you ask me. Kinda a let down.”

I realized where Mel was going with her question, but opening the trunk and finding the envelope wasn’t the same as losing my virginity. “Not a valid comparison.” I flipped the small white envelope in my hand. I almost made a crack about the flimsy envelope and my high school sweetheart but couldn’t bring myself to knock him, the memories too sweet to stain with sarcasm.

“Well, whadda you waitin’ for?” Ma asked. “Open the darn thing.”

I glanced at Bill. He simply shrugged, so I carefully opened it and pulled out a single piece of paper. “Ten twenty-five.”

Mel tilted her head. “Huh?”

I showed her the paper. “That’s what it says. Ten twenty-five.”

I held the paper to Bill. “What’s it mean? Any idea?”

He shook his head. “Not a clue.”

“Well that’s what it is,” Ma said. “A clue.”

“I think you’re right,” I said.

“Who’s right?” Mel asked.

“Ma thinks it’s a clue.”

“A clue to what though?”

I shrugged. “No clue.” I glanced at Bill. “It’s got to mean something. Think about it. Ten-twenty-five.”

He shrugged. “I just don’t know.”

“An anniversary?” Mel asked.

When Bill shook his head, I shook mine too.

“Birthday?” Ma asked.

“Not a birthday either,” I told Mel. “Bank code?”

Another head shake from Bill.

“Garage code?” Mel asked.

“Part of a license plate?” I asked.

Bill just kept shaking his head.

After running through every possible option without success, we gave up. I needed to get Mel home to ice her sprained ankle anyway.

I played interpreter on the ride home, filling Mel in on what Bill and my mother said.

“We need to tell Aaron,” she said.

“Jesus Hernandez,” I said.

“The Mexican Mafia man?” Mel asked. “What about him?”

“Maybe the number has something to do with him?”

“Like a case file or something?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Call Aaron.”

She put him on speaker and we gave him the 411.

“You need to go to the ER,” he said. “Your ankle could be broken.”

I rolled my eyes. Boyfriend had taken precedence over detective. I made a mental note to tease the crap out of him about that.

“It’s not broken,” she said. “Just sprained.”

“And that’s not the point of the call,” I added. “The point is the numbers. Ten-twenty-five. It’s a clue, Aaron. At least we think it is.”

“First, let’s discuss the breaking and entering, into the crime scene of an active investigation, nonetheless.”

My eyes met Mel’s.

“Ouch,” she said. “Maybe I should go to the hospital. My ankle really hurts.”

I gave her a thumbs up.

“Nice try, babe,” Aaron said.

I flipped my thumb down.

“Do you know what kind of trouble you could be in for this?” he asked.

“First of all, we did not break in,” I said. “The door was unlocked. And we didn’t disrupt anything—“

“Except for the trunk,” Mel interrupted.

I gave her my death stare. “You’re not helpful.”

She shrugged.

“Do I want to know how you knew to check the trunk?” Aaron asked.

“I’m guessin’ you already know the answer to that question,” I said.

“I’d prefer the answer be Emma Marx.”

“You and me both,” I said. “But then we wouldn’t need to decipher the code, would we?”

We ran through the gamut of options for what the numbers meant, and Aaron said he’d check on a few. It wasn’t a guarantee of finding the money, but at least it was a start.

“And by the way, why did your guys leave her house in that kind of mess? That was kind of rude.” I asked.

“What kind of mess?”

I explained the condition of Emma’s house to Aaron and he let out a stream of curse words that definitely made up for the ones he’d not used since he’d tried to stop swearing.

“We didn’t leave the house in any kind of mess. Someone else has been there. I gotta go.”

And that was the end of that conversation.

I dropped Mel off at her place and set her up with a bag of ice and eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen.

“I’d love a tall, non-fat, with whip mocha,” she said.

“And they’d like ice water in Hades, too,” I said, heading toward her front door.

“You suck at being a best friend,” she yelled my direction.

“Not the first time I’ve heard that.” I shut the door behind me.

On the short drive home my mother and Bill rambled on.

“Who do you think did that to her house?” Ma asked.

“Probably Jesus,” Bill said.

“Boy’s got no manners. You don’t leave a mess in a woman’s house. You visit, you clean up after yourself.”

“I don’t think he was there to visit, Ma,” I said.

“It don’t matter, it’s still rude.”

I didn’t bother. Sometimes it just wasn’t worth messing with her old school way of thinking. “What do you think the numbers mean? Could it be a password for something?”

“Josh says you gotta have passwords for everything these days. Maybe it’s for that thing-a-ma-jig your son plays?” Ma asked.

“I think she means his XBOX or whatever it is he plays.”

“It’s an XBOX,” he said. “And I hadn’t thought about that.”

“There’s one way to find out,” Ma said, and then she was gone.

“She does that often, doesn’t she?” Bill asked.

“More than I like.”

He gave me a head nod and disappeared too.

“And then there was one,” I said to my empty car.

Several hours later I sat on my couch, thoughts of Emma Marx, her son Justin, and the rest of the case keeping me from sleep. I reviewed what I knew, which I realized wasn’t much. Bill Marx had been killed walking out of court after giving up the bad guys. The family had been put in WITSEC. Bill saved a little of the money he’d laundered for the bad guys, and Emma hid it after his death. Emma gets an envelope from who knows who, with who knows what in it, ships her kid off to her mother’s house, gets drunker than a skunk, claims the kid went missing, and then takes a tumble down her stairs to her death. Some time in the midst of that—or not, I wasn’t sure—she leaves a clue in the false bottom of a trunk. Ten-twenty-five.

What I didn’t know was a heck of a lot more than what I knew.

I grabbed a Diet Coke from the fridge and headed to the basement. Everyone was asleep and I needed to have a powwow with my mother, and I didn’t want to wake them, nor did I want my daughter Emily to hear me talking to my dead mother. Emily didn’t know I had the gift and I didn’t want her to find out. Because she had some freaky celestial spirit sixth sense, she was already floating down there when I flipped on the light.

“Boo.”

I rolled my eyes. “Nice try.”

She shrugged. “Drat. I coulda used a good laugh.”

I stumbled backward, clutched my chest, and squealed. “Oh my stars, a ghost! Whatever should I do?”

“What’s the point a bein’ a ghost if I can’t haunt the ones I love?”

“You do--my brothers.”

“There is that, and I gotta say, that’s a lotta fun.”

An image of John and Paul seeing something they couldn’t explain popped into my head, and I giggled. “Yeah, I bet it is.”

“So whadda need?” she asked.

“It’s creepy how you know when I need you.” I plopped onto the couch, but not before moving a handful of chick-flick DVDs my daughter had left stacked on the cushion.

“I’m your mother. I know you like I know a good meatball.”

I ignored the fact that my mother had just compared me to a mixed ball of cow and pig. There was a joke in there somewhere, I was sure of it. “Something doesn’t fit. I’m missing something.”

I went over what I knew again, except before I finished, the light bulb over my head flashed. “Bill was killed leaving the court-house.”

“Yeah. That’s what he said.”

“After he testified.”

“Yeah.”

“
After
.”

I could almost see the light bulb go on over my mother’s head, too.

“Why would they kill him after he testified against them and not before?”

I nodded. “Because the people he testified against weren’t the ones that killed him.”

She nodded, too. “Yeah, I’m onto something here.” She turned in circles, her feet just barely hovering above the floor.

“Uh, excuse me? I’m the one that said it, not you.”

“Yeah, but I was thinkin’ it first. I just pushed you in the right direction.”

Good grief. Why did I even bother? “So if wasn’t the people he’d testified against, who was it?”

“Ain’t that the million dollar question?”

More like the two million dollar question. “Where’s Bill?”

“How should I know? I ain’t his babysitter. Call him.”

“Ugh. Fine. Bill? Hell-ooo?” I waited a few seconds and when he didn’t appear, I tried again. “Hola, Bill? Eh, uh, Dan?” I thought using his real name might help.

“I heard you when you said ‘Bill.’ Like I said, I’ve grown accustomed to it. It’s funny how that happens, actually. I guess names aren’t as important as we think.”

I waved my hand in the air. “We’ll talk about that later—or not—who wants the money?”

He stared at me, his brows furrowed. “I don’t know.”

My mother chimed in. “You work for someone else? Someone you didn’t give up to the po po?”

Remnants of ghosts from my recent past along—with my mother rapping—flitted through my head when she said po po. “Who killed you?”

“Who killed me?”

I nodded.

“Yuh huh. Who?” Ma asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” I asked.

“That part’s kind of foggy. I remember walking out of the courtroom. I remember walking out the front doors of the court- house, thinking everything was going to be okay, and the next thing I knew, I was floating over my body watching blood spurt from my neck.”

“A neck shot? Ouch,” Ma said. “That’s gotta hurt. Angela’s great uncle Joey got his throat slit back in the sixties. The neck’s a gusher, Madone. The blood on his clothes. My aunt never got it out. Hadda bury ‘em in a stained suit..”

I held out my palm. “I know, Ma, ‘cause the other one was all stained because he used that one to shoot up his boss. Blah. Blah. Blah.” I’d heard the story a billion times and still didn’t like it.

“All’s I’m sayin’ is you oughta have at least three dressy outfits. Ya know, just in case. ‘Specially if you’re gonna play with the bad guys. You know what I’m sayin’?”

I rolled my eyes. No one went off topic better than my mother. “Aside from the attorney, did you…” I paused, looking for the right word. “help anyone else?”

Bill contemplated the idea but couldn’t come up with anything. “I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s as if there are holes in my memory. Some things are perfectly clear, while others seem to have disappeared completely.”

Ma nodded. “That’s the way it works. More so when you’re knocked off like that. Bein’ I’m an advanced spirit and all, I can tell you you’ll remember eventually, so you just gotta be patient.”

“I don’t have time for patience,” I said. “I’ve got a lot of missing money to find, a code that makes no sense to anyone, and then there’s the whole who killed Emma Marx question.” I paced the length of the room. “Ten-twenty-five. One-zero-two-five.”

“One-zero-two-five?” Bill asked. “I think I know that number.”

I would have beaned him if my hand wouldn’t have gone right through his head. “It’s the code we’re trying to decipher, remember?”

Ma waved her hand at me. “Hush. Maybe he’s remembering.”

She had a point.

Bill did a ghostly version of pacing the room. “One-zero-two-five. One-zero-two-five.”

“Yeah, one-zero-two-five,” Ma said. “So what’s it mean? You rememberin’ something?”

From the look on Bill’s face, I wasn’t sure if he was concentrating or constipated. Either way, he was focused. “Ma, give the man a minute, will ya?”

“I thought you didn’t have time for patience?”

I really hated when she threw my words back at me like that. “Just hush.”

She stuck her tongue out at me.

So mature.

I returned the gesture because I was mature, too, and because I loved her ability to ease my stress with her silly sense of humor. 

“I know the numbers mean something,” he said.

“Yeah, they’re the key to where the money is,” Ma said.