GUNNED (17 page)

The young man I had met in the lobby came in before I could get my own dig in.

“Martha, the governor is on line one.”

“I must take this,” she said to me. “I think I made myself clear. Mandy is not to be bothered by such foolishness again.” She picked up the phone, dismissing me.

I left Martha Aiello thinking two things. The first was that I was obviously a fashion nightmare too hideous to be seen in public, and the second was that I had just been sent down the garden path by her masterful misdirection.

So, was the woman simply the most tactless, rude person I had ever met, or was she using my lack of fashion sense to throw me off her scent? And what was wrong with my fashion sense? I’ve been told on many occasions that I look nice. I usually wear pencil skirts with low black pumps. I jazz things up a bit with scarves and earrings, and I always thought I looked nice in a New England conservative kind of way. What’s wrong with plaid skirts and sweater sets? And black? I wear a lot of black. Everyone looks good in black. She had me rattled. Maybe I should just go home and hide in a dark room until a makeup artist could be found.

I adjusted the rearview mirror and looked at my face. I didn’t see anything horribly wrong with it, though I’d like to perfect the smoky eye thing better. I pushed the mirror back into place and tried to laugh off Martha Aiello’s opinion. I figured this was how she treated Mandy her entire life. No wonder the young woman was hoping the Spiegels were her parents. A lifetime of trying to have a discussion only to have one insult after another hurled back at you, and in a way that made it seem the comments were really for your own good. Oh, Martha Aiello was good. I’d give her that, but how was I going to find out anything else? Did she also get Sheldon’s number and call him back at some point to discuss the issue further, only to put a gun to his head? I could see her doing it. Maybe with the help of one of her aides.

Then I had a thought. The aides. Maybe I should be speaking with them. Martha said Sheldon Spiegel confronted her at the campaign headquarters, which meant her staff would most likely have been around. Someone must have heard something.

I thought a talk with the young man I had spoken to in the lobby might garner me some more information. He told me Martha had an appointment, but neglected to tell me whether it was at her office or away. I took the key out of the ignition and looked toward the office. If the meeting was someplace else, she would have to leave soon. I opened up my glove compartment and took out a small bag of M&M’s, which I ate while I watched the front of the campaign headquarters.

I was almost through the bag when the door of the office opened and Martha Aiello stepped out. She headed my way and I started rummaging in my purse as an excuse in case she saw me. I could pretend that I was looking for something if she happened to tap on my window with more fashion advice, but instead she got into a car parked three spaces ahead of me. Perfect. I waited for her to pull out and drive away, and then I locked my car and walked back to her office.

“Oh, it’s you again. Mrs. Aiello just left. You’ll have to make an appointment if you want to speak with her again,” blue tie said to me.

“Actually, I was hoping to speak with you.”

The young man looked nervous. “Me? Why?”

“Can you tell me if you were here last Monday morning when a man came to see Mrs. Aiello?” Blue tie looked to be about twenty-two and had dark hair and piercing green eyes. A nice looking young man. I wondered if he had been subjected to her advice and had received a makeover.

“I was here. I’m Kurt, by the way. I told him Martha was busy, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He marched right back to her office. I thought for sure I would be fired for letting him get past me. Not that I get paid much, mind you, but she goes through staff quickly. I get credit for this job, plus I’m hoping it will lead to something more permanent when I graduate in May.”

I looked at him incredulously. “Really? You’d want to come back and work for her full time?”

“God no! What I really wanted to do with my life was to be the next triple threat theater major with a bright future on Broadway, you know, like Hugh Jackman, but my dad thought government was a more, well, manly path to take. It’s not so bad, I guess. I wouldn’t mind working in city government and this would be a good reference. Anyone who can survive working for Martha Aiello could probably work anywhere. But I couldn’t put it down if she fired me, though I’m pretty sure I could use it as a sympathy reference. Everyone knows what she’s like.”

Personally, I thought the kid should pursue his love of the theater. Or grave digger. Or just about anything other than working for politicians.

“So what happened with Mr. Spiegel?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Mr. Spiegel. The man that showed up last Monday.”

“Oh, right. He never told me his name. Just said he had to speak with Martha and then he marched off to her office.”

“And then what happened?”

Kurt shrugged. “Not a lot, actually. I kept an eye on the office, you know, in case she came storming out, but they talked for a few minutes and then he left.”

I gave Kurt a sympathetic look. “And then you got in trouble?”

“No. Nothing. I know, right? Surprised me, too. But she never said anything to me.”

I leaned on the counter looking dejected. Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. It was a good idea in theory, even if it didn’t yield me any new clues.

Kurt smiled. “Nothing happened to me, but she was a real bi…she was really nasty for the rest of the day. More moody than usual, even canceled an appointment, and she
never
does that. She left early and came in very late on Tuesday. Not like her at all. Look, I have a lot of stuff to do and her appointment wasn’t very far away. She might be coming back soon. She does that, just to check up on people. Makes fake appointments and then sneaks back trying to catch us goofing off or something. You should leave.”

I thanked Kurt and returned to my car, but not before I urged him to follow his true path. Whatever Mr. Spiegel said to Martha Aiello it managed to crack her iron lady veneer. Now all I had to do was figure out if it led her to murder.

Long before I was born my grandmother bought a brownstone on Court Street, which was part of the Wooster Square neighborhood in New Haven. At one point in the eighteen hundreds Wooster Square was a residential area where ship captains built houses to be near the port, but by the late nineteenth century the area became more industrial and thus a less desirable location for the current residents. Eventually Italian immigrants moved in.

The neighborhood was destined to be demolished, but some believed it was worth saving and the Wooster Square Project was born. All the houses on my grandmother’s street got a makeover, trees were planted, and the street became a no-car zone. Wooster Square was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and my grandmother was quite proud.

Over the years Meme had been lucky enough to have a never-ending supply of professors from Yale to whom she could rent her apartments. She kept the small one-room basement apartment for herself, and Sam and I loved to visit. The area was vibrant and full of life. I hadn’t been to the area since Meme moved to Indian Cove, but today I found myself only a couple of blocks away from my grandmother’s old house.

Shelley Jamison worked in an insurance office not far from Pepe’s Pizza. If I hadn’t already had my lunch I’d order a large and gobble it all myself. It was that good. Probably the best in New England.

I found Shelley in the outer office working on her computer. She looked up as I walked in. Recognition dawned on her face and then she smiled.

“Oh my goodness. Have you found something out already?”

“No, nothing like that. Sorry. I was wondering if you’d have time to talk with me.”

“Sure. Have a seat. My boss is gone for the day. There’re some agents in the back, but they won’t bother us. I’ll just have to answer the phones if they ring. Our receptionist is out today so I’m stuck up here, but it’s quiet today. Tuesdays always seem to be like that.”

“Shelley, you told me the other day that Mr. Spiegel came by, but your husband told him to leave and he did.”

“Yeah, Jeff told him to get out and leave Christine alone.”

“Here’s the thing. I have a feeling Mr. Spiegel felt there was a good chance that Christine was his daughter. I think after he spoke with you and your husband, he checked out some other people on his list, but then he went back to either your house or Christine’s apartment.”

Shelley bit down on her lower lip.

“Did you see him again?” I asked.

“He came back to our house. He stopped by on Tuesday afternoon just as I got home. He asked if I could help persuade Christine to have a blood test. I told him to just stop. I told him to cherish his family and stop all this nonsense. What did it matter? Christine was happy and his interference in her life could have serious consequences, you know, with her engagement to Hunter. The truth is I’d love for Christine to dump him. He’s not good enough for her. He’s polite and everything, but I just don’t trust Hunter for some reason. I can’t explain it. Call it mother’s intuition. In the long term, I don’t think he’ll make her happy.  But she’s a grown woman and needs to make her own decisions. As a mother you need to pick your battles.”

“What did Mr. Spiegel say?”

“He just asked me to reconsider. He said that if his theory was right, we could get on with our lives. Look,” Shelley said as she leaned forward on the desk. “I don’t honestly care if she’s the Spiegels’ child. I mean, she’s adopted. I know she’s not my biological child. My main concern is what we told you the other day; I’d hate for her to find out about who her real mother and father were, and I don’t want Jeff and me to get into any trouble over the fact that we thought we might have been given the wrong baby and never said anything about it.”

“Were her parents really that bad?” I asked.

Shelley let out a long breath. “MaryAnn, the mother, not so much, but that ex-boyfriend of hers was a piece of work. Scary. That’s why we didn’t want to do tests when we saw the dimples. They’d probably want his DNA to check, and I wanted to stay as far from him as I could. I know he didn’t want the baby, but he wanted money. For a long time Jeff and I kept waiting for him to show up on our doorstep with his hand out, threatening to take Christine if we didn’t give him money, but we never saw him again.”

“So what happened with Mr. Spiegel? Did he leave at that point?” I asked.

Shelley nodded her head. “Yes, he gave me his business card and said to call if I changed my mind. I watched him drive away and not a moment too soon. Jeff got home about five minutes later.”

“Did you tell your husband that Mr. Spiegel had come by?”

“I wasn’t going to,” Shelley began, and then answered a call, typed out an email and sent it off. “Sorry. Like I was saying. I wasn’t going to tell Jeff. He has a temper. But we tell each other everything. Always have. And the truth is I was upset and Jeff could tell the minute he walked in the door.”

“Then what happened?”

“Nothing. I ran to the grocery store for one of those roasted chickens for dinner. I wasn’t in the mood to cook, but by time I got home, Jeff had received a call from his boss and they needed him to come back in. The company he works for is expanding and they need to hire some more workers, but the overtime pay is good, and with a wedding coming up, well…”

“What time did he get home?”

Shelley shrugged. “I don’t know. After dinner I watched a little TV, read for a while and then I was out. I’m a good sleeper. Always have been. Even Christine’s crying as a baby never woke me up.”

I left Shelley Jamison with a couple of things on my mind. Shelley may have been the last person to see Sheldon Spiegel alive. She may in fact have been the person who sent him to the afterlife. It would have been very easy for her to call him after her husband left, telling Mr. Spiegel she had arranged for Christine to speak with him again only to put a hole in his head when he showed up. The other thing that got me thinking was her husband. Maybe Jeff Jamison never went back to work like he told his wife. Maybe he made the whole thing up about getting some overtime. I thought about this and felt a more likely scenario was that Mr. Jamison had had enough of his family being bothered and thought it was finally time to get rid of Mr. Spiegel once and for all.

The hospital where Millie and the other five babies had been born had changed hands a couple of times over the years, and along with the change in management, the name had changed as well. According to Shirley, Nurse Kathy, whose name was Kathy Pastoretti, had weathered all the changes and still worked for the Alliance Medical Center, formerly the New Haven Medical Center.

The hospital had a large parking structure and I made my way up and around and around, until I came to the top and managed to find what looked like the last parking space. After all these years I had no idea if Kathy Pastoretti still worked with newborns or not, so I made my way to the main desk and waited in line.

“Next!”

I moved to the counter. “I’m looking for Kathy Pastoretti. She’s a nurse here. I have an appointment with her,” I lied. The woman behind the counter looked like a no-nonsense type and I had no idea if I would get anywhere if I told her it was a personal matter.

“Sixth floor. Maternity.”

“So she’s working today?” I asked.

“Sixth floor, maternity. You’ll have to ask there. Next!”

I thanked her and made my way to the bank of elevators. I got off on the sixth floor and saw the nurses’ station to my left. This wasn’t my best idea. The maternity ward was a beehive of activity and what were the chances that Kathy would be able to talk with me—that’s if she was even on duty. I probably should have called first, but I was in the area.