Trueish Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel (4 page)

Dina reappeared, waving a Polaroid photo. “Look! This is Michail. He let me measure it and take a picture.”

It was a primal reflex the way my hands jumped up to cover my eyes. “This is so wrong.”

“Isn’t it magnificent?” Dina asked, waiting on a round of approval that wasn’t going to happen. Not with this audience.

I didn’t want to. I really didn’t want to.

“You do it,” I told Stavros.

“I don’t want to look at it.”

I peeked. He was looking at it.

“Okay,” he said, after a long, hard look. “It’s not the same one.”

The lid fell back into place. My brain took several pinches of relief, a handful of question marks, and tossed them into a blender. What it came back with was: “So then whom does it belong to?”

“I don’t know,” Dina said. “It’s not Michail’s, that’s all I care about.”

We left the Queen of Empathy to her sweeping and trudged back down the street. I followed Melas to his police car to make sure he was going to make it. His color was slowly coming back. He had worked his way up to the shade of whipped honey.

He stared off into the distance, where there were ponies, and rainbows, and no dismembered members. “Who sent you that thing?”

“Nobody. They sent it to Grandma.”

“Who sent it to her?”

“She didn’t say, but she knows them, whoever it is. It’s someone in prison. That’s all she told me before she left. Papou said he’d tell me who it was if I could open the box.”

He gnawed on that a moment. “Where’s Baboulas?”

“Away.”

Both eyebrows crept higher.

“I don’t know,” I said. No mention of the fact that I could guess. Grandma hadn’t shared her health status with me. No way was I going to share it with Melas.

He lounged against the car. A hundred degrees and the man was in jeans—and he looked cool wearing them. Detective Nikos Melas was an impossible situation. We were attracted to each other, yeah, but he was a lawman and I was the offspring of a former hitman—amongst Dad’s many other talents—and the granddaughter of one of Greece’s most notorious women.

He already had a bad habit of turning me on when I’d rather snipe at him. My body’s memory had perfect recall when it came to The Kiss he’d stamped on my mouth last week. Those stupid hormones of mine wanted a rematch.

Well, they weren’t getting one. I was the one in control of my moving parts, and where I wanted to move was far away from Detective Melas—effective right now.

Too bad he had a look on his face that said he wanted to converse, now that his color was returning to normal.

Here it came—the bad boy grin. Followed by that move where his eyes slowly raked over my body, digging up all kinds of feelings I didn’t want, most of them in my underwear. I hadn’t seen him since the day after he’d been one of a four-man rescue team who’d saved my bacon from the Baptist.

“I’ve been thinking about taking you out again,” he said.

“We’re out right now.”

“Are you snippy because I haven’t called?”

He wished. “Why would I? Our date wasn’t a date. It was business.”

He blew out a long stream of hot air. “Maybe I wanted it to be a date.”

“Did you?”

“It’s complicated.”

You’re telling me
. “It’s complicated because you’re making it complicated. All you have to do is quit bringing it up and—voila! —uncomplicated.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“Denial solves a lot of problems.” I thought about it. “Maybe not
solves
, but denial definitely has its place.”

He changed the subject. “How are you?”

“So hot and sweaty that either my sweat glands shut down or the heat is sucking it up faster than I can make it.”

“I meant to check on you, see how you were doing after the Baptist thing.”

“You didn’t.”

“But I wanted to.”

A cold spider clambered up my spine. The former cop was dead but the horror lived on. Fear was like a zombie: reanimate that sucker and it would stump around after you forever, moaning for its share of your brain.

“I’m fine,” I said. Was I fine? Not really. More like fine-ish. Except for the part where a serial killer almost snuffed my lights out, where my family was the mob, and where my father was still missing and maybe dead.

“I have to go,” I said. “I have a thing.”

“I know. I saw it. I’m coming with you.”

“No, you’re not.”

“It’s evidence of a crime.”

“For all you know it fell off.” He looked at me so pointedly he could have poked out my eye. “Or it could be from one of those medical corpses.”

“Which would make it stolen property.”

“You suck, Melas.”

He grinned. It was the slow, lazy expression of a man who had me where he wanted me. “Not even once, honey.”

I jumped back into my yellow car, revved the engine, cranked the radio’s volume button until the speakers blew my hair back. Then Stavros and I blasted back toward Mount Pelion with Melas on our tail.

By the time we reached the compound, and I killed the engine outside the garage, I’d already come up with a dozen different identities for the man with the missing frank. He was a medical corpse, like I suggested to Melas. Or some poor homeless guy who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was the sender’s enemy—or a friend who really screwed up. The sender had delivered a message, but where the heck was I going to find an interpreter, and what did any of this have to do with Dad? Without Grandma around I’d have to figure out who sent the box, then go to the source itself.

A big voice in the front of my head began hammering on about how it wasn’t like me to go running off to a prison, demanding answers from inmates. I mean, look at
The Silence of the Lambs
. Things almost ended Very Badly for Clarice Starling, and she was a professional. Me, I was a former bill collector. Former because Grandma razed my workplace and broke my boss’s legs. Now he was being eyed for arson and investigated for tax issues—the issue being that he hadn’t paid them properly. This is no way qualified me to waltz into a prison with empty pockets and a mouthful of questions.

My stomach churned audibly.

“Hey!”

Melas. He was stuck on the wrong side of the gate. Oops.

“Can I come in?” He seemed so sad standing there, gripping the bars, handsome face smushed between them.

I looked at the guard. The guard looked at me, request poised on his lips.

“No,” I said.

“Katerina …”

“Go home, Melas.” I blew him a kiss and trotted under the arch into the courtyard. As always, it was like walking into Eden—minus the serpent and the naked people. Grandma had fountains, fig trees, a conservatory, an enormous pool where Xander did late-night laps, and pockets of gardens arranged in pretty patterns.

Papou still owed me a name. Now it was time to pony up the goods.

But first I scooped up every last cigarette butt, stashing them in a paper bag I’d rustled up in Grandma’s kitchen, and took them with me.

His apartment was on the second floor at the far right end of the compound, Stavros had told me, facing the family orchard.

Papou hollered, “Come!” when I knocked. The door was unlocked, so I went right in.

“Why aren’t you on the ground floor?” I asked.

“Nobody expects the cripple to live on the second floor.”

He didn’t explain further. To my ears it sounded like a Zen saying.
Only the hand that erases can write the true thing; it is the power of the mind to be unconquerable; do not seek for the truth, only stop having an opinion; nobody expects the cripple to live on the second floor
.

I nodded because what else could I do? He sounded like a legit Greek philosopher, and I knew my Greek philosophers. After my mother died I quit looking to God for answers and took up philosophy instead. Regular history had a better track record than biblical history. They say there’s wisdom in the Bible, but it’s a long slog through the begetting and incest.

The old man’s apartment was cluttered in an orderly way. The living room walls were barely visible behind the shelves, each of them filled with an arrangement of doohickeys and figurines and books. The hall closet was open, but I couldn’t see inside from where I stood.

“I was a collector of life’s mysteries,” he said. “I am waiting now to collect the final one, but the delivery man is late, that
malakas
.”

“Before he gets here do you suppose you could tell me who sent Grandma the box?”

He rolled over to the closet door, pushed it shut. “I was trying to go out like that guy from
Kung Fu
, but I couldn’t find rope or a blue pill, so here I am talking to you. The man you want, they call him Rabbit.”

A hot, invisible needle shoved itself in my eye. An old memory was the hand behind the needle. It wanted to be remembered, and it wanted to be remembered now.

I winced. “Why do they call him Rabbit?”

“Because he has a hundred children. What’s wrong with your eye?”

“Nothing’s wrong with my eye. Does he have a real name?”

“Stelios Dogas is his name. There’s something wrong with your eye or your head.”

“I’m fine—really. Where have they got him locked up?”

“Larissa’s prison. It’s a big yellow building, the color of piss.” He chuckled. “You are going to see him, aren’t you? Before you do, see about that eye or they will keep you there.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my eye. Someone has to talk to him. Grandma isn’t here. He sent a clue and I have to find out what it means.”

“I think you are mental.” He drew little air circles on one temple. “Going there is the worst thing you could do. If you think it’s a clever idea you have problems.”

No, I knew it was stupid. Worse than stupid. It was
totally
stupid. Sometimes a woman needed an adverb to underscore how idiotic something was. This was one of those times.

“Sometimes clever and right are the same thing, sometimes they’re not.”

“That’s a good answer. I didn’t think you were capable of it.”

I grinned at him, but it was window dressing. Inside, my nerves were firing off messages.
Can you believe this chick
?
All balls and no brain.
Rabbit … Rabbit … Rabbit …
“I got lucky.”

“Must be your grandmother’s genes.”

I asked him something I hadn’t had a chance to ask anyone else yet. “What was my grandfather like?”

“Yiannis?” He shrugged. “Imagine a rock sitting on the ground, doing nothing. That was your grandfather.”

That was … unexpected. “How did he die?”

“He walked into an ambush. He was looking for a sofa so he could sit.”

“My other grandfather died when a dog crapped on his lawn.” Mom’s dad had famously blown an artery screaming at the neighbor’s Great Dane.

“Must have been some crap.”

“It was on his newspaper.”

He nodded like he knew about dog crap and newspapers. I guess some things were universal.

“You go to see Rabbit, you be careful. He has charmed the pants off virgins, nuns, married women, and the occasional Turk.”

“He’s in prison.”

“Bah! Bars mean nothing to a man like that. If there is a crack he will fill it. Don’t show him anything he can put his
poutsa
in.”

Suddenly, the earth vanished beneath my feet. That sharp, pointy memory had conjured up a battering ram. It slammed into the barrier between past and present, flooding my head with an old tune Dad used to sing.

“
I Left Her Foot in a Box and Carried With Me Her Shoe
…
”
I sang.

“That is a song we used to sing about Rabbit,” he said sharply. “Where did you hear it?”

“In a kitchen.”

“We used to sing it the bar and at parties. Always there was ouzo involved. Rivers of ouzo.”

“There wasn’t any ouzo when I heard it, just Greek salad.” And the cold tolling of an early warning bell that none of us had recognized as the beginning of an end.

“Things have really changed if that song was served with salad.”

“I hate change,” I said.

“Funny, because that is all you have done since you got here. And there is more coming—an avalanche of change, I think.” He rolled over to the shelves on the north-facing wall, grabbed a leather and metal contraption that looked like ancient horse-wear. He tossed it to me. “Put this on before you go.”

“What is it?”

“A chastity belt.”

I threw it back, trying not to let the “Ewww” escape. “It’s a maximum security prison.”

“That doesn’t mean the security is good. All it means is that it has the maximum security the prison can afford.”

A
s Papou said
, Larissa’s prison building was the color of stale morning urine. With its razor wire hairdo atop the fence, it was impossible to mistake the prison for anything other than a correctional facility. What it was correcting I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t look like it could make honest men out of anything, let alone crooked human beings.

“Want me to come with you?”

That was Stavros. He’d tagged along for the forty-five minute drive, after I told him where I was headed. Elias was with us, too, discreetly parked several spaces away.

“I should be fine,” I told him. “How hard can it be?”

“When my friend Rikki was in here I used to bring muffins every month. He really liked muffins.”

“Is he still here?”

Stavros lifted his chin then lowered it. That’s what passed for a headshake around here. “Someone shanked him for the muffins. They were good muffins.”

“What kind?”

“Apple cinnamon.”

“Those are good,” I said. “Okay, here goes.”

My wardrobe was limited. Most of what I owned was in my closet back home, the one in Mom and Dad’s house, where I still technically lived because it made Dad woozy to think about cutting the cord. I’d leased an apartment a couple of weeks ago, but Grandma had it burned down before I could move in … or tell Dad. Anyway, clothes. I went with jeans and a fitted T-shirt. It was the closest thing I had to business casual.

Getting into a Greek prison turned out to be easy. I showed them my passport, signed the sign-in sheet, followed a rolling boulder made of a Greek mother’s baklava. Maybe I’d seen too many movies, but I expected to wind up on the good-guy side of one of those booths with a Plexiglas window and an archaic handset. When the guard led me to a cramped room with a metal table, complete with a loop for cuffs, and two metal chairs, I asked about the booths.