The big fix, p.7
The Big Fix, page 7
Anthony rounded to my side of the island and leaned back against it. The heat and smell of him seemed to mix with the liquor. I didn’t know which ingredient was making me drunk. “Here’s another fact, a few more, actually. You’re not a very good spy; I’ve seen you watching me, I find you exasperating yet fascinating, and I wonder what it is you find so interesting about me, because you’re obviously intrigued enough to be here.”
I looked up at him and studied the planes of his handsome face. Memory of his body squeezing mine in the pitch-black closet sent a warm rush through me as I noticed the ochre-colored flecks in his dark eyes. In the right light, they could have been gold.
“You seriously don’t know?” I asked. My voice came out low and breathy. Transfixed. “Why I find you interesting?”
He held my gaze like it was something alive and precious between us. His lips parted, and a soft, oaky breath spilled out before he spoke. “I would imagine it has something to do with the body in the closet, but other than that, no.”
He was right; the body in the closet was the primary factor. But strip that away, and he was still an enigma. Brooding, curt, surprisingly polite when he wanted to be. Not to mention gorgeous, smart, and good with a hammer. Despite everything else, gazing into his eyes had me wanting to know something personal about him. Anything.
“Tell me something about yourself, Anthony.”
He kept staring at me, slowly blinking his thick lashes. The hard edge in his eyes melted away and a welcoming vulnerability replaced it. His voice came out in a soft, raspy murmur. “My friends call me Tony.”
I was so lost in the heavy haze of his voice and his stare, the warm liquor pooling in my blood, that I didn’t think of the words coming out of my mouth. “You have friends?”
He snorted an amused, awkward laugh. “I’ve got a couple, yeah.”
I wanted to drown in my glass of brown booze. “Sorry. That sounded so rude. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, you seem like a lone wolf.”
He polished off his drink and set the glass on the island. “That’s fair. Uncle Lou was really the only person I had; no one else in the family talks to us. I can guarantee I’ll be the only family member at his funeral on Tuesday. But besides that, people like me can’t really afford to get close to others. It creates leverage, and that’s a dangerous thing in my line of work.”
The statement left a lot to unpack, but one question was obvious. “And what does your line of work involve exactly?”
He folded his bulky arms and tapped his thumbs against his biceps. His lips pursed out like he was debating what to disclose, and I wondered if I was going to get another annoyingly vague answer. “Technically, I’m a financial consultant. It’s just that some of the stuff I consult on isn’t exactly on the books. I’m basically the suit side of Uncle Lou’s business.”
I blinked in shock to have learned anything at all. “And he was, what, a hit man?”
“No!” he said with an affronted laugh, even though I wasn’t kidding. All evidence pointed to the obvious.
“Okay, then what was he?”
He sighed with another pass through his hair. I wondered if he’d go bald early because of all the tugging, but based on the thickness of the wavy mane, the chances seemed slim. “Look, sometimes people get into bad stuff, and they need someone to make it go away. That’s what Uncle Lou did. He made bad stuff go away for people.” He watched me as I put the pieces together. I felt his eyes outlining my face, my lips, dipping down to my throat and back up again.
I knew what he meant; I just didn’t think such people actually existed in real life. “So he was a fixer.”
He silently held my gaze for a few telling beats. “And all of this”—he gestured to our general surroundings, and I took it to mean everything from the house to the body to the break-in—“was part of a job he was working on. That’s why I’m here, and why I need that key.”
I felt it vibrating like a tuning fork, where it was buried in my bra. Anthony’s eyes dipped to my hip again, my pocket, and I tried not to give myself away that he was looking in the wrong place. “What’s in that safe?” I asked.
He watched my lips through hooded lids as I spoke, as if he wanted to bite them. “Something important.”
I fought to keep my voice steady while I tingled all over. “And what happens when you get it open? Are you going to finish the job and leave?”
“That’s the plan,” he said in a tone so close to a growl, I gripped the island for support. “So,” he said, leaning in even closer, “I really need you to give me that key.”
I was under his spell. Completely hypnotized. I would have done anything he asked. And judging by the size his eyes grew to when I dug my hand into my bra, I had as much power over him too.
I removed the key and held it between us.
He took it from me, and a sincere smile spread across his face. If I expected him to invite me back into the office to see what was in the safe, I was sorely mistaken. “Thank you. I’ll walk you home now, if you’d like.”
I blinked at him. “That’s it?”
“Yes.”
I folded my arms and frowned. “You didn’t hold up your end of the deal, pal. I still don’t know what this has to do with Portia Slate.”
He released a breath that sounded painfully weary. “I really shouldn’t answer that question, but I have one for you: What do you know about her?”
I held his gaze, glad to be getting somewhere. “I met her once. She came to campus when the Slate Foundation donated a computer lab. We had coffee together . . .” I paused to emphasize the next thing I said. “Her bodyguard was with her.” I could tell from the look on his face that he understood my implication. “How did he end up in your closet, Anthony?”
His jaw was working so hard, he hardly opened his mouth to speak. “I really can’t tell you that.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Shouldn’t. For your safety.”
The word safety landed like a stone dropped in my belly. I suddenly felt cold.
He let out a stiff breath. He stood very close and rested a hand on my shoulder. His eyes melted into a sincere plea. “Penny, I’m very sorry you’re involved in this. But the more you know, the worse this will end up. The best thing you can do is stay away from me.”
“Gladly. But do I need to be worried?”
He weighed his response for longer than was comfortable, and looked like summoning the answer was causing him distress. “I’ll keep an eye on things.”
“‘Keep an eye on things’? What does that even mean?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. Now I need you to go home.” He hooked his hand behind my elbow and started leading me out of the kitchen.
I tried to dig in my feet, but the floor was slick, and his grip was firm. “Wait!” I wormed my way out of his hold and faced him with my hands up. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me about Portia.”
“Well, I’m not going to, so maybe you should make yourself comfortable in one of the bedrooms upstairs. That would make it easier to keep an eye on you anyway.” He tugged at his collar like he was uncomfortable and frustrated. It was the first I’d seen him truly flustered, other than the closet incident—which, somehow, there were two of now.
I defiantly held my ground and crossed my arms. I was quickly running out of bargaining chips and still didn’t have what I’d come for. “Well, what if I go to the police and tell them I know who was in the closet?”
“Go ahead. They already know.”
I flinched. “What? How?”
“Because I told them.”
It was the last thing I expected him to say. My face folded in a frown of confusion. “Then why isn’t it all over the news?”
He gave me a hard stare, which sent a shiver prickling my skin. “Because someone doesn’t want it to be, Penny.”
The silence that followed his statement might as well have been a scream. It echoed through my mind like a banshee telling me to run.
Several pieces clicked sharply into place.
“Right. Okay, then,” I said, and started to back away. I needed to get out of the house, but I didn’t want to turn my back on him. “I’m going to head home now. Thank you for the chat. I hope you have a nice night.” Words kept falling out of my mouth like books from a broken bag.
Anthony watched me go with his lips hinting at a smug, little grin as if he’d finally found the right button to press to get me to leave. “Do you want me to walk you home?”
“Oh no. I’m fine,” I said with a wave of my hands and a confidence I didn’t feel. I was going to sprint, hop the fence if I had to, and hide under the covers all night.
“Okay, Penny. Have a good night,” he said with a little wave as I disappeared around the corner into the foyer.
“Good night.” As soon as he was out of sight, I dashed for the front door. I tore it open and ran down the front steps, not even bothering to close the door behind me. I skirted the side of the house, glancing over my shoulder to make sure he hadn’t followed, and made my way back to Libby’s gate, which I’d propped open. I didn’t fully breathe until I was on the other side of it.
Inside, Libby slept on the couch in front of a glowing TV, as expected. I left her there and hurried up the stairs.
It wasn’t until I was in pajamas, tucked into bed with the curtains drawn that I let myself fully process what I had learned.
Anthony said his uncle Lou made bad things go away for people and he’d stepped in to finish the job. Portia Slate was missing; her bodyguard was dead. The first was widespread news; the latter had been covered up, perhaps because it would have exposed the truth about the former.
I squeezed my eyes shut and let the pieces fall into the most logical pattern. A terrifying, chilling mosaic exploded behind my lids, and I was almost certain of one thing.
Portia Slate was dead, and Anthony and his uncle had covered it up.
They were a family of fixers, and they’d fixed her murder.
CHAPTER 6
If there was a threshold for the amount of caffeine that could be safely consumed in a single morning, I’d surpassed it hours ago. My eyeballs were vibrating. I didn’t sleep. I tossed and turned all night, thinking of Anthony and Portia, and then tried to compensate with my sister’s stash of organic fair trade dark roast.
Searching everything I could about Portia Slate and her bodyguard, I’d been to infinity and back. Nearly anything I could want to know about Portia, from her birthplace (New York) to her height (five-seven), from her favorite dessert (chocolate mousse) to her favorite vacation spot (Mykonos), waited online like a catalogue spread of oversharing. Despite a hefty social media presence (1.5 million Instagram followers), it wasn’t all coming direct from her; she’d been interviewed, quoted, photographed. There was no shortage of interest in her.
But her bodyguard, I couldn’t even find a name. He was nothing more than a blurred figure in the background of every photo. Surely, he had a family. Parents, if nothing else. But truly, I had no idea the kind of person who went into private security. Maybe he had no one to notice or mourn his death.
There was also the break-in at Anthony’s house last night. I had no idea what to make of it, but it couldn’t have been anything good.
It was a complex problem, but I solved complex problems all the time. It’s just a puzzle. As I sorted through the pieces, I realized something that usually helped with the hardest problems was going back to the beginning. So that’s what I did.
Portia’s disappearance might have been the true origin of it all, since it happened the furthest in the past, but as far as my involvement went, the catalyst had been Lou Griotti’s death. That’s what brought Anthony to town and moved him in next door. Without that, there never would have been an estate sale or a body in the closet. I would have spent Saturday splashing in Libby’s pool and lounging in the sun rather than being interrogated as an accomplice.
I shouldn’t have been surprised I couldn’t find an obituary for Lou online, but somehow I was. I still didn’t even know how he’d died.
Libby found me in the kitchen, guzzling coffee and rapidly blinking out the window, staring at his house in a trance. As per usual morning routine, she turned on the TV to a local news show and set about preparing breakfast.
“What’s up with you?” she asked.
My jitteriness must have been obvious. Perhaps it was my tapping foot or the mug of coffee threatening to spill in my shaky hand. “Nothing. I couldn’t sleep.”
She secured Ada in her high chair and deposited a small pile of Cheerios for her to immediately club with a fist and send scattering. “Well, maybe if you stop staring at the m-u-r-d-e-r-e-r next door, you could relax.” She glanced at Max as she spelled out the word.
He was too busy driving a small toy truck through the Cheerios obstacle course, which his sister had provided on the tabletop, to notice.
I took another sip of coffee I most certainly did not need, rather than respond. I’d come to a conclusion, and had been trying to figure out how best to approach telling Libby, because she would surely try to stop me. Unfortunately, the caffeine had robbed my brain of tact, and the words just fell out.
“I want to go to his funeral.”
She paused filling a sippy cup with orange juice and looked up. “What? Whose funeral?”
“Who do you think?” I said, and nodded toward the neighbor’s house.
She secured the cup’s lid and tipped it twice to make sure it wasn’t leaking before she handed it to Max’s outstretched hands. “They’re having a funeral? I thought Anthony was the only relative in contact with him.”
“He is . . . Wait. How do you know that?”
When my sister blushed, it was at a fraction of the intensity my face burned, but still. I saw a pink wave unfurl into her cheeks. “I may have asked Nicole what she knows about the case,” she said sheepishly.
“You did what?!” I squawked. “You talked to the detective’s wife and didn’t tell me?”
“Don’t yell at me! I’m not the one going over to his house late at night and getting snatched. My information gathering is much safer.”
My stomach bottomed out. I thought for a second she meant last night when I’d snuck out, but quickly realized she was referring to the night before when I confronted Anthony about the news story.
I poked my finger into a Cheerio and traced a figure eight on the tabletop, trying to sound casual. “What did you learn from Nicole?”
She cast a glance over her shoulder toward the neighboring house, as if Anthony might overhear, and then leaned in with a telltale glint in her eye. She was ripe with gossip and looking only the slightest bit guilty about it. “He’s a financial consultant from Manhattan. Single. No spouse, no kids. He and Lou were estranged from the family. Lou left him everything.”
I digested the information and realized Anthony had told me things he hadn’t told the cops. Or at least Detective Warner hadn’t told his wife, who then hadn’t told my sister. I wasn’t about to tell Libby the financial consultant part was a cover and Anthony and his uncle were a tag team of fixers who covered up crimes for other people, because the only way I could have known that was by sneaking into his house the night before and hearing it straight from his mouth.
“Did you happen to find out how Mr. Griotti died?”
Libby frowned, perhaps realizing that was still a hole in the story. “No. I’d heard it through the grapevine he’d passed, but never the reason why. Nicole said Daryl is really stressed. Especially with all this Portia Slate stuff happening so close. At least he’s not on that case too.”
Right then, and as if on cue, the morning news show returned from commercial break. The bubbly anchor, who was ten shades of perky blond, somberly narrated a headline that caught my attention.
“A new development in the Portia Slate missing person case this morning has authorities reconsidering what may have happened to the tech billionaire’s wife.”
My stomach dropped to my toes once more. I stopped breathing. I dove on the remote Libby had left on the island and turned up the volume.
“Authorities recombed the area around the Slates’ estate in Woodside,” the anchor continued. “After several hours, they found what they are calling the first big break in the case.”
My breath lodged in my throat again. Surely, they could not have found Portia’s body. The story would have been framed differently from the start if that was the case. Instead of dragging us along for mystery theater, they would have gotten to the point in the first sentence: Billionaire’s wife found dead.
I waited an excruciating few seconds for the reveal.
“Mrs. Slate was reported to have been wearing a pair of blue running shoes when she went missing last week. One of those shoes has now been found in the woods outside her home.”
The image cut to an interview with a hardened-looking, middle-aged man in a beige police uniform. Alan Prescott, San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office popped up in the bottom of the screen. He stood outside, under a copse of shady oak trees near the end of a gated driveway, and spoke into an invisible microphone.
“We combed these woods multiple times, but this is a large area. Even with our resources working around the clock, it’s entirely possible the evidence was overlooked until now.”
I could only imagine what Portia was doing in those woods that caused her to lose a shoe. Running from her husband? Running for her life? Maybe she tripped and there was a struggle, and her shoe came off. Maybe she took it off on purpose and left it behind as evidence because she knew she was going to die. Maybe she never made it out of those woods alive.
“At this point, we can’t be certain what the shoe means,” Prescott said onscreen. “But it does confirm that Mrs. Slate was, in fact, in these woods before she went missing.”
The image cut back to the news anchor. Her mouth set in a solemn line. “We will continue to report on this story as it unfolds. Of course we are all still hoping for the safe return of Mrs. Slate.” She looked down for two seconds, as if to cleanse her palate, before moving on to the next story.
