Goddaughter Caper, The Read online

  Even more interesting…

  “You’ll find bond certificates and cash in there. Some valuable drawings. Most of your inheritance, in fact. Other than the real estate.”

  Seb had also left me his art studio on James North. I still needed to decide what to do with that.

  “This is a little weird,” I said, giving the box a slight kick with my shoe. “What should I do?”

  “Go through it. Make a list. Get the stuff to a bank as soon as possible. I suggest you talk to Gaetano Gentile at the Royal Bank on King. He does some investments for the family.”

  Sort of ironic, having one of the family working for a bank. But, as Pete would say, I was related to half the people in this burg.

  “The key is in an envelope on your desk. Put that in a safe place until you can get it all to the bank.” Paulo rang off.

  I found the envelope. The key was inside. Then I went back over to the box. A small padlock hung from an old brass clasp. The key unlocked the padlock, and I twisted the lock open. Then I took the key and put it immediately in the inside zippered pocket of my purse.

  I returned to the box—actually, the proper term for it would probably be chest. It was carved, after all. I leaned forward to open the lid. It was heavier than it looked.

  Yup, it was crammed with paper. Several big brown envelopes—holding bond certificates, I guessed. To one side I could see wads of old currency bundled up with rubber bands. Heck, there were even some two-dollar bills! When did they stop making those? Were they even legal still?

  But there were several stacks of tens and twenties as well.

  My nose caught a whiff of mildew. Somehow, it seemed like too much work to sort through this right away. I’d wait until Pete was free, and we could go through it together. Might even be fun. After all, it wasn’t every day that a person inherited two million. Pete was darned lucky to be marrying me. Good thing he had proposed before we knew I was inheriting from Seb. Otherwise people might have thought he was marrying me for my money. And that would make me see red. I hate when people think that. Bad enough when they accuse women of being gold diggers. But to have people thinking that about my fiancé? That would be demeaning.

  I put the lid back down. Then I walked to my desk and sat down in the fake-leather swivel chair. The coffee was now at perfect drinking temperature. I sat back to enjoy it, and my mind started to wander.

  I had planned not to think about the body in the ally. But somehow, Wally the Wanker was haunting my mind. I could think of a hundred reasons why a person or persons unknown would want to take him out. Blackmail is a poor career choice.

  Thing is, there were probably too many people with motive. Finding the right one would be tough.

  My cell phone began to sing, and it was Nico.

  “Gina?” His voice squeaked an octave higher than usual. “Can you come over? Like, right now?”

  Weird. It sounded like he was panting.

  “Sure,” I said. I clicked the phone off.

  Nico was only next door, in the newly rented space that would soon house his interior-design store. The family had provided money for him to set up. Of course, this would come with strings attached, I had warned him. In fact, we had talked about it just last week.

  But I can’t wait for you to get your money, Gina. I want to set up now, Nico had said.

  Look, you don’t know what you might be agreeing to. They put money your way…believe me, they are going to want something for it, I’d said knowingly.

  Nico wouldn’t have to be beholden to them for long. I intended to pay the family back as soon as I inherited from Great-Uncle Seb. Now I could do that. Nico was more like a brother to me than a cousin. I got a kick out of thinking how I could help him out.

  I left my office, waved to Tiff and Zak at the counter and pushed out the front door into blazing sunlight.

  It could be cold in The Hammer in early November, although we usually didn’t get snow until December. But today, with the brilliant sun, I didn’t need a jacket for the short trip next door.

  I let myself in.

  The shop itself looked like a movie set gone bad. The place wasn’t open yet. Nico was just moving stuff in. Boxes stood everywhere, piled upon one another. A few were half open, with packing paper spilling out the top.

  Some of the contents were already on display. There was a full-size bronze crane to the left of the door. Piles of fabric samples sat on the white marble counter beyond it. The floor between was covered with discarded brown paper and bubble wrap.

  Nico was standing just beyond the counter, wringing his hands. No, really. I’ve never seen anyone wring their hands outside of a movie before. He reminded me of Uriah Heep. The Dickens character, not the rock band.

  Of course, he was dressed like he’d just escaped from a vintage rock band of sorts. The black skinny pants and lime-green satin shirt were not standard Hamilton issue. Nico carries a man bag rather than a lunchbox.

  “Oh thank god you’re here, Gina. I didn’t know what to do.”

  He seemed glued to the spot, looking down.

  “So what gives?” I wound my way through the boxes.

  His eyes darted over to me. They were huge. A hand went to his mouth.

  “Look here.” He pointed down with his other hand. I followed it with my eyes, to the crate on the floor.

  It was a wooden crate about six feet long and two feet wide. The lid had been wrestled off. What lay there wouldn’t exactly help decorate the store. Unless Nico was planning to cater to vampires.

  “Holy hell!” I sucked in air. “A body? Another one?”

  The hand that had covered Nico’s mouth was now doing double time gesturing in the air.

  “I thought it was a statue I ordered from Naples.” His voice was a whisper.

  I looked down into the box.

  “This ain’t no Venus de Milo, Nico.” No artist in his right mind would bother to sculpt this ugly dude.

  “I think I’m going to faint,” he said. I watched him sink down on another box and groan. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. Both hands supported his head.

  Crap. Another body. What was it with bodies these days?

  “Do we know this one?” I moved closer to peer at the contents of the crate.

  This guy was definitely dead, poor fellow. He looked middle-aged and white, with thinning black and gray hair. Someone had folded his hands over his chest. They looked stark against the black of his suit. I noticed there were rings on both hands. Four of them. Rings, that is, and one had a pretty large diamond in it.

  So not a poor man. In fact, he looked like someone important.

  “You ever see him before?”

  Nico shook his head. “You?”

  I considered. “Nope. I seriously doubt if he is from around here.”

  “How can you tell?” Nico asked.

  “Not sure. But he looks foreign, and we don’t know him. Where do you think this was shipped from? Is there a label?”

  “Couldn’t see one.”

  “Who delivered it?”

  Nico shrugged his thin shoulders. “It was Fed-Exed. Several things came at once.”

  “His suit, then? It looks expensive. Maybe it’s Italian? There should be a label somewhere.”

  Nico glanced over to the crate. “No way am I moving that thing to check.” He shivered.

  Then his nose twitched. “Funny. He doesn’t smell much. I thought dead bodies were supposed to be smelly. Not to mention he’s been traveling for a while.”

  “That’s because he’s been embalmed, Nico.”

  “What? Are you serious?”

  I shook my head. “Look at the color of his skin. Almost natural. Doesn’t look gray at all. Remember Great-Uncle Seb?”

  Nico and I had recently visited Seb in the hospital. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been in a state to wake up when we poked him to say hello.

  Nico groaned. “Yeah, Seb looked dead.”

  I lowered a finger to test the poor dude
’s hand. Yup. Definitely dead.

  “Strange, huh? Who goes to the trouble of embalming someone and then ships them out of the country?”

  Nico groaned again. “This is just too weird.”

  “Maybe…” I was getting an idea. “Maybe they embalmed him just so he wouldn’t smell bad and attract attention.”

  That made sense.

  “Why ship him here at all?” Nico wailed. “Gina, what are we going to do?”

  “Let me think,” I muttered. We had to get rid of the body as soon as possible, no question. I didn’t have a good reputation with the police. And with Nico—and me—showing up at the dump site of Wally the Wanker…well, you get the picture. Two bodies in one week was over the limit, even in The Hammer.

  We had to get rid of it. But how? Where would we take it?

  Nico has a talent for reading my mind. “We can’t exactly dump it in the bay.”

  Burlington Bay is infamous for serving as an underwater cemetery. Many of the dearly departed who rest there had been fitted with concrete shoes.

  “Nico, we won’t even be able to budge this crate, let alone carry it. Not with just the two of us.”

  There was only one thing to do. I phoned Sammy.

  FOUR

  Sammy is a wiry guy about fifty with Woody Allen hair. He’s also sharp as a shark’s tooth. He is my godfather’s Jewish cousin and a sort of favorite uncle to me. Yes, we can buy both our matzo and mortadella wholesale in this family.

  I adore him.

  “Doll, I can’t talk now,” he said. I could hear a lot of commotion in the background. Outdoor noises, and a lot of clunks. Men yelling back and forth in Italian.

  “Hold ON!” I yelled into the phone. “There’s a dead body in a crate here!”

  Sammy cursed. “Damn that Mario. He screwed up again. Call Jimmy. He’ll take care of it. Gotta go, sweetheart. Sorry.”

  I stared at the phone as he clicked off.

  “Bloody hell,” I said to Nico. “I knew it. Sammy knows something about this. Told me to call Jimmy.”

  “Jimmy?” Nico’s voice went up in pitch. “As in Last Chance Club—speed dating for geezers Jimmy? Why?”

  We stared at each other. This was weird. Jimmy is a very old guy who spent the first part of his retirement in the slammer. The family had a combined release-day-and-eightieth-birthday party for him a few years ago.

  A few weeks ago, Jimmy and the Last Chance Club from the Holy Cannoli Retirement Home helped me out on a minor job. Okay, a major heist at the art gallery. Actually, a reverse theft. And if that sounds confusing, you should have seen the actual operation.

  “What’s Jimmy’s phone number?” I asked Nico.

  He looked down at his smartphone and did a few finger movements. Then he shot a bunch of numbers at me. I punched them into my smartphone and waited for the pickup.

  “Discreet burials,” said a shaky tenor voice.

  I paused a second.

  “Jimmy?”

  “Shit. Who is this?”

  “It’s Gina.”

  I could hear another voice in the background asking who it was.

  “Gina,” whispered Jimmy to the other person. I heard two voices going back and forth in staccato undertones.

  I waited.

  “Are you still there?” I said.

  “I’m here.” Jimmy was back with his ear to the phone.

  “What was that about burials?”

  “Got confused. Thought I was still talking to Mags. We got a funeral to go to.”

  Mags was Mad Magda, I knew. Magda is a legend in The Hammer. She helped me with that little art-gallery job a few weeks back. That’s when I found out Jimmy and Magda were an item. They had been an item for over fifty years. Someday I needed to talk to her about how to keep the magic going. I was getting married soon, after all.

  “Look, I got a problem. Nico was expecting a statue to arrive here.”

  A pause. “Life-size? Shapely broad in heavy marble?”

  I clicked to full alert.

  “That sounds like it. He got this other… um, thing instead,” I said. I didn’t want to say body, because I didn’t know how secure Jimmy’s phone was.

  “Wondered what the hell had happened. Hold on a sec, Gina.”

  He turned away from the phone to talk to someone in person. Magda, I guessed. It sounded like chipmunks chattering back and forth.

  Meanwhile, at our end, Nico had progressed to rocking back and forth and moaning.

  Now I was starting to get panicky. Jimmy came back on the line.

  I said, “Look, can you do something about this? Sammy said to call you. And frankly, we’re sort of shook up.” No kidding. Wasn’t every day you opened a box and found a body.

  Jimmy was cool. “Don’t worry, Gina. I’ll take care of it. You and Nico leave the store for a while. Go get a cannoli or something. Come back after three. Bye.”

  There was a clue in that sentence. If I’d only caught that “store” clue, it would have saved a lot of trouble.

  But I didn’t catch it, dammit.

  I clicked off and turned my head. Nico was staring at me with the biggest brown eyes you ever saw.

  “That was possibly the weirdest phone call ever,” I said to him.

  FIVE

  We got back to Hess Village just after four. Nico dropped me off at Ricci Jewelers and went to park the car. Tiff was saying goodbye to a customer on the phone when I walked in the door.

  She put the receiver down and looked over. “All ready for the shower tonight?”

  I put on a big fake smile. “Sure. It will be swell.”

  She smirked. It went with her black spiked hair really well.

  I hated the idea of a bridal shower, and Tiff knew it. A whole room of women playing those cute games…it’s just not me. But that wasn’t the only reason. Any sort of gathering that includes my family seems to go lunatic. I try to avoid family events when I can.

  But I wouldn’t be able to avoid this one. All the aunts would be there, and half of The Hammer.

  I walked back to my office and found the door blocked by a large wooden box. Another box! The Hammer seemed to be littered with them these days.

  This one was a light wood like pine, and it had a hinged top. A plain steel padlock secured the lid on one side.

  “What the hell is this?” I said. I gently kicked the thing with my foot. The box didn’t move.

  “I think it’s a wedding present,” said Tiff.

  “Cool!” I might not like wedding showers, but wedding presents were a whole other thing. And this one looked unusual. “How do I get it open?”

  “Mario left a key.” She came around the side of the counter and handed it to me.

  I took the steel key. Then I bent over and held the padlock in my left hand. My right hand worked the key.

  Click.

  I opened the padlock and removed it. I put it on the counter, with the key still in it so it wouldn’t get lost.

  “Wow,” I said. “This lid is heavy. Give me a hand.”

  Tiff leaned down, and we both struggled with the wooden lid. It swung back on its hinges.

  The inside of the box was stuffed with hundreds of those Styrofoam peanuts.

  “This is weird,” I said. “What can it be?”

  Tiff was already scooping handfuls of peanuts and throwing them on the floor. I let her continue because she was younger than I was and my back was getting sore.

  After a while she stood up. We both gazed down at the contents.

  A statue.

  “That’s strange,” said Tiff.

  I’d seen a lot of marble statues on my various trips to Italy. This one looked museum quality. Maybe a Roman reproduction? Her hairstyle was certainly Roman.

  This had to be Nico’s missing statue. The one that should have been delivered to his store instead of the body.

  I was getting a really funny feeling now. You know that sensation when everything feels tingly? My mind was equally uneasy.
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br />   I continued to stare down at the statue. It was rather beautiful, in a Roman Forum kind of way. Not exactly condo sized. “You said Mario brought this?”

  “Yeah. And he took away the other one you wanted removed.”

  My head shot up. “Huh? What other one?”

  She tilted her head and met my eyes. “The other box. The smaller one in your office. He said you knew about it. You called Jimmy or something.”

  What? They took the box full of Seb’s stuff? What the poop was going on?

  Wham, wham, wham!

  Someone was hammering on the glass front door.

  I turned. Nico was standing on the other side of the glass. His arms were flailing, and he was generally freaking out. Tiff moved swiftly to unlock the door and let him in.

  He burst into the room, brown eyes blazing.

  “It’s still there!” he blurted.

  “What’s still there?” I said.

  His face was red, and he was panting hard.

  “The body!”

  I gasped. “In the crate next door?”

  “What body?” said Tiff.

  We both stared at her.

  “CRAP!” I yelled. My arms also flailed. I started to pace. Correction—I tried to pace. The Styrofoam peanuts made it difficult. My foot slipped on them.

  “Sonovabitch!”

  “What body are you—”

  “Quiet,” I ordered Tiff. I reached down to rub my ankle. “I’m trying to think.”

  Body next door. Statue here. Mario screwing up, Sammy had said. Mario was always screwing up.

  Bingo! I had it now. I straightened and fixed my eyes on Nico.

  “The first box was delivered by a real delivery company, right? Not our guys?”

  Nico nodded.

  “Then it’s simple. Our guys got the place wrong. I called Jimmy on my cell from here this morning. He probably thought the body had been delivered here, instead of next door. So he told Mario to return the statue here and pick up a box from here, instead of your place.”

  “Oh fiddle, Gina. That has to be it.” Nico groaned.

  “Right,” I said. “Mario was told to pick up a box. But he took Seb’s box instead of the one with the body.”

  “Wouldn’t they have noticed it was a bit small for a body, Gina? I mean, the thing couldn’t have been longer than three or four feet.”