Mob Wedding Mayhem (4 page)

S
tacy had
no way of knowing she’d be lying to her husband just a few hours later. What should have been a simple matter of getting some signatures on the wedding planning contracts at Mr. D’Argenzio’s office turned into a scene straight out of a bad mobster movie, only Stacy was playing the part of the confused visitor who walks in on a murder in progress.

“I told you to take care of it! That’s what you call taking care of it?” a deep voice thundered from behind the door. Stacy paused in the middle of knocking on the office door, her hand still held in front of her in a dainty fist. A sharp bang on the other side of the door caused her to jump. She dropped her fist and turned away, scampering down the dark hallway on her tip toes, irritated that the soles of her pumps sounded almost as loud as what had to have been a gunshot.

She’d only made it halfway down the long hall when the office door opened. A man stepped into the hall and called out for Stacy to stop. Instead, she kept going, alternating between looking disinterested and panicked.

“Hey! I said come back here! What did you want?” he boomed in his baritone voice. Stacy froze. She turned around slowly, somehow managing to force a smile on her face before she’d made it all the way around. She was confronted by a thickly muscled man in a navy blue pinstripe suit with a deep red tie and matching pocket square, an odd fashion choice for so early in the day. Most men in the South wouldn’t wear something like that except in the dead of winter, and even then not until late evening.
It must be why he’s sweating like a race horse
, Stacy thought before recovering enough to level her voice.

“Well, I have the contracts for Mr. D’Argenzio to sign, but it sounded as though he might be busy,” she began, but her voice trailed off when she saw the look of pale, stricken horror on the burly man’s face.

“Wait, did you say, the contracts? You mean, you brought them with you? Here?” he asked breathlessly, already taking a step towards Stacy after casting a quick glance over his shoulder to the office. She nodded, trying to swallow silently but failing miserably. “Damn, I wish you’d gotten here twenty minutes sooner. Come on, I’ll take you to the boss.”

Stacy looked over her shoulder longingly, hoping to make it to the door, to the parking lot, and to the safety of her car. Instead, she found herself practically pulled along, following this strange man into the room where she’d been certain something horrible had just happened. She cringed when they reached the open door to the outer office, half expecting to find blood and pieces of human brain coating the walls.

Instead, it looked a lot like her dentist’s waiting room, complete with matching low-backed furniture and a coffee table filled with old magazines. These titles happened to be about golf, which made sense considering this was a golf course, but then again, so did most of the magazines at her dentist’s office. She’d always had a sneaking suspicion that her dentist’s insistence on her using an expensive proprietary mouth rinse he prescribed had more to do with his love of golf than his diligence in protecting her tooth enamel.

“Boss, this lady brought the contracts. Whaddya want me to do?” he said, politely dragging Stacy by the elbow until she was through the outer office and standing in front of the owner’s wide mahogany desk. The leather chair behind the desk spun slowly, and somewhere within the office Stacy could swear she heard the sound of violin music. She was feeling pretty light-headed and on the verge of fainting by the time the man made the full revolution and finally faced her dead on.

Mr. D’Argenzio was formidable even while still seated behind his desk. Stacy couldn’t imagine what it must be like to look up into his jet black eyes and feel the scrutiny of his piercing gaze. Considering the way he filled the desk chair, she guessed he had to be at least six-and-a-half feet tall, and probably tipping the scales at almost three hundred pounds. He didn’t look the least bit overweight, it was just that there was so much of him.

“You? You’re the one they sent with the contracts? What in the name of Pompeii is going on around this place? I needed those contracts half an hour ago, no wonder I didn’t get ‘em! And now because they’re late, I gotta deal with a whole other situation…”

His voice trailed off as Stacy stood frozen in place. Her immediate reaction at being chastised was to drop her gaze to the carpet for a split second. It was only a reaction; any second now she would remember that she was Anastacia East Prudell and no one spoke to her like that. But for just that moment, she was in seventh grade math class all over again, standing at the board like an idiot while the hateful teacher ridiculed her for not working the problem correctly.

A light red shape next to her shoe caught her eye. Its color was strange, standing out the way it did against the multi-hued beige carpet. It was unmistakable…

“Mr. D’Argenzio, I’m Anastacia Prudell. I’m sorry the contracts were delayed, but I have them now. I didn’t realize you were in such a hurry to get them, I apologize.”

“You apologize? Did I hear that right?” he demanded, a sarcastic snarl causing the corner of his mouth to turn up. His eyes registered disbelief at what she’d just said, but Stacy merely watched him calmly. She’d weathered more than her fair share of bridezillas and their mothers over the course of her career, and one irate wedding daddy wasn’t going to be her undoing.

“Yes, you did. But as I said, I have them now. Let’s get them signed so I can get out of your way. You seem to be very busy today,” Stacy said pointedly, looking around the room at the four or five men who practically lined the walls.

“You mean to tell me the contracts aren’t signed?!” Mr. D’Argenzio roared, slamming his fists against his desktop so hard that a tiny golf bag that held pens and pencils toppled over. Again Stacy refused to flinch. Flinching or showing remorse when a member of the bride’s family got angry was how you ended up eating the cost for the difference between the chicken and the lobster, and she wasn’t having any of that.

“How would the contracts already be signed when I’m just now bringing them for your signature?” she said slowly, enunciating each word as if she was speaking to a village idiot. She waited as recognition slowly dawned on his face. Mr. D’Argenzio slowly lowered himself back into his chair and waited, measuring his response.

“Who do you work for, girl?” he finally stammered, wiping at the sweat on his forehead with a silk handkerchief he’d pulled from his breast pocket. Stacy was dying to tell him that no one dressed like that at this time of year, but thought better of it.

“My name, as I said, is Anastacia Prudell. Of Events By Design? My firm is planning your daughters’ double wedding, and I have the contracts for you to sign.” She stared him down, both savvy business people watching the other to see who would make the first move. The father of the brides had no choice but to cave.

His boisterous laughter filled the office, its sound waves reverberating off the exposed beams that made up the rafters high above their heads. He looked around at his team of hands and they quickly joined in on the laughter.

“My apologies, Mrs. Prudell, I had you mistaken for someone else, someone who’s bringing over a different set of important papers. But hey, when it comes to my two girls, there’s no more important papers than these,” he said good-naturedly, holding out his hand and gesturing with a flick of his fingers for her to hand them over.

Stacy passed him the leather folder she carried and sat in the chair that one of his men brought over for her. She couldn’t help but check the upholstery for any signs of blood before perching on its edge, crossing her legs at the ankles and tucking her feet to the side the way her former employer had taught her.

“Donnie,” the father said after flipping through each marked page without reading it and scrawling his looping signature across the bottom, initialing in the places Stacy had marked with little flags, “take Mrs. Prudell to the dining room and see to it that she gets a nice lunch. Put it on my bill.” He turned to Stacy and stood up, coming around the desk and holding out both hands to her before helping her to her feet. He kissed the knuckles on both hands and smiled broadly.

“I’ll join you in a little while, we’ll go over the big plans my daughters have cooked up with their mama!” Mr. D’Argenzio proceeded to kiss both of her cheeks before gesturing for her to follow his assistant. She had no choice but to comply.

“
I
’m telling you
, Stacy, I don’t like it. I want you to skip this one, please. For me,” Nathan pleaded from the bedroom as she finished getting ready for bed. She’d already washed her face and applied a night cream, brushed her teeth, and combed out her thick shoulder-length hair. All that stood between her and what she hoped wasn’t a night full of horrible dreams about gun shots and mobsters was the thorough nagging her husband had waiting for her.

“I’ve already told you, we can’t afford to skip this one. You’re right, something’s weird about this one and it’s bugging me that I can’t put my finger on it. I’m telling you, the bride’s father didn’t even read the contracts before signing them! But we can’t afford to just toss this one aside. First of all, we now have contracts and the guy can sue you. And that’s assuming there’s no fallout from irritating a man with possible connections to the mob.”

“But Stace—”

“No buts! We need this contract. Besides, if one dead guy is all it takes to get the man with the checkbook to sign off on his wife’s grand plans at every single wedding we do, I’ll start rounding up potential victims, I swear! This is going to be a piece of cake, I know it. He’s too busy to fuss with the details, he’s just there to write the checks for his two princesses.”

“Well then, if it’s gonna be so easy make Tori handle this one. She covered everything for you just fine while we were in Barbados. She’d be great at it. She just has this way of speaking to thugs that makes them somehow understand. It’s like they get her, or something.”

“Cute. But I’m not throwing one of my best friends under the bus… or to the sharks, as Jeremiah would say. Although I do still have to get her back for staging my wedding without permission, and even more for not letting on what was going on with her and Rod… No, never mind. It would be wrong. And two wrongs don’t make a right!” she argued brightly.

Stacy climbed under the covers and nestled closely against Nathan’s chest. He hesitated for only a moment before wrapping a protective arm around her and pulling her closer. He kissed the top of her head, then made his way down her cheek until his lips met hers.

“Just promise you’ll run at the first sign of trouble,” he said quietly. “Make that the third sign, since the first sign was a dead body floating in a water hazard and the second sign was you being mistaken for the bearer of some important contracts after some guy got shot!”

“You’re just being paranoid. We don’t know for sure that anybody was shot.”

“And we don’t know that anybody wasn’t shot, but we do know that it sounded like someone was shot!”

“That’s the last time I tell Jeremiah anything. I didn’t know he was gonna come running to you about it,” Stacy grumbled. “Fine, I promise. I’ll drop this wedding like third period French if anything else goes wrong. I’ll even wear my running shoes to work, not that I’ll need them, of course. It’s going to be fine, you’ll see.”

“Are you telling me that to convince me, or to convince yourself?” Nathan asked mysteriously before switching off his bedside lamp and rolling over to go to sleep.

B
y morning
, Stacy wasn’t as confident as she’d been the night before when she was safely tucked in her husband’s arms. After a fitful night’s sleep in which she was aware she’d had vivid nightmares even though she couldn’t remember what they were about, Nathan went off to do whatever he did all day while she got ready for work. Whether it was his urging or the combination of strange events surrounding this wedding, she couldn’t be sure, but she was certain she was getting a bad feeling about this one.

“Oh, there you are,” Mandy said somberly when Stacy finally made it to the office. Stacy checked her watch instinctively; it was too early in the day for everyone to have beaten her to the office and for there to have been a crisis already.

“What’s up?” she asked, reaching for the newspaper Mandy held out and looking at the front page photo.

“Your floater, that’s what. Turns out he was close to the D’Argenzios.”

“Well, close to one of them, you mean,” Tori said snidely, coming up behind Stacy and joining in the fun of informing the boss. “And by close, I mean on top of, underneath, around… you know.”

“Wait, what? You mean the groom’s dead?” Stacy shrieked, clutching the paper and scanning the article desperately. “Which groom? TELL ME! Which one?”

“No, unfortunately, as it turns out the dead guy isn’t one of the grooms. He just might have wished he was. It seems he was intimately connected to one of the brides, either AnaMaria or Caterina.” Mandy and Tori exchanged a secretive look, but Stacy noticed it.

“What? What do you two know that you’re not telling me?”

They hesitated, but Tori finally answered. “They’re saying it was a mob hit.”

“They?” Stacy demanded with a mocking laugh. “Who is they? Who do you know who is literally named ‘they’?”

“Oh come on, Stace, you know what I mean. ‘They,’ as in, ‘everybody’.”

“I see, so now this famous ‘they’ has a cousin named ‘everybody.’ This just gets better and better.” Stacy folded the paper in half and creased it sharply before holding it out for Mandy to take. “This doesn’t concern us. Our job is AnaMaria D’Argenzio, Caterina D’Argenzio, and their respective grooms. And rumors being spread by ‘everybody’ and ‘they’ can be put to rest now, and never spoken of again within these offices. Got it? Good.”

Stacy turned on her heel and walked into her office, shutting the door firmly behind her. She stalked over to her desk and collapsed into her chair, fighting to catch her breath. Deep down she knew what she’d seen and what she’d heard, but she’d done a pretty decent job so far of pretending that it was something other than mob hits. Finding out that one of the brides was stepping out on her future husband with the unfortunate man in the unfortunate golf pants was more than Stacy’s nerves could take.

She let her head drop to her desk until a moment later when she heard her office door open. She looked up and felt a mixture of relief and consternation when she saw Jeremiah, wearing what looked for all the world like his “I told you so” face.

“What can you possibly want besides the joy of rubbing it in my face?” Stacy asked in a weary voice, barely able to hold her head up. Jeremiah gave her a sympathetic smile.

“First of all, I have never rubbed ‘it’ in anyone’s face, especially not a lady. My mother raised me better than that. You know, a good friend would pull up a chair and sit beside you, then listen while you talked… I am not that good friend. Get up. We’ve got work to do.”

“Where are we going?” she asked, pulling back slightly when Jeremiah took her hand and led her to the door.

He turned and sighed, put out at having to explain how right he’d been. “We need this wedding. You’ve said so yourself. This wedding is not only going to pay our salaries and our bills, it’s going to make sure I spend next winter somewhere tropical, smelling various orchids for the spring wedding season. But before we can do that, we’ve got to be sure we’re on the right side of both the law and the mob. We’ve got one and a half dead men to sort through so we can move forward with this wedding.”

“How did you come up with half a dead man? Is he just injured?” Stacy asked, confused.

“No, but you heard a gunshot, only there was no dead guy in the office. So maybe he’s only half a dead man?”

“I’m sorry, wait. How in the world is this our problem? Why do we have to go sticking our noses in where they don’t belong and aren’t particularly wanted?”

“Oh, how the mighty have turned frighty!” Jeremiah teased, a knowing look on his face. “I thought we didn’t care about the mob or killing or rumors. I thought we had a job to do!”

“Exactly my point! We have a wedding to put on, not a mystery to solve like Scooby and Friends! Why do we have to get involved?”

“Because you know you’re never going to let it rest until you do. You can’t do your job if you’re afraid of your own clients. You said it yourself, something fishy is going on, and we’re getting sucked into it. Let’s find out who these people are, then we can get started on our actual jobs.”

“Sorry, I’m just not up for playing Nancy Drew. I don’t have a curious bone in my body, at least not where the Mafia is concerned.” Stacy pulled her hand free from Jeremiah’s grasp and crossed her arms defiantly.

“Okay, then. It’s time for you to tear up their contracts and give back their deposits. Because you can’t go near this event with a murder or two hanging over your head.” Jeremiah glared back just as defiantly as he held out his cell phone for her to take. “Go ahead, Stace. Pick up the phone and tell Nathan you’re off this wedding. Tell him that his company isn’t going to take part in an event that has been overshadowed by the death of someone who loved the bride, someone she probably loved very much.”

The florist’s not-so-subtle reminder to Stacy about why they did this job—that feeling they got from seeing two people find their perfect happy ending—was a low blow and he knew it, but Stacy took the bait. She threw her hands up in frustration.

“What do we have to do?”