Trueish Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel (21 page)

“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.”

“You did. I was there.”

Now I remembered him. He’d hauled Penka away, that first day in the police station. He’d been wearing a
tzatziki
stain then, too.

“Okay, so that was me.”

He scoped out dead Rigas on the floor. “You kill him?”

“No!”

The other cops were outside, separating witnesses and gawkers into separate piles. They seemed normal, not like gunmen, but what did I know? Marika looked like someone’s mother—which she was—and yet she carried enough firepower on our adventures to sink a smallish submarine. So appearances could be dirty, rotten liars.

“You see my problem,” Stained Shirt said. “I’m looking at a dead guy, then I’m looking at a mobster’s grandkid and—“ He looked at Marika. “Who are you?”

“Who am I? Nobody. I am a woman drinking
frappe
.”

“You don’t have a
frappe
.”

“That is because she took them.” She pointed to me.

Now wait a minute, I never took any—

I looked down at my hands. Sure enough, I was holding two
frappes
. That explained why my hands were cold. I’d figured it was shock. I shoved one at Marika, who began sucking on the straw with a ‘
See? I told you’
look on her face.

Stained Shirt shook his head, probably out of a desire to clear away the feeling that he’d stepped into the Twilight Zone. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s start from the beginning. What happened?”

I gave it to him from the top, minus the potentially incriminating details. Unfortunately that left me with a lopsided story. I had come in, talked briefly to Rigas Dogas, then a gunman shot him in the head. That sounded flimsier than plastic wrap, even to me.

Stained Shirt groaned and shoved his notepad back into his shirt pocket. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’m going to hand you over to Detective Melas. You’re more of a headache than I want or need.”

“That seems fair,” I told him.

Another cop car rolled up to the curb. Melas. He shot a glance at the shattered window, then moseyed over to the uniforms talking to witnesses. He was in plainclothes again today, flat-front trousers and a button-down shirt he hadn’t bothered to tuck in. He’d rolled up the sleeves. Somehow he managed to blend dressy and casual and make it look like he fell off the cover of
Delicious Bad Boys Magazine
. Too bad ninety-nine percent of my brain was occupied by, oh, the dead guy on the ground.

Poor Rigas Dogas.

After a few moments, Melas broke away from his
compadres
and moseyed into the coffee shop. He looked down at the dead guy, then steered me outside.

“You okay?”

I shoved my sunglasses onto the bridge of my nose. “I want to puke on your shoes, does that answer your question?”

He gave me a funny look, inched out of the splash zone. “Witnesses are saying the shooter was some weirdo with a bird on his shoulder.”

“An eagle?”

“How did you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’ll get it out of you one way or another.”

“What are my choices?”

He leaned in close. “
Now
you’re flirting with me? Your timing is—“

“You wish,” I said. “If I was flirting with you there’d be no mistaking it. I want to know what my options are, that’s all.” Because Melas had a history—well, not him, but his mother definitely had a history of using brute force methods of getting information out of people, and there was a good chance she’d passed the gene down to her son. So I thought it was fair to ask what my options were, before the torture started.

He stared at me. He did intensity almost as well as Xander. I wanted to crumple like a tin can.

“Kat …”

“Oh, all right. The guy with the eagle, I think his eagle was the one that delivered the second box.”

“Why do I have a feeling you know who he is?”

“He’s Rabbit’s crazy son.”

“Who’s the guy in the coffee shop?”

“Also Rabbit’s son.”

“Tough family.”

“Different mothers. Must run on the father’s side”

“Do I want to know why you were in Rigas Dogas’ coffee shop?”

“We were getting coffee.”

He looked at me.

“Okay, Marika was getting coffee while I asked him questions.”

“What questions?”

“Where his brother was, for starters. I had no idea they were … I’m not sure ‘estranged’ is the right word.”

“What did Rigas say?”

“He denied any knowledge of his brother, beyond the basics. He even thought his brother might be in jail with their father.”

“Stay there,” he said. He walked over to the water’s edge, made a phone call. He swaggered back a moment later.

“He was,” Melas said. “Until a week ago.”

“Did he break out, too?”

He shook his head. Very not-Greek of him. “He did his time so they let him go. Assault and battery.”

“Let me guess, he was in Larissa’s prison.”

Nod. “Blood with blood.”

“So he commissioned the box from his father before he got out, and he made the second one himself … why?”

“Maybe he likes you.”

“I’d rather he pulled my pigtails or something.”

“Pigtails?”

I bunched my hair into two fists. “Pigtails.”

“Mmm,” he said, in something dangerously close to a growl. “I like that.”

I let my hair fall back into position. “Forget it.” Too bad I didn’t want to forget it. I’d conjure up that hunger on his face when I was alone, and relive it over and over. Stupid hormones.

“You’re not the kind of woman a guy forgets without the help of amnesia.” Then he flipped the switch and went back to business. “I’m guessing he sent the first box, too, since that’s the one he commissioned.”

“That seems like a safe bet. But why?”

We stood there for a moment, metaphorically scratching our heads. Melas in cop mode was intense, focused. He was granite and steel. Cold things. I couldn’t help wanted to put my hands on him and warm him up.

“Nobody else has turned up missing a heart or … or …”

“Penis,” I said.

He shot me a look. “Organ. So it’s probably also a safe bet that he’s responsible for the murders of three middle-ranking criminals. No sign of Harry Harry’s eyes?”

I shook my head, clinging to my American body language. Then I remembered something. “I thought you were supposed to be following me.”

“The guys from Thessaloniki called off the dogs. They found Rabbit.”

Cold water poured through my veins. “Where?”

“Kala Nera.”

Kala Nera—Good Waters—was one of the Pagasetic Gulf’s coastal villages. It sat about a half hour’s drive southeast of here, if you drove like a normal person. Greeks could shave the journey to fifteen minutes or fewer.

“Does that let Grandma off the hook?”

Some morsel of information was caught behind his teeth.

“What?” I asked him suspiciously.

“He’s dead. He washed up on the beach. A bunch of kids had been using him as a raft.”

My first reaction was to make a face. Greek kids did weird things for entertainment. Then my second reaction—the sensible one—kicked in. How could Rabbit be dead? Yesterday he’d been at the bottom of a hole in Melas’s childhood home. How had he turned into a piece of driftwood so quickly? My stomach turned a shade more sour.

“Do you think it was his son?”

“I think a lot of people wanted Rabbit dead, but his son is top of the list.”

“What’s his name, the crazy son?”

“Periphas. Periphas Dogas.” He was staring at me like he expected me to make an instant connection.

I didn’t—at least not until I pulled out my phone and hit the Internet. The name was vaguely familiar.

“The king Zeus turned into an eagle,” I said. “His mother must have been a hippy.”

He nodded. “Apparently Periphas took the name personally. His records show he has an eagle tattooed on his back. The wings extend across his arms.”

“The man takes his mythology seriously. So what now? Wait—they found Rabbit. Does this mean Grandma gets to come home?”

“She orchestrated and implemented a prison break. I don’t think they’ll be letting her go anytime soon, even without solid proof. I’m sorry.” To his credit, he did look sorry. He liked Grandma, even if he didn’t approve of her career choices. Good thing he didn’t know about his mother’s past.

Kyria Mela. Yikes. How had Rabbit managed to escape her care?

“I have to go,” I said. “Things to do.” Like checking on his mother.

“You okay?”

“
Frappe
,” I said. “Busting to pee.”

“Uh huh …”

Did he look like he believed me? That was a negative.

I decided to play the frail damsel card. Desperate times and all that. I was, after all, about to do a good deed. “I’m from Portland, not Detroit. I’m not used to all this death.”

“They’ve picked up since you got here.”

“Confirmation bias,” I said in English, mostly because I didn’t know the Greek words.

“What?”

“Confirmation bias.” I spelled it out for him. “Google it. In the meantime I’m going to lie down.” I stopped short of pressing the back of my hand to my forehead. I wanted to seem delicate, not crazy.

I trotted back to Marika, who was hammering Stained Shirt with stain removal advice. Poor guy, he looked dazed. Marika could be a human tornado. Good thing he didn’t know what she was hauling around in that big bag over her shoulder.

“Ready for another adventure?” I asked her.

“Are we going to watch another murder?”

“Probably not.”

She thought about it for a moment. “Everything is kind of a downer after you’ve seen a murder.”

I thought that was a good thing, but then I didn’t have four kids with a henchman, so what did I know?

She pointed at Stained Shirt. “Work the soap into the stain, then rinse with vinegar.”

“Rinse with vinegar,” he said tonelessly. “Work the soap.”

We went out to the Beetle. Paramedics were loading the dead
kafeneio
owner into the back of the ambulance. There was still no sign of my assassins. I wondered what they’d seen—if anything. Not that it really mattered now that the identity of the gunman wasn’t a secret.

“
Ay-yi-yi
!” Marika yelped.

I peered in. There was a wooden box on the driver’s seat. This one was smaller than the others, about the right size to hold a couple of eyeballs.

“Okay,” I said, thinking fast. “Don’t squeal. Get into the car casually.”

“But—“

“No ‘but.’ Not yet. I’m going to tell Melas about the box, but I need to go to Makria first, without him knowing.” I shoved the box under my seat, trying not to think that I was probably sitting on Harry Harry’s eyeballs.

“Okay. That sounds like a good plan.” She threw back her head and fake laughed. “We could be Thelma and Louise. I am Thelma, you are Louise.”

I couldn’t remember which was which, so I wasn’t sure if her comparison was on the planet of accurate. “You know they die at the end, right?”

“You don’t know that. All you see is them driving off the cliff. They could have lived.”

“Probably not.”

“I want to believe they lived.”

“That cliff was the Grand Canyon!”

She gave me a knowing smile. “We are arguing because we didn’t touch red the other day.”

W
e bickered all
the way to Makria, until I cut the engine in the small parking lot outside the village. Surprisingly, apart from a tour bus and the Peugeot we had the lot to ourselves. Still no sign of my assassins. Or Cleopatra.

“Where are we going?” Marika wanted to know.

When I told her she wagged her finger. “No, no, no. You see her, I am going to have another
frappe
, and maybe a little cake.”

She rushed off toward the village square, leaving me to face Kyria Mela by myself. I trudged up to her tidy cottage, but there was no answer when I knocked. So I tried it Greek-style, standing in her yard, calling her name.

A neighbor stuck her curler-speckled head over the fence. “She’s at the church. Go and you will find her there.”

If the village square or promenade is the heartbeat of a Greek village, then the church is its conscience. Although, I wasn’t sure that was the case with Saint Catherine’s. The priest, Father Harry, was firmly on Team Grandma, and he’d allowed her to have the church bugged. If Kyria Mela was in church, spilling her secrets aloud during prayer, then it wouldn’t be long until the helicopters landed in Makria’s village square and airlifted her away.

I hurried down the hill, on a mission to tighten her loose lips—if they were loose. This was a woman whose hair didn’t dare move, in case she whacked it with a hairbrush. I turned right at the crossroads, rushed into Saint Catherine’s, panting.

Kyria Mela was lighting candles, pressing their bottoms into the candle stand’s shallow sand pit. Her mouth was moving a mile a minute. The ear on the other end of the conversation belonged to Father Harry.

Her mouth stopped when she saw me.

Father Harry whipped around. “Katerina!” he boomed.

Everything about the priest was jolly. He was Santa Claus in a black cassock and matching
skoufos
—the little black hat Greek priests wear. Could I trust him? Who knew? But I liked him anyway. Who doesn’t like Santa Claus?

“What news, Katerina?” he asked. His voice dropped to a loud whisper. “What news of your grandmother?”

“The lawyers are doing what they can.” I tried to give Kyria Mela a meaningful glance without Father Harry catching on. “Did you hear, the police found that escaped prisoner in Kala Nera this morning.”

“Back to prison with that one, then, eh?” the priest said.

“Uh, not exactly. He’s too busy being dead.”

Only one of the two was surprised, and it was Kyria Mela. That I hadn’t expected. A piece of me had suspected if Rabbit was dead then Kyria Melas could have been the person who made him that way. Not the dominant piece, but definitely a piece the size of a chocolate square.

“Dead!” she exclaimed. “How is that possible?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “This morning he washed up on the beach in Kala Nera.” I gave her a look I hoped she’d interpret as
Don’t say anything, the church is bugged
, and I think maybe she got the message because her lips tightened into thin white lines. Whatever her plan, whatever her orders, something had gone wrong, because in her mind Rabbit wasn’t supposed to be dead. The last time she’d seen him he’d been alive, and she had every expectation that he’d remain that way until it was his time to go.