Agnes and the Hitman (30 page)

“Damned if I know,” Joey said.

Xavier got out of his car and came over the bridge, where Doyle met him, but the detective’s focus was on the house as he crossed the lawn, Doyle following, yammering at him.

“Let’s just invite the whole damn town.” Shane looked at his uncle. “You know, Joey, if we find Frankie in there, and anything at all points to you having killed him, there isn’t much I can do to keep Xavier off your ass.”

“I ain’t worried,” Joey said. “I didn’t kill him. I just want to know what happened that night.”

Xavier came up the porch steps, Doyle stomping up next to him.

“What can we do for you, Detective?” Shane asked.

“I understand there’s been some excavation work in the basement,” Xavier said. “I even heard a rumor there’s some sort of bomb shelter out there in the backyard and a tunnel that leads to it. And I heard that you fellows have opened up that tunnel and are getting ready to open the hatch to that bomb shelter.”

“You sure heard a lot,” Joey muttered.

“And where is Detective Hammond?” Shane asked, not wanting that doofus wandering around unsupervised.

“Detective Hammond appears to have taken a long lunch break,” Xavier said. “I believe at the marina. Missing all the excitement, that boy is. Sort of like when they opened Capone’s vault on TV.”

“There was nothing in Capone’s vault,” Shane noted.

“I’m hoping for better results here,” Xavier said.

“Some could say you was trespassing,” Joey said.

“Some say you might have some trouble if that bomb shelter gets opened,” Xavier said.

“Like who?” Joey demanded.

“Oh, there’s been a lot of talk.” Xavier pulled a piece of paper out of the pocket of his white coat. “For example. This here is Miz Agnes’s criminal record. I was quite surprised to note the contents. Turns out she’s wielded a frying pan before with violent effect.”

Shane looked at Joey and noted that shut the old man up for the moment.

“I also heard your Miz Agnes is pretty handy with a cooking fork to the neck.”

Fucking Taylor,
Shane thought. There was going to be one fewer chef in the world shortly.

“Somebody swear out a complaint?” Joey said, still cool.

“No,” Xavier admitted, and Shane thought,
Not Taylor then, somebody Taylor told.
The detective scowled toward the river. “What the hell is that noise?”

“Flamingos,” Joey said. “So all you got is some gossip and some old paper, I don’t—”

Agnes came out onto the porch with Lisa Livia and a trim brunette draped in cameras. Opening the shelter was not going to be the clandestine affair Shane had had in mind. He had indeed forgotten what Keyes was like. He looked toward the bridge, expecting to see the local high school marching band come across with cheerleaders and the rest of the town population.

“I brought a flashlight” Xavier cheerfully held up a heavy-duty light

“I rigged lights,” Carpenter said. “You won’t need it”

“Can we get this over with?” Lisa Livia said, and Shane could feel the edge coming off her, nothing like her usual voluptuous vibe. He glanced at Agnes and she nodded curtly, but her tension was for LL, standing at her elbow, and he remembered that for Lisa Livia, Frankie wasn’t some dead mobster, he was her father, and they might be about to open his tomb.

“You sure you want to—”

“Yes,” Lisa Livia snapped, and Shane led the way into the house, past the kitchen table that held a box full of lurid pink pens with feather tops, and down the ladder, holding it in place as everybody else climbed down.

They all waited in the rec room while he and Carpenter went down the fifty-foot tunnel and manned the hydraulic jack. It was a complicated arrangement of cables and blocks of wood that Shane didn’t even attempt to figure out He had enough of a headache trying to figure out who was trying to kill who and why.

“Grab that,” Carpenter said. Shane grabbed the lever indicated. “Ready?” Carpenter asked. Shane nodded. “Let’s do it.”

In concert, they began to apply pressure. At first there was no obvious result except a tightening of the steel cables. Then an ominous creaking of the wood blocks, the cables ran over. “Don’t worry,” Carpenter said. “I’ve done this kind of thing before.”

“Opened twenty-five-year-old bomb shelters?”

“I opened a bank vault once that had been shut for sixty years.”

“What happened?” Shane said as he leaned into the level.

“Wall cracked a little,” Carpenter said, and Shane looked up at the arched ceiling above him.

“How much is a little?”

“I got it open. It’ll pop, just like—”

The hatch popped open with a whoosh and a creak of rusty hinges that echoed down the tunnel and through the house.

Voices rose from the other end of the basement, a babble of questions and some contention.

“It’s all right,” Shane called back.

“No, it isn’t,” Agnes yelled back to him.
“Brenda’s
here.”

Brenda’s voice floated down the tunnel. “Is the shelter open?”

“No,” Shane called back, but she came tapping down the long tunnel in her heels, and the rest of them followed her. He sighed and turned toward the open hatch and stepped over the lower edge.

The first thing he saw was a safe, its door wide open.

Inside the safe was a frying pan, its rim crusted with very old blood.

Inside the frying pan and piled around it in the safe were empty money wrappers. Lots and lots of them. Enough, Shane thought, to go around five million dollars.

“Oh,
my God!”
Brenda said, her voice full of drama.

“That’s not my frying pan,” Agnes said from behind him, and he turned and
saw them, crowding the door, Brenda with her head turned away, Xavier and Agnes behind her, and next to Agnes,
Lisa Livia looking pale and the thin brunette holding up her camera.

“I told you,” Brenda said to Xavier, her voice rich with distress. “I told you. Joey and Four Wheels killed him. I can’t bear to look.”

“Look at what, Miz Dupres?” Xavier said.

“At...” Brenda turned to look into the shelter, at first with dread and then with disbelief. “What...
Where’s Frankie?”

“He’s not in there,” Lisa Livia said, her voice as stunned as Brenda’s, and Agnes put her arm around her friend.

Lisa Livia turned and walked back down the tunnel.

“She wanted her dad dead?” Shane asked, and Agnes shook her head, giving him a look that said she’d tell him later.

“Joey came in and moved the body,” Brenda was saying to Xavier, grabbing his sleeve. “Him and Four Wheels. They moved it!”

“How?” Xavier asked, but Carpenter had already moved past the safe and was looking up.

“Hmm,” Carpenter said, and began to climb up an old metal ladder welded to the side of the shelter.

Shane went to see what his partner had seen and realized that there was a door at the top, and when Carpenter pushed on the door and flipped it open, sunlight poured in, and above that, a ceiling, blue with gold stars.

“That’s my gazebo,” Agnes said from beside Shane.

Shane turned back to where Xavier was looking at the frying pan.

“Well, someone got whacked a good one,” Xavier said, and looked at Agnes.

“That is
not
mine,” Agnes said again.

“This is now a crime scene—” Xavier began and then the earth began to shake. “What the hell?”

“Did you order some trucks?” Carpenter said to Agnes from the top of the ladder.

“Trucks?” Agnes said.

“Five of them. Dump trucks. Heading for your bridge.”

“No,”
Agnes said, running for the tunnel.

Shane went to follow her and caught a glimpse of Brenda. She looked like the news about the trucks was making her feel
much better.

“What are you
doing?”
Agnes screamed as she got to the bridge, but the driver was just as furious, waving his paperwork at her, asking what the hell business she had ordering five trucks of sand to cross a substandard bridge. “I’m suing you people,” he yelled.

“I didn’t order this,” Agnes yelled back. “What the hell is it?”

The driver pulled out an invoice. “Eighty cubic yards of pink sand, for a wedding at Two Rivers mansion.”

“Pink sand?”
Agnes said, dumbfounded.

“Who ordered it?” Shane asked, and she jerked back, surprised to find him beside her.

The driver squinted at the invoice. “A Brenda Dupres.”

Agnes turned and yelled,
“Brenda,”
but Brenda was already tapping down the steps in her spike heels, looking enraged, a tiny blond D-cup tigress.

“What did you do to my clock?”
she said, stamping across the grass, pulling her spike heels out of the earth with vicious energy.

“Some shithead showed up last night to kill me,” Agnes said to her, “and he shot up your damn clock instead.
Now what the hell is all this pink sand?”

“Maria wanted a flamingo-themed wedding,” Brenda said, reining in her temper as she drew herself up. “I thought pink sand would fit right in with everything else here. I know how nasty the shore can look when the tide is out. But I never
dreamed
it would break the bridge.” She looked down to the river, where the first three trucks were dumping their sand on the shore, Kristy dutifully snapping pictures of it all. “One, two, three ...” She blinked her eyes at the truck stuck in the cut. “Four. There should be another truck—oh, yes, there it is.” She waved at the driver on the road to the bridge. “Five.”

“There ain’t nothing more coming out here, lady,” the driver from the wrecked truck said, “except a tow truck.”

“Oh,” Brenda said, sadly. “Looks like it’s the country club for the wedding then.” She smiled at Agnes. “Fiddle-dee-dee.”

Agnes turned on her.
“No, it is not the country club.”

Anger is not your friend, Agnes.

Neither is Brenda Fortunato, Dr. Garvin.

Brenda smiled. “Agnes. Honey. The baker canceled. The florist canceled.” She took a step closer. “The photographer sent an assistant who doesn’t have a clue what she’s doing. The health inspector won’t let you serve dinner. You tried to kill the caterer.” She took another step closer. “The house is only half-painted. The bridge is out. Your kitchen is a crime scene. And you owe me for a very expensive antique grandfather clock.” She was almost nose to nose with Agnes now. “You simply can’t do it, Agnes. You’re finished.” Her eyes narrowed.
“Give up.”

Agnes felt her breath go, felt the old dizziness take hold as the red washed over her again, and then she heard Lisa Livia in her head again, saying,
Face it, Agnes, you’re a killer,
thought of Shane, putting those two bullets in the guy in the laundry room, walking through the kitchen firing at the guy in the hall until his gun was empty, never losing his temper, no expression on his face at all. Another part of her brain knew that Shane had his arm around her waist, ready to haul her off if she went for Brenda’s throat, but the part of her brain where the red mist lived was changing course, looking at Brenda now, knowing that professional killers did not get mad. They just ended things.

“You listen to me,” she said to Brenda, her voice like ice. “On Saturday at noon, the cake will be beautiful, the flowers will be magnificent, the photographer who is taking pictures of the sand right now will be taking pictures of the bride, the catering will be amazing and legal, and the bridge will not only be back, it will be so strong that twenty trucks could cross it. And the house will be the house you have always dreamed of having, and, as God is my witness,
will never have
because I will defeat you utterly and completely, I will grind your face in the dust, I will make you nothing before the world, Brenda Dupres, and my kitchen will not be a crime scene because I will have proved that you picked up that goddamned frying pan in that goddamned bomb shelter and whacked your goddamned husband with it twenty-five years ago, and you will spend the rest of your life in an orange jumpsuit in prison where there is no moisturizer and your face will look like old luggage and the only man you’ll be able to seduce is a guard named Bubba with no teeth, so go back to your boat and pray, Brenda, get down on your knees and pray to whatever obscene and vicious god that made you that you do not cross me again
because I will destroy you.”

Brenda had stopped, her mouth open, gaping, and Shane had loosened his hold on her, and a silence had fallen over the landscape in general.

“Agnes Crandall,” Brenda said finally, her voice tremulous, “I do declare, you’re insane.”

“And don’t you forget it,” Agnes said, and walked back toward her house.