The Lost (Celestial Blues, Book 2) - By Vicki Pettersson Page 0,53

was never going to see any of Kit’s moves. Not if Grif had anything to say about it. “She’s at a burlesque show with her girlfriends,” Grif answered truthfully. She’d left the message on his cell phone an hour earlier.

“All tease and no tit, huh?” Ray shook his head, as blind to subtlety and nuance as to the way Grif’s fist curled on the table, and sighed. “Ah, well. To each his own.”

“Crying over lost customers, Ray?”

Cupping his palms around a cigarette, Ray scoffed. “We’re in a recession, didn’t you hear? Times are never so good as when they’re bad.”

And wasn’t that a sad societal statement, Grif thought, looking around.

“Got some new girls,” Ray said. “In case you want to play while the Kit-Kat is away.” He wriggled his brows knowingly.

“You know why I’m here, Ray.”

Pursing his mouth like the cigarette had gone sour, Ray looked away. A woman writhed on the center platform, but he watched her like one of those newfangled reality shows this generation was so crazy about—like it was happening to someone else far away. “Still digging up old bones?”

“You said you were going to help.” Grif had given the man four months to get back to him, four months to go through his mobster father’s belongings and scrape up a name or two that might help Grif discover who’d killed him more than fifty years earlier. But Ray had none of his father’s enterprise. Whereas the old man had virtually run this town from the underground, Ray sat out in the open, showing his white belly.

“Came up empty.” Ray shrugged his shoulders, no big deal. He’d rather risk nothing and gain the same. “Anything Pops mighta had was either lost or thrown out as trash.” He paused, making a face. “Unless that bitch, Barbara, took it with her when she fled to California. God knows she took everything else.”

Yes, Barbara DiMartino. Old Sal DiMartino’s second wife. Grif had never known her—she’d come along after he’d been dusted—but for some reason she knew him. And for some reason, Ray had reported, she hated Evie and him both.

Barbara said that both Shaws got exactly what was coming to them.

“No word from her, then?” Grif asked, reminding Ray of their previous conversation. “You still don’t know where she might be?”

Ray flicked his fingers, scattering ash on the floor. It disappeared unnoticed. “She remarried damned quick after moving to Cali, and probably again after that. She wasn’t one to mourn too long over a cold grave, if you know what I mean. Not when there was still plenty of the living to cash in on. Don’t matter. Like I toldja before, we didn’t get along. I don’t ever expect to hear from her again.”

Turning away, Grif rubbed his chin with the back of his hand, fighting not to punch something. This Barbara was the best potential lead he’d had. She’d hated him at the time of his death, and Grif wanted to know why. “Maybe you can help me with something else, then. I’ve been remembering some things about that day.”

Ray swiveled his head, staring Grif square in the face. “What do you mean, ‘remembering’?”

Grif cursed inwardly at the slip. He was doing that more and more these days. The longer he remained on this mudflat, the more the past and present got mixed up in his mind. Borrowing Ray’s nonchalance, he shrugged the look away. “You know, just bits and pieces I heard over the years. Thought maybe you could confirm or deny.”

“Confirm what?” Because they both knew that’s what Grif really wanted.

“That there were two guys, not one, who attacked Griffin and Evelyn Shaw in their bungalow that night at the Marquis.”

Ray shrugged. “Man, I didn’t hear that they were attacked at all.”

No, he’d heard that Grif had killed Evie, left her to die, and disappeared. “Trust me,” Grif muttered. “They were attacked. And I believe at least two men died that night. Shaw and one of his attackers.”

The third had left him and Evie to bleed out on a cold marble floor.

“Man, I was just a kid,” Ray said, shaking his head, but Grif already knew that. He remembered Ray as a seven-year-old brat running dice in the back of his father’s liquor store. Now fifty-seven, Ray was so mistrustful of his memory, and eyesight, that he believed Grif only greatly resembled the man he once knew.

“You’re not being very helpful here, Ray,” Grif said. And why was that? They’d parted last time with an agreement