The Spia Family Presses On - By Mary Leo Page 0,106

had left at his house before our second breakup, a borrowed flannel shirt and a pair of Uggs I had totally forgotten about. I slapped on minimal makeup, thought about food, but decided tea and a slice of white toast with butter was about all I could handle, and maybe a baked olive or two. Someone, most likely Leo’s housekeeper, had cleaned up the kitchen, leaving the platter of about a hundred baked olives sitting on the counter.

I barely remembered making them.

It had been a very long night.

Leo drove me home around nine, after we decided to take this thing slow, whatever this “thing” was. I apologized for thinking he’d lied about talking to Dickey on his porch, and he apologized for the last five years.

He dropped me off in my mom’s private parking lot—the chain still ran across the public driveway—and I gave him a long slow kiss then told him I’d call him when I landed in Maui. I was determined to be on that plane Sunday night despite the events of the previous evening.

I sprinted up my mom’s back stairs, eager to return her bracelet. I didn’t want it hanging around in my apartment. There was no telling who would show up to steal it so they could further incriminate her, if that was possible. Nick finding Dickey in her trunk seemed to lock up her guilt perspective rather easily, at least it seemed that way last night.

At any rate, I was hopeful that the slashed tire didn’t quite fit into the case-closed theory. I mean, why would my mom slash her own tire? Obviously, the killer was still trying to set her up, but by some stroke of cosmic fate, Nick was there to see it this time.

Still, I wasn’t taking any chances with anything else going wrong.

My sudden clear head was probably due to the great dream sex, or, I was obsessed with solving this whole murder thing because for one thing, my mother was not going to do time for something I knew she did not do, no matter what the evidence against her proved. Secondly, I had every intention of being on that flight to Maui Sunday night. Either way, I had a mission and heaven help the person who got in my way. This time I was determined to come up with the right Wise Guy or Wise Girl.

I’d read somewhere that mob wives and grandmothers were taking up the sword in Naples and Calabria when the men were either shot down or carted off to prison. Some of these gun toting grandmas were even more vicious than the men, and would shoot at each other in drive-by wars. Not that I had any intention of taking my vendetta against Dickey’s murderer to a firearm level, but I certainly intended to ferret out the creep by any and all other means I had available to me. If that meant I had to get down and dirty, then so be it.

Of course, I didn’t exactly know what “down and dirty” consisted of, but I figured when the time came my unique upbringing would kick in and I’d somehow know exactly what to do.

At least that was the plan of the moment.

Wow! Dream sex was powerful stuff.

When I walked into mom’s kitchen, there were no signs that anyone was around. Of course, that didn’t mean much, her back door was unlocked and an imported gangster had possibly taken up residency on the second floor.

Still, there were no signs that Benny had spent the night, no stogies in the ashtray on the counter, and his pink mug dangled from a hook under a cabinet. Hopefully, Giuseppe had already moved into his own apartment above one of the shops on the property.

What was I thinking?

As I walked to my mom’s room I remembered Dickey’s open suitcase in one of the upstairs bedrooms and wondered if it was still there, the one with all the price tags still on the clothes. Experience told me, from some of the other ex-cons around here, that price tags meant he or she had just been released. My gut told me there was something in that case I needed to see. What that could be, I had no idea, but I wanted to check it out. Once I put the bracelet in my mom’s jewelry armoire I intended to do just that.

No stone left unturned, kind of thing.

First, though, I couldn’t stand how quiet the house was so I pulled the