The Spia Family Presses On - By Mary Leo Page 0,22
wanted to contaminate the crime scene if we could help it, but that was probably a moot point by now.
In the meantime, the little problem of one dead mobster still haunted my thoughts and the more we stood there, the more panicked I became that someone would walk in on us. “Hurry,” I told her. “We need to get out of here and lock this place up while I think of what to do next.”
Lisa finally gained control of her voice. “There’s a handgun in there,” she said in even tones as if finding the gun along with her phone was a natural occurrence. “I’d say there’s a relatively good chance it’s the murder weapon unless this is some new way of storing the family weapons.”
I gave her a wry look. She didn’t flinch.
“Why would the killer leave the weapon where anybody could find it so easily? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Does any of this make sense? I don’t know. Maybe he or she thought the police would never look inside these things, or at least not right away and that would give them time to remove it. I think we interrupted the killer before he or she could make a clean escape.”
“But we never heard a gun shot.”
“It could have happened right before we came in and the killer didn’t want to take the chance of leaving with a smoking gun, so to speak.” She focused on polishing her phone. It looked dead, but I could tell she was hopeful.
She said, “Or the killer wanted it to be found. Tell me your mom doesn’t own a handgun.”
“Is it one of those automatic things?”
She glanced back in the futso. “No, so that’s good, right?” She smiled as if everything would be fine now. “It’s a small revolver, with a mother-of pearl handle.”
For some reason her teeth looked as if they could glow in the dark, or was that just my imagination playing tricks with the mother-of-pearl image playing inside my head. “Then I can’t tell you my mom doesn’t own a handgun.” It sounded exactly like the one my dad gave her as an anniversary present when I was a little girl. The evidence was beginning to pile up. “Just tell me one more thing. Does it say anything on the handle?”
She moved to get a better look inside while I made excuses for the handgun. After all, a lot of people owned guns with mother-of-pearl handles. It didn’t have to be my mother’s gun, at least I hoped it wasn’t. “I can’t tell. There’s not enough light.” She twisted herself and backed up a bit. I held my breath. “Wait. There’s something, L-U . . .”
My heart skipped a beat. “ . . . C-I-L-L-E,” we said in unison. She looked over at me. “It was my grandmother’s name, and her weapon of choice. Some families pass down jewels, my family passes down handguns.”
“You want me to fish it out?”
As if on cue, the back door creaked open and a voice echoed through the barn. “Hey, Dickey, you in here?”
It was Uncle Benny. Lisa quickly stood up without retrieving the gun, took a step back, caught her foot on the edge of the overturned olive mill, and nearly tumbled on top of it. I grabbed the back of her sweater and pulled her upright just in time. “No, Uncle Benny. It’s just Lisa and me,” I yelled. “We’ll be right out.”
“I’m right here,” he said behind me. His baritone voice startled me and I let go of Lisa who instantly lost her balance and fell on top of the stone, which caused it to tilt to one side allowing Dickey to pop out like a golden lupini bean bursting out of its shell.
Uncle Benny yelled, “Marone! What the fuck!” and took a couple steps back losing his balance due to those boxes I had moved earlier. He began to fall backwards as he spun around grabbing at air, then for me. I tried for stability by leaning forward. Big mistake. We landed only inches away from Dickey.
On the up side, we didn’t hit our heads on the stone mill. On the down side, between the three of us, we had sufficiently contaminated the crime scene so that the police would now believe we were somehow all involved.
As Uncle Benny and I lay there, holding onto each other, staring into Dickey’s blank eyes—he was now facing us—I realized that Dickey smelled a little sweet. I took another whiff. Definitely berries. Or