The Spia Family Presses On - By Mary Leo Page 0,44

got nothing to hide.”

“Oh?”

She rolled out of bed and stood there, staring down at me, looking rather put together for just having woken up. “Okay, so maybe we didn’t call the police the moment we found Dickey. We were just doing what we thought was right at the time. He was a bad dude anyway. A mob boss. You don’t seriously believe he didn’t kill Carla DeCarlo, do you? Or had something to do with it? Besides, nobody cares if there’s one less mobster in this world.”

She turned on her naked heels, padded off to the kitchen area, filled a kettle with tap water and placed it on a burner. I rolled out of bed and trudged off to the bathroom, eager to take yet another shower. A shower was always a place for me to think, and brother did I ever need time to think.

I grabbed a change of clothes from my closet and went into the bathroom. As soon as I stepped inside the scent of berries was almost overpowering. I figured it had to be coming from the clothes-hamper where I’d thrown my oily clothes.

When I placed my clothes on the counter, I nearly jumped out of my flannels. A bloody white handkerchief rolled up in a cylinder sat on the edge of the sink.

I took a step back, then slowly crept in closer, afraid the thing was going to jump up and bite me . . . I figured nothing was impossible after the previous night.

As I moved in closer to the bloody intruder, I picked up a toothbrush lying on the sink and poked at it a couple times. The hankie unraveled a bit and something that resembled a finger fell out of it and rolled around in the sink, leaving a streak of dark red blood.

“That’s disgusting,” I said out loud.

I leaned over the sink to get a better look and realized that it was, in fact, a pinky finger, a pinky finger with a long, perfectly manicured nail. Undoubtedly, this was Dickey’s pinky finger rolling around in my sink. My already tormented tummy reminded me just how disturbing this moment of severed madness was.

“Oh-my-god! Lisa, come’ere-come’ere-come’ere!”

Lisa ran in before I finished getting all my yells out. She spotted the severed digit as soon as she walked in the room and cautiously peered inside the basin.

“Wow,” she calmly said. “I hope this finger belongs to Dickey or your family is getting completely out of control.”

“It’s his. It has to be his. I remember the manicure.”

She poked around at the bloody hankie. “There’s a note.” She picked it up, carefully unfolded it and read the printed words: “If you give me what was on this finger, Dickey will disappear forever. If you don’t, you’ll regret it. This is my final offer.” She looked at me. “This is so Godfather. Couldn’t the killer have thought of something more original? I mean, come on. A finger? A threatening note? Whoever this guy is, needs to update his bag of mob tricks.”

The teapot whistled. She dropped the note in the sink and walked out of the bathroom, leaving me standing there still clutching my pile of clean clothes, completely put off by her flippant attitude. We were talking murder here and she was talking Hollywood.

I padded out of the bathroom. “Doesn’t this scare you? Aren’t you worried, or at the very least, nauseous? Someone just threatened us, not to mention that he or she, although I’m thinking it was a he because the women in this family are pretty squeamish when it comes to blood. Anyway he was in here last night while we slept. The killer was in my apartment planting Dickey’s finger. That alone is disturbing.”

“I keep telling you to lock your door.” She pulled a white six-cup teapot from the cupboard. “It’s more corny than anything else. Okay, and disgusting. But nauseous? Umm, not so much. From all I’ve read about the mob, and from hanging around with you, this seems like some kind of vendetta that we shouldn’t be involved in. I mean, we don’t have the ring, so obviously the killer is completely misguided. We just need to let him know the facts and stay out of the way. Without a body, the murder isn’t our problem.”

She busied herself with filling a tea ball with loose tea, placing it inside the teapot then pouring in the hot water.

I sighed and sat down hard on the bed. It was all getting to be too