[Dead Cold Mystery 29] Cold Blood by Blake Banner

Author:Blake Banner [Blake Banner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Police Procedural, Suspense, Thriller, Private Investigator, Crime Fiction
Publisher: Right House
Published: 2023-08-14T23:00:00+00:00

Eleven

We took Bruckner Boulevard, crossed the creek, and took a right into Quincy. All the way, I had a growing sense of unease. We moved down at a steady pace, through what looked like a slice of New England transposed to New York, higgledy-piggledy houses, redbrick and clapboard, with their gabled roofs, wind vanes, and well-kept lawns.

It was as we came to the intersection with Barkley Avenue that it dawned on me, and it must have dawned on Dehan too because I heard her swear softly.

“Sweet Jesus, Stone. How could we be so stupid?”

“Pelham Bay, Quincy Avenue.”

“I was looking at the damned address when I gave it to Gordon. It just didn’t register.”

We crossed Barkley, moved fifty yards down Quincy, did a one-eighty, and parked facing the house. Dehan was shaking her head.

“Listen to me. Don’t interrupt, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I said don’t. Listen. Zeta is living in Castle Hill, making a couple of films a year in Los Angeles and cleaning up financially. She likes a bit of the rough, so she hooks up with Xavier Pereira. That’s a couple of years back. Like he told us, they have a complex relationship. Sometimes he stays at her place, sometimes he has to get out and go home. So when he’s not around, she goes shopping at Shoprite and gets friendly with Mr. Pany and develops a taste for stuffed vine leaves. When Pereira gets put away for a year, they progress from dolmades to kleftiko, and things start to get serious.”

I nodded. “She’s got a lot to offer Mr. Pany. Aside from a wealth of experience in areas of life which he would appreciate fully, there is also her financial wealth, which he would not find unattractive either.”

“But,” she went on, “he is well known in the neighborhood, at least he thinks he is, and he cannot be seen to be consorting with a lady of the night, otherwise known to him as a whore! He is also not keen for Pereira to discover who has been cuckolding him while he has been in the slammer. So he and Zeta agree, provisionally at least, that they will meet only at his house, and he will not be seen at hers. She divorces Pereira and tells him she is pregnant with another man’s baby.”

“Right,” I said, “and the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is not so much what happened when she told Pereira, but what happened when she told Mr. Pany?”

She nodded slowly with pursed lips. “Was she a hard-working actress to him, or was she a whore who deserved to die?” She turned and stared at the house. “He would have had plenty of time to order the pizza, go and kill her, and get back home.”

“Dumping the body would not be easy.”

She looked at me. “The garage at her house is in back. He drags the body out and dumps it in the trunk. Nobody would see him. He takes it home, showers, dumps the clothes, then in the small hours, he takes her body and dumps it at the creek.

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