Blood in Babylon Read online

  I said, “Annunziata killed him.”

  She sighed, wiping her eyes. “He was doomed, like his father. It was never going to come out right. That family, they were dark, crazy people. Especially her. He was trying to escape, but look what he did. Drove himself crazy.” She smiled briefly, staring down at the carpet. “He was a beautiful man. He had a beautiful soul in many ways, you know? But he was out of control, like a supernova!” She laughed. “Beautiful to see, but stay out of its path. It will destroy everything that comes before it.”

  Mary came back with a box of tissues. I took them, handed them to Joy and retrieved my handkerchief. As I took it, a lopsided smile creased her face. “You’re a clever son of a gun. Now you got my DNA, and I can’t deny it. Don’t worry, I ain’t going to deny it.”

  I smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “I know Chevronne is close family to Ned, but I also know he’s adopted. So what is she to you? You have no sisters, so she is your cousin?”

  “How you know I got no sisters?”

  “I had a friend at the Bureau check you out, Joy. You got a scholarship to Harvard to study psychology, and you gave it all up for four days with Aloysius Chester.”

  “He was the craziest, most fascinating man I ever met.”

  “Why’d you have your cousin adopt him?”

  “When I had to drop out from my degree, because of the pregnancy, and then, on top of that, Al just left me and disappeared without a word, I went into a bad depression. Chevronne can’t have kids, so she said she could adopt him till I got back on my feet. By the time I did get back on my feet…” She shook her head. “It would have been pure wickedness to separate them. He thought she was his mother, she loved him like a son. So I stepped back, let them be happy. I married, had Mary. Bill, my husband, died when she was young.”

  Mary went and sat on the arm of her mother’s chair. “Mom, is everything OK? Are you OK?”

  “Yes, sweetheart, everything’s going to be OK.” She held my eye, challenging me.

  I sighed. “Why did you kill him?”

  “I didn’t want to. But I felt justice should be done. I had borne his son, and lost him, because of Al’s arrogance and egotism.” She paused, biting her lip and dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. “I felt I was entitled to something. He never recognized me, you know that? He grew to love me, because I was always there taking care of him. And I still loved him, in some crazy way, even in his psychosis, there was such a deep, restless soul there.” She laughed. “So I told him, hey! Let’s get married! I will look after you. I’m already your nurse! So I can nurse you all day, take care of you, and look out for your interests. Our interests, after all, will be the same. So I was going to demand from that family, for both of us, what he had stolen from me.”

  Dehan nodded. “Yeah, Al told his brothers and his sister he was going to marry a woman. That was you.”

  “That was me. And we were both happy. I knew Dr. Epstein would kick up a fuss, but I was pretty sure I could handle him. How you going to prove to a court that it would be bad for that man to have me as his wife?”

  She laughed out loud, then her lip curled in and she started crying again. “Poor Al. He was so scared of his sister. I used to go and visit him every night for maybe ten minutes or half an hour. He was always watching his TV show, Murder She Wrote, and we would spend a little while together, I would make sure he was OK, and then I would go home.” She paused. “But then he started to tell me, he was scared. That Annunziata was getting real mad, that she was going to cause problems. And then he told me, he did not want to marry me. His family had been giving him a hard time, you know? And he was going to tell them the marriage was off.” She sat staring at the floor.

  I said, “So you decided to kill him.”

  “I was not going to get what I deserved. I was not going to get what they had stolen from me. My son was not going to be acknowledged as his heir. I was just going to get chucked back on the scrap heap, one more time, picked up and thrown away, one more time. That was not going to happen again, not to me.”

  “Where did you get the gun from?”

  “That used to belong to Bill. He lived in the southwest for a while, bought a gun and liked to have it around, for protection.”

  “So you picked a movie that would be on at ten thirty on the night of the 23rd, and started building Mary up, looking forward to seeing it. You mentioned it to a few friends too, you needed to be away from the church by ten so you could see the movie. You planted that fact firmly in everyone’s mind.

  “But you popped in to see Al long before that, at six or six thirty, on your way to the church from work. Maybe he let you in, but I am figuring that by then, you had a key and let yourself in. He was watching his show and got up as you entered the living room, and as he stood, you stuck him in the heart with your own kitchen knife. Then, I am guessing you put the knife in a plastic bag and took it away with you. Once home, you washed and bleached both the knife and the bag.”

  “Yes.”

  Dehan said, “But what about the 9mm rounds? What about the overturned furniture, and the shots in the kitchen?”

  I nodded. “It was clever.” I turned back to Joy. “You were very cool. After you’d killed him, you went to the church, did all your duties, with the bloody knife still in your bag. And you diligently reminded everyone that you needed to be back for ten thirty, to see the movie. You left at ten or shortly after and you went back to Al’s house. Now you turned over the living room, though you couldn’t bring yourself to break anything, and you went to the kitchen, where you changed the time on the clock to ten thirty, and after that, you stood at the doorway and emptied three rounds into the corner of the kitchen, as though they had been random shots fired during a struggle. But you made sure that one of those shots hit the clock. You knew the boys in the lab would be able to establish at what time it stopped working, and so get the time of death set at ten thirty.”

  “You pieced all that together? That was smart.”

  “And finally, you took his money. Because there was money, wasn’t there?”

  She smiled and nodded. “One million dollars, kept for years in a sports bag up in the attic. He told me about it maybe a year before. He called it his safety net, if he ever decided to escape back to Mexico. And that was what started me thinking about marriage. I would never have killed him if he had married me.”

  “So then you hurried home. You had already set up the DVD of the movie you wanted to watch, and your daughter…” I stared at Mary and searched for a diplomatic way to say it. “Who doesn’t question you…”

  “She’s simple, detective, just say it. She knows it. She don’t care, do you, sweetness?”

  Mary smiled and shrugged.

  I went on. “She unwittingly helped establish your alibi. You were home in time for the film, at precisely the same time Aloysius was being shot at and stabbed in his house. Did you realize at the time that by doing that, you were putting Ned in the frame for his murder?”

  “Of course not. When Al phoned me and told me what had happened with Ned, I had no idea how serious it had been. But in any case, they had no evidence against him.”

  “You waited a year for the dust to settle, and then you went ’round the corner to Hernandez and Heap, the attorneys in Dr. Epstein’s block, and set up your trust fund. I’m guessing they were not too fussy about the legal proprieties.”

  “They didn’t care where it came from, so long as they got their fee and their percentage.”

  We sat in silence for a while.

  Finally, she said, “How did you know it was me?”

  I shrugged. “It couldn’t be anybody else. When the injunction was taken out to prevent us from seeking an order to disclose the adoption papers and the trust, it dawned on me. I had to reason backward. So I asked myself, ‘OK, of the people who had the opportunity to kill Al that night, who would have an interest in taking out that injunction?’”

  She and Dehan both frowned. Mary played
with the hem of her skirt.

  I went on: “Ned had never been a serious suspect for me. The broken fingers precluded him from firing a 9mm, and also from stabbing him with such accuracy. Besides, at that time, he was knocked out with diazepam and weed.

  “A random passerby or a neighbor were absurd, because they would have no interest in taking out an injunction to stop us prying into Ned’s past. That left Ned’s mother. But I had half a dozen witnesses that put his mother with him that night, tending to his broken fingers. And in any case, she was his adoptive mother—now, two got you twenty that it was one or both of the biological parents who had taken out the injunction, so I asked myself, of the people who’d had an opportunity to kill Al, which of them might be Ned’s biological parent?

  “That narrowed it down to one person, who walked past Al’s house most nights at about the time that Al died. And the more I thought about it, the more I saw your face in Ned’s and Ned’s in yours. Of course, he was paler and had those blue eyes, but that was because of his father. And then there was the fact that both you and Chevronne had Barbadian accents.

  “So I had my friend at the Bureau look into you, and there it was. You had been at Harvard, studying psychology, in 1990. We’ve got Ned’s DNA, and Chevronne’s and yours... And we will have the court orders tomorrow to see the trust fund and the adoption papers. It is over, Joy.”

  She stroked her daughter’s hair, where she sat on the arm of her chair. A tear ran down her cheek. “Who’s going to look after my little girl now?”

  Mary frowned at her. “Are you going to leave me, Mom?”

  “For a while, baby. Dr. Epstein will take care of you.”

  I sighed and pulled my cell from my pocket.

  EPILOGUE

  About two months later, I was sitting on the balcony of the Madison Beach Hotel, barefoot and bare-chested, enjoying the sunny, salty wind on my face. I had a dry Martini sitting in front of me and my laptop, with the Word application open. I had written one word: One.

  I tried out Chapter One, but decided against it. One felt more terse.

  Dehan kissed the top of my head, which was distracting, and then sat next to me in a bikini, which was more distracting.

  “Maybe I’ll start after lunch,” I said.

  She examined my face for a while. “You don’t have to do it, you know.”

  “No, I want to. It would be good to tell their stories. Especially Aloysius. He had a story to tell. He had something to say. But bad luck, chaos…”

  “A few pretty bad choices.”

  “That too.”

  “OK, we’ll have some lunch, a glass of wine or two, then a walk on the beach, and give it another try then.”

  “By then, I’ll want a lie down.”

  “Well, OK, maybe a lie down will inspire you.”

  I nodded. “I think it might,” I said.

  And not for the first, or the last time, I marveled at my own good fortune.

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

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  First of all, thank you so much for giving my work a chance. If you enjoyed this adventure, then I would be extremely grateful if you would consider writing a short review for the book online. A good review means so much to every writer, but means even more for self-published writer like myself. As it allows new readers to find my books, and ultimately allows me to spend more time creating stories that I love! :)

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  Blake Banner

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  DEAD COLD MYSTERY SERIES

  An Ace and a Pair (Book 1)

  Two Bare Arms (Book 2)

  Garden of the Damned (Book 3)

  Let Us Prey (Book 4)

  The Sins of the Father (Book 5)

  Strange and Sinister Path (Book 6)

  The Heart to Kill (Book 7)

  Unnatural Murder (Book 8)

  Fire from Heaven (Book 9)

  To Kill Upon A Kiss (Book 10)

  Murder Most Scottish (Book 11)

  The Butcher of Whitechapel (Book 12)

  Little Dead Riding Hood (Book 13)

  Trick or Treat (Book 14)

  Blood Into Win (Book 15)

  Jack In The Box (Book 16)

  The Fall Moon (Book 17)

  Dead Cold Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (SAVE 25%)

  Dead Cold Box Set #2: Books 5-8 (SAVE 25%)

  Dead Cold Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (SAVE 25%)

  Dead Cold Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (SAVE 25%)

  THE OMEGA SERIES

  Dawn of the Hunter (Book 1)

  Double Edged Blade (Book 2)

  The Storm (Book 3)

  The Hand of War (Book 4)

  A Harvest of Blood (Book 5)

  To Rule in Hell (Book 6)

  Kill: One (Book 7)

  Powder Burn (Book 8)

  Kill: Two (Book 9)

  Unleashed (Book 10)

  The Omicron Kill (Book 11)

  9mm Justice (Book 12)

  Kill: Four (Book 13)

  Death In Freedom (Book 14)

  Omega Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (SAVE 25%)

  Omega Box Set #2: Books 5-8 (SAVE 25%)

  Omega Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (SAVE 25%)

  * * *

  [1] Kama in the original Pali, karma in Sanskrit. Stone is of course aware of this.