Playing Dead

CHAPTER 3

Five minutes after Wade left, I decided to turn the page and allow the plucky, foolish heroine to plunge ahead.

I wondered what it meant that I was now thinking idiotically of myself in the third person and using words like plucky. My colleagues would offer up the fancy term disassociating. Sadie would say not wanting to deal.

Rosalina Marchetti could be a con woman, I told myself. Or a stalker. Emotionally unbalanced. Dangerous.

I had to know.

My fingers leapt over the keys of Daddy’s computer, suddenly alive after a week of crippled hesitation. It took just thirteen minutes before I found the right Rosalina Marchetti in the Chicago Tribune archive. And, when I say right, I mean wrong, so wrong.

Rosalina Marchetti née Rosie Lopez, more poetically known in her stripper days as Rose Red, married Chicago mobster Anthony Marchetti on January 27, 1980. A month after that, Marchetti stood before a judge and received a life sentence, convicted on six counts of first-degree murder and unrelated charges of embezzlement and bribery. The sentence seemed light. Anthony Marchetti belonged in hell. He’d viciously murdered an FBI agent, his wife, three children, and an agent guarding them at a safe house. But the court left a chance for parole.

Marchetti stared coolly out of his wedding announcement, a dark and charismatic stereotype. He looked as if he would be equally comfortable attending the opera or chopping off body parts in a back room. The glowing woman is usually the star of these kinds of photos, but his new bride, Rose, hung back shyly, her face in shadow. It was ridiculous to think that either of these people had anything to do with me.

Their melodrama didn’t end there. A little more searching confirmed that Rosalina’s story held up. She’d given birth to an unlucky little girl six months later. I say unlucky because the child was kidnapped three days after her first birthday. My stomach hurt as I kept reading, one of the “hot reads” on a true crime site with 136,000 hits. Days after the abduction, the kidnapper had sent Rosalina her daughter’s finger. I looked down to confirm that my fingers were still attached. Why didn’t Rosalina ask about the finger in her letter?

Details were scarce after that. I fought off another little chill after finding the girl’s name-Adriana Rose Marchetti-still active on the FBI’s missing persons list. She’d never been found.

Rose Red now lived in a lavish, gated Italian-style villa on Chicago’s North Shore. Anthony Marchetti still sat in prison. She’d never divorced him. According to various society columns, she was a generous contributor to AIDS causes, missing persons organizations, and library charities.

But I could find only her name. After the wedding photo, there were no more pictures.

My eyes glazed a little. I hadn’t slept more than four hours a night in two weeks, not since Sadie’s pre-dawn phone call saying Daddy was gone.

I should go. This would be the first night I’d spend at the ranch instead of at Sadie’s, and there weren’t sheets on a single bed or anything in the fridge but Miller Lites and Cokes for Daddy’s friends who dropped by the ranch to hunt. Daddy asked our longtime housekeeper to shut down the house six months ago, and Daddy had worked here, showered here, and slept here, unless he took a suite at the downtown Worthington.

It was at least a forty-five-minute drive home. Maybe the Worthington was a good idea for tonight.

I could see nothing but inky black out of the windows that lined the west wall, not even the brick of the building next door, so close I could touch it if I leaned out. The other offices in Daddy’s building-an insurance agency, an orthodontist, and a law practice-had emptied by 6 p.m., so I was alone with the ghosts. The air-conditioning clunked on and my heart did a little frog jump.

Still, one more nagging thought.

It took only a few more strokes to find out where Anthony Marchetti wound up.

Twenty days ago, he had been moved from the Level 1 maximum security prison in Crest Hill, Illinois, to a jail cell in Fort Worth, Texas. Marchetti was up for parole. And he was about a five-minute drive away.

Someone was messing with me, either up there or down here.

My tired eyes processed movement, a blur of green.

Someone was in the room, at the door.

My right hand automatically took hold of the Beretta M9 my father kept in a special holster attached under the desk and I whipped it up, evening it directly at the head of a man I’d never seen before. This took approximately three seconds. Good muscle memory.

A long time ago, Sadie and I taught our little hands this move with a squirt gun. The object then: to get the other player wet and to wipe up the floor before Daddy returned from his conference room.

“Whoa.” The stranger stopped short, about a foot in.

This guy had to be a lost tourist. Not bad-looking, but not my type. An aging frat boy. He wore a lime-green polo shirt like a flag from another country, with a tiny pink pony on his left bicep. His ripped $150 jeans were made to look as if he’d worked a lot of cattle, but had instead been beaten and distressed by slave labor in Vietnam.

He was a pretender.

As a Levi’s devotee, who’d worked cattle since age six, I counted this as the first strike against him. There were other strikes, like short hair moussed into an unnatural state.

“Are you lost?” I asked carefully. “This is a private business.”

Eyes on the Beretta, he plopped himself in the leather chair facing me. He set a small digital recorder on the desk and a briefcase on the floor.

“I’d feel better if you put that thing away,” he told me. “I’m from Texas Monthly magazine. We have a mutual acquaintance. Lydia Pratt? I didn’t mean to scare you but I thought I’d try to catch you here and set up a time for us to meet. Here’s my card. You weren’t answering your cell.” He tossed the card across the desk.

His story rang a few true notes, but the man himself set my nerves screeching like teenage cheerleaders. I lowered the gun, returned it to its safe place under the desk, and picked up his card.

Jack Smith. Senior reporter. Texas Monthly magazine. Two phone numbers and a fax number with an Austin prefix, and an email address.

“Call me Jack,” he said, grinning, sticking out a hand I didn’t take.

Get out. The words screamed in my head. I glanced down at my cell phone and considered a less lethal move. Two missed calls from a cell phone with an Austin prefix. So he probably wasn’t lying about that, either.

“And?” I asked.

“And I’m working a story about the success of horse therapy with kids who have aggressive or antisocial behavior. Lydia said you two were doing research together. I badgered her to give me your cell number.”

True. Lydia Pratt was a former mentor and professor of mine at UT and a long-distance research partner.

“How did you get in the front door downstairs?” I asked. “The computer security system locks it automatically after five.”

He shrugged. “It was open.”

“How did you know I’d be here?”

“I’m a reporter,” he said, like that explained everything. “I interviewed Lydia in Austin on Friday. She mentioned you were in Fort Worth. I flew in to work on another story and you and I happened to be in the same place at the same time. The guy I interviewed today said your father had an office down here.”

“Who is that? The guy you interviewed?”

“I gotta protect my sources.”

This guy was annoyingly glib, like he was speaking lines in a movie. “This isn’t a good time,” I said abruptly. “And my part of the research is focused more on treating kids who’ve experienced a devastating trauma. The suicide of a parent, the death of a sibling. Horse therapy is only part of my research. You need to leave.”

“Think about it,” Smith insisted, not moving. “I’m sure you could add something interesting. A story could help you get more funding for your research. I won’t take much time. I’m at Etta’s Place until Monday night.”

Etta’s Place. This had to be some kind of huge cosmic joke. I forced myself not to glance up at her picture. Etta’s Place was the downtown inn that thrived on the slim possibility that after the Kid died, Etta masqueraded in Fort Worth as a boardinghouse matron named Eunice Gray. Or, if you were reading something other than the slick hotel website, Eunice ran a brothel. I’m sure she didn’t charge the website rate of $150 or more a room, no matter what salacious service was offered.

Sadie would call this serendipity. A sign, probably from Etta herself. An artist, my sister believed in magnet healing, braless summers, alien abductions, and that Granny’s psychic bloodline ran through our veins.

As for funding, mine was plenty deep and directly from my trust fund.

Jack Smith uncrossed his long legs and stood up. I followed him, through Melva’s office, down the narrow hall and stairs to the lock on the front door.

“I just want to check it,” I remarked sweetly. The lock appeared to be in perfect working order.

“How about that?” His grin widened. “Must have been a little glitch with the computer.” I didn’t reply. Daddy had told me the security company vowed the special feature was as reliable and about as technically complex as an alarm clock.

“What’s the other story you’re working on?” I asked. “The one that brought you to Fort Worth?”

Smith’s lips curled back up into that irritating grin.

“I know where Jimmy Hoffa is buried,” he said, and sauntered off, leaving that hanging in the hot air.

Our building’s entrance opened onto a side street, away from the tourists and bars and the daily cattle drive. The city had been chintzy with the lighting here, so Smith turned into a walking shadow until he hit the end of the block. The streetlight illuminated his shirt like a neon glow stick before he disappeared around the corner. I waited until I was sure he wasn’t coming back. Then I took the pistol out of my waistband, where I’d tucked it when he wasn’t looking.

Jack Smith, reporter, would have been better off wearing American-made, boot-cut jeans for more than one reason.

For instance, they would have done a better job of hiding his ankle holster.

The jeans always told the story.

Jack Smith, reporter or not, was a pretender with a capital P.

A half-hour later, I put my father’s Mac to sleep and turned out the lights, closing the door to Daddy’s office, checking to make sure it was locked. The 9 mm pistol was in my purse, right beside Rosalina Marchetti’s letter.

I now stood in Melva’s little piece of the world. The cozy space doubled as a waiting area even though Texans like my Daddy didn’t make people wait.

Melva always left a floor lamp lit before shutting the door behind her every weeknight at precisely 5:31 p.m., but tonight, right now, it just lengthened the shadows. The twenty-seven-inch Mac on her desk glowed with a picture of her six-year-old grandson’s Halloween impersonation of Frankenstein, casting an eerie high-tech rainbow on the Charles Russell print hanging behind it.

I was gathering up the courage to venture back into the dark hall.

In my mind, not moving an inch from Daddy’s door, I walked the entire route to where I had parked the pickup truck. Down the hall and the staircase, out into the sweltering night, up two more empty blocks until I hit the parking garage. No tequila-soaked tourists in stiff new cowboy hats showed up to keep me company.

In my head, I rode up the creaky elevator alone to the third floor. I crossed a stretch of concrete and darkness to Daddy’s beater Chevy truck, alone. I fumbled to open the door, panicked by now about getting inside fast enough and punching down the inside locks. No electric locks, no keyless remote for this old girl of a truck.

Standing there in Melva’s safe world, staring into that dark hallway, I considered turning around and spending the night in Daddy’s indent on the couch, the pistol on the floor right below my head. Instead, I punched a familiar number into my cell, hoping the creak above me wasn’t Jack Smith or Etta Place. Or my dead Daddy, angry that some stranger was trying to lay claim to me.