Deadly Debut Read online

  “We can’t let them arrest Eve,” Ayshe cried. “Eve, you have family in Turkey?”

  Eve tried to sip her coffee, but tears welled up in her eyes. “Yes, but—”

  Ayshe turned to Mehmet. “We have to do something!”

  “Tsk, tsk,” Mehmet clicked his tongue and put his hand around Eve’s shoulder in a fatherly gesture. “I have an uncle in Istanbul. He owns a shop in Kapali Çarsi, the Grand Bazaar. He does well. We’ll put you on the plane tomorrow morning. You’ll work in his shop for a few months till this settles, then you come back.”

  “She hasn’t done anything wrong,” Roy fumed. “She’s innocent. Why does she have to run away? Innocent people don’t run away in this country.”

  “This country, that country.” Mehmet waved his hand dismissively. “Cops don’t care who’s innocent. They just need to point a finger at somebody and say case closed.”

  Roy blew up. “You don’t believe in justice?”

  Mehmet shrugged. “I believe in justice, cops believe in justice. I believe in God, you believe in God. But our gods are different. You wanna trust your life to whichever God is stronger?” He raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Allah, I don’t recommend it.”

  Eve began to tremble so badly she couldn’t control it. The cup fell out of her hand, and the coffee spilled on the floor.

  “She’s freezing, poor thing.” Roy plopped down next to Eve and hugged her. “Ali, give her your sweater.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody,” Eve cried out. “I don’t want to run away. I was born here. This is my home. But I’m so scared.”

  “Sometimes, you have to go away to find your home,” Mehmet assured her. Ali took off his camel wool sweater and handed it to Eve. She pulled it on and buried her face in the warm cashmere.

  “Thank you,” she sniffed. “Ayshe, I spilled your coffee, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry,” Ayshe comforted her. “Mehmet hid Al and he’ll hide you, too.”

  “Try this one, Miss Gülnar,” Ali picked another cup from the tray. “I made it. It’s different.”

  Eve held the cup with shaking hands and took a sip. It tasted of cardamom, which Turks didn’t put in their coffee. Ali made it his way, from an Arabic recipe. Eve didn’t like cardamom, but appreciated the care. So much like Ali.

  Thanks to the sweater and coffee, her shivering eased up, and she started thinking again. She wasn’t running away. She was innocent. She took another sip of coffee, wincing at the cardamom taste. She was going to find out who did it. Even if it seemed she had exhausted all possibilities. Wait a second. How could she have missed it. The thought was so startling, she broke into a sweat. Ali! She’d completely excluded him from her suspect list, because he was Muslim. But he wasn’t Turkish. He didn’t fit Leila’s parents’ strict definition of “her own kind.” God, what a cardamom taste could do.

  But what if she was wrong? Mehmet, Roy, Alfonso—she’d accused enough men today. Ali, of all people? Ali, so courteous, polite, caring, and friendly?

  Beads of sweat started trickling down her face. She wiped them off with her puffy sleeve, and the soft sweater scratched her. Surprised, Eve looked at the sleeve and frowned. Hidden between the thick threads of camel hair was something small and twinkly. Eve fingered it out from the threads and looked at it closely. It was a little golden bead from Leila’s veil.

  “Oh, my god,” she cried out, knowing she was right this time. “You did it. You killed Leila.”

  She faced shocked stares.

  “It makes perfect sense.” Eve glared at Ali. “It all comes together. Didn’t you finally agree to marry the bride your family chose for you? Didn’t you have an engagement a few months back? That’s exactly when Leila had her nervous breakdown and stopped dancing. And then she went and talked to your bride, didn’t she?”

  A nervous quiver passed through Ali’s face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Miss Gülnar.”

  “My god, what an embarrassment it must’ve been for you and your family,” Eve went on. “I’m sure the only way to restore the arrangement was to get rid of Leila. So, you promised Leila you’d marry her to shut her up, and then you killed her. You strangled her with your ‘engagement gift’—the peacock veil. That’s why this bead is on your sweater. I’m sure there’s more than one, because the veil was totally destroyed.”

  “You’re distraught, Miss Gülnar, and you’re worried about your safety,” Ali announced with sudden arrogance. “It’s understandable for you to be illogical.”

  “I’m damn logical.” Eve slammed her cup down, so hard the coffee sloshed out. “I just never thought of it till I smelled cardamom!”

  “I’m out of here.” Ali got up, the picture of frustration. “But I’d like to have my sweater back, please.”

  “Your sweater is full of evidence,” Eve screamed. “Roy, don’t let him go.”

  Roy placed his big, heavy arm on Ali’s shoulder and forced him back on the pillows. “Sit down, pal. Let her finish.”

  “How do you suggest I did it, Miss Gülnar?” Ali hissed. “You saw me when you danced.”

  “Oh, I know how you did it,” Eve yelled. “You brought the shamadan into the tent and hid behind the fabrics. Then you knocked on the door when I left, and Leila opened. Of course, she opened it for you. You were her fiancé.”

  “I was not her fiancé,” Ali shouted, finally losing his cool. “You’re talking nonsense. If you remember, I took the shamadan from you when . . .”

  “Exactly,” Eve cried out, pointing her finger at him. “That’s how you made your exit. Very clever, Ali, very clever! You slipped out of the tent to take the shamadan precisely when I finished. That way, it looked like you were around. Hey, Roy, was Ali with you at the bar when I did the Candlelight Dance?”

  Roy shook his head. “No. In fact, he wasn’t at the bar ever since he left to light the damn thing.”

  Eve jumped to her feet. “He was hiding behind the tent.”

  “You witch,” Ali shouted, no longer able to control himself. “What do you know? That stupid whore screwed up the arrangement my family made years ago. They would’ve disowned me if I didn’t restore it. But this stupid broad didn’t want to listen to any rationale.”

  He made a beeline for the tent’s exit, but both Roy and Mehmet grabbed him and pulled him down.

  “You’re going to tell all this to the cops, aren’t you pal?” Roy growled. “And if you won’t, I’ll call a coupla friends of mine, and once they talk to you, speaking to the cops will feel like a pleasure.”

  Nick Donahue and Paul Carella walked into the tent with a plainclothes cop.

  “Detective Dave Higgins, NYPD,” he introduced himself, holding up his badge.

  “Right on time, pal,” Roy said with scorn. “The murder of the Aladdin’s Cave has just been solved.”

  The detective looked around, his eyes pausing on the jiggling coins of Eve’s hip scarf.

  “Solved by who?” he inquired.

  “By our hip-scarved sleuth.” Roy gave Mehmet a wink and extended his hand toward Eve, as if introducing her to the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for the gorgeous and glorious Eve Gülnar!”

  FAMILY MATTERS

  Peggy Ehrhart

  “IT’S Mutt,” my dad’s voice said. “You busy?”

  I had a surveillance job for an insurance case on my calendar, but he sounded so worried, I said, “Nothing I can’t postpone.”

  “Will you come out here?” I could hear his stereo blasting out bebop.

  “What’s up?”

  “You know Eric? The bass player? Cops think he killed his ex-wife. He’s in jail.”

  “Where do I come in?” I asked. It was a gorgeous fall day after a week of rain, and a ride to Staten Island on the ferry would feel like playing hooky.

  “He’s innocent. I told him my daughter would get him out.”

  “He can’t make bail?”

  “He’s a musician, Davis.”

&nbs
p; Visions of the PATH train replaced visions of the ferry. If I was going to talk to Eric, I’d have to go to Brooklyn. Staten Island doesn’t have a jail.

  I put on the radio while I dressed, and Eric’s ex-wife was the big local story. She had turned up along Richmond Terrace that morning with her head bashed in.

  I HARDLY recognized the dejected man sitting on the other side of the Plexiglas screen. The last time I’d seen Eric Nelson, he and my dad were gigging at the Zinc Bar with a saxophone player. Eric had seemed monumental: six feet tall, with ruddy skin and unruly gray hair. The three of them were grooving like it was still the fifties, and Miles Davis—yes, I was named for him—was the invisible fourth member of their combo.

  Now Eric had shrunk. “Thanks for coming,” he mumbled, looking not at me but at the grimy surface of the counter that supported the Plexiglas.

  “My dad says you’re innocent.”

  “Of course.” He raised his eyes. They were pale blue. “I would never lay a hand on her.”

  “So how come they arrested you?”

  “I don’t have an alibi,” he said, and he lowered his eyes again. “It happened last night, around midnight.”

  “What do you mean you don’t have an alibi? You must have been somewhere.”

  “I wasn’t,” he said.

  “Did the cops go over your car? Whoever killed her had to get her to Richmond Terrace.”

  “They don’t know where my car is.”

  “Do you?”

  He bit his lips like he was trying to lock his mouth.

  I GOT my ferry ride as the sun set behind the Statue of Liberty.

  It was Sunday, so some of my fellow passengers were day-trippers, out for the ride. Others claimed their cars from the commuter lot or caught buses heading for the tidy enclaves that make up most of Staten Island. But I just walked up the hill to my dad’s. He rents two rooms of a ramshackle stucco house carved into apartments, on a street where kids in baggy jeans and knee-length T-shirts loiter.

  I could hear the drums before I could see the house, tucked as it is between two apartment buildings.

  “Hey, Mutt,” I said, hugging him at the door. He said something, but I couldn’t hear it over the music blasting from the stereo. Ernest, the Dalmatian that Mutt had rescued when a neighbor moved, sniffed my crotch.

  “I’ve been jamming along with those sessions I did with Miles in ’59,” Mutt said after he turned down the stereo. “Man, I was hot.”

  He headed toward the stove, a few steps to the left of the drum kit that dominated the room. My dad looks like an energetic wizard, tall and skinny, with piercing eyes and wispy, white hair. “Tea?”

  “Sure.”

  “Sit down. Eat something.” He gestured toward the table that doubles as his desk and reached me a box of wheat-germ cookies. “You saw Eric?” he asked, after he got the flame going under the kettle.

  “He doesn’t have an alibi, and he won’t say where his car is.” Ernest laid his bulky head on my thigh and gazed at the cookies.

  “He didn’t do it,” my dad said. “He still loved her.”

  The kettle whistled, and Mutt set a pair of mismatched cups on the table, lowered tea bags into them, and filled them with boiling water.

  “Cops are lazy.” He perched on the stool from his drum kit. “They won’t look any further. But you can.”

  “Well,” I said. “The logical question is whether she hooked up with anybody after she threw Eric out.”

  “And she did,” my dad said, slapping the table. “I knew you’d have an idea.”

  “Who’s the guy?”

  Mutt ran into the other room, where newspapers were scattered around a Barcalounger that he’d rescued from the trash. “This guy,” he said, hurrying back and pointing to a half-page ad for Island Pre-Owned Cars. “Tony Ferrara. Linda was engaged to him. It tore Eric up because he always thought the two of them would get back together.”

  THE next day, I returned to Staten Island in my car, a ten-year-old gray Honda. It’s the perfect car for a PI—completely nondescript.

  The trip from my place in Hoboken took me down the turnpike, across the Goethals Bridge, and past the spot where Linda Nelson’s body had been found. Richmond Terrace outlines the top of Staten Island, from the dusty wasteland of the Howland Hook Marine Terminal to the bustling grunge of the St. George area. Along the way, Richmond Terrace skirts a few miles of woodsy scrubland, a nature preserve littered with junk despite the “No Dumping” signs.

  I was poking along behind a bus, taking in the view of Bayonne across the Kill van Kull, when I saw the crime-scene tape. A solitary cop lounged behind the steering wheel of a patrol car parked half on the shoulder of Richmond Terrace and half on rutted dirt that gave way to scruffy grass.

  I pulled up opposite him.

  Before I had a chance to turn off the ignition, he was striding toward me. I rolled down my window.

  “Oh, Officer,” I said. “I hope you can help me.” My usual cool-weather outfit is jeans, cowboy boots, and a leather jacket, but today I had substituted a slender skirt and cleavage-revealing sweater from the thrift store, both pale pink.

  “This is a crime scene, ma’am,” he said gruffly. He was a young guy, baby-faced. The gruffness came across like an act he’d picked up from TV.

  “People dump things here,” I said. He nodded. “My students are looking for dump sites to photograph.”

  He backed up and scrutinized my license plates. “Jersey doesn’t have trash?”

  “We want to document the whole tri-state area.” I put my hand to my mouth, like horrified people do in comic strips. “This isn’t where that poor woman was killed?” I let my eyes go wide.

  I’d learned to be a detective while I was living in Hollywood, trying to make it in the movies. My acting jobs weren’t bringing in enough to live on, so I went to work for a very cool PI named Joe Dogherty.

  “She wasn’t killed here, ma’am,” the officer said. “This is where the body was dumped.”

  “I see you’ve got the tape up—and we wouldn’t be doing the project for awhile. But would you mind if I get out and look closer?”

  He shrugged. “Okay by me. The crime scenes unit is done.”

  Gazing into the brush punctuated by stunted trees with scanty leaves just starting to turn yellow, I could see tires, a toaster and microwave oven, a computer monitor, a muddy suit jacket, all kinds of miscellaneous junk, and a pair of women’s shoes—purple, with gold stiletto heels. One was perched on top of the computer monitor, and the other lay near a decaying branch. Most of the stuff looked like it had been sitting there through last week’s rain, but the shoes looked new.

  “Those shoes seem new,” I said. “They’re not her shoes?”

  “She was wearing shoes.”

  AS Hylan Boulevard curved out of the Grasmere neighborhood, I could see Island Pre-Owned Cars in the distance. I knew that’s what it was because of the metallic banners fluttering in the breeze.

  A guy about my age greeted me when I entered the office, a 1950’s-style layout with floor-to-ceiling windows. Two desks were arranged against the only windowless wall, and the wall was covered with plaques and framed photographs.

  “Is Tony here?” I asked.

  “He’s not in right now,” the guy told me. He had the self-confident air of a grown-up high-school jock and was wearing a slacks and sports jacket outfit that looked like it came as a set.

  My eyes scanned the photos on the wall. One of them showed an older guy shaking hands with Hillary Clinton.

  “Is that him?” I asked. “He looks like you. Is he your dad?”

  The guy put out his hand. “I’m Frank Ferrara,” he said. He had blue eyes and a salesman’s smile.

  “Maybe you can help me,” I said. “I just moved here and I need a car.” I continued to study the pictures. “Don’t mind me,” I added. “I’m kind of nosy.”

  “You’re living on the Island?”

  “Yeah.” Near the Hillary Cli
nton picture was one that featured Tony, another guy, and a woman, maybe in her mid-thirties.

  “Who’s the woman?” I asked. “She looks like you, too.”

  “That’s my sister, Dianne.” I was pointing at the picture, and I noticed his eyes lingering on my naked ring finger.

  “You moved out here all by yourself?” he asked.

  “I’m a big girl.”

  “What’s a single woman want to live on Staten Island for?”

  “Manhattan’s expensive, and Brooklyn is crowded, and Queens is dirty, and the Bronx is scary. This is just fine.”

  He laughed. “You sound like Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”

  “Who’s the other man in the picture?”

  “That’s my Uncle Mike.”

  “Where do your sister and your uncle sit? I only see two desks.”

  “Uncle Mike’s dead now.” Frank touched his chest. “Heart attack.”

  “How about your sister?”

  “She doesn’t work here.” He stepped toward the door that led to the cars.

  “What does she do?”

  “She manages a beauty school.”

  “On the Island?”

  He turned back to look at me. “You’re awfully curious.”

  “I told you I was nosy. Does the beauty school have a name?”

  “What is this?” He laughed. “Do you want to look at cars or not?”

  “Okay,” I said, giving him a flirtatious smile. “Let’s look at cars.”

  FORTY-FIVE minutes later, I sat in a coffee shop browsing through the Yellow Pages and copying down the names, addresses, and phone numbers of all the beauty schools on Staten Island. Then I got in my car, took out my cellphone, and worked my way through the list, asking for Dianne Ferrara. I got lucky on the fifth call, but I didn’t wait for Dianne to pick up her extension. I just flicked off the phone with my thumb and headed for the Parisian Beauty Academy.

  IT wasn’t much to look at—a stucco box streaked with rusty stains and plopped down in a gravel parking lot. But the sign on the door said, “Deluxe Salon Services at Discount Prices—Walk-Ins Welcome.” I crunched over the gravel and walked in.

  Nobody was at the reception desk.