Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [story read aloud .txt] 📗

“Personae?”

“I gather she is visiting friends for the weekend.”

She spoke with her mouth full. “Dere a’ chew Phenelophe Peash im Mew Ork shtate.” She swallowed. “Only one in New York City. Flat A, tenth floor, 464 Riverside Drive. She’s in the right class for him to have noticed she existed and engineered some persuasion.”

I sat, took a bite of my own sandwich and asked, “Have we got a picture?”

“Gorgeous. She’s an actress, so she has a small presence online.”

My phone pinged and when I checked, she had sent me a picture of a partly clothed woman of prominent charms. I shrugged. “Not my type. Too…” I shook my head. “Too too.”

“Yeah? I think you’re in a minority.”

“You got a cell?”

She nodded. “And her GPS is switched on.” She pointed at her screen. “She’s in Madison, Connecticut. She’s at a big house on Lantern Lane.”

“Dystopia is alive and well.”

“You want to call ahead or be all dystopian and just turn up? ‘Vee know vere you are! Vee can finet you anyvere unt make you obey!’”

“That sounds like fun, but I think we’ll call and see if she’s willing to talk to us. If she’s not, we can try some persuasion engineering.”              She tossed me a piece of paper with a number on it. “Something tells me she’ll be more responsive to a man.”

“You’re a cynic, Dehan. I bet she’s a really nice person.”

I dialed and waited while it rang. After a moment, it stopped and a voice like the chiming of tiny silver bells said, “Hel-lo-hoo! Penny Peach speaking!”

I inserted a fatherly smile into my voice, avoided eye contact with Dehan and said, “Ah, Miss Peach, this is Detective John Stone of the NYPD.”

“Oh, Lord.” A small giggle. “What have I done?”

I laughed. “Nothing that I am aware of, Miss Peach. I head up the cold cases unit here at the 43rd Precinct in the Bronx, and we were hoping to ask you some questions about an old case we are investigating.”

There was a long silence. I was about to ask if she was still there when she said, “What case, Detective?”

The acoustics and the sound quality had changed and I gathered she had moved away to a more private spot.

“This would have been about four and a half years ago…”

I left the words hanging, curious about how she would respond. Her response was a half-hearted laugh and, “You’re teasing me.”

“Do you know what case I am referring to, Miss Peach?”

“I’m not sure.”

“If you were sure, what would it be?”

“Was it a homicide?”

“This is not a guessing game, Miss Peach.”

“Jack…?”

“Would you be willing to talk to us this afternoon? We believe you might have information that could be very helpful in our investigation. As I am sure you can appreciate, it is vitally important that we eliminate you from our inquiry.”

“Eliminate me? Am I a suspect?”

“Not right now, and the best way to avoid becoming one is to cooperate fully with us. We will be discreet, Miss Peach, and if your relationship with him is not relevant to the murder, it need never become public knowledge.”

I heard a small sigh. “Yes, all right, when will you be here?”

“In about two hours.”

“OK, I’ll see you in two hours at Crysty’s, on Warf Road. And, Detective, please do be discreet. I am here with my fiancé at his senior partner’s house. There is a lot riding on this visit.”

I glanced at Dehan and smiled. “I’m John, my partner is Carmen, we’re just passing through and we thought we’d look you up. Let’s make it the Madison Beach Hotel, we’ll be staying over till the morning.”

“…Thank you. That’s very… sensitive of you. Carmen is a lucky woman.”

“See you in a couple of hours.”

I hung up. “Well, Carmen, how do you fancy dinner at the Madison Beach Hotel?”

“Do they do bison steak?”

“No, but they do prime 14 oz, 21 day aged New York strip, roasted garlic smashed potato, grilled asparagus, applewood smoked bacon butter and crispy leeks.”

“Sold to the girl with the appetite. Let’s go talk to daddy’s latest fan.”

We stood and I saw Mo, large and pale with his shirt untucked, staring at us from the next desk across the aisle. He shook his head. “Do you two know how nauseating you are?”

Dehan pulled on her jacket and grinned. “What are you having for dinner, Mo?”

“Get lost.”

“Who knows? We might, tramping barefoot along Madison Beach; see where our wandering footsteps take us.”

“Yeah,” he growled at the papers on his desk. “Here’s hoping.”

We left.

FOUR

Madison is a small, pretty town that feels as though it has been carefully tucked into a tiny pocket on the edge of an immense forest that stretches far across the continent, from New England deep into Canada. It feels that way because that is basically what Madison is. As we turned into Warf Road from the Boston Post Road, wherever we looked there were trees, thousands of them: oaks, red maple, sugar maple, vast beech trees and pines, all bulbous and billowing like clouds of green smoke rolling across the landscape; and tucked in among the foliage, dwarfed by it, were houses, steeples and chimneys, understated and elegant, which were not at odds at all with the wild woods that surrounded them, but seemed to be a part of them.

“I could retire somewhere like this,” I said.

“Retire? We have to have kids before you retire.”

“Kids, in the plural.”

“Two or three.”

“I could get myself elected sheriff.”

“Then I could raise the kids and bake apple pies.”

I smiled. It was a nice image. We cruised gently down, past the golf course and after a moment Dehan grinned. “No, not a sheriff. I