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

in strange silhouette against their own, dim, limpid light. We paused a moment, waiting for a gap in the sporadic traffic, and crossed to the far side, where the restaurant stood, spilling warm amber light onto the sidewalk.

We pushed inside into the warm. The lights were low, and the dark wood of the walls and the bar gave the place a certain gloom. A young waitress met us with a bright smile and showed us to our table near where a fire was burning in a grate. We sat and I looked around. We needn’t have booked. The place was largely empty, and, beside a murmur of conversation and some very quiet country music, it was almost silent.

We took the menus she offered us, Dehan ordered a beer and I asked for a Martini, dry. I smiled and added, “It’s not the same as a dry Martini, or a dry martini with a small ‘M’. It’s two parts gin to one part Martini, over two large rocks, with an olive in it.”

She smiled brightly and tilted her head on one side. “Sure. I can do that for you.”

Dehan shook her head at the menu. “She didn’t have to shake it instead of stirring it?”

“That’s a Bradford and follows the Savoy recipe book from the 1930s. Whole different ball game. Tell me about how Lenny dos Santos is different from the killer in the lock up case.”

“In that case, our guy deliberately manipulated the situation, actually stage managed it. In this case I think it was almost accidental. Obviously we’ll know more tomorrow after we talk to him, but the way I read it right now, he was a thug with delusions of grandeur. He heard there was a big shot novelist teaching creative writing in the neighborhood and decided he could do that. Maybe he had some notion about writing about his life of crime and cleaning up.”

“Making a killing on a killing.”

“Nice. Something like that.”

I read from the menu: “Lightly breaded calamari, fried and served with a marinara sauce. That’s me, or fried mozzarella, topped with mushrooms and roasted red peppers. That’s you.”

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“Then there are seven different kinds of steak. You can have it with cheese or shrimps or… you know.” I made an ‘on and on’ gesture with my hand. “Or you can have your twelve ounce Angus ribeye with a choice of potatoes or French fries, the way it was meant to be.”

“Yeah, that one.”

“And draft beer.”

“You done?”

I nodded and signaled the waitress. She came over with our drinks and I gave her our order. When she’d gone, Dehan sipped her beer and wiped her lip on the back of her hand.

“I think perhaps what we’ve been missing all along is something that you observed at the beginning, and then we got sidelined: that Helena was a fascinating woman.” I nodded. She went on. “Fascinating enough, in fact, to hook a guy like Jack Connors and keep him from a woman like Penelope who must have been almost half her age. Dogs like Jack Connors need to sleep around or their ego pops and they die of emptiness when they realize how small and sad they really are.”

“Wow.”

“Way it is, dude. But he knew that Helena was something special and he hung on to her. Now, in spite of her naïve, simplistic view of bad guys, it took real balls to start that creative writing course in the heart of the Bronx. That in itself shows that she was something special, and she was a looker too, and five years younger.”

“All true.”

She took another pull on her beer and sat staring at it in her hand a moment, with a white foam moustache on her lip.

“I’m willing to bet,” she said, “that every guy in that class had a crush on her, and maybe the girls did too. She was something special, something you don’t see often. Now…”

“Along comes Lenny.”

“Along comes Lenny. I’m going to do a Stone now.”

I laughed. “Do a Stone?”

She wagged her finger at me, then wiped away her moustache. “I am going to extrapolate from known facts and reach a totally unjustified conclusion which happens to be right.”

I laughed some more.

“From what we saw on Lenny’s rap sheet, I am going to go out on a limb and say that this is one supremely arrogant son of a bitch who believes that he is entitled to everything. He’s like Grant Shaw’s extra-evil twin. Take what you want, and if they won’t give it, shoot them and take it. He has decided that he is the dude and he can do anything, so now he is going to be a famous writer. He joins the class and within minutes becomes the class mascot. Everybody loves the dude, especially our naïve, idealistic liberal do-gooder Helena. And the more she praises him as her special pupil, the more she feeds his ego and encourages him to believe that he really is the business.

“He’s just a thug. I grew up with a hundred of them when I was a kid. He could be Irish, Puerto Rican, Mexican or Nigerian. It makes no difference. He was an ignorant thug with an inflated ego. And she, in order to assuage her own liberal conscience, nurtured in him his totally unrealistic belief—A, in his own abilities and B, in the relationship that was developing between Helena and himself. How am I doing?”

“That is a lot of extrapolating going on there, Little Grasshopper, but it is also a pretty compelling story. Keep going.”

“So, and here I am just guessing, but we’re out for dinner shootin’ the breeze, right? So I can guess. I am guessing that he began to send her messages. I don’t mean folded bits of paper in his homework saying, ‘I love you Mrs. Magnusson, I