Trueish Crime: A Kat Makris Greek Mafia Novel Read online

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere yet.”

  “When the time comes, if you want to go—go. Don’t let Mama force you to be someone you don’t want to be.”

  Grandma’s voice wafted out between the shutters. “I heard that, Rita.”

  Aunt Rita winked at me. “Ears like a dog.”

  “That I heard, too.”

  * * *

  ON THE OTHER side of midnight I crawled between the sheets in my tiny, temporary room. Grandma’s second bedroom no longer seemed strange to me. I was used to the cramped space and the fifty-year-old furniture. This space was becoming more mine every day. My clothes were in the drawers. My suitcase had been banished under the bed. On the small dresser sat the wooden statue Baby Dimitri had given me. The little guy had a dick that was reaching for the stars. It had made it as far as his chin.

  Before clocking out for the day I checked on the Crooked Noses, to see if there was anything new. Mafia activity was their meat and potatoes, but the Greek sub forum was small enough that they welcomed reports of potentially related crime. Sure enough, they’d picked up the Fatmir and Harry Harry threads, and now they were trying to determine if, and how, they were connected. So far none of them pointed back to me. With luck it would stay that way. I didn’t want to be involved.

  I checked email, scrolled through Facebook’s feed, but everyone’s updates seemed bland, surreal, as though they were fabricated: Here is an advertisement for how the average newsfeed should look. Day by day it was becoming less relevant. They were becoming less relevant.

  Or maybe I was the one drifting away. The lone balloon cut away from the bunch.

  I thought about what Baby Dimitri had said about the kind of friends I was making here. I didn’t want my only friends to be the kind of people I might have to visit in prison someday. I didn’t want to bring muffins to be people who’d be shanked over apple and cinnamon. Normal was what I needed. People who would ground me. People who couldn’t buy and sell cops, who didn’t think Ambien was something you should be able to buy at the beach.

  Soon—I hoped—I’d be home. Back to normal. Back to where my friends were paying for cable and refilling their prescriptions at Rite Aid and Walgreens.

  But for now I had to dig deeper into the weirdness.

  Eagle Guy. He was the one. His bird dropped the package, after he’d all but run away from me.

  Had he followed us up to the monastery, or had we unwittingly followed him?

  How could I find him again?

  Grandma must have been reading my brain waves from the next room, because next thing I knew she was tapping on my door. I cast the sheet aside, peered out through the door. She was in a black, billowing nightgown, all her bits untethered. Gravity and time had had one hell of a party at Grandma’s place. Looking at her I saw my future, if I didn’t invest in good foundation underwear.

  “Are you okay?” I asked her.

  She waved my concern away. “I am sending men to Meteora to see if they can locate this man with the eagle.”

  “What happens if they find him?”

  “They will bring him here.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  She gave me a funny look. “Then they will not bring him here.” She shook her head at me and shuffled back to her room. I flopped back on the bed.

  If Grandma’s men came back empty-handed I had some ideas. That bird of Eagle Guy’s had to come from somewhere.

  What I knew about eagles was limited to the correct spelling of eagle and their penchant for rodents, but there had to be places out there that accommodated those who had to have a cool and unusual pet. Maybe he’d read too much Harry Potter and couldn’t score an owl. Maybe he had an unhealthy attachment to his character in a computer game. Regardless, he had to ply his bird with an eagle-sanctioned diet and provide it with healthcare. What I needed was a professional bird nerd, someone who could tap a few keys and spit out a list of individuals who regularly purchased an unusual number of mice.

  I scrounged up the name of a nearby vet who knew birds. Tomorrow morning I’d go see him, see if he could point me in the right direction.

  * * *

  CLEOPATRA WAS SITTING around in a white Renault. She wasn’t even trying to hide.

  Not far from where she was parked were Elias, Mo, and Lefty, in their respective vehicles. It was a weird tableau, all of them in what was basically Grandma’s front yard, but right now my issue was with the wannabe queen of the Nile.

  “You can’t park here,” I said.

  “Apparently I can.”

  “This is trespassing.”

  “So call the police. All I’m doing is sitting here, enjoying the Greek sunshine.”

  I glared at her. “I don’t think you are.”

  Cleopatra rolled her windows down. “Take a look. Do you see anything other than a glamorous, beautiful woman enjoying the day?”

  “I see a fossil from the 80s done up like a dog’s dinner.”

  She blew me a kiss.

  “You’re a creep!”

  “I’m not creepy. You’re jealous.” She dry-spat several times to shoo away the evil eye. The evil eye is what wafts around Greece, latching into babies and attractive, accomplished people. Compliments are generally served with a side of spit—fake or real—because the evil eye, like sane people, hates being spat on. I kind of wanted to spit on her, too, but not for the safety of her soul.

  If she even had one.

  I stomped back to my car, where Marika was leaning against the side, a big shoulder bag obscuring most of her middle.

  “Is that Cleopatra?

  “Yes.”

  “Why is Baboulas letting her sit there on her property?”

  “That’s a good question.” The three assassins I understood. Grandma knew the score and she was tolerating them for my sake. But Cleopatra? I wondered if she had some kind of in.

  We trotted over to the guardhouse, where the day guy was leafing through a paperback novel.

  “Why is she out there?”

  “She who?”

  I pointed. He stared at the car. “Oh. Her. I don’t mind her being here. Brightens up the scenery.”

  Yeah, the way glitter brightens up a stripper.

  “I need my slingshot,” I said.

  Marika lit up. “Are you going to shoot them?”

  “Just her. She’s a pain in my butt.”

  “No.” She hoisted up her big bag. “I will speak with her.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “I have five children—four sons and a husband. I can handle the Queen of Egypt.”

  Marika stormed over to the car, bag swinging.

  I’d seen how Marika handled her menfolk. With a loud voice and the kind of hand waving that could command a large orchestra. “It’s okay,” I called out. “I’ll get rid of her myself.”

  She pulled one of those fun-sized machine guns from that huge bag of hers and opened fire on the hood of the Renault. BAM! BAM! BAM!

  The three assassins leaped out of their cars, weapons waving. They exchanged embarrassed glances when they realized they were witnessing a very short catfight. Inside the guardhouse the guard answered his phone. He fired off a few words and hung up.

  “Baboulas wanted to know about the gunfire,” he said, “so I told her.”

  I trotted out to where the gun was still smoking.

  Cleopatra stuck her head out the window, bared her teeth in an approximation of a grin. “Your friend is stupid. The engine is in the back.”

  “Stupid, eh?” Marika stomped around the back and unleashed another deafening volley. “Who is stupid now?” she yelled. “Who? You are stupid, that is who!”

  “You shot my car!”

  Marika dropped the gun in her bag. “I did nothing. I was standing here, enjoying the day.” She strolled back through the gates to the Beetle.

  “You shot up her car,” I said.

  “It was an accident. My finger slipped and her car was in
the way when it happened.”

  “That’s a pretty good story,” I said.

  “Every one of my sons, and Takis, has told me that story when I caught them picking their noses and eating the boogers. Always it is an accident, their finger slipped.”

  The TMI (Too Much Information) was strong in this family.

  “Where are you going today?” Marika asked me.

  “I have to pick up Donk, then I’m going to see a veterinarian.”

  “What happened to his scooter?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “I have never met a veterinarian before.”

  I looked at her.

  “Maybe he will use some big Greek words you don’t know.” She gave me a meaningful look.

  “I … guess you could come with me?”

  “Today is your lucky day because I am free. Come.” She climbed into the Beetle’s passenger seat.

  “It’s not really an adventure,” I said.

  “I am a stay-at-home mother. Everything that does not involve snot or skata is an adventure.”

  “You won’t need the gun.”

  “Okay, but I will bring it anyway. Takis says you never know when you will need insurance.”

  * * *

  DONK GLARED AT MARIKA. “When do I get to sit in the front seat?”

  “Never, that is when. We should see about getting him a car seat,” she said to me. She turned around to face the teenager. “You look young enough to still need a car seat.”

  “I’ll sit in a car seat when you go on a diet.”

  Marika turned back around. “I think he is going bald. Does it look to you like he is going bald?”

  I glanced in the rearview mirror. “Hard to say with that hat on.”

  “Hats make you bald,” she said with absolute conviction.

  “I’m not going bald!” He swiveled the brim around to its intended position, slouched in the seat, defeated. Poor kid, Marika had likely set up a new neurosis. It made me wonder which way she made her offspring twitch.

  My phone jangled. Melas was on the other end.

  “Find any body parts lately?” he asked me.

  “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

  “Only the crazy ones.”

  This from a guy who had boned a mobster’s wife and knocked her up.

  “Hanging up now,” I said.

  “Okay. I won’t tell you what I know.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “We found a dead guy behind one of those roadside shrines on Pelion. A sheepherder called it in. He’s missing a … a body part.”

  “Which body part?”

  “The one you found.”

  “Which one?” I said on automatic. What could I say; my brain was busy processing the part about a dead body.

  He launched immediately into cop-mode. “You found another one?”

  Oh boy. Why hadn’t I kept my mouth shut?

  “I didn’t find anything.” I lowered my voice. “It … fell out of the sky. In a manner of speaking.”

  “Fell out of the sky.”

  “An eagle dropped it.”

  There was a pause. A long one, during which I fancied he debated the merits of dumping me on the next America-bound boat.

  “Meet me at the Volos morgue,” he said.

  “Do I have to?”

  The line was already dead.

  “Change of plans,” I told my passengers. “We’re going to the morgue.” A moment passed. “Where exactly is the morgue?”

  Chapter 11

  THE VOLOS MORGUE was in the belly of the hospital, and it was close to overflowing. I had left Donk in Marika’s custody. She was circling the block because parking was non-existent. My assassins couldn’t find parking either, so they were following in her tire prints, chomping at the bit because I’d told her to drive at the speed of snow melting in February. By some feat of magic (I suspected she’d used sexual favors) Cleopatra had nabbed a disabled parking space by the front doors.

  “Don’t worry,” I had told her on the way past, “the moment they look at you they’ll know you belong there.”

  Back in the morgue, with its walls the exact ghostly shade of green they use to paint phosphorescent star and planet decals, I was listening to the morgue attendant bitch about the guests who wouldn’t leave. He was a little schnauzer of a guy, whose expression teetered on the edge between laughter and tears.

  “It’s the economy,” Melas told me. “People can’t afford to bury their dead, so they dump them here.”

  Yikes. “What happens to them?”

  “Prison food.” The attendant glanced back at me. “Joking. Sorry, morgue humor. Some we have to keep indefinitely. Others … we manage to get permission from the government to bury them. Did you bring the organ?”

  “I didn’t realize I was supposed to. Nobody—“ I glanced pointedly at Melas. “—asked me to.”

  “Where is it?” the detective asked.

  “Refrigerator.” They looked at me. “What? Where else would you put it? In this weather it’s the fridge or the freezer, and I figured you wouldn’t want it to get freezer burn. I was being considerate.”

  They were somewhere between horrified and entertained.

  “Let’s go look at your guy,” the attendant said.

  It was wall-to-wall meat lockers like on TV. The place reeked of disinfectant and broken dreams. Probably the latter belonged to the attendant. He looked like he’d rather be at the beach, knocking back frappes, instead of sliding a dead man out of a vault.

  The body was covered in a sheet.

  I wondered where it had begun, this ritual of covering the deceased. Were we hiding our dead from the boogeyman by stashing them under bedclothes?

  The attendant to the dead said, “You okay with this?”

  I nodded. It was that or pass out in a puddle of my own puke.

  Melas moved closer so that his words brushed my ear. “All you have to do is say if you recognize him or not.”

  Deep breath. Let it out slowly. “I’m fine. Show me.”

  Down went the sheet.

  Dark hair. Olive skin. Pre-death he’d been cultivating stubble. Average build. Maybe forty-something. Spider tattoo on his neck.

  I shivered.

  “Don’t know him.”

  Up went the sheet. Slam went the locker.

  I excused myself and slid out the door. Melas followed.

  Gastric acid was making noises about how it wanted to see the light. I closed my mouth, tried to think. Out there somewhere was a Frankenstein, chopping bits off bad guys and sending them to me.

  Well, Grandma. But I was taking it personally.

  “I’m sick of Greece,” I said to Melas. “Greeks probably kidnapped my father. Someone is always trying to kill me. Everyone I know except you is a criminal of one kind of another. And I’m slowly getting used to that. Now, it’s not so weird that I’m surrounded by killers and dealers and money launderers. It should be weird. It should be horrifying.”

  His hard cop face softened. “It is horrifying. But right now your brain is trying to cope. It’s pushing all the weirdness aside so you can do what needs doing to find your father.”

  “You think so?”

  He leaned against the wall and slung an arm—his, thankfully—around my shoulder, and snugged me up to him. “I think about it a lot. He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.”

  “Nietzsche. Look into the abyss long enough, the abyss looks into you.”

  “I don’t do this job for the monsters,” he said. “Locking them up is a byproduct. What I do is help people. That’s what I concentrate on when the darkness gets too thick and deep. You’re not getting accustomed to the darkness—you’re doing what has to be done to find your father.”

  That—I wanted that to be my truth.

  “Do you guys have any leads about the body in there?”

  He shook his head. “We’re spread thin—and getting thinner
. We’re down a bunch of informants after Pistof blazed through them. Others are either afraid to come forward or they want to be paid. The department doesn’t have spare cash. That … thing from the box is the only lead I’ve got. I don’t suppose you guys took fingerprints?”

  “I don’t think they do that.”

  Notice the clever way I changed we to they? I wasn’t one of them. I didn’t want to be. Once I found Dad I was out of here, back to where the biggest crime happening in my vicinity was a speeding ticket, maybe shoplifting. I wanted to be around people who could honestly say they’d never killed anyone.

  That wasn’t too much to ask, was it?

  And here came the now-predictable tsunami of guilt. The Family was the only family I had besides Dad, and I wasn’t sure I had him anymore. The voice noodling around inside my head told me he was still alive, but there was another voice in there, too, and it had a ‘glass is half-empty’ kind of personality. It said Dad was dead and this family was all the family I’d ever have, so I’d better not screw it up.

  “You’ll let me know if any more body parts show up, right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why did you call me?”

  “He had a picture of you in his pocket. One from the newspaper.”

  Melas walked me out of the hospital. He was parked in the emergency bay; being a cop came with perks. Not many, if you were a Greek cop, but some.

  Cleopatra jumped when she saw me. She had been slapping some more paint on her face.

  Melas stopped to gawk at her car. “Are those bullet holes?”

  I squinted. Shrugged. “Could be. Who can say?”

  He shook his head. “Where’s your car?”

  “No parking. Marika had to drive it around the block a few times. Sure enough, here came Marika, my Beetle screaming to a stop as she hit the brakes. Behind her, several sets of brakes squealed as the assassins tried not to plow into one another.

  Obviously snow melted fast here in February.

  “Circus?” Melas asked.

  “Entourage.”

  “You have an entourage?”

  “I have Marika, Donk, the walking blowup doll back there, and three assassins.”