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She hesitated. “I hear Ohio.”
“Which city?”
Head shake.
“Okay, thanks—is there anything else you want to tell me?”
“No, no,” she said. “No. I got to go back to work.”
She lifted a remote control from the same pocket that had captured the phone, pressed a button, and squeezed through the opening gate as soon as space permitted.
I called Milo. “Doug March left this morning for Ohio.”
“How do you know?”
I told him.
He said, “Wife’s dead a few days and he’s back to business just like he told us. She have anything else to say?”
“No but she was antsy from the moment she saw me.”
“Think she knows something?”
“Could be or she’s just affected by Meagin’s death. Also, living in that house with just one other person could feel creepy.”
“The more meat, the more worms, huh?”
“Where’d that come from?”
“Jewish proverb,” he said. “Rick’s grandfather’s favorite. Okay, I’ll eventually do a recontact. Meanwhile, Sean found someone who actually dated Gio. So to speak. She’s on her way to the station. Wanna meet her?”
“So to speak?”
He explained.
I said, “On my way over.”
CHAPTER
19
Rhonda Mae “call me Rikki” Montel was fifty years old and pneumatically curvy, with huge but hard brown eyes topped by heavily blued lids and fronted by stick-on lashes a quarter inch long. Her deeply tanned face suggested genetic beauty on its way to defeat by gravity. A shaggy black do reached nearly to her waistline.
She wore a second-skin beige knit dress that exposed lean, sinewy legs with pronounced calf muscles. She was pacing when we entered, red-soled, red leather shoes with five-inch heels turning her walk to a totter. Five rings on her left hand, six bracelets around her right arm that provided a sleigh-bell soundtrack.
Per Milo she’d been “an unhappy customer” when confronted by Sean at the Waldorf bar. Pointed out enthusiastically by a bartender after viewing Gio Aggiunta’s photo and being informed of his murder.
Before making the I.D., the barkeep, a young woman named Katy Gantry, had scooted back into a far corner. Putting maximum distance between her and the corner table where Rhonda Montel sat studying a magazine and sipping from an old-fashioned glass.
When Sean came over, Gantry said, “She’s dangerous? I mean we know she’s trouble but I never thought it would get tothat.”
Sean said, “What kind of trouble?”
“You know.”
“She gets rowdy?”
“Uh-uh, just the opposite. She’s super quiet, behaves herself too good for us to do anything. But we all know what she’s up to.”
