Murder Can Spoil Your Appetite Read Online Free

call da Silva? You know how convincing I can be. I could give him some story like . . . like you’ve just been rushed to the hospital with a heart attack.”
    I guffawed at that one. “You don’t think he would want to know which hospital? And that he might go just a tad ballistic when he found out I wasn’t a patient there?”
    “I suppose,” Jackie conceded dejectedly. “Oh, how I wish that man had never walked in here.”
    “So do I, Jackie,” I told her as the knot tightened. “So do I.”
     
    I took off for home at around four-thirty, soon after the conversation with Jackie.
    My answering machine was winking at me when I got in. I pressed Playback.
    “Aunt Dez?” said this close-to-hysterical voice. “Call me right away. I’m at the store.”
    Now, I know my niece well enough to recognize that this kind of urgency in her tone is not necessarily an indication that the sky is falling. Nevertheless, I dialed her number at Macy’s, where she works as a buyer, even before taking off my suit jacket.
    She picked up on the first ring.
    “What’s wrong, Ellen?”
    “Why would you do that?” she screeched. A few notes higher, and the question would have been audible only to dogs.
    “Do what?”
    “How could you put yourself in jeopardy like this?”
    “Would you mind telling me what you’re talking about?” I said, although the fog was beginning to lift.
    “I called you at the office before, but you’d just left. Jackie told me you now have a gangster for a client? Have you got any idea at all what people like that do to someone who crosses them?”
    God! As Yogi Berra would say, it was déjà vu all over again. I wanted to scream. But realizing that, like Jackie, Ellen was sincerely worried about my welfare, I made an almost Herculean effort to keep my tone level. “Listen, I don’t intend to cross the man, so I’ll be perfectly all right.”
    “I understand he even has to have a bodyguard! It’s like a movie, for heaven’s sake.”
    Damn Jackie and that big, overworked mouth of hers! I slipped off my jacket.
    “Well, uh, it’s the kind of business he’s in,” I offered lamely. “There’s a lot of money involved.”
    “It has nothing to do with money, and you know it,” Ellen retorted. After which she threw in the proof: “Not even Donald Trump has a bodyguard.” (Although it was delivered with a great deal of conviction, this information should not be taken as gospel, since Ellen and The Donald rarely hang out together.) “Jackie told me the bodyguard looked really menacing, too.”
    I am going to strangle you, Jackie. Just you wait!
    “Anyhow, you have to get out of this,” Ellen insisted. “You’ll be able to think up an excuse. Tell da Silva you have a health problem or something.”
    “I’m afraid it’s not that easy.” And then resignedly, as I kicked off my shoes: “Let me explain . . .”
    Well, I talked my heart out about how determined da Silva had been that I take him on as a client—and that at this point there was nothing in the world I could do about the situation.
    “Okay,” Ellen finally said. “I guess you’ll have to go through with it. But please be very, very careful, Aunt Dez.” Then muttering under her breath—and I could just picture her slowly shaking her head—“A bodyguard. What kind of a person needs a bodyguard, anyway?”

Chapter 4
    The instant Ellen hung up, I shed the remainder of my clothes.
    I was having dinner with Al later. I had no idea where. All I could wheedle out of him was that we were going someplace really special to celebrate our three-months-of-seeing-each-other anniversary. Tonight wasn’t the actual “milestone,” though. We couldn’t make it on that date because Al was leaving New York tomorrow morning for over a week, first attending a dental convention in Vegas (did I mention that he’s a dentist—and with a very successful practice, too?) and then traveling on to L.A. for a visit with his brother.
    Anyway, he was