Gina Cassavogli’s involvement had come out of left field. At first defensive over how I’d talked to Amy, I now knew that Amy had caught her with Blitz in the backseat of Ebony’s car. And hadn’t Gina threatened me with a lawsuit because her husband was an attorney? I wondered how that played into her master plan of having Candy Girls take over our business? I could hardly imagine that she’d want her activities with Blitz to become public knowledge.
I hadn’t given much thought to Black Jack and Linda Cannon. Was it a coincidence that they’d been robbed days after Blitz’s murder? Or had someone, not finding the money on Blitz at the party, broken into their house looking for it? Or had it all been staged, a way to bury them under community sympathy instead of looking too closely at their possible involvement?
The bus jerked to a stop. The sudden movement snapped me out of my thoughts. What was I thinking? I was so eager to find another suspect that I was practically accusing a family of murdering their son. But blood was thicker than water. I knew that better than most. Even though I’d moved away, at the first sign that something was wrong with my dad, I’d dropped everything and come back. And I’d stay as long as it took to make sure he was okay.
I climbed off the Zip-Two a stop early and walked the rest of the distance to Ebony’s apartment. Her Cadillac was parked out front. I went around the back and knocked on the door that led to the kitchen. She answered a few seconds later, like she’d been close by.
“Hey, girl,” she said. She wore a pair of faded denim bell-bottoms with patch pockets, platform sandals with cork soles, and a maize-colored shirt that was knotted at her waist. A long, tribal-looking scarf was knotted around her head. Ivory, who looked like little more than a dumped-out bag of cotton balls on the kitchen floor, sniffed her purple toenails. “What brings you here so early?”
“We need to talk,” I said.
“Come on in.”
I followed her through the back door to a small love seat out front. She paused when she reached the sofa. Ivory looked up at her and yipped, and she ran the palm of her hand over his puffy white fur.
“I know about the twenty thousand dollars,” I said. Her head snapped up. First shock, then relief, and then an attempt to pretend she hadn’t reacted at all flashed across her face in pulses. “You must have dropped it when you were loading or unloading your car. I found it after you drove away on Monday. I have it—not with me, but it’s in the costume shop.”
“You’ve had it all this time?”
“Ebony, I don’t understand why you had it. You said Blitz didn’t pay you. But I talked to Dig and he told me he found the envelope with Blitz’s initials on it in your car. An envelope that had something dark and red smeared on it. And he told me how you took the money but threw the envelope out. What’s going on?”
Ebony walked around the side of the sofa and sat down next to Ivory. He settled down on the cushion next to her and put his paws on her thigh.
“Blitz told me he had my money. He said there was one thing he wanted for it. He wanted to know the truth about me and his dad. He didn’t give it to me. I found it in my car. After.”
“After what?”
“After he was murdered.” She looked down at Ivory, who looked up at her. For a few seconds, it felt like they were having a wordless conversation. I liked to think that Ivory was the voice of reason, telling her to tell me what was going on. Perhaps he was, because when she looked away from him, she stood up and reached her hand down between the cushions of the sofa and pulled out a knife.
“What is that?” I asked. I needed to hear her say it to confirm my worst suspicions.
“It’s the knife that I had in the kitchen. The one I was about to use to carve the goose. When I saw Blitz’s body, I dropped it and it landed in the blood.”
Her eyes were wide, the whites of them standing out against her coffee-colored skin. Her mouth was shaped like an O, which made her already-pronounced cheekbones stand out even more. Terror emanated off her in waves. Like a contagion, it made my throat restrict almost immediately.
“Why is it here?” I asked, fighting to keep my voice calm.
“I found it in the bushes behind my house. I don’t know how it got there, but I know it means one thing. Somebody planted it to make me look guilty.”
“But if you were holding that knife, then it wasn’t the one used to kill Blitz.”
She sank back down on the sofa, her hand wrapped around the handle of the knife. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. What’s gonna happen to me?”
“Ebony, you have to calm down.” I leaned forward and put my hands on her wrists. The tip of the knife pointed down and poked me in the thigh. I moved my knees to the side. “Set the knife down here and tell me what happened.”