Page 28 of Spiteful Heart

“Yes,” she said, frowning. “Let’s park somewhere near the theater.”

We got rolling, carefully driving by the entrance to the parking garage, not seeing a single living soul within as we went. Lola chewed on her lip the entire drive to the downtown theater, not saying a single word to me.

The movie theater was the kind of place you’d imagine was the place to be way back when. It had lots of lights that blinded anyone on the street when it got dark, big signs jutting out over the sidewalk with movie titles and times. Red velvet carpet once you got inside, after you bought your ticket from the ticketmaster behind his wall of glass. A very old-fashioned kind of place, although it had seen better days. Much better days.

I parallel parked us across the busy four-lane street. With all the rush-hour traffic, there was no way he’d be able to see us—that was, if he actually showed up. The more minutes that passed, the less likely I thought he’d be here.

“This Giulia,” I started, “do we even know what she looks like?”

“No,” Lola muttered with a frown. “At the bar, when she introduced herself to Harvey, I was busy talking to Newton. I didn’t see who it was. There were a lot of chicks there that night. By the time I was done talking to Newton, he said she’d left.”

My finger tapped the steering wheel. “Have you tried to find her online?”

“Oh, because I’msuperbig into social media, yeah. You know me. I got profiles on all the sites—” Her tone dripped facetiousness, and she only stopped when I shot her a quick glare. “I might be a serial killer, but I’m not Joe Goldberg. I don’t stalk people online.”

“So that’s a no, then,” I said. “So, really, we don’t know that Giulia’s even a real person.”

“She’s real.”

“How do we know that, though? No one has seen her. This is his first date after being put on Newton—and he’s not showing up. And I don’t see any woman standing around in front of the theater waiting for him, either.”

Lola sighed. “So, you agree with Sylvester, then? You think it’s Harvey?”

“I’m not saying that. I just think it’s fishy, is all.” I bit the inside of my cheek, thinking, and as I stared at the theater across the street, it dawned on me. “You said you were talking to Newton when this woman came onto Harvey?”

“Yeah. A-plus for your listening skills.”

“We’ve never seen this chick, so by all accounts, she might not exist. What if… what if he saw you talking to Newton and knew it was a good time to make a little alibi for himself?” I paused, another possibility popping into my head. “Or what if Harvey had help to make that alibi?”

Lola squinted at me. “Help? Who’d…” She trailed off, unable to finish the question, probably because she came up with the answer all by herself. “You think Harvey and Newton are working together?”

“It’s a possibility, isn’t it?” Just based on the expression Lola gave me, I could tell I’d surprised her by that suggestion. It was one no one had thought of before—or if they had, they hadn’t told me about it.

I didn’t know much about Harvey, minus the fact that he was an awkward son of a bitch with an almost innocent aura about him. Which, to this day, I found odd. That, and he was a DeLuca loyalist before the shit hit the fan for them and the Bloody Princess tried staging a coup. He’d pretty much worked for her half his life, since he got behind the wheel. His pops had worked as Carl’s driver, so he had a way in.

And Newton? He ran one of the clubs in the city we knew was a DeLuca hangout. It’s why Richie had put Lola there to begin with, made her audition and become an act, as short-lived as it had been. Newton’s ties were always to the DeLucas, in the end, so it wasn’t a stretch to think he’d want Lola out of the picture.

Because if Lola was gone, the Luciano brothers would crumble, their power weakening enough that he could take them down, for good. He could eliminate the last of the old families and put himself right on top… and have Harvey as his right-hand man.

Shit. The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed.

I told Lola my thoughts, and she didn’t say a word as I explained it to her. She listened with a thoughtful ear, her lips puckering and the hands on her lap tightening into fists. She said not a word until I was done, until I asked her, “What do you think?”

“I think…” Lola paused, swallowing. “I think the motive might be there, you’re right. But the voice on the tape—”

“Anyone can download an app that changes your voice,” I told her. “It’s not hard. That voice you heard probably isn’t even a real voice, just a computer auto-tuning it or something.”

Lola leaned her head back on the headrest, moving her blue eyes to the roof of my car. She shook her head gently, muttering, “But it’s familiar. That’s the thing, Viper. It doesn’t sound like a voice made by some app or computer—it sounds like a voice I know. I know I’ve heard that voice before, and it’s not Newton and it’s definitely not Harvey.”

“Then there’s a third person?” I offered, shrugging. “We know Newton has a bunch of men at his disposal—maybe it’s one of them and you overheard him talking one of the times you were at the Gilded Rose.” It was a possibility. It was all a possibility.

But that was the problem. We had a shit ton of possibilities and no hard facts, other than the bodies. The police had run tests on the body, tested for fingerprints and even ran the DNA of the semen left in the body against their databases. No matches, meaning whoever our perp wasn’t in the system. Sylvester had gotten the information from Jimmy Boy, the cop in our pocket, and Jimmy had no reason to lie. Plus, he’d given Sylvester a copy of theresults.

We knew nothing. Our foe had the advantage here, without a doubt. I hoped that would change soon, because I didn’t know how much longer Lola could go on like this. She was driving herself mad—and she was already mad, so…

“I don’t know,” Lola whispered. “I just don’t know.”

Wasn’t that the statement of the month.

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