Connections in Death (In Death 48)

She tossed her coat over the newel post. “You’ll be too busy with festering boils to have him reanimated.”

“Don’t ask,” Roarke told Summerset as Eve headed upstairs with the cat on her heels.

He went up after her.

“I want another thirty on this,” he told her. “And you’ll be wanting to set up your board.”

“Thirty’s good.”

She dealt with her board. Two murders, she thought, and she hadn’t had five minutes in her home office on either. That changed now.

Seated at her command center, she wrote up notes on the Cohen/Vinn interview. She circled a finger in the air when Roarke came in. “Need another five.”

“And a meal.”

He strolled into the kitchen, considered the options. By the time she’d finished he had the domed plates and a bottle of wine on the table.

“You know he never asked—like Vinn did—who died and how.”

“I noticed.” Roarke poured the wine, lifted the domes.

“Because he was part of it, heard about it, and/or Jones contacted him for some legal advice after our visit.” She sat, added—in his opinion—entirely too much salt and butter to her mashed potatoes.

“Again, it could be all of the above.”

“Could be.” She sampled the potatoes, deemed them good, cut a slice of a pork medallion. “The real question is how much time he’ll do and where—not if.”

“I can give you tax evasion.”

“Already?”

Roarke studied his wine, sipped. “I regret calling for payment on this one. But what’s done is done. Shell companies—so thin I could’ve cracked them with a thought. He’ll have fraudulent identification to access some of his six accounts.”

“Six?”

“Not counting the legitimate ones, or the one with Jones. I’ll give him some credit for knowing enough to live within Eldena’s means, and to carefully file their taxes on what they report. What he doesn’t report is considerably more. More rent than either of them show—which means you can likely slap Jones with tax evasion and so on. He also owns the residence—and makes a very nice rent from the other units, and from Eldena.”

“I had a feeling. Is her name on that one, too?”

“It is. Jones’s isn’t, so he’s kept that apart. It’s mortgaged, you see, like the others. Cohen needed her income to float the loans. The rent more than covers the expenses, and he banks the profits. The bloody bastard takes most of her income—which I imagine he tells her is to pay rent and so on. Banks that as well. I’ll give you hard numbers, but for the moment, we’ll say he’s very well set.”

As he often did for her, Eve broke a dinner roll in half, handed him a share.

“Okay, fraud and tax evasion, good start, and an excellent way to sweat anything else out of him. I’ll buy the connection with Jones through a client due to the sleaze factor. But he knows more than real estate holdings. He should’ve asked about the murders, should’ve at least tried to look shocked about a couple homicides.”

Because he felt they’d both earned it, Roarke topped off their wineglasses. “I have to say, after so easily unearthing his system and accounts, he’s not particularly smart. He sees himself as what my mates and I would’ve called a cute hoor. Someone who’s getting the leg up on the quiet. But he’s a bumbler. Canny or greedy enough to set this all up, not bright enough to do it very well. And tying himself to someone like Jones?”

Sincerely baffled by the ineptitude, Roarke shook his head over another sip of wine. “A violent gangster already known to the authorities. Jones runs afoul of those authorities, they begin to dig—as indeed happened—and Cohen’s in the drink. Bleeding eejit.”

Eve studied him as she ate. “You’re really pissed. Because it was too easy, not enough fun?”

“That’s a minor disappointment, but no. Eldena Vinn. He used her, stole from her, all while patting her head and telling her he’d take care of things. It’s not the same, not nearly, as telling someone a loved one’s dead, but, Eve, her world fell apart right then and there. You could see it. It fell apart because he valued his bank accounts more than a woman who loved him.”

“Better she knows,” Eve said simply. “Now we’ll see what she does about it. I can’t see her taking him a cake and a smile on visiting day or gearing up for a conjugal. Meanwhile, he’s a non-cute hoor—which makes no sense in any language—a bleeding eejit, a sleazy, disbarred lawyer. But is he complicit in murder?”

“Are you asking yourself or me?”

“It can be both. Let’s start with you.”