Gargantuan_ A Ruby Murphy Mystery - Maggie Estep [109]
“I’m sorry you had to see that.”
“Both of them,” she said.
I still wasn’t clear on exactly what had happened or why, but Ruby had been kidnapped by a deranged man who was after Attila Johnson. The man had locked her away in a cabin and boarded over the windows. She’d escaped by making a hole in the floor and crawling out from under the cabin. Then she had witnessed her lover and his wife being murdered.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Ruby said, speaking in a small flat voice. “I just let the guy walk out. He walked out and opened up his car door, called his dog. He had a dog. Then he just drove away.”
She didn’t tell me what she did then, but I had a feeling she had stayed in there with the bodies awhile. Saying her peace to her murdered lover, I suppose. I don’t know. There wasn’t a phone in the place and she’d started walking along the road until someone picked her up and gave her a ride to the police station.
“He was in trouble, Ruby,” I told her when she’d finished talking. “He’d been holding horses back and then all of a sudden he got a conscience about it. Attila got on the wrong side of a guy we’ve had an eye on for years. Guy had his fingers in everything. Prostitution, drugs, but ironically, he wasn’t doing anything crooked in racing. Owned a few horses but it was on the up-and-up. Apparently this was one thing he did for the love of it. Only he didn’t have much luck with his stock. His horses didn’t win races and I guess something like that doesn’t sit well with that kind of guy. He got tired of playing it straight. Resorted to what he knew. Paid off some riders, threatened others. Attila didn’t go for it though.”
Ruby asked what her kidnapping had to do with any of it.
“We don’t know that yet,” I told her, immediately feeling weird about the we, like I was in some club she wasn’t part of. “The Bureau I mean,” I corrected. “They haven’t got all the pieces yet.”
She didn’t seem to notice the correction.
“Ben Nester, the guy that grabbed you, he was just a groom working for some very small-time trainer. They got nothing on Nester. No idea how he ties in. Yet.”
She didn’t say anything then. I wanted her to ask me more questions. She didn’t though and I wasn’t going to push it.
It was close to dawn when I got her back to Coney Island. The edges of the sky were lightening, slowly pushing the night away.
Ramirez and Elsie were standing in the hall as we came in. Ruby said a few words to them then excused herself. She opened up the door to her apartment, walked in a few feet, then bent down to pet the cats. I stood in the doorway watching her. After a while, she made her way to the couch and sat down. She hefted Stinky, the big cat, into her lap and cradled him. She was staring ahead.
“Should I make you some breakfast?” I asked her softly.
“I don’t have any food,” she said.
“I could go get something.”
“I don’t care,” she said.
That hurt. I knew she didn’t mean anything by it. Just that I was the last thing on her mind right then.
I told her I was going to the store and went out. The sky had a lot of pink in it now but Coney Island was still asleep. I went over to Mermaid Avenue. Most of the shops wouldn’t open for hours but there was one open bodega with a cop cruiser parked in front of the place. Though the practice of selling pot, dope, or coke from tiny Puerto Rican-run grocery stores was long extinct in most of Manhattan, it still went on in the outer boroughs. This particular bodega must have done something to piss the cops off if they were blatantly watching the place. Charged them for lunch maybe. I glanced at the boys in blue and went in. I was surprised to find a carton of eggs that hadn’t reached its expiration date. I picked up a container of juice and some bread and butter and jam.
The wafting smells of my cooking didn’t animate Ruby much but she shoveled down a few mouthfuls of egg. I had about a decade’s worth of things I wanted to tell her but they’d keep. When I felt that staying any longer would be an outright intrusion, I told her I was going to head out.
“Okay,” she said.