Murder Under Her Skin: A Pentecost and Parker Mystery (Pentecost and Parker Mysteries) - Softcover

Buch 2 von 5: Pentecost and Parker Mysteries

Spotswood, Stephen

 
9780593460191: Murder Under Her Skin: A Pentecost and Parker Mystery (Pentecost and Parker Mysteries)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593460197 ISBN 13: 9780593460191
Verlag: Diversified Publishing, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice • Rex Stout meets Agatha Christie with a fresh twist in the new Pentecost and Parker Mystery, a delightfully hardboiled high-wire act starring two daring women sleuths dead set on justice as they set out to solve a murder at a traveling circus

“A delight.... It’s a pleasure to watch [Pentecost and Parker] sifting through red herrings and peeling secrets back like layers of an onion.” The New York Times Book Review

Someone’s put a blade in the back of the Amazing Tattooed Woman, and Willowjean “Will” Parker’s former knife-throwing mentor has been stitched up for the crime. To uncover the truth, Will and her boss, world-famous detective Lillian Pentecost, travel to the circus, where they find a snake pit of old grudges, small-town crime, and secrets worth killing for.

Will called Hart & Halloway’s Traveling Circus and Sideshow home for five years, and Ruby Donner, the circus’s tattooed ingenue, was her friend. To make matters worse, the prime suspect is Valentin Kalishenko, the man who taught Will everything she knows about putting a knife where it needs to go.

To uncover the real killer and keep Kalishenko from a date with the electric chair, Will and Ms. Pentecost join the circus in sleepy Stoppard, Virginia, where the locals like their cocktails mild, the past buried, and big-city detectives not at all. The two swiftly find themselves lost in a funhouse of lies as Will begins to realize that her former circus compatriots aren’t playing it straight, and that her murdered friend might have been hiding a lot of secrets beneath all that ink.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

STEPHEN SPOTSWOOD is an award-winning playwright, journalist, and educator. As a journalist, he has spent much of the last two decades writing about the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the struggles of wounded veterans. His dramatic work has been widely produced across the United States. He makes his home in Washington, D.C. with his wife, young adult author Jessica Spotswood.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

The prosecution calls Lillian Pentecost to the stand.

A wave of barely hushed whispers washed over the courtroom. Judge Harman, never one to shy away from a good gavel-­banging, let it go unscolded for a change. He couldn’t really blame folks. They’d been packed shoulder to shoulder on the hard courtroom benches for three long days, watching the calendar flip from July to August 1946 while they slogged through the boring nuts and bolts of the prosecution’s case. Waiting for the real drama to start.

The air-­conditioning had gone belly-up halfway through day one and the two hundred or so reporters, family members, and assorted lookie-­loos were sweating through their stay-­pressed as we approached the climax of the city’s murder trial of the moment.

My boss was the climax.

Every eye in the room was on Lillian Pentecost as she made her way to the witness stand, cane thumping out an even rhythm on the courtroom’s hardwood floor. She cut an impressive figure: tall, slender, on the far side of forty, impeccable posture—­the better to show off the lines of her gray herringbone suit, white collared blouse, and favorite blood-red tie. Her long chestnut hair was tied up in a labyrinth of braids, her signature streak of gray weaving through like a vein of quicksilver.

I even got her to slap on some makeup. A little eye shadow to bring out the winter-­gray of her eyes, blush to add drama to her hawkish profile, and the palest of pink lipsticks to make her mouth seem a tad less severe. The goal was no-­nonsense but approachable. A woman you’d trust to tell you who murdered who.

The defense table was an island of stillness in the midst of the tittering. Forest Whitsun, attorney for the defense, turned in his seat to watch Ms. P’s approach, the look on his face steely confidence mixed with a dash of curiosity.

Sure, I’m interested in what she has to say, his expression told the jurors, but only so I can explain to you good people why she’s mistaken.

As for the defendant, you could have propped him outside a cigar shop, he was so wooden. Over the last few days, Barry Sendak had perfected the look of the unjustly accused, woe-­is-­me. Now, his eyes were blank, lips pressed in a thin line.

I’ll give him this, though—­he didn’t look like an arsonist.

Which was a problem.

Not that arsonists come ready-­to-­wear. But you’d expect someone who was responsible for burning seventeen people alive and leaving hundreds more homeless and grieving to show it on his face.

The Old Testament scribblers had it right. Murder should leave a mark.

But that was wishful thinking.

The jury had spent the last three days looking for a tell and coming up empty. All they saw was a soft pudge of a man who barely topped five feet. Who at thirty was sliding to bald and thought a brush mustache would make up the difference. He had the imposed-­upon air of a civil servant, which is exactly what he was, having spent the last ten years as a safety inspector for the New York City Fire Department. He had the watery brown eyes of a doe in the forest, and in his one-­size-­too-­big suit he looked more like prey than predator.

I knew different.

I’d been with him when my boss pointed the finger and Lieutenant Nathan Lazenby, one of the city’s top homicide cops, slapped on the cuffs. Nobody would have mistaken Sendak for prey then.

When I was little, my father made me help him drag a badger out of its burrow near our garden. It had been making waste of our lettuce and my father decided it was time for the thing to go. He stood behind me with a shotgun while I grabbed it by its legs and pulled. It came out spitting and clawing and if my Dad hadn’t been so quick on the trigger, that rodent would have torn my face off.

Sendak had the same look on him when Lazenby led him away. Like he wanted to sink his teeth into Ms. Pentecost’s cheek and give a good yank.

The problem was the jury wasn’t seeing the beast.

The other problem—­and the DA had been clear that this was the larger of the two—­was that the three tenement buildings Sendak had torched had been in Harlem. The seventeen dead were all Negroes. And if you could find a more lily-­white jury, I’d have given you a medal.

The evidence against Sendak was circumstantial. Sure, there was a truckload of it, but if you were hunting hard for reasonable doubt, you could squint and convince yourself it was there and only have a little trouble sleeping at night.

It took some serious arm-­pulling and a few scathing editorials in the papers to convince the DA to move forward with the case. Even then, he only pulled the trigger because of a specific thumb pressing down on the scales.

That thumb, along with its four friends, was at that moment laid out on a Bible, its owner swearing to tell the truth, whole and nothing but.

“Put me on the stand,” Ms. Pentecost had told the district attorney. “I promise you I will reveal to the jury just what kind of man Mr. Sendak is.”

Lillian Pentecost didn’t make promises lightly, and the DA knew it. So here we were. Last day, last witness, and the whole ballgame riding on my boss.

Someone once told me that ladies don’t sweat, but I guess I wasn’t much of a lady. I was schvitzing along with the rest of the audience.

From the back row of the courtroom, I watched as Howard Clark, the assistant DA who’d drawn the short straw, began to lead Ms. Pentecost through the whys and wherefores. None of it was news to me, so I took the opportunity to pull out the telegram that had been delivered to our door that morning by an out-­of-­breath Western Union boy and read it again.

ruby found murdered. circus currently in stoppard, virginia. request professional assistance. —­bh

BH was Big Bob Halloway, owner and operator of Hart & Halloway’s Traveling Circus and Sideshow. The telegram included a phone number where he could be reached.

Ms. P had been upstairs putting herself together when it arrived. I hadn’t shown it to her yet. I didn’t want her mind on anything but the task in front of her.

I, on the other hand, had the luxury of letting my mind wander.

Ruby Donner. The Amazing Tattooed Woman.

An impossible landscape of roses and sailor girls, hearts and mermaids and pirate ships, and an emerald-­green serpent spiraling up her left leg from toe to thigh and places beyond. The count had been north of three hundred when I’d last seen her.

Four years since then. I wondered what she would have thought of little Willowjean “Will” Parker, dolled up in her going-­to-­court jacket and skirt so she’d blend in with the rubes in the cheap seats.

The reporters I was sharing the row with had teased me about my outfit.

“You undercover as someone’s secretary?” one wit from the Times had asked. “You can sit on my lap and take dictation anytime, Parker.”

I showed him my favorite finger and quietly suggested he sit on that.

“Aw, don’t be like that, Red. I’m just playing.”

That’s what passes for flirting from the Fourth Estate.

I self-­consciously ran my hand through my frizzy red curls. I’d spent the last eight months growing them out, and they were within spitting distance of shoulder-­length for the first time since grade school. My fingers got caught in a tangle and I had to yank them free. I glanced around to...

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Verlag
Diversified Publishing
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593460197
ISBN 13 
9780593460191
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
480
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Edel Music & Entertainment GmbH
https://www.edel.com

Neumuhlen 17
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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