"Casey Daniels - Pepper Martin 01 - Don of the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Daniels Casey)

breast pocket.

It was probably what he'd been buried in.

The thought sent a shiver up my spine, and I shook it away. Good thing. My too-curly carrot-colored
hair was wound into a braid and it twitched against the back of my white polo shirt, snapping me back to
reality.

It had taken me a solid week to get the script for this tour down pat. Now this guy shows up and throws
me off my game? He deserved to be put on the spot. I made a sweeping gesture toward our guest.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like you all to meet Mr.AugustinoScarpetti ."
You'd think it would have had a little more effect on the crowd. A little more than none, anyway.

Two dozen pairs of eyes stared at me. As empty as my checkbook. Two dozen people whose sticky
tags said their names were things like Gladys and Rose and Henry, waited for me to say more.

No one atGardenViewCemetery had ever bothered to tell me how to handle a cemetery-tour heckler. I
knew I had to punt.

"Mr.AugustinoScarpetti is buried here." I pointed toward the mausoleum with its Egyptian columns at the
front corners and a door that had been imported all the way fromItaly . It was brass with a glass insert,
and according to what I'd been told by the folks who knew about these things, the door cost more than I
paid in rent for an entire year. I guess that was only right since the mausoleum was bigger than my
apartment.

Pretty classy digs for someone who was too dead to appreciate it.

From the other side of the door, I could see the glow of the stained-glass window at the far end of the
mausoleum, the oriental rug that covered the marble floor, and the dozen red roses that were delivered
every week like clockwork. Always on Thursday, the day GusScarpetti had been gunned down.

When I turned back around, I half expected that the Gus clone would be gone. But he was still there,
looking as interested in what I had to say as everyone else in the group. Which was pretty much the
reminder I needed to get my head back into the game.

"I'll bet most of you have heard stories about Gus," I said, and everybody but Gus nodded
enthusiastically. "His mob nickname was the Pope, and he was the head of one of the largest crime
families inтАФ"

"One of the largest?"Scarpetti looked me over like I was a salami hanging in a deli window. His eyes
glinted. Just like the diamonds in his ring. "What idiot told you to say that? One of the largest? That's
what they get for letting a girl talk about something as important as this. TheScarpetti Family wasthe
largest.The largest family. Go ahead, you tell them that."

"I don't have to. You just did."

"Did what?" The question came from a woman named Betty in the front row. I looked her way.

"What he said," I told her.