"I'm sor—no. No, I'm not sorry, Mom. You hate my books. You complain that I don't come home enough. Okay, okay, you have a point there. You tell me I'm fat, you tell me I cause you embarrassment. You ... you never hung up my Perfect Attendance plaque I got in the fourth grade."
"That last might have been dispensed with, my dear," Saint Just whispered to her.
"Right," Maggie agreed, shifting on the seat of the chair, her posture belligerent. "You never read one of my books. Never. None of you. You just condemned them because they were romances. Filth, you called them—and you never read them."
Maureen raised her hand. "I did. I mean, I do. I read all of them. I get them from the library."
"Well, there's a mixed blessing, sweetings," Saint Just whispered, close by Maggie's ear. "She reads them, but she doesn't buy them."
"Margaret, are you quite finished?"
Maggie looked up at Saint Just, who nodded.
"Yeah, Mom, I'm done. And now I do apologize. I fell into a trap, one people under stress fall into all the time. We don't want to think about Daddy, about the trouble he's in, so we fight about anything we can fight about. I'm sorry."
"As well you should be," Mrs. Kelly said, falling back into her more recognizable form. "Now, tell us how much of this jackpot you get to keep, dear. I seem to have missed that. Enough to pay Cynthia to find a way for your father to beat this rap?"
"Beat this—uh." Maggie gave her head a quick shake. "Well, yeah, sure, Mom. I have enough money to help Dad prove his innocence. But not from the jackpot. I'm giving my winnings to Sterling. He ... um ... well, he was the one pushing the Max button. I'd found the Cash-out button, and would have pushed it, but he was having so much fun that I let him keep pushing the button, and it wasn't as though it was my money we were wasting, you know, so in some ways it is Sterling's win, not mine. And that guy, that Novack guy? I did take his machine."
"My congratulations, my dear," Saint Just told her as everyone else in the room opened their mouths, but it was as if Maggie had hit some sort of invisible Mute button, because no words passed anyone's lips. "They've been struck dumb."
It was Cynthia Spade-Whitaker who rallied first. "Margaret, here's some free legal advice. Never say that again. Any of it. To anyone. Ever."
"She'll be very careful, I assure you," Saint Just said, at last pushing himself up from the arm of the chair, as sitting close beside Maggie hadn't seemed to do much to protect her from her family.
"Good, because some ambulance-chasing lawyer would jump all over that statement. By the way how did you break your leg?"
"Maggie ..." Saint Just muttered beneath his breath warningly.
"My foot, you mean? Well, it's the silliest thing. I was jogging in Central Park when this man came running by yelling 'The sky is falling, the sky is falling.' And he was naked. Did I mention that he was naked? And this cop comes out of nowhere, to throw a tackle on the guy, and the guy rolled into me, we both went down—bam, broken foot."
"Really? You could probably sue, you know. I represented a similar case not six months ago. Smithers v. the City of New York City, and—"
"She made that up, Cynthia," her husband told her, glaring at Maggie. "She writes fiction, Tate said, remember?"
Cynthia coughed slightly. Shook back her shoulders. "Very amusing."
"Yes," Saint Just said. "Our Maggie is easily amused. Now, if we might return to the subject of the murder?"
"The alleged murder," Cynthia corrected. "The detective refused to give me any pertinent information as to TOD, MOD, COD. The whole thing could have been an accident, and this arrest-happy cowboy just took it from there."
"Time of death, manner of death, cause of death, right?" Maggie asked Saint Just, who merely nodded. He watched The Learning Channel faithfully, as well as all the CSI programs, and was familiar with all of the terms.
"Ah, but we do have at least a preliminary cause of death," he told everyone. "Evan and I had a small coze before Maggie and I adjourned here, and we deduced, from the questions posed to him from the detective, that Mr. Bodkin succumbed to a blow to the head with a heavy object. Several blows, to be precise, as I understand that Evan saw the murder weapon that had been sealed in a heavy plastic evidence bag, and was told that what he saw on the weapon was blood, bits of bone, and gray matter."
"Oh, yuk," Maggie said, wrapping her arms around her midsection. "So, what was the weapon?"
"A bowling ball," Saint Just told them, watching them in turn as he paused, let the tension build. "A bowling ball inscribed EEK: Evan Edward Kelly." He looked over his shoulder at Maggie. "Nearly as unfortunate as your We Are Romance writers organization, yes? Do you Americans never think of these things?"
"Did they read him his rights before they showed him the bowling ball? Did he identify the bowling ball as his? That's why they showed it to him. Has to be. If they asked him, they're out of line."
"That, Attorney Spade-Whitaker, I could not say."
"I can get any confession thrown out," Cynthia told them confidently, sitting back and crossing her long legs. "If they'd taken him straight to Cape May, let the county prosecutor's office handle everything from the get-go, or even called in the state police, we might have more trouble. But they didn't, not on Christmas Eve. With any luck at all, we can have this whole thing tossed, at least for a few weeks, until they have more than a bloody bowling ball. The weapon might be Kelly's, but that doesn't mean they can prove he had possession of the ball at the time of the murder. OJ got off with a lot more against him."
"So if the bowling ball doesn't fit, they have to acquit?" Maggie asked, then rolled her eyes at Saint Just.
"You're being very encouraging, counselor," Saint Just complimented, ignoring Maggie. "But I think we have a sticking point here. Mrs. Kelly seemed to believe, at first blush, that Evan murdered the late Walter Bodkin for her. Mrs. Kelly? Would you care to explain that statement?"
Maureen muttered something under her breath, picked up the tray of crushed cookies, and escaped toward the kitchen. Saint Just watched her go, something about the woman's reaction whenever Walter Bodkin's name was mentioned in relationship to her mother niggling at him. Combined with her blurted giggle at the police station, it was enough to make him believe that he'd have to speak with the woman sometime soon.
"No. I don't care to explain anything to you," Mrs. Kelly said, also getting to her feet. "It's late, I'm tired, and don't want to think about any of this any more tonight. Tate, see to your guests. Margaret, go take care of your father. We're done here."
And that was that. Maggie might be his general at the moment, but Alicia Kelly clearly remained commander-in-chief.
Chapter Nine
Maggie and Alex had walked the long block from her father's borrowed bachelor apartment to her mother's condo. Well, Alex had walked it. Maggie had hopped it. They now retraced their steps slowly, by necessity, Maggie with her chin tucked into the collar of her new winter coat against the late December wind off the ocean as she hopped, stopped, rested, hopped again.
"Smell that, Alex? I really like this city, much as I was glad to get away from home. I miss the smell of the ocean," she said during one of her rest stops. "But I think I enjoy it more in July, when my teeth aren't chattering. At least it isn't snowing tonight. No white Christmas this year."
"It will be midnight in another minute," Alex told her, slipping his arm around her waist during one of her long pauses to catch her breath, drawing her against the side of his body. "Happy Christmas, sweetings."
She peered up at him in the light from a streetlamp. "Our first Christmas together, a house of our own, my stupid foot, a jackpot, a murder. I guess we'll never forget this first one, huh? Alex?"