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questions you weren’t really supposed to answer so she kept her mouth shut and her hands clenched in her lap.
Sambucco heaved another sigh as if the words pained him. “The call came from you, Lucille.”
Chapter 9
“Yo, Lu, you okay? What’s Sambucco doing here?” Frankie suddenly appeared in the doorway.
Lucille realized she had uttered a small shriek at Sambucco’s words. Surely he didn’t think she had something to do with . . .
“Put your head down,” Sambucco commanded, reaching out and pushing Lucille’s head between her knees.
She stayed that way until the gray haze that threatened to envelop her retreated.
“Lucille. What are you doing? Dinner is getting cold, and when I checked on the chicken parmi—” Angela said from the doorway.
“Leave it, Angela, okay?” Frankie said with such a sharp tone to his voice that Angela spun on her heel with a soft hmmph and retreated back to the dining room.
“What’s going on?” Frankie’s fists were clenched, his shoulders stiff and his jaw set. He turned to Sambucco. “Why are you bothering my wife?”
All she needed was for Frankie to take a swing at Sambucco and end up in the slammer. Lucille put up a hand. “Take it easy, Frankie. Everything is fine. Richie just has a few questions about what happened yesterday. Okay? You go back and eat your dinner before it gets cold. And tell Angela to take the chicken parmigiana out of the oven, would you?” she yelled after his retreating back.
She could hear him grumbling under his breath as he made his way back to the dining room.
Sambucco waited until they heard the scrape of Frankie’s chair. “As I said, the last phone call recorded on Donna’s cell phone was yours, Lucille.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with—”
“It’s like this.” Sambucco spread out his hands. “The chief seems to think that you called Donna and asked her to meet you at the church. Easy enough to do. You wanted her opinion on the flowers or the seating or one of them things you women worry about. And from what people have said, Donna was always more than happy to give her opinion.”
“But that don’t mean . . . I mean I didn’t . . . you can’t say that I . . .”
“It’s not me.” Sambucco pointed at his own chest. “It’s the chief, see. He thinks you lured Donna to the church and then killed her.”
“But why would I . . . ?” Lucille felt as if the world around her was disintegrating. Or like she was falling into one of them sinkholes down in Florida they kept showing on the news.
“Why? Only the killer knows that,” Sambucco said, leaning back in his chair. It creaked under his weight.
“So you don’t think I . . .”
Sambucco cracked his knuckles. “It’s like this, Lucille. In a murder investigation we got to go by the clues and the evidence. Feelings, they don’t enter into it. The way it looks, you called Donna, got her to go on over to St. Rocco’s and then you killed her. Simple as pie.”
Lucille started to open her mouth but Sambucco stopped her.
“You don’t happen to have an alibi, do you?”
Lucille thought back to the day before. She remembered leaving the house, checking on Mrs. S. and Mrs. P over in the kitchen at St. Rocco’s, then going to the church. She was missing something.
“Macy’s,” she shouted suddenly. “I went to Macy’s to buy a pair of pantyhose. You have no idea how hard it is to find a—”
“Anyone see you? Anyone who can vouch for you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the salesgirl might remember me.”
“You didn’t happen to glance at her tag and maybe catch her name, did you?”
Lucille shook her head.
“Do you have the receipt? Sometimes they put the time as well as the date on them now that they’ve got all these computers and such.”
“Sure. I put it in my purse. Let me go get it.”
Lucille trotted over to the hall closet and retrieved her handbag. She sat on the sofa with it on her lap and began to riffle