MAN-KILLER

                                                                                                                      by

                                                                                                      LAWRENCE KELTER

                                                                                                            CHAPTER ONE

Sitting at the café table with my back to the door I felt excitement building. Rocco Benelli’s scent sailed in on a breeze as he walked through the door—the unmistakable fragrance of his aftershave, shampoo, and musk, a perfect storm of sensory eroticism as evocative as hickory burning in the hearth on a bitter and snowy night. He was well behind me and out of sight, but I was sure it was him. The back of my neck tingled with the dance of a thousand rising hairs as his image took shape in my mind. I could picture his swagger as he came toward me—the slapping of his leather boots on the café’s oak floor, the rising and settling of his broad chest. Heart thumping, I reached for my coffee and knocked over the paper cup. A pool of rich brown awkwardness spread across the table before me. I glimpsed at my reflection in the liquid and thought, klutz!

I jumped out of my chair and right into his brawny arms. Somehow I managed to suppress a telltale, I’m-swept-away gasp.

“Hey, Gina Marie, are you all right?” he asked in his throaty baritone, a voice that made me vibrate like a pitchfork all the way down to the tips of my toes.

His breath carried the mystery of every woman he’d ever been with, titillating and taunting me. “Hey, biyatch, we kissed Rocco,” they trilled, “mouth-to-mouth, tongue-to-tongue. Suck it!”

I couldn’t think of a thing to say to him while I stood there, dumbstruck, gawking at his broad stubble-clad chin and the fathomless depth of his brown eyes that matched the hue of his wavy ringlets. Time stood still while I was in his arms. I felt safe and protected. I kid you not, the man’s embrace was as enveloping as a nurturing womb.

Hey, Gina Marie Cototi, snap out of it!  Get your head out of your ass. Slamming my open palm into the center of his chest, I shoved him away. “Getting a little handsy this morning, Rocco?”

Palms out, he backed away. “Whoa, easy, Gina. I was just trying to help.”

I felt my armor shoring up, the interlocking of a trillion nanobots erecting an impenetrable shield around me. “Yeah, right—you mean helping yourself to an early morning grope is more like it.” Meanwhile, coffee was dripping off the edge of the table, running down my leg, and puddling at the bottom of my left boot. The sticky liquid squished between my toes. Yuck.

“No problem,” he said as he grabbed a wad of napkins from the napkin dispenser and shoved them into my hands.

I breathed a sigh of relief as he moved off and made his way to the counter to place an order. “That was a close one,” I whispered. I’d narrowly avoided betraying myself, the deep dark emotion I had to bury down deep. It wasn’t the first time, I doubted it would be the last. I had a long history of putting my foot in my mouth around Rocco Benelli. Apparently, it was a look that didn’t raise any red flags for him—no alarm bells went off at the sight of me making an ass of myself.

Benelli, my sister Theresa, and I were holdouts in a Brooklyn enclave that had gone through a great transformation and was still rapidly changing. Once a heavily Italian neighborhood, a diverse influx of ethnic groups had migrated into the area en masse, making it exceedingly difficult to find a good cannoli or a slice of pizza that hadn’t been defiled with chunks of canned pineapple. Shrimp dumplings on the other hand? Up the wazoo! And kebabs, fuhgeddaboudit, like the marketplaces of Casablanca.

But Ma and Pops raised me and my sister here, and all things considered it had been a pretty good place to grow up. Neither Theresa nor I were married, but we both had careers and didn’t want for anything. Sure, our parents constantly skutched us about our marital status. “When are you girls getting married? When are we going to get grandchildren?” You know, all the usual guilt trips. But the complaining never got out of hand. Although we’d lost close paisans to Staten Island and Long Island, we still had a lot of family in the neighborhood, and our family still got together for dinner every Sunday afternoon. Brooklyn had changed a lot since Theresa and I were kids but not the traditional Cototi Sunday meal. As far as I could see, we weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Now Rocco, he had a reputation, y’know? Growing up he had this Svengaliesque charm going for him. He was a bad boy with good looks. Now, I ask you, what could be more dangerous?

Or more desirable?

He had Catholic schoolgirls ripping off their bras faster than you could say sins of the flesh. When he was sixteen, Benelli moved his bed into the loft above the family’s detached garage and like a missionary doctor in a leper colony, there was a line leading into Dr. Feelgood’s clinic that was longer than the one outside Walmart at 6:00 a.m. on Black Friday.

Mr. Dark and Brooding was knocking down virgins faster than ducks at a shooting gallery. And the son of a bitch wasn’t shooting blanks. The church had to set up an emergency fund for some of the girls Benelli accidentally got pregnant, a fund Theresa and I laughingly referred to as the Our Lady of Perpetual Dumbass Emergency Relief Fund. I mean, what in the world were those girls thinking?

Believe me, I understand the enormous power of raging hormones, but a girl’s got to use her head. Am I right?

Still, there was no denying that Benelli had some kind of animal magnetism. What the Latvians would call the Kavorka, the lure of the animal. Being alone with Benelli was not a wise decision unless you were the kind of girl who was at home with everyone in the neighborhood calling you a puttana, the Italian word for whore.

Long story short, it wasn’t a good idea for a female to be alone with Benelli, which is why I told him I’d meet him at Café Talia. The Italian eatery was busy throughout most of the day and had just one shared restroom. God forbid I lost my shit and couldn’t resist Benelli’s charms, there was no way I was going to do him on the crab-infested toilet frequented by the Cinzano-embroidered tracksuit-wearing guidos who drank strong espresso all day long and dropped heat with the regularity of a metronome.

“So what’s this about, Cototi?” Benelli asked as he placed two coffee cups on the table. I’d invited him for coffee, saying I had a money-making proposition for him. I hadn’t gone into specifics because I could hear a woman insistently calling him back to bed while we were on the phone.

He turned a chair around backwards, straddled it, leaned forward, and rested his arms over the seatback. Worn Willie and the boys were bulging through his jeans. I wondered if he knew that I could see (translation: gawk at) his package through the cutout in the back of the chair.

What am I thinking? Of course he does. The man is a cool, calculating cocksman. He does everything with the intention of enticing women into bed.

“Hey, Rocco, why don’t you turn the chair around and sit upright like an evolved human being?”

“Why? Am I staying that long?”

Wow, this SOB has attitude like I’ve never seen. My shoulder bag was big enough to smuggle a full-size Electrolux vacuum. I reached into it and dropped a few files on the table, each one was a full inch thick. “You know what I do, right?”

He shrugged, then pried the lid off his coffee container. “No, Gina, I’ve got no idea what you do. I haven’t heard jack from you since we graduated high school. And now, after all these years, you reach out to me with some cockamamie money-making scheme. I hope to Christ you’re not selling Avon or some shit.” He glared at me defiantly. “And by the way, you’re welcome for the coffee. Try to keep this one off your lap.” He took a sip of coffee, then turned and gave the A-okay gesture to the pretty young thing behind the counter who’d been waiting for his approval. She pointed to a bottle of anisette as if asking if he’d like a splash in his cup. “No thank you, sweetheart,” he said but she refused to take no for an answer.

Ducking under the sideboard she approached our table, screwed the cap off the bottle, and topped off his cup. To say her shirt was low-cut was a gross understatement. From what I could see, her breasts had been fashioned in the image of the minne di Sant’ Agata pastries, the perfectly formed icing-covered hemispheres that lined the top shelf of the café refrigerated display case. And if she bent over any lower, I’d bet dollars to cream-filled donuts we’d all get a peek at her maraschino cherries. “Let me know when you need a warm-up,” she said, batting her magnetic eyelashes like a servant fanning a maharajah with a broad palm leaf fan.

She was coming on like gangbusters and I could see that he was eating it up, all her advances, every tawdry ploy. The lucky bastard didn’t even have to try, but just for good measure, he slipped off his leather jacket and sat there in his skintight wifebeater. His arms were taut and vascular. The chest hair bristling out the neck of his white T-shirt was like the well that all machismo sprang from.

I cleared my throat. “Look, Rocco, are we doing business, or what?”

He didn’t turn around immediately. To be fair, Miss Whiskey Shot was pouring it on thick. She was in the process of giving the anisette bottle a happy ending. And man oh man—watching her massage the throat of that bottle took my breath away, and no doubt, Rocco’s as well.

A loud ah-hem brought a stop sigh open hand inches from my face. It was Benelli’s way of telling me to chill out. I was forced to endure her prolonged and repeated arm touching, hair tossing, and lip licking while she continued to flirt with him. I half-expected a brass pole to emerge from a trap door in the floor.

I was frustrated by all the attention he was showing her. I mean, had he not noticed my gorgeous long legs and my tiny waist? Coffee Girl was cute in a slutty kind of way, but she was no Gina Marie Cototi, no siree.

I was way sluttier.

Just kiddin’.

As an Italian woman I don’t like being ignored. Disregarding a Sicilian woman ranks just behind double-dealing, two-faced lying and overcooked pasta as the things that piss us off the most. “I don’t have all day, Rocco,” I said, irritation rising in the tone of my voice. “Are we doing this or not?”

I was a licensed PI with a shitload of pending files. Of late, insurance carriers were dropping fraud cases on me faster than I could handle them, and Benelli, well, when he wasn’t busy rolling in the sheets was an out of work (translation: shit-canned) parole officer. He knew his way around the street life element and knew how to handle ex-cons. I figured he could chase down a lead and help me lighten my load, but it appeared he wasn’t all that interested in making money. He instructed in martial arts from time to time, and I thought it might be handy to have him close by on some of my more challenging cases. I carried a Glock so his intimidating presence would be purely prophylactic.

I cleared my throat one last time, loudly, loud enough to tear the walls of my esophagus.

“What already?” he said. “You got emphysema or something? I’ll be with you in a minute.”

I didn’t know what to say, whether to wait or get up and leave. But he was Rocco Benelli, after all and not exactly known for his congenial manner. I’d known that going in and decided to give him a few minutes more. It turned out that shredding my gullet was not a complete waste of time. Rocco nudged the courtship clock forward and quickly sealed the deal. Having set a date with Ms. Cannoli Cream, he finally turned back to me. “You were kind of rude. What happened to you, Gina? You used to be such a sweet kid.”

The cojones on this guy. Me? I was rude? You’ve got to be friggin’ kidding. “Look, Rocco, I asked you here to make you a business proposition, not to watch you seduce an adolescent barista.”

“Adolescent my ass? What are you talking about?”

I pointed to a two-wheeler chained to the post of a parking meter. “I like the rainbow-colored handlebar streamers. I imagine the training wheels have been off a good six months.”

“Bullshit, Gina, we’ve talked before. She turned twenty-four last week.”

Twenty-four? Yeah, maybe in dog years. “So, look, Rocco, I’m a licensed private investigator and I’ve got more cases than I can handle. I know you’ve got law enforcement experience and I thought—”

“What does it pay?” he asked, cutting to the chase.

Enough to keep you flush in Trojans and antibiotics. “Two hundred a day.”

“Off the books?”

“Why, a grand a week gonna put you in a higher tax bracket?”

“Off the books?”

“If need be.”

“Yeah, it needs to be.”

“Okay, sure.” Off the frigging books—whatever.

He gave me his signature overconfident smile implying that I was a fool to even think about challenging him. He pulled the top folder off the pile, wet his index finger, and flipped it open. One page at a time, he wet his finger and flipped to the successive page. All I could think about was his saliva soaking into the paper. God only knows where that finger has been. I’d have to put on dishwashing gloves, dump the entire file into the copier, and dump the originals in a biohazard bin.

There was an arrogance in the way he performed his due diligence, as if he was doing me a favor. He took his sweet time while he slowly and methodically reviewed the file and didn’t make eye contact with me until he was done. “Vladimir Rzhevsky, AKA Vlad ‘The Scud.’ I know this guy. I saw him fight Julio César Chávez in an exhibition match after the champ retired. Vlad’s no spring chicken, but he’s an undercard headliner, and I bet he’s still got a jab like an electric cattle prod.”

“Scud?”

“Not big on geopolitics are you, Cototi?” he asked in a condescending tone. “A Russian Scud missile? Rzhevsky’s a Russky. Two and two equal four yet?”

We’re off to a great start, I said to myself and flipped him the bird. “I’ve got your two and two right here, Benelli.”

“Took you long enough.” He turned the file around so that I had a clear view of “The Scud.” His eyes were sunken in and his right cheek had a jagged scar. The corners of his mouth were turned down so sharply I thought it unlikely he was capable of smiling. “No dice, then?” I watched Benelli’s expression expecting him to beg off, but he didn’t. I presumed his declination and reached out to put the file back in my bag. “All right,” I said, “take a look at the next one.”

Rocco frowned at me as if to say you’ve got to be kidding. “I’ll take Rzhevsky,” he said, matter-of-factly. “The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. Isn’t that what they say?” He dropped his hand on the table in front of me, palm open, his expression cold, a layer of ice covering a core of surgical stainless steel. “A thousand big ones,” he demanded. “One week in advance.”