“Enzo,” Ramirez says. “Just tell your wife the truth.”
Enzo mumbles something under his breath. There is no way I am leaving this room without finding out what he doesn’t want me to know.
“Enzo?” I say again.
“Okay.Okay.” He clenches his hands into fists. “I worked for him. I worked for Dario Fontana. Okay?”
My jaw drops. That is a piece of the puzzle I never heard before. Enzoworkedfor the guy who used to beat up on his sister? Not only that, but from what I understood, the man was a mobster. So if Enzo worked for him…
“I was akid,” he says. “I was sixteen when I started working for Dario. I didn’t know who he really was. By the time I realized…”
“How many years did you work for him?” Cecelia presses him.
Enzo looks completely miserable having this conversation. “Eight years.”
“And when you were working for him, what did you do for him?”
Enzo closes his eyes for a moment, then opens them again. “Please stop. I… I understand. This is bad. I get it.”
WhatdidEnzo do for this mobster?
“Okay,” Cecelia concedes. “We don’t have to talk about this right now. But I need you to see what we are dealing with. If this were to come up in a courtroom…”
“Yes. I understand.”
“I will fight for you,” she says. “But I don’t want to hear lies, Enzo. I can’t do a thing for you if you lie to my face. You have to tell me everything. You have to be completely honest so I can protect you.”
He looks her straight in the eyes. “I did not kill Jonathan Lowell. You have my word.”
“Fine,” she says. “But if you didn’t, then who did?”
“Suzette Lowell,” I blurt out. That has been the thought in my head since the moment I saw that dead body lying on the floor. Suzette never seemed to respect or even like her husband. My first instinct was that she finally killed him.
“But how?” Ramirez asks. “That neighbor—she swears Suzette was out all day.”
“Does she have an alibi?” I ask.
“No alibi, no. But it’s not like this cul-de-sac is walkable. She would’ve had to come home with her car. It would have been noticeable.”
“There is another way,” Enzo says.
Cecelia raises her eyebrows. “I’m listening.”
“There’s a way to park around the back without going through the cul-de-sac,” Enzo says. “Suzette told me about it. She could have parked in the back, gone in through the back door, and Janice Archer would never have seen her.”
“And you wouldn’t have noticed her?”
“I was back and forth between our yard and theirs. I wouldn’t have necessarily seen her.”
“Okay, that’s a start. Let me look into it.” Cecelia looks down at her watch. “All right, I’ve got a busy afternoon, so I have to run. This is not going to be a walk in the park, but I promise, I’ll do everything in my power to keep them from pinning this on you. I’ll fight for you.”
Enzo frowns at her as she rises to her feet. When did little Cecelia Winchester learn to walk in such high heels? “You have had cases like this before and won?” he asks.
To her credit, Cecelia artfully dodges the question. “We are going to win this one.”
I hope she’s right.
FIFTY-ONE
