Kitty Kitty by Michele Jaffe Page B

resemble the photo more. “Nothing anyone did was ever good enough for him. Except Arabella. She was his perfect princess. Probably why she couldn’t deal with his death.”
    I remembered reading articles about that: Ned Neal, brilliant entrepreneur, found dead in his palace in Venice. It had happened a few months before we got there, in early summer. “It was a heart attack, right?”
    “Arabella didn’t think so. She decided he’d been murdered. Because it was so hard to believe that a fifty-five-year-old who worked twenty hours a day would have a massive coronary.”
    “Couldn’t he have been killed? I mean, it wasn’t impossible.”
    “Yep, pretty much. He was locked up all alone in his office, like always, when it happened. They had to bash the door down to even find the body. But Arabella kept coming up with absurd theories about how it could have happened, anyway.”
    “Like what?”
    “Snakes through the air vent. Someone using a vacuum to suck all the air out of the room so he suffocated. Poisonousspiders. And we’d hire all these experts to look into them, and at the end we’d be back where we started. At a heart attack.” He was clenching and unclenching his fists as he spoke. “For what? At the end of it he was still dead and gone. And now so is she.” He shook his head as if he could shake away the thought and said, “I should probably call Beatrice.”
    “Is that the woman I talked to on the phone? She said she was your father’s secretary, but if he’s dead—”
    “She’s more like the glue that’s been holding us all together for the last year. She and Bella were especially close. She’ll be devastated that my sister committed suicide.”
    “She didn’t.”
    “What?”
    “I don’t believe she committed suicide.”
    A muscle worked in his jaw. “No, of course not. You wouldn’t.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “That you’re like Arabella. She wouldn’t have trusted you if you weren’t. And that means you’ll have some elaborate theory to explain it.”
    “I don’t. But it just doesn’t make sense.”
    “Yeah, see, actually, it does. The reason I came to Venice? Bella called me and told me she finally figured out how Dad was offed, and I had to get here right away.”
    “Really? She said she knew who did it? Did she tell you anything else?”
    “Only that it would le blow my mindo.”
    “That sounds like her. But why does that make you think she killed herself?”
    “Every time she was wrong about this she’d get really depressed. Suicide-watch depressed. And I’m sure this was just another one of those. Another mess-up. And she got depressed again. Only this time she let it carry her away.” He took a deep breath. “Besides, who would want to kill her? She was harmless.”
    I thought about that. “I’m not so sure.” A snippet from my phone conversation with her the night before came back to me then, her saying, I asked someone the wrong question…. I wish I knew which one….
    My heart started to pound, fast. “What if you’re wrong and it went the other way?” I started walking around the room. “What if she actually did figure out who your father’s murderer was and she let it slip, so they killed her to keep her quiet?”
    “You sound just like her. That’s exactly the kind of crazy stupid thing she would say.”
    I stopped walking. “But it’s true. Maybe one of Arabella’s theories was right. Maybe this murderer is smart and creative and managed to hide his crimes by making them look impossible.”
    “How would you go about investigating that?”
    “I don’t know. Arabella said she was going to Prada. I’d probably start there. Then maybe—”
    “You just won’t stop, will you?” he said tightly.
    “Don’t you want to know the truth?”
    “The truth? I know the truth.” He took a step toward me. I took a step back. “The truth is that my dad died of a heart attack, and Arabella killed herself because she couldn’t accept it.”