Pious Deception by Susan Dunlap Read Free Book Online Page A

She yanked the drawer forward. It hovered but didn’t fall. She grabbed a ball of lacy red nylon, shook it till it hung free—red lace bikini pants.

7
    “W HAT COULD HAVE POSSESSED you to falsify Austin Vanderhooven’s death certificate? You, a doctor, Elias?” Sylvia Necri shouted. She stood, hands braced on thick hips, back to the picture window and the skyscraper across Central Avenue. Her coarse dark hair was brushed back in the same no-nonsense style she had worn it in when she had reached the construction site in the Superstition Mountains at six the previous morning. The furrows in her forehead and the grooves beside her mouth were the scars from many an architect-vs.-contractor battle.
    She had missed dinner because she’d had to haggle with the cement contractor. The next hour and a half she had spent on the phone tracking down the general contractor, finally unearthing him in a roadhouse ten miles north of the site. She’d reasoned, cajoled, and threatened till one in the morning before she got him back to following the plan. It was nearly two when she had headed home to Phoenix, squinting into the blanketing blackness of the mountain road, shoulders hunched from anger. The shot of Chivas at the roadhouse hadn’t put a dent in it. She had opened the door of her condominium at 4:13 Friday morning, looked into her living room and found her nephew, looking exhausted and frightened.
    “What are you doing here?” she’d demanded. “You told me you’d be in Acapulco, windsurfing. You’d planned it for months.”
    “I changed my mind.”
    “Changed—”
    “Forget that, Aunt Sylvia. That’s not the problem.” Then he had told her about Vanderhooven’s body, Dowd’s detective, and the death certificate he had signed twenty-four hours earlier.
    It was now 4:54 A.M.
    “How could you be so stupid?” she yelled at him, for once unmoved by his handsome face.
    “What else could I do? Austin was my friend, I couldn’t tell the world that he’d been found, er”—Elias dropped his gaze—“unzipped, in the church. People would never forget that.”
    He wasn’t lying about his concern for his friend Austin. He was loyal, her nephew, sometimes too loyal, and he had come to like the priest. But that was beside the point. “This could mean your medical career, Elias, the career I’ve sacrificed my life to pay for. With the money I spent on your education, I could have bought—no, not bought, designed and built —a house by Encanto Park, instead of living here in an apartment someone else slapped together.”
    With a small grin playing under his dark mustache, Dr. Elias Necri looked around the condominium living room, his gaze resting on the handcrafted coffee table, the twelve-by-eighteen Navaho rug she had commissioned, the framed photo of her group of young architects with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesen West. He stared at the window that overlooked Central Avenue, center of Phoenix’s banking and government. “You’re not living in poverty, Aunt Sylvia.”
    “Stop it!” she snapped. “Don’t you tell me that because we were raised poor we should be satisfied with crumbs now. You of all people!” She stared at her nephew, fighting even now the allure of his deep, dark eyes, that earnest, hurt, little-boy look. “What else, Elias? You don’t endanger your entire career to protect someone’s memory.”
    “Aunt Sylvia, Austin was my friend. We jogged together three days a week.”
    “Don’t fool yourself. You were his friend because I asked you to be his friend. How many weeks did you go panting around the streets at dawn so you could run fast enough to keep up with him, so you could happen to run into him and suggest you jog together? You’ve always been a liar, Elias—”
    “Aunt Sylvia!”
    “Don’t look so shocked. Even as a toddler you lied.” Her voice softened. “It was cute then; you were so transparent. Your mother threatened to beat it out of you; it was I who protected you.