Real Murder (Lovers in Crime Mystery Book 2) by Lauren Carr Page B

hand to demand a petting.
    “Oh, it’s only you,” she said before realizing her cat was in someone else’s house and she didn’t bring him. “Irving, what are you doing here?”
    “Most likely he let himself in through the cat door,” Dolly replied while studying the dates on the spines of the photo albums lined up along her bookcase. “That’s how he lets himself in.”
    “Lets himself in?” Cameron gave Irving a chastising look. “How long has he been doing that?”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” the elderly woman said. “The days have all blended together for this old mind. He just showed up one day while I was eating my Cheerios and demanded  the milk at the bottom of my bowl. I gave it to him and he’s been coming over ever since. He’s here every morning for breakfast. He loves Cheerios.”
    Irving flicked his ears with their tuffs sticking out at his mistress. He seemed to smirk at her while plopping down on the arm of the sofa to wash his paws.
    “You naughty boy,” she said before turning her attention back to the photo album.
    “Most boys are.” Dolly patted Irving on the head. “Naughty, I mean.”
    Cameron gasped when she saw a familiar face in one of the pictures. The heavy-set man was sitting in a wing-backed chair with a small girl with curls in his lap. “Is this—”
    Dolly squinted her eyes to study the picture that Cameron was pointing at. “Oh, that’s me with Uncle Al,” the elderly woman said in a matter-of-fact tone before turning back to the bookcase to resume her search. “Ava can’t be in that  album. That was at least two decades before she was born.”
    “Uncle Al,” Cameron said with a stutter. “Do you mean Al as in Al Capone?”
    “Yes, that was his name.” Dolly pulled a heavy album from off the shelf and handed it to Cameron.
    “You called Al Capone ‘Uncle Al?’”
    “He was really a very nice man,” Dolly said. “He was one of my father’s biggest customers.”
    “Libations?” Cameron said. “Was your father a bootlegger?”
    The elderly lady lowered herself into a wing-backed chair across from the detective. Irving leapt off the arm of the sofa to jump into Dolly’s lap. His face filled with content, he curled up and purred while she petted him with both hands down the length of his body. Cameron recognized the chair Dolly was sitting in as the same chair in the picture.
    “Bootlegger is such a derogatory term for what my  father did,” she said. “He was one of the best libation makers of his time. Why, orders for his moonshine came from all over the eastern half of the country. Uncle Al used to say that Daddy had the Da Vinci touch. He was an artist, and his booze was the best there ever was.”
    “How did you end up in Chester, West Virginia?” Cameron asked.
    “Prohibition ended, and suddenly everyone was making booze. It wasn’t such a specialized profession anymore,” Dolly said with a frown. “By the nineteen fifties, Daddy was looking for another line of work. The race track was bringing in a lot of people looking for entertainment—especially men. So he bought a big old farmhouse outside of Newell and opened up a club. But it was a very private club. Extremely exclusive.   The only way people could get in was by knowing a member who would vouch for them.”
    “But alcohol was legal,” Cameron said. “What made this club so exclusive and private that—” She gasped. Eight girls when she was never married.
    “Daddy named it Dolly after me,” the elderly woman said with pride.
    “Your girls!” Cameron said. “They weren’t your daughters.”
    “I never said they were my daughters,” Dolly said, “but they were like daughters to me. I cared very much about every one of my girls. Why, after Daddy passed away and I inherited Dolly’s—”
    “You were a madam,” Cameron said.
    “And a very good one.” With a scoff, she waved her hand. “But Dolly’s wasn’t like any run-of- the-mill bordello. We were