Explosive Eighteen

FOUR

“YOU GOT SOFT IN HAWAII,” Lula said. “You lost your edge. That’s what happens when you go on vacation and do whatever the heck it is that you did. Which, by the way, I don’t even care about no more.”

Lula had picked me up at Buggy’s house, and we were on our way to the bonds office.

“I didn’t go soft in Hawaii,” I said. “I never had an edge.”

“That could be true about the edge, but you’ve been out after two felons now, and they both whupped your butt. So I thought maybe it was on account of being distracted by whatever it is you’re distracted by. Not that I care what it is. And notice what a good friend I am, even though you don’t care to confide in me and I disturbed my nap to rescue you.”

“I’m not distracted. You can attribute both whuppings to pure incompetence.”

“Well, aren’t you little Miss Down-on-Yourself. I could fix that. You need a doughnut.”

“I need more than a doughnut.”

“What, like chicken? Fries? Maybe one of them giant two-pounder bacon burgers?”

“I wasn’t talking about food,” I said to Lula. “You can’t solve all your problems with food.”

“Since when?”

“I’m thinking about taking a self-defense class. Maybe learn kickboxing.”

“I don’t need no self-defense class,” Lula said. “I rely on my animal instincts to beat the bejeezus out of an offending moron.”

That didn’t always work for me. I wasn’t all that great at beating the bejeezus out of people. My fight-or-flight instinct ran more toward flight.

“Now that I’m up from my nap, I’m in a mood to go after the big one,” Lula said. “I want to bag Joyce. Where’s she living? Is she still in that hotel-size colonial by Vinnie?”

“No. The bond agreement lists her address as Stiller Street in Hamilton Township.”

So far as I know, Joyce is currently single. Although that might be yesterday’s news. It’s hard to keep up with Joyce. She’s a serial divorcée, working her way up the matrimonial ladder, kicking used-up husbands to the curb while negotiating lucrative settlements. She left her last marriage with a net gain of an E-class Mercedes and half of a $1.5 million house. Rumor has it he got the guinea pig.

Might as well have a look at Joyce’s house, I thought. Make a fast run out to Hamilton Township, and by the time I got back, hopefully, my car would be parked behind the bonds bus.

Twenty minutes later, we were rolling down Stiller.

“This clump of houses is brand new,” Lula said. “I didn’t even know this was here. This was a cornfield last week.”

The clump of attached town houses was called Mercado Mews, and it looked not only brand new but expensive. Joyce lived in an end unit with a two-car garage. Everything looked fresh and spiffy. No activity anywhere. No cars parked on the street. No traffic. No one tending the azalea bushes. No one walking a dog or pushing a stroller.

“Looks to me like lots of these houses aren’t sold yet,” Lula said. “They look empty. ’Course, Joyce’s house looks empty, too.”

According to the file notes, Connie had been calling every day, twice a day, since Joyce went missing. She’d called the cell number and the home phone, and no one ever picked up.

Lula pulled to the curb and we went to the door and rang the bell. No answer. She waded into the flowerbed and looked into the front window.

“There’s furniture in here, but no Joyce that I can see,” Lula said. “Everything looks nice and neat. No dead bodies on the floor.”

“Let’s snoop around back.”

We skirted the house and discovered the backyard was sealed off with a seven-foot-high wooden privacy fence. I tried the fence door. Locked.

“You’re gonna have to kick it in,” Lula said. “I’d do it, but I’m wearin’ my Via Spigas.”

We’ve done this drill many, many times. Lula was always wearing the wrong shoes, and I was inept.

“Go ahead,” Lula said. “Kick it.”

I gave a halfhearted kick.

“That’s a sissy kick,” Lula said. “Put something behind it.”

I kicked it harder.

“Hunh,” Lula said. “You don’t know much about kickin’ in doors.”

No kidding. We went through this routine at least once a week, and it was getting old. Maybe I didn’t need kickboxing lessons. Maybe I needed a new job.

“One of us is gonna have to alley-oop over the fence,” Lula said.

I looked up at the fence. Seven feet. Neither of us was exactly Spider-Man.

“Who’s going to alley, and who’s going to oop?” I asked her.

“I’d do the lifting, but I just got a manicure. And I notice you don’t have a manicure at all. Only thing noticeable about your hands is the missing tan on your ring finger that I don’t care about.”

“Okay, great. I’ll do the lifting, but you’re going to have to ditch the Via Spigas. I don’t want to get gored by a stiletto.”

Lula took her shoes off and threw them over the top of the fence into Joyce’s yard. “Okay, I’m ready. Give me a boost.”

I tried boosting, but I couldn’t get her off the ground.

“You’re going to have to climb onto my shoulders,” I said.

Lula put her right foot on my thigh, hoisted herself up, and wrangled her left leg over my shoulder. Her spandex skirt was up to her waist, and her tiger-striped thong was lost in the deep, dark recesses of her voluptuousness.

“Uh-oh,” she said.

“What uh-oh? I don’t like to hear uh-oh.”

“I’m stuck. You gotta get a hand under my ass and shove.”

“Not gonna happen.”

She wrapped her arms around my head to keep from slipping, and we went over backward. WUMP.

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

“Hard to tell with you laying on me. I might need a moment.”

We both got up and reassessed the situation.

“My Via Spigas are on the wrong side of the fence,” Lula said, tugging at her skirt. “No way am I losing them Via Spigas.” She hauled her Glock out of her purse and drilled five rounds into the gate lock.

“Holy cow!” I said. “You can’t do that. That’s loud. Everybody’s probably calling the police.”

“There’s no everybody,” Lula said. “This here’s a ghost town.” She tried the gate, but it was still locked. “Hunh,” she said. “Maybe we could dig under the fence.”

“Do you have a shovel?”

“No.”

“Then you’re going to have to decide between your manicure and your shoes,” I told her.

“Over you go,” Lula said.

She got me to the top of the fence, where I hung for a moment, swung one leg and then the other, and managed to fall without fracturing anything. I opened the gate, let Lula in, and we looked in the back windows. Same deal. No Joyce in sight. Back door was locked.

“I could get us in,” Lula said. “I could have a accident with one of these back windows.”

“No! No broken windows. And no more shooting at doors. I can get Ranger to sneak me in.”

“I bet,” Lula said. “Not that it’s any of my business or that I care about what’s going on with you and Mr. Mysterious. ’Course, if you were dying to tell me, I suppose I’d have to listen.”

“The only thing I’m dying to do is get out of here.”

We unlocked the gate from the inside, returned to Lula’s Firebird, and she drove me back to the bonds office.

“Looks to me like Ranger got your car washed,” Lula said, eyeing the RAV4 parked behind the bus. “I can’t ever remember seeing it that clean. Ranger’s like a full-service dude. He rescues your car from being stolen, and he returns it detailed. I’m guessing you must have made him real happy in Hawaii. Not that I care. I’m just taking a winger here.”

It was more like I made him happy, and then I didn’t make him happy, and then I made him happy. And then the shit hit the fan.

“He’s just a clean kind of guy,” I said to Lula.

“Yeah, I could see that.”

Lula took off, and I went to my car. The driver’s side door had been left unlocked. The key was tucked under the mat. There was no Big Buggy in the backseat.

I punched Ranger’s number into my cell phone. “Thanks,” I said. “Did you get my car detailed?”

“There was a problem with blood on your right front quarter panel, so Hal ran it through the car wash.”

“Omigod.”

“Nothing serious. Bugkowski slipped resisting arrest and smashed his face into your car.”

“Where is he now?”

“Bugkowski was screaming like a little girl and drawing a crowd, and Hal didn’t have the paperwork to justify a capture, so he had to let him go.”

“Did Hal get my messenger bag?”

“Yes. He brought it back here to Rangeman. He didn’t want to leave it in an unlocked car.”

“Maybe you could mail it to me?” I asked.

I was really, really not ready to see him.

“You can run, but you can’t hide,” Ranger said.

So true. I hung up and headed for home. I stopped at the supermarket and had my cart half filled with groceries when I realized I had no money, no credit cards, no ID. It was all in my messenger bag… with Ranger. Damn. I returned the groceries and called Morelli from my car.

“About tonight,” I said. “Is it going to involve dinner?”

“Not unless you want to eat at midnight.”

“Are you avoiding me?”

“I’m not that smart,” Morelli said.

I sat for a long moment after Morelli hung up, reviewing my current choices. I could drive to Rangeman and retrieve my bag from Ranger. I could go home and share a cracker with Rex. I could mooch dinner from my mom.

Twenty minutes later, I was at my parents’ house and Grandma was hustling to set a plate at the table for me. My mom had been making minestrone this morning, and that meant there’d also be antipasto, bread from the bakery, and rice pudding with Italian cookies.

“The table is set for four,” I said to Grandma. “Who’s coming to dinner?”

“This real interesting lady I met last week. I joined one of them bowling leagues, and she’s on my team. You might want to talk to her. She’s some kind of relationship counselor.”

“I didn’t know you could bowl.”

“Turns out it’s easy. You just gotta throw the ball down the alley. They gave me this shirt and everything. We’re the LWB. That stands for Ladies with Balls.”

My father was watching television in the living room. He rattled his newspaper and muttered something about women ruining bowling. He was watching national news and a bulletin came on showing a picture of a man found dead at LAX. He’d been hit with a blunt instrument, had his throat slashed, and he’d been stuffed into a trash can.

Ugh. As if this wasn’t horrific enough, I was pretty sure it was the guy sitting next to me for the first leg of the Hawaii flight home. I’d spoken to him briefly in the beginning but slept for the rest of the trip. I’d been surprised to find his seat empty when we reboarded. My impression had been that he’d planned to fly into Newark. I guess this explained his absence.

The doorbell rang. Grandma rushed to get it and ushered a brown-haired, pleasantly plump, smiling, forty-something woman wearing an LWB bowling shirt into the living room.

“This is Annie Hart,” she said. “She’s the best bowler we got. She’s our ringer.”

I knew Annie Hart. I’d been involved in a Valentine’s Day fiasco with her a while back and hadn’t seen her since. She was a perfectly nice woman who lived in LaLa Land, firmly believing she was the reincarnation of Cupid. Hey, I mean, who am I to say, but it seemed far-fetched.

“How wonderful to see you again, dear,” Annie said to me. “I think of you from time to time, wondering if you’ve resolved your romantic dilemma.”

“Yep,” I said. “It’s all resolved.”

“She got married in Hawaii,” Grandma told Annie.

My father shot straight out of his chair. “What?”

“She had a ring and everything,” Grandma said.

My father was wild-eyed. “Is that true? Why didn’t someone tell me? No one ever tells me anything around here.”

“Look,” I said, holding my hand in the air. “I’m not wearing a ring. I’d be wearing a ring if I was married, right?”

“You got a ring mark,” Grandma said. “Of course, I guess there could be other explanations. You could have the vitiligo, like Michael Jackson. Remember when he turned white?”

My mother put two platters on the dining room table. “I have antipasto,” she said. “And I have a bottle of red open.”

My father went to the table shaking his head. “Vitiligo,” he said. “What next?”

“Annie’s been helping Lorraine Farnsworth with her love life,” Grandma said, forking into a slice of hard cheese and prosciutto.

My mother looked over at Annie. “Lorraine is ninety-one years old.”

“Yes,” Annie said. “It’s time for her to make a decision. She’s been seeing Arnie Milhauser for fifty-three years. It might be time for her to move on.”

My father had his head bent over his antipasto. “Only place she’s gonna move on to is the bone farm.”

“She’s doing pretty good for her age,” Grandma said. “Sure, she rolls her share of gutter balls, but heck, who don’t.”

“She’s doing better now that we got her the longer tubing to her oxygen tank,” Annie said.

Grandma nodded. “Yeah, that helped. She was on a short leash before.”

I had my phone clipped to the waistband on my jeans, and it beeped with a text message. We need to talk to you. It’s urgent. Come outside. It was signed The FBI.

I texted back no.

The next message was Come outside or we’re coming in.

I pushed away from the table. “I’ll be right back,” I said. “I need to step outside for a moment.”

“Probably got to let a breezer go,” Grandma said to Annie. “That’s always why I got to step outside.”

My mother drained her wineglass and poured another.

I went to the front door, and saw they were the fake FBI guys. They were standing at the curb in front of a black Lincoln. The bigger of the two, Lance Lancer, motioned me forward. I shook my head no. He pulled his badge out, held it up for me to see, and crooked his finger at me. I did another head shake.

“What do you want?” I yelled.

“We want to talk to you. Come here.”

“Move away from the car. I’ll meet you halfway.”

“We’re the FBI. You gotta come to us,” Lancer said.

“You’re not the FBI. I checked. Besides, the FBI doesn’t ride around in big black Lincoln Town Cars.”

“Maybe we got it on account of it was confiscated,” Lancer said.

“What do you want?” I asked him.

“I told you we want to talk, and I can’t be yelling to you. It’s confidential.”

I moved out of the house onto the walk. “I’ll meet you halfway,” I said again.

Lancer mumbled something to Slasher, and they marched over to where I was standing.

“We want the photograph you got on the plane,” Lancer said. “Bad things are gonna happen if you don’t give it to us.”

“I told you. I don’t have it.”

“We don’t believe you. We think you’re fibbing to us,” Lancer said.

Good lord. As if the vacation wasn’t disastrous enough, now I’m involved in God knows what.

“I don’t have it. I’m not fibbing. Go away and bother someone else,” I told them.

Lancer’s eyes opened wide. “Get her!” he said.

I whirled around and jumped away, but one of them managed to snag my shirt. I was yanked back, clawing and kicking. There was a lot of swearing and ineffective bitch-slapping, and somehow my foot connected with Slasher’s boys. His face instantly went red and then chalk white. He doubled over, hands to his crotch, and he went to the ground in a fetal position. I ran into the house, locked the door, and looked out the window. Lancer was dragging his partner into the Lincoln.

I straightened my shirt and returned to the dinner table.

“Feel better?” Grandma asked.

“Yup,” I said. “Everything’s good.”

“Your digestion will improve when we get your romantic problems solved,” Annie said.

Little alarm bells went off in my head and my scalp prickled. We? Did she say we? I had enough trouble going on with the men in my life without Annie getting involved. Annie was a sweet person, but she was only a few steps behind Morelli’s Grandma Bella in the Whacko of the Year competition.

“Honestly, I haven’t got any romantic problems,” I told Annie. “It’s all peachy.”

“Of course it is,” Annie said. And she winked at me.

“I hate to rush everyone, but we gotta get a move on,” Grandma said. “Bowling starts at seven o’clock, and you gotta get there early or all the good shoes are gone and only the fungus shoes are left. I’m going to get my own shoes, but I have to wait for my Social Security check.”

Rushing through dinner is never a problem. My father doesn’t waste unnecessary minutes on bodily functions. He slurps his soup down boiling hot, has seconds, mops the bowl with a crust of bread, and expects to immediately move on to dessert. This no-nonsense approach to dinner gets him back to the television in record time and cuts down on time spent tuning out Grandma.

“I was talking to Mrs. Kulicki at the bakery today, and she said she heard Joyce Barnhardt was mixed up in something bad and got compacted at the junkyard,” Grandma said, helping herself to an almond cookie.

“How awful,” my mother said. “How would Mrs. Kulicki know such a thing? I haven’t heard anything.”

Grandma dunked her cookie in her coffee. “Mrs. Kulicki’s son Andy works at the junkyard, and it came from him.”

That would be a real bummer if it were true. It was a pain in the ass to get money back on a dead FTA. Especially when the body was incorporated into the bumper of an SUV. Plus, I suppose I’d miss Joyce, in a perverse, sick sort of way.

After Grandma and Annie took off, I helped my mom with the dishes and spent a few minutes watching television with my dad. No one mentioned rings or marriage. My family solves problems with silence and meat loaf. Our philosophy is, if you don’t talk about a problem, it might go away. And if it doesn’t go away, there’s always meat loaf, mac and cheese, roast chicken, pineapple upside-down cake, pasta, potatoes, or baloney on white bread to take your mind off unpleasant things.

My mother sent me home with a bag of cookies, a half-pound of deli ham, provolone, and a loaf of bakery bread. If you come to eat at my mom’s house, you leave with something in a bag.

I stopped at the entrance to my apartment building parking lot and did a fast survey. No black Lincoln Town Car in sight, and I was sure I hadn’t been followed. So probably it was safe to go to my apartment. I took the stairs, walked the second-floor hall, and listened at my door. Silence. I pushed the door open and peeked in. No fake FBI guys lurking in the kitchen. Most likely, Slasher was sitting somewhere icing down his privates. I’d made a good connection. Imagine what sort of damage I could inflict if I actually knew what I was doing.

I gave Rex part of a cookie, went to my computer, and searched around until I found a news story on the man murdered at LAX. His name was Richard Crick. Age fifty-six. Surgeon. Had an office in Princeton. He’d been in Hawaii attending a professional conference. Police were speculating it was a random robbery gone bad.

I suspected different. Crick had something valuable… the photograph. For whatever reason, he slipped the photograph of the man into my bag while I was sleeping. And then either he fingered me before he died, or else a bunch of people figured it out. I had no clue as to the significance of the photograph, and didn’t especially want to know.

I tapped Crick into one of the bonds office background search programs and watched the information scroll down. He’d been an army doctor for ten years. Three were in Afghanistan. Three in Germany. The rest Stateside. He’d gone into private practice when he left the army. Divorced. Two adult sons. One living in Michigan, and one in North Carolina. Squeaky clean until a year and a half ago, when he was hit with a wrongful death malpractice claim. So far as I could see, the claim was still pending. He owned a home in Mill Town. The latest appraisal was $350,000. He owed $175,000 on his mortgage. He drove a two-year-old Accord. No other litigation. No liens. No reports of bad credit. All in all, a pretty boring guy.

No point to sneaking into his house and his office and looking around. I was coming to this game late. The fake FBI, the legitimate FBI, local police, employees, and relatives would already have combed through everything.

I remoted the television on and surfed around, finally settling on the Food Channel. I fell asleep halfway through a Food Truck special and didn’t wake up until eleven-thirty. I checked my phone for messages, found none, and went to bed.