Notorious Nineteen

SIXTEEN

THE VAN WAS still parked across from Norma’s condo, and Susan was behind the wheel. She was smoking, staring straight ahead, eyes glazed.

“Hey,” I said. “How’s it going?”

“It’s not going,” she said. “My ass is asleep from sitting here.”

“We had pizza for lunch and we couldn’t finish it. You want some?”

“Sure.”

I passed the pizza box to her through the open window. “Any change in Norma’s routine? Has she had any visitors?”

“No. And no.”

“Are you here 24/7?” Lula asked. “Where do you go to the bathroom?”

“I go home when she goes to work. I figure Jerkface is sleeping then and isn’t going to be out walking around.”

“Jerkface as in Geoffrey?” I asked her.

“Yeah. Jerkface Geoffrey.” She opened the lid on the pizza box and looked inside. “What’s on this?”

“Everything,” I said.

Susan finished her cigarette, tore a chunk of pizza off for the cat, and ate the rest of the slice.

“I know he’s in there,” she said. “The shades are never raised. I can practically smell him from here.”

“That’s a long way to smell someone,” Lula said. “He must be a real stinker.”

“I’m tired of sitting here,” Susan said. “I’m going in tonight. Soon as she leaves, I’m breaking in.”

“Do you know how to do that?” Lula asked. “No offense but you’re sort of a amateur.”

“I watched a video on YouTube. It’s easy. It’s called lock bumping. I’m all set with a key from the hardware store that’s been filed down. And then all I have to do is hit it with a hammer.”

“God bless YouTube,” Lula said. “You don’t even need to go to college no more because you could learn how to do everything on YouTube.”

“She’s going to come out any minute,” Susan said. “You should go away or hide or something so you don’t spook her.”

Lula and I went back to the Mercedes and waited. After ten minutes Nurse Norma stepped out of her front door, locked it, got into her sporty car, and drove off. When she was out of sight Lula and I returned to Susan.

“Let’s do it,” Lula said to Susan. “Let’s root out Jerkface.”

Susan fished the bump key out of her purse. “Are you coming with me?”

“Hell yeah,” Lula said. “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away.”

Susan cracked a window for the cat, and we all marched across the parking area to Norma’s condo.

“I’ve never done this before,” Susan said, “but it didn’t look hard on the video.”

“I’ve done it lots of times,” Lula said. “I used to always break a window to get in, and sometimes when I’m not prepared ahead I still do that, but mostly I bump the lock now.”

Susan stuck the key into the lock, tapped it with the hammer, and turned. Nothing.

“You gotta have a knack,” Lula said. “Try again. You’ll get the feel of it.”

The lock tumbled on the third try.

“I did it!” Susan said.

“This could be the start of a whole new career for you,” Lula said. “Being able to bump a lock opens up lots of financial choices.”

“None of which are legal,” I said.

“It’s legal for us,” Lula said.

I flicked the lights on. “Sometimes.”

Susan still had the hammer in her hand. “Stand back. I’m going on a Geoffrey hunt, and when I find him I’m going to hit him with this hammer until he tells me where he hid the money.”

We moved out of the small foyer into the living room. The furniture looked comfortable. Lots of shades of beige. Dark wood tables. Beanpot lamps. An orange chenille throw on the couch.

“This looks like a page out of a Pottery Barn catalog,” Lula said. “I recognize all this. I get that catalog in the mail.”

Susan stalked her prey through the rest of the house. She had steely eyes and a white-knuckle grip on her hammer. She opened closet doors and looked under beds, and swore when there was no Geoffrey cowering behind Norma’s pink fuzzy bathrobe.

“If she finds her husband you might want to jump in and take control before she splits his head open like it was a walnut,” Lula whispered to me.

I didn’t think she was going to find her husband. I could pretty much tell from the living room that there wasn’t a man in residence. No size 12 running shoes under the coffee table. No crushed beer cans or Doritos bags hanging out on end tables. The pillows on the couch were all plumped and lined up perfectly. And in the kitchen the dishes were inside the dishwasher and not left on the counter.

While Susan was looking for her husband I was looking for information about Nurse Norma. Drug paraphernalia, bank statements, travel plans, a phone number or an address written on a pad by the phone, compromising photos, something that would tie her to The Clinic. I didn’t find any of those things but I now knew she wore lacy thongs, she used Bumble and Bumble shampoo, she fell asleep reading Cosmo, Glamour, and professional articles on Botox, thermal fat reduction, and heart transplants.

The thongs, shampoo discovery, and reading selections didn’t tell me why Norma was going to The Clinic every day if there were no patients. And if Cubbin wasn’t in Norma’s condo or at The Clinic, where the heck was he? Oddly enough the one thing that tied it all together was the Yeti. He was in Cubbin’s house, and he was in The Clinic.

“I can’t believe it,” Susan said, back in the middle of the living room after totally searching the condo. “He’s not here. I was so sure he was here.”

“We would have liked if he was here,” Lula said. “Stephanie needs to buy a car.”

“Do you have any other ideas?” I asked Susan. “Let’s start fresh. Where would Geoffrey go to hide? Would he go to a relative? Would he go to the shore? Would he steal a car and drive to Phoenix?”

“He wouldn’t go to a relative,” she said. “They’d turn him in. They were horrified when he was accused of embezzling the money. And they were probably the reason he took the money in the first place. Geoffrey was sort of the schmuck of the family. He wasn’t making a lot of money. He didn’t have a glamour job. And then there was always the one-nut thing hanging over his head.”

“You be surprised how many men only have one nut,” Lula said.

“Yeah, well, he was the only one in his family with one nut, and the rest of his equipment wasn’t impressive. Unfortunately I don’t know firsthand but I’m told his brother is hung like a horse.”

“How about the shore?” I asked.

“I can’t see him at the shore. It was never his favorite place. I don’t know about stealing a car and driving to Phoenix. I guess he could do that, but it seems to me he’d be in some pain and wouldn’t want to be moving around that much. He was never great with pain. Most likely he’d try to get out of the country. He always wanted to go to Australia.”

“Does he have a passport?” I asked.

“I took his passport out of the safety deposit box and hid it.”

“And it’s still in your hiding place?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe that’s what the Yeti was looking for,” Lula said. “Of course with the kind of money ol’ Geoffrey stole he could buy a new passport.”

“What will you do now?” I asked Susan.

“I guess I’ll go home and wait to be evicted.”

“Well, good news,” Lula said. “That could take a while. I hear they’re real backed up on foreclosures.”

I dropped Lula at the office and cruised around the block, trying to decide what to do next. For the better part of the day I’d forgotten about the gruesome note, but now that it was time to go home I had a hollow feeling in my stomach. It was the stretch of pavement between my car and the door to my apartment building that bothered me most. I felt vulnerable when I walked that stretch of pavement. I could delay the experience by eating dinner with my parents, visiting Morelli, or dropping in on Ranger, but eventually I had to get from my car to my door. Better to do it sooner than later, I decided. It would be more dangerous when it was dark.

I drove home, parked, and retrieved Ranger’s small Ruger from under the driver’s seat. I walked into my building with the gun in my hand and hoped I wouldn’t run into any of my fellow tenants. I had a reputation for being the building’s Calamity Jane, and I didn’t want to enhance that image. I made it safely to my door, slipped inside, and threw all the bolts.

My apartment is mostly furnished with relatives’ discards. It won’t get a spread in Architectural Digest, but it’s comfortable in a secondhand kind of way. I can’t cook, and I never have dinner parties, so my dining room table serves as a computer desk. I have a couch and coffee table positioned in front of the television, and that’s about it for interior decorating.

I said hello to Rex and gave him a baby carrot. I took a half-empty box of Frosted Flakes out of the cupboard, settled in front of the television, and snacked my way through dinner. I was channel surfing, looking for a nine o’clock show, and I noticed a red glow coming from the parking lot. I went to the window and saw that Ranger’s car was on fire. A second later my cellphone rang.

“Now what?” Ranger asked.

“Someone toasted your car. I imagine we know who did it. I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but personally I think I was safer in the Buick.”

Ranger disconnected, and I stayed at the window to watch the fire trucks arrive. Two Rangeman SUVs and a cop car followed the fire trucks. No need for me to go out. Rangeman would take care of it. I pulled my curtains closed, double checked the locks on my door, and went back to the Frosted Flakes and television, wishing I had a bottle of wine to help make it all go away.