Lean Mean Thirteen

SEVENTEEN

I WOKE UP to someone banging on the bedroom door and Morelli in bed next to me with the pillow over his face. I took the pillow off Morelli. "What's going on?"

"If I go out there, I'll kill him," Morelli said.

I crawled out of bed, toed through the clothes on the floor, and located a pair of sweatpants that looked fairly clean. I stepped into the sweats and rolled them at the waist. I was still in Morelli's T-shirt. Didn't bother to brush my hair. I opened the door and looked out at Dickie. He had two black eyes and a Band-Aid on his nose.

"Yeah?" I said.

"Jesus," he said. "What are you doing here? The nightmare never ends."

Good thing for him I didn't have a staple gun.

"How did I get here? Last thing I remember I was kidnapped," Dickie said.

"Go downstairs and look for breakfast. We'll be right down."

I turned and bumped into Morelli, who was standing behind me, naked. What is it with men that they can walk around like that? I could barely get naked to take a shower.

"No clothes?" I asked him.

"You're wearing my last almost-clean sweats."

"Underwear?"

"None. I need to do laundry. Dickie’s been wearing my clothes."

"I'm not going downstairs with you naked."

Morelli kicked through the clothes and came up with a pair of jeans. I watched him put the jeans on commando, and my nipples got hard.

"I could have these pants off in record time," Morelli said, eyes on my T-shirt.

"No way. Dickie might hear."

"We could be quiet."

"I couldn't concentrate. I'd be imagining Dickie with his ear to the door."

"You have to concentrate?" Morelli asked.

"Hey!" Dickie yelled from the foot of the stairs. "There's no milk."

I followed Morelli down the stairs to the kitchen, where Dickie was eating cereal out of the box.

"There's no milk," Dickie said. "And there's no more orange juice."

"There was orange juice last night," Morelli said.

''Yeah, but I drank it."

Morelli fed Bob and got the coffee going. I looked for something to eat that might not be contaminated with Dickie cooties. I didn't mind sharing a cereal box with Morelli, but I wasn't going to eat from something Dickie had just stuck his hand in. God knows where that hand was last.

"Tell me about the key," I said to Dickie.

"What key?"

I glanced at Morelli. "I'm going to hit him."

"I'll close my eyes," Morelli said. "Tell me when it's over."

"You can't do that," Dickie said. "You're supposed to protect me. Especially from her. You do one little thing wrong with her and the Italian temper comes out. And God forbid you come home late for dinner."

"Four hours!" I said. "You'd come home four hours late for dinner, and you'd have grass stains on your knees and your shirt caught in your zipper."

"I don't remember that part," Dickie said. "Did I used to do that?"

"Yes."

Dickie started laughing. "I wasn't making a lot of money back then. I couldn't afford a hotel room."

"It's not funny!" I said.

"Sure it is. Grass stains and rug burns are always funny." He looked over at Morelli. "She didn't like to do doggy."

Morelli slid a look at me and smiled. There wasn't much I didn't like In do with Morelli. Okay, a few things, but they involved animals and other women and body parts that weren't designed for fun.

"What?" Dickie said. "What's that smile? Oh man, are you telling me she does doggy with you?"

"Leave it alone," Morelli said.

"Is it good? Does she bark? Do you make her bark like a dog?"

"You need to stop," Morelli said. "If you don't stop, I'm going to make you stop."

"Arf, arf, arf!" Dickie said.

Morelli gave his head a small shake, like he didn't fucking believe he had Dickie in his kitchen. And then he grabbed Dickie by his T-shirt and threw him halfway across the room. Dickie hit the wall spread-eagle like Wile E. Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon, and the cereal flew out of the box. Bob came running from the living room and snarfed up the cereal.

"What's that about?" Dickie asked, struggling to get to his feet.

"Trying to get your attention."

I handed Morelli a cup of coffee. "Ask him about the key."

"I'm telling you I don't know anything about a key," Dickie said.

"Let me refresh your memory," I said to him. "You left the safety of this house and went straight to my apartment, where you were caught on camera breaking in and searching for something. Later that day, I got a call from a guy who wanted the key."

"So?"

"So I know there's forty million dollars out there. I know everyone wants it. And I know someone thinks I have the key. And unless I can figure this out, I'm going to get barbecued like Smullen and Gorvich."

"Let's start from the beginning and build up to the key," Morelli said. "How did you meet Smullen and Gorvich and Petiak?"

"I met Petiak at a financial-planning conference. We got to be friends, and he introduced me to Smullen and Gorvich. I'd just been passed over for partnership, and I could see the handwriting on the wall. Office politics weren't in my favor. So I was looking at options. Petiak had money and clients but no ability to litigate if the need should arise. He suggested we go into business together, and I agreed. I knew his client list was questionable, but I thought I could live with it."

"Smullen and Gorvich?"

"We needed more money to buy the building, and Petiak knew Smullen and Gorvich from a previous life, and he knew they were looking for a place to practice. It was all a con, of course. They were always the unholy triad. At some level, I suspected this, but I had no idea how unholy they actually were. I was desperate to be a partner somewhere and get my own business established, so I didn't look at anything too closely."

Dickie shook the cereal box and turned it upside down. Empty. "I'm hungry," he said. "This was the last of the cereal. And I want coffee."

"Help yourself to the coffee," Morelli said.

"I need cream. I can't drink black coffee."

Morelli looked like he was going to throw him against the wall again.

"I'll go to the store," I said.

Not so much as a favor to Dickie. More because I needed cream for my coffee too.

"I want to go with you," Dickie said. "I'm tired of being cooped up in this house."

"I can't take a chance on having you recognized," Morelli said. "If Petiak or one of his idiots spots you in my car, we'll blow our cover."

"I can wear a hat," Dickie said.

"Put him in a hooded sweatshirt," I told Morelli. "He can put the hood up and slouch down. I need food."

Morelli got a hooded sweatshirt off the living room floor and tossed it to Dickie. "I'm going with you," Morelli said. "Give me a minute to find clothes."

My socks had dried, but my shoes were still wet. I grabbed a jacket from Morelli's hall closet and put a ball cap on my head.

We all skulked out to the SUV parked in the back of the house. Dickie rode shotgun, and I got in behind him. Morelli walked Bob down the alley until Bob did everything he had to do, and then Morelli ran Bob back and put him in the cargo area.

Morelli went south to Liberty Street and pulled into a strip mall that was anchored by a 7-Eleven. I took everyone's order, Morelli gave me a wad of cash, and I went shopping. I was on my way out with a bag of food when I spotted Diggery at the other end of the mall, doing taxes out of the back of a beat-up Pontiac Bonneville. He had the trunk lid up, and he had a little folding table and two stools set out. There were seven people in line. I handed the bag over to Morelli and walked down to Diggery.

"Oh jeez," he said when he saw me.

"You're up early," I said to him, checking out his fingernails for signs of fresh dirt.

"This here's convenience taxes," Diggery said. "You can pull your pickup in and get your fresh coffee and then come get your taxes done and go off to work."

"I was next," a woman said to me. "You gotta get to the rear of the line."

"Chill," I told her. "I'm wanted for murder, and I'm not in a good mood."

"Here's the thing," Diggery said to me. "I know it's not a big deal to go get bonded out again, but it's gonna cost me more money, and I don't have it. I had to buy winter coats for the kids and rats for the snake. If you let me finish my tax business, I'll come with you. I'll have money from the taxes. Tell you what, you cut me some slack here, and I'll do your taxes. No charge."

"How much longer do you need?"

"Two weeks."

"I really could use some help with my taxes."

"Just put your pertinent information in a shoe box and bring it all to me. I'll be able to fit you in next Monday. I'll be at Cluck-in-a-Bucket on Hamilton Avenue between ten and twelve at night."

"What was that about?" Morelli asked when I got back to the SUV.

"Simon Diggery doing taxes. He said he needed the money to buy rats for the snake, so I let him go."

"That's my girl," Morelli said. He flipped a bagel back to Bob and took us home.

I'd gotten bagels, doughnuts, cream cheese, milk, orange juice, bread, and ajar of peanut butter. Dickie chose a bagel and loaded it up with cream cheese. Morelli and I ate doughnuts.

"Talk while you eat," Morelli said to Dickie. "You went into business with Smullen, Gorvich, and Petiak. Then what?"

"It was all looking good. We bought the building, and then we were doing well, so we made some other real estate investments. Petiak and Gorvich both had home offices and I only saw them at the off-site Monday meetings. Fine by me. I always thought Petiak was a little creepy. He has this quiet way of talking, choosing his words as if English is his second language. And there's something about his eyes. Like light goes in but doesn't come out. And Smullen had ties to South America, so I saw him sporadically. It was a little like having my own firm. I had my own clients and my own staff. There were four names on the stationery but I was usually the only partner in the building."

Morelli refilled his coffee and topped off my coffee and Dickie’s. "What went wrong?"

"It was Ziggy Zabar, the accountant. He figured out what was really going on, and he wanted to get paid off."

"And what was really going on?" Morelli asked.

"It's actually very clever," Dickie said. "They were using the law firm to launder money. Petiak was a military guy until he got booted out for something… probably insanity. Anyway, he was a supply officer. Worked in a depot and had access to all the munitions. And he saw a way to tap into these depots all across the country and move munitions out of the depots into his private warehouse."

"The warehouse on Stark Street?"

"Yes. Next comes Peter Smullen. Smullen is married to a woman from a cartel family. Smullen has contacts all over South America. These contacts have dope but need guns, so Smullen takes the dope, and Petiak delivers the guns. The last piece to the puzzle is Gorvich. Gorvich is the drug dealer. He gets the stuff from Smullen and packages it up and distributes it. Now comes the good part. The money Gorvich takes in for drug sales is recorded as payment for legal services. It gets deposited in the firm's account and is sanitized."

Morelli took another doughnut. "So Petiak smuggles guns off government property, stores them in your warehouse, and then ships them off to South America. The cartel pays for I the guns with drugs. The drugs get shipped to Trenton, probably to the warehouse, where they're packaged and sold to local dealers. And the dealers pay for the dope in billable hours."

"Yep," Dickie said. "Genius, right?"

"Not exactly. Zabar figured it out."

"Well, it was good in theory," Dickie said. "It would make a good movie."

"Where do you fit in all this?"

"I was the token real lawyer in the firm. I was supposed to give them some legitimacy. The only reason I know anything is because Smullen made a phone call from his office and I happened to be in the hall. He was on speakerphone talking to Petiak, and they were making plans to pull all the money out of the firm and disappear. Petiak said there was no rush. He said Zabar was taken care of and wasn't going to make any more problems. This was Tuesday morning, after the Monday partners' meeting that Zabar was supposed to attend. Smullen said if Zabar could figure it out, there were others in the accounting firm that could do the same thing. Petiak agreed but said they had to give Gorvich two weeks to transact business."

Bob came in and sat at Morelli's feet.

"You ate your bagel in the car," Morelli said to Bob. "You'll get fat if you eat another bagel."

Bob heaved himself to his feet and padded back to the living room.

"Was this when you cleaned out the Smith Barney account?" Morelli asked.

"Not right away. 1 didn't know what to make of it. My worst fear had always been that one of Gorvich's drug dealers would walk in and shoot up the office. I knew our client list was scary. A conspiracy never occurred to me."

"You must have known they were all from Sheepshead."

"Everyone has a circle of professionals they tap into when the need arises."

"They bought their degrees on the Internet," I said to Dickie.

"At the time, I didn't care. I didn't have the resources to make a success on my own, so I was willing to do some denial to get a partnership."

"Why didn't you go to the police when they killed Ziggy Zabar?"

"I didn't know they killed Zabar. Petiak said he took care of him. That could have meant anything. Later in the week, the police came asking if Zabar had attended the meeting, but even then I still thought he was just missing. Petiak could have paid him off, and Zabar could have gone to Rio. Anyway, have you seen Petiak? He's not a guy you could walk up to and ask if he killed your accountant." Dickie pushed back in his chair. "You need a television in here. How can you have a kitchen without a television?"

"I manage," Morelli said. "So what I'm supposed to believe is that you heard a phone conversation suggesting your partners were going to take your money and run and you didn't do anything?"

"I didn't confront them, if that's what you mean. These are guys who have professional hit men on their client list. I represent Norman Wolecky. I backed out of the hall without making a sound, and when the building emptied out for the night, I went through all the financial records, and I found out how much money we had at Smith Barney. I knew from the phone conversation that something illegal had gone down, but I couldn't figure out what it was. I thought it was probably something like tax evasion. If it was tax evasion, I knew I was fucked. I signed the returns just like everybody else. What was pissing me off was that they were going to take the money and leave me behind to take the fall. I was sitting on this information, waiting for someone to come to me, and no one did. So Friday afternoon, I went to Joyce’s house so no one would hear me, and I cleaned out the Smith Barney account. It was easy. All four of us have our own password to access the account. My plan was to wait for the Monday meeting. If they didn't say anything to me at the Monday meeting, I was going to leave the country and enjoy my forty million. Screw Smullen, Gorvich, and Petiak. My mistake was that I didn't leave soon enough. Smullen found out about the withdrawal and sent the goon patrol to my house Monday night."

"You still could have fled," I said to him. "Why did you hang around?"

"To begin with, I didn't have a passport. It was in my house, and my house was filled with cops. And then when I went back to my house, my passport was missing. I know there are ways to get a fake passport, but I'm not James Bond. I don't know how to go about getting a fake passport, and the thought of using one scares the crap out of me. I get nervous when I have to take my shoes off at the airport. I'm innocent and I feel guilty. What am I going to do when I'm actually guilty?

"So I put myself in a cheap motel in Bordentown until I could come up with a plan. I'm not talking to anyone. Not even Joyce. Okay, maybe phone sex, but that was it. And then I'm watching television, and the local news comes on, and they're talking about how Zabar, the accountant, washed up on the banks of the Delaware. Now I know Petiak killed Zabar. This is serious shit. This isn't just income tax evasion, this is also murder.

"Time to get out of Dodge, I tell myself. If I can't go to an island and lose myself, I can at least go to Scottsdale. Unfortunately, it turns out I can't get to the money. Now I'm really in a bind. I have no more cash in my pocket, and I'm afraid to use a credit card and have it traced. I get to thinking about the warehouse and the apartment building the firm owns, and I wonder if I can hang out there for just a couple days until I can locate the money. I go to the apartment building, and it's in use. Full. No empty apartments. Then I go to the warehouse, and I see Gorvich in the parking lot talking to Eddie Aurelio. Two of Aurelio's soldiers are standing watch at parade rest by Aurelio's Lincoln. It's like a scene out of The Godfather. I don't know a whole lot about the Trenton drug scene, but I know Aurelio is big-time mob.

"I drove past the warehouse and got on Route One and kept going until Princeton. I stopped at a Starbucks and tried to get my heart rate down over a latte. Decaf. I didn't know what the hell was going on, but I was running out of options until I could get the money. So I called the police and told them about Gorvich and Aurelio and Gorvich's client list, and about Smullen and Petiak taking care of Zabar the accountant. I told them I'd testify to all this, but they had to put me someplace safe. And I told them I only trusted Morelli. So here I am."

"Why Morelli?"

"Because you have the key," Morelli said to me. "He needed to be close to the key. He knew we were seeing each other, and he thought he might catch some stray information. He's been sitting here waiting for another opportunity to retrieve the key. What he didn't realize was that Petiak was staking out your apartment for entirely different reasons."

"Petiak is doing cleanup," Dickie said. "He's getting rid of anyone who looks like a threat. At least, that's the way he tells it. After spending some very scary time with him, my feeling is he's gone gonzo. I think Stephanie popped up on his radar screen and he just wanted to enjoy the experience of taking his flamethrower to her."

"And you gave him more reason, didn't you?" Morelli said.

"He hit me! First that RangeMan gorilla attacked me in the apartment, and then I got kidnapped on the way out of the building. It was traumatic. I was handcuffed, and they rammed me down onto the floor of the car so I couldn't see anything. And then when they dragged me out, I still didn't know where we were. I only knew I was in a two-car garage. No windows. No other ears. There was just the light from the garage door opener.

"Petiak was there with his spooky eyes. He didn't say anything to me. I still had my hands locked behind my back, and he hit me in the face. Just like that… bam! 'What the fuck was that?' I said to him. 'That was to let you know I'm serious,' he said. Then he asked me where the forty million was and I said I didn't know. So he hit me again, except that time it wasn't in the face, and I decided to tell him whatever he wanted to know."

"You told him Stephanie had the key."

"I told you. He hit me!"

I saw Morelli's eyes turn black, and I felt the air pressure change in the room. I stepped between Morelli and Dickie and put a hand to Morelli's chest.

"You don't want to kill him," I said to Morelli.

"Get out of my way."

"This is complicated enough. And we might need him for something. And you'd have to go before a review board if you kill him."

"I don't get it," Dickie said to Morelli. "What's the big deal here? He already wanted to kill her. It's not like he could kill her twice. Man, you two are a pair. You have anger-management issues. I hope you're not planning on reproducing. Hate to see a kid with her hair anyway."

I turned to Dickie. "What's wrong with my hair?"

"It's always a mess. You should get Joyce to help you with it. She has great hair. If you'd been more like Joyce, things might have worked out differently."

After that things happened pretty fast, and when Morelli pulled me off Dickie, his nose was bleeding again.

Someone had knocked Dickie off his chair and gone after him like Wild Woman. I guess that was me. Morelli had me at the waist with my feet two inches off the floor.

"I don't know why I always feel like I have to take care; of you," Morelli said to me. "You do such a good job of it all by yourself."

There was blood splattered across the floor, soaking into Dickies shirt.

"Crap," I said. "Am I responsible for all that blood?"

"No, he cracked his nose on the table when he panicked and tried to get away from you. If I put you down, do you promise not to go after him again?"

"Forever?"

"No. Just in the next ten minutes."

"Sure."

Morelli got some ice out of the freezer, wrapped it in a towel, and handed it to Dickie. "Do you suppose you could try being a little less obnoxious?" he asked him.

"What'd I do? I'm sitting here minding my own business, trying to be cooperative. Talk to Bitchzilla over there."

I looked at my watch. "Nine minutes," I said to Morelli.

"I've got blood all over my shirt," Dickie said.

Morelli mopped the blood up off the floor with some wadded paper towels. "First of all, it's my shirt. And second, it's still the cleanest shirt we've got until we do laundry."

"Well, for cripes sakes, do the laundry," Dickie said.

"I don't have a washer or dryer, and I can't leave you in the house alone."

"I can take the laundry to my mom's house," I said. "Gather it up for me."

"I want to know the rest of the story first," Morelli said.

Dickie had his head tipped back with the ice pack over his nose. "I'm not talking anymore. I have a headache."

Morelli went to the powder room and got a bottle of Advil. "From what I've heard so far, you didn't know a whole lot about the drugs-for-arms business. How did you find out about all that?"

"Petiak told me after he hit me. He's on a big nutso ego trip. Had to tell me all the details of his master plan. Even demonstrated his flamethrower. Almost burned the fucking garage down. I gotta admit, the flamethrower is pretty cool. He says he sells a lot of them to the South American drug lords. Apparently scares the bejeezus out of the locals. And I have to tell you, I almost messed myself at the thought of getting it turned on me."

"Why didn't he turn it on you?"

"I imagine he wanted to make sure I was telling the truth about the key. I got stun-gunned, and I guess injected with something, and next thing I knew, I was back here."

"And the key?" Morelli asked.

"It's actually a key card. It allows the cardholder to access a high-security account in Holland from a satellite location here in the States. I have the account numbers memorized and a second set in a safety deposit box, but they aren't any good without the card. Without the card, I have to go to Holland to appear in person and pass a retinal and fingerprint scan. Not an option without a passport."

"Stephanie seems like an odd choice for the key keeper."

"I didn't choose her. She took the key with her when she left my office. The key's in the clock. I wasn't too worried about it because I knew she'd take care of the clock. I figured in some ways it was probably safer than if I'd left it at the office."

"What clock?" Morelli asked.

"Her Aunt Tootsie gave us a desk clock as a wedding present. I was using it in my office, and Sticky Fingers took it on her way out. I went to her apartment twice to look for it and couldn't find it. It's not here either, so I'm assuming it's at her parents' house."

I'd entirely forgotten about the clock. I was mentally scrambling, tracing backward. When did I last see the clock? It was in my bag. Then I stopped at the food store. Put the bags in the back of the car. Put the clock with the bags. Took the bags into the house. Could I have left the clock in the car? I couldn't remember bringing the clock into my apartment.

"You're looking pale," Morelli said. "Like all the blood just drained out of your face. You're not going to faint, are your

"I think I left the clock in the car."

"What car?"

"The Crown Vic."

"Where is it now?" Morelli asked.

"1 don't know. It broke down on Route 206 and Ranger had one of his men take care of it."

Dickie took the ice pack off his face. "You lost Aunt Tootsies clock?"

"It's not your money anyway," Morelli said to Dickie. "It's drug money. It belongs to the government. It'll be confiscated."

I called Ranger and asked him about the Crown Vic. He called back three minutes later.

"Binkie had it towed to the salvage yard," Ranger said.

"Which one?"

"Rosolli's off Stark."

"How's Tank?"

"Tank's good. He was discharged this morning. Anything I need to know?"

"Yes, but it's too complicated to tell you on the phone. I'll be around later. Did you feed Rex breakfast and give him fresh water?"

"That's part of Ella's job description."

I flipped my phone closed. "It's at Rosolli's."

Dickie's eyes got wide. "The junkyard? My God, they'll compress it to the size of a lunchbox."

"I'll call it in," Morelli said. "They'll send someone out to locate the car."

"What about me?" Dickie said. "Do I stay here?"

"Your status hasn't changed," Morelli said. "Until I hear otherwise, you're in protective custody."

"Get me your laundry basket," I said to Morelli. "I need clean clothes. I think I’m starting to mold."