Notorious Nineteen

TWENTY

MORELLI AND BOB left just as the sun was coming up. I gave Morelli the keys to the Buick, and told him I’d try to stay out of trouble. I went back to bed and woke up to blinding day-light and Ranger standing at my bedside with coffee. He was wearing Rangeman black cargo pants and T-shirt, and he was, as always, armed. He wore custom-tailored suits when he was talking to clients, but at all other times he dressed like the rest of his men.

“What the heck?” I said.

“I have a full day, and I need to talk to you.”

“Is that coffee for me?”

“Yes.”

I sat up and took the coffee. “What’s going on?”

“I left keys to an SUV on your kitchen counter. I have someone coming over to fix your window. I got a call from the bridal salon that they were worried about your shoes. They wondered if you had pink shoes and they reminded you that you were wearing sneakers and not heels when you tried the dress.”

I burst out laughing at the thought of Ranger taking the message.

“It’s not funny,” Ranger said. “One more message like that and I’ll get my nuts repossessed.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. I’ve ruled out all but one man in my unit, and he’s supposed to be dead. His name is Orin Carr, and he was the unit demo expert. He was reported killed in Afghanistan, but there are pieces of information in some of the notes that only Orin would know. Orin was the unit whackjob. He would walk through minefields with his eyes closed because he thought he had divine protection.”

“How did he feel about fire?”

“He loved fire. He said it was the great purifier.”

I sipped my coffee. “Are you close to catching him?”

“No. I’m chasing down a dead man. He isn’t leaving any markers.”

“Can I help?”

“Yes. Get the shoe thing straightened out so I don’t have to talk to that woman again.”

And he left.

I rolled out of bed, carried my coffee into the bathroom, and took a shower. A half hour later I was dressed in a black T-shirt and a short denim skirt that I hadn’t worn since high school, and my phone rang.

It was Lula. “Where the heck are you?” she asked. “We got Grandma here, and she’s got big news. She’s been snooping.”

“What’s the news?”

“You gotta hear it from Grandma. I thought for sure you’d be here by now.”

Grandma got on the phone. “I went undercover to Cranberry Manor with Florence Mikolowski last night,” Grandma said. “She was going to visit her friend Marion, and I told her I wanted to go along to see the place. So we were sitting there having a cup of tea and who do you think comes in? Susan Cubbin. Flo’s friend knew her right off. And Mrs. Cubbin goes straight to the office her husband used to have and starts pulling open all the drawers and looking under the desk and in all the books in his bookshelf. And the whole time that young girl who took us around, what’s-her-name, is trying to stop Mrs. Cubbin, and Mrs. Cubbin’s having none of it. I tell you, she was on a mission. And we’re standing there watching it all. And then Mrs. Cubbin is rummaging around in a file drawer, and she goes Aha! And she runs out of the office and out of the building.”

“She found something!” I said.

“Yeah, she had a big folded-up paper in her hand. Like a poster or something.”

Lula got back on the phone. “We gotta go see Susan Cubbin. I bet she knows where the money is. And it might be with her jerk husband.”

“I’m on my way. Give me fifteen minutes.”

I left Tiki with Rex, and I ran to the car with my messenger bag in one hand and a gun in the other.

“Look at you in a skirt today,” Lula said when I walked in.

I took a cruller out of the box on Connie’s desk. “I need to do laundry. This was the only thing left in my closet.”

Lula looked out the window. “You have another new car.”

“It’s Ranger’s. Morelli had to borrow the Buick.”

“What’s wrong with Morelli’s SUV?”

“It sort of got blown up.”

Everyone looked at me with their eyebrows raised.

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Not worth telling.”

Grandma, Lula, and I trooped out of the office and got into the shiny, immaculate black Jeep Liberty.

“I’d like to know where he gets all these new cars,” Lula said. “It’s like they drop out of the sky. And the other question is, how does he get insurance when you keep blowing them up?”

“I don’t blow them all up,” I said.

I drove to the Cubbin house in Hamilton Township and parked in the driveway, behind the van. We went to the door and Susan opened it before I had a chance to ring the bell.

“I saw you drive up,” she said. “Now what?”

“Just checking in,” I said.

“I recognize the old lady,” Susan said. “She was at Cranberry Manor last night. You want to know what I was doing, right?”

“I’m not so old,” Grandma said. “I got a bunch of good years left in me.”

“What were you doing there?” I asked Susan.

“I was looking for the money. What else would I be doing?”

“Did you find it?”

“When I find it, all you’ll see is an empty house.”

“What about the big albino? Has he been around?”

“The realtor?”

“I don’t think he’s a realtor.”

“Whatever. Haven’t seen him.”

Grandma craned her neck to look around Susan into the living room. “This is a real nice house. I like your decorating.”

“I did it myself. I was going for the Americana look.”

“You got it,” Grandma said. “What’s with the suitcase in your living room? Are you planning a vacation?”

“No. I’m cleaning out my closet.”

We left Susan and returned to the Jeep.

“I think she was fibbing about cleaning out her closet,” Grandma said.

“Suppose you embezzled five million dollars?” I asked Grandma and Lula. “Where would you put it?”

“I guess it would be in a bank account somewhere,” Lula said. “It’s not like he robbed a liquor store. He probably took some here and there. That’s a lot of money to take out of that dinky Cranberry Manor.”

“I’d put it in a lot of different banks,” Grandma said. “You gotta move it around and laundry it. And then I’d put some in Grenada and Jakarta and places like that.”

“How do you know all this?” Lula wanted to know.

“I pick it up at Bingo. I sit with Angie Raguzzi. Her brother is in the investment business.”

“Her brother is mob,” I said.

“Yeah,” Grandma said. “Angie says this economy is real good for the mob on account of they’re the only ones loaning money to people. Of course if Cubbin was planning on going somewhere and wanted to take his money with him he could be collecting it all in hundred-dollar bills. It would take a couple suitcases to hold it all if you bundled it up nice and neat.”

“You know that from Angie?” Lula asked.

“No. I got that from Tony Destafano. He’s a bagman. He makes collections, and he’s got it down to a science. He could tell you how many hundreds you could put in a brown grocery bag.”

“He go to Bingo too?” Lula wanted to know.

“No. I see him at viewings. All them old mob guys are croaking. Pretty soon there’s not gonna be any more mob. All the young guys are going into the hedge fund business.”

“What are we gonna do now?” Lula asked. “Is it time for lunch?”

“Not nearly,” I said. “I think we sit around the corner and wait to see if Susan Cubbin drags her suitcase out to the van and goes somewhere.”

“That would be a good plan,” Grandma said, “but I gotta tinkle.”

I drove to Dawn Diner so Grandma could tinkle. Lula got double rice pudding to go, Grandma got a piece of apple pie, I got a giant wedge of coconut layer cake, and we went back to Susan Cubbin’s street. No van. Her driveway was empty.

“Maybe she had to run an errand,” Lula said.

Yeah, maybe she ran an errand to Rio. I hear they do a lot of stomach stapling and fat suctioning there.

I parked half a block away, and we ate our food. An hour went by and no Susan Cubbin. I drove up to her house, walked to the front door, and looked in the window. No suitcase.

I took Grandma home. I dropped Lula off at the office. I called Mary DeLorenzo at the bridal salon and told her I had shoes. I was feeling sick after eating all the coconut cake, so I went home and took a nap. It was midafternoon when I woke up to my phone ringing.

“You’re not going to believe this one,” Connie said. “I just got a call from my cousin Frankie. He owns the pawnshop on Broad, and Susan Cubbin was in. She had a gold bar, and she wanted to know how much she could get for it.”

“Get out!”

“Swear to God. Frankie said he took the bar and emptied his cash register into a suitcase she had with her. He called me because he knew we were looking for her husband.”

I called Morelli and asked if he was making any progress with Elwood Pitch.

“I’m running down a ton of contacts and finding nothing,” Morelli said. “I looked into The Clinic, and on the surface it seems to be legitimate. Franz Sunshine is writing it off as a loss on his taxes.”

“There’s more going on there than a tax loss.”

“I agree. From what you’ve told me he has a security guard, a part-time nurse, and a perfectly maintained lab and surgical suite. He’s using that building for something.”

“Did you go in to take a look?”

“No. I have no justification for questioning them. I did a drive-by, and it looked locked up and empty.”

I told him about Susan Cubbin, and I got silence on the other end.

“Are you still there?” I asked.

“I’m dumbstruck. A gold bar?”

“Yeah. In trade for a suitcase full of money.”

I could hear Morelli laughing. “Just when life can’t get any more insane someone comes along with a gold bar. I hope she kept her pawn ticket because I’m sure she got hosed. Gold is trading high.”

I wandered into my living room and looked out my newly fixed window. Logan was sitting cross-legged on a small patch of grass at the beginning of my parking lot.

“I have to go,” I said to Morelli. “I have to see a guy about a thing.”

I hung up on Morelli, and stuffed a pair of cuffs into the waistband of my denim skirt on the remote possibility that I could catch Logan. I took the stairs down to the lobby, I stepped out the door, Logan saw me and ran away.

This whole deal with Logan was dragging. At this rate I was never going to get rid of Tiki. I really should go more proactive, I thought, but I had other stuff on my mind. Like Ranger’s freak. I did a quick scan of the lot to make sure no one was aiming a rocket launcher at me, and I returned to my apartment.

I went into my bedroom, gathered up my laundry, and headed for my parents’ house. My mom has a washer and dryer that don’t require the insertion of money. Plus I’d get dinner.

“Look who’s here,” Grandma said when she saw me at the door. “You came on a good night. We got a ham.”

I threw my laundry into the washer and helped set the table. My dad was asleep in front of the television, and my mom and my grandmother were in the kitchen. It’s not a big kitchen but it gets the job done. Refrigerator with a freezer on the bottom. A four-burner stove with an oven. Small microwave on the counter. A sink and a dishwasher. The dishwasher is a recent addition but my mom and my grandmother rarely use it. They still do dishes by hand while they review the evening meal and gossip about the neighbors.

The kitchen is like Tiki. It’s an inanimate object that seems alive. It smelled like apple pie and baked ham today. My mom had the windows open and a fan going, pulling in the scent from the geraniums in her window box. In the winter the windows will be closed and steamy from soup bubbling on the stove. It’s been like this since the day I was born and I can’t imagine it any other way.

My mom has squeezed a table and four chairs into the kitchen. My sister and I did our homework here. We ate breakfast here. And this is where important announcements were made. Engagements, pregnancies, college choices. This is also where I stomped and fumed over curfews, rolled my eyes at my parents’ antiquated ideas, and plotted how to sneak out when they were asleep. My sister never did any of those things. She was the perfect child.

I moved out from under my parents’ roof a bunch of years ago and I haven’t been completely successful at re-creating this comforting and stabilizing environment for myself. I’m hopeless in the kitchen, and I never seem to have the time to build my nest. Holidays like Christmas and Easter sneak up on me and fly by before I can decorate my apartment and wrap presents. Maybe if it wasn’t so easy to come back to my parents’ home I’d work harder at building my own. On the plus side I have a hamster and a cookie jar. Okay, so I keep my gun in the cookie jar. But it’s a start, right?

I sat at the little table across from Grandma and watched her shell peas. I could smell the ham heating in the oven with the brown sugar and mustard glaze, the ham studded with cloves and draped in pineapple rings, and I was ready to gnaw my arm off with hunger. Problem was, I couldn’t stop thinking about Susan Cubbin and the gold bar. She shouted Aha! in her husband’s office and next thing she had a gold bar. No way could I walk away from it.

“I have an errand to run,” I said to my mother. “If I’m not here for dinner don’t worry about it. I’ll stop by later and get leftovers.”

The van was in the driveway when I got to Susan’s house. I went to the door, and Susan sighed when she saw me.

“You know,” Susan said.

“I know you pawned a gold bar.”

Susan pressed her lips together, and she blinked away tears. “He’s dead,” she said. “Jerkface is dead.”

“Why do you think he’s dead?”

“It’s all here. All the money he stole from those people. It’s all still here. He didn’t run out on me. He went to the hospital, and he expected to come back. He had it hidden. It was in a place I would never have thought to look.”

“Did you tell this to the police?”

“No. It’s proof he was guilty, and I feel bad about it. I mean, isn’t it enough that he’s probably dead?”

“What about Cranberry Manor?”

“He hated that place. He said the old people were always complaining. And he said they cheated on everything. Cards, Bingo, taxes, Social Security. Half of them are collecting on dead relatives.”

“It’s still their money.”

“I know, but I can’t be the one to tell on him. It seems mean. He was my husband, and he wasn’t so bad. He just had a lot of issues.”

“Can I help?”

“Yes. You can help me figure out a way to get the money back to Cranberry Manor without making Geoffrey look like a monster.”

“Give me some history.”

“Come on in and I’ll show you what I found.”

I followed Susan to the dining room table and looked down at what appeared to be a blueprint for landscaping her yard.

“Yesterday I was sitting out back having a glass of wine and the sun kept reflecting off something in the yard. So finally I got up to see what it was and at first I thought it was a gold button that popped off something and got smashed into the grass. I tried to get it up, but it wouldn’t come, and I kept digging away more grass and more grass, and what do you think I found?”

“A gold bar.”

“Yes. And then it hit me. I remembered Geoffrey was always talking about his big scheme to landscape the yard, and how flowers were as good as gold. Five years ago he started working on this blueprint. He’d haul it out and work on it some, and then he’d file it away and go on to another project.”

“I haven’t seen your backyard. Is it filled with flowers?”

“No! That’s the thing. He kept saying flowers were as good as gold but he only planted a few flowers. There were some bushes in the yard when we first moved in and they’re still there too, but that’s it.”

“He was buying gold and planting it,” I said.

“Yes. And he was marking off the locations of the bars on the blueprint. It hit me like a big brainstorm! Like BLAM! I went all over the house looking for the blueprint, and when I couldn’t find it I went to his office. It was real smart of him, because when the police searched the office they didn’t bother to take the landscape plan.”

“Did you find all the bars?”

“I got all the ones that were marked on the plan. I don’t know anything about the price of gold, so I don’t know if all the Cranberry Manor money is there. It wasn’t easy to get those stupid bars up either. It took me all night, working with a flashlight and one of those little shovels.”

“Where are they?”

“In the kitchen.”

I went to the kitchen and gaped at the bars. They were stacked up everywhere.

“How many are there?” I asked her.

“A hundred and thirty-three. Actually there were a hundred and thirty-four but I took the one so I could get a manicure. Digging up gold bars is hell. My nails were destroyed.”

“I have to think about this,” I said. “Keep your doors locked and your shades down so no one sees what you’ve got in your kitchen.”

“There are so many of them,” she said, looking at the bars. “I didn’t know what to do with them.”

“I’ll figure it out,” I told her. “Just lay low until I get back to you.”

I left Susan, got behind the wheel, and broke out in a sweat. A hundred and thirty-three gold bars. At least five million dollars’ worth of gold, stacked up in her kitchen. This went way beyond putting a couple hundred dollars under your mattress. This was mind-boggling.

I went back to my parents’ house and ate the ham. At least I think I ate the ham. At some point I looked down at my plate and realized it was clean and I must have eaten something, but I couldn’t remember. My mind was on the bars. It was hard to get past the fact that Susan Cubbin had five million dollars in gold in her kitchen. A dilemma I wasn’t likely to face because the men I loved didn’t have stolen gold bars buried in their backyards. At least none that I knew about.