Sizzling Sixteen

THREE

RANGEMAN IS HOUSED in a discreet seven-story building on a quiet side street in Trenton proper. If you didn’t look closely, you wouldn’t notice the small brass plaque by the side of the door that simply states RANGEMAN. No other sign identifies the business. Ranger’s private lair occupies the top floor. Two more floors are dedicated to employee apartments, and the remainder of the building runs the security operation. Rangeman services private residences and commercial properties for clients who need a high level of protection. Plus, Rangeman does the occasional odd job of guarding bodies, finding bodies, and possibly eliminating bodies.

Ranger was my mentor when I first went to work for my cousin Vinnie. I suppose he’s still my mentor, but now he’s also my friend, my protector, from time to time he’s been my employer, and on one spectacularly memorable occasion, he was my lover. I have an electronic key to the underground garage and to Ranger’s private apartment. It also gives me access to the building, but today I let the guy at the first-floor reception desk buzz me in. I took the elevator to the control room and walked past the cubbies and consoles, waving to men I knew.

Ranger’s office was a few steps down the hall. He was on the computer when I walked in, and he smiled when he saw me. A big thing for Ranger, since he doesn’t do a lot of smiling. He was dressed in Rangeman black T-shirt, cargo pants, and running shoes. Everyone in the building was dressed exactly like this, but Ranger’s clothes fit him better. Possibly because Ranger was clearly at the front of the line when God was handing out the good body parts. You could dress Ranger in a black plastic garbage bag, and he’d still look hot.

“I need a tracking lesson,” I said to Ranger. “You know how you always know my location? I want to be able to do that. I want to put one of those gizmos on someone’s car.”

“I can give you the gizmo,” Ranger said. “And I can show you how to install it, but it won’t do you any good if you can’t receive the signals. It would be easier and less expensive if you let me track this person for you.”

“That would be great. I need to know where Mickey Gritch is going. He’s kidnapped Vinnie, and I have to get Vinnie back.”

“Why?”

I blew out a sigh. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Ranger opened his desk drawer, took out a set of keys, and tossed them to me. “You need a car.”

“So you’re giving me one?”

“It’s the right thing to do,” Ranger said.

RANGEMAN KEEPS A fleet of shiny new black cars for employee use. Most are SUVs. There are a couple F150s and a couple vans. And Ranger’s personal car is a Porsche Turbo. The car I drew in the Rangeman lottery was a black Jeep Wrangler.

It was noon when I parked the car in front of the office, and Lula and Connie had two pizza boxes open on Connie’s desk.

“That’s a lot of pizza for someone only eating one of everything,” I said to Lula.

“I’m not eating from Connie’s box,” Lula said. “I got myself one pizza and that’s what I’m eating, but if you want a piece, you could help yourself.”

Lula’s pizza had the works, and Connie had a cheese and pepperoni pizza. Since I was in a cheese and pepperoni mood, I went with Connie’s pizza.

“Let me guess where you got the shiny black car,” Lula said. “I’m guessing Ranger.”

“It’s a loaner.”

Lula selected another piece. “Do you know what I think? I think that man is all bad and scary silent on the outside and soft and mushy on the inside.”

I knew Ranger pretty well and I wasn’t sure what was on the inside, but I knew it wasn’t soft and mushy.

“Have you heard any more from Mickey Gritch?” I asked Connie.

“No. I got a phone call first thing this morning and nothing since. I guess Mickey called Lucille last night. Lucille called Harry, and Harry made a few inquiries and found out about the hooker. And by the time I talked to Lucille, she was having the locks changed on the house, and Harry was on a rant. I got the clear impression no one on that side of the family cares if Mickey Gritch offs Vinnie.”

“That’s a shame,” I said. “I know Vinnie brought all this on himself, but it’s still sad.”

I ate two pieces of pizza, chugged a bottle of water, and hiked my bag onto my shoulder.

“Where you going?” Lula wanted to know.

“I have Ranger tracking Mickey Gritch, so I thought I’d take the afternoon to try to find Dirk McCurdle. He’s still in violation of his bond.”

“I thought his name was McCuddle,” Lula said.

“Nickname,” I told her.

The papers branded him McCuddle because he married four women before the state of New Jersey wised up and arrested him. Besides being tagged for bigamy, McCurdle got caught shoplifting some very expensive lingerie. He said social security didn’t give him enough money for him to keep up with the anniversary presents.

“He looks like a nice little old man in his newspaper pictures,” Lula said.

Dirk McCurdle was seventy-two years old, 5′9″ tall, pleasantly plump and pink-cheeked, had wispy white hair and a face like a cherub.

“I have a feeling McCurdle is with one of his wives,” I said. “One is in the Burg, one’s on Cherry Street, and two are in Hamilton Township.”

“Hold on,” Lula said. “I’ll go with you in case one of those wives gets out of hand and you need backup.”

I glanced at the file Connie had given me. McCurdle’s first wife was his age. All the other wives were in their late seventies. Probably, I could handle them.

“Anyway, I never saw any bigamist wives,” Lula said. “I want to see what they look like.”

I THOUGHT I’D start with the most recent wife and work my way back. Margaret McCurdle lived in a garden apartment in Hamilton Township. The buildings in the complex were two-story redbrick with white doors and white shutters at the windows. There were ten apartments in each building. Five up and five down. Margaret lived in an end unit on the ground floor.

“This looks real normal,” Lula said, swinging out of my Jeep, taking in the faux colonial columns in the front of the building. “This don’t look like a bigamist hide out. I hope I’m not gonna be disappointed. I hate when that happens.”

We crossed the lot to the front door and I rang the bell.

The woman who answered the door was about five foot nothing. Her hair was pale blond and cut short. Her makeup reminded me of pictures of Japanese geisha. Exaggerated bow mouth painted with glossy bright-red lipstick, white pancake makeup, and pencil-thin black eyebrows. She was wearing a magenta velour warm-up suit and white tennis shoes.

“Are you Margaret McCurdle?” I asked her.

“Yes. You aren’t more wives, are you?”

“No.”

“Thank goodness,” she said. “I can’t keep track of them anymore. I don’t know how Dirk does it. He has wives coming out of the woodwork.”

I gave her my card. “I’m a bond enforcement agent,” I told her, “and I’m looking for Dirk.”

“Good luck,” Margaret said on a sigh. “I’ve given up looking for him. He went out for ice cream two weeks ago and never came back. And now it turns out I’m wife number four. I read about it in the paper. I suppose I should get a lawyer, but they’re so expensive.”

“What’s it like being married to a bigamist?” Lula asked her.

“It’s perfect,” she said. “He told me he was still managing his company in Des Moines. So he would show up on Thursday night in time to set the garbage out for Friday pickup. And then he would leave early Sunday. He was very attentive, and he was always a gentleman. And he was excellent in bed.”

“No kidding,” Lula said. “You and McCuddle have a lot of sex?”

“No, but we talked about it.”

“Do you know where he is now?” I asked her.

“Jail?”

“Not yet,” I said.

Lula and I said good-bye to Margaret McCurdle, and I drove us a half mile to Ann McCurdle’s house on Sycamore Street. Ann lived in a small ranch house in a neighborhood filled with small ranch houses. Her house was pale gray, with blue shutters and a blue door. Her yard was tidy, and it looked like someone had just mulched around her azalea bushes.

“This is fascinating to me,” Lula said, “because I’m a student of human nature. That’s why I was such a good ’ho. I took an interest in my clients. And now here I am seeing all these bigamist wives living in all these different kinds of houses. Don’t you think it’s fascinating?”

Actually, it wasn’t high on my list of things that fascinated me, but I thought it was nice that Lula was fascinated.

I rang Ann’s doorbell with Lula hovering behind me. I rang a second time and the door was answered by a wiry old lady with a paintbrush in her hand. She had gray hair the color and texture of steel wool, her bifocals were crooked on her face, and she was dressed in white orthopedic shoes and a shapeless cotton creation that was somewhere between a dress and a bathrobe.

“Mrs. McCurdle?” I asked her.

“Yeah,” she said. “Me and everybody else.” She craned her neck to look past Lula. “This isn’t another one of them television interviews, is it? I’m painting my kitchen, and I don’t have my hair fixed.”

I introduced myself and gave her my card. “I’m looking for your husband,” I told her. “Do you have any idea where he might be?”

She pushed a clump of hair back from her face and left a smudge of lemon yellow paint. “I don’t know where he is, and if you find him, I want to know so I can hunt him down and wring his neck. He started painting my kitchen this stupid yellow color three weeks ago and never came back to finish.”

“It’s gonna be real cheery when you get done,” Lula said.

“Cheery, my behind,” Ann McCurdle said. “Every time I look at it, my blood pressure goes up. I’m popping pills like they’re M &M’s.”

“So I guess marrying a bigamist didn’t work out for you,” Lula said.

“It could have been worse. Just when I was getting sick of him, he’d go off on a two-week business trip. That’s the secret to keeping the magic in a marriage,” she said. “You don’t see too much of each other. Men are only interested in one thing anyway. S-E-X. And then after they get it, they go to sleep and snore.”

“I noticed that,” Lula said.

I thanked Ann McCurdle for her help, and Lula and I went back to the Jeep.

“Maybe bigamists aren’t as fascinating as I thought,” Lula said, cinching her seat belt. “According to the newspaper, none of these wives knew there were other wives. Now that I’m meeting them, I could see how that could happen.”

I motored out of the lot and turned onto Klockner Boulevard. “His first wife lives in the Burg. I thought we’d try her next, since it’s on our way back to the office.”

The Burg is an odd-shaped chunk of Trenton bordered by Hamilton Avenue, Liberty Street, Chambers Street, and Broad Street. I lived in the Burg for my entire childhood, and my parents still live there. Houses are small, yards are narrow, cars are large, windows are clean. This is a neighborhood of hard working second-generation Americans. Families are extended and proudly dysfunctional. Although dysfunction in Jersey might be hard to measure.

Tomasina McCurdle lived one block in from Hamilton in a single-family house with brown clapboard siding and brown trim.

“This house looks like a turd,” Lula said. “How could someone live in a all-brown house? You’d think you were going into a turd every day. It’s just my opinion, but I’d find that depressing. When you had company over, what would you tell them? The directions would be to turn off Hamilton and park in front of the house looks like a turd.”

I had to admit, it wasn’t the most attractive house I’d ever seen, but turd seemed harsh. Truth is, the bottom half of my parents’ house was brown, and okay, if I was being honest, it wasn’t such a great-looking house, either.

I knocked at the door and a sturdy woman answered. She was early seventies, short black hair shot with silver, wire-rimmed glasses, dressed in a green pants suit, large pearl earrings, lots of perfume.

“Tomasina McCurdle?” I asked.

“That’s me,” she said. “And I know who you are, too. You’re Edna’s granddaughter. The one who burned down the funeral home.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” I told her. “People were shooting at me.”

“I suppose you’re looking for my foolish husband, the bigamist.”

“We sure are,” Lula said. “And if you don’t mind me asking, what was it like being married to a bigamist?”

“It was like being married to anyone else.”

“That’s disappointing,” Lula said.

Tomasina pressed her lips together. “Tell me about it. I was married to that idiot for fifty-one years, and ten years ago, he decided to just up and marry someone else. And then he goes and marries every floozy that comes along. What the heck was he thinking?”

“Do you know where I might find him?” I asked her.

“I imagine he’s with one of his home wreckers.”

“Other than homewreckers, is there any place else he might be staying? A relative’s house? A close friend?”

“I can’t see him with any relatives. His brother died last year. His parents are dead. Our son lives in Delaware, and he’d tell me if Dirk was with him. Ernie Wilkes is his best friend, but Ernie’s wife wouldn’t put up with having Dirk in the house.”

“You look all dressed up,” Lula said. “Are you going out someplace?”

“No. I just got home. I was at Karen Shishler’s afternoon viewing at Stiva’s.” Tomasina turned to me. “Your grandmother is there causing a scene because there’s a closed casket. The viewing was over, and she refused to leave until they opened the casket.”

“Thanks,” I said. “If you see Dirk, please call me.”