Fearless Fourteen

by Janet Evanovich

  “Problems in school?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  “Well?”

  He bit into his lower lip.

  “Your mom hasn't turned up in any of the local hospitals,” I told him. “That's a good sign.”

  “Or the morgue.”

  “Yeah, or the morgue,” I said.

  “Maybe she took off.”

  “She wouldn't take off without you. She loves you.”

  “Thanks,” Zook said. “Do you think she's okay?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  I ran into the deli on the way home and picked up lunch meat and chips and ice cream sandwiches. Marion Fitz was working checkout.

  “I hear you found a dead guy in Morelli's basement,” she said. “Is this Virginia baked ham or the low sodium?”

  “Virginia baked.”

  “I heard it was Allen Gratelli.”

  “That's what I'm told.”

  “Wasn't he dating Loretta Rizzi?”

  Bang. Direct hit to my brain. “I don't know,” I said. “Was he?”

  “His trucks been in front of her house a lot. Maybe she just had cable problems.”

  I carried my bag out to my car, tossed it onto the backseat, and got behind the wheel. Zook was hooked into his iPod, waiting for me.

  “Was your mom dating a guy named Allen Gratelli?” I asked him.

  “He's Uncle Dom's friend. He'd come over sometimes to see if we were doing okay. I thought he was sort of a jerk. Sometimes it was like he was trying to put moves on my mom, but she always made a joke about it.”

  “I ran into him today.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “He was in Morelli's basement. Someone shot him.”

  Zook's eyes went wide. “Get out. Was he hurt bad?”

  “Yes.”

  “How bad?”

  “Real bad.”

  I suspect if I was relaying this information to a fourteen-year-old girl, she would be sad at this point. She'd be remembering pets and relatives and stuffed animals that had been injured, and the tragedies would be commingled in the frontal lobe of her brain. Zook, being a boy, thought it was cool.

  “Oh man,” Zook said. “Is he dead?”

  “Yes.”

  Zook was leaning forward, straining against his seatbelt. “Who shot him?”

  “I don't know. He was dead when I found him.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He looked dead. Bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.”

  “Whoa. That's amazing. Is he still there?”

  “No. They moved him out.”

  Zook slumped back. “Darn. I miss all the good stuff.”

  “Did your Uncle Dom ever say anything about the money? Like where it was hidden?”

  “No. He just kept saying he was going to be living the high life.”

  “Did he have other friends besides Allen Gratelli?”

  “I guess, but I don't know any. Allen was the only one who came around after Uncle Dom went to prison. And Allen just started to come around a couple months ago.”

  The police were gone when I returned to Morelli's house. Only Mooner in the lawn chair and a single van from an emergency cleaning service suggested something unusual had just occurred.

  “Zookamundo,” Mooner said. “Been waiting for you, man. We gotta convene with the wood elves.”

  “Did you see the dead guy?” Zook asked.

  “Yeah. He was real dead,” Mooner said. “Pooped in his pants and everything.”

  “Awesome,” Zook said.

  I left Mooner and Zook in the living room with the ice cream sandwiches and the wood elves, and I went to the kitchen to help Morelli. He was methodically going through drawers, extracting keys and odd scraps of paper. The basement door was open, and the smell of bleach and pine-scented detergent drifted up the stairs.

  “Zook tells me Allen Gratelli was friends with Dom,” I said to Morelli.

  “Shazam.”

  Morelli grinned and wrapped an arm around me. “I'm going to get you naked tonight and make you say shazam again.”

  I knew that wasn't an empty promise. “Having any luck here?” I asked him.

  “I've got a pile of renegade keys, and I now know the problem with our plan. It's not enough to find a key. You have to know where it goes.”

  My cell phone rang, and I answered to Connie.

  “I have Brenda back with the film crew,” Connie said. “They want more footage.”

  “Are you kidding me? They want more monkey?”

  “No. They want a different takedown.”

  “We screwed up a simple domestic disturbance. Where do we go from there?”

  “How about Loretta? She's disappeared, right? That's a violation of her bond agreement.”

  “I can't find Loretta. I have no place to look. I have no clue.”

  “Just lead them around. Make something up. At least no one will shoot at you. And there won't be any monkeys,” Connie said.

  I hung up and looked at Morelli. “Connie wants me to find Loretta.”

  “Good,” Morelli said. “I want you to find Loretta, too. Loretta probably knows what's going on. She might even know where the money is located.”

  “I don't know where to begin.”

  “There were four men involved in the robbery. Go on the assumption that Allen Gratelli was one of the men and find the other two. I'm guessing one of them has Loretta.”

  “Why aren't you looking for Loretta?”

  “I'm baby-sitting her kid. And it seems to me it's more dangerous to stay in this house than to be on the streets. So I'm staying here, and you're hitting the streets.”

  “Okay, fine, terrific, I'll go find Loretta, but you're going to owe me.”

  “Shazam,” Morelli said.

  The bonds office looked like it was holding a casting call for 'Ho Bounty Hunters. Lula and Brenda were there, dressed in their leathers, plus Nancy, Mark Bird, and his producer and the camera crew.

  “I can't drag everyone around with me,” I told them. “I need to talk to people, and the camera crew is intimidating. They're going to have to stay in the van.”

  “Okay,” Mark said, “we'll wire you for sound and we'll do re-creations.”

  “What's this Loretta like?” Brenda wanted to know. “What did she do?”

  “She robbed a liquor store,” I told her.

  “Was she armed?”

  “Yeah. She had a lightsaber.”

  “A what?”

  “She had her kid's Star Wars lightsaber from Disney World.”

  “But she got a lot of money, right?” Brenda said.

  “Actually, she got a bottle of gin. She needed a Tom Collins.”

  “Been there, done that,” Brenda said.

  I took the new paperwork from Connie, plus a profile on Allen Gratelli, and we all piled into Lula's Firebird. Lula drove north on 206, past Bider College, to a neighborhood of modest houses. She wound down a couple streets and stopped at a house with a lot of cars parked in the driveway. This was Gratelli's house and it looked like people were arriving to give their condolences. Problem was, according to Connie's computer check, Gratelli lived alone. He was divorced, no children. His parents were deceased. He had two brothers and one sister.

  Lula parked on the street, and we walked to the house.

  The front door was open, and I could hear people yelling at one another inside.

  “Knock, knock,” I said, peeking into the house.

  Two men were shoving each other around, a guy in a cable uniform was ransacking a chest in the hall, and a woman was yelling at the two men.

  “You dumb shit,” the woman said to one of the men. “Who cares if he slept with your wife? Your wife is a slut. Everyone's slept with your wife. Stop being a jerk and go look for the stupid directions.”

  “What directions?” I asked her.

  Her head snapped around, and she took in Lula and Brenda and me. “Cripes,” she said. “It's the rod squad. I knew
Allen was a sicko, but this is ridiculous.”

  Lula stiffened her spine. “Say what?”

  “You heard he was dead, right? And now you're here on the scavenger hunt? Well, back off, because I was here first,” the woman said.

  I corralled Lula and Brenda and pulled them aside. “Cozy up to the guy in the cable uniform and find out what he's looking for.”

  The woman made a disgusted gesture at the men and flounced off to the kitchen.

  I tagged along and watched her open and close drawers.

  “Are you his sister?” I asked the woman.

  “Yeah.”

  “I'm sorry,” I said. “This must be a terrible time for you.”

  “We weren't close.” She cut her eyes to me. “Have you known Allen long?”

  “Long enough.”

  “I guess men talk when you're, you know, doing things.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Like what did he say?” she asked me.

  “Uh, mostly he gave instructions.”

  “Really? What sort of instructions? Did he say where it was located?”

  “No. I knew where it was located. He mostly said hit me harder. And then ouch and yow and that sort of thing.”

  “I don't mean those instructions. I mean, did he tell you where the money is hidden?”

  “Oh. No.”

  “Allen was such an idiot. I can't believe he got himself shot. What was he thinking?”

  “Do you know who shot him?”

  “I imagine it was someone looking for the money, just like him. Probably crazy Dominic Rizzi.”

  “This is the money from the robbery, right?”

  “I guess. He just kept talking about the money he was going to get when Dom got out of jail. And then Dom got out and nobody could find the money. And then last night, Allen said he had directions and today he's dead. I figure I'm next of kin and the money is mine. I just need to find the directions. Me and my two remaining moron brothers.”

  “Doesn't it bother you that Allen was probably killed over the money and you could get killed, too?”

  “Do you have any idea how much money we're talking about?”

  “A lot?”

  “More than a lot. We're talking a shitload.”

  “What if you don't find the directions here?”

  “I guess I just start digging around the death house. I figure Dom gave the money to his crazy old Aunt Rose, and she hid it somewhere. And then she died before Dom got out of prison.”

  I left the kitchen, gathered up Lula and Brenda, and herded them outside.

  “What did you find out?” I asked them.

  “He worked with the dead guy,” Lula said. “And the dead guy was always talking about the money he was gonna get when Rizzi got out of prison. And so this jerk-off figured now that the dead guy is dead, he was gonna come look for the money.”

  “That's it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you get his name?”

  “Morty Dill. He was all taken with Brenda here. He would have told us anything.”

  “He reminded me of my fifth husband,” Brenda said. “Sort of cute the way he kept calling me darlin'.”

  “I know all about you from Star magazine,” Lula said. “I thought your fifth husband was that English guy who got caught with his pants down in the movie theater. You're thinking of your sixth husband, who was the country singer. Kenny Bold.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “There was the guy you married right out of high school. The plumber. Then there was the ice skater who turned out to be gay. The third guy was a stock car driver. Then you remarried the plumber, but that only lasted a couple weeks. And then the English guy.”

  “You're right,” Brenda said. “I'd forgotten about the second marriage to the plumber.”

  A black Mercedes sedan with tinted windows cruised down the street, stopped in front of the house for a moment, and sped away.

  “Guess he don't like a crowd,” Lula said. “My opinion is, people gonna be coming out of the woodwork to get that robbery money.”

  “Morty said Allen had directions to the money,” Brenda said. “Morty was looking for the directions.”

  I looked back at the house. “I suppose we should join in the hunt. Or at least we should wait around to see if anyone finds the directions.”

  An hour later, everyone cleared out. The house had been searched from top to bottom and the result was a big zero.

  “I'm not going to get an Emmy on this episode,” Brenda said. “This is a huge yawn.”

  “You'd get an Emmy if we found the directions,” I told her. “Let's just think about this a little. Supposedly, Allen Gratelli had directions to the money, and next thing, he was dead in Morelli's basement. So, if the directions weren't on him, and they aren't in his house... where would they be?”

  “In his car,” Lula said.

  “I don't remember seeing his car. It wasn't parked in front of Morelli's house.”

  “If I was doing B&E on a cop's house, I wouldn't park in front of it,” Lula said. “When we break into someplace we always park around the corner.”

  Stephanie Plum 14 - Fearless Forteen

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A half hour later, we were back in Morelli's neighborhood. According to Connie's research, Gratelli drove a silver Camry. Lula motored around the block and, sure enough, there was Gratelli's car, parked around the corner, a block away. Lula pulled in behind it, and we all got out and looked into the Camry. There was a briefcase on the backseat. The cameraman panned across the car and went in for a close-up.

  “There it is,” Brenda whispered into her mic. “There's the briefcase with the directions to millions of stolen dollars.”

  We tried the doors. Locked.

  “No problemo,” Lula said. She opened her trunk and removed a slim metal tool.

  She rammed the tool into the doorframe and popped the lock. “It's not like I steal cars or anything,” Lula said, “but a girl needs to be prepared. A girl's gotta have skills, you see what I'm saying?”

  I took the briefcase from the car and set it on the hood.

  It was a Samsonite hardside attache case. The kind gorillas can jump on and not make a dent. I released the two locks and everyone crowded close together, excited to see if the directions were inside. I lifted the lid and... Bang!

  Blue dye exploded out of the attache case.

  No one moved. No one spoke. No one blinked. We all just stood there, dripping blue dye.

  “What happened?” Brenda wanted to know. “Am I okay? Was it a bomb?”

  I looked at the dye on my hands and shirt. “Gratelli booby-trapped his briefcase.”

  “He's lucky he's dead,” Lula said. “I'm wearing leather. Somebody's gotta be responsible for this dry-cleaning bill.”

  The cameraman looked at his blue lens. “I'm done for the day.”

  I closed the attache case and snatched it off the hood of Gratelli's car. “I'm taking this with me. I'll give it to Morelli to check out.”

  “It's in my hair, isn't it?” Brenda asked. “I feel so funky.” She looked down at herself. “I have blue boobies.”

  Lula carefully eased herself into the Firebird and drove away. Brenda and the camera crew took off in the van. And I walked to Morelli's house.

  Mooner answered the door. “Far out,” he said. “Off the chain.”

  I had no idea what “off the chain” meant, and I didn't care. I was blue. I walked through the living room, and Zook never looked up from the computer screen. I got to the kitchen, where Morelli was stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce, and I dropped the attache case onto the kitchen table.

  Morelli gaped at me with the spoon in his hand. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Booby-trapped attache case.”

  “Have you seen yourself?”

  “No. Is it bad?”

  “How do you feel about blue?”