Twisted Twenty-Six

by Janet Evanovich

  “He wasn’t really Zeus,” I said. “You know that, right?”

  “Yeah, but he was sort of Zeus. It just seems wrong.”

  For sure.

  * * *

  —

  I dropped Lula off at the office and continued on to my parents’ house. I wanted to make sure everything was okay, and I wanted to mooch lunch and read through the information I got from Connie and Miracle Fitness. If one of the La-Z-Boys snatched Grandma, it would be worrisome, but at least we would have a place to start looking. This other player was much more frightening.

  My father was watching television and eating an egg salad sandwich off a tray table. My mom and my grandmother were at the kitchen table. They each had an egg salad sandwich. The first thing I noticed was that Grandma wasn’t wearing her necklace.

  “Where’s your necklace?” I asked, hanging my messenger bag on the back of a kitchen chair. “You’re supposed to never take it off.”

  “It got wet in the shower, so I set it on the counter to dry, and then I forgot about it,” Grandma said. “There’s more egg salad in the fridge.”

  I made myself a sandwich and brought it to the table. “You can’t forget about the necklace. You need to always wear it.”

  “I’ll put it on when I go upstairs, but I don’t see the need for it,” Grandma said. “This seems like a lot of to-do about nothing.”

  “The man who tried to kidnap you is dead,” I said. “I’m sure he was killed so he couldn’t divulge the name of whoever hired him.”

  “You don’t know that for sure,” Grandma said. “People get killed in Trenton all the time.”

  “Humor me and wear the necklace,” I said. “Besides, it’s pretty and it’s a gift from Ranger.”

  “I understand the man who was murdered worked at Miracle Fitness,” my mother said. “That place has a real reputation. It’s practically a swingers’ club.”

  Grandma leaned forward over the table and lowered her voice. “Marg Bowman said the ladies diddle themselves in the sauna. She said they wear nothing but a towel and they diddle.”

  I felt my face scrunch up. “Eeuuww!”

  “I’d like to know how that goes,” Grandma said. “Do they all sit down and one of them asks, ‘Should we diddle today?’ Seems like it would be rude if one of them just started diddling without asking.”

  “I’m eating egg salad,” I said. “Could we talk about something besides . . . you know? Like, is there anything new going on?”

  “I got a letter from the lawyer setting the estate meeting for Monday,” Grandma said. “I’m thinking about giving some of my money to the animal shelter.”

  “Good idea,” I said.

  “I’m going to get more money than I need, so you all can have what you want and then I’ll give the rest away to the homeless dogs and cats.”

  “That’s nice of you,” my mother said, “but I don’t need anything. The house is paid off and my car is only two years old.”

  “Yeah, but you’re gonna need a new liver one of these days, and that costs money,” Grandma said.

  I pulled Connie’s folder plus the pink folder out of my bag. First up was the list of trainers. This wasn’t worth anything because they all had phony names. Poseidon, Hermes, Apollo, Atlas. I went to the membership list next. Eight pages of small print. Mental groan.

  “Something wrong?” Grandma asked. “Your eyes just rolled so far back in your head I was afraid you’d fall out of your chair.”

  “It’s this list. Connie got me the names of everyone who has a Miracle Fitness membership. I thought I might find someone who was connected to Jimmy in some way and would want the keys. Someone who would hire Red Air Jordans and then kill him to shut him up.”

  “That’s easy,” Grandma said. “Jimmy’s first wife, Barbara. She’s always talking about the hot trainers at Miracle. She’s in her late seventies, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s one of the diddlers. She’s on hormone replacement, and Rogaine. I think she gets Botox, too. Did you see her at the viewing? Her face doesn’t move. She’s all frozen up. She belongs on that show . . . Housewives of Hell.” Grandma reached for a cookie from the white bakery box on the table. “Barbara never married again, after the divorce. She tells everybody she has PTSD from being with Jimmy. She’d take out a hit on me in a heartbeat. His daughter, Jeanine, goes to Miracle Fitness too. She’s married to Bernard Stupe.”

  “I went to school with one of their kids,” I said. “Don. He was a year ahead of me.”

  “He’s in Seattle now,” Grandma said. “And the other one is in the military. I’m sure Jeanine would know about the keys, but I can’t see her killing over them. She’s always been a nice person. Quiet. Not like her mother. Bernard’s quiet too. Polite.”

  “What about the second wife?” I asked.

  “Bunny,” Grandma said. “They were married for less than a year. Rumor has it that she got a bucketload of money from the divorce. She’s living in Arizona now. She was at the viewing and then she flew back to Phoenix. I think she just wanted to make sure Jimmy was dead.”

  I looked at my mother. “Can you think of anyone?”

  “Sidney DeSalle owns Miracle Fitness,” she said. “There are a lot of rumors about him and his business practices. He’s known for being a pretty rough guy. I don’t know if he would be interested in the keys, but I imagine he’d know about them.”

  I called Connie and asked her to run Sidney DeSalle through the system.

  “No problem,” she said, “but you’ve got to come get Lula. She’s driving me nuts. She’s all into fitness, doing squats across the room and jumping jacks in her spike-heeled shoes. She says she’s working to look like the woman behind the desk at Miracle Fitness.”

  “That’s only going to happen if Miracle Fitness is handing out miracles.”

  I disconnected, ran upstairs and got Grandma’s necklace, then went back to the kitchen and put it on her.

  “I have to go to work,” I said. “I’ll check back later.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  LULA WAS TRYING to touch her toes when I rolled into the office. She was doing a lot of grunting, and her fingertips weren’t anywhere near her toes.

  “My problem is I’m not wearing the right clothes,” Lula said. “I’m not in my workout clothes. These clothes are too restrictive.”

  Lula was wearing a black spandex miniskirt, and every time she bent over there was a flash of red thong, which was ultimately lost in the Grand Canyon of Lula.

  Connie had her hands over her eyes. “Tell me when she stops.”

  “I’m on a self-improvement plan like Stephanie, only mine is physical. I need to lose three or four pounds,” Lula said, standing straight, tugging her skirt down over her ass.

  Lula needed to lose fifty or sixty if she wanted to look like the woman behind the Miracle desk. An alternative would be to grow six inches, but that wasn’t likely to happen either.

  I called Morelli and told him about Barbara Rosolli and Sidney DeSalle.

  “I’ll talk to them,” he said. “We looked at the recording from the security camera that covers the parking lot next to the bail bonds office. A car drove past at one A.M. Tuesday. Couldn’t make out the occupants or the license plate. We also talked to Lucca’s neighbors, but that was a bust. He lives in a big apartment complex where no one knows anyone else.”

  “What about the three sisters?”

  “Angie, Tootie, and Rose? It looks like they were responsible for the searches and the firebomb. They don’t seem to be interested in kidnapping Grandma. They just want to harass her. And they wouldn’t mind finding the keys in the process.”

  “You have a snitch?” I asked.

  “Yeah. My mom.”

  Never underestimate the value of the Burg gossip network. More news gets passed during bingo at the firehouse and daily mass at the C
atholic church than from CBS, NBC, and Fox News combined.

  “What’s going on tonight?” Morelli asked.

  “I need a night at home. I’ve gone through all my emergency clothes at your house, and I have to clean Rex’s cage.”

  “How’s your arm?”

  “It’s good. Nothing oozing out of the incision. Stitches are intact. Only aches a little when I use it.”

  “I know big, strong cops who would be sidelined for two weeks with your gunshot wound.”

  “I don’t have that luxury. And I was lucky. It was only a flesh wound.” I hung up and hooked a thumb at Lula. “Let’s go.”

  I got behind the wheel and pulled the hijacker file out of my bag.

  “Looks like we’re going after a new guy,” Lula said.

  “Emory Lindal. Wanted for hijacking a truck full of beer. Took it while the driver was eating dinner. Made the mistake of drinking a six-pack, and the police found him asleep behind the wheel. Didn’t show up for court.”

  “Probably embarrassed to show his face because he’s an alcoholic idiot,” Lula said. “Any priors?”

  “Traffic violations. Domestic violence. Seventy-two years old and lives in a mobile home south of town.”

  “He doesn’t sound like much of a hijacker,” Lula said. “It sounds to me like he committed a crime of convenience. He probably doesn’t even have a warehouse.”

  I drove south toward White Horse and turned off onto Old Bridge Pike. After five miles we still hadn’t come to an old bridge, and we’d passed only one other car.

  “According to my phone map, this guy’s road is a quarter mile on the right,” Lula said.

  I got to the road and stopped. It was narrow and it was dirt.

  “I don’t like this road,” Lula said.

  “There’s a sign on it that says Applegate Road. So this is it.”

  “I know what’s going to be at the end of this road. There’s going to be some nasty old guy living in a broken-down, rusted-out trailer, and he’s going to have a pet snake. A big one. That’s always the way it is with dirt roads going through the woods.”

  I turned onto the road and took it slow over the rutted surface. “That only applies to one guy and one snake,” I said. “Maybe there are others, but we only know one. Simon Diggery and Ethel. And I think Ethel likes you.”

  I drove past a shack made of random lumber and half of a VW van. It didn’t look habitable, and I didn’t see any sign of recent use.

  “I’m telling you this isn’t going to end good,” Lula said. “I’m totally creeped out. I don’t even like woods when they got flowers, and this woods only has woods.”

  We came to the end of the road and stared out at a small mobile home. It was pocked with rust, and the windows were painted black. It was surrounded by high grass. A crude dirt path led to the door. There were signs plastered all over it warning off intruders. KEEP OUT. SURVIVALIST HABITAT. DO NOT ENTER. SECOND AMENDMENT IN FORCE. Vultures hunkered down on the roof and circled overhead. Some of the roof vultures were working at trying to rip the roof open.

  “That’s a lot of vultures,” Lula said.

  I agreed. It was a lot of vultures.

  “You know what vultures like?” Lula said. “Dead things.”

  “We should go check it out,” I said.

  Lula’s eyes bugged out. “Are you nuts? This is a horror movie. You step out of this car, and some freak is going to rush out of the woods with an ax and chop you up into tiny pieces. He’s going to be bleeding out of his eyes, and his skin is going to be green and falling off him in chunks.”

  “I’m thinking that the dead thing in the trailer is Emory Lindal, and that’s why he went FTA.”

  “I guess that’s possible,” Lula said. “The guy with the ax could have got to him.”

  “You stay here,” I said. “I’m going to take a fast look.”

  I opened the car door and stepped out and was almost knocked over by the smell. I jumped back into the car and jerked the door closed. “Wow!”

  “You know what that smell is?” Lula said. “It’s the death cooties. I told you not to go out there, but do you listen to Lula? Hell, no. You have to see for yourself. Now we got death cootie smell in our car.”

  I put the SUV in reverse, backed up about a quarter mile, stopped, and called the police. Twenty minutes later a patrol car pulled up behind us.

  Lula checked the car out in the rearview mirror. “Twenty minutes and all that responds is this lame-ass patrol car. Did you tell them about the guy in the woods with the ax?”

  “No. I told them about the vultures and the smell.”

  The cop got out of his car and walked up to us. I rolled my window down, showed him my credentials, and gave him the short version of the story, omitting the guy with the ax.

  He got back into his car, pulled around us, and drove to the end of the road. I rolled my window up and followed him. He parked, got out of his car, took a couple steps toward the trailer, and returned to his car. Ten minutes later a fire truck and an EMT rolled in, followed by another patrol car.

  “This is more like it,” Lula said. “Only thing missing is the helicopter.”

  I was getting antsy. I hadn’t intended to spend this much time here. I didn’t like leaving Grandma unattended, and I wanted to work on the Sidney DeSalle angle. I called Morelli a couple times, but he didn’t pick up.

  Two firefighters went into the trailer. They had their respirators on, and Lula pointed out that they carried axes. They came out after a couple minutes and walked back to the cop cars. None of this activity seemed to affect the vultures. They kept pecking and clawing and ripping at the top of the trailer.

  I put my hand over my nose and mouth and joined the group of men at the cop cars. They were sufficiently far enough away from the trailer that the smell was almost bearable.

  “What’s in there?” I asked.

  The fire guy had his respirator off and was smiling. “Raccoons,” he said. “A lot of them. It looks like they broke in, ate everything they could find, including rat poison, and couldn’t get out. Then they died and exploded. I don’t know who owns this rust bucket, but he’s got wall-to-wall raccoon guts in there.”

  “No human guts?”

  “None immediately visible.”

  I went back to Lula and inched the Porsche around the fire truck and EMT.

  “Raccoons,” I said, leaving the cop cars behind, bumping my way over the crude road.

  “Say what?”

  “Raccoons broke in, died there, and exploded. No humans. No snakes.”

  “That’s damn disappointing,” Lula said. “That’s anticlimactic.”

  I called Morelli again and still no answer. I called Grandma, and she said she was on her way to the bakery. She was in the mood for a cannoli.

  “Are you alone?” I asked her.

  “Yep,” she said, “but it’s okay because I’m wearing my necklace. After I get my cannoli, I thought I’d stop in to see if Dolly has time to fluff up my hair. Stanley Bonino is at Stiva’s tonight. He was a big deal in the K of C, and he was friendly with Jimmy. I hear he’s laid out in Slumber Room Number One. They’re expecting a crowd. Shirley Balog said she’d pick me up.”

  “Are you sure you want to go to Stiva’s tonight? The sisters might be there.”

  “I don’t care about the sisters. I already picked out my outfit. I’m going to wear my navy and red dress. It has a good neckline to show off my necklace.”

  “Tell Shirley she doesn’t have to pick you up,” I said. “I’ll go to the viewing with you.”

  “You’re a good granddaughter,” Lula said when I hung up. “That viewing is going to be a nightmare.”

  * * *

  —

  I was in my apartment reading Connie’s report on Sidney DeSalle when Morelli called.

&nb
sp; “Sorry about the missed calls,” he said. “My phone isn’t holding a charge. I have to get a new one.”

  “Anything interesting to tell me?”

  “DeSalle was out of town when Lucca was killed. That doesn’t mean he didn’t order the hit.”

  “I had Connie run a credit report on him. He’s in the money with Miracle Fitness, so I’m struggling to find his motive for wanting the keys.”

  “We don’t know what the keys unlock,” Morelli said. “Everyone assumes it’s money, but it could be incriminating evidence.”

  “The other player is Barbara Rosolli.”

  “She’s a real nutcase,” Morelli said. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to her yet. Not looking forward to it. She hated Jimmy, and she thinks she deserves to get all his money. The entire Burg and beyond knows this. She’s already got a lawyer ready to contest the settlement. If Grandma is out of the way, the money will go to Barbara’s daughter, Jeanine. So there’s a lot of motivation here.”

  “Is she capable of murder?”

  “I’m not sure she could strangle someone, but murder once removed might not seem like a crime to her. She comes from a mob family, and she married into the mob.”

  “My quiet night of hamster cage cleaning has turned into a night spent at Stiva’s.”

  “Stanley Bonino, right? Should be interesting. I’m sure the sisters will be there. Probably Barbara and some of the La-Z-Boys. Make sure you’ve got your medallion on.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  BY SIX-THIRTY I’d finished all my reading, cleaned Rex’s cage, and chugged a bottle of beer and ate a peanut butter and olive sandwich. I was dressed in my go-to outfit of black pencil skirt and stretchy white scoop neck sweater. I debated flats or heels and went with flats. Just in case I had to chase down a bad guy. I added a short, fitted red jacket and hung my messenger bag on my shoulder.

  Grandma was waiting for me on the porch when I pulled to the curb. Five minutes later, we were at Stiva’s, and Grandma was pushing her way through the crowd to the front door.