Janet Evanovich: Smokin Seventeen

“I thought I’d stop at Giovichinni’s.”

Giovichinni’s Deli was on Hamilton, not far from the bonds office. It was a family enterprise, and it was second only to the funeral home for feeding the Burg gossip mill. It carried a full line of deli meats and cheeses, homemade coleslaw, potato salad, macaroni salad, and baked beans. It also had Italian specialty items, and it served as the local grocery with all the usual staples found in a convenience store.

“I love Giovichinni’s,” Lula said. “I could get a roast beef sandwich with beans and potato salad. And they got the best pickles, too.”

Five minutes later Lula and I were at the deli counter ordering sandwiches from Gina Giovichinni.

Gina was the youngest of the three Giovichinni girls. She’s been married to Stanley Lorenzo for ten years, but everyone still calls her Gina Giovichinni.

“I heard they found Lou Dugan,” Gina said to me. “Were you there when they dug him up?”

“No, but I got there soon after.”

“Me, too,” Lula said. “His hand was reachin’ up outta the grave. It was like he’d been buried alive.”

Gina gasped. “Omigod. Is that true? Was he buried alive? Supposedly he was involved in some big deal that went bad.”

“Must have gone real bad,” Lula said. “They planted him under the garbage cans.”

“What kind of deal?” I asked Gina.

“I don’t know. One of the girls who danced at the club was here getting an antipasto platter last week, and she said Lou was real nervous just before he disappeared, talking about losing a bunch of money, making travel plans.”

“Where was he going?”

“She didn’t say.”

• • •

Lula and I took our sandwiches back to my car, and I drove the short distance to the bonds office. Mooner’s bus was still parked at the end of the block, the medical examiner’s truck was still on the scene, a bunch of men huddled on the sidewalk, and a state crime scene van was parked on the sidewalk just beyond the men. The yellow crime scene tape blocked off the entire construction site, and two men wearing CSI jackets were working at the excavation area.

“Life sure is strange,” Lula said. “One day everything is going along normal as can be, and then next thing you know your place of business is firebombed and Mr. Titty gets buried there.” She thought about it for a couple beats. “I suppose for us that is normal.”

A disturbing thought, and not far from the truth. Maybe my mother is right. Maybe it’s time to stop stun-gunning men who think they’re vampires, get married, and settle down.

“I could learn to cook,” I said.

“Sure you could,” Lula said. “You could cook the crap out of shit. What are you talkin’ about?”

“It was just a thought that popped into my head.”

“It should pop back out ’cause now that I’m thinking about it, I’ve seen you cook and it wasn’t pretty.”

I parked behind Connie’s car, and Lula and I hauled our food into the RV. Connie was behind her computer at the dinette table, and Mooner was lounging on the couch, playing Donkey Kong on his Gameboy. It didn’t take a lot to entertain Mooner.

“Where’s Vinnie?” I asked Connie. “I didn’t see his car.”

“He went down to the station to re-bond Ziggy.”

“Wow, that was fast.”

“Yeah, Ziggy made his one phone call, and court’s in session, so Vinnie should be able to get Ziggy released right away.”

The deal with a bail bond is that the court sets a dollar amount on freedom. For instance, if a guy is arrested and charged with a crime he then goes to court and the judge tells him either he can stay in jail or else he can pay a certain amount of money and go home until trial. He only gets the money back if he shows up for trial. We come in when the guy doesn’t have enough money to give to the court. We give the money to the court on his behalf, and charge the guy a percentage for the service. Good for us and bad for him. Even if he’s innocent he’s out our fee. If he skips out on his trial, I find him and drag him back into the system so we don’t lose our money to the court.

“How’s Ziggy gonna get home?” Lula wanted to know. “He got that whole vampire thing going with the sunlight and all.”

“I don’t know,” Connie said. “Not my problem.”

I ate my ham and cheese sandwich and washed it down with a diet soda. Lula plowed through a Reuben, a tub of potato salad, and a tub of baked beans.

“How do I look?” Lula asked. “Do I look like I’m getting to be a vampire? Because I don’t feel so good.”

“You don’t feel good because you just ate a bucket of fried chicken, half a coffee cake, and a Reuben with over half a pound of meat on it. Anyone else would have to get their stomach pumped.”

“I’m an emotional eater,” Lula said. “I had to settle my stomach on account of I had a upsetting morning.” Lula leaned forward and stared at me. “What’s on your forehead? Boy, that’s a mother of a pimple.”

I felt my forehead. She was right. There was a big bump on it.

“It wasn’t there when I got up this morning,” I said. “Are you sure it’s a pimple? It’s not a boil, is it?”

Lula squinted. “Looks to me like a pimple, but what do I know.”

Connie studied it. “I’d say it’s a pimple that has the potential to approach boil quality.”

I pulled my compact out of my purse and looked at the pimple. Eek! I dabbed some powder on it.

“You’re gonna need more than powder to cover that,” Lula said. “It’s like that volcano that exploded. Krakatoa.”

I smeared concealer on Krakatoa, and I thought about Grandma Mazur and the dream about the road apples.

“That’s better,” Lula said. “Now it just looks like a tumor.”

Lovely.

“As far as tumors go, it’s not a real big tumor,” Lula said. “It’s one of them starter tumors.”

“Forget the tumor!” I told her.

“It’s hard to forget when you gotta stare at it,” Lula said. “Now that I know it’s there I can’t see anything else. It’s like Rudolph with the red nose.”

I looked at Connie. “How bad is it?”

“It’s a big pimple.”

“It’s just a big pimple,” I said to Lula.

Lula thought for a beat. “Maybe it would help if you had bangs to cover it up.”

“But I don’t have bangs,” I said. “I’ve never had bangs.”

“Yeah, but you could ,” Lula said.

I dropped the concealer into my bag and pulled out Merlin Brown’s file. Vinnie had written bond for Brown two years ago without a problem. The charge had been shoplifting, and Brown had done some minor time for it. Hard to know what the issue was now that he’d been brought in for armed robbery. Either Brown simply forgot his court date, or else he wasn’t excited about the idea of doing more time. I tapped his number into my cell phone and waited. A man picked up on the third ring, and I hung up.

“He’s home,” I said to Lula. “Let’s roll.”

MERLIN BROWN LIVEDin a low-rent apartment complex that made my cheapskate apartment building look good. The buildings were red brick, three stories tall, and utterly without adornment unless you counted the spray-painted graffiti. No balconies, no fancy front doors, seventies aluminum windows, no landscaping. They sat perched on hard-packed dirt in no-man’s-land between the junkyard and the gutted lead pipe factory on upper Stark Street.

A discarded refrigerator and sad-sack couch had been left by the dumpster at the end of the parking lot. Four men sat on the couch, chugging from bottles wrapped in brown paper bags. The guy on the end weighed somewhere in the vicinity of three hundred pounds and the whole couch sloped in his direction.