Janet Evanovich - Notorious Nineteen

“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.”