Takedown Twenty

  There were Raguzzis sprinkled all over the Burg. Emilio Raguzzi owned an auto body shop, and he and his wife lived across the street from Morelli’s mom. His two sons also lived in the Burg. I didn’t know Rita personally, but I’d heard she was living in Hamilton Township.

  “I don’t know why you can’t get some other job,” my mother said to me. “Why can’t you get a job in a bank or a hair salon? I heard there was an opening at the deli on Hamilton. You could learn to be a butcher.”

  My mouth dropped open and a piece of cookie fell out. I tried to stuff a chicken once and almost fainted. The thought of manhandling raw meat all day was enough to give me projectile vomiting.

  “I hear butchers make good money,” my mother said. “They work good hours and everybody likes them.”

  “And you’d get to be a real expert with a meat cleaver,” Grandma said. “You never know when that could come in handy.”

  “I don’t think I’m butcher material,” I said. “And I sort of like my job. I meet interesting people.”

  “You meet criminals,” my mother said. “And now you’re going after the most popular man in the Burg. Already I’m getting phone calls that you should leave Uncle Sunny alone. Everyone loves him.”

  I took another cookie. “You just told me he was fooling around even when his wife was alive. That’s not a nice guy. And besides, he kills people.”

  “He don’t usually kill people anymore,” Grandma said. “He’s getting on in years. He’s got peeps who do that now.”

  “What about Stanley Dugan? Sunny is accused of murdering Stanley Dugan.”

  “It could have been an accident,” Grandma said.

  “He ran over him twice! And then Sunny got out and choked Dugan. There was a witness who videoed it all on his iPhone.”

  “Well, Sunny shouldn’t have run over Stanley,” Grandma said, “but you gotta give him something for still being able to put in a day’s work.”

  “I have a ham for tonight,” my mother said to me. “You could invite Joseph for dinner.”

  I scraped my chair back. “That would be nice, but I’m working tonight.”

  “I bet you’re chasing down a killer,” Grandma said. “Am I right?”

  “I don’t very often chase down killers,” I told her. Unless you count Uncle Sunny.

  “Then what’s up?” she asked. “Are you after a second-story guy? A car thief? A terrorist?”

  “I have a date with Ranger, but I’m pretty sure it’s work.”

  “I wouldn’t mind that kind of work,” Grandma said. “He’s hot.”

  My mother pressed her lips together. Ranger wasn’t marriage material. Ranger wasn’t going to give her grandchildren… at least not legitimate ones.

  “Gotta go,” I told them. “Things to do.”

  I called Connie from my car and asked her for a home address for Rita Raguzzi.

  “I’ll only give it to you if you come collect Lula,” Connie said. “She’s driving me nuts. We need to ration her coffee in the morning. She won’t stop talking about giraffes.”

  I swung by the office and retrieved Lula.

  “Here’s the information you wanted,” she said, handing me a computer printout and buckling herself in. “What’s up with this Raguzzi?”

  “Grandma says Uncle Sunny keeps his toothbrush at her house.”

  “Grandma knows everything. Did you ask her about the giraffe?”

  “The giraffe didn’t come up.”

  “How could the giraffe not come up? We got a giraffe in Trenton. It’s practically a miracle. And it’s not like he’s some plain-ass horse or cow. A giraffe’s special. It’s the tallest animal. It’s taller than a elephant. A giraffe can get to be nineteen feet tall. And his legs could be six foot. Did you know that?”

  “No. I didn’t know that.”

  “A giraffe could run thirty-five miles an hour, and they could weigh twenty-eight hundred pounds. And here’s the good part: He got a tongue could measure twenty-one inches. Bet Mrs. Giraffe likes that one.”

  “That’s a big tongue.”

  “Freakin’ A. In the wild a giraffe lives about twenty-five years, but I think running around Trenton could shorten a giraffe lifespan. I’m worried about poor Kevin.”

  “Who’s Kevin?”

  “The giraffe. I named him Kevin.”

  I scanned the file on Rita. She was fifty-one years old, twice divorced, indeed living in Hamilton Township. She worked out of a downtown Trenton office as a realtor.

  “I don’t suppose you want to go look for the giraffe,” Lula said.

  “What would we do if we found him?”

  “We could talk to him. He might be lonely. And we could make sure he’s getting something to eat. There’s not a whole lot of trees with nice juicy leaves in the neighborhood he picked out.”

  “Surely his owner has found him by now.”

  “Maybe his owner don’t want him. Maybe he’s an orphan giraffe. Like cats that go wandering around and don’t have a home. What do you call them cats?”

  “Feral.”

  “Yeah, this here could be a feral giraffe.”

  I looked at my watch. “We can take a fast drive down Morgan and scope out the side streets, but then I need to follow up on Rita Raguzzi.”

  “That works for me. I’ve just gotta make sure Kevin isn’t laying in the road with a dart stuck in his butt like Ralph Rogers. Lucky for Ralph that was only a tranquilizer dart.”

  I nodded. “Lucky him,” I said, thinking this probably wasn’t a good time to tell Lula that Ralph Rogers was dead.

  I took Hamilton to Olden and turned off at Morgan. Lula powered her window down so she could listen for giraffe noises, and I cruised up and down the streets.

  “Hold on,” Lula said. “What’s that up ahead? Stop the car! I see giraffe poop.”

  I jerked to a stop, and we squinted at the mound of brown stuff that was half on the sidewalk and half in the gutter about ten feet in front of us.

  “How do you know it’s giraffe poop?” I asked Lula.

  “I saw a giraffe taking a poop on YouTube. Once you see giraffe poop, you don’t forget it.”

  Lula got out, took a closer look, and returned to the car.

  “It’s pretty fresh,” she said. “I bet it’s only about a hour old.”

  “You know that by looking at it?”

  “It’s my professional opinion. We should get out of the car and look on foot. The little guy must be hiding somewhere.”

  “He’s not a little guy, and there’s nowhere he could hide here. You’d need a grain silo to hide a giraffe.”

  We were on Sixteenth Street. A door opened toward the end of the block, and Moe stepped out and lit up. He sucked in some tar and nicotine, looked our way, and gave his head a small disgusted shake, as if our presence was ruining his euphoric lung-destroying experience. He stubbed out his cigarette and sauntered over to my car.

  “See, here’s the thing,” Moe said, looking in my window. “It’s actually unhealthy for your health that you should be in this neighborhood.”

  “We were looking for the giraffe,” Lula said.

  “You shouldn’t be looking for that, either,” Moe said. “It’s all detrimental to your well-being.”

  “Do you know the giraffe?” Lula asked.

  “Not personally,” Moe said.

  “Move out of the way,” I said to Moe. “We’re looking for Sunny, and I think he’s in that house.”

  “It happens he isn’t in that house,” Moe said. “And you’re not looking there anyway.” He pulled a gun and shot two rounds into my back door. “I’d hate to think that could be your head.”

  “You got a lot of nerve doing that to her car,” Lula said. “You’re gonna hear from her insurance company.”

  Moe stepped back and looked at the Taurus. “You got insurance on this?”

  I blew out a sigh. “No.”

  “How about life insurance?” he asked me. “You got any of that?”


  “No.”

  “Then you should be extra careful, girlie.”

  I put the car in gear and drove away.

  “He got a attitude issue,” Lula said. “If you ask me, he could use a personality adjustment.”

  “Do you think Sunny is in that house?”

  “We could go around back and do some investigating.”

  I drove around the block and came back down the alley that ran behind the Sixteenth Street buildings. We counted off houses and stopped three from the end. I moved up a house and pulled in behind an Econoline van.

  “We gonna be peeping Toms?” Lula asked.

  “Yes.”

  A silver Toyota sedan drove past us and parked behind the house. A woman got out and took two brown grocery bags from the backseat. She was in her forties, clearly ate a lot of pasta, and needed a new hairdresser. The back door opened, and Moe came out and took the grocery bags. They both went into the house and closed the door.

  “That’s sweet,” Lula said. “He came out to help with the bags. I bet that’s Mrs. Moe.”

  So probably we’d found Moe’s house, and chances weren’t good that Sunny was holed up there.

  “Let’s check out Rita Raguzzi,” I said to Lula.

  I backtracked on Olden and headed for Hamilton Township. Rita Raguzzi lived in a residential neighborhood of single-family houses that had been developed in the seventies. Yards were large and lawns were green. Homes were comfortable but not luxurious. Raguzzi’s house was a split-level with an attached garage. Convenient for sneaking a man in and out when he was someone else’s husband. There was a black Mercedes in the driveway. It was the economy model, if there is such a thing.

  “Looks to me like someone’s home,” Lula said. “Maybe Uncle Sunny’s here, walking around in his underwear.”

  I thought that was doubtful but not impossible.

  “You want me to sneak around and snoop while you ring the doorbell?” Lula asked.

  “Sure.”

  I rang the doorbell, and Lula crept around the side of the house, walking tiptoed so her four-inch spike-heel Manolo knockoffs wouldn’t sink into the grass.

  A woman opened the door and looked out at me. “What?”

  She was in her late forties to early fifties. Her complexion was Mediterranean and her hair was platinum, cut short with one side tucked behind her ear and the other side dramatically sweeping across her forehead and partially obscuring her eye. She was wearing red patent-leather stiletto heels and a little red dress that showed a lot of cleavage and a lot of leg, and had a lot of spandex in it.

  “Rita Raguzzi?” I asked.

  “Yeah, and unless you want to buy or sell a house I haven’t got time. I’m late for a showing.”

  I gave her my card. “I’m looking for Sunny.”

  “Stephanie Plum. I thought I recognized you. Aren’t you engaged to Joe Morelli?”

  “Not exactly. Are you engaged to Sunny?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “So we have something in common.”

  She did a fast scan of my jeans and sneakers and crappy car at the curb. “The only thing we have in common is an interest in Salvatore Sunucchi. And our interests aren’t compatible. You want to lock him up, and I want to lock him down.”

  “Lock him down?”

  “Marriage, stupid.” Raguzzi narrowed her eyes at me. “I’ve got a ten-year investment in this goat, and nothing is going to stand between me and his offshore bank accounts and Trenton real estate. I’m a fraction of an inch away from a ring on my finger.”

  “Won’t he want a pre-nup?”

  “You get a pre-nup in case of divorce. I’m not planning on a divorce. I’m planning on being a widow.”

  “You mean because he’s older than you?”

  “I mean because he has a bad heart. I figure all I have to do is load him up with Viagra and invite a friend over for a threesome.”

  “I didn’t know he had a bad heart.”

  “Yeah, he could go at any minute, so back off, because hanging out while Sunny sits in jail and maybe croaks isn’t going to work for me.”

  “He’s not going to sit in jail and croak. I’ll take him in, he’ll get bonded out again, and you can get married while he waits for his court date to come around.”

  “He was lucky to get bonded out the first time. The judge who set the bond is on vacation and, due to a large windfall of cash, might never come back, and Sunny might not have so much luck at getting another sympathetic judge.”

  “Hard to believe,” I said.

  She shrugged. “It’s a crapshoot.”

  I looked over her shoulder, into the house. “I don’t suppose he’s here.”

  “No. And it’s a good thing, because if he was here and you tried to apprehend him, I might panic over the home invasion and accidentally empty a clip into you.”

  “Then you would be in jail.”

  “Only if they found your body. And the probability would be slim to none.”

  I believed her. Sunny was good at making people disappear.

  “Okey dokey,” I said. “Good talk. You have my card. I get paid dead or alive, so if Sunny drops dead from whatever, I’d appreciate a call.”

  “Yeah, I’ll be sure to do that. You’ll be next in line, right after my dog groomer.”

  Lula was already in the car when I slid behind the wheel.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “I don’t think she’s going to be helpful.”

  “I looked in all the windows, and I didn’t see no sign of Sunny. She got a nice house, though. Everything looked new and neat. I bet she got a cleaning lady.”

  I put the car in gear and headed for the office.

  “I sure would like a cleaning lady,” Lula said. “Wouldn’t you like to have a cleaning lady?”

  I have a small one-bedroom, one-bath apartment I share with a hamster. I have the bare minimum in furniture, one fry pan, one pot, and once a month I borrow my mother’s vacuum cleaner. I suspect a cleaning lady would be overkill.

  “You know what the first thing I’d have a cleaning lady do?” Lula said. “Baseboards. I hate doing baseboards. Most people would probably say they wanted the cleaning lady to do the toilet, but not me. It’d be baseboards.”

  I wasn’t sure if my apartment even had baseboards. “I don’t spend a lot of time in my apartment.”

  “Yeah, but when you’re there you want it to be your favorite spot, right? It has to reflect your personality. Like, wall treatment is important. It gotta put you in a good mood. That’s why my walls are orange. Orange is a good all-purpose color. It’s the new neutral. And it goes good with my favorite color, which is leopard. I did a lot of accessorizing with leopard. I re-covered my most comfy chair in leopard, and I got a leopard bedspread. Now, if we want to talk about your apartment, it’s pretty bare-ass. You might want me to help you redecorate someday being that it’s one of my hobbies.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “It could even be a bonding experience.”

  “You don’t think we’re bonded enough?”

  “There’s all kinds of bonding,” Lula said. “This would be decorator bonding. We never done that before.”

  FIVE

  CONNIE LOOKED UP from her computer when Lula and I walked into the bonds office. “How’d it go?”

  “We got skunked for the day,” Lula said. “We met the girlfriend, but we didn’t see no Sunny.”

  “You should try later tonight,” Connie said. “He has to be staying somewhere, and it obviously isn’t in his apartment on Fifteenth Street.”

  “Stephanie got a hot date tonight,” Lula said. “She can’t be staking out Sunny. She gotta be concentrating on Ranger.”

  “It’s not a date,” I said. “It’s work.” I was almost certain of it.

  A black shadow scuttled past the large plate glass window that faced the street, and we all sucked in air.

  “What was that?” Lula asked. “That better not be what I’m
thinking it was, because I’m thinking it was something scares the heck out of me.”

  The front door banged open, and Joe’s Grandma Bella marched in. “I thought I would find you here,” she said, glaring at me.

  Her gray hair was pulled back into a bun. Her brows were thick and black. Her eyes were fierce, like the eyes of an eagle about to snatch up an unsuspecting rabbit and rip it to shreds.

  “I put the eye on you!” Bella said, pointing her finger at me.

  Connie ducked down behind her desk, and Lula jumped away and pressed herself against the wall.

  “You’re not supposed to be giving people the eye,” I said to Bella. “I’m going to tell Joe’s mother on you.”

  “Joe’s mother give you good too,” Bella said. “You no friend of this family. You hunt down Sunny.”

  “It’s my job.”

  “My job to give you the eye. Stop you in your tracks.” She scrunched up her face. “You ready?”

  I blew out a sigh. “Yeah.”

  Bella pulled her lower eyelid down with her finger and stared at me.

  “Okay,” she said, releasing the lid. “I got you for sure. I give you a big one.” She shook her finger at me. “You get new job.”

  She whirled around, marched out the door, and stalked down the street.

  “I think I wet my pants,” Lula said.

  Connie came out from behind her desk. “That is one crazy old lady.”

  “So what did she do to you?” Lula asked me. “Do you feel any different?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I don’t see your teeth falling out yet. And you haven’t grown a tail like a donkey,” Lula said. “That’s gotta be a good sign.”

  I hiked my messenger bag up onto my shoulder. “There’s no such thing as the eye.”

  “Sure,” Lula said. “We know that. But just in case, you might want to stop by the church and burn a candle or something.”

  It was a little after five when I got home. I hung my bag on a hook in the foyer and went into the kitchen. I said hello to Rex, asked him about his day, and gave him another Ritz cracker. Being that Rex lives in an aquarium and not much goes on, he didn’t have a lot to say.

  I looked around my kitchen and living room and had to admit there might be something to Lula’s assessment of my decorating. I really hadn’t done much to spruce things up after the last explosion when Ranger’s friend blew himself up in my foyer. I added Decorate apartment to make it a special place to my mental to-do list, then tabled the project for a better time.