“Last time they forgot the fries,” Diggery said. “I think they might be getting cheap and left them off on purpose.”
Diggery was standing in his open door. I caught movement at his feet and realized his boa was making its way out of the double-wide and down the makeshift steps. The snake was about ten feet long and probably weighed in at about fifty pounds.
“Holy crap, holy cow, holy get me out of here,” Lula said. “That snake is coming to get us.”
I figured the snake’s top speed was one mile an hour. I didn’t think we were at risk of being run down by it. Still, I didn’t want to get too close.
Diggery looked down and saw the snake clear the steps. “Ethel!” Diggery said. “What the Harry Hill are you doing? You know you’re not allowed out of the house.”
Ethel wasn’t paying attention to Diggery. Ethel was heading for the patch of woods behind the double-wide.
“You gotta help me get Ethel,” Diggery said, hustling after the boa. “Once she gets into the woods it’s impossible to get her back. She’ll go up a tree and sit there until she gets hungry, and it’s not good to let Ethel get too hungry. She’s a sweet girl ordinarily, but she mostly don’t care what or who she eats if you let her get too hungry.”
“Is she hungry now?” I asked him.
“Naw. She ate a big old groundhog yesterday.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Well, it wasn’t as good as a Virginia baked ham, but Ethel seemed to like it. I found it on the side of the road all swelled up.”
Diggery had Ethel by the tail end and was trying to pull her toward the trailer, but he couldn’t get a good grip.
“Get in front of her and shoo her back to me,” Diggery said.
Yeah, right. I don’t think so. “How about if you get in front of her and maybe she’ll curl up on you,” I said.
Diggery trotted around and stood in front of Ethel. “Come on, Ethel. I got a candy bar for you in the kitchen.”
Ethel stopped all forward motion and thought about it.
“What kind of candy bar?” Lula asked.
“I got a Snickers,” Diggery said.
“That’s a good candy bar,” Lula said. “I wouldn’t mind having a Snickers. I got a piece of Cluck-in-a-Bucket fried chicken left over in the car. I’d trade you that piece of chicken for the Snickers.”
“Ethel would most likely rather have the chicken,” Diggery said. “It’s a deal.”
“It’s only a deal if you come back to town with me after you give Ethel her chicken,” I said.
“You got my word,” Diggery said.
Lula got the chicken from the car, handed it over to Diggery, and Diggery waved it in front of Ethel and led her back into the double-wide. After he got her into the trailer he slammed the door shut. Five minutes went by and there was no Diggery.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Simon!”
The door opened and Simon stuck his head out. “What?”
“Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“You know where,” I said. “We made a deal. You gave your word.”
“Everybody knows my word isn’t worth crap,” Diggery said. And he slammed the door closed again.
“That really burns me,” Lula said. “He took my chicken, and I didn’t get no candy bar.”
I blew out a sigh. This wasn’t going to be easy. I was going to have to go in there and drag him out, all the while trying to avoid Ethel.
“I want my candy bar!” Lula yelled at the trailer. “You better not be eating my candy bar.”
Nothing. No response from Diggery.
“That does it,” Lula said. “He’s not gonna get away with this. I was all set to have a tasty treat, and now I’m in a cranky mood. If there’s one thing I don’t tolerate it’s a man who doesn’t deliver on a dessert.”
Lula stomped up to the trailer, climbed the rickety steps, and hammered on the door. “Open up,” she said. “You better open this door and give me my Snickers bar or else.”
“Waa, waa, waa,” Diggery said on the other side of the door. “You’re just a sore loser on account of I outsmarted you.”
“Outsmart this,” Lula said, hauling her Glock out of her purse and drilling seven rounds into the door.
About forty snakes rushed out from under the trailer and made off for the woods. I shouted at Lula to stop shooting. And Diggery wrenched his door open and glared out at Lula.
“What are you, nuts?” Diggery said. “You can’t go around shooting up a man’s home. This here’s a respectable neighborhood. Look what you did to my door. Who’s gonna pay to fix this door?”
“Where’s my candy bar?” Lula asked.
“I don’t have no candy bar,” Diggery said. “I lied about the candy bar.”
Lula leaned forward. “I smell Snickers on your breath. And you got a little smudge of chocolate stuck in your whiskers. You ate my candy bar, didn’t you?”
“I was under stress,” Diggery said. “I needed it. I could feel my blood sugar plummeting.”
“Well, I’m not wasting any more time with you,” Lula said. “I got better things to do. And now I got a craving for a Snickers.”
Lula grabbed Diggery by his shirtfront, yanked him out of the double-wide, and kicked the door shut. She wrestled him down the stairs, lost her balance, and the two of them went to the ground. They rolled around a little. Lula got the top and sat on Diggery.
“I can’t breathe,” Diggery said. “How much do you weigh? Good thing for you I ate that candy bar. You don’t need no more candy bars.”
I got Diggery into plasti-cuffs, and Lula crawled off him. We lifted him to his feet and walked him to my car.
FOUR
IT WAS ALMOST noon by the time we left the police station. Diggery was in police custody, waiting for Vinnie to bond him out again, and I was in possession of a body receipt stating I’d recovered Diggery.
“I don’t know why we bother doing this,” I said to Lula. “It’s just wasted time and energy. Vinnie bonds him out, he goes FTA, and we bring him in. And then it starts all over again. It’s like we have a job doing nothing. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“Nope,” Lula said. “I’m in it for the money.”
“The money sucks. Look at this car I’m driving!”
“Yeah, you must not know how to manage your money, because I have a kick-ass car.”
“You make less than I do. You get a percentage of my percentage.”
“True, but I’m also pulling a salary, and I do a little of this and a little of that.”
I cut my eyes to her. “What’s ‘a little of this and a little of that’?”
“It’s my entrepreneurial side. Like, I give hooker lessons on the third Saturday of every month. I help the girls who want to go into the profession. I teach technique. I was one of the few ’hos who could successfully do a thirty-second hand job for those customers in a time crunch. It was an adaptation of the Indian rope burn. And then I give advice on wardrobe, and I help them pick a corner. I tell them it’s location, location, location. And then another enterprise I got going is my bedazzling skills. You’d be surprised how many people want shit bedazzled but don’t have the time. I got business cards and everything.”
“I had no idea you did all that.”
“You bet your ass. I’m not just another pretty face. I got projects. That’s why I got an appetite. It takes a lot of fuel to keep my brain operating. In fact, I’m probably not functioning at full power right now because I didn’t get that Snickers bar.”
“I feel like this is leading up to a stop at the 7-Eleven.”
“Exactly. Not only could I get my Snickers bar, but we could get nachos for lunch.”
I drove Lula to the 7-Eleven on Perry Street. We loaded up on nachos and backtracked to Lincoln. I crossed the railroad tracks, followed Chambers to Hamilton, and parked in front of the bonds office. Ranger pulled in behind me.
“It’s like magic the way he always knows where to find
you,” Lula said.
It wasn’t magic. It was GPS. He’d stuck trackers on my cars. I got out and walked back to him.
“I want to take you through the factory tonight,” Ranger said. “They’ll be cleaning until midnight. After that it will be empty except for security. Bogart employs a day guard and a night guard. They each make two rounds. The rest of the time they stay in the guard station at the loading dock.”
“So someone had plenty of time to dip the HR guy in chocolate.”
“You can draw your own conclusions when you see the plant. I’ll pick you up at eleven-thirty.”
Morelli wasn’t going to like this. Ranger wasn’t his favorite person. Ranger especially wasn’t his favorite person when he was alone with me at eleven-thirty at night. Fortunately it was poker night, and Morelli would be doing his man thing with his cousin Mooch, his brother, Anthony, Eddie Gazarra if Shirley let him out of the house, and whoever else showed up with a six-pack of beer.
I watched Ranger drive away and joined Lula and Connie in the bonds office.
“What’s up with the man of mystery?” Connie asked.
“Harry Bogart has hired Rangeman to manage security, and Ranger wants me to go undercover. I’m going to take a job on the line so I can look around.”
“Are you shitting me?” Lula said. “You’re gonna work in the ice cream factory? All my life I wanted to work in an ice cream factory. Maybe you could get me a job.”
“I don’t get to eat the ice cream,” I said. “It’s a job.”
“Yeah, but I bet you get a discount. And suppose you could score a job in the test kitchen? And, like, what happens when the gloppity gloppity machine screws up and doesn’t fill the containers right? What happens to those screwed-up containers of ice cream? I bet they end up in the employee lunch room.”
I gave Connie the body receipt for Diggery, took the outstanding FTA paperwork from my messenger bag, and read through the file. Eugene Winkle. Armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Nineteen years old. Two priors. His address was on the fourth block of Stark Street. Not a good address. His mug shot wasn’t good, either. He looked like an enraged bull. Smushed-in nose. Small, crazy, angry eyes. Thick lips parted enough to catch a glimpse of stainless steel caps. Undoubtedly could easily open a beer bottle with his teeth.
Lula was looking over my shoulder.
“Whoa!” Lula said. “That don’t look human. What is that?”
“Eugene Winkle,” I said. “He’s FTA.”
“And he’s gonna stay that way,” Lula said. “I’d rather face Diggery’s snake.”
“I was with Vinnie when he bonded him out,” Connie said. “The picture doesn’t do him justice. He’s actually a lot uglier. He’s about six foot five and weighs around four hundred pounds. Good news is that he probably can’t run very fast. Bad news is…well, you can see the bad news.”
“Maybe he’s a nice person under all that ugly,” Lula said. “He could be misunderstood. I bet he was bullied when he was a kid. They probably called him Winkie.”
“He robbed his grandmother, shot her neighbor in the foot, and ran over the family dog,” Connie said.
“That’s terrible,” Lula said. “What kind of person runs over a dog? I hope that dog is okay.”
“I think it lost part of its tail,” Connie said. “The grandmother put up Eugene’s bond. She said he was too mean to be in jail. She said if she could find him she was going to set the dog loose on him.”
“What kind of dog is it?” Lula asked.
“Chihuahua,” Connie said.
“Hunh,” Lula said. “Must be a vicious little bugger.”
I looked at my watch. Damn. Too early to quit work and start drinking.
“Vinnie isn’t back yet,” Connie said, “so I suppose I’m going to have to go into town to bond out Diggery. Someone’s going to have to babysit the office until I get back.”
“I’ll stay here,” Lula said. “I got a new copy of Star magazine that I gotta read. It’s got a article that Jennifer Aniston might get a tattoo of a unicorn.”
Connie took her purse out of her bottom drawer and stood. “What about you?” she asked me. “Are you going after Winkle?”
“Eventually. Not alone. And probably not today. I’m still looking for Larry Virgil.”
“Stephanie could stay here,” Lula said. “Just in case we get a rush of desperados.”
I cut my eyes to Lula. “ ‘Desperados’?”
“It could happen,” Lula said.
Connie looked over at me. “Good idea. Stay here and keep Lula from shooting the desperados if they show up. I won’t be long. Court’s in session. I should be back in an hour.”
Connie and Vinnie always park in the small lot at the back of the building. The lot had parking for four cars and opened to a narrow alley that bisected the block. It was hidey-hole parking for Vinnie, and it allowed Connie to sneak cigarettes.
Connie left through the back door, and Lula turned to me. “I bet she’s out there sneaking a smoke first. That alleyway and parking lot are like the safety zone for smoking without stinking up your personal environment.”
“Seems like it would be easier to just quit smoking.”
“You say that on account of you never smoked. Sure, it could shorten your life and give you lung cancer and heart disease and ruin your skin, but you ever see the look on someone’s face when they take that first drag? It’s like when you feel a orgasm coming on. Like you’ve been workin’ and workin’ at it and finally you know you nailed it and zow! you got yourself a orgasm.”
“Were you a smoker?”
“Hell, yeah. I was a big smoker, but I’m not stupid. I got this beautiful chocolate skin and I’m not going all crone with it because of smoking.”
“How did you quit?”
“I traded in my cigarettes for a vibrator. I got a dandy little battery job that I carry in my purse, and when I feel the urge to light up I just stick this thing against my lady parts and buzz myself into relaxation and happiness. Personally I don’t get the whole e-cigarette thing. I mean, if you’re going mechanical wouldn’t you rather put those batteries to work on your pleasure bean?”
I was speechless. I was raised Catholic, and this was way outside my comfort zone. Okay, so I know about the pleasure bean, but the last thing I wanted to think about was Lula’s pleasure bean. It was probably the size of a duck egg. I tried to shake the image out of my head, but it was stuck there. I was going to have to go home and pour bleach into my brain.
“So anyways,” Lula said. “Do you think Jennifer Aniston should get a unicorn tattoo?”
I didn’t have strong feelings about it one way or the other. I personally had never been a big unicorn person, but who am I to impose my views on Jennifer Aniston?
I settled into one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs in front of Connie’s desk and looked over Larry Virgil’s file. Nothing new jumped out at me, and the questions that arose weren’t about Larry Virgil. They were about the truck and the frozen man. Surely by now the truck driver had been questioned. Was he a suspect? Had he known there was a dead guy in his truck? How the heck could this have happened?
“You look like you got a lot of thinking going on,” Lula said. “You must care a lot about Jennifer Aniston.”
“I was thinking about the frozen man. It really bothers me that he was dressed up like a Bogart Bar. I know this is weird, but it feels like a personal insult. Like someone disrespected the Bogart Bar.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Lula said. “Maybe it was a homage to a Bogart Bar. Maybe the killer liked this man and wanted to make him look like his childhood favorite memory.”
“The killer killed him! That’s not something you do to someone you like.”
“I see what you’re saying, but maybe being turned into a Bogart Bar is one of the hazards of working in a ice cream factory. Not that I’d let it stop me on account of ice cream factory employment’s on my bucket list.”
??
?I didn’t know you liked ice cream that much. I always thought of you as fried chicken and donuts.”
“I’m a complex person,” Lula said. “I got a lot of stuff going on. You haven’t even seen the tip of my iceberg yet. One of my goals is to be a TV star.”
“I thought you wanted to be a supermodel.”
“Yeah, but that’s all yesterday. It’s about being a reality TV star now. It’s only a matter of time before I have my own show. I got two ideas, and we’re about to start shooting some demo reels. That’s how you get on these shows. You gotta shoot a demo reel.”
“What show do you want to be on?”
“Well, one is my own original idea and the other one is Naked and Afraid. I’m hookin’ up with Randy Briggs.”
Randy Briggs is thirty-six inches tall and has the personality of a junkyard dog.
“You hate Randy Briggs,” I told Lula.
“Exactly. That’s what makes it so good. There’s instant drama, you see what I’m sayin’? We got the idea from Saturday Night Live. The sexy little guy from Game of Thrones did this Naked and Afraid skit with Leslie Jones, and it was dope.”
“So you’re going to rip off Saturday Night Live?”
“You got it. Brilliant, right?”
“Probably some people have already submitted reels for that.”
“It don’t matter, ’cause ours is so awesome. And we got a twist on it. Ours is Naked and Afraid in Trenton. It’s gonna be the city version.”
“I don’t think you can go around naked in Trenton.”
“Yeah, but we’re only shooting at night. By the time we get reported to the police we’ll be long gone, swallowed up in the shadows. Randy might have problems with that on account of he got pasty white skin and washed-out sandy hair, but I disappear real good in a shadow.”
“What’s your original idea?”
“I can’t tell you, but it’s huge. It’s gonna way top Naked and Afraid. We don’t want it to leak out, so I can only tell you it involves bathrooms. When we get ready to start shooting I might bring you along as a extra cameraperson. We don’t want to miss a instant of reality. We could use a backup camera.”
I’d rather be abducted by aliens than film a reality show involving bathrooms and Lula.