“I don’t usually pay for favors, but if we’re going in that direction I wouldn’t mind turning this car around and taking you back to Rangeman for the night.”
Yikes. Tempting but at the same time frightening. And then there was Joe Morelli. And the Catholic Church. And my mother.
“Well?” he asked.
“I’m thinking.”
“Think faster, babe. The light just changed.”
“Ice cream factory.”
“It’s only a matter of time,” Ranger said.
I blew out a sigh. I knew this was true.
SEVEN
THE BOGART ICE Creamery was in a light industrial complex that had never developed beyond the ice cream plant. There were curbs and roads and empty lots, but no buildings other than Bogart’s. The employee parking area was deserted. Streetlamps dropped pools of white light onto the blacktop. The big two-story warehouse-type building was dark with the exception of exterior lighting on the six-bay loading dock, and lights were blazing inside the small guardhouse.
Ranger parked by the loading dock, and we left the car and approached the guardhouse. There were two men on duty. One was in a green Harry Bogart uniform, and the other was in Rangeman black fatigues. Ranger nodded to both men and continued on to the back door. He tapped a code into the door lock, we entered the factory, and Ranger threw the main light switch.
Lights flooded the building, and it looked to me like the entire manufacturing process was essentially in one huge two-story room. Conveyor belts and stainless steel tubes snaked around the room entering and exiting large stainless steel boxes that performed who-knows-what. Heavy-duty refrigerator-type double doors were built into a far wall. I imagined the doors opened to a freezer. A series of small offices lined the wall on the opposite side of the room. The offices all had large fixed-frame windows that looked out at the line workers.
“Has it been determined how Arnold Zigler got crammed into the back of the truck?” I asked Ranger.
“No. The truck was loaded Monday morning. Half the truck was filled with pints of assorted flavors. The other half was filled with Bogart Bars. It should have left in the early afternoon, but the driver got sick and couldn’t make his run, so the truck sat at the loading dock. It’s speculated that the driver was poisoned. He’s okay now, but he went down fast with food-poisoning symptoms. When the night guard made his first run at nine o’clock, someone took off with the truck.”
“Virgil?”
“Don’t know. Virgil is in the wind. Morelli will know more. He’ll have access to CSI reports. My job isn’t to solve the crime. My job is to make sure the crimes don’t continue.”
“Yes, but don’t you need to solve the crime to do this?”
“It’s not clear if this murder relates to the other crimes.” Ranger pointed at three pipes with valves and dials on the far wall. “The cream gets pumped out of tanker trucks into refrigerated silos on the outside of the building. The silos empty into the pipes you see on the wall, and the cream flows into the pasteurization vat. After pasteurization it gets pumped through a homogenizer and then through a plate cooler and finally into another vat to be further cooled for storage. After that it’s flash frozen to the consistency of soft-serve.”
“What about the different flavors? And how does it get to be a Bogart Bar?”
“For the most part the flavors are added during the first cooling process. Bogart Bars have their own line. I’ll walk you down to it. There’s also a line that packages the ice cream. You’ll see all that in action tomorrow.”
The Bogart Bar line stretched almost the length of the room. Even without the machines running, the process was pretty clear. The soft ice cream was extruded into molds, and the molds were moved into a stainless steel box with a dial on the outside.
“The freezer, right?” I said.
“Right. The ice cream is flash frozen into bars. The bars move through the system to the chocolate machine where they’re entirely encased in liquid chocolate. Excess chocolate drains off, the bars pass through the machine that covers them with nuts, and then they’re frozen again.”
I was standing next to the chocolate machine. “How does the chocolate get into this big contraption?” I asked Ranger.
“There’s a ladder on the other side. The machine is sealed while it’s running, but there’s a hatch on the top for adding ingredients. And the entire lid can come off for cleaning.”
“It seems to me that dunking someone in here would be at least a two-man job.”
Ranger nodded. “And it would be messy.”
“So maybe the dead man was chocolate coated somewhere else?”
“That would be my guess.”
“Like at a rival ice cream baron’s plant?”
“I haven’t seen Morris’s setup, but I doubt he would contaminate his own chocolate vat by dumping a dead man in it.”
“Good point. So maybe Harry Bogart didn’t need to scour his whole plant.”
“He had no way of knowing if any of the equipment had been compromised.” Ranger pointed to the row of offices. “Bogart has the large corner office. He also has offices elsewhere in the building. The deceased was four offices down from Bogart. The test kitchen is in the double office at the far end. There are more offices and storage in a separate wing. The main entrance and reception area are also in that wing.”
“So you’re thinking that Zigler, the human resources guy, was shot and frozen someplace off-site. Then he would have been chocolate covered and sprinkled with nuts and put back in a freezer.”
“Correct.”
“The killer has a really big freezer.”
“The deceased was five feet ten inches. There are some home chest freezers that could hold him, but it’s more likely the killer had access to a commercial freezer.”
“The killer also had access to the freezer truck.”
“Everyone had access to the freezer truck. It was sitting at the loading dock, plugged into electric with the freezer unit running.”
“I imagine you’re suggesting he install a gated, razor-wire fence.”
“Razor wire would be an option, but the area around the loading dock should definitely be fenced and gated. And he needs security cameras not only for security but also for liability.”
“And he’s willing to spend the money?”
“Apparently. He’s resisted in the past because he’s been afraid it would tarnish the innocent image of his ice cream.”
I was all in favor of keeping the image of ice cream innocent. Unfortunately, that ship had sailed for me when the head of human resources for Bogart Ice Cream was murdered and covered in chocolate. As much as I wanted to wipe the image of the dead man from my mind, I also wanted to find the person who killed him. Murder is ugly. And this murder felt especially ugly to me. It felt personal. I was there when Arnold Zigler fell out of the truck and crashed to the ground. I saw him covered in chocolate and nuts, and I didn’t like it. The more I thought about it the angrier I got. It was disrespectful to Arnold Zigler, and I know this is shallow, but some immoral creep had ruined a childhood treasure for me. Bogart Bars were now tied to a vision of a grisly murder.
The human resources office had yellow crime scene tape stuck to the locked door. Ranger peeled the tape off and used a slim lock pick to open the door.
“The police have already combed through this office, but they don’t always look for the right thing,” Ranger said. “You take the desk, and I’ll go through the file cabinet.”
We pulled on disposable gloves and went to work. I rifled the desk drawers and found that the HR guy chewed nicotine gum. He used nicotine patches. He vaped e-cigarettes. And he smoked Marlboros. If he hadn’t been shot he wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway. He preferred fine-point Sharpies. Had sticky pads in a variety of sizes and colors. And he kept a collection of porno mags in his bottom drawer. I guess after all that nicotine he had to relax himself from time to time.
“Are you finding anything???
? I asked Ranger.
“Nothing dramatic. There are several large files for unhappy employees. A couple more for problem employees. I’ve copied them for you to read through. It wouldn’t hurt for you to check them out. There’s also a file here with nothing more than a name. ‘J. T. Soon.’ Did you find anything in the desk?”
“Just the usual stuff. Pens and sticky pads and porno.”
He glanced over at me. “Anything I should see?”
“No. I imagine you’ve seen it all.”
“Babe,” Ranger said.
“Zigler has a folder here with a bunch of loose papers. Job applications, health insurance forms, and a handwritten note to run a full background check on J. T. Soon.”
“Anything else on Soon? Was he one of the people applying for a job?”
“No. There’s just this note. Nothing else.”
We stepped out of the office, relocked and closed the door, and replaced the crime scene tape. We peeled our gloves off and tossed them in the trash.
“I have one last show-and-tell,” Ranger said.
I followed him through the double doors that led to the other wing. We walked a short distance down the hall and pushed through another set of double doors into a storeroom. Rows of metal shelves filled the warehouse. The shelves were stacked with paper booties, jugs of vanilla, toilet paper, chocolate syrup, powdered milk, large plastic bags of crushed nuts, towers of empty ice cream containers, cases of strawberries packed in air-tight bags, pallets of shrink-wrapped Bogart Bar wrappers.
“CSI hasn’t released an analysis of the nuts and chocolate coating the deceased,” Ranger said, “but Bogart feels pretty certain they came from his plant. He uses a proprietary mix of specially chopped nuts. So we’re thinking it might be an inside job. And we’re looking for someone who had access to the storeroom and could walk off with a couple gallons of chocolate syrup and not be noticed.”
Ranger wrapped an arm around my shoulders and moved me out of the storeroom. “Let me know when you find him.”
“Do I get a bonus?”
He grinned and kissed me on the top of my head. “Yeah. You’ll get a bonus.”
I had a pretty good idea about the nature of the bonus.
“How much?” I asked him.
“It’ll be priceless.”
“Oh boy.”
We were standing in the hallway that led to the manufacturing plant. Ranger pushed me against the wall and leaned in. “Would you like to know the details?”
There was no space between us. I could feel him pressed into me. His lips skimmed the rim of my ear when he asked the question, and I felt the rush of heat buzz in my brain and flash through every part of me. The heat curled into my hoo-ha with a spasm that was a blink away from an orgasm.
He kissed me, and our tongues touched. The kiss deepened, his hand caressed my breast, and my hand went south on him in search of the bonus.
Somewhere far off a door opened and closed, and we both paused. It was the night guard making one of his rounds.
I guess I should be grateful. I might have been condemned to hell if it had gone any further. It was one thing to have a relationship with two men. It was a totally other thing to have them simultaneously.
I looked around. “So is there anything else to see?”
“Not tonight,” Ranger said.
EIGHT
IT WAS AFTER one o’clock when I crawled into bed with mixed emotions about the next day. I wanted to rush in and root out the killer, and at the same time I felt completely incompetent at doing the job. I set my alarm for seven o’clock, giving me a half hour to shower and whatever, and a half hour to drive to the ice creamery.
• • •
The alarm went off, and I hit the snooze button and pulled the pillow over my head. Five minutes later the alarm went off again, and I dragged myself out of bed and into the shower.
I wasn’t sure what one wore to work in an ice cream factory, so I dressed in my standard uniform of jeans, a red short-sleeved V-neck jersey, and running shoes. I scarfed down a cold meatball sandwich for breakfast and poured my coffee into a to-go mug. As I chugged out of the parking lot, I got a phone call from Lula.
“Are you there yet?” she asked. “What kind of job did you get?”
“I just got on the road. I don’t have to be there until eight o’clock.”
“Well, you better hurry. You don’t want to be late on your first day. People hate that.”
“Are you at the office?”
“Hell, no. I’m in my closet deciding on who I want to be today. I mean, I’m always Lula, but I got a multifaceted personality.”
“Talk to you later,” I said. And I hung up.
I drove two blocks, and I got a call from Morelli.
“Big day today,” he said.
“How so?”
“You have a new job. Are you on your way to the ice cream factory?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you excited?”
“Are you?”
“Not at the moment,” Morelli said.
“Do you have any news on the Bogart Bar man?”
“Nothing interesting. It would help if we could find Virgil. Maybe you could keep your eyes open for him.”
“In my spare time.”
“Boy, you’re cranky today. Probably because you didn’t see me last night.”
“How was the poker game?”
“I lost my shirt. I think Anthony cheats.”
Morelli’s brother, Anthony, cheats on everything, including his wife. Aside from that one major character flaw he’s a fun guy.
“If you ask me nice I might come over for dinner tonight,” Morelli said.
“Sure. Hot dogs?”
“I heard you got meatballs at Giovichinni’s.”
“I ate them for breakfast.”
“I’ll bring dinner,” Morelli said.
“Deal. I have to go now. I have to concentrate on my driving.”
Mostly what I had to do was whip up some enthusiasm for Harry Bogart ice cream.
By the time I walked through the front door and up to the receptionist I had almost convinced myself I could do the job. I could learn how to make ice cream. I could mingle. And maybe I could find the killer.
“I’m Stephanie Plum,” I told the woman behind the desk. “The employment office is expecting me.”
“The employment office is in a bit of disarray,” the woman said, “but Mr. Bogart will personally speak with you. He’s in his office just down the hall. Go through the double doors and turn left.”
Okay, I told myself. I get to meet Mr. Ice Cream. I get to talk to the inventor of the Bogart Bar. It could be cool, right?
I walked the hall and came to the little gold plaque on the wall that said “Harry Bogart.” The door was open so I peeked in at the man behind the massive oak desk.
“Hell-o-o-o,” I said. “Knock, knock.”
“For God’s sake just come on in,” Harry Bogart said. “Who the hell are you?”
“Stephanie Plum.”
“Who?”
“I work for Rangeman. I’m supposed to assume a job on the floor so I can look around at your operation.”
Harry Bogart was a big man. Big blockhead with buzz-cut gray hair. Close-set blue eyes, bushy gray eyebrows, ruddy cheeks, thick lips, jowls. Not entirely attractive. I guessed he might be six feet tall and about fifty pounds overweight. He was wearing a tan suit, white dress shirt, brown-and-blue-striped tie. He fit the suit like an overstuffed sausage.
“You don’t look like much,” Bogart said to me. “Is this how you come to a job interview? Do you smoke dope?”
I told myself to keep thinking about the bonus and how I was going to avenge the sullying of the Bogart Bar. Telling Bogart he was a bloated ass was pointless, since he undoubtedly already knew this.
“It wasn’t my understanding that this was an interview,” I said, giving him my best kiss-up smile. “I was told I would be working on the floor.”
&
nbsp; “I don’t want you talking to anyone. If anyone even suspects you’re a snitch you’re out of here.”
I felt my eyes involuntarily narrow and knew it wasn’t doing a lot for the smile still plastered to my face.
“Maybe you want to review this plan with Ranger,” I told Bogart.
Bogart leaned forward and squinted at me. “What’s with the black? Why is he always wearing black?”
“It’s easy. Everything matches.”
“That’s nuts. What the hell’s wrong with him? Even his underwear?”
“Getting back to your security problem,” I said.
“Someone’s out to get me,” Bogart said. “I think it’s that skunk Morris.”
“Do you think he killed your human resources man?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s sneaky. Always looking like such a goody-goody do-gooder, but you turn your back on him and he’s a sneak.”
“Okay.”
I looked around the office. It was a cluttered mess. Stacks of files and magazines. Bowling trophies. Photographs on every surface. Harry Bogart with kids, dogs, politicians, and a monkey eating ice cream.
“Am I supposed to be working now?” I asked him.
He pressed a button on his multiline phone and yelled at it. “Kathy!”
A moment later a fifty-something woman stuck her head in the open door to Bogart’s office. “Yes?” she asked.
Bogart gestured at me. “This is what’s-her-name. She’s going to be working the line. Get her suited up and take her to Jim.”
There was the sound of activity in the hall, and the receptionist and Lula shoved themselves past Kathy and stumbled into the room.
“I tried to stop her,” the receptionist said to Bogart.
“This receptionist woman don’t know nothing about political correctness,” Lula said to Bogart. “She didn’t want me to come in here because I’m a black woman of a certain size.”
“I didn’t want you to come in because you don’t have an appointment,” the receptionist said.
“Yeah, but you prejudged me,” Lula said. “And anyways, I do have an appointment. I’m with Stephanie.”
“Who’s Stephanie?” Bogart asked.