“And I’ll need a body receipt so Vinnie can collect his bond.”
“I’ll leave it at the back desk,” Manny said. “Give me a day. This is going to be a lot of paperwork.”
TEN
IT WAS A little after six o’clock when I got home. Morelli and Bob were already in my apartment. The table was set for two, and the kitchen smelled like Morelli’s mother had been cooking in it.
“Have you been here long?” I asked him.
“Nope. Just got here. I’ve got my mom’s lasagna in the oven, and there’s bread from the bakery.”
I was so relieved I almost burst into tears. I wrapped my arms around Morelli and relaxed into him. He was warm and solid and comforting. Bob jumped off the couch and nosed his way in between us.
“Bad day?” Morelli asked.
“The worst. The ice cream plant people are really nice, but I’m all wrong for the job. And then after work I stopped at 7-Eleven and ran into Larry Virgil.”
“I heard,” Morelli said. “Eddie called me. He said you were shook up.”
“I saw him get hit. I can still hear the sound. It was horrible. And then a bunch of cars ran over him.”
Morelli wrapped his arms around me. “It’s not your fault.”
“That’s what Eddie said.”
“In the interest of mental health I’m suggesting you move on to something more positive…like sex or lasagna.”
“Lasagna!”
“I knew I shouldn’t have given you a choice.”
I went to the fridge, grabbed two bottles of beer, and gave one to Morelli. “Anything new on the Bogart Bar man?”
“The truck was stolen at nine o’clock Monday night. It’s unlikely the human resources man was on the truck at that time. And it’s unlikely that the crime was committed at the plant. Everything indicates the HR man was killed, frozen, and coated in chocolate off-site.”
“Could Virgil have been the killer?”
“Hard to believe. Probably Virgil happened on the truck and hijacked it. Thought it was his lucky day.”
“Someone went to a lot of trouble to make Arnold Zigler into a Bogart Bar.”
“Yeah. It showed motivation.”
Morelli pulled the lasagna out of the oven and brought it to the table. I poured dog kibble into a bowl for Bob, and brought over the bread and two more bottles of beer.
“Do you guys have any persons of interest?” I asked Morelli.
“No.” He looked across the table at me. “Do you?”
“No.”
Morelli served the lasagna, and we all dug in. Morelli’s mom was an amazing cook. My mom was good, but Morelli’s mom was a pro. Her lasagna noodles were always perfect. Her red sauce was a family secret. She used just the right amount of ricotta, mozzarella, and Italian sausage.
“This is fantastic,” I said to Morelli.
He smiled. “You always say that.”
“I wish I could cook like your mom.”
“You have other talents.”
I wasn’t going to pursue this. If I asked about my other talents we’d never finish dinner. We’d be in the bedroom. Don’t get me wrong. I like sex. I like it a lot. I just don’t like it as much as I like Morelli’s mom’s lasagna.
“Do you have any lab reports back?” I asked.
“It looks like the chocolate and nuts came from the Bogart plant. Time of death seems to be late Friday. DNA will take longer.”
“Prints?”
“Nothing on the body. The truck was covered with them, including yours. Lots of people come in contact with that truck during a normal business day.”
My phone buzzed with a text message from Ranger.
“I’m working the loading dock tomorrow,” I told Morelli. “I’m supposed to report to the foreman at eight o’clock. And I’m supposed to wear sensible shoes.”
“Walk me through the purpose for this job one more time,” Morelli said.
“Ranger’s been hired by Harry Bogart to improve his security. Bogart thinks someone is trying to sabotage his business. So Ranger hired me to go inside and look around.”
“And the Bogart Bar guy?”
“It’s not clear if the two problems are related.”
“Did you learn anything from your first day?”
I helped myself to another chunk of lasagna. “Nothing useful. It’s a pretty bland group. Not a lot of gossip. And I only came in contact with a few people. It sounds like Mo Morris runs a more employee-friendly plant, but no one seemed especially unhappy to be working for Bogart. This could be because Bogart doesn’t do drug testing. He’s got a bunch of mellow ladies working for him.”
“Do I need to send someone in there?”
“Probably not necessary. Ranger will straighten it out when he takes over security.”
“That’ll be popular.”
“Yeah, I imagine they’ll have some employee turnover.” I looked toward the kitchen. “Is there dessert?”
Morelli grinned.
“Not that!” I said. “I know there’s that. Jeez Louise, don’t you ever think of anything else?”
“It’s on my mind a lot,” Morelli said.
“Even when you’re working?”
“Not so much when I’m working. I’m a homicide cop. I almost never get a hard-on when I’m looking at a body filled with bullet holes.”
“So is there dessert?”
“Yeah. There’s ice cream.”
I collected the plates, took them into the kitchen, and went to the freezer. It was filled with Bogart Bars.
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “You got Bogart Bars?”
“They were on sale.”
ELEVEN
AT 7:45 A.M. I parked in the employee lot at the ice cream plant and found the employee entrance. It opened up onto a hall that led to the locker rooms. Because I was working on the loading dock I didn’t need to get suited up, so I left my messenger bag and lunch in a locker and went in search of my foreman.
I was directed to a wide hallway with polished concrete floors and harsh overhead lighting. Double doors to the freezer were at one end of the hall and double doors to the loading dock were at the other. I pushed through the loading dock doors and looked around, happy to be outside. It was a cloudless blue-sky day. Perfect for September. Warm in the sun and chilly in the shade. Hardly any stench from the chemical plant in the neighboring industrial park and only a slight haze of air pollution.
A young guy slouched against one wall, and an older man was talking on his phone. A refrigerator truck was backed up to the high concrete platform. It was a box truck about half the size of the eighteen-wheeler Lula and I commandeered. A much smaller ice cream truck decorated with pictures of Bogart Bars and Kidz Kups was parked by the ramp leading down from the platform. It was the beloved Jolly Bogart truck. It was one of the few ice cream trucks that still drove through neighborhoods, rain or shine, summer or winter, selling ice cream to kids and their moms.
The older man put his phone away and stood hands on hips, looking me over. He blew out a sigh and shook his head. Not happy.
“What the hell am I supposed to do with you?” he said.
I didn’t know the answer to that. “I assume you’re the foreman.”
“Yeah. Gus. And you’re what?”
“Stephanie.”
“Well, Stephanie, we gotta load this truck up with ice cream. The stupid-looking guy standing over there with his thumb up his ass is Butchy.”
“Haw,” Butchy said, and he lit a cigarette.
“Last time Butchy loaded up a truck it had a dead guy stuffed into the back of it,” Gus said.
“Not my bad,” Butchy said. “I didn’t put him there. And when I loaded the truck there wasn’t no room for a dead guy. That truck was full up to the doors. Someone got away with some ice cream. My thinking is that Zigler was just a placeholder. He was put there to take the attention away from the fact that someone’s stealing ice cream.”
“Right, and maybe it wa
s aliens stealing the ice cream,” Gus said.
“Exactly,” Butchy said. “It was most likely them Mexicans just come over the border.”
Gus and I exchanged glances.
“This is what I got to work with,” Gus said. “He’s dumb as a box of rocks.”
Butchy sucked on his cigarette. “Haw,” he said, blowing out a cloud of toxic smoke.
Gus gave me a list of ice cream orders. “You can read, right?”
“Yep.”
“I always gotta ask these days. You never know. We have to pack the truck for delivery, and we have to put the ice cream in according to drop-off order. It’s all color-coded, and if you start at the top of the list you can’t go wrong. Sometimes the trucks go out to warehouses for fulfillment. When we do those trucks we load pallets, and we use the forklift. This truck is doing local deliveries, so the orders have been shrink-wrapped and we gotta move them on dollies. You’re gonna take a dolly into the warehouse freezer and stack it up as best you can with your orders. Then you’re gonna push it out here, and Butchy is gonna load it into the truck. We got two dollies, so while he’s loading you can go back and get more orders. When he turns blue from being in the freezer truck you’ll swap jobs with him until he thaws out.”
There was a yellow forklift parked on the far side of the loading dock and two things next to it that I assumed were the dollies. They looked like something from the Home Depot garden section. A wide, flat shelf on heavy-duty castors with handles attached to both ends.
I stuffed the list of orders into my jeans pocket and took a dolly for a test drive. I wrestled it around to the door leading to the hallway and shoved it down the hall to the freezer. The freezer door had a numerical lock on it. Bummer. I returned to the loading dock and asked Gus about the lock.
“Just punch in zero, zero, zero, zero,” Gus said.
“That’s the code?”
“Yup. Think you can remember it?”
“Me and everyone else.”
“Now you’re catching on. We try to keep things simple here. Otherwise I gotta do everything myself.”
“I can’t get locked in the freezer, can I?”
“Good question. No. The door opens from the inside.”
I returned to the freezer, punched the code in, and rolled the dolly through the door. The door closed behind me, and my heart did a little flip. I tried the door and it opened. Good deal. I wasn’t going to freeze to death. Three-quarters of the freezer was devoted to shrink-wrapped ice cream on pallets. The remaining space contained smaller quantities of the color-coded shrink-wrapped orders. I started at the top of the list and loaded the dolly. By the time I got the dolly loaded my fingers were cold and aching, and my nose was running. I towed the dolly out of the freezer and paused for a moment, stamping my feet and rubbing my hands together. I needed Uggs and gloves and a sweatshirt. I’ll be better prepared next time, I thought. The follow-up thought was that I hoped there wasn’t a next time.
I pushed the dolly down the hall, maneuvered it through the loading dock door, and handed it over to Butchy. I got the second dolly and repeated the drill. Butchy didn’t seem inclined to swap jobs, so we kept going until the last order was placed in the truck a little before eleven.
“Now what?” I asked Butchy.
Butchy lit up. “Now we hang out and wait for Gus to come back. He’s got a bad prostate. He takes lots of pee breaks. He says it just dribbles out. Pathetic, right?”
“I wish I didn’t know that.”
Butchy sucked on his cigarette. “I go like a racehorse. I got a real fire hose.”
Butchy was a scrawny guy with an eagle’s beak nose, bad skin, bad teeth, and a bad haircut. He was in his late teens to early twenties. The fact that I now knew he had a fire hose did nothing to enhance my opinion of him.
The hallway door opened, and a man came out dressed in a bright green clown suit. He was wearing an orange wig that was a cross between Ronald McDonald and Carrot Top. His nose was covered in red greasepaint. He was the Jolly Bogart clown. When I was a kid he was the highlight of my day. Even if I didn’t get ice cream I loved to hear the truck come down the street playing the Jolly jingle.
“Hey,” Butchy said to him.
“Yeah,” Jolly said. “Where’s my shit? Is it in the truck?”
“Gus hasn’t come out with it yet,” Butchy said. “He’s trying to drain the lizard.”
“Cripes, how long’s he been in the can?”
Butchy looked at his watch. “Half hour.”
Jolly blew out a sigh, and his shoulders slumped. “This is gonna mean an extra fifteen minutes in the clown suit. Could it get any worse?”
“The clown suit looks comfortable,” I said.
“Right,” Jolly said. “Nice and baggy. Gives my boys room to breathe, which is a good thing because the only fun they have is knocking against each other. You know what it’s like to try to get laid when you’re a clown? It’s not easy. The greasepaint won’t come off my nose. I glow in the dark. And you know what I gotta do all day? Smile at the rotten, smelly, snot-nosed little kids. I hate kids.”
“Why don’t you get another job?”
“Lady, I’ve been a clown for twelve years. You think I’m going to get hired to do brain surgery?”
“At least you’re not a Bogart Bar,” Butchy said. “Haw.”
Jolly grinned. “True. That honor went to Zigler. It brightened my day a little. Someone looked more ridiculous than me. It’s a shame there wasn’t a picture in the paper. That part was a disappointment.”
Gus pushed a loaded dolly through the hall door. “Someone give me a hand getting this down the ramp.”
Butchy and I helped Gus, and Jolly followed. We wrangled the dolly up next to the Jolly Bogart truck, and packed the truck with Bogart Kidz Kups and Bogart Bars. Jolly got behind the wheel and drove off.
“You might as well take an early lunch,” Gus said to Butchy and me. “We have a truck coming in at one.”
• • •
Butchy went off to take a nap in his tricked-out F-450 pickup, and I went to the deserted break room. I got coffee and ate my sandwich while I looked through the employee files Ranger had copied for me. There were five in total.
PeeWee Stutz had been accused of sexual harassment six months ago. He’d received a warning and been referred to group counseling. That seemed to be the end of it.
Maureen Gooley had a long history of lunchroom altercations. She worked on the floor and was fired three weeks ago after she sucker-punched Lucinda Keever. Maureen was sixty-three years old and was rumored to have a drinking problem.
Stan Ducker had the thickest file of all. It was filled with requests to transfer. Job description simply said “Truck driver.” I read further and realized this was the Jolly Bogart clown. Each request was very neatly stamped “Declined.” No other explanation given. It seemed odd that you would turn the Jolly Bogart truck over to someone who hated kids. Maybe once Stan got out on the road and rolling he perked up.
Sylvia Mook also had a file filled with requests to transfer. She was working on the floor and wanted an office job. She’d been at the plant for five years.
Maria Ortiz was unhappy with the machines in the break room. She wanted Coke, and only Pepsi was offered. She also didn’t like the brand of toilet paper in the ladies’ room. She thought there should be assigned parking in the lot so you could find your car more easily. She worried about the air quality throughout the plant. And she wanted a transfer from the housekeeping crew to a job on the floor. There were seven requests for transfer. All neatly stamped “Declined.”
I used my phone to check my email. I called Morelli but got his voicemail. I glanced over at the vending machines. Maybe I needed to treat myself to a giant Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Peanut butter is healthy, right?
I was scrounging in my bag, looking for loose change, when a text message came in from Ranger telling me my snooping days were over. I’d been recognized and reported to Bogart, and Bogart
wanted me out of the plant.
Thank God. I wanted to find the man who’d murdered Arnold Zigler and the Bogart Bar. I truly did. And I wanted to do a good job for Ranger. But Jeez Louise I hated working the line and the loading dock.
I shoved the files back into my messenger bag, tossed my trash, said adios to the break room, and headed for my car.
TWELVE
IT WAS ALMOST noon when I walked into the bonds office. Lula was on the fake leather couch with her laptop. No Connie.
“What’s up?” Lula asked.
“I got outted. Someone recognized me, and Bogart gave me the heave-ho.”
“Did you get any ice cream?”
“No.”
“Bummer. Next time you need to negotiate a better deal. You should have had one of them golden umbrellas.”
“I think you mean golden parachute.”
“Say what?”
“A golden parachute lets you gently float down to earth.”
“Mary Poppins could do that with a umbrella,” Lula said. “What about Mary Poppins?”
The thing about Lula is that when she gets things wrong they frequently make sense.
I heard the door open behind me and saw Lula’s eyes go wide. I turned and bumped into Ranger.
“Babe,” he said, his hands at my waist to steady me.
Even if I’d had my eyes closed I would know I was smashed up against Ranger. He always smells great. He uses Bulgari Green shower gel, and the scent clings to him. I’ve used it and it’s gone by the time I’m done toweling off.
His hand moved to my wrist, and he tugged me outside. “I’m on my way to talk to Bogart,” Ranger said, “but I wanted to talk to you first. Did you pick up anything useful while you were at the plant?”
“I didn’t get to talk to a lot of people, but the general attitude is mostly mellow. No one seems to be overly concerned about the freezer meltdown, the tainted ice cream, or the Bogart Bar guy. I read through the five files you gave me, and nothing really jumped out. Three files were thick because of requests to transfer. You might ask Bogart about that. I didn’t see anything in the employment histories as to why the requests were consistently turned down. No reasons were given. It occurred to me that we might want to take a look at new hires. If Mo Morris sent someone into the plant to sabotage stuff it would have been just before all the bad things started to happen.”