Tricky Twenty-Two

  “Their shift ends at four,” Ranger said.

  “It won’t take that long,” Monica told him.

  They drove away and Ranger wrapped an arm around me. “We missed our date with Ernie Blatzo this morning. Do you want to take him down now or wait until tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow. Definitely tomorrow.”

  “You need to get out of your wet clothes, Babe. I’d be happy to help.”

  “Thanks for the offer, but you’ve helped enough.”

  SIXTEEN

  I KICKED MY shoes off when I walked into my apartment, and I left my wet clothes on the bathroom floor. I took a fast shower to wash the smell of funeral flowers out of my hair, and I dressed in sweats and a T-shirt. It was the moment of truth. I was going to bake a cake.

  Rex was running on his wheel when I walked into the kitchen.

  “I’m going to bake a cake,” I told him. “It’s going to be awesome.”

  Rex stopped running for a moment, blinked his shiny black eyes at me, and went back to running. Not impressed.

  I’d never seriously looked at my kitchen before, but it turns out I haven’t got a lot of counter space. I also haven’t got a mixer or a big bowl. I had a mixer when I first moved in but it got charred when my apartment was fire-bombed.

  “No problem,” I said to Rex. “I’ll make my cake at my parents’ house.”

  I packed my cake pans and all the cake ingredients into a shopping bag, laced up my sneakers, hung my messenger bag on my shoulder, and told Rex he was in charge of the apartment. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, and it looked like the sun was trying to burn through. I parked in my parents’ driveway just as Mrs. Kulicki was dropping Grandma off from the wake.

  “Too bad you couldn’t stay longer,” Grandma said to me. “Emily Root had too many highballs and started singing one of them Miley Cyrus songs and tried to hump the fire pole. She was doing pretty good, too, considering she’s so old.”

  “I don’t think I know Emily Root.”

  “She was wearing the purple dress. They bused her in from Senior Living. She had her teeth in her purse on account of they were giving her trouble.” Grandma looked at my shopping bag. “What have you got in there?”

  “My cake stuff. I thought I’d make it here.”

  “Good idea. There’s nothing better than smelling a cake baking in the house.”

  Grandma went upstairs to get out of her wet clothes, and I went into the kitchen.

  “I came over to bake a cake,” I told my mother.

  My mother stopped chopping vegetables and made the sign of the cross. “Something’s wrong. You have breast cancer. You found a lump.”

  “No!”

  “You’re pregnant.”

  “I’m fine. I just feel like making a cake.”

  “Holy mother! Where did you get that bruise?”

  “I walked into something.”

  I unpacked my bag and set everything on the kitchen table. “I was going to make the cake at home but it turns out I don’t have a mixer. Or a bowl. So I brought everything here.”

  “Maybe you should start with a box mix. I’ve got Duncan Hines in the pantry.”

  “Nope. I’m making it from scratch. If this turns out I might go to school to be a pastry chef.”

  My mother clapped her hand to her heart. “You got fired. The bonds office burned down again. Somebody finally killed Vinnie.”

  “Everything is fine. I just got to thinking it might be fun to bake cakes.”

  “There’s got to be a reason for this. Did Joseph propose? Did he give you a ring? Would you like to learn how to roast a chicken?”

  “No, no, and no. Joe and I broke up, remember?”

  Grandma came into the kitchen. “What did I miss?”

  “Stephanie and Joseph are still on the outs,” my mother said.

  I pulled the recipe out of my bag and put it on the counter. “I’m going to make a chocolate cake. And I’m going to make it all by myself.”

  “Good for you,” Grandma said. “Go for it.”

  “All I have to do is follow the recipe, right?”

  “Right,” Grandma said. “And then we can eat it for dinner. We’re having pasta and red sauce and meatballs, if you want to stay. We got a lot of it.”

  “Sure. That sounds good.”

  “I don’t know why you keep breaking up with Joseph,” my mother said. “He’s such a nice young man.”

  This was true. But he didn’t want me. It was so painful I couldn’t say it out loud.

  “I have to concentrate on this cake,” I said. “I don’t want to mess up.”

  “Last time you tried to cook something you set your kitchen on fire,” Grandma said.

  “Baking is better,” I said. “It doesn’t involve oil that suddenly bursts into flames.”

  I measured everything out and precisely followed the directions. I looked at the two cake pans.

  “It says I’m supposed to dust them with flour,” I said to Grandma.

  “Yeah, but first you got to grease them up,” Grandma said.

  When I was done I had chocolate cake batter and flour all over the front of my T-shirt.

  “Guess this is why pastry chefs wear those white jackets,” I said.

  “I always wanted one of them jackets,” Grandma said. “We should get ourselves a couple. I could get them online.”

  “No more Internet,” my mother said to my grandmother. “You’re addicted. You’re on all the time.”

  “I’ve got my sites,” Grandma said. “I gotta keep up. I’m famous. I’ve got a blog.”

  I slid my cake pans into the oven and set the timer. “What kind of sites do you go on?”

  “All the usual. I tweet and I google and I got a Facebook page. And I go on some dating sites, only they’re the kind you don’t date in person. You just date online. Some of those I stopped using because the men got weird.”

  Thwack! My mother sliced a carrot.

  Grandma rolled her eyes. “She don’t approve of me having fun,” Grandma said.

  Thwack! Another chunk off the carrot.

  A text message buzzed on my phone. It was Lula wondering where I was hiding. I told her I was at my parents’ house, and she texted back that she’d be there in a couple minutes.

  “What kind of frosting are you putting on your cake?” Grandma asked.

  “Chocolate.”

  “That’s the best kind,” Grandma said. “You wash out your bowl, and I’ll set the butter on the counter to soften.”

  I just finished cleaning my work area when Lula showed up.

  “Howdy, Mrs. P. and Granny,” Lula said. “Hope you don’t mind me stopping by like this, but I had to bring a package to Stephanie. Connie said it could wait until tomorrow, but I gotta know what’s in it.”

  It was a large padded envelope with no return address. It was postmarked Des Moines.

  Oh boy.

  “I bet it’s something good,” Lula said. “The excellent mechanical device we got came from Des Moines.”

  “Maybe we should wait until after dinner,” I said.

  “No way,” Grandma said. “I want to see what you got.”

  I opened the envelope and pulled out a pair of skimpy black lace panties.

  “They look like they got something missing from them,” Grandma said.

  “They’re made that way,” Lula said. “They’re crotchless. I bet he got these at Frederick’s of Hollywood.” Lula looked in the bag and found a note. “It says here that he wants to rip these off Stephanie with his teeth.”

  My mother took a bottle of whiskey from the cupboard above the sink and poured herself two fingers, straight up.

  “Why me?” my mother asked, tossing the whiskey back like a pro.

  “There’s a name on this card,” Lula said. “It’s the same as last time. Scooter Stud Muffin.”

  “That’s a coincidence,” Grandma said. “I used to friend someone who called himself Scooter Stud Muffin. I haven’t heard from him in
a while on account of I blocked him from my account. He was one of the ones that was getting weird.”

  “You mean like Facebook friend?” Lula asked.

  “Yeah, only it wasn’t Facebook,” Grandma said. “It was a romance site.”

  Lula shook her finger at Grandma. “Granny, you’ve been catfishing!”

  I looked over at Lula. “What’s catfishing?”

  “It’s when you go on a dating website and make up your profile,” Lula said. “Like Granny could be telling men she’s twenty-three years old and a NFL cheerleader. Problem is when it gets serious and they want to meet you in person you gotta keep making excuses.”

  “Exactly,” Grandma said. “I’m real hot stuff online.”

  “That’s awful,” my mother said.

  “Everybody does it,” Grandma said. “It’s not like there’s a lot of good stuff to watch on television these days. You got to do something to make the time go. You heard about fantasy football? This here’s fantasy dating.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Let’s see if I can guess. You told these men you were me?”

  “Of course not,” Grandma said. “You don’t steal someone’s identity. I went by the name of Gina Bigelow. And I said I was an interior designer. The only thing I borrowed from you was a picture. It didn’t have your name on it or nothing.”

  “They could do an image search,” Lula said. “Connie uses stuff like that at the office all the time. You just plug Stephanie’s picture in, and it’ll get you her name. After you have her name it’s easy to find out all kinds of other things, like where she works and her home address.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Grandma said. “Does it work for everyone?”

  “Some people are harder to find than others,” I said. “I’m easy because my picture’s been in the paper a couple times.”

  “And it’s easy to find people who got social media accounts with their pictures on them,” Lula said.

  “It’s like we’re living in a time of magic,” Grandma said.

  “How many people are you catfishing?” Lula asked Grandma.

  “I got two on the hook right now. And there were four that I cut loose. Those were the ones I sent the picture to. It was like a goodbye gesture.”

  “Boy, you must be something to get these men so worked up over you,” Lula said. “I bet you would have made a good ’ho.”

  “Coming from you that’s a real compliment,” Grandma said to Lula.

  “I smell cake baking,” Lula said.

  “It’s Stephanie’s cake,” Grandma said. “She made it all by herself. We’re going to put the frosting on it when it’s cool.”

  “I wouldn’t mind having a piece of that cake,” Lula said.

  “You could stay for dinner,” Grandma said. “We’re having the cake for dessert.”

  Lula looked over at my mother. “Is that okay with you, Mrs. P.? I don’t want to impose.”

  My mother is a good Christian woman who would never refuse someone a seat at her table, but I knew this was a nightmare for her. With Lula and Grandma at the table together, it’s much more likely that my father will try to stab someone with his fork.

  •••

  My father has developed coping methods over the years. He puts his head down at the dinner table and plows through the meal, listening to no one. Once in a while he’ll pick his head up and look like he wants to join the Foreign Legion. At the moment he was concentrating on shoveling in chocolate cake.

  “That was a wonderful meal,” Lula said to my mother. “And this chocolate cake is excellent. Who’d ever think Stephanie could make a cake?”

  “How about you?” Grandma asked Lula. “Do you like to bake?”

  “I’ve never thought about baking,” Lula said. “I think I’m more a savory person than a baking person. Not that I’d ever pass up a donut. And, anyways, I don’t have a oven.”

  I finished my cake and wondered if I was a baking person. The cake had turned out okay. It had tasted better than it looked. It had been a little lopsided, and I couldn’t figure out how to get a nice swirly pattern in the frosting.

  Truth is, the whole thing hadn’t been as satisfying as I’d hoped, and I couldn’t imagine being in the back room of a bakery making cakes all day. I clearly was no Julia Child. And for sure I was no Martha Stewart.

  I helped my mother clear the table and I paused in the kitchen to check my email. Two emails from Valerie with pictures of her kids. An email from Connie saying a new FTA had come in. And an email from Gobbles saying he wanted to talk to me. I emailed back asking when and where, and he answered that he wanted to meet me behind the Zeta house at ten o’clock. Good deal!

  I pulled Lula aside and told her about the email.

  “I’m in,” Lula said. “We’re gonna bust him.”

  “Don’t you find it strange that he wants to talk?”

  “He’s probably just tired of being on the run.”

  “He could go to the police station and turn himself in. He doesn’t need me.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t know that.”

  “He’s not stupid. And he has his girlfriend helping him. And she’s not stupid.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “It feels complicated.”

  “Say what?”

  I handed Lula a towel and we started drying the dishes my mom was washing.

  “I just don’t want to go all animal on him,” I said. “I want to give him a chance to talk.”

  “I get that,” Lula said. “I’m all about that.”

  “No shooting.”

  “Sure. Unless it’s necessary.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to be necessary.”

  “Yeah, but if it is.”

  “It won’t be.”

  “Boy, you know how to take the fun out of stuff. What are we gonna do until ten o’clock? I wouldn’t mind going to the mall. Macy’s is having a shoe sale.”

  “I can’t go to the mall like this. I’ve got chocolate cake batter all over my shirt.”

  “It balances out the bruise and the pimple,” Lula said. “You don’t know what to look at first. It’s one of them things that confuses the senses. It could be a signature look for you.”

  “How about if you go to the mall without me, and pick me up at nine o’clock.”

  SEVENTEEN

  LULA AND I parked in the student center lot at nine-thirty and walked across campus to the Zeta house. It was a dark moonless night. It was midweek and you might think Kiltman students would all be studying. Wrong. Half of Kiltman was at the Zeta house. Lights were blazing and a band was playing. We walked onto the porch and looked in at the band. Keyboard, two guitars, and a drummer.

  “They aren’t bad,” Lula said, “but that drummer isn’t no Brian Dunne.”

  “Do you see anyone in there who looks like Christopher Robin?”

  “No. It’s too packed to see anything.”

  We left the porch and walked around the side of the house. Gobbles said he’d meet me in the back. It was pitch-black at the back of the house. No exterior lighting and not a lot of light spilling out windows. They had a bunch of bushes that hadn’t been maintained.

  “I need a flashlight,” Lula said. “I can’t freakin’ see where I’m going.”

  It didn’t help that she was wearing platform FMPs.

  “I think you’re heading into the bushes,” I said. “Go right.”

  “How far right? Where are you? Oh shit!”

  There was the sound of Lula crashing into a bush, a grunt, and silence.

  I flicked the flashlight app on my cellphone and aimed it at Lula. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I tripped over something. God knows what these loser college kids leave laying around.”

  I played the light from the phone around Lula. She was sprawled on the ground, and it was clear that she’d tripped over a body. The body was on its back, had an arm in a sling, and a hole in its head. It was Mintner, and I was pretty sure he was
dead. His eyes were open but fixed, and he’d leaked a lot of blood. A bolt of cold fear and revulsion ripped through me, and I swallowed back a rush of nausea.

  “M-m-mintner,” I said.

  “Say what?”

  “You tripped over Dean Mintner. I think he’s dead.”

  I had my light trained on the body, but my hand was shaking, and the light was dancing around.

  Lula scrambled away and jumped to her feet. “Holy shit. Holy crap. Damnation. I hate dead people. I’m gonna have the creeps. I touched him. I’m gonna have the death cooties. I need a shower. I need a cheeseburger. Someone get me fries.”

  I shut the flashlight app off and called Morelli.

  “I’m at the Zeta house,” I said. “Lula and I were walking around the house, looking for Gobbles, and Lula tripped over Dean Mintner. I’m pretty sure he’s dead. Okay, I’m positive he’s dead. He’s got a bullet hole in his head.”

  I hung up with Morelli and flashed the light around the area. I didn’t see any more bodies, dead or otherwise.

  “He’s on his way,” I said to Lula. “And he’s sending a uniform. Give me your gun, and I’ll stay here. You go out to the road and wait for the uniform.”

  Lula handed her gun over. “You know how to use this, right?”

  “Sort of.”

  If I was going to keep working for Vinnie, I was going to have to learn some skills. Some self-defense moves. And I needed to be more comfortable with a variety of firearms. I needed to at least be able to confiscate a gun and make sure I didn’t shoot myself in the process.

  I was taking a lot of deep breaths, trying to calm myself. I had the flashlight app off, and I was standing in total darkness. I was listening for a footfall, but my heart was beating so loud in my ears, I wasn’t sure I could hear an elephant approaching. My fear was that I was in the shooter’s sights. That some nutcase serial killer freak was in the shadows, thinking maybe he should kill me, too. I’d moved away from the body, but I didn’t want to leave and chance that the crime scene would be disturbed. Or that the body would disappear.

  I saw police strobes flash in the sky, and moments later I heard Lula talking, and I saw the glare of the Maglite the cop was carrying. I put the gun on the ground and stepped away.