Top Secret Twenty-One: A Stephanie Plum Novel(4)

I returned to State Street and headed for North Trenton.

“His one kid lives on Cherry Street,” Lula said, reading Connie’s text message. “And it looks like he works at the button factory.”

Twenty minutes later I parked in front of Aaron Poletti’s house. It was a narrow two-story row house, similar to my parents’ home in the Burg. Postage-stamp front yard with a small statue of the Virgin Mary in the middle of it. American flag hanging from a flagpole jutting out from the tiny front porch.

“It’s a pretty Virgin,” Lula said. “I like when they got a blue dress like this one. It looks real heavenly and peaceful except for the chip in her head. She must have gotten beaned by a baseball or something.”

Lula and I went to the front door, I rang the bell, and a young woman with a toddler on her hip answered.

I introduced myself and told her I was looking for her father-in-law.

“I do not know where he is,” she said. “And he certainly isn’t welcome here. He’s a horrible person. I mean, honestly, I have a little girl, and what he was doing was so awful.”

“Has he been in contact with your husband?”

“No! Well, at least not that I know. I can’t imagine Aaron even talking to him.”

“Aaron works at the button factory?”

“He’s on the line. His father wanted him to be part of the business, but Aaron declined. They’ve never gotten along.”

I gave her my card and asked her to call if she learned anything new about her father-in-law.

“Okay, so she’s not gonna call either,” Lula said when we were back in the Explorer. “Jimmy Poletti’s not gonna hide out there.”

Probably true, but you never know for sure.

“We gonna go to kid number two now?” Lula asked.

“Might as well.”

Kid number two lived in an apartment in Hamilton Township. According to Connie’s information he was twenty-two, single, and worked as a fry cook at Fran’s Fish House on Route 31.

The apartment complex consisted of three unimaginative redbrick chunks of building hunkered down around a blacktop parking lot. Each building was two stories with a single door in its middle. Landscaping was nonexistent. This was not a high-rent deal.

I parked, and Lula and I entered the center building and took the stairs to the second floor. The building was utilitarian. The hall was dimly lit. Probably that was a good thing, because the carpet didn’t look wonderful. We found 2C and rang the bell.

The door got wrenched open, and a skinny guy peered out at us. He was around 5′ 10″, with bloodshot eyes, bed-head hair, reeking of weed, and his arms were decorated with burn scars, which I supposed were from working the fry station. He was wearing pink boxers with red hearts on them.

“Oswald Poletti?” I asked.

“Yeah. You Girl Scouts selling cookies?”

“Nice shorts,” Lula said.

He stared down at them as if he was seeing them for the first time.

“Some girl gave them to me.”

“She must hate you,” Lula said.

I introduced myself and told him I was looking for his dad.

“Haven’t seen him,” he said. “We aren’t close. He’s an even bigger dick than me. I mean, dude, he named me Oswald.”

“Do you know where I might find him?” I asked.

“Mexico?”

I gave him my card and told him to call me if anything turned up.

“We’re batting zero,” Lula said when we got back into the car. “You’re not gonna get a call from him ’less he needs cookies.”

“So Jimmy Poletti’s kids don’t like him. And his wife doesn’t like him. Who do you suppose likes him?”

“His mama?”

I called Connie. “Do you have an address for Jimmy Poletti’s mother?”

Two minutes later, the address appeared in a text on my phone.

“She lives in the Burg,” I told Lula. “Elmer Street.”

“This is getting boring. No one wants to talk to us. No one knows nothing. This keeps up and I’m gonna need lunch.”

I turned off Hamilton at Spring Street and two blocks later turned onto Elmer. I drove one block and pulled to the curb behind a hearse. The hearse was parked in front of the Poletti house, and the front door to the house was open.

“That don’t look good,” Lula said. “That looks like someone else who isn’t gonna talk to us. Unless it’s Jimmy. Then hooray, case closed.”

I got out and walked to the house and stepped inside. A bunch of people were milling around inside. Two guys who looked like they were from the funeral home, an old man who was dabbing at his nose with a tissue, a man in his fifties who was more stoic, and two women. I knew one of the women, Mary Klotz.

“What’s happening?” I asked Mary.

“It sounds like it was her heart,” Mary said. “She’s been sick for a long time. I live across the street, and the paramedics were always here. I’d see the lights flashing once a week.”

“The two men …”

“Her husband and a relative. I think he’s a nephew or something.”

“No sign of her son?”

“He didn’t come around much. I imagine you’re looking for him.”