Top Secret Twenty-One: A Stephanie Plum Novel(5)

“He didn’t show for his court date.” I gave her my card. “I’d appreciate a call if you see him.”

Lula was waiting for me in the car. Lula didn’t like dead people.

“Well?” Lula said.

“Poletti’s mother. Sounds like a natural death. His father is still alive, but I didn’t get to talk to him. I didn’t want to intrude.”

“Did you see her?”

“No.”

Lula gave a whole-body shiver. “Gives me the creeps just being here. You know there’s spirits swirling all around the house. I could practically hear them howling.”

“Howling?”

“That’s what they do! They come to get the dead person’s soul. Don’t you ever go to the movies? You ever see any of them Harry Potter films? Anyways, I’m getting hungry. I could use a Clucky Burger with special sauce and bacon and some cheese fries.”

I took Lula to the drive-thru at Cluck-in-a-Bucket, then dropped her off at the office and headed for my parents’ house. They live a short distance away, in the heart of the Burg, in a duplex house that shares a common wall with a very nice widow who is older than dirt. She lives a frugal existence off her husband’s pension, has her television going every waking minute, and bakes coffee cakes all day long.

My Grandma Mazur was at the door when I parked in front of the house. Grandma came to live with my parents when my grandfather went to the big reality TV show in the sky. We hid my father’s shotgun a month after Grandma moved in. There are times at the dinner table when his face turns red, his knuckles turn white, and we know we did the right thing by removing temptation. My mother has found her own way to cope. She drinks. Personally, I think my grandmother is a hoot. Of course, I don’t have to live with her.

“Just in time for lunch,” Grandma said, opening the screen door. “We’re having leftover meatloaf sandwiches.”

I followed Grandma into the kitchen. My parents don’t have central air. They have freestanding fans in all the rooms, an air conditioner hanging out of a living room window, and similar air conditioners in two of the bedrooms. The kitchen is an inferno. My mother accepts this with quiet resignation, her face flushed, occasionally dripping sweat into the soup pot. My grandmother doesn’t seem to be affected by the heat. She says her sweat glands stopped working when her ovaries went south.

I took a seat at the small kitchen table and dropped my bag onto the floor.

“Are you after Jimmy Poletti?” Grandma asked. “I heard he skipped out on his bail bond.”

“I talked to his wife and both his sons, and no one seems to like him or know where he’s hiding.”

“Yeah, he’s a real stinker. His own mother didn’t even like him.”

“I tried to talk to her too, but she’s dead.”

“I heard,” Grandma said. “Rose Krabchek called an hour ago. Mrs. Poletti is going to be laid out at the funeral home on Hamilton. It’s going to be a good viewing. She’s high-profile now that her son is a fugitive.”

The Burg doesn’t have a movie theater, so everyone goes to viewings at the funeral parlor on Hamilton Avenue.

“Any gossip going around about Jimmy?” I asked Grandma.

“Haven’t heard anything that would be useful. He had a house at the shore, but I’m told it washed away with that last hurricane. I saw pictures, and the beach isn’t even there. What happens with that? Does he own part of the ocean?”

My mother put plates and paper napkins on the kitchen table. “Who wants a meatloaf sandwich?”

I raised my hand. “With lots of ketchup.”

“And chips,” Grandma said. “I want one with chips and a pickle.”

My mother is an older version of me with shorter brown hair and a thicker waist. My grandmother used to resemble my mother, but gravity’s taken its toll and now Grandma has slack skin the color and texture of a soup chicken and steel gray hair permed into tight curls. She’s of an age where she’s fearless and has enough energy to light up Cleveland.

“Jimmy Poletti wasn’t real popular with his family,” Grandma said, “but he sure could sell cars. He was one of them personable people on television. If I was in the market, I’d buy a car from him. He was always dressed up in a nice suit, and you could see he had a good package.”

“He was selling girls out of the back room in his car dealership,” my mother said. “He’s a disgusting human being.”

“I didn’t say he was a good person,” Grandma said. “I just said he had an impressive package. ’Course, maybe he faked it. Like he could have put tennis balls in his Calvins. Or he could have padded them with toilet paper. Do you think men do that?”

I had two men in my life, and neither of them needed tennis balls.

My mother brought the meatloaf sandwiches to the table and took a seat. “I’d see his second wife at mass sometimes. Sometimes she’d have bruises. Just terrible. She’d be praying and crying, poor woman. We were all relieved when she left him.”

“I met his third wife,” I said. “I don’t think she’s going to be in church crying and praying.”

“You just never know,” my mother said. “A man like that doesn’t value life. He would do anything.”