To the Nines

by Janet Evanovich

  “Would you like to try one?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  She handed the gear over and showed me how to measure.

  “Looks good to me,” I said after doing the measuring thing.

  “No,” she said, “it's off on one side. See the little burr on the edge of the one cog?” Jane took the gear from me, filed the side, and measured again. “Maybe you should just watch a while longer,” she said.

  I watched Jane do four more gears and my eyes glazed over and some drool oozed from between my lips. I quietly slid from my stool and moved to the next cubicle.

  Dolly Freedman was also testing new gears. Dolly would drink some coffee and measure. Then she'd drink more coffee and perform another test. She was as thin and as pale as Jane, but not as lifeless. She was cranked on coffee. “This is such a bullshit job,” Dolly said to me. She looked around. “Anyone watching?” she asked. Then she took a handful of gears and dumped them into the perfect gear bucket. “They looked good to me,” she said. Then she drank more coffee.

  “I'm going to be doing Samuel Singh's job,” I told her. “Do you know what happened to him? I heard he just didn't show up for work one day.”

  “Yeah, that's what I heard, too. No one's said much about him. He was real quiet. Carried his computer around and spent all his breaks on the computer.”

  “Playing computer games?”

  “No. He was always plugged into a phone line. Surfing. Doing email. Real secretive about it, too. If someone came over to him he'd close up the computer. Probably was on some porno site. He looked like the type.”

  “Slimy?”

  “Male. I keep protection in my desk for those types.” She opened her top desk drawer to show me her canister of pepper spray.

  I continued to move around the room, saving Edgar, the Asian guy, for last. Several of the women thought Singh looked unhappy. Alice Louise thought he might be secretly gay. No one could fault his work habits. He arrived on time and he did his barrel. No one knew he was engaged. No one had any idea where he lived or what he did in his spare time, other than surf the Net. Everyone had seen the newspaper article and thought Vinnie looked like a weasel.

  I called Ranger at noon.

  “Yo,” Ranger said.

  “Just checking in.”

  “How are the folks at TriBro?”

  “Not giving me a lot, but it's still early.”

  “Go get 'em, babe.” And he disconnected.

  I drifted over to Edgar's table mid-​afternoon. Edgar was dropping acid on a small metal bar with threads at either end. One drop at a time. Drip, wait, and measure. Drip, wait, and measure. Drip, wait, and measure. There had to be a thousand bars waiting to be tortured. Nothing was happening. This job made watching grass grow look exciting.

  “We're testing a new alloy,” Edgar said.

  “This seems more interesting than the gear measuring.”

  “Only for the first two million bars. After that, it's pretty routine.”

  “Why do you keep this job?”

  “Benefits.”

  “Health insurance?”

  “Gambling. If the product fails, one of us goes to Vegas as a tech rep. And the products fail all the time.”

  “What's a tech rep?”

  “A technical representative. You know, a repairman.”

  “Did Singh ever go to Vegas?”

  “Once.”

  “And you?”

  “On an average, once a month. Failure is usually stress related. And that's my area of expertise.”

  “Did Singh like Vegas?”

  “Why are you so interested in Singh?” Edgar asked.

  “I'm taking over his job.”

  “If you were taking over his job you'd be sitting at his desk doing measurements. Instead, you're floating around, talking to everyone. I think you're looking for Singh.”

  A point for Edgar. “Okay, suppose I am looking for Singh. Would you know where to find him?”

  “No, but I'd know where to start looking. The day before he disappeared he was in the lunch room calling all the McDonald's places, asking if a guy named Howie worked there. It was pretty strange. He was all excited. And it was the first time I'd ever seen him make a call.”

  I looked through the window, into the manufacturing area, and I caught Bart Cone's eye. He was examining a machine, standing with three other men. He glanced up and saw me talking to Edgar.

  “That's not a happy face,” Edgar said, his attention shifting to Bart.

  “Does he ever have a happy face?”

  “Yeah, I saw him smile once when he ran over a toad in the parking lot.”

  Bart made a wait here gesture to the men at the machine and marched across the work floor to the test area. He wrenched the door open and asked me to follow him out to the offices. I took my purse since it was the end of the day and there wasn't much chance I'd be returning.

  Bart was once again dressed in black. His expression was menacing. I followed him into an office that smelled like metal shavings and was a cluttered mess of stacked catalogues and spare parts collected in tattered cardboard boxes. His desk was large, the top heaped with loose papers, disposable coffee cups, more spare parts, a multiline phone, and a workstation computer.

  “What the hell were you doing in there?” Bart asked, looking like a guy who might have murdered Lillian Paressi. “I thought I made it clear that we had nothing to tell you about Singh.”

  “Your brother feels otherwise. He suggested I work undercover for a day.”

  Bart snatched at his phone and punched a key on speed dial. “What's the deal with Ms. Plum?” he asked. “I found her in the test area.” His expression darkened at Andrews answer. He gave a terse reply, returned the handset to the cradle, and glared at me. “I don't care what my brother told you, I'm going to give you good advice and God help you if you don't follow it. Stay out of my factory.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Okeydokey.” And I left. I might be a little slow sometimes, but I'm not totally stupid. I know a genuinely scary dude when I see one. And Bart was a genuinely scary dude.

  My cell phone rang as I was pulling out of the lot.

  “Stephanie? It's your mother.”

  As if I wouldn't recognize her voice.

  “We're having a nice chicken for dinner tonight.”

  My unmarried sister was nine months pregnant, living with my parents, and had turned into the hormone queen. I'd have to endure Valerie's mood swings to get to the chicken dinner. Valerie's boyfriend, Albert Kloughn, would most likely be there, too. Kloughn was also Valerie's boss and the father of her unborn baby. Kloughn was a struggling lawyer, and he was practically living at the house, trying to get Valerie to marry him. Not to mention Valerie's two little girls by a previous marriage who were nice kids, but added to the bedlam potential.

  “Mashed potatoes with gravy,” my mother said, sensing my hesitation, sweetening the offer.

  “Gee, I sort of have things to do,” I said.

  “Pineapple upside-​down cake for dessert,” my mother said, pulling out the big gun. “Extra whipped cream.” And she knew she had me. I'd never in my life turned down pineapple upside-​down cake.

  I looked at my watch. “I'm about twenty minutes away. I'll be a couple minutes late. Start without me.”

  Everyone was at the table when I arrived.

  My sister, Valerie, was pushed back about a foot and a half to accommodate her beach ball belly. A couple weeks ago she'd started using the belly like a shelf, balancing her plate on it, tucking her napkin into the neck of her shirt, catching spilled food on her huge swollen breasts. She'd gained seventy pounds with the baby and she was all big boobs and double chins and ham hock arms. Unheard of for Valerie, who previous to her divorce had been the perfect daughter, resembling the serene and slim Virgin Mary in every way, with the possible exception of virginity and hair style. The hair was Meg Ryan.

  Albert Kloughn was at her side, his face round and pink, his scalp gl
eaming under his thinning sandy hair. He was watching Valerie with unabashed awe and affection. Kloughn wasn't a subtle guy. He hadn't any idea how to hide an emotion. Probably he wasn't great in a courtroom, but he was always fun at the dinner table. And he was surprisingly endearing in an oddball way.

  Valerie's two girls from her first and only marriage, Angie and Mary Alice, were on the edges of their seats, hoping for a fun disaster . . . like Grandma Mazur setting the tablecloth on fire or Albert Kloughn spilling hot coffee into his lap.

  Grandma Mazur was happily sipping her second glass of wine. My mom was at the head of the table, all business, daring anyone to find fault with the chicken. And my dad shoveled food into his mouth and acknowledged me with a grunt.

  “I read in the paper where aliens from a different galaxy are buying up all the good real estate in Albany,” Grandma said.

  “They'll get hit hard with taxes,” Kloughn told her. “They'd be better to buy real estate in Florida or Texas.”

  My father never raised his head, but his eyes slid first to Kloughn and then to my grandmother. He muttered something that was too low to carry. I suspected it was in the area of good grief.

  My father is retired from the post office and now he drives a cab part-​time. When my grandmother came to live with my parents, my mother stopped storing the rat poison in the garage. Not that my father would actually take to poisoning my grandmother, but why tempt fate? Better to store the rat poison at cousin Betty's house.

  “If I was an alien I'd rather live in Florida anyway,” Grandma said. “Florida has Disney World. What's Albany got?”

  Valerie looked like she was ready to drop the baby on the dining room floor. “Get me a gun,” Valerie said. “If I don't go into labor soon I'm going to shoot myself. And pass the gravy. Pass it now.”

  My mother jumped to her feet and handed the gravy boat to Valerie. “Sometimes the contractions are hardly noticeable in the beginning,” my mother said. “Do you think you could be having hardly noticeable contractions?”

  Valerie's attention was fully focused on the gravy. She poured gravy on everything . . . vegetables, applesauce, chicken, dressing, and a heap of rolls. “I love gravy,” she said, spooning the overflow into her mouth, eating the gravy like soup. “I dream about gravy.”

  “It's a little high in saturated fats,” Kloughn said.

  Valerie glanced sideways at Kloughn. “You're not going to lecture me on my diet, are you?”

  Kloughn sat up straight in his seat, his eyes wide and birdlike. “Me? No, honest, I wouldn't do anything like that. I like fat women. Just the other day I was thinking how fat women were soft. Nothing I like better than big, soft, squishy pillows of fat.”

  He was nodding his balding head, trying hard, running down dark roads of panic.

  “Look at me. I'm nice and fat, too. I'm like the Doughboy. Go ahead, poke my stomach. I'm just like the Doughboy,” Kloughn said.

  “Omigod,” my sister wailed. “You think I'm fat.” She went into open-​mouthed sobbing and the plate slid from her stomach and crashed onto the floor.

  Kloughn bent to retrieve the plate and farted. “That wasn't me,” he said.

  “Maybe it was me,” Grandma said. “Sometimes they sneak out. Did I fart?” she asked everyone.

  My eyes inadvertently went to the kitchen door.

  “Don't even think about it,” my mother said. “We're all in this together. Anyone sneaks out the back way, they answer to me.”

  When the table was cleared and the dishes were done, I made my move to leave.

  “I need to talk to you,” my mother said, following me out of the house to stand curbside, where we had privacy.

  The bottom of the sun had sunk into the Krienski's asbestos shingle roof, a sure sign that the day was ending. Kids ran in packs, burning off the last of their energy. Parents and grandparents sat on small front porches. The air was dead still, heavy with the promise of a hot tomorrow. Inside my parents' house, my father and grandmother sat glued to the television. The muffled rise and fall of a sitcom laugh track escaped the house and joined the mix of street noise.

  “I'm worried about your sister,” my mother said. “What's to become of her? A baby due in two weeks and no husband. She should marry Albert. You have to talk to her.”

  “No way! One minute she's all smiley face and crying because she loves me so much and then next thing I know she's grumpy. I want the old Valerie back. The one with no personality. And besides, I'm not exactly an expert at marriage. Look at me ... I can't even figure out my own life.”

  “I'm not asking a lot. I just want you to talk to her. Get her to understand that she's having a baby.”

  “Mom, she knows she's having a baby. She's as big as a Volkswagen. She's already done it twice before.”

  “Yes, but both times she did it in California. It's not the same. And she had a husband then. And a house.”

  Okay, now we're getting somewhere. “This is about the house, right?”

  “I feel like the old lady who lived in a shoe. Remember the rhyme? She had so many children she didn't know what to do? One more person in this house and we're going to have to sleep in shifts. Your father's talking about renting a Porta Potti for the backyard. And it's not just the house. This is the Burg. Women don't go off and have babies without husbands here. Every time I go to the grocery, I meet someone who wants to know when Valerie is getting married.”

  I thought this was a good deal. It used to be that people wanted to know when I was getting married.

  “She's in the kitchen eating the rest of the cake,” my mother said. “She's probably got it topped with gravy. You could go in and talk to her. Tell her Albert Kloughn is a good man.”

  “Valerie doesn't want to hear this from me.”

  “What's it going to take?” my mother wanted to know. “German chocolate torte?”

  The German chocolate torte took hours to make. My mother hated to make the German chocolate torte.

  “German chocolate torte and a leg of lamb. That's my best offer,” she said.

  “Boy, you're really serious.”

  My mother grabbed me by the front of my shirt. “I'm desperate! I'm on the window ledge on the fortieth floor and I'm looking down.”

  I did an eye roll and a sigh and I trudged back into the house, into the kitchen. Sure enough, Valerie was at the small kitchen table, snarfing down cake.

  “Mom wants me to talk to you,” I said.

  “Not now. I'm busy. I'm eating for two, you know.”

  Two elephants. “Mom thinks you should marry Kloughn.”

  Valerie forked off a huge piece and shoved it into her mouth. “Kloughn's boring. Would you marry Kloughn?”

  “No, but then I won't even marry Morelli.”

  “I want to marry Ranger. Ranger is hot.”

  I couldn't deny it. Ranger was hot. “I don't think Ranger's the marrying type,” I said. “And there would be a lot of things to consider. For instance, I think once in a while he might kill people.”