Fearless Fourteen: A Stephanie Plum Novel

by Janet Evanovich

  I took a moment to decide if I was going to throw up or faint or evacuate my bowels. None of those things seemed to be going on, so I stumbled up to the kitchen, closed the basement door behind me, and dialed Morelli.

  “There’s a d-d-dead guy in your b-b-basement,” I told him.

  Silence.

  “Did you hear me?” I asked, working hard to control the shaking in my voice.

  “I know this is stupid, but it sounded like you said there was a dead guy in my basement.”

  “Shot in the f-f-forehead. Bob took his shoe and won’t give it b-b-back.”

  “Have you called the police?”

  “Just you.”

  “You know what would be good?” Mooner said when I hung up. “Coleslaw. I don’t suppose you have any coleslaw?”

  “No.”

  “Just thought I’d ask.”

  “Aren’t you bothered by the fact that someone was killed in Morelli’s basement?” I asked Mooner.

  “Do I know him?”

  “I don’t know. Do you want to take a look?”

  Mooner stood and ambled down the stairs. Moments later, he strolled back into the kitchen and took a handful of chips. “Don’t know him,” he said, finishing his sandwich, eating his chips.

  I wasn’t nearly so calm. I don’t like dead people, and I especially hated that someone was killed in Morelli’s house. It felt unclean and scary and like the house had been violated.

  MOONER HAD TAKEN a lawn chair from Morelli’s backyard and set it on the sidewalk in front of Morelli’s house, so he could watch the homicide show in comfort. He had a can of soda in one hand and the potato chip bag in the other, and he was kicked back. There were several squad cars parked at angles on the street, plus the medical examiner’s meat wagon and a couple other assorted cop cars. A clump of uniforms stood by the meat wagon, talking and laughing. Morelli was on his porch, the front door to his house open behind him. He was talking to Rich Spanner, another homicide cop. Spanner had obviously caught the case. I knew him on a superficial level. He was an okay guy. He was a couple years older than Morelli and built like a barrel.

  Just minutes ago, they’d carried the victim out in a zippered bag and stuffed him into the ME’s truck. The crime lab guy was still inside, working.

  I was leaning against my car, not wanting to be in the middle of all the police activity inside the house. Rich Spanner and Morelli concluded their conversation. Spanner left, and Morelli walked over to me.

  “This is a frigging nightmare,” Morelli said.

  “Did you know the dead guy?”

  He shook his head. “Not personally. His name is Allen Gratelli. The address on his license was Lawrenceville. Spanner ran him through the system, and he has no priors. He worked for the cable company.”

  “So what’s his connection to you?”

  “Don’t know. Was he the guy who ran out of the basement the other night?”

  “Could have been. Seemed like the right size, but I couldn’t be sure. I don’t recognize the name. Did Spanner know him?”

  “No. No one knows him. He’s nobody.”

  “Well, somebody knows him, because they killed him in your basement.”

  “Let’s review my life,” Morelli said. “I have crazy Dom shooting at me because he thinks I stole this house out from under him. I have his nephew living with me. I’m not sure why, except that he looks a little like me, and the kid’s mother is missing. And in the last three days, I’ve had my house broken into twice and a guy killed in my basement. Did I miss anything?”

  “Does Mooner count?”

  “No.”

  “Do you suppose there’s a connection between all those people?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, I do. And I think it’s all related to the bank job. We know that four men participated in the robbery. Dom took the fall and the other three men were never identified, and the money was never recovered. I’m guessing when we dig around a little, we’ll find out Dom knew Allen Gratelli.”

  “And maybe Gratelli was involved in the robbery.”

  “It would explain the hole in his head,” Morelli said.

  “And maybe the money is hidden in your house!”

  “It was a lot of money. They hauled it off in a van. More likely, a key or a clue to the location is hidden in the house.”

  “We need to comb through the house.”

  “Little by little, I’ve been making this house my own, and I’ve gotten rid of a bunch of things that belonged to Rose. A lot of the clutter has been tossed.”

  “Yes, but a lot of it is still here. You never throw a key away. You still have your locker key from high school. If you found a key, you’d put it in one of your junk drawers.” I looked at my watch. “I have to get Zook. When I come back we’ll start looking.”

  ELEVEN

  ZOOK SETTLED HIMSELF onto the passenger seat and stared down at his shoes.

  “Problems in school?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  “Well?”

  He bit into his lower lip.

  “Your mom hasn’t turned up in any of the local hospitals,” I told him. “That’s a good sign.”

  “Or the morgue.”

  “Yeah, or the morgue,” I said.

  “Maybe she took off.”

  “She wouldn’t take off without you. She loves you.”

  “Thanks,” Zook said. “Do you think she’s okay?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  I ran into the deli on the way home and picked up lunch meat and chips and ice cream sandwiches. Marion Fitz was working checkout.

  “I hear you found a dead guy in Morelli’s basement,” she said. “Is this Virginia baked ham or the low sodium?”

  “Virginia baked.”

  “I heard it was Allen Gratelli.”

  “That’s what I’m told.”

  “Wasn’t he dating Loretta Rizzi?”

  Bang. Direct hit to my brain. “I don’t know,” I said. “Was he?”

  “His truck’s been in front of her house a lot. Maybe she just had cable problems.”

  I carried my bag out to my car, tossed it onto the backseat, and got behind the wheel. Zook was hooked into his iPod, waiting for me.

  “Was your mom dating a guy named Allen Gratelli?” I asked him.

  “He’s Uncle Dom’s friend. He’d come over sometimes to see if we were doing okay. I thought he was sort of a jerk. Sometimes it was like he was trying to put moves on my mom, but she always made a joke about it.”

  “I ran into him today.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “He was in Morelli’s basement. Someone shot him.”

  Zook’s eyes went wide. “Get out. Was he hurt bad?”

  “Yes.”

  “How bad?”

  “Real bad.”

  I suspect if I was relaying this information to a fourteen-year-old girl, she would be sad at this point. She’d be remembering pets and relatives and stuffed animals that had been injured, and the tragedies would be commingled in the frontal lobe of her brain. Zook, being a boy, thought it was cool.

  “Oh man,” Zook said. “Is he dead?”

  “Yes.”

  Zook was leaning forward, straining against his seatbelt. “Who shot him?”

  “I don’t know. He was dead when I found him.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He looked dead. Bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.”

  “Whoa. That’s amazing. Is he still there?”

  “No. They moved him out.”

  Zook slumped back. “Darn. I miss all the good stuff.”

  “Did your Uncle Dom ever say anything about the money? Like where it was hidden?”

  “No. He just kept saying he was going to be living the high life.”

  “Did he have other friends besides Allen Gratelli?”

  “I guess, but I don’t know any. Allen was the only one who came around after Uncle Dom went to prison. And Allen just started to come around a couple m
onths ago.”

  THE POLICE WERE gone when I returned to Morelli’s house. Only Mooner in the lawn chair and a single van from an emergency cleaning service suggested something unusual had just occurred.

  “Zookamundo,” Mooner said. “Been waiting for you, man. We gotta convene with the wood elves.”

  “Did you see the dead guy?” Zook asked.

  “Yeah. He was real dead,” Mooner said. “Pooped in his pants and everything.”

  “Awesome,” Zook said.

  I left Mooner and Zook in the living room with the ice cream sandwiches and the wood elves, and I went to the kitchen to help Morelli. He was methodically going through drawers, extracting keys and odd scraps of paper. The basement door was open, and the smell of bleach and pine-scented detergent drifted up the stairs.

  “Zook tells me Allen Gratelli was friends with Dom,” I said to Morelli. “Shazam.”

  Morelli grinned and wrapped an arm around me. “I’m going to get you naked tonight and make you say shazam again.”

  I knew that wasn’t an empty promise. “Having any luck here?” I asked him.

  “I’ve got a pile of renegade keys, and I now know the problem with our plan. It’s not enough to find a key. You have to know where it goes.”

  My cell phone rang, and I answered to Connie.

  “I have Brenda back with the film crew,” Connie said. “They want more footage.”

  “Are you kidding me? They want more monkey?”

  “No. They want a different takedown.”

  “We screwed up a simple domestic disturbance. Where do we go from there?”

  “How about Loretta? She’s disappeared, right? That’s a violation of her bond agreement.”

  “I can’t find Loretta. I have no place to look. I have no clue.”

  “Just lead them around. Make something up. At least no one will shoot at you. And there won’t be any monkeys,” Connie said.

  I hung up and looked at Morelli. “Connie wants me to find Loretta.”

  “Good,” Morelli said. “I want you to find Loretta, too. Loretta probably knows what’s going on. She might even know where the money is located.”

  “I don’t know where to begin.”

  “There were four men involved in the robbery. Go on the assumption that Allen Gratelli was one of the men and find the other two. I’m guessing one of them has Loretta.”

  “Why aren’t you looking for Loretta?”

  “I’m baby-sitting her kid. And it seems to me it’s more dangerous to stay in this house than to be on the streets. So I’m staying here, and you’re hitting the streets.”

  “Okay, fine, terrific, I’ll go find Loretta, but you’re going to owe me.”

  “Shazam,” Morelli said.

  THE BONDS OFFICE looked like it was holding a casting call for ’Ho Bounty Hunters. Lula and Brenda were there, dressed in their leathers, plus Nancy, Mark Bird, and his producer and the camera crew.

  “I can’t drag everyone around with me,” I told them. “I need to talk to people, and the camera crew is intimidating. They’re going to have to stay in the van.”

  “Okay,” Mark said, “we’ll wire you for sound and we’ll do re-creations.”

  “What’s this Loretta like?” Brenda wanted to know. “What did she do?”

  “She robbed a liquor store,” I told her.

  “Was she armed?”

  “Yeah. She had a lightsaber.”

  “A what?”

  “She had her kid’s Star Wars lightsaber from Disney World.”

  “But she got a lot of money, right?” Brenda said.

  “Actually, she got a bottle of gin. She needed a Tom Collins.”

  “Been there, done that,” Brenda said.

  I took the new paperwork from Connie, plus a profile on Allen Gratelli, and we all piled into Lula’s Firebird. Lula drove north on 206, past Rider College, to a neighborhood of modest houses. She wound down a couple streets and stopped at a house with a lot of cars parked in the driveway. This was Gratelli’s house and it looked like people were arriving to give their condolences. Problem was, according to Connie’s computer check, Gratelli lived alone. He was divorced, no children. His parents were deceased. He had two brothers and one sister.

  Lula parked on the street, and we walked to the house. The front door was open, and I could hear people yelling at one another inside.

  “Knock, knock,” I said, peeking into the house.

  Two men were shoving each other around, a guy in a cable uniform was ransacking a chest in the hall, and a woman was yelling at the two men.

  “You dumb shit,” the woman said to one of the men. “Who cares if he slept with your wife? Your wife is a slut. Everyone’s slept with your wife. Stop being a jerk and go look for the stupid directions.”

  “What directions?” I asked her.

  Her head snapped around, and she took in Lula and Brenda and me. “Cripes,” she said. “It’s the rod squad. I knew Allen was a sicko, but this is ridiculous.”

  Lula stiffened her spine. “Say what?”

  “You heard he was dead, right? And now you’re here on the scavenger hunt? Well, back off, because I was here first,” the woman said.

  I corralled Lula and Brenda and pulled them aside. “Cozy up to the guy in the cable uniform and find out what he’s looking for.”

  The woman made a disgusted gesture at the men and flounced off to the kitchen. I tagged along and watched her open and close drawers.

  “Are you his sister?” I asked the woman.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “This must be a terrible time for you.”

  “We weren’t close.” She cut her eyes to me. “Have you known Allen long?”

  “Long enough.”

  “I guess men talk when you’re, you know, doing things.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Like what did he say?” she asked me.

  “Uh, mostly he gave instructions.”

  “Really? What sort of instructions? Did he say where it was located?”

  “No. I knew where it was located. He mostly said hit me harder. And then ouch and yow and that sort of thing.”

  “I don’t mean those instructions. I mean, did he tell you where the money is hidden?”

  “Oh. No.”

  “Allen was such an idiot. I can’t believe he got himself shot. What was he thinking?”

  “Do you know who shot him?”

  “I imagine it was someone looking for the money, just like him. Probably crazy Dominic Rizzi.”

  “This is the money from the robbery, right?”

  “I guess. He just kept talking about the money he was going to get when Dom got out of jail. And then Dom got out and nobody could find the money. And then last night, Allen said he had directions and today he’s dead. I figure I’m next of kin and the money is mine. I just need to find the directions. Me and my two remaining moron brothers.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you that Allen was probably killed over the money and you could get killed, too?”

  “Do you have any idea how much money we’re talking about?”

  “A lot?”

  “More than a lot. We’re talking a shitload.”

  “What if you don’t find the directions here?”

  “I guess I just start digging around the death house. I figure Dom gave the money to his crazy old Aunt Rose, and she hid it somewhere. And then she died before Dom got out of prison.”

  I left the kitchen, gathered up Lula and Brenda, and herded them outside.

  “What did you find out?” I asked them.

  “He worked with the dead guy,” Lula said. “And the dead guy was always talking about the money he was gonna get when Rizzi got out of prison. And so this jerk-off figured now that the dead guy is dead, he was gonna come look for the money.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you get his name?”

  “Morty Dill. He was all taken with Brenda here. He
would have told us anything.”

  “He reminded me of my fifth husband,” Brenda said. “Sort of cute the way he kept calling me darlin’.”

  “I know all about you from Star magazine,” Lula said. “I thought your fifth husband was that English guy who got caught with his pants down in the movie theater. You’re thinking of your sixth husband, who was the country singer. Kenny Bold.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “There was the guy you married right out of high school. The plumber. Then there was the ice skater who turned out to be gay. The third guy was a stock car driver. Then you remarried the plumber, but that only lasted a couple weeks. And then the English guy.”

  “You’re right,” Brenda said. “I’d forgotten about the second marriage to the plumber.”

  A black Mercedes sedan with tinted windows cruised down the street, stopped in front of the house for a moment, and sped away.

  “Guess he don’t like a crowd,” Lula said. “My opinion is, people gonna be coming out of the woodwork to get that robbery money.”

  “Morty said Allen had directions to the money,” Brenda said. “Morty was looking for the directions.”

  I looked back at the house. “I suppose we should join in the hunt. Or at least we should wait around to see if anyone finds the directions.”

  An hour later, everyone cleared out. The house had been searched from top to bottom and the result was a big zero.

  “I’m not going to get an Emmy on this episode,” Brenda said. “This is a huge yawn.”

  “You’d get an Emmy if we found the directions,” I told her. “Let’s just think about this a little. Supposedly, Allen Gratelli had directions to the money, and next thing, he was dead in Morelli’s basement. So, if the directions weren’t on him, and they aren’t in his house . . . where would they be?”

  “In his car,” Lula said.

  “I don’t remember seeing his car. It wasn’t parked in front of Morelli’s house.”

  “If I was doing B&E on a cop’s house, I wouldn’t park in front of it,” Lula said. “When we break into someplace we always park around the corner.”