Sticky Fingers

by Nancy Martin

  I peered up at her, my juvenile-delinquent antenna on alert.

  “What?” she said. “I’m serious.”

  Just then, her cell phone buzzed on the nightstand. I made a swipe for it, but Sage scooped up the phone.

  “Study buddy. Big chemistry test today,” she said, and took the phone into the bathroom. She shut the door firmly.

  I leaped out of bed and listened at the door, hoping to learn a little more about Mr. Squeegee. But Sage turned on the tap water, and I couldn’t hear anything.

  Because Loretta had an early day in court suing the Amsterdam grandson, I used her bathroom across the hall to take a shower. I came back to steal a pair of clean panties and a pair of socks from Sage’s top drawer. I could still hear the water running in Sage’s bathroom, so I took a quick tour of her other drawers, too. And her shelves and under her mattress.

  Under the mattress, I found four blank college applications.

  Worse yet? Under the bed, I found a gigantic pile of college catalogs and brochures. There must have been a hundred different colleges represented in all that paper.

  A dull pain throbbed behind my eyeball. Clearly, Sage hadn’t even looked at half the stuff she had hidden under the bed. She hadn’t done a damn thing about applying for college.

  Did Loretta know about this? What kind of talk had she conducted with Sage on this subject?

  Because I sure as hell didn’t know what to say.

  How did other parents handle this kind of passive-aggressive crap? Especially those who had screwed up their own lives and certainly didn’t have a college diploma to wave around?

  Annoyed, I shoved the catalogs and brochures back under the bed and hurried downstairs.

  Sister Bob had Loretta’s television on, and she listened to the morning news from the floor where she was grunting, doing sit-ups.

  “Good morning, Roxana! Do you exercise every morning? Isn’t it a pain?”

  “Give it up to God, Sister Bob.” I crouched down to hold her ankles.

  As she finished counting off her sit-ups, we listened to the tail end of the Clarice Crabtree story, complete with footage of the rolled-up carpet.

  When Clarice’s name was finally mentioned, Sister Bob paused in the act of sitting up. “That’s the woman you were looking up in the library yesterday, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  She gave me a frown. “Did you know about this yesterday?”

  “I knew something was up,” I said.

  The reporter started talking about bigamy, and how none of Clarice’s neighbors could imagine she’d had two husbands.

  “Doesn’t that beat all?” Sister Bob remained paused, her hands linked behind her head. “What woman wants two husbands? Surely it’s hard enough to train one properly.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  Sister Bob gave up on exercise. She rubbed her stomach muscles and eyed me. “Why didn’t you marry that nice Patrick Flynn, Roxana? I heard he liked getting into trouble, but I always thought he was a good boy.”

  “Who told you he liked trouble?”

  “Oh, everybody at St. Dom’s. His father used to say he’d rather get a switching than a medal for good behavior. Why didn’t you marry him?”

  “Maybe because he ran out on us?”

  “Oh, what do you expect from a boy that age? Most of them, their brains don’t develop until they’re in their twenties, right?”

  “He didn’t deserve to be Sage’s dad.”

  Sister Bob reached for the remote control on the floor beside her and snapped off the TV. She peered at my face. “What’s wrong with your lip? Did somebody punch you?” She clapped one hand over her mouth to stifle a cry of dismay. “Oh my heaven, you didn’t go after that man at the library, did you?”

  “Nope, sorry. He’s still on the loose. No, this was something else. At work. Nothing big.”

  I poured myself a cup of coffee from Loretta’s De’Longhi and sat down at the table, where the newspaper was spread out. I saw a photo of Clarice Crabtree on top of the fold. The headline read, Double Life?

  I wanted to know who ended Clarice’s double life.

  Sister Bob struggled to her knees and used a chair to leverage herself to her feet. She went to the stove and turned up the heat under a frying pan. A fragrant sizzle rose up, and she used a wooden spoon to stir.

  Today Bob wore a pair of white sneakers with sparkles on the laces and a lavender track suit that drooped around her butt. Beneath her nose, her upper lip was still red, as if burned by hot wax. Somebody had pulled out most of her eyebrows, too. She had two skinny half-moons drawn in brow pencil on her forehead.

  “Sister Bob, you grew up with Carmine, right?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And the guys who ended up working for him. You knew them, too?”

  “Some of them.” Sister Bob cracked eggs into the frying pan over some onions and peppers and bacon that had been mingling their own deliciousness. As the eggs cooked, she sliced a loaf of Italian bread for the toaster. For a nun who’d lived for several decades in the strict life of a convent, she certainly had reverted smoothly to her upbringing.

  Within a few minutes, she slid a plate in front of me and set the frying pan in the middle of the table on a kitchen towel.

  I caught her wrist. “I need to know about the guys who did the really dirty jobs for Carmine. I only remember cigar smoke and a lot of slips of paper and dollar bills on the kitchen table. But who did the wet work?”

  If my question horrified her, she managed not to show it. Instead, she gave me the Look—a hot laser beam that nuns probably learned in weekly seminars. The Look was a weapon deployed to remind naughty children of the brevity of life—or at least the power of a nun to stand a kid in a corner for a few hours of humiliation.

  Radiating disapproval, she said, “Why do you want to know all that awful stuff?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “I understand complicated.” She poured two glasses of orange juice and sat down at the table, the power of the Look only mildly reduced. “I hear your uncle Carmine has been paying you to do his errands.”

  “Just a few.”

  “Are you hard up for money? Is that why you’re on his payroll all of a sudden? Or is it the excitement that appeals to you?”

  “I wouldn’t call it excitement, exactly.”

  “For the adrenaline rush, then. Sure, I know all about adrenaline,” she said when she saw my skeptical smile. “I know that’s half of the appeal of working for Carmine.” She met my eye. “You’re on a slippery slope, Roxana.”

  “I’m not sliding anywhere,” I said. “I just want to know who Carmine might call if he had a really big job he wanted done. A kidnapping, maybe.”

  “Kidnapping! That sounds sordid.” Sister Bob put a modest amount of breakfast on a plate for herself. “I knew all those slick fellows who worked for Carmine. They were his muscle. It was the thing to do in the neighborhood once—be a big man, be dangerous. Get special treatment in restaurants. Maybe get a discount on a car. But that’s all gone. That glamorous life of crime—it doesn’t exist anymore, not the way it looks in the movies. And eventually, each of those big men developed a guilty conscience.” Bob tapped the back of my hand with her fork. “You will, too, Roxana. Mark my words.”

  “I’m not Carmine’s muscle.”

  “No?” She speared a pepper. “Maybe Patrick Flynn isn’t the only one around here who likes getting into trouble.”

  “Me? I’ve got a daughter to think about.”

  “Good,” said Sister Bob. “Keep your priorities straight. You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.”

  “Do you see me scratching?”

  “No. I know you don’t want to be anything like your own mother, God rest her.” Bob ate some eggs, obviously thinking about me. “She didn’t pay enough attention to you, Roxana, but you turned out just fine in spite of everything, didn’t you?”

  I toyed with my breakfast and said nothi
ng.

  Sister Bob said, “You turned into a terrific mother yourself.”

  Hardly terrific, I thought. My face must have said as much.

  “You’re good with Sage,” Bob insisted. “Whether you recognize it or not. You’re a good influence on that girl, and when you can’t be, you have the sense to step aside and let others take over.”

  “I give Loretta all the credit for how Sage is turning out.”

  Bob nodded in agreement. “Loretta’s wonderful. It’s a good thing you see that. It wouldn’t hurt to say so once in a while.”

  Yeah, I’d been avoiding Loretta lately. I wasn’t sure why, but I didn’t want to talk to her right now.

  Watching Bob eat her breakfast one dainty bite at a time, I went back to my original question. “You gotta trust me when I say I’m staying out of trouble, Sister Bob. I need to know who would Carmine call to do a kidnapping, back in his heyday? You know any names?”

  “Sure, I knew all of them. Larry Spezzante, Tommy the Tank, Dutch Campisano. But they’re all dead now.”

  “All of them?”

  “Well, Dutch is in assisted living. Some people say that’s worse than a cemetery.”

  If I got lucky, Dutch might know somebody in Carmine’s organization who might still be called upon to do a kidnapping. “Hey, wait, doesn’t Dutch have a son? That guy with the road rage? Always getting arrested for rear-ending senior citizens in traffic?”

  “I don’t know. He sounds awful. I suppose I should start praying for him.”

  Half to myself, I murmured, “Maybe I should go talk to Dutch.”

  “He won’t have much to say. Alzheimer’s, I think.”

  “I’ll go see Dutch anyway.”

  “We both should go.” Sister Bob slapped the table. “Visitors might cheer him up. And I like the idea of being your sidekick on this mission. I can keep an eye on you. I’ll see what I can set up for us. Maybe this afternoon?”

  “Sure.” Sister Bob worked fast, which I liked. “Aunt Roberta, can I ask you one more thing?”

  She sipped her juice and waited.

  “You really moved in the neighborhood when you were a girl. I mean, you had dates every weekend, Loretta says. You shocked everybody when you decided to be a nun. And you stuck with it for how long? Thirty years? That’s a really long time to do something and then give it up. How come you left the convent?”

  She set her glass back on the table. “A hot flash.”

  “Huh?”

  She grinned at me. “I had my first hot flash just after I was told to resign from the hospital. I flashed right on the steps of the convent and decided it was a sign from God. Time to leave. Time to do something with my hormones before they dried up completely. Why should you young people have all the fun?”

  I laughed and thanked her for the breakfast and went outside.

  While I was still standing on the porch, my cell phone rang. I checked the ID.

  Uncle Carmine.

  Now, that was one guy I really didn’t want to talk to right now.

  I closed the phone without answering, and that’s when I noticed that parked behind my truck in the alley was a police cruiser with its engine running. A thin blue cloud of exhaust hung in the cool morning air behind the vehicle. Bug Duffy rolled down the driver’s-side window.

  13

  “You look well rested,” Bug said when I strolled over to his car. “For a fugitive.”

  I leaned my hip against his rearview mirror. “If I’d known you were hanging around out here to arrest me, I’d have invited you in for breakfast. Sister Bob made bacon and eggs.”

  “No, thanks. I’ve been up all night and snacking on doughnuts to stay awake. If you’ve got a Tums, I’ll spare the handcuffs.”

  He wore a pair of reflective sunglasses. I couldn’t see his eyes, and apparently he wanted to keep it that way.

  I said, “Sorry, I don’t have any Tums. I guess I’ll just have to outrun you.”

  “Forget it, then. I don’t feel up to chasing you.”

  “Find Clarice’s killer yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “I— Look, I’m sorry about yesterday. Losing my temper, I mean.” I didn’t want to get into a big deal about my mother and all, but I said, “You were right. I was kinda torn up about things. I didn’t mean to take it out on you. This whole friend thing—well, it’s new territory for me.”

  “Forget about it,” Bug said easily, to my great relief. “I talked to both husbands again last night. I guess we’d have figured this out sooner if I’d checked those two IDs in Clarice’s handbag, but that’s the way police work goes sometimes. ME said she was probably killed right after she was snatched, so I don’t think we could have stopped that. Both of the husbands claim they had no idea Clarice was married to somebody else.”

  “Do you believe them?”

  “Not exactly. We also started looking at Clarice’s financial records.”

  “And?”

  “She drew a small salary from the museum. So did Husband Number One—Eckelstine. But they had big expenses—nice cars, big mortgage, legal fees to keep their kid out of jail. They used credit cards erratically—ran up big debt, then paid them off in big chunks.”

  “Where’d they get the chunks of money?”

  “Eckelstine says she was paid to give speeches, but he wasn’t sure about the details. Either that, or he’s lying. Clarice took care of all their finances, he said.”

  “What’s the story with the Mitchells?”

  “Same deal. She handled the financial stuff. He mostly takes care of their kid. She’s a figure skater. Here’s where it gets interesting. You won’t believe what it costs to train a teenage ice-skater. Tens of thousands of dollars on coaching, travel, tournaments. Plus she goes to a private school—some online education with assignments the kids do on their own time. Huge tuition, plus extra fees for tutoring when she travels. I’ve got a guy working on figuring out where Clarice got the money to pay for everything. Mitchell, incidentally, has no job at all except driving the daughter back and forth between skating rinks. He devotes all his time to the kid.”

  “Maybe Clarice’s father gave her dough?”

  Bug shrugged. “Maybe. She had recently taken over his financials, too, but at first glance his assets were modest.”

  “By the looks of his house, Professor Crabtree didn’t have much extra cash. What are you doing next?”

  “Talking to banks to follow the money. Then back to the husbands. One of them probably offed her.”

  “Did you figure out who Rhonda is? Crabtree kept asking about her. I wonder if she was maybe a secretary or something. Or a sister?”

  “I forgot about Rhonda.”

  “You’ve had a lot on your mind. Look, there’s something I haven’t told you.”

  Bug squinted up at me through his sunglasses. “Just one thing?”

  I tried to smile, but couldn’t. “When I was in the house talking to Clarice that night, Nooch saw a black limousine pull up on the street.”

  Bug waited for more, saying nothing.

  “It took Nooch a while to remember to tell me. He’s forgetful. It’s not his fault. Anyway, yesterday I asked around, and it sounds to me like Dooce was in the neighborhood that night.”

  “Dooce? You mean the singer, Dooce?”

  “Yeah, him. And his assistant, some guy named Jeremy.”

  “Dooce was at the Crabtree house? When were you going to mention that?”

  “I’m mentioning it now. Look, they didn’t get out of the car or anything.”

  Bug’s expression didn’t waver, and I wanted to pull off his sunglasses to see what he was thinking. Finally, he said, “A rock singer driving by the Crabtree house doesn’t sound like a promising lead right now, Roxy.”

  It sounded pretty stupid to me, too, suddenly. So I said, “I’m just putting my cards on the table, that’s all. You know—sharing information with a friend.”

  His phone jingled, and he answered it. He checked
his watch while listening to the voice on the other end. “Yeah, I’ll be there in ten.”

  “Hot lead?” I asked when he snapped the phone shut.

  He shook his head. “I’m taking my boys to their dentist appointment.”

  Bug’s wife, I knew, had MS. He’d shouldered a lot of parental responsibilities in the last year. I felt a twinge of guilt for giving him a hard time. He had his hands full already.

  Bug tossed his phone on the passenger seat. “Look, I still need to talk to you about what happened yesterday with Clarice’s husbands. What they said to each other before I got there—that kind of thing. You available later?”

  “For you to arrest me?”

  “Not unless you provoke somebody into another street brawl. Lunch? At Roland’s? One o’clock?”

  I wondered if he’d still be awake at one o’clock, but I liked the fish sandwiches at Roland’s, so I said, “Yeah, okay.”

  Bug rolled up his window, put the cruiser in gear, and left the alley.

  I climbed into the truck and started the engine. While hunting for a radio station that would tell me more about Clarice Crabtree’s life and death, I saw a black Escalade pull into the alley.

  An Escalade. In Loretta’s alley. My urban-dweller radar switched on.

  The vehicle of city drug dealers and bad guys in general was a sleek truck with tinted windows and the full package of chrome wheels and door trim. From the angle of the sunlight, I couldn’t see who was behind the wheel of this one.

  The driver beeped his horn, and a second later Sage pushed out the door and came skipping down the sidewalk, munching on toast and smiling at the driver. She climbed in the passenger seat, and I could see her silhouette as she leaned across and kissed the driver, long and sweetly.

  I laid a hand on my horn and blasted it.

  Sage sat up quickly and buckled her seatbelt. The driver pulled away fast, throwing up a spray of gravel.

  That’s when I saw the license plate: SQUISHY.

  It was no drug dealer. It was my daughter’s new boyfriend. I considered ramming the Squishy Escalade with the Monster Truck, but I couldn’t get the beast turned around fast enough. I grabbed my cell phone and dialed Sage’s number.