Twisted Twenty-Six (Stephanie Plum 26)

by Janet Evanovich

  St. Francis Medical Center is on the edge of the Burg and a three-minute car ride from my parents’ house. I parked, got Benny’s room number from the attendant at the lobby desk, and went straight to his room.

  There were two beds. One was empty. Benny was in the other. He was in a hospital gown, looking like he was about to give birth to twins. He had an oxygen thing hooked up to his nose and an IV drip hooked up to his arm. He was clearly shocked to see me.

  “What the hell?” he said.

  “I heard you were here,” I said, “and I thought you might be hungry.” I opened the pizza box and set it on his bedside table.

  “Oh man,” Benny said. “That’s a Pino’s with the works.” He pushed a button on the side of his bed, and it raised him up into a sitting position. “Close the door a little so the nurses don’t see. I’m supposed to be on a special diet.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “Maybe you shouldn’t eat this.”

  “You try to take this away and I’ll kill you. I could do it too. I know I look like a pussy in this hospital gown, but I’ll do whatever it takes to keep this pizza. They fed me Cream of Wheat and Jell-O for lunch. It was disgusting.”

  I closed the door and walked back over to him. “So, what’s the deal here? You looked healthy last time I saw you.”

  “I got a lot of plaque, whatever the hell that is. They put these stent things in me and then I’m okay. Gonna get another one on Monday. Personally, I think it was stress this time.” He took a bite and closed his eyes. Some pizza grease ran down his chin. “Oh boy. Oh man. There’s nothing like a Pino’s pie.”

  “What were you stressed about?”

  “Your granny, what else? She’s got the keys, and now it’s a real cluster fuck. Excuse my language, but that’s what it is. We should never have listened to Julius. He kept saying to give her more time. ‘She’ll come around,’ he said. ‘She’s grieving.’ ” He finished the first piece and took a second.

  “Did Charlie or Lou come to visit you? Do they know you’re here?”

  “They got their hands full. They got to negotiate now.”

  “What are they negotiating?”

  “Price. The asshole who has your granny is nuts. If we’d snatched her in the beginning it wouldn’t have cost us anything. Now this guy wants to ruin us.”

  “Do you know who it is?”

  “No. It’s all done by Internet and throwaway phones. If you ask me, technology sucks. Nothing’s personal anymore.”

  “But you know it’s a guy?”

  “No. I just assume.” He started on another piece of pizza. “You should have brought beer with this.”

  “Next time,” I said.

  “You’re okay,” Benny said. “You come here to pump me for information, but you’re nice enough to bring pizza. And I like that you listen. It’s like we’re just having a conversation.”

  “I think you’re okay, too,” I said to Benny. “Take care. I hope everything works out on Monday.”

  “Walk in the park,” Benny said.

  My mom and dad were still at the table when I got back. I got a soda from the fridge and helped myself to a slice of the extra cheese.

  “Who got the pizza?” my mom asked.

  “Benny the Skootch. He’s in the hospital. Needs a stent.”

  “Him and everybody else,” my dad said. “You get to be our age and things start to clog up.”

  “I didn’t know you were friends with Benny,” my mom said.

  “I wanted to ask him if he knew who took Grandma.”

  “Did he know?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  I finished eating and went into the kitchen with my mom. She tidied up and I sat at the little table and read through the Miracle Fitness list. It was a long list, and I took my time. Morelli and his co-workers couldn’t find a connection between Lucca and the La-Z-Boys. Ranger and Connie couldn’t find anything in Lucca’s history that would connect him to the La-Z-Boys. The connection had to be on the list in front of me. I got through all the names and came back to Barbara. She had real motivation. She never got over the divorce. She had anger. And she wanted money. Maybe not for herself, but for Jeanine and her grandchildren. If she couldn’t access whatever treasure the keys had locked away, she could ransom Grandma to the La-Z-Boys. It was smart. Actually, it was brilliant.

  I called Morelli and told him about my visit with Benny and my theory about Barbara.

  “I’m impressed,” Morelli said. “I took the wrong approach with Benny, and you did the right thing. And I think you’re right about Barbara. She has a motive, and she has the connection. I just can’t see her acting alone.”

  “If she was able to talk Lucca into kidnapping Grandma, she probably is capable of finding another fall guy.”

  “I’m tied up right now. I was pulled off the kidnapping temporarily. Had a gang bloodbath in the projects. I’ll be here all night, but tomorrow morning we’ll visit Barbara. In the meantime, you might want to have Ranger do something illegal, like put her under physical and technical surveillance.”

  I hung up and looked over at my mom. “You’re still not ironing.”

  “It isn’t the same without your grandmother making fun of me.”

  “I’m heading out,” I told her. “If anything scary happens, call me right away.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I DROVE FROM my parents’ house directly to Barbara Rosolli’s. Waiting for Morelli or asking Ranger for help would be the smart thing to do, but sometimes you need to go with your gut and just charge ahead. Morelli and Ranger were intimidating. Me, not so much. Barbara would be more willing to talk to me if I was alone. I didn’t think she was going to admit to kidnapping Grandma, but she might slip and say something useful. And if she didn’t make a slip, I had a speech prepared to spur her into action.

  I rang her bell, and she answered the door with a glass of wine in her hand. Yes! Off to a good start.

  “Stephanie,” she said, looking around me. “Where’s Mr. Sexy?”

  “I’m alone.”

  “Too bad. He was hot.”

  “Can I come in for a moment?”

  “Sure, what the hell, join the party. Jeanine and I were having a glass of wine. Her husband is working late again.”

  They were drinking wine at the kitchen table. This is something I would do with my mom. There was comfort at the table that couldn’t be found anyplace else in the house. I sat down and accepted a glass of wine. There was a chunk of Parmesan on a cutting board, and some slivers had been sliced off.

  It was disarming that I was invited to be part of this. Just as it was disarming that Benny was happy to have me visit. I was on the hunt for kidnappers and killers, and it would have been easier if everyone was rude.

  “Here’s to us,” Barbara said, and we clinked glasses.

  “And here’s to Edna,” Jeanine said. “Let’s hope she’s okay and returns to us soon.”

  “Oh God,” Barbara said. “Do I have to drink to that?”

  “Mom!” Jeanine said.

  “Okay, okay,” Barbara said. “Here’s to Edna.”

  I took a slice of the Parmesan. “This is really good,” I said. “Did you get this at Giovichinni’s?”

  “Of course,” Barbara said. “You don’t find hard cheese like that at the supermarket.”

  “It’s nice that you live next door to each other and you can get together like this,” I said. “Does Bernie work late a lot?”

  “No. It’s that they got a big order for precast and some machine broke down. Bernie wanted to stay with the mechanic who was working on the machine. These guys get time and a half for overtime. The Cement Plant looks like a big business, but the profit margin is slim. I guess it gets eaten up fast with time-and-a-half paychecks.”

  “It’s disgraceful that you and Bernard should have to worry about those things,” Barbara said. “Your father should have put money aside for you. And now even in death the money will go to other places.” />
  “Bernie and I don’t need Daddy’s money,” Jeanine said. “We’re doing okay.”

  Barbara chugged half a glass of wine. “The whole La-Z-Boy thing is bizarre anyway. A bunch of old men sitting around in recliners in a nudie club. Ick!”

  Here was the opening for my speech! I’d seen it done in Sherlock Holmes movies, and it always worked. Let the guilty person think you knew all about them, so they’d make a hasty move and screw up.

  “I talked to Benny today,” I said. “He’s in the hospital waiting to get stented.”

  Jeanine went wide-eyed. “You talked to Benny? Isn’t he a kidnapping suspect? What did he say?”

  “He was angry that the La-Z-Boys didn’t kidnap Grandma sooner. They dragged their feet on it, and now someone else has her and is essentially ransoming her to them.”

  Barbara gave a bark of laughter. “I love it.”

  “So, do you know who has her?” Jeanine asked.

  “Yeah, I think I do,” I said. “Benny didn’t tell me any names, but I’m pretty sure I have it figured out.”

  “Who?” Jeanine asked.

  “I don’t want to say until I’m sure. I’m waiting for Morelli to get off work. I want to run it by him before I officially go to the police with it.”

  I watched Barbara when I laid the trap. She didn’t look panicked. Mostly she looked like she’d had a skosh too much wine and was having a hard time focusing.

  “Well, I should be going,” I said. “Thanks for the wine. This was nice. We should do this more often.”

  I got in my Macan, drove around the block, and parked a couple houses down from Barbara’s house. I cut my lights and settled back to wait. In the Sherlock Holmes movies it took no time at all for the guilty person to leave their home and go to the scene of the crime to make sure everything was still okay.

  After I’d waited for almost an hour, a car cruised down the street and turned into Jeanine’s driveway. Bernie was home from work. Barbara’s lights went off in her house, and I had high hopes that she’d get into her car and lead me to Grandma. After twenty minutes I decided that Barbara had gone to bed. So much for Sherlock Holmes.

  I rode past my parents’ house. It was dark except for a single light in an upstairs bedroom window. I rode past Morelli’s house next. Dark. No green SUV parked in front. He was still at work.

  I went home and studied the Miracle list one more time. I turned the television on to Turner Classics. A Charlie Chan movie was playing. Black and white. 1936. Maybe it wasn’t Sherlock Holmes who used the bluff to smoke out the villain. Maybe it was Charlie Chan. Maybe it was every movie detective between the years 1933 and 1945. When you watch movies late at night with a glass of wine, they tend to blur together.

  Halfway through Charlie Chan I went to the kitchen for a snack and heard what sounded like a kitten mewing on the other side of my door. I looked out my security peephole. Nothing. Nobody there. The mewing continued. I opened my door and looked down at a small gray kitten.

  Something went ZINNNG in my head, and when I came around I was confused and in a state of utter panic. I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t open my mouth. I couldn’t see. My heart was pounding in my chest, and I was struggling to breathe. I think I was crying, but it was impossible to know for sure in the confusion and darkness. I could have been sweating. I could have been having a nightmare and nothing was real. For a moment I thought I was buried alive.

  The confusion started to clear, and I inched into survival mode. One step at a time, I told myself. Breathe. Think. Hard to tell if I was blind or simply in total darkness. I saw a thin seam of light above me. I wasn’t blind. I was in a container. I could feel the sides. It had a lid, but the lid wasn’t completely sealed. I couldn’t remember being placed in a container. What did I remember? A kitten. And then a big blank space. I wasn’t in pain, so I hadn’t been hit on the head and knocked out. I’d probably been stunned. And it had been a big charge. That would mean I’d been completely out for just a few minutes. It could have been longer if I’d gotten stunned a second time. The confusion would have lasted five or ten minutes. I’d stun-gunned a lot of people, and I knew the progression of symptoms. I was okay with this. Better to be stunned than to have a concussion.

  I couldn’t open my mouth. Duct tape, I thought. My hands were bound behind my back. Not with cuffs or plasti-cuffs. More duct tape. There was vibration under me. I was being taken somewhere in a truck or a van. I could sense when we stopped and when we took a corner.

  Charlie Chan came through for me. My bluff had worked. I’d been abducted by the amateur. Barbara. She’d found a couple new goons to work for her, and here I was getting trucked away and hopefully they’d take me to Grandma. The troublesome part of all this was that she’d already killed a guy who’d become a liability. I didn’t have my cellphone on me. Nothing that Ranger could track. We slowed and bumped over a stretch of uneven surface. I hoped we weren’t at the landfill. That thought gave me another moment of panic.

  We came to a stop, and I heard a vehicle door slam shut and another get wrenched open. My container was tipped back slightly, and I was rolled a couple feet and then dropped a couple feet, hitting hard on what I assumed was the ground. I sniffed the air. It didn’t smell like the landfill. I was tipped back again and rolled along. I couldn’t tell how many people were walking with me. There was no talking. The person dragging me was breathing heavily. Out of shape or maybe nervous and scared. There were scraping sounds, and I was jerked up a step. Just one. Door threshold, I thought. Door slammed shut.

  I heard muffled speech from someone a short distance away. A latch was released, the lid to the container was opened, and the container was dumped on its side. I blinked in the sudden light and saw that I’d been stuffed into a blue recycling container with wheels. Someone grabbed the back of my shirt and pulled me out. It was Bernard Stupe.

  I was in a windowless room about the size of a two-car garage. Grandma was at the far end, standing beside a cot. She looked disheveled but alert. There were some water bottles and fast food bags on the floor by the cot. She was handcuffed to a chain that stretched through an open door behind her. I could see part of a toilet through the door.

  “Asshole,” Grandma yelled at him.

  “Shut up,” Bernie yelled back. “One more word and no more cookies.”

  Grandma gave him the finger. “Cookie this, you dirtbag.”

  He ripped the tape off my mouth and rolled the recycling bin over to the door.

  “I didn’t see this coming,” I said. “I’m surprised you would throw in with Barbara.”

  “Barbara has no part in this,” Bernie said.

  “Jeanine?”

  “Are you kidding me? Ms. Turn the Other Cheek and Be a Good Person? Miss Sweetness and I’m So Sorry? I don’t think so.” He went out the door and returned with a length of chain and a padlock. “I wasn’t counting on this, so I’m going to have to improvise. I thought it was all finally moving along to a happy ending, and then Jeanine came home and told me you had it figured out. She said you talked to Benny and you’d figured out who was masterminding everything. Okay, so she didn’t say ‘mastermind,’ but that’s what she meant.”

  He dragged me up to my feet and over to Grandma. He wrapped the chain around my ankle and secured it with the padlock. He walked the other end of the chain into the bathroom, and I could hear him fidgeting with it.

  He came out, took a pocketknife from his jeans pocket, and sliced the duct tape off my wrists. I reached out to grab him, but he jumped away.

  “I don’t get it,” I said to Bernie. “Why did you hire those two guys to kidnap Grandma?”

  “Zeus and what’s his name? It was a reasonable idea in the beginning. It was supposed to be that this big strong guy waits for the right moment, snatches the old lady, and brings her here to stay for a couple days. It’s calm. It’s simple. It’s relatively nonviolent. Turns out Zeus is a moron. He picks up some loser idiot at a bar and they decide to go in like a S
WAT team on a suicide mission. What the heck was he thinking? He broke down a kitchen door and disrupted your mother’s ironing. They weren’t supposed to be armed. Guns weren’t part of the plan.”

  “You hired the god of Thunder,” Grandma said. “What did you expect?”

  “I know,” Bernie said. “It was a bad choice.”

  “You should have hired a less macho god.”

  “He was the only one who needed money,” Bernie said. “Zeus was a big spender.”

  “And then you killed him?” I asked.

  “I had to. He was in a panic. He was going to turn himself in. He would have ruined everything.”

  “Bernie,” I said. “How could you do that? You aren’t a killer.”

  “I am now,” Bernie said. “And it was surprisingly easy. BANG. Ironic, right? All those years when Jimmy would have nothing to do with me. I wasn’t fit to be in the mob. I wasn’t good enough for them. I know what everyone said about me. Bernard isn’t too bright. Bernard isn’t Italian. His relatives are from one of those inferior eastern European countries. Tea drinkers.” Bernie closed the blade on his knife and put it back in his pocket. “And it turns out I can kill without remorse. Go figure.”

  “So, what is this about?” I asked. “Getting even?”

  “It’s about getting even and about the chance to start my life over. Someplace far, far away.”

  “Why do you want to start it over? You have a good life. A good job. A loving wife.”

  “I have a shit job. I hate my job. My father left the company to my brother. He’s two years younger than I am. The company should have been mine. Not that I wanted it. The Concrete Plant. Do you know what we do? We pour concrete into molds and sell the blocks.”

  “What would you rather do?” I asked him.

  “As it turns out, I’d rather kill people.”

  “That’s not a step up from concrete,” Grandma said.

  “Anyway, as it happens, I’m brilliant,” Bernie said. “While the La-Z-Boys are going nuts because they can’t find the keys, I found a way to benefit from their stupidity. I don’t know what the keys look like. Don’t care. I don’t know what they open. Don’t care. For that matter, I don’t know if Grandma here is going to be any help to them. Don’t care. What I do know is that they think Grandma has the sacred keys. And they’re willing to pay big bucks for Grandma. Grandma is my ticket out of the Concrete Plant. Even Julius Roman thought I was a genius. He approached me at the Bonino viewing. Said he met a business associate in the alley and was on his way home when he saw me dump Lucca. Said he figured I was going to extort money from the La-Z-Boys, and he wanted in on it.”