Between the Plums Page 15

  “Can you do that?”

  “No. I go where I’m needed. There aren’t a lot of people who can do my job.”

  “Were there any customers?” Burlew asked.

  “No,” I told him. “Nobody bought anything.”

  “The coffee delivery scheme isn’t working,” Diesel said. “We need to think of something else.”

  “The coffee delivery scheme is perfectly okay. It’s Burlew we need to fix. He needs practice,” I said. “I’m going to be the coffee person, and you be Larry. I’ll walk in, and you start a conversation with me, so he can see how it’s done.”

  I went outside, and then I came in again.

  “Here’s your coffee,” I said to Diesel, pretending to hand him a cup of coffee.

  “Thanks,” Diesel said. And he grabbed me and kissed me.

  I pushed away from him. “What the heck was that about?”

  Diesel was rocked back on his heels, smiling. “I felt like kissing you. It was cold outside, and you’re all nice and warm.”

  “Boy. I wish I could do that,” Burlew said. “That was great.”

  “It wasn’t great,” I said to Burlew. “That was a bad example. Diesel’s a nut. I’m going to go out and come in again, and this time I’m going to hand you the coffee.”

  I went outside and stood on the sidewalk for a moment, sucking in cold air. The kiss had actually been pretty damn terrific. Not that it was going to lead to anything, but it was terrific all the same. I pulled myself together and came back in and pretended to hand Burlew a cup of coffee.

  Burlew took the coffee and looked at me blank-faced.

  “What do you say?” I asked him.

  “Thank you.”

  “What else?”

  Burlew was stumped.

  “Tell her your name,” I said.

  “Larry Burlew.”

  “My name is Jet,” I told him.

  Silence.

  I jumped back in. “Tell her you think her name is unusual. Ask her if it means something.”

  “That’s stupid,” Diesel said. “He’ll sound like a dork.”

  “What would you suggest?”

  “I’d get right to it. I’d tell her I was going to catch the Knicks game at the sports bar down the street, and I’d ask her if she wanted to join me.”

  “You can’t just say ‘Thanks for the coffee’ and then ask her out to a bar. It’s too abrupt. And how do you know she’s a Knicks fan?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s a guy thing. It makes him look like a guy. If he says something dorky about her name, she’ll think he’s a pussy. Anyway, if she wants to go out with him she’ll say yes. If she doesn’t say yes you know it’s a lost cause and you move on.”

  “I don’t like basketball,” Burlew said.

  “What do you like?”

  “I like opera.”

  Diesel was hands on hips. “You’re shitting me.”

  Burlew fixed his attention on the display case. “There’s a pork roast missing. Are you sure you didn’t sell anything?”

  “I gave it away. It was a charity thing. Girl Scouts.”

  Diesel’s attention wandered to the street. “Hey, get this,” he said. “Coffee Girl must be off work for the day. She’s got her coat on, and her purse over her shoulder, and it looks like she’s coming over here. She’s out of the coffee shop and crossing the street.”

  “Oh no,” Burlew said. “She doesn’t have more coffee, does she?”

  “No,” Diesel said. “No coffee.”

  The bell chimed on the front door, and Jet walked in. “Hi,” she said to me. “Your cousin is going to make me employee of the month for selling so much coffee.” Her attention turned to Diesel. “Hello,” she said.

  “He’s gay,” I told her. “Flaming.”

  Jet sighed. “I knew he was too good to be true.” She looked over at Larry Burlew.

  “Straight as an arrow,” I said.

  Jet nodded. “It’s important to know stuff like that about your . . . butcher. Like, is he married?”

  “Nope. Totally available.”

  “So I would be smart to buy meat here?”

  “You wouldn’t regret it,” I said.

  “Good. I feel like steak tonight.”

  Diesel slid a look at me. “Carnivore,” he whispered.

  Jet directed her attention to Burlew. “What looks tasty?”

  “Do you want to grill it, or broil it, or pan-fry it?” Burlew asked.

  “I don’t know. Something healthy.”

  “I have a great recipe that I do with sirloin,” Burlew said. “I marinate it and then I broil it with vegetables.”

  “That sounds terrific,” Jet said. “Maybe you could show me how to do it.”

  “Sure,” Burlew said. “It’s real easy. I could do it tonight if you want. And I’ll bring the steak and stuff with me.”

  Jet wrote her address on a scrap of butcher paper. “Come over whenever you’re done with work. I’ll get some wine.” And she left.

  Diesel and I looked at Burlew.

  “What the hell was that?” Diesel asked.

  “I’m good when it comes to meat,” Burlew said.

  It was twilight when we left the butcher shop. Streetlights were glowing behind swirling snow, and Trenton was looking cold but cozy.

  “We’re hot at this relationship shit,” Diesel said. “We do things all wrong, and it all turns out right.”

  We drove back to Beaner’s neighborhood and cruised several blocks. Diesel stopped in front of Ernie’s, and I ran in to take a fast look. No Beaner in sight, so I returned to the car.

  “It’s too early,” Diesel said. “We should come back around eight.”

  “We need to get to my parents’ house anyway,” I told him. “I said we’d be there for dinner.”

  “We?”

  “I didn’t want you to feel left out.”

  “I remember your parents. They run a loony bin.”

  “Okay. Fine. Drop me off at the door.”

  “No way,” Diesel said. “I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”

  “We just have to make a fast stop at my apartment to get Bob.”

  A half hour later, we opened my bathroom door, and Bob looked out at us, all droopy-eyed and drooling and panting. He did some pathetic whimpering noises, opened his mouth, and said gak! And barfed up a roll of toilet paper.

  “Better than a couch,” Diesel said.

  I cleaned up the toilet paper and put a new roll in the holder. By the time I was done, Bob was completely perked up, affectionately rubbing against Diesel, spreading dog slime the length of his leg.

  “Probably I should change clothes before we go to your parents’ house,” Diesel said.

  For sure.

  Diesel pulled a pair of jeans and a shirt out of his backpack. They were exact duplicates of what he was wearing, minus the slime and pizza sauce. No better, no worse. He peeled his shirt off, unlaced his boots, and stepped out of his boots and jeans.

  “Good God,” I said and whirled around, so I wasn’t facing him. Not that it mattered. The image of Diesel in briefs was burned into my brain. Ranger and Morelli, the two men in my life, were physically perfect in very different ways.

  Ranger was Cuban American with dark skin and dark eyes and sometimes dark intentions. He had a kickboxer’s body and Special Forces skills. Morelli was hard and angular, his temperament Italian, his muscle and skill acquired on the street. Diesel was put together on a larger scale. And while I couldn’t see details, I suspected he was larger everywhere.

  ______

  My grandmother was setting the table when we arrived. The extension was in, and the kitchen chairs and a kid’s high chair had been brought out to seat ten. Valerie and Albert were already there. Albert was watching television with my dad. I could hear Valerie in the kitchen talking to my mom. Her oldest girl, Angie, was on the floor in the living room coloring in a coloring book. The middle kid, Mary Alice, was galloping around the dining room table,
pretending she was a horse. The baby was on Albert’s lap.

  All action stopped when Diesel walked in.

  “Oh jeez,” my father said.

  “Nice to see you again, sir,” Diesel said.

  “I remember you,” Mary Alice said. “You used to have a ponytail.”

  “I did,” Diesel said, “but I thought it was time for a change.”

  “Sometimes I’m a reindeer,” Mary Alice said.

  “Is it different from being a horse?” Diesel asked her.

  “Yeah, ’cause when I’m a reindeer I got antlers, and I can fly like Rudolph.”

  “Can not,” Angie said.

  “Can, too.”

  “Can not.”

  “I can fly a little,” Mary Alice said.

  I cut my eyes to Diesel.

  Diesel smiled and shrugged.

  I let Bob off his leash, left Diesel in the living room to charm my father, and went to the kitchen to check in with my mother. “Is there anything I can do?” I asked.

  “You can spoon the red sauce into the gravy boat, and you can try to talk some sense into your grandmother. She won’t listen to me.”

  “Now what?”

  “Have you seen her?”

  “She was setting the table.”

  “Did you take a good look?”

  Grandma Mazur shuffled into the kitchen. She was in her seventies, and gravity hadn’t been kind. She was all slack skin and dimpled flesh draped on a wiry frame. Her hair was steel gray and permed. Her teeth were bought. Her eyes didn’t miss much. Her lips were horribly swollen.

  “We’re oud a nakins,” she said. “There’s no ore in da china canet.”

  “Omigod,” I said. “What happened to your mouth?”

  “Sexy, hunh?” Grandma said.

  “She had her lips plumped up,” my mother said. “She went to some idiot doctor and had herself injected.”

  “An nex eek I’n gettin’ ass inlans,” Grandma said. “No ore saggy ass for ee.”

  “Ass implants are serious,” I told her. “You might not want to do that.”

  “Ere’s a sale on inlans nex eek,” Grandma said. “I hade ta niss a sale.”

  “Yes, but implants have to be incredibly painful. You won’t be able to sit. Why don’t we just find a sale on shoes? We can go to Macy’s and then have lunch in the food court.”

  “Okay,” Grandma said. “At sounds like un.”

  My mother took the lasagna and I took the red sauce and Grandma took a basket of bread to the table. Everyone seated themselves and dug in.

  Grandma Mazur took some lasagna and poured herself a glass of red wine. She forked some lasagna into her mouth and took a sip of wine and everything fell out of her mouth, onto her lap.

  Bob rushed over and ate the food off Grandma’s lap, and then settled himself back under the table, ever alert.

  “Ny lith are oo ig,” she said. “Dey don ork.”

  My mother jumped up and returned with a straw for Grandma and a tumbler of booze for herself.

  My father had his head bent over his lasagna. “Just shoot me,” he said.

  “I like lasagna,” Albert Kloughn said. “It stays on your plate. And if you don’t use too much red sauce, hardly any gets on your shirt.”

  Kloughn was a struggling lawyer who got his degree from the Acme School of Law in Barbados. He was a nice guy, but he was as soft as a fresh nuked dinner roll, and his upper lip broke out into a sweat when he got nervous . . . which was a lot.

  “How’s the law business?” I asked him.

  “It’s good. I even have a couple clients. Okay, one eventually died, but that happens sometimes, right?”

  “And how’s the new house?”

  “It’s working out real good. It’s a lot better than living with my mother.”

  “And what about getting married?”

  Kloughn turned white, farted, and fell off his chair in a faint.

  Diesel got up and dragged Kloughn to his feet and sat him back in his chair. “Take a deep breath,” Diesel said to Kloughn.

  “How embarrassing,” Kloughn said.

  “Dude,” Diesel said, “everyone feels like that about marriage. Get over it.”

  “Poor snuggle uggums,” Valerie said, spoon-feeding Kloughn some noodles. “Did him hurt himself?”

  Diesel draped an arm across my shoulders and put his mouth to my ear. “We definitely want to go with the stun gun. In fact, I think we should stun-gun both of them.”

  “Maybe you can get Albert to take a walk with you after dinner, and you can talk to him. He got in touch with Annie and asked for help, so he’s obviously motivated.”

  “That would be high on the list of things I don’t want to do. Second only to getting zapped by Beaner.”

  “About Beaner . . . just exactly what is it that happens when he zaps someone?”

  “You don’t want to know. And I don’t want to tell you. Let’s just leave it alone for now.”

  “I’ve been thinking about Beaner. Maybe we should talk to Mrs. Beaner. Does she live in the Trenton area?”

  “She lives in Hamilton Township.”

  “Is she Unmentionable? Does she have scary, evil skills?”

  “She’s mildly Unmentionable. Doesn’t do much with it. Mostly parlor tricks. Bending spoons and winning at rummy. I interviewed her when I got the Beaner assignment.”

  “And?”

  “You know everything I know. She said she was tired of marriage. Wanted to try something else. She told me Beaner blamed it all on Annie Hart, but Annie didn’t have anything to do with it. Annie was just a friend. She didn’t know where Beaner was staying, but clearly it was in the Trenton area because he was determined to get even with Annie.”

  “That’s it? Why didn’t you ask her to lure Beaner over to discuss things, and then you could jump out of the closet and do your bounty hunter thing and capture Beaner?”

  “She knows better than to be around when Beaner goes down. There’ll be fallout, and she wants no part of it.”

  “What about you? Aren’t you afraid of Beaner?”

  “It takes a lot to damage me, and Beaner doesn’t have that kind of power. The best he could do is make me mildly uncomfortable.”

  “Okay, how about this? We get Mrs. Beaner to lie to her husband. Set up a bogus meeting.”

  “Tried that. She wouldn’t do it.”

  I mushed a piece of bread around in my leftover sauce. “You know what that means.”

  Diesel did a palms-up. He didn’t know what it meant.

  “She still cares about him,” I said. “She doesn’t want to betray him. She doesn’t want him captured and neutralized or whatever it is that you do.”

  Diesel helped himself to a second chunk of lasagna. “Maybe. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to get involved.”

  “I could talk to her.”

  “Probably not a bad idea,” Diesel said. He looked at his watch. “Here’s the plan. I get Albert out into the air and walk him around the block and try to figure out what the heck he wants to do about getting married. You talk to your sister and see if she’s on board. And at eight, we try our luck at Ernie’s Bar. If thing’s don’t work out, tomorrow you visit Mrs. Beaner.”

  7

  We were in my car, on our way to Ernie’s. It had stopped snowing, but the sky was moonless black, and the air had a bite to it.

  “How’d it go with Albert?” I asked Diesel.

  “He didn’t faint, but he wasn’t real coherent. From what I can tell, he wants to get married, but the thought of the ceremony freaks him out. Apparently the poor guy’s even tried getting hypnotized, but he still can’t get down the aisle.”

  “How about tranquilizers?”

  “He said he tried them and had an allergic reaction and went gonzo.”

  “I talked to Valerie, and she pretty much told me the same thing. Not that I didn’t know it already. He’s really a sweet guy. He loves the kids, and he loves Valerie, and I know he would love being mar
ried. It’s getting married that’s the problem.”

  Diesel cruised down the street and pulled to the curb across from Ernie’s.

  “Is he in there?” I asked Diesel.

  “I don’t think so,” Diesel said after a couple beats, “but it wouldn’t hurt for you to take a look anyway.”

  I crossed the street, pushed through the big oak door into the warm pub, and hiked myself up onto a barstool. No trouble claiming a seat. Ernie’s was an after-work place, not a Saturday night date destination, and it was eerily empty. A few regulars nursed drinks at the bar and numbly watched the overhead television. The tables were empty. The lone bartender ambled over to me.

  “What’ll it be?” he asked.

  “I’m looking for a friend. He was here last night. Has a birthmark on his face. His name’s Bernie.”

  “Yeah, I know the guy. Didn’t know his name was Bernie. Not real talky. Pays in cash. He hasn’t been in today. We get a different crowd during the week. Saturday and Sunday it’s real slow. Were you supposed to meet him?”

  “No. Just thought I might run into him.”

  I left the bar and returned to the car. “He’s not there,” I told Diesel. “The bartender said he hasn’t seen him. Maybe we spooked him off this afternoon. Maybe he saw us walking around looking for him.”

  Diesel was behind the wheel with his phone in his hand. “I have a problem,” he said. “Annie isn’t answering. I check on her four times a day. This is the first time she hasn’t answered.”

  “Maybe she’s in the shower.”

  “She knows I call at this time. She’s supposed to be there. I’m having a guy I know drop in on her. He lives in her building.”

  “Why aren’t you staying with him?”

  “He has a girl living with him. And he’d drive me nuts. You drive me nuts, too, but in a more interesting way.”

  Oh boy. “Do you think Beaner found Annie?”

  Diesel did a palms-up. “Don’t know.”

  Diesel’s phone rang, and he looked at the readout. “It’s Flash,” he said to me.

  “The guy in Annie’s building?”

  “Yeah.”

  A minute later, Diesel disconnected, put the car in gear, and pulled into the stream of traffic. “She isn’t in the apartment. The door was locked. Nothing seemed to be disturbed.”