Top Secret Twenty-One: A Stephanie Plum Novel Read online

  “Did you check on his dealerships?” I asked her. “Has he been going to work?”

  “One of them was shut down. I spoke to the managers of the remaining two, and no one’s seen him since his arrest. I guess he talked to them on the phone a few times. But not since he disappeared.”

  “Do you have addresses for his kids?”

  “One is in North Trenton, the other’s in Hamilton Township. I’ll text Lula the street addresses and also places of business.”

  I returned to State Street and headed for North Trenton.

  “His one kid lives on Cherry Street,” Lula said, reading Connie’s text message. “And it looks like he works at the button factory.”

  Twenty minutes later I parked in front of Aaron Poletti’s house. It was a narrow two-story row house, similar to my parents’ home in the Burg. Postage-stamp front yard with a small statue of the Virgin Mary in the middle of it. American flag hanging from a flagpole jutting out from the tiny front porch.

  “It’s a pretty Virgin,” Lula said. “I like when they got a blue dress like this one. It looks real heavenly and peaceful except for the chip in her head. She must have gotten beaned by a baseball or something.”

  Lula and I went to the front door, I rang the bell, and a young woman with a toddler on her hip answered.

  I introduced myself and told her I was looking for her father-in-law.

  “I do not know where he is,” she said. “And he certainly isn’t welcome here. He’s a horrible person. I mean, honestly, I have a little girl, and what he was doing was so awful.”

  “Has he been in contact with your husband?”

  “No! Well, at least not that I know. I can’t imagine Aaron even talking to him.”

  “Aaron works at the button factory?”

  “He’s on the line. His father wanted him to be part of the business, but Aaron declined. They’ve never gotten along.”

  I gave her my card and asked her to call if she learned anything new about her father-in-law.

  “Okay, so she’s not gonna call either,” Lula said when we were back in the Explorer. “Jimmy Poletti’s not gonna hide out there.”

  Probably true, but you never know for sure.

  “We gonna go to kid number two now?” Lula asked.

  “Might as well.”

  Kid number two lived in an apartment in Hamilton Township. According to Connie’s information he was twenty-two, single, and worked as a fry cook at Fran’s Fish House on Route 31.

  The apartment complex consisted of three unimaginative redbrick chunks of building hunkered down around a blacktop parking lot. Each building was two stories with a single door in its middle. Landscaping was nonexistent. This was not a high-rent deal.

  I parked, and Lula and I entered the center building and took the stairs to the second floor. The building was utilitarian. The hall was dimly lit. Probably that was a good thing, because the carpet didn’t look wonderful. We found 2C and rang the bell.

  The door got wrenched open, and a skinny guy peered out at us. He was around 5′ 10″, with bloodshot eyes, bed-head hair, reeking of weed, and his arms were decorated with burn scars, which I supposed were from working the fry station. He was wearing pink boxers with red hearts on them.

  “Oswald Poletti?” I asked.

  “Yeah. You Girl Scouts selling cookies?”

  “Nice shorts,” Lula said.

  He stared down at them as if he was seeing them for the first time.

  “Some girl gave them to me.”

  “She must hate you,” Lula said.

  I introduced myself and told him I was looking for his dad.

  “Haven’t seen him,” he said. “We aren’t close. He’s an even bigger dick than me. I mean, dude, he named me Oswald.”

  “Do you know where I might find him?” I asked.

  “Mexico?”

  I gave him my card and told him to call me if anything turned up.

  “We’re batting zero,” Lula said when we got back into the car. “You’re not gonna get a call from him ’less he needs cookies.”

  “So Jimmy Poletti’s kids don’t like him. And his wife doesn’t like him. Who do you suppose likes him?”

  “His mama?”

  I called Connie. “Do you have an address for Jimmy Poletti’s mother?”

  Two minutes later, the address appeared in a text on my phone.

  “She lives in the Burg,” I told Lula. “Elmer Street.”

  “This is getting boring. No one wants to talk to us. No one knows nothing. This keeps up and I’m gonna need lunch.”

  I turned off Hamilton at Spring Street and two blocks later turned onto Elmer. I drove one block and pulled to the curb behind a hearse. The hearse was parked in front of the Poletti house, and the front door to the house was open.

  “That don’t look good,” Lula said. “That looks like someone else who isn’t gonna talk to us. Unless it’s Jimmy. Then hooray, case closed.”

  I got out and walked to the house and stepped inside. A bunch of people were milling around inside. Two guys who looked like they were from the funeral home, an old man who was dabbing at his nose with a tissue, a man in his fifties who was more stoic, and two women. I knew one of the women, Mary Klotz.

  “What’s happening?” I asked Mary.

  “It sounds like it was her heart,” Mary said. “She’s been sick for a long time. I live across the street, and the paramedics were always here. I’d see the lights flashing once a week.”

  “The two men …”

  “Her husband and a relative. I think he’s a nephew or something.”

  “No sign of her son?”

  “He didn’t come around much. I imagine you’re looking for him.”

  “He didn’t show for his court date.” I gave her my card. “I’d appreciate a call if you see him.”

  Lula was waiting for me in the car. Lula didn’t like dead people.

  “Well?” Lula said.

  “Poletti’s mother. Sounds like a natural death. His father is still alive, but I didn’t get to talk to him. I didn’t want to intrude.”

  “Did you see her?”

  “No.”

  Lula gave a whole-body shiver. “Gives me the creeps just being here. You know there’s spirits swirling all around the house. I could practically hear them howling.”

  “Howling?”

  “That’s what they do! They come to get the dead person’s soul. Don’t you ever go to the movies? You ever see any of them Harry Potter films? Anyways, I’m getting hungry. I could use a Clucky Burger with special sauce and bacon and some cheese fries.”

  I took Lula to the drive-thru at Cluck-in-a-Bucket, then dropped her off at the office and headed for my parents’ house. They live a short distance away, in the heart of the Burg, in a duplex house that shares a common wall with a very nice widow who is older than dirt. She lives a frugal existence off her husband’s pension, has her television going every waking minute, and bakes coffee cakes all day long.

  My Grandma Mazur was at the door when I parked in front of the house. Grandma came to live with my parents when my grandfather went to the big reality TV show in the sky. We hid my father’s shotgun a month after Grandma moved in. There are times at the dinner table when his face turns red, his knuckles turn white, and we know we did the right thing by removing temptation. My mother has found her own way to cope. She drinks. Personally, I think my grandmother is a hoot. Of course, I don’t have to live with her.

  “Just in time for lunch,” Grandma said, opening the screen door. “We’re having leftover meatloaf sandwiches.”

  I followed Grandma into the kitchen. My parents don’t have central air. They have freestanding fans in all the rooms, an air conditioner hanging out of a living room window, and similar air conditioners in two of the bedrooms. The kitchen is an inferno. My mother accepts this with quiet resignation, her face flushed, occasionally dripping sweat into the soup pot. My grandmother doesn’t seem to be affected by the heat. She s
ays her sweat glands stopped working when her ovaries went south.

  I took a seat at the small kitchen table and dropped my bag onto the floor.

  “Are you after Jimmy Poletti?” Grandma asked. “I heard he skipped out on his bail bond.”

  “I talked to his wife and both his sons, and no one seems to like him or know where he’s hiding.”

  “Yeah, he’s a real stinker. His own mother didn’t even like him.”

  “I tried to talk to her too, but she’s dead.”

  “I heard,” Grandma said. “Rose Krabchek called an hour ago. Mrs. Poletti is going to be laid out at the funeral home on Hamilton. It’s going to be a good viewing. She’s high-profile now that her son is a fugitive.”

  The Burg doesn’t have a movie theater, so everyone goes to viewings at the funeral parlor on Hamilton Avenue.

  “Any gossip going around about Jimmy?” I asked Grandma.

  “Haven’t heard anything that would be useful. He had a house at the shore, but I’m told it washed away with that last hurricane. I saw pictures, and the beach isn’t even there. What happens with that? Does he own part of the ocean?”

  My mother put plates and paper napkins on the kitchen table. “Who wants a meatloaf sandwich?”

  I raised my hand. “With lots of ketchup.”

  “And chips,” Grandma said. “I want one with chips and a pickle.”

  My mother is an older version of me with shorter brown hair and a thicker waist. My grandmother used to resemble my mother, but gravity’s taken its toll and now Grandma has slack skin the color and texture of a soup chicken and steel gray hair permed into tight curls. She’s of an age where she’s fearless and has enough energy to light up Cleveland.

  “Jimmy Poletti wasn’t real popular with his family,” Grandma said, “but he sure could sell cars. He was one of them personable people on television. If I was in the market, I’d buy a car from him. He was always dressed up in a nice suit, and you could see he had a good package.”

  “He was selling girls out of the back room in his car dealership,” my mother said. “He’s a disgusting human being.”

  “I didn’t say he was a good person,” Grandma said. “I just said he had an impressive package. ’Course, maybe he faked it. Like he could have put tennis balls in his Calvins. Or he could have padded them with toilet paper. Do you think men do that?”

  I had two men in my life, and neither of them needed tennis balls.

  My mother brought the meatloaf sandwiches to the table and took a seat. “I’d see his second wife at mass sometimes. Sometimes she’d have bruises. Just terrible. She’d be praying and crying, poor woman. We were all relieved when she left him.”

  “I met his third wife,” I said. “I don’t think she’s going to be in church crying and praying.”

  “You just never know,” my mother said. “A man like that doesn’t value life. He would do anything.”

  “This is good meatloaf,” my grandmother said, taking a bite of her sandwich. “I like that you put barbecue sauce on top of it.”

  “I saw it on the Food Network,” my mother said.

  “And it’s real moist.”

  My mother chewed and swallowed. “I soaked it in bourbon.”

  THREE

  I LEFT MY parents’ house and returned to my apartment. I have some search programs on my computer, and I thought I’d do some snooping around on Poletti. I live in a perfectly okay but not fantastic apartment building on the north edge of Trenton. The building has a fancy door that fronts the street but is never used. Everyone parks in the large lot at the rear. Eighty percent of the residents are senior citizens who wear their handicapped status as a badge of honor and judge the quality of their day by how close they’re able to park to the building’s back door.

  My apartment has one bedroom, one bathroom, a small kitchen, and a combined living-and-dining room. My furniture is sparse and mostly secondhand from relatives who made their initial purchases in 1950.

  I’d just plugged Jimmy Poletti into a background search program when someone pounded on my door. I went to the door, looked out the security peephole, and saw nothing. I turned to go back to my computer and there was more pounding. I did another look out the peephole.

  “Down here,” someone yelled. “Look down, you moron.”

  I knew the voice. Randy Briggs. Not one of my favorite people. He was my age, with sandy blond hair. He was about three feet tall. And he was cranky.

  I opened the door. “What?”

  “How is that for a greeting?” he said, pushing past me into my apartment. “It’s because I’m short, right? You hate me because I’m short.”

  “I don’t care that you’re short. I like lots of things that are short. Little dogs and daffodils. I hate you because you’re mean as a snake. Would it kill you to be nice?”

  He looked up at me. “Why do you say that? Did you hear something?”

  “About what?”

  “About killing. Like that someone wants to kill me.”

  “So far as I know, everyone who meets you wants to kill you.”

  “I’m serious. Did you hear about a contract?”

  “On you?”

  “Yeah. I’m in trouble.” He went into my kitchen and looked around. “You got anything to drink? I could use a drink. Vodka rocks would be good.”

  “I haven’t got any vodka.”

  “How about wine? You got a nice pinot noir?”

  “I think I have a beer.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  I opened the beer and handed it to him. He chugged it down, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and gave me the empty bottle.

  “I suppose you want to know about the contract,” he said.

  “No.”

  “How could you not want to know?”

  “Easy. Not my business.”

  “Yeah, but we’re friends.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Boy, that’s harsh. After all we’ve been through together.” He went back out into the hall and returned with a duffel bag.

  “What’s that?” I asked, staring down at the bag.

  “My stuff. I need a place to stay.”

  “Not here.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t like you.”

  “Yeah, but my apartment got blown up. I need to stay with someone who’s got a gun.”

  “Oh no. No, no, no, no.”

  “I won’t be any trouble. Look at me. I’m little. You won’t even know I’m here.”

  “I know you’re here because I have a sharp burning pain behind my left eyeball.”

  I grabbed his duffel bag and ran for the door with it. He grabbed my leg, and I went down to one knee a couple feet short of the door.

  I tried to shake him loose. “Let go!”

  “Not until you say I can stay.”

  “Never.”

  “Please, please, please. I’ll be nice. You gotta help me. I don’t want to die. Jimmy Poletti is trying to kill me.”

  “Jimmy Poletti?”

  “Yeah, he looks nice on television but he’s a nasty bugger.”

  “Why does he want to kill you?”

  “I did his bookkeeping. I know all his secrets. The money laundering, the payoffs, the offshore accounts.”

  “He obviously hired you because he knew you were a slime bucket, so why does he suddenly think you’re a threat?”

  “When he got arrested, the cops were climbing all over everything. We managed to get rid of the paperwork, but I’m left swinging in the wind.”

  “He’s worried you’d rat him out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Would you?”

  “Hell, yes.”

  “Have you gone to the police?”

  “No. I’m sort of implicated in the cooked books. At first, my choice was to die or try a plea deal, but then I thought of you. If you can bring Poletti in, he’ll get locked up for a hundred years and he won’t kill me. And I won’t have to talk t
o the police.”

  “Okay, I’ll buy all that. But why do you have to stay here?”

  “No one else will let me in.”

  “I’d buy that too.”

  “You gotta help me,” Briggs said. “I’m a dead man without you. You know what’s left of my apartment? It’s in that duffel bag. Good thing I was in the basement doing laundry when he rocketed the firebomb through my living room window. The guy’s nuts!”

  And he wanted Randy Briggs. And I had Randy Briggs. So maybe I could somehow use Briggs as bait to capture Jimmy Poletti.

  “What?” Briggs said. “You’ve got that look. The scary look that means you’re thinking.”

  “I might let you stay if you’ll help me find Poletti.”

  “Anything.” He released my leg. “What do you want to know?”

  I took my hands off the duffel bag and stood. “Do you have any idea where he’s hiding?”

  “Not exactly,” Briggs said, “but I know where he owns property, and I know some of his mob friends.”

  “Would his mob friends hide him?”

  “Depends if they thought they could get their hands on his money. He’s got a load of money stashed away.”

  “Do you know where the money is stashed?”

  “Who, me? No.”

  “You do! That’s why he wants to kill you.”

  “It’s not like I have access to it. I just might know where he keeps it.”

  Oh boy. “What else?”

  “That’s it. I swear.”

  I spread a map of Trenton out on my dining room table. “Where are his properties?”

  “There’s the three dealerships,” Briggs said. “You know about them. Then there’s a parking garage where he keeps his inventory. It’s by the government buildings. He rents part of it out. It’s at the corner of State Street and Norton. So far as I know there aren’t any offices in it. It’s just parking. He has the house in West Trenton. I’m sure you’ve already been there and met Poletti’s soulmate.” Briggs gave an involuntary shiver. “She scares the crap out of me. They had a house at the shore, but it floated out to sea. He owns a slum on Stark Street that operates as a rooming house. And he owns houses in North Trenton that he rents out.”

  Briggs used my red Sharpie to put dots on the map, showing the property locations.