Sticky Fingers (3 page)

I figured Nooch should read the next chapter in his book because at the moment, he looked like he’d robbed a bank. But he and I spent a couple of hours hauling the marble counter and the iron bars out of the bank. The whole time, Nooch moaned about his orange shirt.

I tuned out his complaints. While we worked, my thoughts kept circling back to kidnapping Clarice Crabtree. The whole idea sounded like a joke to me.

In high school, there are cool smart girls who share their civics homework when you forget to do it, and there are mean smart girls who laugh when you can’t explain the themes of
Ethan Frome
when Sister calls on you in English class. Clarice was the laughing kind.

She also had a neat blond ponytail and a little button nose in a school full of girls whose grandparents came from the hill country of Italy. She had her high school uniform tailored, while the rest of us rolled up the skirts and tied our shirttails tight around our waists. For a while, she pretended a fascination with the tattoos of the girls I ran around with in those days, but eventually she took to curling her lip when she walked past the gang of us who smoked cigarettes at the bus stop every morning.

Worst of all, she ratted out people who sneaked cherry bombs into the Spanish class Cinco de Mayo piñata.

I spent two weeks in detention for the cherry bomb incident, and had to work off the damages, too, washing blackboards for the rest of the school year. Clarice gave me smug smiles in the school hallway until classes let out in June.

Yeah, I hated her, but why anybody’d want her kidnapped, I couldn’t figure. And I knew that whatever the ransom was, it wasn’t enough to put up with being alone with Clarice for ten minutes.

Eventually I figured the whole kidnapping plot was definitely some kind of plot to entrap Carmine, and I decided to forget about it. I had better things to do than worry about my high school’s top mean girl.

Nooch and I finished loading stuff I wanted from the bank and went inside to say good-bye to Speeder. When we came outside, we discovered somebody had spray-painted the tail of the Monster Truck:

BITCH

Nooch stood beside me, staring at the word. “I don’t think that paint’s going to wash off easy.”

“No it’s not. And I smell Gino Martinelli.”

“Huh?”

“Gino did this. I’m starting to think maybe I shoulda handled things differently with him.”

Nooch looked astonished. “You never say that! Rox, this could be some kind of breakthrough for you. You should definitely borrow my book.”

“I’ll wait for the Cliff’s Notes.” I tapped my foot on the pavement. Gino was really starting to annoy me.

Nooch and I unloaded the truck at the salvage yard and drank some Red Bull in my office. Then I dropped Nooch off at the house he shared with his grandmothers. Done for the day, I went up to Bloomfield, the Little Italy neighborhood of Pittsburgh, in hopes of grabbing dinner with my daughter.

I’d given birth to Sage when I was just a kid myself, and even now I knew she was better off living with my aunt Loretta, whose house was filled with cozy fragrances and slip-covered furniture. My lifestyle wasn’t right for Sage. I had a tendency to move around a lot—not always staying one step ahead of trouble. I also needed to keep my eye on the various houses I bought, renovated fast, and flipped. Usually I camped out in the half-empty buildings rather than let local druggies destroy my property.

Loretta was a better influence. Homework got done. Healthy meals were consumed. Dinner table conversation was civilized. Nobody spray-painted insults on Loretta’s car either.

The house usually smelled deliciously of marinara sauce and garlic, but tonight I found Loretta in her kitchen surrounded by cookies. Mountains of cookies. The scent of anise and cinnamon was almost thick enough to chew, and the dining room table was stacked with Tupperware containers brimming with ladylike treats with pastel frosting and confetti sprinkles.

“Wipe your boots!” Loretta cried when I popped the door back on its hinges.

When she wasn’t practicing law, Loretta did a damn good imitation of a sitcom housewife—cooking, cleaning, and dispensing motherly advice even though she wasn’t technically anybody’s mother. Her husband had died years ago, and she’d distracted herself from the grief by trying to raise me after my own parents left the picture. Now she was shepherding Sage through the tumultuous teenage years.

The second time around, Loretta was having more success.

She stood at the stove with a frilly apron tied over a pin-striped business suit, stirring a pot. The apron had pink ruffles and said, Eat Dessert First, a mantra she would never embrace herself. Loretta was big on eating your vegetables first, which was one of the reasons I bugged out of her house as soon as I could.

She scuffed around the kitchen in her slippers. Most of the time, she tried to dress herself to be taken seriously, but it was a lost cause. Loretta was naturally soft bosomed, with big hair, lots of eye makeup, and the kind of cleavage that Hugh Hefner probably dreamed about as a pipe-smoking teenager. She had tried making the transition to the modern age by buying her suits at Brooks Brothers and getting them altered to fit her prodigious bust size. The result was a voluptuous middle-aged lady lawyer who occasionally caused elderly judges to snap their gavels.

I kicked off my boots and unzipped my sweatshirt. “Wow, did the Pillsbury Doughboy explode in here?”

Still stirring, Loretta said over her shoulder, “Before I took this new case, I promised I’d help with the cookie table for Shelby Martinelli’s wedding.”

“Gino Martinelli’s daughter?”

“You know perfectly well she’s Gino’s daughter. Did you fall on your head today? They’ve got four hundred people coming to the wedding on Saturday. Fortunately, the judge on my case got the stomach flu and sent us home early. Otherwise, I’d be in big cookie trouble.”

Loretta was an attorney, specializing in championing the elderly. Lately, she’d been suing some slacker for telephoning old people and claiming he was their grandson, stuck in Amsterdam because his pocket had been picked. You’d be surprised how many grandparents are willing to give their life savings to get their idiot grandsons out of a jam. Even grandparents who don’t have grandsons old enough to ride their tricycles in Amsterdam.

The mere mention of the Martinelli family wedding, though, put me on red alert. That, and the way Loretta didn’t meet my eye and kept her voice brisk.

Just as I had when I was a teenager and knew I was in trouble, but wasn’t sure for which infraction exactly, I tried to sound casual. “How many cookies do the Martinellis expect four hundred people to eat? After dinner and wedding cake?”

“There will be take-home containers. You know the Martinellis. Shelby’s cousin had a cookie table that ran the whole way around the Sheraton’s ballroom.”

“So they have to beat the cousin.” I took another look at the Tupperware containers. There might have been a hundred, stacked everywhere. “You baked all these cookies?”

“Heavens, no. I promised I’d do the collecting. I’ve got plenty of room in the freezers. Everybody’s dropping off tonight. By the way, I said you’d help deliver to the reception hall on Saturday morning.”

“Sure thing.”

Loretta’s basement freezers were usually stuffed with homemade pasta casseroles that could be thawed, baked, and delivered to sick neighbors, the homeless shelter, or the social hall at St. Dominic’s Church at a moment’s notice. Now and then, she helped out friends who were collecting offerings for wedding cookie tables. Sometimes, ten thousand cookies were required to make an appropriately festive cookie table. Only Loretta had enough freezer space.

A knock sounded at the back door, and Loretta handed me the wooden spoon. “Here, stir.”

“But–”

Loretta bustled to the back door and opened it. The upper half of the person standing there was obscured by the stack of more Tupperware containers.

“Hi, Loretta.” The voice came from behind the cookies. “It’s me, Irene Stossel. I’ve got buttercream horns from my mother.”

“Oh, Irene, your mother’s cream horns are the best! Everybody says so. Step inside.”

Irene did as she was told, and Loretta closed the door before pulling the top four containers out of Irene’s arms. She gave Irene the customary two kisses, then hotfooted it into the dining room to stash the new arrivals with the cookies that had already been delivered.

Obediently, Irene stood on the rug, holding the rest of the cookies. She spotted me at the stove. “Hey, Roxy. Long time, no see.”

Irene had been famous for eating glue back in kindergarten—big globs of it off her finger, the way most of us eat chocolate frosting from a can. But later, she didn’t have a regular bunch of friends to sit with in the cafeteria, and she was always one of the last girls to get picked for teams in gym class. In other words, since the glue-eating incident, she had become a pariah. It’s kind of sad when your big moment in the spotlight happened when you were six, right?

After our days in Catholic school, Irene became one of those dutiful daughters who stayed behind to take care of her parents after her siblings fled the neighborhood. As far as I knew she spent her days driving her mother around in a beige Buick to the grocery store and the salon. Irene also tended to dress like she was part of her mother’s generation. And talking with her—she could go into excruciating detail about how to choose a standing rib roast—could be like trying to make conversation with drywall.

But I took a closer look and decided Irene had changed lately. She was wearing jeans, a manly sort of orange parka, and combat boots instead of the standard beige London Fog with beige Naturalizers and beige pants with an elastic waist. I wasn’t sure what the transformation meant. Her hair–usually neatly permed into a helmet like her mother’s—was now long and frizzy.

It looked to me like Irene had untied the apron strings at last. I stayed at the stove, stirring. “Hey, Irene. Your mom okay?”

“She’s fine. I just dropped her off at the bingo game.”

“So what’s new?”

“Not much. Except I got a job managing the Greentree gun range.”

“Gun range? You mean, like, shooting?”

“Yeah, ducking bullets, that’s me.” Irene gave me a cheerful grin. “Today I had a guy who complained to me about his new gun. Said the weapon kept dropping parts every time he fired it. Turns out, it was the shell casings.”

“Wow,” I said. “What an idiot.”

“Scary who’s allowed to carry a firearm.”

“I’ll say.”

I stayed at the stove, but took a look at Irene’s parka. I wondered if she was packing while she delivered cookies.

Brightly, Irene said, “How’s your uncle Carmine?”

“Carmine? Fine, I guess.”

“I heard he’s been sick lately.”

I shrugged. “Could be. I don’t talk to him much.”

“No? Too busy? I could look in on him once in a while, if you want.”

Lots of folks in the old neighborhood still looked up to Carmine for the crime boss he used to be. Even people who never asked him for a favor or to bet on a baseball game thought he was Robin Hood or something. Sure, he used to give a few bucks to old ladies who couldn’t pay their rent, but mostly Carmine preyed on the weak and the stupid. If people knew how he’d cheated their fathers or taken advantage of their neighbors? Believe me, they wouldn’t act like he was such a great guy.

But if he kissed the bride at a wedding and tucked a hundred-dollar bill into her hand, people talked about it for years.

And here was Irene Stossel looking eager to take him chicken soup.

“Sure,” I said. “Knock yourself out.”

Loretta came back and took the remaining containers from Irene. “There you go, dear. Tell your mother I’m so relieved she could contribute. I don’t know what I’d have done without her.”

“You know Mom,” Irene said, still standing on the rug. “She’ll make cookies for anybody, anytime.”

“That’s a blessing. See you at the wedding?”

“Maybe, maybe not. I might have to work. I have a job at the gun range now.”

“Goodness,” Loretta said. “Does your mother know?”

“Yeah, she thinks it’s great. She wants a Glock for Christmas.”

“Happy holidays,” I said.

Loretta shot me a dirty look. But she said to Irene, “Just be careful, dear. And thanks for the cookies!”

I noticed Loretta didn’t invite Irene to sit down at the table for a cup of coffee and a biscotti. She practically shoved Irene out the door. “Bye, now!”

“Jeez,” I said. “What happened to Irene? She finally get laid, do you think?”

“Don’t talk like that.” Loretta went straight to the sink and washed her hands. “She’s a nice girl. Devoted to her mother. But … all right, she’s a little strange. Why would she take a job shooting guns when she could have worked at her grandfather’s bakery? He always has those pizzelles in the window—they’re so popular. Come to think of it, why hasn’t he sent any pizzelles for the wedding? I should give him a call. Here, let me stir.”

I handed over the wooden spoon and peeked into the goop in the saucepan, wrinkling my nose. “What kind of cookies are these? It doesn’t smell like anything I recognize.”

“It’s not cookie, it’s depilatory wax.”

I backed up fast and clamped one hand over my upper lip. “I don’t have a mustache!”

“Wait until menopause. It’s not for you. Your aunt Roberta is here.” Loretta pointed at the powder room door, closed, but with a bead of light shining under the door.

I relaxed, glad not to be tonight’s victim. “Has she moved in? I thought I saw her Dodge Neon parked outside.”

“She’s staying here for a little while. Tonight we decided to try getting rid of a few dark hairs.”

“A few? Loretta, in dim light, she’d pass for Uncle Salvatore.”

Aunt Roberta wasn’t really my aunt, but a cousin of Loretta’s. She was a former nun, known in the family as Sister Bob. Which explained the Dodge Neon—the car all nuns drive, for some reason. For years, she’d worked as some kind of bigwig hospital administrator, but the hospital was sold to a conglomerate and Sister Bob was asked to retire.

Instead, Sister Bob suddenly turned in her rosary and quit the nun gig. Since then, she moved from family household to family household, and everybody was working on Sister Bob’s appearance. The crazy hope that at sixty-two she might still find happiness as a married housewife burned as brightly as a candle in church.