Sticky Fingers (17 page)

“Let me check Facebook,” Sage said. “Maybe I can learn something.”

Facebook checking involved going through the steps of being “friended,” which sometimes took a while, so I finished off the cookies and put my head on Sage’s pillow. She typed and clicked, and I closed my eyes.

Sage’s room had been mine up until she was born. I hadn’t spent much time in it when I was a teenager. Mostly, it was a place to crash when I wasn’t out running around. I’d painted the room pink before Sage was born, though, and the two of us had shared it until she started first grade. I kept her in a crib in the corner at first; then we shared the double bed.

Gradually, though, I’d moved my life out of the house. As Sage grew into a person who needed a parent, Loretta took over more and more of the daily routine of child rearing. I checked in most nights and helped her with her algebra, her geometry, and finally trigonometry. But Loretta was the grown-up in Sage’s daily life. Maybe that had been a bad thing for me to do.

The more Sage had watched me, though, the more I’d felt like I was doing everything wrong.

Tonight it felt nice to be back in the room we’d shared. Cozy. Uncomplicated.

Fleetingly, I wondered if Clarice had been a good mother. Did she tuck her kids into bed every night? Check their report cards? Make special sandwiches? Set a good example? How had she pulled it all off?

I woke up in the morning when Sage hit her alarm and rolled out of bed for school.

While she bustled around the room, she told me what she learned about Richie Eckelstine.

“He got arrested for graffiti.” Sage wriggled into a pair of black leggings and pulled a short dress over her head. “He did a couple thousand dollars of damage at his school and got caught when his friends turned him in.”

I yawned. “Nice friends.”

“Graffiti might look cool, Mom, but it’s the first sign of neighborhoods going to pot, not to mention expensive to clean up. After the school incident, the police figured out he was responsible for spraying paint all over a bunch of businesses. Even some university buildings. He was in big trouble. His parents agreed to pay damages, though.”

I sat up and pushed away a throw blanket that somebody had tucked around me during the night. “How did you learn of all this? Facebook?”

Sage grabbed a couple of shirts out of her closet and held them up against herself, looking in the mirror to check her reflection. She gave me a grin in her mirror. “I have my methods.”

“You’re a genius.” I stretched in the bed. “Can I give you a lift to school?”

“No, thanks. I like walking. It clears my head. Gets me ready for the academic challenges of the day.”

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 nothing.

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.”