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“Not at this moment, but I’m thinking about it.”
“Would you like me to stay here tonight?”
“It would be a waste. I can barely keep my eyes open. I’m going to go to bed and sleep for days.”
“I might not care.”
I punched him in the arm, and he got up and walked to the door.
“Call if you need me,” he said.
I fell asleep on the couch, and Morelli woke me up at six o’clock. He had Bob with him and a bag of food from Pino’s. Meatball sandwiches, fries, coleslaw, and ricotta cake. He clicked the news on, and we ate in front of the television.
“Did you catch Shine and Salgusta?” I asked.
“No. They’re in the wind, but it’s only a matter of time.”
“Ranger said he found me by following a trail of metallic blue extensions.”
“I called when I finally got home from work last night, but you didn’t answer. When I called this morning and you still didn’t answer I got worried, so I came here and found your door unlocked and the television on. I got in touch with Ranger, and he was able to access the security camera at the back of this building. He ran the video back and saw Stupe dragging a recycling bin out and wrangling it into a panel truck that belonged to the Concrete Plant. We went to the Concrete Plant and wandered around, finally finding the blue bin with your extensions all over it. The door to the storage building was open and Stupe was inside. We saw the cot and the food bags and all of Salgusta’s equipment. And I have to tell you my heart stopped for a full two minutes, and Ranger went pale. We were inside the building when one of Ranger’s men came to tell us about the garage door and empty bay. We must have missed you by seconds. The chopper was already in the air doing a traffic report. He spotted the concrete truck, we scrambled every patrol car in the area, and Ranger took off. One of the patrol cars said they clocked him at 110 miles per hour on Route One.”
“Stupe was trying to extort money from the La-Z-Boys. He killed Lucca and Julius Roman.”
“And then Shine and Salgusta killed Stupe.”
“Yep. And eventually they would have killed me, but they had to go to Home Depot, and I was able to get away.”
“They had all their torture tools out, and they decided to go to Home Depot?”
“Ran out of gas for the torch.”
“God’s will,” Morelli said.
“Yeah, better to be lucky than good.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
EARLY MONDAY MORNING I woke up happy to be alive and without a man’s initials burned into my hoo-ha. It was now three o’clock, and I was still feeling happy. I was wearing my new blue silk shirtwaist dress to the lawyer’s office. Grandma was wearing a magenta tracksuit. Her lipstick matched her tracksuit and her red hair was spiked up with Sumoclay. She looked even happier than I did. And I suspected her outfit was a stiff middle finger to intimidation of any kind.
Jimmy’s lawyer, Ziggy Weinberger, was in a midrise office building in center city. When Grandma and I arrived at one o’clock, the small conference room was already packed with people: Jimmy’s sisters, Barbara, Benny the Skootch’s two wiseguys in training, a man and woman I didn’t know, and empty chairs for Charlie Shine and Lou Salgusta.
When Grandma and I took our seats, Ziggy leaned forward in his chair at the head of the table. “I don’t think we need to wait for Charlie and Lou,” he said. “They’re probably in Argentina. So, let’s get started. Jimmy had a will drawn up several years ago. It addressed the possibility of another marriage, and in the event of that marriage, all of Jimmy’s assets would go to his wife.”
“That will is invalid due to senility,” Barbara said. “I fully intend to contest it.”
Angie jumped out of her chair and waved her bandaged hand at Grandma. “Whore woman!”
“Ladies,” Ziggy said. “A little decorum, please.”
Angie sat down, and Ziggy continued.
“Everyone should have a file folder,” he said. “There are documents in your folders that give an accounting of Jimmy’s assets at the time of death.”
I paged through my documents, got to the bottom-line figure, and raised my hand.
“I’m not seeing any assets,” I said.
“That’s correct,” Ziggy said. “He had an insurance policy to cover burial, but aside from that, he was broke. He spent the last of his money on his vacation.”
