Fearless Fourteen - Janet Evanovich [42]
ELEVEN
ZOOK SETTLED HIMSELF onto the passenger seat and stared down at his shoes.
“Problems in school?” I asked him.
“No.”
“Well?”
He bit into his lower lip.
“Your mom hasn’t turned up in any of the local hospitals,” I told him. “That’s a good sign.”
“Or the morgue.”
“Yeah, or the morgue,” I said.
“Maybe she took off.”
“She wouldn’t take off without you. She loves you.”
“Thanks,” Zook said. “Do you think she’s okay?”
“Yes. I do.”
I ran into the deli on the way home and picked up lunch meat and chips and ice cream sandwiches. Marion Fitz was working checkout.
“I hear you found a dead guy in Morelli’s basement,” she said. “Is this Virginia baked ham or the low sodium?”
“Virginia baked.”
“I heard it was Allen Gratelli.”
“That’s what I’m told.”
“Wasn’t he dating Loretta Rizzi?”
Bang. Direct hit to my brain. “I don’t know,” I said. “Was he?”
“His truck’s been in front of her house a lot. Maybe she just had cable problems.”
I carried my bag out to my car, tossed it onto the backseat, and got behind the wheel. Zook was hooked into his iPod, waiting for me.
“Was your mom dating a guy named Allen Gratelli?” I asked him.
“He’s Uncle Dom’s friend. He’d come over sometimes to see if we were doing okay. I thought he was sort of a jerk. Sometimes it was like he was trying to put moves on my mom, but she always made a joke about it.”
“I ran into him today.”
“Lucky you.”
“He was in Morelli’s basement. Someone shot him.”
Zook’s eyes went wide. “Get out. Was he hurt bad?”
“Yes.”
“How bad?”
“Real bad.”
I suspect if I was relaying this information to a fourteen-year-old girl, she would be sad at this point. She’d be remembering pets and relatives and stuffed animals that had been injured, and the tragedies would be commingled in the frontal lobe of her brain. Zook, being a boy, thought it was cool.
“Oh man,” Zook said. “Is he dead?”
“Yes.”
Zook was leaning forward, straining against his seatbelt. “Who shot him?”
“I don’t know. He was dead when I found him.”
“What did he look like?”
“He looked dead. Bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.”
“Whoa. That’s amazing. Is he still there?”
“No. They moved him out.”
Zook slumped back. “Darn. I miss all the good stuff.”
“Did your Uncle Dom ever say anything about the money? Like where it was hidden?”
“No. He just kept saying he was going to be living the high life.”
“Did he have other friends besides Allen Gratelli?”
“I guess, but I don’t know any. Allen was the only one who came around after Uncle Dom went to prison. And Allen just started to come around a couple months ago.”
THE POLICE WERE gone when I returned to Morelli’s house. Only Mooner in the lawn chair and a single van from an emergency cleaning service suggested something unusual had just occurred.
“Zookamundo,” Mooner said. “Been waiting for you, man. We gotta convene with the wood elves.”
“Did you see the dead guy?” Zook asked.
“Yeah. He was real dead,” Mooner said. “Pooped in his pants and everything.”
“Awesome,” Zook said.
I left Mooner and Zook in the living room with the ice cream sandwiches and the wood elves, and I went to the kitchen to help Morelli. He was methodically going through drawers, extracting keys and odd scraps of paper. The basement door was open, and the smell of bleach and pine-scented detergent drifted up the stairs.
“Zook tells me Allen Gratelli was friends with Dom,” I said to Morelli. “Shazam.”
Morelli grinned and wrapped an arm around me. “I’m going to get you naked tonight and make you say shazam again.”
I knew that wasn’t an empty promise. “Having any luck here?” I asked him.
“I’ve got a pile of renegade keys, and I now know the problem with our plan. It’s not enough to find a key. You have to know where it goes.”
My cell phone rang, and I answered to Connie.
“I have Brenda back with the film crew,” Connie said. “They want more footage.”
“Are you kidding me? They want more monkey?”
“No. They want a different takedown.”
“We screwed up a simple domestic disturbance. Where do we go from there?