Fearless Fourteen - Janet Evanovich [68]
“You aren’t going to be long, are you? I don’t have a lot of patience when it comes to fried chicken.”
“An hour, tops.”
“Okay,” Lula said. “I guess I could last. I want a large bucket of extra spicy, extra crispy fried chicken. I want a order of biscuits with gravy and some coleslaw.”
“I thought you were trying to lose weight.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to waste away to nothing. And anyway, everyone knows you don’t gain weight on Sunday. Sunday’s a free day.”
LISA ZERO LIVED in a nice little house in Hamilton Township. The nine-year-old answered the door and Lisa immediately showed up behind him. She was wearing makeup and a skirt, and I guessed she’d gone to church this morning. She was a couple inches shorter than me and a couple pounds heavier. Her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. I supposed she’d heard about Stanley.
I introduced myself and apologized for being blue and for intruding.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Let’s step outside. I don’t want the kids to hear. I haven’t told them yet. Stanley was an asshole, but he was still their father.”
“Did you know he was involved in the bank robbery?”
“I suspected. Not at the time, but the last couple years he started drinking too much and he’d say things. I guess you’re after the money.”
I shook my head. “No. I’m looking for the fourth partner.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you there. Stanley never said anything about the partners. He only talked about the money. How when Dom got out, they could put it all together, and they’d all be rich.”
“Put it all together?”
“Yeah, I don’t know what he meant by that, but I got the feeling there was a map or something. Or maybe a bank account in all their names. Like they each had a piece of a puzzle. I didn’t figure I’d ever see it, so I didn’t pay close attention. He’d drink, and then he’d get real talky, and then he’d get mean.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I got the house, and we’re moving ahead with our lives.”
“Do you know a guy named Allen Gratelli?”
“No.”
“But you knew Dom.”
“Not really. I only knew him from the newspaper articles when he robbed the bank, and then when Stanley started talking about him.”
“You must have been surprised to learn Stanley was mixed up in a bank robbery.”
“Stanley was always mixed up in something. He was always looking for easy money. One time, he held up a convenience store and stole lottery tickets. Hello. Like they couldn’t figure that one out if he won?”
I gave Lisa Zero my card and told her to call if she thought of anything helpful. I wound my way through her subdivision, hit Klockner, and drove on autopilot to Cluck-in-a-Bucket. I parked in the lot, under the big rotating chicken. I stuffed a couple twenties into my jeans pocket and got out of the Zook car.
Cluck-in-a-Bucket is a zoo on Sunday. It’s the lunch of choice for the lazy, the fat, the salt-starved, the emotionally injured, the families on budgets, the cholesterol-deprived, and the remaining ten percent of the population who just want a piece of chicken.
The tables and booths were filled and there were lines in front of all the registers at the counter. Clucky Chicken was making balloon chickens for the kids and handing out coupons for Clucky Apple Pies. I went to the end of a line and zoned out. No one seemed to notice I was blue.
I was thinking about Lisa Zero and her comment about the puzzle pieces. Suppose Dom was the one who hid the money, and to make sure it was still intact when he got out of prison, he didn’t tell his partners the exact location. But maybe it was a concern that Dom might not make it through his term, so each partner got a piece of the treasure map. No. That didn’t work. They could put their pieces together any time they wanted and cut Dom out. Okay, suppose a fifth person, like Aunt Rose, hid the money? And then she gave each of the partners a piece of the map. I shuffled forward in the chicken line, still thinking about the map. The fifth-person theory didn’t totally hold up, either. The