Sticky Fingers Read online

  “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  “Of course it matters.” I refolded the letter and skimmed it back across the table. “There’s a cop behind this, Marvin. It’s a sting. Somebody’s trying to put Carmine in jail once and for all.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. The details were very specific—where and when the snatch could happen, everything. Except for the Parcheesi and Doritos part. Are you interested?”

  “Hell, no,” I said. “I stay away from felonies. And besides, I don’t pick on women.”

  He took the letter and tucked it back into his pocket. “The guy who normally does this stuff for Carmine turned me down because—well, he’s had two knee replacements.”

  “Carmine’s whole crew have pacemakers and live on Metamucil.”

  He smiled unpleasantly. “So that leaves you, Roxy.”

  Sure, I liked the idea of causing a little trouble. But I had a daughter to think about, and Nooch, too. So I shook my head. “Forget it.”

  “You sure?”

  I fixed him with a look. “Read my lips, Marvin. I don’t hurt women. Not for anybody.”

  He stopped smiling.

  Curiosity got the best of me, though. I said, “Tell me one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Who’s the woman? The mark? The one who’s supposed to be kidnapped?”

  “Name of Clarice Crabtree.” Marvin picked up his corned beef. “She works at the museum.”

  I stopped worrying and burst out laughing. “Marvin, you’ve been scammed! I went to high school with Clarice! She got straight A’s and never said a word to anyone unless it was to brag about how great she was. Hell, if somebody wants her kidnapped, it’s probably just to shut her up.”

  3

  Back in the truck, my dog Rooney woke up with a slobbery snort and gobbled the remaining half of Nooch’s sandwich, wrapping and all.

  “I wasn’t finished with that!” Nooch cried as his snack disappeared.

  “Take it easy,” I said as Rooney licked his chops. “You ate lunch an hour ago. You didn’t need another whole sandwich, for God’s sake.”

  “I can’t help it if I get hungry,” Nooch said. “And you said you’d quit cussing. It’s bad for business.”

  Most of the guys in my business cussed a hell of a lot more than I did. But Nooch had almost the same brain as a barnacle, so disagreeing with him could turn into a long afternoon. It would be easier to clean up my language.

  Nooch Santonucci had been my wingman since back in our high school days, when kids taunted him for being a retard, and I busted their heads for it. The partnership lasted because he was the size of a triceratops and could do my heavy lifting without protest. And in daylight, I preferred his kind of company—a man who did what he was told. To tell the truth, I liked that kind of man at night, too.

  “What did Marvin want?” Nooch asked when we were buckled up with Rooney panting between us on the front seat.

  “He wanted to buy me lunch.” The less Nooch knew about Marvin’s proposal, the better.

  “I been reading this book,” Nooch said, “that says being evasive is an early warning sign.”

  “Who says I’m being evasive? And since when do you know what that means? Wait a minute. You’re reading a book?” I shoved Rooney out of the way and stared at Nooch. “A real book? What’s it called?”

  “Wonderful You. Father Mike gave it to me. He said it would help me realize my potential as a human being. The book says the power of positive thoughts will dissolve all the world’s problems. A golden stream of positive energy, that’s all we need to become magnets for wealth and health.”

  “Magnets for–?”

  “Wealth and health. It’s a great book. Here, Father Mike gave me a notebook to write down the important stuff.” Nooch fished a battered ring-bound notepad out of his pocket and thumbed it open. A few pages bore carefully penciled block letters. “See? Positive thoughts, that’s important. I’m supposed to close my eyes and visualize what I want. Trouble is, when I close my eyes, I keep falling asleep.”

  “You’re actually writing stuff down?”

  “Yeah, Father Mike says it’ll help me remember.”

  I started the truck. “So what’s being evasive an early warning sign of?”

  “I forget, but it’s bad. So is cussing, which degrades your respect for—for something, but I forget that part, too.” He tried paging through his notes to find the right answer. “Anyway, you’re supposed to surround yourself with stuff that reflects positive energy, which I figure is sandwiches and pizza, because everybody loves sandwiches and pizza. But cussing isn’t positive.”

  “Suddenly I’m having a close encounter with my own personal Doctor Phil,” I said. “Put your notebook away before Rooney eats it.”

  Nooch placidly obeyed. “You should read the book, Rox. You’re always reading books. But this one is all about having a positive outlook on life.”

  “I’m plenty positive.”

  My cell phone rang before he could argue the point, and I pulled it from the pocket of my jeans. Without checking the ID, which is always a mistake, I answered.

  “You bitch,” Gino Martinelli said in my ear. “I’m coming after you.”

  Last I’d seen, little Gino had been hopping up and down barefoot and buck naked like some kind of furious Italian leprechaun.

  “You’re a pest, Gino,” I said. “And not a very positive person, if I might say so.”

  “You’re not as tough as you think you are,” he snarled, and added some curses.

  I switched ears so Nooch wouldn’t hear Gino’s nonpositive language. Gino once boxed flyweight—at least, that’s what he bragged down at the Sons of Italy–but mostly he was just another old guy blowing a lot of hot air. I said, “Don’t threaten me, Gino. You know I hate being terrified.”

  He said, “Just watch your rearview mirror, bitch, because I’m coming.”

  “Put extra glue on your toupee,” I advised. “Your wife will be mad if you lose it. Does she know about your latest girlfriend yet? The one you pulled out of kindergarten class?”

  He cussed some more and hung up.

  Nooch said, “Gino doesn’t like talk about his toupee.”

  “Then he should get a new one. It looks like he’s wearing a weasel up there.”

  “You’re just making him madder. You should be positive. Be a magnet for wonderfulness.”

  “There’s nothing wonderful about Gino.” I pulled into traffic. “I thought his wife would be keeping him busy with wedding stuff this week.”

  “My nonna says I need a suit for the wedding.”

  “Okay, we’ll go shopping. I can probably afford something from the thrift store.” There was no use spending real money on a suit that Nooch would wear once. “But right now, we’ve got work to do. It’s okay to work, right? Is it positive enough for you?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Nooch said. “I like working. Work is positive.”

  An old bank was being torn down in the Garfield neighborhood. Nooch and I put on our hard hats and went inside.

  “Roxy!” Speeder Reed spun his wheelchair in the middle of the bank’s dusty floor and rolled over to me. “Glad you could make it.”

  “Hey, Speeder. What do you have for me?”

  “The marble counters and the iron bars. Can you believe a bank in this neighborhood wasn’t using bulletproof glass?”

  “Maybe that explains why they closed this branch.”

  Speeder’s dad had been in the salvage business for years, and his son accidentally got caught in the collapse of an old church. Since losing the use of his legs at the age of thirteen, Speeder had showed a lot of determination to stay in the family trade. His arms and shoulders were huge from spinning the wheelchair around, and he fearlessly drove a specially equipped van into the most dangerous parts of the city. He could always be found scooting through demo sites, covered in dust and giving orders.

  “Take whatever else you can carry out of her
e,” Speeder said. “We’re gonna drop this building in the morning.”

  “Thanks.”

  Half the success in the salvage business is the dumb luck of finding stuff of value after everybody else has given up. It takes the sensitive nose of a beagle and the instincts of a treasure hunter with a little Gypsy fortune-teller thrown in. I sifted through the bank’s cash drawers but didn’t see any old bills stuck in any cracks. But I did find treasure under a broken desk.

  “What’re those?” Nooch leaned over my shoulder.

  I gathered up a handful of narrow plastic tubes. “Dye packs,” I said, handling them carefully. “Banks used to put these in the bags they handed over to robbers. Once the thief touched the money, the dye pack blew up and made him obvious to the police.”

  “Cool!” Nooch grabbed one out of my hand, and it immediately burst.

  “Watch out!” I waved my hand in front of my face to dispel the orange cloud.

  When I opened my eyes, a huge orange blotch had stained the front of Nooch’s brown sweatshirt. With his yellow hard hat, he looked like the Great Pumpkin.

  “Oh, man.” He stared down at himself. “Orange is the color of the Cincinnati Bengals. How am I going to explain this?”

  Wearing the colors of an archenemy team was treason to a Pittsburgh Steelers fan.

  “I don’t think there’s any need to explain,” I said. “One look pretty much tells the story.”

  “Is it a positive story?” Nooch asked. “If I’m supposed to be on a path of fulfillment, I think it should be a positive story.”

  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 ha
d 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?