Explosive Eighteen

My father was wild-eyed. “Is that true? Why didn’t someone tell me? No one ever tells me anything around here.”

“Look,” I said, holding my hand in the air. “I’m not wearing a ring. I’d be wearing a ring if I was married, right?”

“You got a ring mark,” Grandma said. “Of course, I guess there could be other explanations. You could have the vitiligo, like Michael Jackson. Remember when he turned white?”

My mother put two platters on the dining room table. “I have antipasto,” she said. “And I have a bottle of red open.”

My father went to the table shaking his head. “Vitiligo,” he said. “What next?”

“Annie’s been helping Lorraine Farnsworth with her love life,” Grandma said, forking into a slice of hard cheese and prosciutto.

My mother looked over at Annie. “Lorraine is ninety-one years old.”

“Yes,” Annie said. “It’s time for her to make a decision. She’s been seeing Arnie Milhauser for fifty-three years. It might be time for her to move on.”

My father had his head bent over his antipasto. “Only place she’s gonna move on to is the bone farm.”

“She’s doing pretty good for her age,” Grandma said. “Sure, she rolls her share of gutter balls, but heck, who don’t.”

“She’s doing better now that we got her the longer tubing to her oxygen tank,” Annie said.

Grandma nodded. “Yeah, that helped. She was on a short leash before.”

I had my phone clipped to the waistband on my jeans, and it beeped with a text message. We need to talk to you. It’s urgent. Come outside. It was signed The FBI.

I texted back no.

The next message was Come outside or we’re coming in.

I pushed away from the table. “I’ll be right back,” I said. “I need to step outside for a moment.”

“Probably got to let a breezer go,” Grandma said to Annie. “That’s always why I got to step outside.”

My mother drained her wineglass and poured another.

I went to the front door, and saw they were the fake FBI guys. They were standing at the curb in front of a black Lincoln. The bigger of the two, Lance Lancer, motioned me forward. I shook my head no. He pulled his badge out, held it up for me to see, and crooked his finger at me. I did another head shake.

“What do you want?” I yelled.

“We want to talk to you. Come here.”

“Move away from the car. I’ll meet you halfway.”

“We’re the FBI. You gotta come to us,” Lancer said.

“You’re not the FBI. I checked. Besides, the FBI doesn’t ride around in big black Lincoln Town Cars.”

“Maybe we got it on account of it was confiscated,” Lancer said.

“What do you want?” I asked him.

“I told you we want to talk, and I can’t be yelling to you. It’s confidential.”

I moved out of the house onto the walk. “I’ll meet you halfway,” I said again.

Lancer mumbled something to Slasher, and they marched over to where I was standing.

“We want the photograph you got on the plane,” Lancer said. “Bad things are gonna happen if you don’t give it to us.”

“I told you. I don’t have it.”

“We don’t believe you. We think you’re fibbing to us,” Lancer said.

Good lord. As if the vacation wasn’t disastrous enough, now I’m involved in God knows what.

“I don’t have it. I’m not fibbing. Go away and bother someone else,” I told them.

Lancer’s eyes opened wide. “Get her!” he said.

I whirled around and jumped away, but one of them managed to snag my shirt. I was yanked back, clawing and kicking. There was a lot of swearing and ineffective bitch-slapping, and somehow my foot connected with Slasher’s boys. His face instantly went red and then chalk white. He doubled over, hands to his crotch, and he went to the ground in a fetal position. I ran into the house, locked the door, and looked out the window. Lancer was dragging his partner into the Lincoln.

I straightened my shirt and returned to the dinner table.

“Feel better?” Grandma asked.

“Yup,” I said. “Everything’s good.”

“Your digestion will improve when we get your romantic problems solved,” Annie said.

Little alarm bells went off in my head and my scalp prickled. We? Did she say we? I had enough trouble going on with the men in my life without Annie getting involved. Annie was a sweet person, but she was only a few steps behind Morelli’s Grandma Bella in the Whacko of the Year competition.

“Honestly, I haven’t got any romantic problems,” I told Annie. “It’s all peachy.”

“Of course it is,” Annie said. And she winked at me.

“I hate to rush everyone, but we gotta get a move on,” Grandma said. “Bowling starts at seven o’clock, and you gotta get there early or all the good shoes are gone and only the fungus shoes are left. I’m going to get my own shoes, but I have to wait for my Social Security check.”

Rushing through dinner is never a problem. My father doesn’t waste unnecessary minutes on bodily functions. He slurps his soup down boiling hot, has seconds, mops the bowl with a crust of bread, and expects to immediately move on to dessert. This no-nonsense approach to dinner gets him back to the television in record time and cuts down on time spent tuning out Grandma.

“I was talking to Mrs. Kulicki at the bakery today, and she said she heard Joyce Barnhardt was mixed up in something bad and got compacted at the junkyard,” Grandma said, helping herself to an almond cookie.

“How awful,” my mother said. “How would Mrs. Kulicki know such a thing? I haven’t heard anything.”

Grandma dunked her cookie in her coffee. “Mrs. Kulicki’s son Andy works at the junkyard, and it came from him.”

That would be a real bummer if it were true. It was a pain in the ass to get money back on a dead FTA. Especially when the body was incorporated into the bumper of an SUV. Plus, I suppose I’d miss Joyce, in a perverse, sick sort of way.

After Grandma and Annie took off, I helped my mom with the dishes and spent a few minutes watching television with my dad. No one mentioned rings or marriage. My family solves problems with silence and meat loaf. Our philosophy is, if you don’t talk about a problem, it might go away. And if it doesn’t go away, there’s always meat loaf, mac and cheese, roast chicken, pineapple upside-down cake, pasta, potatoes, or baloney on white bread to take your mind off unpleasant things.

My mother sent me home with a bag of cookies, a half-pound of deli ham, provolone, and a loaf of bakery bread. If you come to eat at my mom’s house, you leave with something in a bag.

I stopped at the entrance to my apartment building parking lot and did a fast survey. No black Lincoln Town Car in sight, and I was sure I hadn’t been followed. So probably it was safe to go to my apartment. I took the stairs, walked the second-floor hall, and listened at my door. Silence. I pushed the door open and peeked in. No fake FBI guys lurking in the kitchen. Most likely, Slasher was sitting somewhere icing down his privates. I’d made a good connection. Imagine what sort of damage I could inflict if I actually knew what I was doing.

I gave Rex part of a cookie, went to my computer, and searched around until I found a news story on the man murdered at LAX. His name was Richard Crick. Age fifty-six. Surgeon. Had an office in Princeton. He’d been in Hawaii attending a professional conference. Police were speculating it was a random robbery gone bad.

I suspected different. Crick had something valuable… the photograph. For whatever reason, he slipped the photograph of the man into my bag while I was sleeping. And then either he fingered me before he died, or else a bunch of people figured it out. I had no clue as to the significance of the photograph, and didn’t especially want to know.

I tapped Crick into one of the bonds office background search programs and watched the information scroll down. He’d been an army doctor for ten years. Three were in Afghanistan. Three in Germany. The rest Stateside. He’d gone into private practice when he left the army. Divorced. Two adult sons. One living in Michigan, and one in North Carolina. Squeaky clean until a year and a half ago, when he was hit with a wrongful death malpractice claim.