Chapter Two
CHAPTER TWO
Connie looked up from her computer when we walked in. “Did you get someone?”
“We got him and then we lost him,” I said. “Is Vinnie still here?”
“He left right after you did,” Connie said. “He had to go downtown to bond someone out.” She handed me a file. “I got a new FTA. It just came through. Indecent exposure in the supermarket. Not a big-ticket bond, but it’ll get you pizza money.”
I took the file and shoved it into my bag. “Can you get me more information on Bruno Jug?” I asked Connie. “Wives, girlfriends, social clubs, hobbies, vacation houses. Anything.”
“You bet,” Connie said. “I’ll do a search on him, and I’ll ask my cousin Carl. Jug isn’t in the family, but he moves in some of the same circles as Carl.”
Connie is remotely connected to the mob of yesteryear, and she has some current relatives who have unexplained incomes. Carl would be one of them.
Lula reappeared from the back of the office. “What did I miss? What are you talking about?”
“Bruno Jug,” I said.
“I could use to miss that conversation. I don’t like things that got to do with death.”
“I doubt he does his own wet work,” Connie said. “He’s white-collar. He’s a suit.”
“I still don’t want to talk about him,” Lula said. “I want to talk about the hitch. I expected to see a ring when I came in this morning, and all I got was news that there’s a hitch. Ranger isn’t backing out, is he? That would be real disappointing.”
I dumped my messenger bag onto the couch and slouched into one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs in front of Connie’s desk.
“It’s not Ranger,” I said. “He’s still in Virginia with his tech guy. They’re cleaning up a security breach in an office there.”
“Then what?” Lula asked.
“Remember when Morelli came back from Miami and showed up at the crime scene?”
“Yeah, I remember that,” Lula said.
“Okay, so we got together after.”
“Uh-oh,” Lula said. “How together?”
“Just together. Talking.”
“And?”
“And he asked me to marry him.”
“Holy shit,” Lula said.
Connie, the office manager and the most religious of the three of us, which isn’t saying much, made the sign of the cross.
“And?” Lula asked.
“And I sort of said yes.”
“Holy shit again,” Lula said.
Connie’s phone rang and Connie sent the call to voicemail. “Keep going,” she said to me.
Connie is a couple years older than me, a better shot than me, and caught in a Jersey Shore, eighties time warp with big hair, bright blue eye shadow, and black eyeliner.
“Are you telling me you’re engaged to both guys?” Lula asked. “Because if that’s what you’re telling me, I need a doughnut to calm down.”
Connie pushed the bakery box across the top of her desk toward Lula and turned to me. “Who did you choose?”
“That’s the problem,” I said. “I can’t choose. There are extenuating circumstances.”
“Like someone’s gonna kill someone else?” Lula asked, eating the last stale doughnut.
“No. I don’t think it will come to that. The problem is that when I got engaged to Ranger, we celebrated.”
“That’s to be expected,” Lula said. “Anybody would celebrate getting engaged to Ranger. He’s smokin’, and he’s got a full-time housekeeper taking care of him. And she cooks and irons.”
“Exactly,” I said. “But then I celebrated with Morelli when we got engaged.”
“Okay, I get that,” Lula said. “Anybody would celebrate getting engaged to him, too.”
“Hold on,” Connie said. “When you say that you ‘celebrated,’ do you mean with a glass of champagne?”
“I mean we really celebrated ,” I said.
“So, you really celebrated with both men,” Connie said.
“Yep,” I said. “A lot. First with Ranger and then with Morelli.”
“No harm, no foul there,” Lula said. “Totally understandable.”
“Yes, but when I went to take my birth control pill the morning after Morelli, I found out they’d expired.”
“Were they a little expired?” Lula asked. “A little expired would still be okay.”
“They were a lot expired,” I said. “They should have been thrown away a couple years ago, but they were left in a bathroom drawer with the new pills, and I grabbed the wrong packet. I’ve been taking the stupid things all month. I don’t know why it suddenly occurred to me to look at the date.”
“I’d say a combination of guilt and fear,” Lula said. “Nobody was wearing a raincoat?”
“No raincoats.”
“Maybe you need one of them morning-after pills,” Lula said.
“I don’t think I want to do that,” I said.
Lula went wide-eyed. “You mean you want to have a baby?”
“I think I might.”
I couldn’t believe I was thinking this, much less saying it out loud. I couldn’t cook, and I gagged when I babysat Morelli’s dog and had to pick up after him. How was I ever going to take care of a baby?
“For one thing, I’m not getting any younger,” I said to Lula. “It could be now or never.”
“I suppose,” Lula said. “But you haven’t gotten any older either. And now or never is one of them overrated motivational ideas.”
“You still have to pick a man,” Connie said. “Do you know which one?”
“That’s the hitch,” I said. “If it turns out that I’m not pregnant, I know who I want to marry. If it turns out that I’m pregnant, I can’t make a decision until I’m seven weeks in. At seven weeks you can do a paternity test. I googled it.”
“So, if you’re preggers, you’ll marry whoever the baby daddy is?” Connie asked.
“Yes.”
“Even if it’s not your first choice?”
“Yep. Not a problem. I had a hard time choosing, anyway,” I said.
“You got a point,” Lula said. “You can’t go wrong with either of them. When are you going to know if you’re pregnant?”
“I can start testing six days after Morelli and I celebrated.”
“That would be four days from now,” Lula said. “When is Aunt Flo supposed to show up?”
“I’m not sure. I have almost two weeks of pills left, but I’ve stopped taking them, so Aunt Flo might be confused.”
“Okay, so we have to wait until Friday,” Lula said.
“The six-days-after isn’t a sure thing,” I said. “The ten-days test is more reliable, and the best test is after you’ve missed a period.”
“I can’t wait for ten days,” Lula said. “As it is, I’m gonna be holding my breath until Friday.”
“What about your apartment?” Connie asked me. “I heard you got evicted.”
“I did, but I’ve been reinstated. The management company changed its mind. They realized the fire wasn’t my fault. I mean, I can’t help it if some wacko firebombed my apartment.”
“Yeah, and we caught the wacko, so that has to count for something,” Lula said.
I glanced at the doughnut box on Connie’s desk. Empty. Damn. Connie kept a flask in her bottom drawer, along with her gun and a can of hair spray. Probably it was too early to take a hit from the flask. I didn’t usually drink hard liquor, but in the absence of a doughnut, it served a purpose. I gave up on the doughnut and the liquor and slumped a little lower in my chair.
“Most of the damage was cleaned up by the restoration team,” I said. “And if I can bring Jug in, I’ll collect enough on his apprehension to buy new bedroom furniture. And maybe a television.”
“Are you sure you want to do all that if you’re getting married?” Connie asked.
“I can get a mattress and frame overnight for under three hundred dollars. Otherwise, I might be sleeping on my couch for a couple months.”
“I see where you’re going with this,” Lula said. “You’ve got to keep two guys on the hook, so it’s not like you could live with one of them. I don’t know how you’re going to do this.”
“It should be okay for a day or two,” I said. “I’ll be busy getting my apartment set up. And I’ve got a couple FTAs that will be a priority. Ranger is out of town, so I only have to deal with Morelli.”
“What happens after a couple days?” Lula asked.
“I might get sick. Something contagious.”
“That’s good,” Lula said. “You should say you got COVID. That always works. That’s good for at least a week. And then you could get long COVID if you need more time.”
I was hoping I wouldn’t need more time. I didn’t like keeping Ranger and Morelli hanging like this. It felt icky. It wasn’t the way I wanted to start a marriage.
“Uh-oh,” Lula said to me. “You’ve got that face.”
“What face?”
“The face like you’re not happy, where your mouth turns down and your eyes don’t have no sparkle.”
“I shouldn’t have celebrated with both of them.”
“Yeah, well, that ship already sailed. You just need to take your mind off it. We should go get the indecent-exposure guy. They’re always fun. And they hardly ever shoot at us.”
My phone rang. It was Morelli.
“Hey,” I said to him.
“Just checking in,” he said. “I’m still playing catch-up on paperwork, but I should be done at the end of the day. I thought we could get takeout and you could spend the night.”
“That sounds great, but I told my parents I’d be there for dinner. And then Grandma wanted to go to a viewing at the funeral home. And you know how that ends up. I’ll have a headache from the carnations and lilies. Maybe tomorrow would be better. I’ve gotta go. I have another call coming in.”
“You’re going straight to hell,” Lula said to me. “No doubt about it. That was a monster fib.”
“I fib all the time. It’s part of my job,” I said.
“That don’t make it right,” Lula said.
“Do you fib?” I asked her.
“Hell yeah. I’m a lifelong fibber. One of these days I’m going to confession and get rid of my fibber sins.”
“I thought you weren’t Catholic.”
“Do you have to be Catholic? I’m Catholic by association. I know a lot of Catholics. And I had a bunch of Catholic customers back when I was a ho.”
I grabbed my messenger bag and hung it on my shoulder. “Time to saddle up and move out.”
“Yahoo,” Lula said.
I gave Lula the new file when we were in my Trailblazer.
“Jerry Bottles,” she said. “Sixty-two years old. Not an attractive photo. Bald, big belly, has a nose like Captain Hook in Peter Pan . Says he’s five feet six inches tall and weighs a hundred sixty pounds. Self-employed plumber. Looks like this isn’t his first exposure. His last arrest got him community service, but he exposed himself while he was doing his time, working to clean up the duck pond in Greenwood Park, so he was sent for a psychiatric evaluation. He lives in one of those little row houses on the outskirts of the Burg. Seventy-two Wilmot Street.”
The Burg is a chunk of Trenton on the other side of the railroad tracks from the center of the city. I grew up in the Burg and my parents still live there with my grandma Mazur. Houses are small. Streets follow no rhyme or reason. The bakeries are excellent. The medical center sits on the edge of the Burg. Vincent Plum Bail Bonds is several blocks away and on the opposite side of Hamilton Avenue.
I drove down Hamilton and made a left turn into the Burg before I got to the medical center. I wound my way through the Burg and found Wilmot. There was on-street parking in front of the row houses. I knew there was also parking in the alley that cut the block.
“That’s his house there,” Lula said. “The one with the Christmas wreath on the front door. There’s cars parked at the curb but none of them looks like a plumber’s vehicle.”
“What does a plumber’s vehicle look like?”
“It’s one of those things you know when you see it,” Lula said.
I drove around the block and turned into the alley. Some houses had single-car garages in the alley. Number 72 did not. There was a truck parked in the small backyard.
“You see,” Lula said. “That’s a plumber’s vehicle. I knew as soon as I looked at it.”
“It says Bottles Plumbing on the side panel.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Lula said.
I parked alongside the truck, and Lula and I got out of my Trailblazer and walked to Bottles’s back door.
“We should be nice to him,” Lula said. “You never know when you’ll need a plumber.”
I didn’t think I needed a plumber who displayed his personal plumbing in public, but I would be nice to him anyway.
Bottles answered on the second knock. He was wearing jeans that sat below his belly overhang and a navy collared shirt that had Bottles Plumbing stitched in yellow on the pocket. He had a few greasy strands of hair stretched across his bald head and an outcropping of hair on his large Captain Hook nose. I try not to be judgmental, but by anyone’s standards he was not an attractive man.
“Gerald Bottles?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “What’s up?”
“I represent Vincent Plum Bail Bonds,” I said. “You missed your court date. I need to get you rescheduled.”
“That’s a real pain in the buttocks,” he said. “How about we just forget the whole thing. Nothing ever comes from this court stuff anyway. I’m already doing shrink time, which is a total waste. This shrink guy doesn’t get it. I think he’s got penis envy, but that’s just my opinion.”
“If you don’t want to go to court, why don’t you stop whipping it out in public?” Lula said.
“I’d rather stop breathing,” Bottles said. “I’d rather gouge out my eyeballs. I’d rather become a vegan.”
“So, you’d rather be a dead, blind vegan than give up being a pervert,” Lula said.
“I’m not a pervert,” Bottles said. “It’s that when God gives you something special you got an obligation to make the most of it. I’m not stupid but I’m not real smart either. I don’t have a lot of education. I don’t have good hair. I got a big nose and a big belly. What it all adds up to is that I’m not exactly a heartthrob. I’m not even good at conversation. No one wants to talk about unclogging a toilet.”
“I’m guessing this is going somewhere,” Lula said.
“What I’ve got is a really pretty penis,” Bottles said. “And it’s a crime against nature not to show it to people.”
“Honey, every man thinks his penis is pretty,” Lula said. “Even the ones who want it to be bigger still think what they got is pretty. That don’t mean everyone can go around waving it like a flag on the Fourth of July.”
“Yeah, but mine is exceptional,” Bottles said. “I have the perfect penis. Do you want to see it?”
“No!” I said.
“I guess I could take a look,” Lula said. “Being that I used to be a professional ho and I’ve seen my share, I could give an unbiased opinion.”
Bottles unzipped and took it out. “There,” he said. “What do you think?”
“I gotta admit, that’s a damn nice penis,” Lula said. “It’s a real nice pink color and the skin looks silky smooth. I’m guessing it doesn’t get a lot of abuse.”
“I take good care of it,” Bottles said. “You should see it when it’s in all its glory, if you know what I mean. It’s stunning.”
“We’ll take your word for it,” I said. “You could put it away now.”
“Some people have beautiful paintings that they want people to see. Some people drive flashy cars. Some people live in fabulous mansions. I have a penis,” Bottles said. “I can only keep it hidden for so long and then I have to take it out so people can appreciate it. And I mean, let’s face it, it’s pretty much all I’ve got.”
“I see where you’re coming from,” Lula said, “but you’re a nut.”
“Speaking of nuts,” Bottles said, “mine are worth a look.”
“Not today,” I said.
Bottles looked disappointed. “Some other time?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We need to take you into town to reschedule your court date.”
“I’m due on a construction site,” he said.
“If you can make bail, we might be able to fast-track you.”
“No problem. I’m running a tab with Vinnie.”
“I gotta ask you about the Christmas wreath on your front door,” Lula said. “You must be one of them Christmas-all-year-long people.”
Bottles looked surprised. “I have a wreath on my front door?”
“Yeah,” Lula said. “It’s still green so it must be plastic, and it has a big red bow on it.”
“I never use the front door,” Bottles said. “I didn’t know there was a wreath on it. It must have been there when I bought the house two years ago.”