CHAPTER THREE

I stopped at the bakery and got a box of freshly filled cannoli. If there’s one thing a cardiac patient craves its full-fat ricotta cheese in deep-fried pastry. Steak and fried onion rings would be a second. I drove to Benny’s house and parked at the curb. A purple Kia was in the driveway. Benny’s wife, Carla, had late-stage Parkinson’s, and I thought the Kia probably belonged to Carla’s caregiver.

I rang the bell, a young woman answered, and I told her I’d come to talk to Benny.

“Who’s there? ” Benny yelled from another room.

“Stephanie Plum, ” I yelled back.

“He’s watching television in the den, ” the woman said. “Just walk straight back. ”

The den was a small room that had been tacked onto the living room. Benny was wedged into a club chair positioned in front of a large flat-screen TV. A leather recliner was next to him. A tiger-striped cat was curled up in the recliner.

Benny smiled when he saw me, his eyes instantly focusing on the white bakery box.

“Cannoli, ” I said.

“You’re gonna kill me, ” he said. “Are they fresh filled? ”

“Of course. ”

“Hand them over, ” he said. “You want one? ”

“No. I just had lunch at my mother’s house. ” I looked at the cat. “I’m guessing the cat is in your chair. ”

Benny took a cannoli out of the box. “Yeah, he’s an old guy. I don’t like to disturb him when he’s sleeping. ”

“I heard you weren’t going to the Mole Hole anymore. ”

“None of the guys are there, ” he said. “It’s not the same. And I hear it smells like dead rat roast. ”

This tells me that Benny is getting some real-time reporting from someone at the Mole Hole.

“I followed Lou Salgusta into the tunnel and he tried to cremate me, ” I said. “I managed to get away. The rats weren’t so lucky. ”

Benny finished off the first cannoli and took a second. “Trust me, if Lou really wanted to kill you, you’d be dead. He was probably just playing around. ”

“So, you know about the tunnel? ”

“We all knew about the tunnel. It’s been there for years. I used it a bunch of times. We had plans to make improvements but never got around to it. ”

“Is that where Jimmy hid the treasure? ”

“In the tunnel? No. There’s nothing down there but dirt. ”

“I don’t get why the keys are so important. If you know where the treasure is kept, why don’t you just get it some other way. A locksmith or something. ”

“I knew there was a catch to the cannoli, ” Benny said. “You want to know about the treasure, right? ”

“I’m curious. ”

“The freaking thing is boobytrapped. You try to get at the treasure without using both keys, and it’ll look like Hiroshima. Stupid idea. ” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Where’d you get these? Italian bakery? I can always tell. Best cannoli in Jersey. It’s the ricotta they use. ”

“Hiroshima is big. ”

“No shit. Excuse my French. Nobody ever thought the keys would get lost. Jimmy was Keeper of the Keys, and he was supposed to always have the keys with him. ” Benny ate half of another cannoli. “The keys weren’t on or in Jimmy, so that means your granny has them. It’s the only explanation. She was with him when he checked out. We looked everywhere. We x-rayed his corpse, he should rest in peace. ”

“This treasure must be worth a lot of money. ”

He finished the third cannoli. “Let’s just say I could retire real nice on it. ”

“And you know where it is? ”

“Not exactly. I got a clue. All six of us got a clue. ”

“Why such an elaborate scheme to protect the treasure? ”

Benny shrugged. “We can’t be trusted. We’re all killers. We got no sense of remorse. I mean, it’s not like any of us would kill for no reason. We got to have a good reason. Like it would have to be a job or something. ”

“Or a treasure. ”

There were three cannoli left in the box.

“I’m going to eat just one more, ” Benny said. “And yeah, like a treasure. It was put away as a kind of retirement fund. Mostly because it was too hot to fence when we got it. I’d tell you what my clue says but it wouldn’t do you no good since you don’t have the keys, right? ”

“Right. ”

“Besides, that would be too much information for just a box of cannoli. More information would have to be moving into the sexual favors area. ”

“Eeuuw, ” I said. “Get real. ”

Benny scooped a glob of cannoli filling off his shirt. “I just said that for old times’ sake. I wanted to see how it would feel. ”

“So? How did it feel? ”

“Not as good as I remember. I was something in my day. You won’t tell my wife, will you? ”

“No. I won’t tell her. You should share the last cannoli with her. ”

“Maybe, ” Benny said.

“One last question. And I think I already know the answer. Obviously, someone knows the location of the treasure. ”

“The guy who stashed it away, ” Benny said.

“The Keeper of the Keys? ”

“Bingo. You got it. Jimmy. He was the guy we all trusted. He hid the treasure a bunch of years ago and gave us our clues. He even gave himself a clue. He got the last clue. I’m thinking it probably was the combination for the lock. You gotta stick the keys in and then you need the combination. ”

“And now he’s dead. ”

“Yeah. Dumb fuck. Who would have thought he’d go like that? ”

“When someone dies, what happens to his clue? ”

“The clues get put in the Mole Hole safe… if we can find them. It was like a ritual. We drank some whiskey. We talked about old times. We spit on the floor and put the clue in the Mole Hole safe. ”

“Why did you spit on the floor? ”

“Men do these things. Like I said, it was a ritual. Like retiring the dead SOB’s chair. ” He looked at the two cannoli left in the box. “I might have to eat these. ”

“Three of the six treasure owners have died, ” I said. “And I’m guessing you only have two clues in the safe. I’m guessing Jimmy’s clue is missing along with the keys. ”

“I’m not saying, but you could be right. Look, here’s the deal. The clues were more like a fun game. Truth is, if we wanted to find the treasure we could. We could just put all our clues together. And besides, some of the guys probably followed Jimmy and figured it out. I couldn’t be bothered. For that matter, we could have gotten the keys from Jimmy if we really wanted. All we had to do was kill him. None of us did any of this because the treasure was basically worthless hours after we got it. It was hotter than hot. The booby trap was set so the treasure would be destroyed if someone got stupid greedy before enough time had passed. ”

“Has enough time passed? ” I asked.

Benny shrugged. “Hard to say. ”

Leaving Benny with cannoli crumbs and powdered sugar on his shirt, I let myself out and drove to the office. As far as bail bonds offices go, this one’s okay, but it’s not going to get a spread in Architectural Digest. It’s basically a storefront. The front room has an ugly brown Naugahyde couch against one wall, and two uncomfortable plastic orange chairs are positioned in front of a large metal desk on the other side of the room. A bank of rarely used file cabinets line the back wall. There’s storage in the room behind the file cabinets, and a coffee station just inside the rear exit. My cousin Vinny hides out in a private office located behind the metal desk. Anyone wanting to beat the crap out of Vinnie has to get around the desk and through his locked door. Connie Rosolli, the office manager, sits behind the desk and keeps a loaded Glock nine in her bottom drawer. Vinnie is an excellent bail bondsman, but a slimeball in every other aspect of his life. Hence the security precautions.

Connie looked up from her computer when I walked in. She’s a couple years older than me and a much better shot. She’d be a dead ringer for Dolly Parton if only Dolly had black hair and a mustache.

“I have three Failure to Appear files for you, ” Connie said to me. “One of them is a high bond. Vinnie is going to be all over you to bring him in. ”

If you get arrested and don’t want to sit in jail until the court decides your ultimate fate, you pay my cousin to put up a bond for your release. If you don’t show up for your court date and disappear off the face of the earth, Vinnie is out his bond money. If this happens too many times, not only is Vinnie in the red, but his father-in-law will amputate Vinnie’s penis.

It’s my job to make sure the ifs never get to the penis removal point. I make my money by finding the failure-to-appear idiots for Vinnie and dragging them back to jail. Currently, I was in desperate need of money. Rent was due, and I was two days away from searching the bottom of my bag for spare change.

Lula was on the couch. She’d changed her clothes and she’d added pink glitter to her eyelids for some afternoon glam.

“I already went through the files, ” she said. “We got a good one. George Potts. Remember him? He made national news a couple months ago when he got arrested for streaking down Hamilton Avenue and using the sidewalk in front of Tasty Pastry Bakery as a bathroom. He blamed it on bad weed and a gluten allergy. ”

I looked at the other two. Arnold Rugalowski, one of the fry cooks at Cluck-in-a-Bucket, was caught on camera putting fried roaches in his ex-wife’s bucket of Clucky Chicken. She was insisting it was attempted murder, and he said it was a hate crime. The third FTA was the high bond. Rodney Trotter had been giving silicone butt implants in the back of his fifteen-year-old VW bus. His slogan was we come to you and you get what you want. After numerous complaints and an almost death, he was arrested for practicing butt enhancement without a license. The court set a six-figure bond because it deemed Trotter a high risk for flight.

“You look like a balloon someone just let the air out of, ” Lula said to me. “Are you okay? ”

“The human race is doomed, ” I said. “How can we survive when the earth is populated by people like this? ”

“These people aren’t so bad, ” Lula said. “I’ve known lots worse. You gotta look at their whole picture. The Tasty Pastry Pooper was probably just trying to get happy with weed and a supermarket birthday cake, and it didn’t work out for him. The cook at Cluck-in-a-Bucket fried the roaches. It’s not like he was feeding them to his ex-wife while they were alive or something. And I don’t know what to say about the butt injector. He shouldn’t have been doing that. Anyways, the good news is that we’re going to drag their sorry asses back to jail, where they’ll have a chance to rehabilitate themselves. ”

“Do you really think serving time could help them? ” I asked Lula.

“Hell no, ” she said. “They’ll get gang raped and hooked on meth. ”

Connie held a half-empty box of donuts out to me. “This is why I get a box of donuts every morning, ” she said. “It’s a box full of happiness. ”

I took a donut and shoved the files into my messenger bag. “I’m all about happiness. ”

“Me too, ” Lula said. “We should probably take the box with us in case our happiness runs out. We’re going out after the bad guys, right? ”

“Right. ”

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