Hard Eight (3 page)

Connie is the office manager. She’s in charge of petty cash and she uses it wisely, buying doughnuts and file folders, and financing the occasional gaming trip to Atlantic City. It was a little after eight, and Connie was ready for the day, eyes lined, lashes mascaraed, lips painted bright red, hair curled into a big bush around her face. I, on the other hand, was letting the day creep up on me. I had my hair pulled into a half-assed ponytail and was wearing my usual stretchy little T-shirt, jeans, and boots. Waving a mascara wand in the vicinity of my eye seemed like a dangerous maneuver this morning, so I was au naturel.

I took a doughnut and looked around. “Where’s Lula?”

“She’s late. She’s been late all week. Not that it matters.”

Lula was hired to do filing, but mostly she does what she wants.

“Hey, I heard that,” Lula said, swinging through the door. “You better not be talking about me. I’m late on account of I’m going to night school now.”

“You go one day a week,” Connie said.

“Yeah, but I gotta study. It’s not like this shit comes easy. It’s not like my former occupation as a ho helps me out, you know. I don’t think my final exam’s gonna be about hand jobs.”

Lula is a couple inches shorter and a lot of pounds heavier than me. She buys her clothes in the petite department and then shoehorns herself into them. This wouldn’t work for most people, but it seems right for Lula. Lula shoehorns herself into
life
.

“So what’s up?” Lula said. “I miss anything?”

I gave Connie the body receipt for Paulson. “Do you guys know anything about child custody bonds?”

“They’re relatively new,” Connie said. “Vinnie isn’t doing them yet. They’re high-risk bonds. Sebring is the only one in the area taking them on.”

“Sebring,” Lula said. “Isn’t he the guy with the good legs? I hear he’s got legs like Tina Turner.” She looked down at her own legs. “My legs are the right color but I just got more of them.”

“Sebring’s legs are white,” Connie said. “And I hear they’re good at running down blondes.”

I swallowed the last of my doughnut and wiped my hands on my jeans. “I need to talk to him.”

“You’ll be safe today,” Lula said. “Not only aren’t you
blonde, but you aren’t exactly decked out. You have a hard night?”

“I’m not a morning person.”

“It’s your love life,” Lula said. “You aren’t getting any, and you got nothing to put a smile on your face. You’re letting yourself go, is what you’re doing.”

“I could get plenty if I wanted.”

“Well, then?”

“It’s complicated.”

Connie gave me a check for the Paulson capture. “You aren’t thinking about going to work for Sebring, are you?”

I told them about Evelyn and Annie.

“Maybe I should talk to Sebring with you,” Lula said. “Maybe we can get him to show us his legs.”

“Not necessary,” I said. “I can manage this myself.” And I didn’t especially want to see Les Sebring’s legs.

“Look here. I didn’t even put my bag down,” Lula said. “I’m ready to go.”

Lula and I stared at each other for a beat. I was going to lose. I could see it coming. Lula had it in her mind to go with me. Probably didn’t want to file. “Okay,” I said, “but no shooting, no shoving, no asking him to roll up his pants leg.”

“You got a lot of rules,” Lula said.

We took the CR-V across town and parked in a lot next to Sebring’s building. The bonds office was on the ground floor, and Sebring had a suite of offices above it.

“Just like Vinnie,” Lula said, eyeballing the carpeted floor and freshly painted walls. “Only it looks like humans work here. And check out these chairs for people to sit in . . . they don’t even have stains on them. And his receptionist don’t have a mustache, either.”

Sebring escorted us into his private office. “Stephanie Plum. I’ve heard of you,” he said.

“It wasn’t my fault that the funeral parlor burned down,” I told him. “And I almost never shoot people.”

“We heard of you, too,” Lula said to Sebring. “We heard you got great legs.”

Sebring was wearing a silver gray suit, white shirt, and red, white, and blue tie. He reeked of respectability, from the tips of his shined black shoes to the top of his perfectly trimmed white hair. And behind the polite politician smile he looked like he didn’t take a lot of shit. There was a moment of silence while he considered Lula. Then he hiked his pants leg up. “Get a load of these wheels,” he said.

“You must work out,” Lula said. “You got excellent legs.”

“I wanted to speak to you about Mabel Markowitz,” I said to Sebring. “You called her on a child custody bond.”

He nodded. “I remember. I have someone scheduled to visit her again today. So far, she hasn’t been helpful.”

“She lives next door to my parents, and I don’t think she knows where her granddaughter or her great-granddaughter have gone.”

“That’s too bad,” Sebring said. “Do you know about child custody bonds?”

“Not a lot.”

“PBUS, which as you know is a professional bail agents association, worked with the Center for Missing and Exploited Children to get legislation going that would discourage parents from kidnapping their own kids.

“It’s a pretty simple idea. If it looks like there’s a good
chance either or both parents will take off with the child for parts unknown, the court can impose a cash bond.”

“So this is like a criminal bail bond, but it’s a child who’s at risk,” I said.

“With one big difference,” Sebring said. “When a criminal bond is posted by a bail bondsman and the accused fails to appear in court, the bondsman forfeits the bond amount to the
court.
Then the bondsman can hunt down the accused, return him to the system, and hopefully be reimbursed by the court. In the case of a child custody bond, the bondsman forfeits the bond to the wronged
parent.
The money is then supposed to be used to find the missing child.”

“So if the bond isn’t enough of a deterrent to kidnapping, at least there’s money to hire a professional to search for the missing child,” I said.

“Exactly. Problem is, unlike a criminal bond, the child custody bondsman doesn’t have the legal right to hunt down the child. The only recourse the child custody bondsman has to recoup his loss is to foreclose on property or cash collateral posted at the time the bond is written.

“In this case, Evelyn Soder didn’t have the cash on hand for the bond. So she came to us and used her grandmother’s house as collateral for a surety bond. The hope is that when you call up the grandmother and tell her to start packing, she’ll divulge the location of the missing child.”

“Have you already released the money to Steven Soder?”

“The money gets released in three weeks.”

So I had three weeks to find Annie.

“That Les Sebring seemed like a nice guy,” Lula said when we were back in my CR-V. “I bet he don’t even do it with barnyard animals.”

Lula was referring to the rumor that my cousin Vinnie had once been involved in a romantic relationship with a duck. The rumor’s never been officially confirmed or denied.

“Now what?” Lula asked. “What’s next on the list?”

It was a little after ten. Soder’s bar and grill, The Foxhole, should be opening for the lunch trade. “Next we visit Steven Soder,” I said. “Probably it’ll be a waste of time, but it seems like something we should do anyway.”

“No stone unturned,” Lula said.

Steven Soder’s bar wasn’t far from Sebring’s office. It was tucked between Carmine’s Cut-rate Appliances and a tattoo parlor. The door to The Foxhole was open. The interior was dark and uninviting at this hour. Still, two souls had found their way in and were sitting at the polished wood bar.

“I’ve been here before,” Lula said. “It’s an okay place.
The burgers aren’t bad. And if you get here early, before the grease goes rancid, the onion rings are good, too.”

We stepped inside and paused while our eyes adjusted. Soder was behind the bar. He looked up when we entered and nodded an acknowledgment. He was just under six foot. Chunky build. Reddish blond hair. Blue eyes. Ruddy complexion. Looked like he drank a lot of his own beer.

We bellied up to the bar, and he found his way over to us. “Stephanie Plum,” he said. “Haven’t seen you in a while. What’ll it be?”

“Mabel is worried about Annie. I told her I’d ask around.”

“Worried about losing that wreck of a house is more like it.”

“She won’t lose the house. She has money to cover the bond.” Sometimes I fib just for practice. It’s my one really good bounty hunter skill.

“Too bad,” Soder said. “I’d like to see her sitting on the curb. That whole family is a car crash.”

“So you think Evelyn and Annie just took off?”

“I know they did. She left me a fucking letter. I went over there to pick the kid up and there was a letter for me on the kitchen counter.”

“What did the letter say?”

“It said she was taking off and next time I saw the kid would be never.”

“Guess she don’t like you, hunh?” Lula said.

“She’s nuts,” Soder said. “A drunk and a nut. She gets up in the morning and can’t figure out how to button her sweater. I hope you find the kid fast because Evelyn isn’t capable of taking care of her.”

“Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”

He made a derisive grunt. “Not a clue. She didn’t have any friends, and she was dumb as a box of nails. So far as I can figure she didn’t have much money. They’re probably living out of the car somewhere in the Pine Barrens, eating from Dumpsters.”

Not a pretty thought.

I left my card on the bar. “In case you think of something helpful.”

He took the card and winked at me.

“Hey,” Lula said. “I don’t like that wink. You wink at her again, and I’ll rip your eye outta your head.”

“What’s with the fat chick?” Soder asked me. “The two of you going steady?”

“She’s my bodyguard,” I told him.

“I’m not no
fat chick
,” Lula said. “I’m a big woman. Big enough to kick your nasty white ass around this room.”

Soder locked eyes with her. “Something to look forward to.”

I dragged Lula out of the bar, and we stood blinking on the sidewalk in the sunlight.

“I didn’t like him,” Lula said.

“No kidding.”

“I didn’t like the way he kept calling his little girl
the kid.
And it wasn’t nice that he wanted an old lady kicked out of her house.”

I called Connie on my cell phone and asked her to get me Soder’s home address and car information.

“You think he got Annie in his cellar?” Lula asked.

“No, but it wouldn’t hurt to look.”

“What’s next?”

“Next we visit Soder’s divorce lawyer. There had to be
some justification for setting the bond. I’d like to know the details.”

“You know Soder’s divorce lawyer?”

I got in the car and looked over at Lula. “Dickie Orr.”

Lula grinned. “Your ex? Every time we visit him he throws you out of the office. You think he’s going to talk to you about a client?”

I had had the shortest marriage in the history of the Burg. I’d barely finished unpacking my wedding presents when I caught the jerk on the dining room table with my arch-enemy, Joyce Barnhardt. Looking at it in retrospect I can’t imagine why I married Orr in the first place. I suppose I was in love with the idea of being in love.

There are certain expectations of girls from the Burg. You grow up, you get married, you have children, you spread out some in the beam, and you learn how to set a buffet for forty. My
dream
was that I would get irradiated like Spiderman and be able to fly like Superman. My
expectation
had been that I’d marry. I did the best I could to live up to the expectation, but it didn’t work out. Guess I was stupid. Swayed by Dickie’s good looks and education. My head turned by the fact that he was a lawyer.

I didn’t see the flaws. The low opinion Dickie has of women. The way he can lie without remorse. I guess I shouldn’t fault him so much for that since I’m pretty good at lying myself. Still, I don’t lie about personal things . . . like love and fidelity.

“Maybe Dickie’s having a good day,” I said to Lula. “Maybe he’ll be feeling chatty.”

“Yeah, and it might help if you don’t leap across the desk and try to choke him like you did last time.”

Dickie’s office was on the other side of town. He’d left
a large firm and gone off on his own. From what I could tell he was having some success. He was now located in a two-room suite in the Carter Building. I’d been there, briefly, once before and had sort of lost control.

“I’ll be better this time,” I said to Lula.

Lula rolled her eyes and got into the CR-V.

I took State Street to Warren and turned onto Sommerset. I found a parking space directly across from Dickie’s building and took it as a sign.

“Unh-uh,” Lula said. “You just got good parking karma. It don’t count for interpersonal relationships. You read your horoscope today?”

I looked over at her. “No. Was it bad?”

“It said your moons weren’t in a good spot, and you need to be careful about making money decisions. And not only that, you’re going to have man trouble.”

“I always have man trouble.” I had two men in my life, and I didn’t know what to do with either of them. Ranger scared the bejeezus out of me, and Morelli had pretty much decided that unless I changed my ways I was more trouble than I was worth. I hadn’t heard from Morelli in
weeks.

“Yeah, but this is going to be
big
trouble,” Lula said.

“You’re making that up.”

“Am not.”

“You
are
.”

“Well, okay, maybe I made some of it up, but not the part about the man trouble.”

I fed the meter a quarter and crossed the street. Lula and I entered the building and took the elevator to the third floor. Dickie’s office was at the end of the hall. The sign beside the door read
Richard Orr, Attorney.
I resisted
the urge to write
asshole
below the sign. I was, after all, a woman scorned, and that carried certain responsibilities. Still, best to write
asshole
on the way out.