Plum Boxed Set 1, Books 1-3 Stephanie Plum Novels) (12 page)

A woman came hurrying across the street to me. She was solidly built and conservatively dressed, with her black hair pulled back into a bun at the nape of her neck.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Are you Stephanie Plum?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Alpha would like to speak to you,” she said. “His office is just across the street.”

I didn’t know anyone named Alpha, and I wasn’t eager to hover in the shadow of Benito Ramirez, but the woman reeked of Catholic respectibility, so I took a chance and followed after her. We entered the building next to the gym. It was an average Stark Street row house. Narrow, three stories, sooty exterior, dark, grimy windows. We hurried up a flight of stairs to a small landing. Three doors opened off the landing. One door was ajar, and I felt air-conditioning spilling out into the hallway.

“This way,” the woman said, leading me into a cramped reception room dwarfed by a green leather couch and large scarred blond wood desk. A shopworn end table held dog-eared copies of boxing magazines, and pictures of boxers covered walls that cried out for fresh paint.

She ushered me into an inner office and shut the door behind me. The inner office was a lot like the reception room with the exception of two windows looking down at the street. The man behind the desk stood when I entered. He was wearing pleated dress slacks and a short-sleeved shirt open at the neck. His face was lined and had a good start on jowls. His stocky body still showed muscle, but age had added love handles to his waist and streaks of gunmetal gray to his slicked-back black hair. I placed him in his late fifties and decided his life hadn’t been all roses.

He leaned forward and extended his hand. “Jimmy Alpha. I manage Benito Ramirez.”

I nodded, not sure how to respond. My first reaction was to shriek, but that would probably be unprofessional.

He motioned me to a folding chair placed slightly to the side of his desk. “I heard you were back on the street, and I wanted to take this opportunity to apologize. I know what happened in the gym between you and Benito. I tried to call you, but your phone was disconnected.”

His apology stirred fresh anger. “Ramirez’s behavior was unprovoked and inexcusable.”

Alpha looked genuinely embarrassed. “I never thought I’d have problems like this,” he said. “All I ever wanted was to have a top boxer, and now I got one, and it’s giving me ulcers.” He took an economy-sized bottle of Mylanta from his top drawer. “See this? I buy this stuff by the case.” He unscrewed the cap and chugged some. He put his fist to his sternum and sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m genuinely sorry for what happened to you in the gym.”

“There’s no reason for you to apologize. It’s not your problem.”

“I wish that was true. Unfortunately, it
is
my problem.” He screwed the cap back on, returned the bottle to the drawer, and leaned forward, arms resting on his desk. “You work for Vinnie.”

“Yes.”

“I know Vinnie from way back. Vinnie’s a character.”

He smiled, and I figured somewhere in his travels he must have heard about the duck.

He sobered himself, fixed his eyes on his thumbs, and sagged a little in his seat. “Sometimes I don’t know what to do with Benito. He’s not a bad kid. He just doesn’t know a lot of stuff. All he knows is boxing. All this success is hard on a man like Benito, who comes from nowhere.”

He looked up to see if I was buying. I made a derisive sound, and he acknowledged my disgust.

“I’m not excusing him,” he said, his face a study in bitterness. “Benito does things that are wrong. I don’t have any influence on him these days. He’s full of himself. And he’s got himself surrounded by guys who only got brains in their boxing gloves.”

“That gym was filled with able-bodied men who did nothing to help me.”

“I talked to them about it. Was a time when women were respected, but now nothing’s respected. Drive-by killings, drugs …” He went quiet and sunk into his own thoughts.

I remembered what Morelli had told me about Ramirez and previous rape charges. Alpha was either sticking his head in the sand or else he was actively engaged in cleaning up the mess made by the golden goose. I was putting money on the sand theory.

I stared at him in stony silence, feeling too isolated in his second-floor ghetto office to honestly vent my thoughts, feeling too angry to attempt polite murmurings.

“If Benito bothers you again, you let me know right away,” Alpha said. “I don’t like when this kind of stuff happens.”

“He came to my apartment the night before last and tried to get in. He was abusive in the hall, and he made a mess on my door. If it happens again, I’m filing charges.”

Alpha was visibly shaken. “Nobody told me. He didn’t hurt anybody, did he?”

“No one was hurt.”

Alpha took a card from the top of his desk and scribbled a number on it. “This is my home phone,” he said, handing me the card. “You have any more trouble, you call me right away. If he damaged your door I’ll make good on it.”

“The door’s okay. Just keep him away from me.”

Alpha pressed his lips together and nodded.

“I don’t suppose you know anything about Carmen Sanchez?”

“Only what I read in the papers.”

I
TURNED LEFT AT
S
TATE
S
TREET
and pushed my way into rush-hour traffic. The light changed, and we all inched forward. I had enough money left to buy a few groceries, so I bypassed my apartment and drove an extra quarter mile down the road to Super-Fresh.

It occurred to me while I was standing at the checkout that Morelli had to be getting food from somewhere or someone. Did he scuttle around Super-Fresh wearing a Groucho Marx mustache and glasses with a fake nose attached? And where was he living? Maybe he was living in the blue van. I’d assumed he’d dumped it after being spotted, but maybe not. Maybe it was too convenient. Maybe it was his command headquarters with a cache of canned goods. And, I thought it was possible he had monitoring equipment in the van. He’d been across the street, spying on Ramirez, so maybe he was listening as well.

I hadn’t seen the van on Stark Street. I hadn’t been actively looking for it, but I wouldn’t have passed it by, either. I didn’t know a whole lot about electronic surveillance, but I knew the surveillor had to be fairly close to the surveillee. Something to think about. Maybe I could find Morelli by looking for the van.

I was forced to park at the rear of my lot, and did so harboring a few testy thoughts about handicapped old people who took all the best parking slots. I gripped three plastic grocery bags in each hand, plus a six-pack. I eased the Cherokee’s door closed with my knee. I could feel my arms stretching against the weight, the bags clumsily banging around my knees as I walked, reminding me of a joke I’d once heard having to do with elephant testicles.

I took the elevator, wobbled the short distance down the hall, and set my bags on the carpet while I felt around for my key. I opened the door, switched on the light, shuttled my groceries into the kitchen, and returned to lock my front door. I did the grocery unpacking bit, sorting out cupboard stuff from refrigerator stuff. It felt good to have a little cache of food again. It was my heritage to hoard. Housewives in the burg were always prepared for disaster, stockpiling toilet paper and cans of creamed corn in case the blizzard of aughty-aught should ever repeat itself.

Even Rex was excited by the activity, watching from his cage with his little pink hamster feet pressed against the glass.

“Better days are coming, Rex,” I said, giving him an apple slice. “From here on in it’s all apples and broccoli.”

I’d gotten a city map at the supermarket, and I spread it out on my table while I picked at dinner. Tomorrow I’d be methodical about searching for the blue van. I’d check the area surrounding the gym, and I’d also check out Ramirez’s home address. I hauled out my phone book and looked up Ramirez. Twenty-three were listed. Three had B as the first initial. There were two Benitos. I dialed the first Benito and a woman answered on the fourth ring. I could hear a baby crying in the background.

“Does Benito Ramirez, the boxer, live there?” I asked.

The reply came in Spanish and didn’t sound friendly. I apologized for disturbing her and hung up. The second Benito answered his own phone and was definitely not the Ramirez I was looking for. The three Bs were also dead ends. It didn’t seem worthwhile to call the remaining eighteen numbers. In a way I was relieved not to have found him. I don’t know what I would have said. Nothing, I suppose. I was looking for an address, not a conversation. And the truth is the very thought of Ramirez sent a chill to my heart. I could stake out the gym and try to follow Ramirez when he left for the day, but the big red Cherokee wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. Eddie might be able to help me. Cops had ways of getting addresses. Who else did I know who had access to addresses? Marilyn Truro worked for the DMV. If I had a license plate number, she could probably pull an address. Or I could call the gym. Nah, that’d be too easy.

Well, what the hell, I thought. Give it a shot. I’d torn the page advertising the gym out of my phone book, so I dialed information. I thanked the operator and dialed the number. I told the man who answered the phone that I was supposed to meet Benito, but I’d lost his address.

“Sure,” he said. “It’s 320 Polk. Don’t know the apartment number, but it’s on the second floor. It’s at the rear of the hall. Got his name on the door. Can’t miss it.”

“Thanks,” I told him. “Really appreciate it.”

I pushed the phone to the far corner of the table and turned to the map to place Polk. The map showed it to be at the edge of the ghetto, running parallel to Stark. I circled the address with yellow marker. Now I had two sites to search for the van. I’d park and go on foot if I had to, prowling through alleys and investigating garages. I’d do this first thing in the morning, and if nothing developed, I’d go back to the stack of FTAs Connie had given me and try to make some rent money doing nickel-and-dime cases.

I double-checked all my windows to make sure they were locked, then I drew all the curtains. I wanted to take a shower and go to bed early, and I didn’t want any surprise visitors.

I straightened my apartment, trying not to notice the empty spaces where appliances had been, trying to ignore the phantom furniture indentations persisting in the living room carpet. Morelli’s $10,000 recovery fee would go a long way toward restoring some semblance of normalcy to my life, but it was a stopgap measure. Probably I should still be applying for jobs.

Who was I kidding. I’d covered all the bases in my field.

I could stay with skip tracing, but it seemed risky at best. And at worst … I didn’t even want to think about worst. Besides getting used to being threatened, hated, and possibly molested, wounded, or God forbid killed, I’d have to establish a self-employed mind-set. And I’d have to invest in martial arts coaching and learn some police techniques for subduing felons. I didn’t want to turn myself into the Terminator, but I didn’t want to continue to operate at my present Elmer Fudd level, either. If I had a television I could watch reruns of
Cagney and Lacey
.

I remembered my plan to get another dead bolt installed and decided to visit Dillon Ruddick, the super. Dillon and I were buds, being that we were just about the only two people in the building who didn’t think Metamusil was one of the four major food groups. Dillon moved his lips when he read the funnies, but put a tool in the man’s hand and he was pure genius. He lived in the bowels of the building, in a carpeted efficiency that never saw the natural light of day. There was a constant backround seranade as boilers and water heaters rumbled and water swished through pipes. Dillon said he liked it. Said he pretended it was the ocean.

“Hey Dillon,” I said when he answered the door. “How’s it going?”

“Going okay. Can’t complain. What can I do for you?”

“I’m worried about crime, Dillon. I thought it would be a good idea to get another dead bolt put on my door.”

“That’s cool,” he said. “A person can never be too careful. In fact, I just finished putting a dead bolt on Mrs. Luger’s door. She said some big, huge guy was yelling in the halls, late at night, couple days ago. Said it scared the whatever out of her. Maybe you heard him, too. Mrs. Luger’s just two doors down from you.”

I resisted the urge to swallow and go “gulp.” I knew the name of the big, huge guy.

“I’ll try to get the lock on tomorrow,” Dillon said. “In the meantime, how about a beer.”

“A beer would be good.”

Dillon handed me a bottle and a can of mixed nuts. He boosted the sound back up on the TV, and we both plopped down on the couch.

I’
D SET MY ALARM FOR EIGHT
, but I was up at seven, anxious to find the van. I took a shower and spent some time on my hair, doing the blow-drying thing, adding some gel and some spray. When I was done I looked like Cher on a bad day. Still, Cher on a bad day wasn’t all that bad. I was down to my last clean pair of spandex shorts. I tugged on a matching sports bra that doubled as a halter top and slid a big, loose, purple T-shirt with a large, droopy neck over my head. I laced up my hightop Reeboks, crunched down my white socks, and felt pretty cool.

I ate Frosted Flakes for breakfast. If they were good enough for Tony the Tiger, they were good enough for me. I swallowed down a multivitamin, brushed my teeth, poked a couple of big gold hoops through my earlobes, applied glow-in-the-dark Cherry Red lipstick, and I was ready to go.

Cicadas droned their early warning of another scorcher day, and the blacktop steamed with what was left of morning dew. I pulled out of the lot into the steady stream of traffic on St. James. I had the map spread out on the seat next to me, plus a steno pad I’d begun to use for phone numbers, addresses, and miscellaneous bits of information relating to the job.

Ramirez’s apartment building was set in the middle of the block, its identity lost in a crush of four-story walk-ups built cheek by jowl for the working poor. Most likely the building had originally held immigrant laborers—Irish, Italian, Polish hopefuls barged up the Delaware to work in Trenton’s factories. It was difficult to tell who lived here now. There were no old men loitering on front stoops, no children playing on the sidewalk. Two middle-aged Asian women stood waiting at a bus stop, their purses held tight against their chests, their faces expressionless. There were no vans in sight, and no place to hide one. No garages or alleys. If Morelli was keeping tabs on Ramirez, it would have to be from the rear or from an adjacent apartment.