My cousin Vinnie’s bail bonds office is on Hamilton Avenue. It’s a one-story storefront building with some parking spots by the back door. Vinnie has an inner office where he hides from people he’s stiffed, pissed off, infected with herpes, or previously incarcerated. Vinnie looks like a weasel in a pimp suit. His wife, Lucille, is a saint. His father-in-law, Harry the Hammer, owns the agency and didn’t get his nickname because he was a carpenter.
Connie Rosolli, the office manager and guard dog, was at her desk when I walked in.
“How’d it go last night?” she asked.
“It was good. Ranger walked up to Gardi, yanked him out of his chair, and cuffed him. Very smooth.”
“And?”
“That was it.”
“No naked Ranger in your bed?”
“Nope.”
“Disappointing,” Connie said.
Tell me about it. “Anything new come in for me?”
“I have a failure-to-appear. High money bond. Jimmy Poletti.”
“He owns all those car dealerships, right? He shoots his own commercials. ‘Make a deal with Jimmy!’ ”
“Yeah, turned out some of the deals were taking place in the back room and involved underage girls imported from Mexico.”
I took the file from Connie and paged through it, stopping to look at Poletti’s mugshot. Very respectable. Sixty-two years old. Face a little doughy. Thinning gray hair. Crisp white dress shirt and striped tie. Nice dark blue suit jacket. Looked more like a banker than a car dealer.
“Boy,” I said, “you never know from looking at someone.”
The front door banged open, and Lula stomped in. At 5′ 5″, Lula is a couple inches too short for her weight. She’s a black woman who changes her hair color like other women change their underwear, and her fashion preferences run to tiny spandex skirts and tops. Almost always she overflows out of the skirts and tops, but it seems to work for her.
“I just got a traffic ticket,” Lula said. “Do you believe it? What’s this world coming to when a woman can’t even drive to work without this harassment?”
“What’s the ticket for?” Connie asked.
“Speeding,” Lula said.
I looked over at her. “Were you speeding?”
“Hell, yeah. I was doing forty-three miles an hour in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone and Officer Picky pulled me over. There should be a law against thirty-mile-an-hour zones. My car don’t want to go that slow. It’s painful to drive thirty miles an hour.”
“I’ve got donuts,” Connie said, gesturing to the white bakery box on her desk. “Help yourself.”
Lula’s face brightened. “That helps perk up my mood. I’m taking one with sprinkles. And maybe one with chocolate icing. And look at this one with the pink gooey stuff oozing out of it.”
Lula bit into the one with the sprinkles. “What happened last night with you and Mr. Tall, Dark, Handsome as Hell, and Hot?”
“He captured Gardi. No shots fired.”
“And?”
“There’s no ‘and.’ ”
“Say what? There’s no ‘and he got naked and waved his magic wand’?”
“Nope,” Connie said. “No magic wand. She didn’t get to see the wand.”
“Well, you know he got one,” Lula said. “How come he didn’t wave it and make her a happy princess?”
Connie and Lula looked at me, eyebrows raised, waiting for an explanation.
“It was a job,” I said. “It didn’t involve his … wand.”
Lula shook her head. “That is so sad. Opportunities wasted. What did you wear? Did you wear some dumpy business suit?”
“I wore the little red dress.”
“I know that dress,” Lula said. “It’s definitely wand-worthy.”
Vinnie stuck his head out of his office. “What’s with all the yammering? I can’t hear myself think in here. And why aren’t you out catching some scumbag? I’m out big money for Jimmy Poletti. Go drag his butt back to jail.”
Vinnie slammed his door shut, and Lula stuck her tongue out at him.
“I saw that,” Vinnie yelled from inside his office. “Have some respect.”
“How’d he see that?” Lula asked.
Connie pointed to a camera newly installed over Vinnie’s office door. “He’s got security cameras all over the place.”
Lula gave the camera the finger.
“I saw that too,” Vinnie yelled.
I shoved Poletti’s file into my messenger bag and hiked the bag up onto my shoulder. “I’m heading out. It shouldn’t be hard to find Poletti. It’s not like he’s a gangbanger.”
“He’s sort of a TV star,” Lula said. “I wouldn’t mind going with you to see what he looks like up close.”
We went out the back door and stood looking at our two cars. Lula was driving a red Firebird, and I was driving a rusted-out Ford Explorer.
“Probably,” Lula said, “we should take your car in case we have to shoot him. It won’t matter if he bleeds out in your car.”
“We’re not going to shoot him.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Lula said.
“He’s a businessman. He was wearing a suit for his mugshot. He’s not going to go nuts on us. And besides, we don’t shoot people … hardly ever.”
Lula buckled herself into the passenger seat. “I’m just saying.”
It was nine o’clock Monday morning. It was August. It was hot. It was humid. The air had a brown tinge to it and sort of stuck to your eyeballs and the back of your throat. It was summer in Jersey.
I had my shoulder-length curly brown hair pulled up into a ponytail, and I was wearing jeans and a red tanktop. Lula was wearing a black satin bustier from her Wild West ’Ho House collection, and a poison green skirt that came just a couple inches below her doo-dah. Lula is shorter than me, but there’s a lot more of her. I could be naked standing next to Lula, and no one would give me a second glance.