20 Takedown Twenty (23 page)

“The butcher shop?”

“You know how some men have wet dreams? Randy Berger has pig dreams.”

Morelli burst out laughing. “What are you doing there?”

“I’m a butcher.”

“Cupcake, you go green walking past the chicken parts in the supermarket.”

“This is right up there for the worst day of my life.”

“You’ve had some pretty bad days. Remember when you fell off the fire escape into the dog diarrhea?”

“This was worse.”

“Wow.”

I took the beer bottle off my eye and drank the beer. “I need a shower.”

“Do you need help?”

“No. I need food. Something vegetarian.”

“A salad?”

“A pizza. Hold the pepperoni and sausage.”

I was working my way through my second beer and third piece of pizza, and I was beginning to feel human.

“How’s your nose?” Morelli asked.

“It’s good. I can breathe through it, and it doesn’t hurt if I don’t touch it.”

“Are you going to keep the butcher job?”

“At least for a couple more days. Randy Berger has moved to the top of my list for murder suspects. He knew all the women. He’s big enough and strong enough to pitch someone into a Dumpster. And he’s scary.”

“How is he scary?”

“He worships meat. His eyes get glittery and crazy when he talks about it.”

“All meat?”

“Mostly pork.”

“It’s a guy thing,” Morelli said. “Any normal, red-blooded guy is going to go a little gonzo talking about pig products. All the best food in the world comes from a pig. Hot dogs,
bacon, ribs, pulled pork, pork roast, pork chops, ham, Taylor pork roll.”

“He was roasting a whole pig. It was massive. And he had its ears wrapped in aluminum foil.”

“That’s so they don’t burn.”

“You know about this?”

“I can find my way around a smoker.”

“So you don’t think Randy Berger killed the women.”

“I didn’t say that. I said he’s not crazy just because he gets a little sloppy over pork.”

“What’s your best guess for the killer?”

“I don’t have a best guess,” Morelli said. “What we believe is that he’s local. And the women knew him. He’s neat. Doesn’t like a messy crime scene. Has some ego. Likes to leave a calling card. Feels safe. Maybe feels like he’s above the law. Beyond that we don’t know much.”

“What about the bank accounts?”

“The bank accounts have for the most part been explained away. One account was moved to another bank. One account was cleaned out to buy a cruise ticket that was never used.”

“Your profile doesn’t entirely fit Randy Berger. He probably wouldn’t choose a Venetian blind cord as his instrument of death. He wouldn’t care about neat. He’d be more comfortable with a cleaver.”

“And what about motive?” Morelli asked. “What’s his motive?”

“Fun?”

“It sounds to me like you quit working for Vinnie but you’re still working for Ranger,” Morelli said.

“I can’t bring myself to walk away from those women. And I think it’s odd that four women have been killed and left in a Dumpster and no one saw anything. It’s like the giraffe. There’s a giraffe hanging out on Fifteenth Street and no one’s reported it. What’s with that?”

“It’s a mystery,” Morelli said, sliding his arm around me and leaning close. “You don’t smell like barbecue anymore, but I like you anyway. Maybe we should take some of those items I bought at the drugstore for a test drive.”

“If you touch my nose I’ll make you incapable of fathering a child.”

“Touching your nose wasn’t in my game plan.”

“Are you willing to chance it?”

“No,” Morelli said.

I GOT TO the hardware store at seven-thirty in the morning and bought rubber boots. My credit card was declined, so I gave Victor my last five dollars and the promise of pork chops. I went from there to the butcher shop, where I pulled on my new boots and wrapped the Sasquatch-size apron around myself as best I could.

“This is a big day,” Randy said, taking the first hit of the day from the peach schnapps bottle. “We just got blood sausage and tongue from a farm in Wisconsin, and we have to start butchering the side of beef. I thought after we fill the display cases, you could take care of the customers, so I can tackle the side of beef. You know how to work the slicer and the scale, and you can come get me if there’s a problem. Just remember, the customer is always right.”

I added rubber gloves to my ensemble and helped Randy set up the trays of sausages and steaks. He brought out the tongue, and I felt my gag reflex kick in. The tongue was big. In fact it was bigger than just big. It was monstrous. It was the biggest freaking tongue I’d ever seen. Good thing Morelli’d stayed over last night, because there wasn’t going to be anything happening tonight after my seeing a tray full of cow tongue.

At eleven o’clock I was feeling pretty good about how things were going. I’d weighed out deli meats, steaks, and a roasting chicken, and I hadn’t fainted or thrown up. I’d gagged a little when Mrs. Carlson came in and asked for chicken livers, but I don’t think she noticed. Not that this was a career position for me. I thought I’d stick with it long enough to be sure Randy Berger wasn’t the old lady killer, and then I’d try to get a job stuffing sanitary napkins into a box at the personal products plant.

The front door opened and I caught a glimpse of Joe’s Grandma Bella scuttling past the register and heading for the meat counter. I ducked behind the display case and told myself not to panic.

“Who’s here?” Bella shouted. “Who’s working here?”

Randy stuck his head around the corner from the back room and looked down at me cringing behind the case.

“Dropped my pen,” I said.

“Who’s that?” Bella asked. “Who do I hear?”

I popped up. “Me. Can I help you?”

“You! What you doing here?”

“I’m working here,” I said.

“Then I never shop here.”

Randy rushed to the counter. “I have your special order,” he said to Bella. “It just came in. I sliced into the blood sausage this morning, and it’s the best I’ve ever seen. And the tongue is nice and fat.”

“I like fat tongue,” Bella said. “You give me good price?”

“Of course,” Randy said. He reached into the case and pushed the tongues around until he found one he liked. He held it out for Bella to see. “It’s a beauty,” he said. “What do you think?”

“I’ve seen better tongue,” Bella said. “But I guess this will have to do.”

“You’re a hard negotiator,” Randy said to Bella.

“You give me good price or I give you the eye,” Bella said. “And that one behind you I already give the eye. She going to hell.”

Randy weighed and wrapped the tongue and weighed and wrapped Bella’s sausage. “Anything else?”

“I get my discount?”

“It’ll show up at the register,” Randy said.

Bella left and I turned to Randy. “What discount?”

“The senior discount.”

“Bella is in the wellness program?”

“She’s a certified card-carrying participant. She comes in every other week for blood sausage and tongue.”

I did an inadvertent shiver. God knows what she did with
the sausage and tongue. Probably ate it raw. Probably tossed it into her stewpot with beetle legs and rat tails and brewed up some evil concoction. Or she could be feeding it to Sunny.

“I thought you were almost engaged to her grandson,” Randy said. “Why did she give you the eye?”

“Uncle Sunny failed to appear for his court date, and I was given the unpopular job of capturing him and bringing him in.”

Randy nodded. “The Sunucchis and Morellis are a tight family.”

Ten minutes later Lula swung into the store and marched back to the meat counter.

“I can’t believe you abandoned us and now you’re working here,” she said. “I’m forced to be driving Vinnie around. My car’s gonna have a grease spot on the headrest. How am I ever gonna get that out?” She looked down at the case with the sausages and organ meats. “Holy cannoli, is that a tongue? That’s the biggest freaking tongue I ever saw. It’s like it’s all swelled up. I’m getting hot looking at it. Can you imagine what a tongue like that could do?”

“It’s a cow tongue,” I said.

“No wonder cows are so contented.”

“Did you want something?” I asked Lula. “Lunch meat? Hot wings?”

“No. I just came in to see you, and see how you’re doing.”

“My nose feels a lot better.”

“Are you going to Bingo tonight?”

“No. This job gets out late.”

“It don’t sound like such a good job to me,” Lula said. “And that apron you’re wearing is
yikes
. You need to go to the kitchen store and get yourself something with ruffles.”

Ranger called at noon. “What’s with the butcher shop?”

“I quit the bonds office and took a job as a butcher.”

“Babe,” Ranger said. And he hung up.

By four o’clock Randy had hacked up half a cow and gone through a lot of peach schnapps. I saw no indication that the schnapps affected him, with the possible exception of increasing the ruddiness in his cheeks. Hard to tell if the ruddiness came from the schnapps or from taking a cleaver to Ferdinand the Bull.

“Do you live close to the store?” I asked him.

“I live a quarter mile away in an apartment over the laundromat. It’s real convenient when I want to do laundry, only thing is my floor vibrates if all the dryers are going at once.”

“Is that the laundromat on King Street?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a nice laundromat. I use it sometimes. Maybe I’ll use it tonight and come visit you.”

“You mean you’d come in to my apartment?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t get a lot of visitors.”

“You could show me how to cook something,” I told him. “A hamburger or a pork chop.”

“I was planning on steak tonight.”

“I’d
love
to learn how to cook steak. I won’t even go home to get my laundry. We can go straight from the store.”

“I guess that would be okay,” Randy said. “Is it a date?”

“No. It’s a cooking lesson.”

“Maybe it could turn into a date someday.”

“Sure. Anything’s possible.”

Okay, so I knew that wasn’t possible, but it was a small fib for a good cause. I wanted to look around Randy’s apartment to see if he had Venetian blind cord stashed somewhere.

I started cleaning up before the shop closed. By eight we were picking out steaks, and we were on the road by eight-thirty. I followed Randy and parked in the laundromat lot. I got out of the CR-V and looked up at the second-floor apartment. There were Venetian blinds on the windows. I cautioned myself not to get carried away. Lots of people had Venetian blinds on their windows, and most of those people weren’t killers.

We trudged up the stairs, Randy unlocked his door, and we carted our dinner inside. Randy had a grocery bag with the steaks and a loaf of sourdough bread, and I had the half-empty bottle of schnapps.

He had a brown leather couch and a matching recliner positioned in front of a large flat-screen television in his living room. He had a floor lamp and a tray table by the recliner.
The floor was hardwood with a worn-out tan area rug under the furniture. No curtains.

The kitchen was almost as large as the living room. The appliances were old but obviously worked. The walls were lined with shelves holding cans of tomato paste, spices, oils, canisters of flour and sugar, steak sauce, garlic, apple juice, soy sauce, kidney beans, ketchup, and more. One section of shelving was given over to glasses and dishes. Another to pots and pans. There were two small cabinets over the counter on either side of the sink, and a small square wood table with four chairs was set into a corner of the kitchen. There were salt and pepper shakers in the middle of the table.

“This is nice,” I said. “It’s comfortable.”

“It’s okay. I don’t spend much time here. The shop is open six days a week, and I get home late. I make dinner and then I watch television.”

“What about Sundays?”

“I go to yard sales. I collect things.”

I looked around. His apartment was bare-bones. “Where do you keep the things you collect?”

“In a garage behind the deli.” He put a cast iron grill pan on the gas cooktop and turned the oven on. “Do you want a drink?”