Beware False Profits (20 page)

“You kept showing up.” He nodded to me, too busy eating to spare his pointer. “You were with the lady who took Joey’s place as fortune-teller—”

“You know about that?”

“I heard about Mayday! when I got to town. I heard Joey told fortunes. He was always good at that. Once I was in the joint waiting for my trial, and he told me I’d get off and I did.”

“The joint?”

“Just a misunderstanding.”

I thought about everything I’d learned about Creative Construction. “Work-related misunderstanding?”

“They’re always work-related.”

My gaze locked with Lucy’s.

Rube went on. “So I saw you with that new fortune-teller—”

“My mother,” I explained. Junie and the girls were still out shopping.

“Then the next day I saw you with Joey’s wife, when I was watching their house. He knows how to pick ’em, doesn’t he?”

That was a question best left unanswered. “So you saw me with Maura?”

“Right, but you didn’t see me because I didn’t want you to. When you left I decided to follow, just to see if maybe you had some important connection to him. You went over to Bunting Street, and when you left the old house, I went inside, just to see what was up.”

“And you got inside how?”

He laughed. “You’re kidding, right? You think those locks are secure? You know what a bump key is?”

“It’s a key that’ll let you into almost any house you want to get into,” Lucy said. “I bought a set on eBay last week. But go on.”

He looked pleased, as if he’d found a coconspirator. “When I got in I saw the note you left your contractor. I liked the house. I decided if I stayed there, maybe I’d find out more about Joey, and I figured you’d never catch on. And it was more comfortable than sleeping in my truck.”

“What about all the work you did?” Lucy asked. “Great work, by the way.”

“I’m no criminal. Maybe I let myself in and that wasn’t strictly legal, but I figured I owed you for giving me a place to stay. Besides, I could tell you needed the help. Those other guys never showed up. And at night I didn’t have anything better to do. I had my truck, I had my tools…” He shrugged in finale.

“Until today we thought they were doing the work.”

“I was going to leave you a note before I left for good, telling you not to pay them. Baboons!”

I got the drift if not the precise translation. “Amen.”

So now we knew why Rube had chosen our Victorian, but we still didn’t know why he was here in Emerald Springs. Before I could ask, he ate his last brownie, dusted off his hands, and finished his third cup of coffee.

“Tell me what you know about Joey.” He leaned across the table. His eyes were as black as olives, and they gave absolutely nothing away.

“You have to go first, so I’ll know what to tell you.”

He chewed the inside of his lip, as if considering. “It’s not a good story.”

I was sorry I had to hear it, because I didn’t want anything to ruin my opinion of Joe Wagner. Discovering Joe was a part-time drag queen was campy and exotic, but entirely harmless. I didn’t want to find out he was also a criminal.

Rube took my silence for permission. “I guess you have to know. But it doesn’t put me and my brothers in a very good light.”

I felt marginally more optimistic. “Go ahead and get it off your chest, Rube. Maybe you’ll feel better.”

“My father Jake’s been married a lot. He’s not so easy to live with, if you know what I mean? Wives died or divorced him. I kind of lost count.”

“My mother’s been married five times,” I said.

He seemed to appreciate the comparison. “Something must be wrong in the Belcore gene department, but Pops only has boys, not a girl in the bunch. An even dozen. We didn’t all grow up in the same house. Some of us lived with Pops, some lived with our mothers. But nobody moved too far away. So we spent a lot of time together, got to know each other. And one thing we all knew? Pops didn’t have much patience, and what he had he saved for Joey, the baby.”

“That’s tough.”

“Yeah, we all thought so.
Now
I can understand. Joey’s mother was sort of the love of Pop’s life. She was young and a real looker. And smart? Too smart for Joey’s good, because she figured out early that living with Pops wasn’t what she wanted. So she took off and left Joey and Pops behind. Joey was smart like her. I had a reading problem so I barely finished high school. Simeon? He had a social problem, if you know what I mean. He wanted something, he took it.”

Simeon probably wasn’t having much luck taking what he wanted in Leavenworth, but I nodded.

“Anyway, everybody but Joey had a problem or an excuse. Some of us are just lazy good-for-nothings. Or were, I ought to say. We improve with age, like good Chianti, huh? Anyway, Joey didn’t need to improve. Straight As, good on the football field, responsible, you name it. He got a scholarship to college and decided he’d study business. Pops started talking about letting Joey take over the company when he retired.”

I could see how this might upset the others, who had probably paid their dues in Creative Construction the old-fashioned way. Knowing that someday Joe was just going to waltz in clutching his college degree and start ordering them around? The situation had all the earmarks of a disaster.

“So is that what happened? Your father retired and Joe took over?”

“The summer after Joey finished his third year, Pops got sick. Cancer, if you want to know. The doctor said he didn’t have much of a chance of beating it, and he’d probably pass away quick. Everybody was all broke up. Maybe Pops wasn’t the best father, but he was all we had. Then Simeon reminded us that when Pops was six feet under, Joey would be lording it over us. He said he’d seen a will, and Pops was leaving everything to Joey. Of course Joey was supposed to keep all our interests in mind, but what good would that do? Joey didn’t like something? Out we’d go.”

He looked longingly at his empty coffee cup, so I got up to pour him another, glad I’d made a big pot. I offered a re-fill to Lucy, but she shook her head. She was clearly enthralled.

“I think anybody would feel upset with that situation,” she said. “And your father probably never intended for Joey to take over while he was so young and inexperienced.”

Rube took a long sip, then he licked his lips. “Here’s the rest. Quick and clean. We set Joey up for a fall. It wasn’t hard because he was so green and so honest himself. We shifted some figures here, emptied a bank account there. Joey was working in our office that summer. We fixed the books to show profits we never made, then we fixed them some more to look like Joey had skimmed all the excess into his own pockets. Simeon did most of the work. He knew how to make things happen.” He sighed. “Somebody should have paid attention to that. It got him in big trouble later.”

“Go on,” I encouraged.

“When we showed Joey what we’d found, he denied it, of course. But what could he do? How could he insist he was innocent? All the proof was right there. So we told him we would make it go away because he was our brother, and we had to protect him. But we told him he had to leave for good, that we couldn’t trust him anymore around the company or the family, and if he stayed in Boston, we’d be obliged to tell Pops what he had done and our poor dying Pops would be obliged to turn him in to save everything he had worked so hard to build. Joey was young, and he fell for it.”

“You mean Joe didn’t know he’d been set up?”

“Not then. I’d guess he’s figured it out by now, wouldn’t you?”

I guessed he had. “What about your father?”

“They did some long-shot operation, and he came through fine and dandy. You can imagine we got worried about then. See, we’d thought Pops would die before any of this came to light. But we went ahead and stuck with the story we invented. We told him Joey just disappeared, and nobody knew where he’d gone.”

“And he believed that?”

“About that time we were bidding on some jobs against another firm that was
connected
, if you know what I mean. We told Pops we thought maybe they’d messed with Joey or took him as a warning that we should back off. We pretended like we did everything to find him. Pops was recovering, and he didn’t have the strength to go looking himself. He finally accepted that Joey was gone. For years we thought Joey would come back and rat us out, but he never did. Pops still misses him terrible. He went on to marry and have one more son, but he’s never forgotten Joey.”

I thought about everything Nan had told me this afternoon. The Belcore family was some piece of work. Maybe Joe was lucky to have escaped—although I doubted he felt that way.

“What about Joe’s mother?” Lucy asked. “Are they in touch? Could Joe be with her?”

“For a long time nobody knew where she’d gone. But she’s the reason I knew something had happened to Joey after I traced him here. When that fellow at the food bank announced Joey was with his dying mother? See, when we decided we had to find him, we were finally able to track his mother down. She’s living on the beach in Ft. Lauderdale with a new husband and kids, healthy as a horse, and hasn’t heard from Joey since the day she walked out.”

Lucy was full of questions. “If Joe has figured out by now that his own brothers framed him, why
hasn’t
he gone home to tell your father?”

But I thought I knew. Joe was ashamed. Ashamed that he had let his brothers get the better of him. Ashamed that he had abandoned his dying father to keep from being arrested. Maybe even ashamed that he had never figured out how to make things right again. He’s the most responsible person I’ve ever met. Something like this would eat away at Joe Wagner, but it wouldn’t necessarily spur him to act irresponsibly.

“I bet Joe decided there was nothing to be gained by exposing you and your brothers and breaking your father’s heart all over again,” I said.

Rube hung his head a moment. “That’s what I think, too.”

“So why are you here?”

“We had a family meeting two years ago. We knew we couldn’t go on like this. Pops is getting old, and he deserves to end his life with Joey beside him. At the very least he deserves to know what happened, and what we did. And we need to tell Joey we’re sorry. It’s weighing us down.”

“And everybody agreed to this?”

“Simeon couldn’t be there. At the meeting, I mean. Dan thought maybe we should just keep going like we had been, to keep from hurting Pops even more. But the rest thought it was time to end the lies, so we started looking for Joey. He did a good job of hiding himself. He changed his name, moved out of New England. It took awhile, but we finally got the lead we needed, and my brothers sent me to talk to him and see if I could bring him home.”

“Your timing sucks,” Lucy said.

“Tell me about it.” He looked at me. “Tell me about Joey.”

So I did. I told him everything I knew about Joe, about how much he was loved and admired in Emerald Springs, about his work at the food bank and what a good father he was to Tyler. Then, without mentioning the particulars of the Pussycat Club, I told him the rest.

I was just getting to that possible siting of Joe at Mayday!, a siting I now thought I understood, when the side door opened and my girls came running in, followed by their grandmother. I hadn’t heard the car drive up.

Junie walked in, took one look at Rube, and grinned. “You found him!” Then she frowned. “Or maybe not.”

“Is this the man you saw in the tent at Mayday!?” I asked.

She nodded. “But he’s not your Joe, is he?”

I had noticed from the beginning that Rube sounded almost exactly like his brother when he spoke. Between that and my own reaction when I first saw him, I had already guessed that Rube was the man Junie and Teddy had identified as Joe. When he mentioned seeing me at Mayday! with Junie, I’d been almost sure.

Now my emotions were mixed. I was glad Joe hadn’t been at Mayday! when Hazel died, because that put him farther down the list of suspects. But now there was no proof that Joe Wagner—or rather Joe Belcore—was still alive.

“Do you have to go back to Boston anytime soon?” Lucy asked Rube.

“I’m not going back until I know where my brother is.”

She looked at me, and I nodded, sure what she was going to say next. “Will you keep working on the house while you’re here?” she asked him. “We’ll make it worth your while.”

“You trust me after everything I told you?”

I answered. “Aren’t you the same man who’s been working for us for free?” I held up my hand when he tried to speak. “The man who decided he had to right a very old wrong and came here to do it?”

“We’ve changed. All of us…most of us. I know I have. I won’t let you down.”

Junie put her hand over her heart. She hadn’t heard much of the story, but she had heard enough. “I love happy endings.”

And so did I. Unfortunately this wasn’t an ending. It was just another curve in the road. I hoped someday Joe Wagner could sit in this kitchen and shout “the end” to enthusiastic applause. But at this point, I was afraid that was a long shot.

By Thursday morning whatever bug I’d harbored had been squashed by Junie’s herbs or my own determination. I was no longer limping, and Ed was still speaking to me. I felt so lucky I considered buying a lottery ticket at the grocery store checkout, but I spent the money on a candy bar and enjoyed the immediate reward.

I was vacuuming cat hair off the sofa, one of the more futile jobs in the universe, when the telephone rang. It was Teddy’s teacher.

Determined to hold on to my good mood, I took the phone in the kitchen and flipped on the burner under the teakettle.

“I have a feeling this is about Cinderella,” I said.

Miss Hollins’s voice did not warm at my conciliatory tone. “Did you give Teddy permission to drop out of the play?”

“Absolutely not. Why, did she ask to?”

“She didn’t ask. She insisted.”

I could have told Teddy this was not a woman who responded kindly to orders. I wished my daughter had asked me, but of course, I had told her she had to handle this on her own. I winced.

I got down my favorite mug. Clearly I was going to need newborn lambs frolicking in an English meadow to get me through the conversation. “Did she say why?”

“She refuses.”

“I don’t know either, but my mother-in-law suggested that perhaps some of the other little girls are jealous, and they’re giving Teddy a hard time. Do you think there might be something to that?”

“I don’t let students in
my
classroom behave that way.”

Now
this
was the Jennifer Hollins I remembered, the brand-new teacher with a chip on her shoulder. Before I could think of a response that wouldn’t get my daughter into deeper trouble, I heard her sigh.

“At least I try not to,” she said in a softer voice.

“Nobody expects you to be everywhere. But that’s just one guess. Do you have any?”

“I wish I could read their little minds.”

“Welcome to the club. What did you tell her?”

“I told her we were counting on her, and she has to continue. Can I count on
you
to reinforce that?”

I considered. “I agree with your strategy, but first I need to find out what’s going on. Maybe this is stage fright or something a first grader shouldn’t have to tough out.”

“She seems to love performing. I don’t understand it.”

“Is there a good time to call you after I’ve had a chance to talk to her?”

I jotted down the information and hung up. I had dodged a bullet, but only just. If Teddy didn’t want to tell me what was wrong, there was nothing that could make her. Then what could I do? Insist she remain, without having all the facts? Side with Teddy against her teacher?

In the living room I sat with my lambs and my Earl Grey and thought about all the puzzles in my life. Teddy was just one. Despite solving the mystery of the unpaid carpenter, I was no closer to finding Joe or Hazel’s murderer or even Brownie for a moment of pleasant confrontation.

On top of that, the punch bowl was history. Now I was sorry I hadn’t bought that lottery ticket. Because it was going to take a big win to buy another bowl for the Women’s Society, at least one as nice as the one that had disappeared.

Silently I debated which problem I should tackle after I finished my tea and the sofa. I was fresh out of punch bowl leads, had struck out finding Brownie on the way home from the store this morning, and my calls to Joe’s beach bunny mama had so far gone unanswered. Not that I expected to learn anything new from the woman who had deserted him.

Halfway through a mental inventory of clues and leads, I realized that I had never talked to the food bank staff. Despite knowing that Hazel had poked through Joe’s desk before she died, Cilla was still the only one I’d interviewed. Hazel had followed Joe all the way to New York and the Pussycat Club. So what had she hoped to learn? Performing at the club was hardly grounds to fire him. What else had she been looking for?

I got up to find the lists I’d recovered from Hazel’s pockets. An idea was slowly percolating, and I knew just the man who might help.

Halfway to the desk drawer I looked down at my black jogging pants. They were covered with cat hair.

Maybe I couldn’t find Joe or the punch bowl, and maybe Hazel’s murderer was still at large, but at least I had found the solution for removing all traces of Moonpie from our sofa cushions.

When I got to the Victorian, Rube was hard at work. “Come see the tile,” he said, when I walked through the front doorway. “I hope you like the grout.”

“We’ll be so glad to have it finished, we’ll go with almost anything.” I followed him upstairs and indeed did approve of the grout, which he had matched to the darker tones in the marbleized tile.

“You get those cabinets ordered?” he asked.

“They should have them here next week.” Luckily, Junie hadn’t asked for custom cabinetry, but a basic medium-grade maple that our local dealer could get from his warehouse. Rube planned to add some decorative molding and a simple island topped with granite. Everything was finally taking shape. Junie was so optimistic, she was spending her days on the telephone to fabric manufacturers.

“I’ve got something for you to look at that has nothing to do with the house,” I said. “Can you take a moment?”

He put his hands in the small of his back and leaned into them, like a man who has bent over one too many times. “I could use the break.”

The house was more comfortable now than it had been. Yesterday I had moved in a small table, as well as two director’s chairs, an inflatable mattress, and a toaster oven. Lucy had temporarily furnished the front porch with an inexpensive plastic patio table and chairs, and tonight she was bringing a microwave and a stand to set it on. We had stocked the refrigerator so Rube could choose to heat food here if he wanted. It wasn’t home, but he seemed happy.

We sat together on the porch and listened to birds and the occasional swish of tires on Bunting Street.

“I’ve been thinking about Joe.” Rube already knew about Hazel’s death, but now I told him what Cilla had said about Hazel going through Joe’s desk and files. “On top of that I think she was trying to track Joe down in New York before he disappeared. She was out to get him.”

I fished in my purse and pulled out the supply lists and handed them over. “These could be nothing, or they could have something to do with Joe. What do you think?”

He looked over the papers, reading slowly and moving his finger along with the words. I remembered what he’d said about a reading problem. Rube was just a bit too old to have benefitted from learning disability testing. In his day, kids with problems simply got lost in the system.

After a few minutes he handed back the papers. “How come you wanted me to see these?”

I couldn’t find a tactful way to tell him. “Because I get the feeling you’ve had some experience on the wrong side of the law.”

He grinned at me, looking so much like Joe I had to find another place to rest my gaze.

“You think the food bank’s in trouble?” he asked.

“I believe Hazel thought so. And if it is, then maybe Joe’s involved some way or the other.”

“He’s in charge. If there’s a problem, it’s on his watch. Maybe somebody is taking advantage of him, the way we did.”

“I hate to say this, but if Joe has a fault, that would be the one I’d bet on. Even after, well, you know. He trusts and he forgives, which on the surface sounds great. But I think maybe he does both too easily.”

“Okay, if I was going to rip off a food bank…” He caught my eye again and winked. “Just hypothetically.”

I’d learned a lot about Rube since Tuesday. He was a vice president at Creative Construction, in charge of project performance, although the company was in financial turmoil and no one was taking home much money. He was divorced with two sons, but he had a new woman in his life, although for now his emotional life was wrapped around finding his brother.

I smiled to let him know I was in on the joke. “So what would you do? Hypothetically?”

“Well, one trick? Almost every nonprofit organization has a tax-exempt number, right? So if somebody wants to make a lot of money and not play nice with the government, they just have to get that number, buy goods wholesale without paying tax on them, then sell at regular prices. Do it without alerting anybody, and they could make a lot of money fast.”

I could see something like that happening at our church. I made a note to warn Ed. “Okay, that’s good. What else?”

“Phony employees. I know a guy who set up a phony consulting firm, and the checks went straight to his house. Nobody caught on for years. The guys in accounting never talked to the guys who were supposed to be getting consultation. They just paid the bills.”

“That might be hard to do in a small organization where everybody knows what everybody else does.”

“Yeah, could be. But you said the food bank works in three counties?”

I saw what he was getting at. The distance between the Helping Hands complex and the satellite food banks in connecting counties might make that kind of deception easier. “They could ask for funds to use locally, I guess, and pocket them.”

“Hey, you might get good at this.”

“Oh great, another inappropriate talent.” I imagined the church board hiring a security guard to follow me around during social hour, arming the ushers when the collection plates were passed.

“No harm in thinking like the bad guys,” Rube said. “It keeps everybody safer.”

“I don’t need hypothetical as much as I need specifics. What do those lists suggest to you?”

He shrugged. “Just a guess, but maybe not all the donations are going into the warehouse. Maybe she was afraid the food was being sold on the black market. Simple, but maybe not so easy to prove.”

“A black market for food?”

“If I was going to rip off a food bank, that’s the way I would do it. Think of it this way. You own a little restaurant, and you’re struggling all the time to make ends meet. Some guy comes to the back door with a case of canned peas—”

“You have no idea how much I detest canned peas. Make it tomatoes.”

“Canned tomatoes then.”

“You ever notice the smell when you open a can of peas? Or the color?”

“Get your imagination back on track, okay?”

“I got it. It’s an Italian restaurant. We’ll call it Pedro’s Pasta—”

“Pedro is Spanish. It’s Pietro, and don’t interrupt again. This guy’s standing at the door of Pietro’s Pasta and Pizza Parlor with a case of tomatoes. Now maybe Pietro buys his tomatoes wholesale for say, sixteen or seventeen dollars. But this guy says he’ll sell this case to him for ten. Plus he’s got five or six more cases to sell at the same price. So Pietro’s saved maybe thirty-six, forty dollars, just by saying yes. The guy tells him they fell off a truck. Pietro doesn’t want to know what truck. He pays cash and that’s that.”

“You sound like you know what you’re talking about.”

“You don’t think guys at construction sites aren’t tempted to do the same thing? Pilfering and reselling? As long as they don’t take too much too openly, who’s going to know? Who’s going to care? It’s the price of doing business.”

“Not at a food bank.”

“When the money’s not coming out of your income, do you care half as much if stuff goes missing? You’re not trying to turn a profit. That’s why they call it a nonprofit.”

“I’d like to think most people who work for nonprofit agencies do it because they care about the people they serve.”

“Not everybody.”

“This still sounds like small potatoes to me. How much money can somebody make off a case of tomatoes here and there?”

“But it’s more than tomatoes, isn’t it? From the snooping I did when I was looking for Joe, I’d say a lot of food goes through that program. What’s to keep somebody from getting a few sides of donated beef, removing the porterhouses and T-bones, the rib roasts, and selling them on the sly? Who would know once a cow’s been ground into hamburger? I can’t say for sure, but I’d guess that depending on how widespread the scam, somebody could make a whole lot of money over a period of a year or two.”

All the discussion about small potatoes, Pietro’s tomatoes, and porterhouse steak had made me think about dinner. Rube went back to work and I decided to go to the grocery store. DiBenedetto’s on Robin Street, to be more specific.

At Christmastime my sister Vel introduced me to our little Italian grocery and to Marco DiBenedetto, one of those guys who makes it clear where the great Renaissance sculptors got their inspiration. I had hopes for Vel and Marco. She had visited me twice since then, and I was almost sure it wasn’t my charms or Junie’s that had drawn her to Emerald Springs. I also knew Marco had visited her in New York last month when he was attending a food industry trade show.

The outside of DiBenedetto’s is plain, almost dreary. But the inside is like a trip to a market in Tuscany. Fresh, ripe vegetables laid out in attractive designs. Cheeses I’ve only dreamed of trying. The store isn’t large, and nothing is cheap, but everything is selected with an eye to quality. Our local gourmets keep DiBenedetto’s in business.

Thursday is fresh pasta day, which was only part of the reason I was here. Every Thursday two DiBenedetto aunts rise at dawn and crank out miles of linguine and acres of flat lasagna strips that are nothing like the dried ones with the ruffly edges from the chain groceries. Thursdays at DiBenedetto’s has become a ritual of sorts. I take a number, then while I’m waiting to be called, I buy everything I need for the sauce of the day. The whole family looks forward to Thursday night dinners.