Twisted Twenty-Six (Stephanie Plum 26)

CHAPTER ONE

SOME MEN ENTER a woman’s life and screw it up forever. Jimmy Rosolli did this to my Grandma Mazur. Not forever, but for an afternoon last week when he married her in the casino at Atlantis and dropped dead forty-five minutes later.

So far as I know, the trip to the Bahamas was a last-minute decision, and the marriage was even more unplanned. I guess they were just a couple of wild-and-crazy seniors having a moment.

My name is Stephanie Plum. I’m five seven with shoulder-length brown hair that curls whether I want it to or not. I’ve inherited a good metabolism from my mother’s Hungarian side of the family, so I can eat cheeseburgers and Häagen-Dazs and still button my jeans. The hair and a bunch of rude hand gestures I get from my father’s Italian ancestry.

I work for my cousin Vinnie as a bail bonds enforcement agent. It’s a crappy job, but it’s not as bad as my present job of escorting Grandma to Jimmy’s viewing at Stiva’s funeral home.

“What do you think of my outfit?” Grandma asked. “I got a black dress for the funeral, but it’s not my best color, so I thought I’d lighten things up for the viewing. It’s going to be a doozy. All the bigwigs from the mob and the K of C will be there.”

Grandma was wearing a simple pale green dress that made her complexion look like she’d been embalmed right along with Jimmy. Grandma was in her mid-seventies and didn’t look a day over ninety. She had the posture and energy of a twenty-year-old marine, but gravity had taken its toll. She carried slack skin over lean muscle and spindle bone and was in many respects the human version of a soup chicken. The day before her ill-fated trip with Jimmy Rosolli she’d decided to shake things up at the hair salon and had gone with a short punk cut and flame red hair. If you knew Grandma you wouldn’t be surprised at this, and in fact, I thought it suited her.

“I saw the Queen of England wearing a dress just like this,” Grandma said. “She had a hat on that matched the dress, but I couldn’t find one of those.”

Grandma came to live with my parents when Grandpa Mazur ate his last pork chop, sucked in the last drag on his Marlboro, and went to heaven to keep his eye on Jesus. It’s been a bunch of years now. So far, my father hasn’t killed Grandma—only because we took his guns away and we never leave sharp knives lying out in the open.

My parents live in Trenton, New Jersey, in a small two-story house in a pleasant lower middle-class neighborhood called the Burg. My mom has always been a homemaker. My dad is retired from the post office.

“It’s too bad your mother is in bed with a bad back,” Grandma said to me. “It’s not every day that her stepfather is laid to rest.”

“He was only her stepfather for forty-five minutes,” I said.

“Still, this is an important occasion for me. I get to stand at the head of the casket and be the grieving widow. There’s lots of women out there who would kill to be Jimmy’s widow.”

I had doubts about the source of my mother’s back pain. She self-diagnosed on Google and was self-medicating with bourbon. I was pretty sure the pain had more to do with my grandmother being my mother’s worst nightmare than with my mother having a potentially herniated disk.

“We better get a move on,” Grandma said. “I don’t want to be late. They said I could get a private viewing before they let all the other people in. You’re lucky to come along with me on account of you get to go to the private viewing, too.”

I was escorting Grandma because my mother had threatened to never again

make another pineapple upside-down cake if I didn’t stick to Grandma like glue. Then she sweetened the deal with the promise of lifetime unlimited laundry service, which included folding and ironing.

* * *

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Stiva’s funeral home is no longer owned by Stiva. It’s changed hands several times and has been given a bunch of different names, but everyone still calls it Stiva’s. It’s a large white colonial-type house with black shutters, a wide front porch, a utilitarian brick addition in the rear, and garages behind the addition. I parked in the small lot designated VIP PARKING and followed Grandma to the side door.

Grandma knows every inch of Stiva’s by heart. Ladies of a certain age use Stiva’s as a social center. Grandma and her girlfriends are there four nights out of seven, whether they know the deceased or not. Two of the remaining nights are reserved for bingo at the firehouse. I suppose it could be worse. I mean, it’s not like they’re frequenting strip clubs or crack houses.

Mervin Klack, the current owner and funeral director of Stiva’s, met us at the door.

“Mrs. Rosolli,” he said, “my sincere condolences.”