Stephanie Plum 6 - Hot Six
10
“HOW COULD YOU afford a Corvette?” my father asked. “All you get is Social Security.”
“I have money from when I sold the house,” Grandma said. “And anyway, I made a good deal. Even the Mooner said I got a good deal.”
My mother made another cross. “The Mooner,” she said with just a touch of hysteria. “You bought a car from the Mooner?”
“Not from the Mooner,” Grandma said. “The Mooner don't sell cars. I bought my car from the Dealer.”
“Thank goodness,” my mother said, hand to her heart. “For a minute there . . . Well, I'm just glad you went to a car dealer.”
“Not a car dealer,” Grandma told her. “I bought my car from the Metamucil dealer. I paid four hundred and fifty bucks for it. That's good, right?”
“Depends,” my father said. “Does it have a motor?”
“I didn't look,” Grandma said. “Don't all cars have motors?”
Joe looked pained. He didn't want to be the one to rat on my grandmother for possession of stolen property.
“While Louise and I were looking at the cars, there were a couple men in the Dealer's backyard, and they were going on about Homer Ramos,” Grandma said. “They said he was a big car distributor. I didn't know the Ramos family sold cars. I thought they just sold guns.”
“Homer Ramos sold stolen cars,” my father said, head bent over his plate. “Everybody knows that.”
I turned to Joe. “Is that true?”
Joe shrugged. Noncommittal. Cop face in place. If you knew how to read the signs, this one said “Ongoing Investigation.”
“And that's not all,” Grandma said. “He cheated on his wife. He was a real skunk. They said his brother is just as bad. He lives out in California, but he keeps a house here so he can see women on the sly. The whole family is rotten, if you ask me.”
“He must be pretty rich if he has two houses,” Myron said. “I should be so rich. I'd keep a girlfriend, too.”
There was a collective pause while we all wondered what Landowsky would do with a girlfriend.
He reached for the potato bowl, but it was empty.
“Here, let me fill that for you,” Grandma said. “Ellen always has more keeping warm on the stove.”
Grandma took the bowl and trotted off. “Uh-oh,” she said, when she stepped into the kitchen.
My mother and I got up simultaneously and went to investigate. Grandma was standing in the middle of the floor, looking at the cake on the table. “The good news is Bob didn't eat the whole cake,” Grandma said. “The bad news is he licked the icing off one side.”
Without missing a beat, my mother took a butter knife out of the silverware drawer, scooped some icing off the top of the cake, smeared the icing on the side Bob had licked clean, and sprinkled coconut all around the cake.
“Been a long time since we had a coconut cake,” Grandma said. “It looks real pretty.”
My mother put the cake on top of the refrigerator, out of Bob's reach. “When you were little you used to lick the icing off all the time,” she said to me. “We had a lot of coconut cakes.”
Morelli gave me raised eyebrows when I got back.
“Don't ask,” I said. “And don't eat the outside part of the cake.”
THE PARKING LOT was almost full when we got back to my apartment building. The seniors were home, settled down in front of their televisions.
Myron dangled his house keys at Grandma.
“How about coming over for a nightcap, sweetie.”