“Are you going to eat all those fries?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” Diesel said. “Do you have a problem with that?”
“Just asking.”
I opened the box of doughnuts and almost passed out. Boston cream, maple glazed, jelly, strawberry with sprinkles, chocolate, lemon pudding. I grabbed the Boston cream and devoured it. “Oh man,” I said. “Oh jeez, this is good.” My second doughnut was the maple glazed. “I bet I could eat all these. I bet I could eat them in record time.”
Diesel reached for the chocolate, and I sucked in some air.
“What?” Diesel asked.
“You took the chocolate.”
“There are two of them. We got two of everything.”
“I didn’t realize there were two. It’s fine. I’m good.” I finished the maple glazed and snatched the second chocolate out of the box.
“Ordinarily, I like a woman with strong appetites,” Diesel said, “but you’re downright scary. I’m afraid when you finish the doughnuts, you’re going to start gnawing on my arm.”
“Sorry. I panicked over the chocolate.”
Diesel handed me his phone. “I have the GPS working. Copilot me to Mark’s business address.”
I had the phone in one hand and my strawberry doughnut in the other.
“Turn left at the next street,” I told him. “And then go one block and turn left again.”
Marblehead is quaint. Salem is weird. And Beverly is a normal, hardworking town. Mark More lived and worked in a part of Beverly that was devoted to commercial real estate. Warehouses, light industry, a seafood processing plant. I followed the directions to a two-story redbrick cube of a building with a two-bay loading dock on one side. The sign on the front said MORE IS BETTER.
The sun was low in the sky and lights were on in what I assumed was the office. One car was parked in the lot. The bay doors were closed. Diesel parked next to the car in the lot, and we walked around to the street entrance.
“After seeing what the inheritance did to Shirley and Lenny, I’m almost afraid to go inside,” I said to Diesel.
“According to my assistant, Mark is the local distributor for Momma Jane’s Green Mints. So I guess we’ll find a lot of mints.”
“You have an assistant?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s his name? Where is he? Do you have an office?”
“Her name is Gwen. And I’m not sure where she is. And no, I don’t have an office.”
Diesel opened the glass-paned door, and we stepped into a small room with a desk at one end and a couple utilitarian plastic waiting room chairs at the other. A hallway led to the innards of the building. Somewhere down the hallway, we could hear machinery at work.
We followed the sound of machinery, stopped in front of an open door, and looked into the large warehouse. The floor was polished cement, the ceilings were high, and the walls were cinder block. The area was well lit. Cartons of mints, shrink-wrapped on pallets, were stacked along one wall. A forklift had been parked in front of them. A pile of what looked like assorted junk filled a corner on the opposite wall. The junk was one-and-a-half stories high and extended about a third of the way into the warehouse. Mark More was rearranging the pile of junk with the help of a backhoe. I recognized him from the street encounter with Shirley. He was average height, with light brown hair cut too short on the sides for his Dumbo ears. I guessed his age at late thirties. He wasn’t fat, but he wasn’t fit, either. He was wearing jeans and a white shirt, and he looked like he was concentrating hard on his job.
Diesel and I walked halfway into the room, and Mark spotted us and cut his engine.
“Can I help you?” he called out.
“We need to talk,” Diesel said.
Mark swung down from the backhoe and crossed to us.
“I hope this is about mints,” he said. “Because I’ve got a lot of them.”
“I’ve never heard of Momma Jane’s Green Mints,” I told him.