Beware False Profits Part 21

"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 p.u.s.s.ycat 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 cus.h.i.+ons.

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. n.o.body 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 pa.s.sed.

"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.

Today the aunts had outdone themselves. In addition to the usual, they had made gnocchi. I looked at my number, then I listened for the next one to be called. There were ten people between me and the dwindling supply, and I hoped that half of them got tired of waiting. I even checked the floor, just in case somebody farther up the line had thrown a number away-even though that wasn't exactly fair or kind. Fortunately for my better self, everyone thought gnocchi was worth waiting for.

I steeled myself to accept linguine and went to choose vegetables to go with it.

Marco found me among the lettuces. I refrained from asking when he planned to marry my sister.

"Aggie." He clapped his hand on my shoulder, and I very nearly swooned. Although he and Joe Wagner are big Italian guys, Marco has an edge in the rugged good looks department. There's just something about his eyes and his smile. Nothing I could ever adequately describe.

We chatted. Marco has two little boys, and we compared notes. Then he helped me choose an eggplant and three succulent zucchini. I told him I was planning a sauce for linguine since it looked like the gnocchi would be gone before I got to the counter. He left and came back with a package from the back and confided that he always put a little extra aside for his favorite customers.

Being one of Marco's favorite customers was enough good news to take me through the rest of the day.

He walked me to checkout, and I dove into the other reason I had come. I told him about my conversation with Rube, although I didn't tell him the problem in question might be our food bank.

"My friend was just making a guess," I said. "But I wondered if you've ever seen anything like that here? Does it really happen? People show up with food you can buy at a discount as long as you don't ask where it comes from?"

"It definitely happens. Last week a guy showed up with a refrigerator truck of freshly slaughtered beef. The truck had a Texas license plate. I'm guessing cattle rustler."

"Really?"

He smiled, an awesome thing to behold. "We pride ourselves on knowing exactly where our food comes from, so we never buy through the back door, no matter how steep the discount. But it's still not unusual to be approached."

"How about locals? People you recognize?"

"That never happens. If locals are selling inventory on the sly, they'd be crazy to do it here. They're probably selling it three states away."

We said good-bye and I took my groceries out to the car. They deserved refrigeration, so I made a stop at home. I was heading out the door again when the telephone rang. No surprise there. I was sure the phone had heard me opening the door, ready to exit. From now on I would have to parachute from a second-story window.

My curiosity is insatiable. I could no more let it ring than I could stop myself from trying to find Hazel's murderer. Maura was on the other end.

"Aggie, do you have a moment?"

Unfortunately my lamb mug was in the dishwasher, and my hangnail was covered with a Band-Aid. I leaned against a counter, squeezed my eyes closed, and visualized waves at the seash.o.r.e.

"I haven't heard from Joe," Maura said.

"I'm sorry. I hoped he would call by now."

"You haven't discovered anything?"

Of course I had. I considered whether to tell Maura about Rube and Joe's secret past, but unless I really had to, or Rube insisted, I thought I would keep that under wraps. I still hoped Joe would come back and tell her the truth himself.

"Nothing that will lead us to him," I said truthfully. "But I'm still looking. I was just on my way to the food bank."

"Oh, are you going to be there all day? Because I need a favor, but if you're going to be gone..."

"What do you need? I'll help if I can."

"I have an afternoon appointment with Tyler's doctor. She's going over some procedures with me, so I'll be up-to-date. I thought I had to tell her Joe is missing. I guess this could have effects on Tyler's blood sugar so she wants to have a heart-to-heart. Oh, and we got the camp application all squared away."

I was impressed. Really, right before our eyes Maura was evolving. She had responded appropriately to a crisis and displayed admirable maturity. I felt a sliver of pride that I was helping her along that path.

I also wanted the name of a doctor who took this much interest in her patients.

I made the phone call easier for her. "Do you want me to pick up Tyler at school? It's no problem."

"Would you? I'll call the middle school and ask them to alert him. When you drop him at our house, just remind him he needs to test and do his shot."

"You don't want me to stay?"

"Well, I'll be home by four. He should be okay." She sounded hesitant.

"Not a problem. I'll hang around. He'll probably have stuff to show Deena, anyway."

"That's great. Thanks so much. When I gave you my key, I didn't know you'd need to use it so soon."

"That's what friends are for."