“All the men who work with Ranger drive black cars,” I told them.
“He give them SUVs,” Lula said. “He don't give them no Porsche.”
I bit into my lower lip. “So you think he wants something?”
“Ranger don't do stuff for nothing,” Lula said. “Sooner or later he gets his price. You telling me you don't know the price?”
“Guess I was hoping I was one of the guys, and the car was part of my job.”
“I've seen the way he looks at you,” Lula said. “And I know he don't look at any of the guys like that. Think what you need is a job description. Not that it would matter if it was me. If I could get my hands on that man's body, I'd buy him a Porsche.”
We drove to the Grand Union strip mall, and I parked in front of First Trenton.
“What we doing here?” Lula wanted to know.
Good question. The answer was a little vague to me. “I have a couple canceled checks I want to show my cousin. She's a teller here.”
“Something special about these checks?”
“Yeah. Only I don't know what.” I gave them to Lula. “What do you think?”
“Looks like a couple plain-?ass checks to me.”
The bank was busy at lunchtime, so we got in line to see Leona. I looked over at Shempsky's office while I waited my turn. The door was open, and I could see Shempsky at his desk, on
the phone.
“Hey,” Leona said when I got to her window. “What's up?”
“I wanted to ask you about a check.” I passed Margaret's check to her. “You see anything unusual here?”
She looked at it front and back. “No.”
I gave her Fred's check to RGC. “How about this one?”
“Nope.”
“Anything strange about the accounts?”
“Not that I can see.” She typed some information into her computer and scanned the screen. “Money comes in and goes out pretty fast on this RGC account. My guess is this is a small liquid account RGC keeps at the local level.”
“Why do you say that?”
“RGC is the biggest waste hauler in the area, and I don't see enough transactions here. Besides, I use RGC, and my checks to RGC are canceled through Citibank. When you work at a bank, you notice things like that.”
“How about the cable check?”
Leona looked at it again. “Yep. Same thing. My checks are canceled someplace else.”
“Is it unusual to assign customers to two different banks?”
She shrugged. “I don't know. I guess not, since both these companies are doing it.”
I thanked Leona, and dropped the checks back into my bag. I almost collided with Shempsky when I turned to leave.
“Oops,” he said, jumping back. “Didn't mean to bumper-?ride you. Just thought I'd come over and see how things are going.”
“Things are going okay.” I introduced Lula and thought it was to Shempsky's credit that he didn't seem to notice Lula's neon-?orange hair or the fact that she'd poured over two hundred pounds of woman into a pair of size-?nine tights and topped it off with a Cherry Garcia T-?shirt and faux-?fur jacket that was trimmed in what looked like pink lion mane.