have central air. They have freestanding fans in all the rooms, an air conditioner hanging out of a living room window, and similar air conditioners in two of the bedrooms. The kitchen is an inferno. My mother accepts this with quiet resignation, her face flushed, occasionally dripping sweat into the soup pot. My grandmother doesn’t seem to be affected by the heat. She says her sweat glands stopped working when her ovaries went south.
I took a seat at the small kitchen table and dropped my bag onto the floor.
“Are you after Jimmy Poletti?” Grandma asked. “I heard he skipped out on his bail bond.”
“I talked to his wife and both his sons, and no one seems to like him or know where he’s hiding.”
“Yeah, he’s a real stinker. His own mother didn’t even like him.”
“I tried to talk to her too, but she’s dead.”
“I heard,” Grandma said. “Rose Krabchek called an hour ago. Mrs. Poletti is going to be laid out at the funeral home on Hamilton. It’s going to be a good viewing. She’s high-profile now that her son is a fugitive.”
The Burg doesn’t have a movie theater, so everyone goes to viewings at the funeral parlor on Hamilton Avenue.
“Any gossip going around about Jimmy?” I asked Grandma.
“Haven’t heard anything that would be useful. He had a house at the shore, but I’m told it washed away with that last hurricane. I saw pictures, and the beach isn’t even there. What happens with that? Does he own part of the ocean?”
My mother put plates and paper napkins on the kitchen table. “Who wants a meatloaf sandwich?”
I raised my hand. “With lots of ketchup.”
“And chips,” Grandma said. “I want one with chips and a pickle.”
My mother is an older version of me with shorter brown hair and a thicker waist. My grandmother used to resemble my mother, but gravity’s taken its toll and now Grandma has slack skin the color and texture of a soup chicken and steel gray hair permed into tight curls. She’s of an age where she’s fearless and has enough energy to light up Cleveland.
“Jimmy Poletti wasn’t real popular with his family,” Grandma said, “but he sure could sell cars. He was one of them personable people on television. If I was in the market, I’d buy a car from him. He was always dressed up in a nice suit, and you could see he had a good package.”
“He was selling girls out of the back room in his car dealership,” my mother said. “He’s a disgusting human being.”
“I didn’t say he was a good person,” Grandma said. “I just said he had an impressive package. ’Course, maybe he faked it. Like he could have put tennis balls in his Calvins. Or he could have padded them with toilet paper. Do you think men do that?”
I had two men in my life, and neither of them needed tennis balls.
My mother brought the meatloaf sandwiches to the table and took a seat. “I’d see his second wife at mass sometimes. Sometimes she’d have bruises. Just terrible. She’d be praying and crying, poor woman. We were all relieved when she left him.”
“I met his third wife,” I said. “I don’t think she’s going to be in church crying and praying.”
“You just never know,” my mother said. “A man like that doesn’t value life. He would do anything.”
“This is good meatloaf,” my grandmother said, taking a bite of her sandwich. “I like that you put barbecue sauce on top of it.”
“I saw it on the Food Network,” my mother said.
“And it’s real moist.”
My mother chewed and swallowed. “I soaked it in bourbon.”
THREE
I LEFT MY parents’ house and returned to my apartment. I have some search programs on my computer, and I thought I’d do some snooping around on Poletti. I live in a perfectly okay but not fantastic apartment building on the north edge of Trenton. The building has a fancy door that fronts the street but is never used. Everyone parks in the large lot at the rear. Eighty percent of the residents are senior citizens who wear their handicapped status as a badge of honor and judge the quality of their day by how close they’re able to park to the building’s back door.
My apartment has one bedroom, one bathroom, a small kitchen, and a combined living-and-dining room. My furniture is sparse and mostly secondhand from relatives who made their initial purchases in 1950.
I’d just plugged Jimmy Poletti into a background search program when someone pounded on