"Would you like a glass of water?"

"You got any liquor?"

"No."

"Never mind, then." He looked around. "I'm here to see your grandmother. We're going out to dinner."

"She's getting ready. She'll be out in a minute."

There was a rap on the door and Morelli walked in. He looked at me. And then he looked at Myron.

"We're double-dating," I said. "This is Grandma's friend, Myron Landowsky."

"Would you excuse us, please?" Morelli said, pulling me into the hall.

"I gotta go sit down, anyway," Landowsky said. "I had to walk all the way down here."

Morelli closed the door, pinned me against the wall, and kissed me. When he was done I looked myself over to make sure I was still dressed.

"Wow," I said.

His lips brushed against my ear. "If you don't get those old people out of your apartment I'm going to self-combust."

I knew just how he felt. I'd self-combusted in the shower that morning, but it didn't help much.

Grandma opened the door and stuck her head out. "For a minute there I thought you left without us."

WE TOOK THE Buick because we couldn't all fit in Morelli's truck. Morelli drove, Bob sat next to him, and I sat by the window. Grandma and Myron sat in the back, discussing antacids.

"Any news on the Ramos murder?" I asked Morelli.

"Nothing new. Barnes is still convinced it's Ranger."

"No other suspects?"

"Enough suspects to fill Shea Stadium. No evidence against any of them."

"What about the family?"

Morelli cut his eyes at me. "What about them?"

"Are they suspects?"

"Along with everyone else in three countries."

My mother was standing at the door when we parked. It seemed strange to see her standing alone. For the past couple years Grandma had always stood beside her. The mother and daughter whose roles had reversed-Grandma gladly relinquishing parental responsibility, my mother grimly accepting the task, struggling to find a place for an old woman who'd suddenly become a strange hybrid of tolerant mother and rebellious daughter. My father, in the living room, not wanting any part of it.

"Isn't that something," Grandma said. "It looks different from this side of the door."

Bob bolted out of the car and charged my mother, driven by the scent of pork roast wafting from the kitchen.

Myron moved slower. "That's some car you've got," he said. "It's a real beaut. They don't make cars like that anymore. Everything's a piece of junk today. Plastic crap. Made by a bunch of foreigners."

My father drifted into the foyer. This was his kind of talk. My father was a second-generation American, and he loved bashing foreigners, relatives excluded. He dropped back a step when he saw Turtle Man was doing the talking.

"This here's Myron," Grandma said by way of introduction. "He's my date tonight."

"Nice house you got here," Myron said. "You can't beat aluminum siding. That's aluminum siding on it, right?"

Bob was running through the house like a crazy dog, high on food smells. He stopped in the foyer and gave my father's butt a good sniffing.

"Get this dog outta here," my father said. "Where'd this dog come from?"

"This here's Bob," my grandmother said. "He's just saying hello. I saw a show on the television about dogs and they said sniffing butts was like shaking hands. I know all about dogs now. And we're real lucky that they whacked off Bob's doodles before he got too old and got into the habit of humping your leg. They said it's real hard to break a dog of that habit."

"I had a rabbit once when I was a kid that was a leg humper," Myron said. "Boy, once he got a hold of you it was the devil to get him off. And that rabbit didn't care who he went to town on. Got the cat in a stranglehold one time and almost killed it."

I could feel Morelli shaking with silent laughter behind me.

"I'm starved," Grandma said. "Let's eat."

We all took our places at the table, except for Bob, who was eating in the kitchen. My father helped himself to a couple slabs of pork and passed the rest to Morelli. We started the mashed potatoes going around. And the green beans, applesauce, pickle jar, basket of dinner rolls, and pickled beets.

"No pickled beets for me," Myron said. "They give me the runs. I don't know what it is, you get old and everything gives you the runs."

Something to look forward to.

"You're lucky you can go," Grandma said. "You're lucky you don't need Metamucil. Now that the Dealer's out of business, drug prices are gonna go sky high. Other stuff's gonna be outta reach too. I bought my car just in time."

My mother and father both looked up from their plates.

"You bought a car?" my mother asked. "Nobody told me."

"It's a pip, too," Grandma said. "It's a red Corvette."

My mother made the sign of the cross. "Dear God," she said.

"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."