Everyone but old Mrs. Rizzoli, who was getting a perm, had pepper spray.

Betty Kuchta waved a stun gun in the air. “I’ve got one of these, too.”

“Kiddie toy,” Joyce said, brandishing a taser.

Nobody could one-up the taser.

“So, what’ll it be?” Clara asked me. “Manicure? I just got in some new polish. Luscious Mango.”

I looked at the bottle of Luscious Mango. I hadn’t actually intended to get my nails done, but the Luscious Mango was pretty awesome. “Luscious Mango will be good,” I said. I dropped my jacket and pocketbook over the back of the chair, sat down at the little manicure stand, and plunged my fingers into the soaking bowl.

“Who are you after now?” old Mrs. Rizzoli wanted to know. “I heard it was Kenny Mancuso.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Not me,” Mrs. Rizzoli said. “But I heard Kathryn Freeman saw him coming out of that Zaremba girl’s house at two in the morning.”

“That wasn’t Kenny Mancuso,” Clara said. “That was Mooch Morelli. I heard it right from Kathryn herself. She lives across the street, and she was up letting her dog out. He had diarrhea from eating chicken bones. I told her not to give that dog chicken bones, but she never listens.”

“Mooch Morelli!” Mrs. Rizzo said. “Can you imagine? Does his wife know?”

Joyce pulled the dryer back over her head. “I hear she’s filing for divorce.”

They all went back under the dryers and buried their faces in magazines since this was getting kind of close to home for Joyce and me. It was common knowledge who’d been caught with whom on my dining room table, and no one wanted to risk being present at a shootout with her hair in curlers.

“How about you?” I asked Clara while she filed a nail into a perfect oval. “Have you seen Kenny?”

She shook her head. “Not in a long time.”

“I heard someone saw him sneaking into Stiva’s this morning.”

Clara stopped filing, and her head came up. “Holy mother. I was at Stiva’s this morning.”

“You see or hear anything?”

“No. It must have been after I left. I guess it doesn’t surprise me. Kenny and Spiro were real good friends.”

Betty Kuchta leaned forward from the dryer hood. “He was never all there, you know,” she said, pointing a finger to her head. “He was in my Gail’s class in the second grade. The teachers all knew never to turn their back.”

Mrs. Rizzoli nodded in agreement. “A bad seed. Too much violence in the blood. Like his uncle Guido. Pazzo.”

“You want to be careful of that one,” Mrs. Kuchta said to me. “You ever notice his pinky finger? When Kenny was ten he chopped off the end of his pinky finger with his father’s ax. Wanted to see if it would hurt.”

“Adele Baggionne told me all about it,” Mrs. Rizzoli said. “Told me about the finger and lots of other things, too. Adele said she was watching out her back window, wondering what Kenny was going to do with the ax. Said she saw him put his hand on the wood stump next to the garage and chop his finger off. Said he never cried. Said he just stood there looking at it, smiling. Adele said he would have bled to death if she hadn’t called the rescue squad.”