04 Four to Score (6 page)

“Rumor has it she's working for Vito. She has a lot of money and no discernible job.”

“You telling me she's like a wise guy?”

“Affirmative action,” Connie said.

The front door opened, and we all turned to look. Lula was the first to find her voice. “Killer earring.”

It was a parrot swinging on a gold hoop that was looped through one of Sally's ears.

“Got it at the shore,” he said. “You buy a pair of thong briefs and they throw in the earring.” He made a grab at his ass and hiked himself up. “Christ, I don't know how they wear these thong things. They're giving me hemorrhoids.”

He was minus the Farrah wig, and his own hair was a mess of dark brown corkscrew strands. Sort of Rasta without the dreds. He was wearing cut-off denims, a white T-shirt, red clogs and was freshly manicured with silver polish.

“This is Sally Sweet,” I told Connie and Lula.

“I bet,” Lula said.

Sally handed me the translation of the coded message and looked around. “I thought there'd be wanted posters on the walls and gun racks filled with shotguns.”

“This isn't Dodge City,” Lula said. “We got some class here. We keep the guns in the back room with the pervert.”

I read the note. “ 'One-thirty-two Howser Street. Under the bench.' That's Maxine's mother's address.”

Sally slouched onto the couch. “When I was a kid I watched reruns of Steve McQueen. Now he was a bounty hunter.”

“Damn skippy,” Lula said. “He was the shit.”

“So now what?” Sally wanted to know. “We going to Howser Street?”

Foreboding sliced into my stomach. We?

Lula slammed her file drawer shut. “Hold on. You're not going off without me! Suppose something goes wrong? Suppose you need a big full-figure woman like me to help straighten things out?”

I like Lula a lot, but last time we worked together I gained seven pounds and almost got arrested for shooting a guy who was already dead.

“I'm going to Howser Street,” I said. “Only me. One person. Steve McQueen worked alone.”

“I don't mean to be insulting,” Lula said, “but you ain't no Steve McQueen. And something happens you'll be happy I'm around. Besides, this'll be fun . . . the two of us working on a case together again.”

“Three of us,” Sally said. “I'm going, too.”

“Oh boy,” Lula said. “The three muffkateers.”

*    *    *    *    *

LULA GAVE THE NOWICKI HOUSE the once-over. “Don't appear like Maxine's mama spends much time spiffing up the old homestead.”

We were in Lula's Firebird with Sally in the backseat doing air guitar to Lula's rap music. Lula cut the engine, the music stopped, and Sally snapped to attention.

“Looks kind of spooky,” Sally said. “You guys have guns, right?”

“Wrong,” I said. “We don't need guns to retrieve a clue.”

“Well, this is fucking disappointing. I figured you'd kick the door down and blast yourselves into the house. You know, rough up some people.”

“You want to cut down on the breakfast drugs,” Lula said to Sally. “You keep going like this all your nose hairs are gonna fall out.”

I unbuckled my seat belt. “There's a little wooden bench on the front porch. With any luck, we won't have to go in the house.”

We crossed the patchy lawn, and Lula tested the bottom porch step, pausing when it groaned under her weight. She moved to the next step and picked her way around floorboards that were obviously rotted.

Sally tiptoed behind her. Clonk, clonk, clonk with his clogs. Not exactly the stealth transvestite.

They each took an end of the bench and flipped it over.

No note stuck to the bottom.

“Maybe it blew away,” Lula said.

There wasn't a stray breath of air in all of Jersey, but we checked the surroundings anyway, the three of us fanning out, covering the yard.

No note.

“Hunh,” Lula said. “We been given the runaround.”

There was a crawl space under the porch, enclosed with wooden lattice. I dropped to hands and knees and squinted through the lattice. “The note said 'under the bench.' It could have meant under the porch, under the bench.” I jogged to the car and retrieved a flashlight from the glove compartment. I returned to the porch, scrunched low and flashed the beam around the dirt floor. Sure enough, there was a glass jar directly under the part of the porch that supported the bench.

Two yellow eyes caught in the light, held for a second, and skittered away.

“Do you see it?” Lula wanted to know.

“Yep.”

“Well?”

“There are eyes under there. Little beady yellow ones. And spiders. Lots of spiders.”

Lula gave an involuntary shiver.

Sally made another adjustment on his thong.

“I'd go get it, but a big woman like me wouldn't fit,” Lula said. “Sure is a shame it isn't just a little roomier.”

“I think you'd fit.”

“Nope, unh ah, I know I wouldn't fit.”

I considered the spiders. “I might not fit, either.”

“I'd fit,” Sally said, “but I'm not doing it. I paid twenty bucks for this manicure, and I'm not fucking it up crawling under some rat-infested porch.”

I hunkered down for another look. “Maybe we can stick a rake in there and pull the jar out.”

“Nuh ah,” Lula said. “A rake isn't gonna be big enough. You gotta go in from the end here, and it's too far away. Where you gonna get a rake anyway?”

“We can ask Mrs. Nowicki.”

“Oh yeah,” Lula said. “From the looks of this lawn she does lots of gardening.” Lula stood on tiptoes and looked in a window on the side of the house. “Probably not even home. Seems like she'd be out by now what with us up on her porch and all.” Lula moved to another window and pressed her nose to the glass. “Uh oh.”

“What uh oh?” I hated uh oh.

“You'd better look at this.”

Sally and I trotted over and pressed our noses to the glass.

Mrs. Nowicki was stretched out on the kitchen floor. She had a bloody towel wrapped around the top of her head, and an empty bottle of Jim Beam was on the floor beside her. She was wearing a cotton nightgown, and her bare feet were splayed toes out.

“Looks to me like dead city,” Lula said. “You want a rake, you better get it yourself.”

I knocked on the window. “Mrs. Nowicki!”

Mrs. Nowicki didn't move a muscle.

“Think this must have just happened,” Lula said. “If she'd laid there for any amount of time in this heat she'd be swelled up big as a beach ball. She'd have burst apart. There'd be guts and maggots all over the place.”

“I hate to miss seeing the guts and maggots,” Sally said. “Maybe we should come back in a couple hours.”

I turned from the window and headed for the car. “We need to call the police.”

Lula was on my heels. “Hold the phone on the we part. Those police people give me the hives.”

“You're not a hooker anymore. You don't have to worry about the police.”

“One of them traumatic emotional things,” Lula said.

Ten minutes later, two blue-and-whites angled to the curb behind me. Carl Costanza emerged from the first car, looked at me and shook his head. I'd known Carl since grade school. He was always the skinny kid with the bad haircut and wise mouth. He'd bulked up some in the last few years, and he'd found a good barber. He still had the wise mouth, but under it all, he was a decent person and a pretty good cop.

“Another dead body?” Carl asked. “What are you going for, a record? Most bodies found by an individual in the city of Trenton?”

“She's on the kitchen floor. We haven't been in the house. The door is locked.”

“How do you know she's on the floor if the door is locked?”

“I was sort of looking in the window, and . . .”

Carl held up his hand. “Don't tell me. I don't want to hear this. Sorry I asked.”

The cop in the second car had gone to the side window and was standing there, hands on gun belt. “She's on the floor all right,” he said, peering in. He rapped on the window. “Hey, lady!” He turned to us and narrowed his eyes against the sun. “Looks dead to me.”

Carl went to the front door and knocked. “Mrs. Nowicki? It's the police.” He knocked louder. “Mrs. Nowicki, we're coming in.” He gave the door a good shot with his fist, the rotted molding splintered off, and the door swung open.

I followed Carl into the kitchen and watched while he stooped over Mrs. Nowicki, feeling for a pulse, looking for a sign of life.

There were more bloody towels in the sink and a bloody paring knife on the counter. My first thought had been gunshot, but there were no guns in sight and no sign of struggle.

“You better call this in for the ME,” Carl said to the second cop. “I don't know exactly what we've got here.”

Sally and Lula had taken positions against the wall.

“What do you think?” Lula asked Carl.

Carl shrugged. “Nothing much. She looks pretty dead.”

Lula nodded. “That what I thought, too. Soon as I saw her I said to myself, Hell, that woman's dead.”

The second cop disappeared to make the call, and Lula inched closer to Mrs. Nowicki. “What do you think happened to her? I bet she fell and hit her head, and then she wrapped her head in a towel and croaked.”

That sounded reasonable to me . . . except for the paring knife with blood and pieces of hair stuck to it.

Lula bent at the waist and examined the towel, wrapped turban style. “Must have been a good clonk she took. Lots of blood.”

Usually when people die their bodies evacuate and the smell gets bad fast. Mrs. Nowicki didn't smell dead. Mrs. Nowicki smelled like Jim Beam.

Carl and I were both registering this oddity, looking at each other sideways when Mrs. Nowicki opened one eye and fixed it on Lula.

“YOW!” Lula yelled, jumping back a foot, knocking into Sally. “Her eye popped open!”

“The better to see you with,” Mrs. Nowicki rasped out, alto voiced, one pack short of lung cancer.

Carl stepped into Mrs. Nowicki's line of sight. “We thought you were dead.”

“Not yet, honey,” Mrs. Nowicki said. “But I'll tell you, I have one hell of a headache.” She raised a shaky hand and felt the towel. “Oh, yeah, now I remember.”

“What happened?”

“It was an accident. I was trying to cut my hair, and my hand slipped, and I gave myself a little nick. It was bleeding some, so I wrapped my head in a towel and took a few medicinal hits from the bottle.” She struggled to sit. “Don't exactly know what happened after that.”

Lula had her hand on her hip. “Looks to me like you drained the bottle and passed out. Think you took one too many of them medicinal hits.”

“Looks to me like she didn't take enough,” Sally murmured. “I liked her better dead.”

“I need a cigarette,” Mrs. Nowicki said. “Anybody got a cigarette?”

I could hear cars pulling up outside and footsteps in the front room. The second uniform came in, followed by a suit.

“She isn't dead,” Carl explained.

“Maybe she used to be,” Lula said. “Maybe she's one of them living dead.”

“Maybe you're one of them nut cases,” Mrs. Nowicki said.

Lights from an EMS truck flashed outside, and two paramedics wandered into the kitchen.

I eased my way out the door, to the porch and onto the lawn. I didn't especially want to be there when they unwound the towel.

“I don't know about you,” Lula said, “but I'm ready to leave this party.”

I didn't have a problem with that. Carl knew where to find me if there were questions. Didn't look like there was anything criminal here, anyway. Drunken lush slices scalp with a paring knife and passes out. Probably happens all the time.

We piled into the Firebird and hauled ass back to the office. I said good-bye to Lula and Sally, slid behind the wheel of my CRX and motored home. When things calmed down I'd go back with some sort of long-handled mechanism for retrieving the bottle. I didn't want to explain to the cops about the clues.

In the meantime, there were a few phone calls I could make. I'd only gotten partially through Eddie Kuntz's list. It wouldn't hurt to run through the rest of the names.

Mrs. Williams, one of my neighbors, was in the lobby when I swung through the doors. “I've got a terrible ringing in my ears,” she said. “And I'm having a dizzy spell.”

Another neighbor, Mrs. Balog, was standing next to Mrs. Williams, checking her mailbox. “It's the hardening of the arteries. Evelyn Krutchka on the third floor has it something awful. I heard her arteries are just about turned to stone.”

Most of the people in my building were seniors. There were a couple of single mothers with babies, Ernie Wall and his girlfriend, May, and one other woman my age, who only spoke Spanish. We were the segment of society on fixed incomes or incomes of dubious reliability. We weren't interested in tennis or sitting at poolside. For the most part we were a quiet, peaceful group, armed to the teeth for no good reason, violent only when a premium parking slot was at stake.

I took the stairs to the second floor, hoping they'd have some effect on the pie I'd had for breakfast. I let myself into my apartment and made an instant left turn into the kitchen. I stuck my head in the refrigerator and pushed things around some, searching for the perfect lunch. After a few minutes of this I decided on a hard-boiled egg and a banana.

I sat at my dining room table, which is actually in a little alcove off my living room, and I ate my egg and started on the list of names and businesses Kuntz had given me. I dialed Maxine's cleaner first. No, they hadn't seen her lately. No, she didn't have any clothes to pick up. I called my cousin Marion, who worked at Maxine's bank, and asked about recent transactions. No new postings, Marion said. The most recent transaction was two weeks ago when she withdrew three hundred dollars from the outside ATM.

Last name on the list was a 7-Eleven in north Trenton, a quarter mile from Eddie Kuntz and Mama Nowicki. The night manager had just come on when I called. She said a woman meeting Maxine's description had been in the night before. She remembered the woman because she was a regular. It had been late at night and store traffic had been slow. The woman had been chatty and had relieved the tedium.

I stuffed Maxine's photo into my shoulder bag and took off for the 7-Eleven to confirm the identification. I parked nose-in to the curb at the front of the store and stared beyond the plate glass windows to the register. There were four men in line. Three still in suits, looking rumpled from the heat and the workday. By the time I made my way through the door, there were two men left. I waited for them to complete their business before introducing myself to the woman behind the counter.