Three to Get Deadly (11 page)

I rolled Big Blue into the lot. It was late. All the good spots were taken, so I was back by the Dumpster again. What’s new. At least it afforded me cover from a drive-by. Maybe I’d park here all the time.

I looked up at my apartment and realized my lights were on. That was weird, because I was almost positive I’d shut them off when I left this afternoon. I got out of the car and walked to the middle of the lot. I looked up
at my windows again. The lights were still on. What did this mean? It could mean the lights had been on when I left, and I was suffering from early onset of dementia. Probably I could add a touch of paranoia to the dementia.

A shadowy figure appeared briefly toward the far wall of my living room, and my heart skipped a beat. Someone was in my apartment. I was relieved to be able to rule out the dementia, but I still had a problem. I really didn’t want to do my own investigating and get shot at for the third time today. Unfortunately, the alternative was to call the police. Since I was low on Kaopectate, I didn’t think calling the police was a good alternative.

The figure reappeared. Long enough for me to decide it was a man. He moved closer to the window, and I was able to see his face.

The face belonged to Morelli.

Of all the nerve. Morelli had broken into my apartment. And that wasn’t even the worst of it. He was eating something. I suspected it was spice cake.

“PIG!” I yelled. “Creep!”

He didn’t seem to hear. Probably the TV was on.

I did a fast walk around the lot and found
Morelli’s black Toyota 4x4. I gave the back bumper a kick, and the alarm went off.

Faces appeared in the windows above me while the alarm wailed away.

Mrs. Karwatt on the second floor threw her window open and leaned out. “What’s going on out there?”

A shotgun barrel poked from Mr. Weinstein’s window. “Whose alarm is that? It’s not my Cadillac, is it?”

The only window without a face was mine. I figured that was because Morelli was thundering down the stairs.

I ran to my car with my keys in my hand.

“Stay away from that car, or I’ll shoot,” Mr. Weinstein shouted.

“It’s
my
car,” I yelled back.

“The hell it is,” Mr. Weinstein said, squinting at me through his inch-thick trifocals. BOOM! Mr. Weinstein fired and took out the windshield on the car next to me.

I bolted across the grass median into the street and streaked for the houses on the other side. I stopped and looked back. Morelli was pacing under the rear overhang, shouting at Mr. Weinstein, obviously afraid to venture out into the lot for fear of getting shot.

I slipped into the shadows between two
houses, hopped a backyard fence and came out onto Elm Street. I crossed Elm and repeated the pattern, bringing me to Hartland. I jogged a block up Hartland, crossed Hamilton and plastered myself against the brick wall of an all-night convenience store.

The previous owner of the store had been Joe Echo. He’d sold it in November, and the new Asian owner, Sam Pei, had changed the name to The American Store. I thought the name was appropriate. The American Store contained a sampling of everything an American might need at four times the price. A box of Fig Newtons for $7.50. No matter that there were only twelve in a box. I guess when you needed a Fig Newton in the middle of the night, you damn well didn’t care what it cost.

I pulled a knit cap out of my pocket and tugged it down over my ears. The battery was low on my cell phone, so I searched in my shoulder bag for a quarter, found one, dropped it into the pay phone and dialed my number.

Morelli answered on the fourth ring.

I unclenched my teeth enough to get a few words out. “What the hell are you doing in my apartment?”

“Waiting for you,” Morelli said.

“What were you eating just now?”

“Spice cake. There’s still some left, but you’d better hurry.”

I neatly clicked the phone back into the receiver. “
Ugh!
”

I bought a Snickers from Mr. Pei and ate it while I walked. Time to be realistic. Morelli was a lot better at this cops-and-robbers stuff than I was. It seemed to me that if he wanted to arrest me, he would have done it by now. For that matter, if he was serious about bringing me in for further questioning he would have done it. Probably there was no immediate need for the Kaopectate.

So why was Morelli harassing me? Because he wanted something. What did he want? Information that I might be withholding? Maybe he thought he could worm some missing details out of me better under more casual circumstances. Or maybe he wanted to threaten me without witnesses. Or maybe he wanted to ask me for a date.

I turned the corner at Hartland and decided I should talk to Morelli. This was no longer a simple recovery. Mo was still missing. A man had been killed. I’d been threatened. And there were some details I’d neglected to tell Morelli when I’d been questioned at the station. Not to mention the spice cake.

Everything looked status quo when I got to my parking lot. Lights were on in my apartment. Morelli’s car hadn’t been moved. A small gathering of people were clustered around the Chrysler Mr. Weinstein had used for target practice. Mr. Weinstein was there with a big piece of plastic bagging and a roll of duct tape in his hand.

“Another minute and he would have been driving off in this car, I’m telling you,” Mr. Weinstein was saying. “Better a broken windshield than a stolen car.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” Arty Boyt said. “Good thing you had that gun handy.”

Everyone else nodded. Good thing, they all said.

I slipped into the building and went to the pay phone at the front of the small lobby. I dropped a quarter and called upstairs.

“It’s me again,” I said when Morelli answered.

“Where are you?”

“Far away.”

“Liar.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “I saw you cross the parking lot.”

“Why are you stalking me?”

“Cops don’t stalk. Cops pursue.”

“Okay. Why are you pursuing me?”

“We need to talk,” Morelli said.

“That’s it? Just talk?”

“You had something else in mind?”

“Nope.”

We were both silent for a moment, contemplating the something else.

“Well,” I said, “what do you want to talk about?”

“I want to talk about Mo, and I don’t want to do it on the phone.”

“I heard some people might want to arrest me.”

“That’s true,” Morelli said. “But I’m not one of them.”

“I have your word?”

“I won’t arrest you tonight. I’d rather not make a blanket statement that covers eternity.”

He was waiting with the door open when I got off the elevator.

“You look cold and tired,” he said.

“Dodging bullets is exhausting. I don’t know how you cops do it day after day.”

“I assume you’re talking about Mr. Weinstein.”

I hung my jacket and my shoulder bag on a wall hook. “I’m talking about everyone. People keep shooting at me.” I sliced myself off a big chunk of spice cake and told Morelli about Snake.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

“I think bounty hunters should be tested and licensed. And I think you’d flunk the test.”

“I’m learning.”

“Yeah,” Morelli said. “Let’s hope you don’t get dead in the process.”

Ordinarily I’d consider a remark like that to be an insult, but I’d actually been thinking along the same lines myself. “What’s the deal with Uncle Mo?”

“I don’t know,” Morelli said. “At first I was worried he was dead. Now I don’t know what to think.”

“What kind of prints did you get from his store?”

“Yours, Mo’s and Anders’s from the door-knobs in the rear. We didn’t bother with the public areas. Two-thirds of the burg would have showed up.”

“The neighbors see anything?”

“Only the lady across the street who reported the flashlight.” Morelli was slouched against my kitchen counter, arms crossed over his chest. “Any other questions?”

“Do you know who killed Anders?”

“No. Do you?”

I rinsed my plate and put it in the dishwasher. “No.” I looked at Morelli. “How did
Anders get into the store? I heard him fumbling out there, trying the doorknob. At first I thought he had a key, but the door wouldn’t open. So then I decided he must be jimmying the lock.”

“There was no sign of forced entry.”

“Can we unofficially walk through this?”

“You must be reading my mind,” Morelli said.

“I’m not saying any of this to a cop, right?”

“Right.”

I poured myself a glass of milk. “This is what I know. The back door to Mo’s store was locked. I opened it with a key I got from his apartment. After I was in the store I pulled the door closed. When Ronald Anders tried to get in, the door was locked. At first it sounded like he had a key, but the door wouldn’t open. He fiddled with it for a couple minutes, and the door clicked open. Did you find anything on him that he could have used to pick a lock?”

“No.”

“Did you find a key to the store on him?”

“No.”

I raised my eyebrows.

Morelli raised his eyebrows.

“Either someone needed a set of picks, or else someone lifted a key that doesn’t work
especially well,” I said. “Or maybe someone opened the door with a sticky key, let Ronald Anders into the store, disappeared for a few minutes, returned and killed Anders.”

Morelli and I sighed. The logical person to have a sticky key would be Uncle Mo. And it wasn’t so far-fetched that Mo would know Anders in light of the fact that Mo had been seen on Stark Street from time to time. Maybe this was drug related. Maybe Mo was buying. Hell, maybe Mo was selling. After perusing Mo’s bedtime books I was willing to believe almost anything about him.

“You have anybody talking to the kids who hang at the store?” I asked Morelli. “When you were working vice did you hear anything about drugs coming out of Mo’s?”

“Just the opposite,” Morelli said. “Mo’s was a safe zone. Mo was militant against dope. Everyone knew.”

I had another idea. “How militant?” I asked. “Militant enough to kill a dealer?”

Morelli looked at me with his unreadable cop face.

“That would be strange,” I said. “Lovable, out-of-shape ice cream guy turns killer. Revenge of the small businessman.”

Anders was shot in the back. He’d been carrying a gun, but the gun hadn’t been
touched. The gun had been found when the police rolled the body. The gun had been stuffed into the waistband of Anders’s double-pleated rapper slacks. Whoever got nailed for the murder would have a hard time pleading self-defense.

“Is that it?” I asked Morelli.

“For now.”

Morelli was wearing jeans, boots and a long-sleeved driver’s shirt with the sleeves pushed up. He had his service pistol clipped to his belt. He grabbed his khaki jacket from one of the wall hooks in the entrance hall and shrugged into it.

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take any vacations in foreign countries for a couple days,” he said.

“Gee, and I have tickets to Monaco.”

He gave me a chuck under my chin, smiled and left.

I stared at the closed front door for a moment. A chuck under the chin. What was that? In the past, Morelli had tried to stick his tongue down my throat. Or at the very least he’d make a lewd suggestion. I was suspicious of a chuck under the chin. Now that I thought about it, he’d been a perfect gentleman when he’d brought the pizza.
And what about last night? He’d left without so much as a handshake.

I checked myself out in the hall mirror. My hair was still squashed under the knit cap. Not real sexy, but that had never slowed Morelli down before. I pulled the cap off and my hair sprang out. Eek. Good thing I’d left the cap on.

I went back to the kitchen and dialed Ranger.

“Yo,” Ranger said.

“Anyone bragging about killing Ronald Anders?”

“No one’s bragging about anything these days. The streets are quiet.”

“Turf war?”

“Don’t know. A couple players are missing. A couple dopers are dead. Got some hot shit going around killing people.”

“ODs?”

“That’s the way the death certificates read.”

“You think something different?”

“Feels dark, babe.”

I disconnected and a minute later the phone rang.

“We got a situation on our hands,” Lula said.

“A situation?”

“Just got a call from Jackie, and I can’t make any sense of what she’s saying. Something about how her old man jacked her over again.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s at the FancyAss Apartments. She’s been there day and night, and she sounds flipped out. I told her to wait right where she was, and we’d come fast as we could.”

Fifteen minutes later I pulled into the RiverEdge lot. The sky was black and dense above evenly spaced pools of artificial light thrown by the overhead halogen lamps. Jackie had parked her Chrysler on the fringe of one of those pools. The river was a block away, and the ice fog swirled around the lamps and settled on the cars.

Jackie stood beside her car, waving her arms while she yelled at Lula, and Lula was yelling back at Jackie.

“Calm down,” Lula was saying. “Calm down!”

“He’s dead,” Jackie shouted. “Dead, dead, dead. Fucking dead. Dead as a goddamn doorknob. What a bitch!”

I looked at Lula, and Lula gave me an I-don’t-know shrug.

“I just got here,” Lula said. “I can’t get her
to say anything besides the motherfucker’s dead. Maybe she’s too coked up. Maybe we need to get something to slow her down.”

“I’m not coked up, you dumb ho,” Jackie said. “I’m trying to tell you he’s dead, and you’re not fucking listening.”

I looked around the lot. “Is he dead anywhere nearby?”

I really wanted a no on this one. I’d already had my millennium quota of dead.

“You see that big bush by the Dumpster?” Jackie said.

“Yeah.”

“You see that ugly-ass foot sticking out of that big bush?”

Oh boy. She was right. There was a foot sticking out of the bush.

“Shit, Jackie,” I said. “You didn’t kill that foot, did you?”

“No, I didn’t kill that foot. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Someone jacked me over. I’ve been sitting out here, freezing my ass off, waiting to kill that sonovabitch Cameron Brown, and someone beat me to it. It isn’t fair!”