Three to Get Deadly (10 page)

“Yeah,” I said, still breathing hard. “Blood is a bitch.”

“Okay, so maybe I was a little scared,” Lula said. “I mean, hell, that motherfucker would of shot us dead! Shit. What was he thinking of? What’s the matter with him?”

“I’ve got to get a new job,” I said to Lula. “I don’t like getting shot at.”

“I tell you, now that I’m thinking about it, I’m starting to get pissed off. Who the hell does that jerk think he is, anyway? I’ve got a mind to call him up and tell him what I think.”

I handed Lula the file folder. “Be my guest. The phone number’s on the first page. And while you’re at it, tell him he’d better get his butt over here, because next time someone raps on his door it’ll be Ranger.”

“Fuckin’ A,” Lula said. “Ranger’d root that
little pecker out. Ranger’d stomp on his miserable ass.”

“Boy, I really hate being shot at,” I said. “I really
hate
it!”

Lula wrenched her door open. “I’m not taking this shit. I’m not standing still for this kind of treatment.”

“Me either,” I said, getting caught up in the moment. “That creep needs to be locked up.”

“Yeah,” Lula said. “And we’re just the ones to do it!”

I wasn’t sure about that last part, but I let it slide, and Lula and I marched into the office like storm troopers invading Poland.

Connie looked up from her paperwork. “Uh-oh, what’s going on?”

“We’ve just been shot at,” Lula said, lower lip protruding a good two inches. “Can you believe it? I mean, I’ve been caught in drive-bys. I’m used to that shit. This shit was different. This shit was directed at me personally. I didn’t like this shit one bit. This shit was offensive, you know what I’m saying?”

Connie raised her eyebrows. “Leroy Watkins?”

“Shot at us through a closed door,” I said.

Connie nodded her head. “And?”

“And we ran away,” I said. “Lula was wor
ried about bloodstains on her new warm-up suit.”

Lula had the file in one hand and Connie’s phone in the other. “That Leroy Watkins isn’t getting away with this. I’m gonna call up his ass and tell him what I think. I’m gonna tell him I’m not taking this shit.”

Lula punched in some numbers and stood hand on hip.

“I want to talk to Leroy,” she said into the phone.

Someone responded at the other end, and Lula leaned forward. “What do you mean I can’t talk to him? He just almost dropped a cap in me, and now he’s not available to talk to me? I’ll available his ass.”

The phone was returned to Connie after five more minutes of discussion.

“Snake says he didn’t know it was us,” Lula said. “He said he’d go down to court with us if we come back.”

“Who’d he think he was shooting at?” I asked Lula.

“He said he didn’t know who he was shooting at. He said it just pays to be careful these days.”

“He destroyed his door!”

“Guess a man in Snake’s business got to worry.”

I grabbed my bag and hung it on my shoulder. “Okay, let’s get this over with.”

“The filing is starting to get out of hand,” Connie said to Lula. “This won’t take you all day, will it?”

“Hell no,” Lula said. “We’ll be back before lunch.”

I pulled on gloves but thought twice about a hat. You wear a hat in the morning and you look like a fool for the rest of the day. Not that I looked all that wonderful this morning. It was more that I didn’t want to compound the problem. Especially since Morelli was sitting in my parking lot. Just in case the unthinkable happened, and I got arrested…I didn’t want to have hat hair for my mug shot.

We rumbled off to Stark Street, each of us lost in our own thoughts. My thoughts ran mostly to warm beaches and half-naked men serving me long, cool drinks. From the stony expression on Lula’s face I suspected her thoughts ran a lot darker.

Lula pulled up to the curb in front of Shirlene’s apartment building and heaved herself out of the car. We stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the third-floor windows.

“He said he wasn’t going to shoot at us, right?” I asked, just to be sure.

“That’s what he said.”

“You believe him?”

Lula shrugged.

Ranger would go in with gun drawn, but that wasn’t my style. I felt stupid with a gun in my hand. After all, what purpose did it serve? Was I going to shoot Leroy Watkins if he refused to get in the car with me? I don’t think so.

I grimaced at Lula. She grimaced back. We entered the building and slowly climbed the stairs, listening for the shotgun ratchet.

When we got to the third floor, Shirlene was in the dingy hall, staring at her ruined door. Shirlene was medium height, lean and sinewy. Her age would be somewhere between twenty and fifty. She was wearing pink terry cloth bedroom slippers, faded pink warm-up pants that were a size too small and a matching sweatshirt that was dotted with various-hued food stains, none of which looked recent. Her hair was short and chopped. Her mouth turned down at the corners. Her eyes were expressionless. She held a piece of cardboard box in one hand and a hammer in the other.

“Not gonna be able to hammer anything into that cheapskate door,” Lula told her.
“You need mollies. Only thing gonna hold that cardboard in place is mollies.”

“Haven’t got any mollies,” Shirlene said.

“Where’s Leroy?” Lula asked. “He isn’t gonna shoot at us again, is he?”

“Leroy’s gone,” Shirlene said.

“Gone? What do you mean gone?”

“Gone is gone,” Shirlene said.

“Where’d he go?”

“Don’t know,” Shirlene said.

“When will he be back?”

“Don’t know that either.”

Lula stuffed her fists onto her hips. “Well, what
do
you know?”

“I know I gotta get this door fixed,” Shirlene said. “And you’re standing here taking up my time.”

Lula walked into the front room. “You don’t mind if I look around, do you?”

Shirlene didn’t say anything. We both knew nothing short of that twelve-gauge pump was going to stop Lula from looking around.

Lula disappeared into the back room for a moment. “You’re right,” she said to Shirlene. “He’s gone. He take any clothes with him? He look like he gonna be gone a long time?”

“He took his gym bag, and you know what he got in there.”

I looked over at Lula, eyebrows raised in silent question.

Lula made her hand into a gun shape and aimed it at me.

“Oh,” I said.

“My time is valuable,” Lula said to Shirlene. “What’s the matter with that man, doggin’ me like this? He think I haven’t got anything better to do than to hike up those stairs?”

I gave Shirlene my card, and Lula and I trudged down the stairs with Lula grumbling the whole way.

“Walk up the stairs, walk down the stairs. Walk up the stairs, walk down the stairs,” she said. “Leroy better hope I never catch up with him.”

Now that I was back on the street I wasn’t all that sad not to have made an apprehension. An apprehension would have meant a trip to the police station. And the police station was the last place I wanted to visit right now.

“I guess we could try some bars,” I said with no enthusiasm.

“Snake’s not gonna be in a bar at this time of day,” Lula said. “Snake’s more likely to be hanging around a schoolyard, checking up on his sales force.”

That gave me some incentive. “Okay. Let’s drive by some schools.”

An hour later we were out of schools and still hadn’t found Snake.

“Any other ideas?” I asked Lula.

“Who’s listed on his bail ticket?”

“Shirlene.”

“No one else? No mama?”

“Nope. Just Shirlene.”

“I don’t know,” Lula said. “Usually a man like Snake is out on the street. Even in weather like this he could be on the street.” She slowly drove down Stark. “Not nobody out here today. Don’t even see anybody we can ask on.”

We drove by Jackie’s corner, and it was empty too.

“Maybe she’s with a client,” I said.

Lula shook her head. “Nuh-uh, she isn’t with no client. She’s in that snooty parking lot, waiting for her man. Bet my life on it.”

Lula cruised the block around my apartment building while I checked for Morelli. I didn’t see his car, or anything that resembled a cop or a copmobile, so I had Lula drop me at the front door. I entered the lobby cautiously, not completely convinced of Morelli’s departure. I did a fast survey and
crossed to the stairs. So far, so good. I crept up the stairs, cracked the door at the second floor, peeked out to an empty hallway and sighed in relief. No Morelli.

I couldn’t avoid Morelli forever, but I figured if I avoided him long enough he’d find other leads, and eventually I’d be off the hook.

I unlocked my door and was met with the sound of Rex running on his wheel. I bolted the door behind myself, hung my bag and jacket on one of the four coat hooks I’d installed in my tiny foyer and took a left into the kitchen.

The light was blinking on my answering machine. Four messages.

The first was from Morelli. “Call me.”

I knew it was Morelli because my nipples contracted at the sound of his voice. His tone held a hint of annoyance. No surprise there.

The second message was just as cryptic. “Leave Mo alone. Or else.” A man’s voice, muffled. Unrecognizable. Great. Just what I needed. Anonymous threatening messages.

The third was from the Nissan service center telling me I had new points and plugs. The timing had been reset. And my car was ready to be picked up.

The fourth was from my mother. “Stephanie! Are you there? Are you all right? What’s this I hear about a shooting? Hello? Hello?”

Good news travels fast in the burg. Bad news travels even faster. And if there’s scandal attached, life as we know it comes to a halt until every detail of the tawdry event has been retold, examined, exclaimed over and enhanced.

If I allowed myself to consider what was being said about me at this very moment I’d probably fall over in a faint.

I dialed my parents’ number and got a busy signal. I briefly considered whether this absolved me from the obligatory explanatory phone call and decided it didn’t.

I made myself a tuna fish, potato chip and pickle sandwich and ate it at the kitchen counter.

I tried calling my mother again. Still busy.

I put Rex in the bathtub while I cleaned his cage. Then I cleaned the tub. Then I cleaned the rest of the bathroom. I ran the vacuum. I damp-mopped the kitchen floor. I scoured some of the crud off the top of the stove. Just in case I was arrested, I didn’t want my mother coming into my apartment and finding it dirty.

At three o’clock I gave up with the clean
ing and tried another call to my mother. No luck.

I called Sue Ann to get the scoop on myself and to set the record straight. You could always get Sue Ann. Sue Ann had call waiting.

“You ever hear anything about Uncle Mo being…odd?” I asked Sue Ann.

“Odd?”

“Romantically.”

“You know something!” Sue Ann shouted into the phone. “What is it? What is it? What’s the dirt on Uncle Mo? He’s having an affair, right?”

“I don’t know. I was just wondering. Probably you should forget I said anything.”

I disconnected and tried my mother again. Her line was still busy. It was close to four o’clock, and the light was fading. I went to the window and peered down at the parking lot. No sign of Morelli.

“So what do you think?” I asked Rex. “Should I keep trying the phone or should I just take a ride over?”

Rex telepathically suggested that communicating with my mother in person would have the added advantage of being able to scrounge dinner.

I thought this was pretty clever considering Rex had a brain the size of a dried pea.

I grabbed my shoulder bag and my jacket and squinted into the security peephole on my front door. No one in view. I cracked the door and looked out at the hall. Clear. I took the stairs, crossed the small lobby and exited through the rear door to the lot.

The seniors always snapped up all the good slots close to the back entrance, so my Buick was parked at the outer edge, next to the Dumpster.

I could hear a steady drone of cars on St. James, and streetlights had just blinked on. I had almost reached the Buick when a black Jeep Cherokee suddenly wheeled into the lot and rolled to a stop.

The tinted driver’s side window slid down and a man wearing a ski mask looked out at me, leveled a .45 and squeezed off two rounds that zinged into the blacktop about six inches from my foot. I stood rooted to the spot, paralyzed by fear and astonishment.

“This is a warning,” the man said. “Stop looking for Mo. Next time these bullets will be in your brain.” He discharged three rounds into the heavy iron side of the Dumpster. I dove for cover. A fourth round whistled overhead.

The window rolled up, and the car sped out of the lot.

When my heart resumed beating I got to my feet and cautiously looked over the edge of the Dumpster. Mrs. Karwatt was coming toward me, halfway across the lot, picking her way around icy spots on the macadam, clutching a small plastic bag of garbage to her chest.

“Did you see that?” I asked, my voice approaching a level audible only to canines.

“What?”

“That man in the car. He shot at me!”

“No!”

“Didn’t you hear it?”

“For goodness’ sakes,” she said. “Isn’t that terrible. I thought it was a backfire. I had my eyes fixed on the ice. Gotta be careful, you
know. My sister slipped and broke her hip last winter. Had to put her in a home. Never did recover right. It’s not so bad, though. She gets green Jell-O for dessert twice a week at lunchtime.”

I ran a shaky finger over the holes in the Dumpster where the bullets had impacted. “This is the second time today someone’s shot at me!”

“Getting so a body can’t go out of the house,” Mrs. Karwatt said. “What with the ice and the shooting. Ever since we put a man on the moon the whole planet’s gone to heck in a handbasket.”

I was looking for someone to nail for my sorry life, but I didn’t think it was fair to lay it all on Neil Armstrong.

Mrs. Karwatt pitched her bag into the Dumpster and headed back to the building. I sort of wanted to go with her, but my knees were shaky, and my feet weren’t moving.

I wrenched the door open on the Buick and collapsed onto the seat, hands clutching the wheel. Okay, I said to myself. Get a grip. These were two freak incidents. The first shooting was mistaken identity. And the second shooting was…what? A death threat.

SHIT.

I pulled the cell phone out of my shoulder bag and dialed up Morelli.

“Someone just shot at me!” I yelled into the phone at him. “I was getting into my car in my parking lot, and this guy in a ski mask drove up and told me to lay off looking for Mo. And then he shot at me. Warning shots, he said. And then he drove away.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Are you in immediate danger?”

“No.”

“Did you make a mess in your pants?”

“Came damn close.”

We were silent for a couple beats while we digested all this.

“Did you get his plate number?” Morelli asked. “Can you give me a description of the guy?”

“I was too rattled to think to get the plate. The guy was average build. White. That’s all I’ve got.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah.” I nodded my head in the car. “I feel better now. I just…I had to tell somebody.”

“While I have you on the phone…” Morelli said.

Damn! I forgot I was avoiding Morelli! I
snapped the cell phone closed. No sweat, I told myself. No harm done. But probably it’s not a good idea to hang out in the lot. That left me with two choices. I could go with my plan to visit my parents, or I could return to my apartment and hide in my coat closet. The coat closet held a lot of appeal short-term, but at some point I’d have to venture out, and by that time I’d most likely have missed dinner.

Go with dinner, I thought. Do the coat closet later.

My mother wasn’t smiling when she opened the door.

“Now what?” she said.

“I didn’t do it.”

“You used to say that when you were a little girl, and it was always a fib.”

“Cross my heart,” I said. “I didn’t shoot anybody. I accidentally got knocked out, and when I came to I was sharing a hallway with a dead guy.”

“You got knocked out!” My mother smacked the heel of her hand against her forehead. “I have to have a daughter who goes around getting herself knocked out.”

Grandma Mazur was in line behind my mother.

“Are you sure you didn’t pop him one? I could keep a secret, you know.”

“I didn’t pop him!”

“Well that’s a big disappointment,” she said. “I had a good story all ready to tell the girls at the beauty parlor.”

My father was in the living room, hiding in front of the TV. “Unh,” he said, never moving a muscle.

I sniffed the air. “Meat loaf.”

“Got a new recipe from Betty Szajack,” my mother said. “She puts sliced olives in her meat loaf, and she makes it with soaked bread instead of crackermeal.”

The best way to defuse my mother is to talk about food. For thirty years, we’ve expressed love and anger in terms of gravy and mashed potatoes.

“So are you staying for supper?” my mother wanted to know. “I have spice cake with chocolate mocha icing for dessert.”

“Sure,” I said. “That would be nice.”

I helped Grandma Mazur set the table while my mother finished up in the kitchen. We were about to sit down when the doorbell rang.

“Probably the paperboy trying to juice us out of more money,” Grandma said. “I’m wise to his tricks.”

I answered the door and found myself looking into Joe Morelli’s brown eyes.

He grinned when he saw me. “Surprise.”

“What do you want?”

“You asking for the long list or the short list?”

“I don’t want any list.” I made an attempt to close the door, but he muscled his way into the foyer. “Out!” I said. “This isn’t a good time.”

He ignored me and strolled into the dining room. “Evening,” he said to my mother. He acknowledged my father with a nod of his head, and he winked at my grandmother.

“We’re having meat loaf with olives,” Grandma Mazur said to Morelli. “You want some? We got plenty.”

“I wouldn’t want to impose,” Morelli said.

This triggered eye rolling on my part.

My mother pulled an extra side chair up next to me and laid out another plate. “We wouldn’t think of having you leave without supper,” she said to Morelli.

“I’d think of it,” I said.

My mother smacked me on the top of my head with a wooden serving spoon. “Miss Fresh Mouth.”

Morelli helped himself to two slabs of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, green beans and
applesauce. He made polite conversation with my mother and grandmother and discussed sports scores with my father. On the surface Morelli seemed relaxed and smiling, but there were unguarded moments when I caught him watching me with the offhand intensity of a tree toad eyeing a tasty insect.

“So what’s going on between you and my granddaughter?” Grandma asked Morelli. “Being that you’re here for supper I guess everything’s pretty serious.”

“Getting more serious by the minute,” Morelli said.

“Morelli and I have a working relationship,” I said to Grandma. “Nothing more.”

Morelli slouched back. “You shouldn’t fib to your grandma. You know you’re crazy about me.”

“Well, listen to that,” Grandma said, clearly charmed. “Isn’t he the one.”

Morelli leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “Speaking of work, I have a matter I’d like to discuss with you in private. I thought maybe we could go for a ride together after the table is cleared.”

“Sure,” I said. And maybe I’ll poke out my eye with the turkey baster.

I gathered the plates together and hauled them off to the kitchen. My mother and
Grandma Mazur followed with the serving dishes.

“You go ahead and cut the cake,” I told my mother. “I’ll get the coffee going.”

I waited a moment until I had the kitchen to myself, then I promptly did a quiet exit through the back door. I had no intention of going for a ride that would culminate in a body cavity search. Not that a body cavity search would be a new experience. Morelli had already performed this procedure on me at various ages, with varying degrees of success. The new twist would be that this time the search might be done by a prison matron—and that was even less appealing than falling prey to Morelli.

I was wearing jeans and boots and a flannel shirt over a T-shirt, and my teeth were chattering by the time I’d cut through my parents’ backyard and run the two blocks to Mary Lou’s house. Mary Lou’s been my best friend for as long as I can remember. For six years now she’s been more or less happily married to Leonard Stankovic of Stankovic and Sons, Plumbing and Heating. She has two kids and a mortgage and a part-time job as a bookkeeper for an Oldsmobile dealership.

I didn’t bother with the formality of
knocking on her door. I just barged in and stood there stomping my feet and flapping my arms in her living room, and saying, “D-d-damn it’s c-c-cold!”

Mary Lou was on her hands and knees picking up little plastic cars and men that looked like fireplugs. “Maybe it would help if you tried wearing a coat.”

“I was at my parents’ house and Morelli showed up, and so I had to sneak out the back door.”

“I don’t buy into that one,” Mary Lou said. “If you were with Morelli just now you’d be missing a lot more clothes than your coat.”

“This is serious. I’m afraid he might want to arrest me.”

Mary Lou’s two-year-old, Mikey, toddled in from the kitchen and latched onto Mary Lou’s leg dog style.

I thought kids were okay from a distance, but I wasn’t all that excited about the way they smelled up close. I suppose when they belong to you it makes a difference.

“You probably should stop shooting guys,” Mary Lou said. “You shoot a lot of guys, and eventually the cops get cranky about it.”

“I didn’t shoot this one. Anyway, I had to sneak out of the house, and I had to leave my coat and everything behind.”

Lenny and the four-year-old were sitting in front of the TV watching a rerun of
The Munsters.
Lenny was an okay person but sort of a mouth breather. Mary Lou had always gone for that type, preferring brawn to brain. Not that Lenny was entirely stupid. It’s just that you’d never get him confused with Linus Pauling.

Mary Lou dumped the fireplug people into a plastic laundry basket that was filled with toys, and the two-year-old let out a howl. He cried flat out with his hands clasping and unclasping, reaching for who knows what. Mary Lou, I suppose. Or maybe for his toys that were being put away for the night. He cried with his mouth wide open and his eyes scrunched tight, and in between sobs he shrieked, “No, no, no!”

Mary Lou took a graham cracker from her pocket and gave it to Mikey.

Mikey shoved the cracker into his mouth and continued to blubber, chewing and rubbing his face with his fat baby hands. Cracker mush mixed with tears and baby snot worked its way into his hair and onto his face. Brown drool rolled off his chin and stained his shirt.

Mary Lou gave Mikey a “been there, seen this” look. “Mikey’s tired,” she said.

Like I said before, kids were okay from a distance, but I didn’t think they’d ever replace hamsters.

“I need to use your phone to call home,” I said to Mary Lou.

She wiped at the mush with her shirttail. “Help yourself.”

I dialed from the kitchen, straining to hear over the racket in Mary Lou’s living room. “Is Morelli still there?” I asked my mother.

“He just left.”

“Are you sure? He’s not hanging around outside, is he?”

“I heard his car drive away.”

I borrowed a sweatshirt from Mary Lou and ran back to my parents’ house. I cut through the backyard and jogged down the driveway to check the street. The street looked clear. No Morelli. I retraced my steps to the kitchen door and let myself in.

“Well,” my mother said, “what gives?”

“Never catch me walking out on a hunk like Joe Morelli,” Grandma said. “I guess I’d know what to do with a man like that.”

I guessed I knew what to do with him too, but probably it was illegal to neuter a cop. “You didn’t give him any spice cake to take home, did you?” I asked my mother.

My mother tipped her chin up a fraction
of an inch. “I gave him the whole thing. It was the least I could do after you left him sitting here high and dry.”

“The whole thing!” I shouted. “How could you do that? I didn’t get a single piece!”

“That’s what happens when you walk out. And how was I to know where you were? You could have been kidnapped. You could have had a brain seizure and wandered off with amnesia. How was I to know you’d be back and want spice cake?”

“I had reasons for leaving,” I wailed. “Perfectly good reasons.”

“What reasons?”

“Morelli was going to arrest me…maybe.”

My mother took a deep breath. “Arrest you?”

“There’s a small possibility that I might be a homicide suspect.”

My mother made the sign of the cross.

Grandma didn’t look nearly so glum. “There was a woman on TV the other day. On one of them talk shows. She said she’d been arrested for smoking dope. She said when you get arrested the cops lock you up in a little cell and then sit around watching you on closed-circuit TV, waiting for you to go to the bathroom. She said there’s this stainless steel
commode in one corner of your cell, and it hasn’t got a toilet seat or anything, and that’s where you have to go. And she said the commode faces the TV camera just so they can all get a good view of the whole thing.”

My stomach went hollow and little black dots danced in front of my eyes. I wondered if I had enough money in my bank account to buy a ticket to Brazil.

Grandma’s expression got crafty. “The woman on TV said what you needed to do before you got arrested was to drink a lot of Kaopectate. She said you needed to get good and plugged up so you could wait until you got out on bail.”

I sat down in a chair and put my head between my knees.

“This is what comes of working for your father’s cousin,” my mother said. “You’re a smart girl. You should have a decent job. You should be a schoolteacher.”

I thought of Mary Lou’s kid with the graham crackers smeared in his hair, and felt better about being a bounty hunter. You see, it could always be worse, I thought. I could be a schoolteacher.

“I need to go home,” I said, retrieving my coat from the hall closet. “Lots of work to do tomorrow. Got to get to bed early.”

“Here,” my mother said, handing me a grocery bag. “Some meat loaf. Enough for a nice sandwich.”

I looked in the bag. Meat loaf. No spice cake.

“Thanks,” I said to my mother. “Are you sure there isn’t any spice cake left?”

“A homicide suspect,” my mother said. “How could such a thing happen?”

I didn’t know. I wondered the same thing. In fact, I wondered all the way home. I wasn’t such a bad person. I only cheated a little on my taxes, and I paid most of my bills. I didn’t cuss at old people (at least not to their face). I didn’t do drugs. So why was I having such rotten luck? Okay, so I didn’t go to church as often as I should, but my mother went regularly. I thought that should count for something.