22 Tricky Twenty-Two (7 page)

I HAD A
peanut butter and olive sandwich for dinner and by eight o’clock I was starving. I’d showered away the beer that had splashed off Lula’s head onto mine. I’d put on clean jeans, a dressy tank top with a matching sweater, and flats, and I was ready for girls’ night out.

I met Lula and Connie at the office fifteen minutes later. Lula had hair the color of daffodils. It was all braided into cornrows, and she had a bunch of extensions that reached her shoulders. She’d squashed herself into a fire-engine-red bandage dress that was intended for a much smaller woman but seemed to work for Lula. She had matching lipstick, and she was wearing matching fancy Louboutin knockoffs.

Connie was still wearing work clothes. Tight black pencil skirt that came to an inch above her knees, tight white scoop-necked top that showed a lot of cleavage, chunky gold necklace, earrings, and cuff bracelet, and gold wedge heels. Connie was a couple years older than me and a lot more Italian. My hair was out of control by birth. Hers was by design.

We all piled into the Firebird and Lula drove us to M Street and Hawthorne. We rode around several blocks before parking, keeping our eyes open for Gobbles.

“I’m going with the girlfriend,” Connie said.

I had no opinion. I was thinking about Morelli. He was a really good cop. I couldn’t imagine him being anything else. Of course, until a couple days ago I also couldn’t have imagined him dumping me. Not that this was our first breakup. Morelli and I had a long history of breakups. None of the previous ones had been done naked. The naked thing was really irksome.

Lula parked, and we all sashayed into the bar and scoped it out. Two booths were filled. Four men were at the bar. No Gobbles.

We settled into a booth and ordered burgers and fries, onion rings, and a pitcher of beer.

“Do you ever think about getting a different job?” I asked Connie.

“Every day.”

“Not me,” Lula said. “I like my job.”

“That’s because you don’t have one,” Connie said. “You wander into the office when you feel like it. You drive Stephanie around. You make fried chicken and donut runs. And we pay you.”

“That’s true,” Lula said. “It’s real sweet. Best thing ever happened to me was when the office burned down, and we went from paper files to digital. I came in as a file clerk, but now there’s hardly anything to file. Fortunately I’m of other value. I have intimate knowledge of the worst parts of town and the most disgusting people, and I annoy Vinnie.”

We raised our beer glasses and made a toast to annoying Vinnie.

“You really get dressed up for a girls’ night out,” Connie said to Lula.

“You bet your ass. I take pride in my appearance.” She looked down and made a boob adjustment, hoisting the girls up a couple inches. “You never know when Mr. Good Enough is gonna come along. I like to be ready.”

Connie looked across the table at me. “Why did you ask about changing jobs? Are you thinking about changing jobs?”

“I know someone who’s making a big change, and it has me thinking.”

“What would you do if you stopped working for Vinnie?” Connie asked.

The food arrived, and I ate an onion ring and thought about life after Vincent Plum Bail Bonds.

“I have no clue,” I said to Connie.

“What did you want to be when you were a little girl?”

“Wonder Woman.”

“I get that,” Lula said. “She had that golden lasso. And her boots were excellent.”

“I wanted to be Madonna,” Connie said.

I finished my burger and went to talk to the bartender.

“I remember you,” he said. “You and some guy who looked like Batman chased a guy who ran up a thirty-dollar bar tab through the kitchen and that was the last I saw of him.”

“He’s not a regular?”

“Not nearly.”

“Did he say anything while he was here? Did he talk to you?”

“No. What are you, a cop?”

“Bond enforcement.”

I gave him a twenty and returned to the booth.

“How’d that go?” Lula asked.

“Gobbles hasn’t been back.”

“He’s in the Zeta cellar,” Lula said. “I got a feeling. It’s almost a vision except there’s fog so it’s not one of my more clear visions.”

“So you think we should go look in the cellar?”

“Not
we.
I think
you
should look in the cellar,” Lula said. “I just had my hair done, and I’m wearing my nice red dress. And we’re not sure what they did with those geese. They could be in the cellar protecting Gobbles.”

“Your vision doesn’t tell you about the geese?”

“I don’t see no geese, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any of them there. Like I said, there’s some fog in the vision.”

“I guess it wouldn’t hurt to take a look around the Zeta house.”

Lula parked in a handicap space behind the student center and placed a handicap permit on her dashboard.

“This’ll disguise my car so it doesn’t get filled with geese,” Lula said. “You’d have to be a real horrible person to put geese in a handicap car.”

I examined the parking permit. “Where did you get this?”

“Macy’s,” Lula said. “Jimmy the Cheat was having a trunk sale in the parking lot.”

“You bought a handicap parking permit from a man called Jimmy the Cheat? Weren’t you afraid of getting cheated?”

“Hell no. I’ve known Jimmy forever. Anyways I looked it over real careful, and it looked like the real deal.”

“You’re not handicapped,” Connie said.

“There’s all kinds of handicaps,” Lula said. “I had a disadvantaged childhood and I’m afraid of snakes. I even think I might have some dyslexia and gluten issues. I was putting this dress on, and I was thinking I might have some bloat.”

I didn’t want to hear bloat details, so I led everyone across the dark campus to the Zeta house. We stood in deep shadow for a while and watched people coming and going. Lights were on in the house, and music was blaring.

“Do you still think he’s in the cellar?” I asked Lula.

“I don’t know anymore,” she said. “I was pretty sure at first, but there’s this fog sort of blurring out my video.”

“For crying out loud,” Connie said. “Let’s get this over with and look in the cellar.”

“They keep the door locked,” I told her.

“So we walk in, find someone of authority, and tell him to unlock the door.”

“It might not be that simple,” I said. “Last time we were here Lula shot up the balcony.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t hit anybody,” Lula said. “And look at these people. They drink all day long and they’re all potheads. They probably can’t remember anything.”

“Okay, we’ll go in, but no shooting,” I said to Lula. “None. Zero. Zip. Do not even
think
about taking your gun out of your purse.”

“Sure. I got that,” Lula said. “We’ll go in nice and quiet and look around without nobody noticing us. We’ll just blend in and sneak around to the cellar door. It might even be unlocked.”

I thought our chances of going unnoticed were slim. I was with a two-hundred-pound black woman wearing a size two knock-your-eyes-out tube of red spandex that barely covered her ass. Her hair was blond. Her cleavage was comparable to the Grand Canyon. Her nipples were practically punching holes in the spandex fabric.

“Good plan,” I said. “Let’s go in and keep a low profile.”

We made it through the entrance hall and living room and I stopped to look around.

A guy came up to us with plastic cups of beer. “Are you ladies students here?”

“Hell, yeah,” Lula said, taking a cup. “We’re studying all kinds of shit.”

“Anyone want to go upstairs?”

“Mostly we want to go downstairs,” Lula said.

“We’d like to see the cellar,” Connie told him.

“The cellar’s locked,” he said. “Nothing going on down there anyway.”

“Then why is it locked?” I asked.

“We keep the beer down there,” he said.

“I want to see the beer,” Lula said. “I get turned on by beer. Most people want to drink it, but I like looking at it. You can’t imagine what I could do to you if I had enough beer to look at. You’d never be the same. You’d be ruined when I was done with you.”

“Damn,” he said. “I haven’t got a key. Professor Pooka has a key. So what’s it going to be? One or all of you want to make me happy?”

“You’re gonna have to get happy all by yourself,” Lula said. “We don’t make people happy until we know them better. We got standards.”

“How much do your standards cost?” he asked Lula. “What can I get for ten bucks?”

“You can’t get nothin’ for ten bucks,” Lula said. “If I was in that business, which I’m not, I wouldn’t even look at you for ten bucks.”

“How about twenty? I bet I could get a tug from you for twenty.”

“This here’s insulting,” Lula said. “Do you know what you could get for twenty? You could get a snootful of pepper spray. I got some in my purse.”

Lula reached into her purse and pulled out her gun.

His eyes got wide and he jumped away. “Crap! I know who you are. You’re the nut who shot up the balcony.”

Someone yelled,
“She’s got a gun! It’s the shooter! Call the police.
Run for your lives.”

“I was just lookin’ for my pepper spray,” Lula said.

People were bolting up the stairs and out the front door.

“This isn’t good,” Lula said. “This here’s pandemonium.”

I turned Lula around and pointed her toward the kitchen. “Follow Connie!”

We ran through the deserted kitchen and out the back door. I smacked into Dean Mintner and knocked him flat.

Connie and I picked him up and set him on his feet.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t see you here in the dark.”

“What are you doing out here?” Lula asked him.

“I’m watching. I’m taking down names and collecting evidence.”

“What kind of evidence?”

“I don’t know yet,” Mintner said. “I haven’t figured it out.”

“This is why I’m not going to college,” Lula said. “Everybody’s a goofball.”

We left Mintner and hustled back to the Firebird. Lula put her handicap parking permit into the glove compartment and drove us to the office.

“This was a good girls’ night out,” Lula said. “We should do this more often.”

I WOKE UP
to the smell of coffee brewing. On the one hand terrific, and on the other hand terrifying, because it meant someone was in my kitchen. If it was a deranged killer he probably wouldn’t be making coffee. That left Morelli with a key. And Ranger with the ability to magically unlock anything. My money was on Morelli. Ranger would have brought Starbucks coffee in a container. I got out of bed and padded barefoot into the kitchen.

Morelli was lounging against my counter with a coffee mug in his hand. He poured out a mug for me, added cream, and handed it over.

“I need to talk to you,” he said.

“I have a phone. I have a
doorbell.
”

“I tried your doorbell. It isn’t working.”

“You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you.”

“Cupcake, your gun is in the cookie jar, and it isn’t loaded.”

I drank some coffee and pushed my hair off my face. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Doug Linken. We’re starting to get toxicology tests back, and he had traces of black gunpowder on the soles of his shoes. Harry Getz had the same gunpowder on his shoes. It’s not something you see every day. You might find it on a gunsmith or collector, but neither Linken or Getz owned a gun.”

“Why are you telling this to me?”

“You’re going to be with Monica Linken tonight. I’ve asked her about the gunpowder, but she had nothing. I thought you might be able to pick up something. Someone passing in front of the casket who might make his own ammo. Maybe a history buff who likes guns.”

“Is Monica still a suspect?”

“She’s a person of interest. She has a solid alibi on the Getz shooting. Getz’s wife has a solid alibi on the Linken shooting.”

“So now Getz and Linken were killed by the same gun, and they both had gunpowder on their shoes.”

“Yep.”

“Do they have anything else in common?”

“They were business partners.”

“Maybe they were doing business with someone who used gunpowder.”

“We’ve combed through all their transactions and can’t find anything, but it’s not off the table. Clearly they stepped in it somewhere.”

“Why do you think it relates to the shootings?”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say it relates to the shootings. I just think it’s an interesting piece of information. It’s a mystery I wouldn’t mind having solved.”

I put a piece of bread in the toaster and looked at Morelli. “Do you want toast? Cereal?”

He shook his head no. “I’ve already eaten breakfast.”

I had been sleeping in an oversized T-shirt and bikini panties. Morelli’s eyes were focused on the hem of the T-shirt that hung two inches below my butt.

“Cute,” Morelli said.

“Are you sure you came to talk about Doug Linken?”

He finished his coffee and rinsed his cup out in the sink. “Yeah. I’m really screwed up, right?”

“Looks like it to me, but what do I know.”

He pulled me to him and kissed me. His hand slid under the T-shirt and moved to my breast, and his thumb teased across the nipple.

His phone buzzed with a message, and we both froze.

“Shit,” Morelli said.

The message buzzed again. He removed his hand from my breast and checked the message.

“This is why I have acid reflux,” he said. “Whenever I’m in the middle of
anything
someone gets murdered.”

He gave me a quick kiss. He apologized and left.

This was the second time in less than forty-eight hours that a man stopped fondling me because his phone rang. And both times it was because someone had been killed. If I wasn’t a well-adjusted, emotionally healthy person I might be bothered by this.

I spread peanut butter on my toast, sliced some banana onto it, and ate it while I drank my coffee and checked my email.

I deleted several offers for penis enlargement, and two offers from Russian women who wanted to meet me. I answered an email from my friend Mary Lou, and I checked a couple news sites. I was depressed after the news sites so I played Pharrell Williams’s video “Happy.” I danced along with Pharrell into the kitchen, fed Rex and gave him fresh water, and I was ready to get on with my day.

An hour later I rolled into the office. Lula was on the couch with a copy of
Star
and Connie was at her desk. Vinnie’s door was shut, but his car was parked in the small lot attached to the building.

“You’ve got a box,” Connie said to me. “It was just delivered.”

“It looks like the size of a shoe box,” Lula said. “I bet it’s shoes.”

There was no return address and the postmark was out of state.

“I didn’t order shoes,” I said. “I didn’t order anything.”

I ripped the packing tape off, opened the box, and read the enclosed card.

“What’s it say?” Lula asked.

“It says,
I found you! I’m smart like that. Here’s something you can use until we meet in person.
And it’s signed
Scooter Stud Muffin.
”

I pulled out a wad of tissue paper, and we all stared into the box.

“It’s a dildo,” Lula said. “It’s a good size, too.”

Vinnie came out of his lair and looked at the dildo. “Cripes,” he said. “That thing’s big enough to pork a cow.”

Lula took it out of the box and held it up for a good look. “It says here on the tag that it’s called
The Whopper
and it got studs for her lady’s pleasure.”

Lula pushed a button on the scrotum and the dildo lit up and vibrated.

“This here’s a quality dildo,” Lula said. “It got a good hum to it.”

“Who’s Stud Muffin?” Vinnie asked.

“Stephanie got some secret admirers,” Lula said. “They send her stuff but there’s no return address or name. Unless you count
Stud Muffin
as a name.”

“That’s real interesting,” Vinnie said. “It would be even more interesting if you put the rubber wanger away and did some work. I’m not running a charity here. Why isn’t Billy Bacon back behind bars?”

“We can’t find him,” Lula said. “He’s slippery.”

“So set a trap. Do
something.
”

Vinnie went back into his office and slammed and locked his door.

“Setting a trap isn’t a bad idea,” I said. “We should give him a pizza party.”

“I like it,” Lula said. “A big man like him doesn’t pass up food. Especially if it’s free. We’ll send them to his mama’s house. I’m sure she knows how to get in touch with him.”

“I have a cousin working at Domino’s,” Connie said. “I’ll order it. How many do you want?”

“Has to be enough to tempt him,” I said. “Send him four extra-large with the works. Have the delivery person say it’s part of a promotion, and he was picked out at random. Tell your cousin we want it delivered at noon.”

“Domino’s is the best,” Lula said. “They got everything there. They even got gluten free. Maybe you should include one that’s gluten free in case Billy Bacon got issues.”

“Do we know anyone who would have gunpowder?” I asked Connie.

“My Uncle Lou,” Connie said. “He’s old-school. Likes to make his own shells.”

“He must be eighty,” Lula said. “Is he still whacking people?”

“He gets the occasional job,” Connie said. “He has easy access to nursing homes. Blends right in. Mostly these days he does mercy killings. Terminal cancer. Advanced Alzheimer’s.”

“Besides Lou?” I asked.

“I know some people making explosives,” Lula said.

“Terrorists?” Connie asked.

“Gangbangers,” Lula said. “Not all that dangerous since they all flunked out of school and can’t read. Pretty much they blow the fingers off their hands putting the shit together wrong.”

The door to Vinnie’s inner office got yanked open again and Vinnie stuck his head out. “What are you doing still sitting there? You think the rat bastards we bail out are going to come to you?” He pulled his head back in and slammed the door shut.

“That man has a personality problem,” Lula said.

“Yeah, that’s the tip of the iceberg,” Connie said. “He’s also got father-in-law problems. We’re not running in the black this month, and Harry isn’t happy. Do you remember Ernest Blatzo?”

This got a grimace out of me. Blatzo was a high-money bond who went FTA and disappeared off the face of the earth.

“It would help a lot if you could find Blatzo,” Connie said. “He’s worth twice as much as Billy Bacon and Ken Globovic combined.”

He was also a freak. He raped women in very brutal ways. It was suspected that some of the women he raped got chopped up into tiny pieces and fed to the pack of feral cats that lived in his yard. Since those women were never found it was hard to pin a murder charge on him. I wanted to see him behind bars, but I wasn’t excited about coming face-to-face with him. Truth is, I wasn’t all that brave. My successes were the result of stubbornness and dumb luck. Lula wasn’t that brave either. She caught people by accidentally running over them with her car or promising them a night of hot sex and then sitting on them until I showed up.

“I have his file in my bag,” I said to Connie. “I was hoping he was out of country.”

“We have a source who tells us Blatzo is back in his old house. No one’s actually seen him, but his herd of feral cats are back.”

“I could throw up thinking about that,” Lula said. “That’s disgusting.”

I headed out. “Later,” I said to Connie. “Confirm the pizza party.”

“I’m on it,” Connie said. “What do you want me to do with the
thing
?”

“Toss it,” I told her.

“That would be a shame,” Lula said. “It’s an expensive piece of equipment. I’ll take it if nobody else wants it. I bet I could get good money for this on eBay.”

Connie handed the dildo over to Lula, and Lula shoved it into her purse.

“Do you want the box?” Connie asked.

“Negative,” Lula said. “It’s easier this way.”

We got to the curb and looked at the Buick and the Firebird.

“What’s it going to be?” I asked Lula.

“I’m thinking Buick. Just in case we get lucky, I don’t want to put Billy Bacon back in my Firebird.”

“No problem.”

We chugged away, and I took a left on Broad.

“I don’t like the looks of this,” Lula said. “You’re going looking for Blatzo.”

“We’ll do a drive-by in his neighborhood. If we see any cats gnawing on body parts we’ll call the police.”

“I got creepy crawlies thinking about it. I’m gonna have nightmares tonight.”

Blatzo lived in a hard-times, drug-infested neighborhood of dingy little cinder block houses squatting on blighted, neglected lots. Junker cars and rusted-out refrigerators were left to linger in the front yards. Rats served as target practice in the backyards. The best you could say about Blatzo’s street was that it was free of the gangbangers who lived on Stark. Here the gangbangers only stopped by occasionally to visit the meth lab that flourished two doors down from Blatzo’s.

I idled in front of Blatzo’s house, and Lula and I looked up and down the street.

“Don’t look like anybody’s home,” Lula said. “No lights on. No car in the driveway. Weeds don’t look trampled. No cats sitting on the stoop. Are we sure Blatzo is still living here?”

“According to Connie. His name is on the lease as a renter, and someone is paying the rent.”

“Are you gonna go look around?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Well, you could think about how you’re gonna do it all by yourself because I’m not walking out in that yard. There’s snakes.”

Lula had a point. Hard to tell what was living in the tall weeds and trash.

“There’s a path to the house,” I said. “I’m going to knock on the front door.”

“Are you nuts? What are you gonna do after you knock? What if he answers?”

“If he answers I’ll cuff him.”

“The man is six foot tall, probably weighs as much as a Volkswagen, and eats raw meat.”

I got out of the car and tucked cuffs into my right back pocket and pepper spray into the left.

“Do you have a gun?” Lula asked.

“I have a stun gun.”

“Does it work?”

I took the stun gun out of my bag and turned it on. “Yep,” I said. “It’s charged.”

“I got another one of those feelings,” Lula said. “It’s a premonition of disaster.”

“Chances of Blatzo being in the house are minuscule,” I said. “I’m going to knock on the door. No one will answer. Case closed.”

“I like that thinking,” Lula said. “That makes sense. I could even take a video with my cellphone to show Vinnie we did something.”

I squared my shoulders, tipped my chin up, and marched across the street to the house. Lula got out of the Buick and started filming. I got halfway up the path to the front door, eyes on the prize, and I stepped on a snake. I shrieked and jumped. The snake slid away into the weeds. And I ran back to the car.

“Should I stop filming?” Lula asked.

“Yes. Get into the car.”

I retraced my route to Broad and parked in front of the hardware store. I went into the store, bought high rubber boots, and drove back to Blatzo’s house.

“I don’t know if those boots are snake-proof,” Lula said. “What if you come on a snake with big fangs? Or a jumping snake?”

I got out of the car and put the boots on. “This time I’ll watch where I’m walking.”

“Do you want me to film?”

“I don’t care.”

“You sound cranky,” Lula said.

“I’m a little stressed.”

“You’ll feel better after the pizza party.”

“The pizza party isn’t for us.”

“Yeah, but there might be some left over. Wouldn’t want to waste good pizza.”

I stomped off in my big boots. Across the street, up the path, onto the small stoop. I rang the bell, the door opened, a big hairy hand reached out, grabbed me by my shirt front, and dragged me into the house. The door slammed shut and I blinked up at Blatzo.

“Ernest?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“You n-n-need to come with me. You’re in violation of your bond.”

“I don’t feel like doing that. You know what I feel like doing?”

Oh crap. He was going to rape me and chop me up into tiny pieces for his cats.

“I feel like having a party,” he said. “Just you and me.”

“Yeah, that would be good. We’ll have a party after we check you in with the court.”