Three to Get Deadly (24 page)

No one followed that I could tell, and once I got onto St. James there were too many headlights to distinguish a tail. I had my shoulder bag on the seat alongside me and my pepper spray in my lap. To keep my spirits up I sang “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” all the way to Morelli’s house. I parked at the curb and checked the street. No cars. No one on foot. I locked the Mazda, marched to Morelli’s front door and knocked. I guess I was still nervous because the knock came
out like BAM BAM BAM instead of knock, knock, knock.

“Must have had your Wheaties today,” Morelli said when he answered the door.

I pushed past him. “You keep your doors locked?”

“Sometimes.”

“They locked now?”

Morelli reached behind him and flipped the Yale lock. “Yep.”

I went to the living room window and drew the drapes. “Pull the curtains in the dining room and kitchen.”

“What’s going on?”

“Just humor me.”

I followed him into the kitchen and waited while he adjusted Venetian blinds. When he was done I took the tape out of my shoulder bag. “You have a recorder?”

There was a briefcase sitting on the kitchen table. Morelli opened the briefcase and took out a recorder. He slipped the tape into the recorder and pressed the play button.

Ranger came up first.

“Bad advice,” Morelli said.

“That’s not what I want you to hear.”

The noise blasted out and then the man’s voice. Morelli’s face showed no expression while he listened to the message. Cop face,
I thought. He ran the tape through a second time before shutting the machine off.

“Not Mickey Maglio,” he said.

“No.” A cop would know better than to have his voice recorded.

“You have any clue you were being followed?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Did you pick up a tail tonight?”

“No.”

“There’s a record store, grunge shop across from the Shuman Building. It’s got some video machines in it. It’s a kid hangout. The call probably originated from there. I’ll send someone over to ask a few questions.”

“Guess the crashing and scuffling we heard didn’t come from your neighbor’s dog.”

“Whoever was out there must have knocked the garbage can over trying to get a better look.”

“You don’t seem very upset by this.”

There were dishes drying in a drainer on the sink. A dinner plate, a cereal bowl, a couple glasses. Morelli grabbed the dinner plate and threw it hard against the opposite wall, where it smashed into a million pieces.

“Okay,” I said. “So I was wrong.”

“You want to stay for dinner?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Morelli made chicken sounds.

“Very adult,” I said. “Very attractive.”

Morelli grinned.

I paused with my hand on the door handle. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me more about your conversation with Dickie.”

“No more to tell,” Morelli said.

Yeah, right.

“And don’t follow me home,” I said. “I don’t need a bodyguard.”

“Who said I was going to follow you home?”

“You have your car keys in your hand, and I know the body language. You look like my mother.”

The grin widened. “You sure you don’t want an escort?”

“Yes, I’m sure.” The only thing worse than being scared out of my wits was having Morelli know it.

Morelli opened the door and glanced at the Mazda. “Looks like you’ve got one of Bucky’s loaners.”

“Bucky remembered me from high school. Said you gave me quite a recommendation on the men’s room wall at Mario’s.”

“That was during my reckless youth,” Morelli said. “These days I’m the soul of discretion.”

It was still early, and I couldn’t get excited about going home and fixing dinner for one. The alternatives were Cluck in a Bucket or mooching a meal from my parents. I was afraid I might be recognized and remembered at Cluck in a Bucket, so I opted for family.

My mother looked flustered when she came to the door. “Whose car is that?” she asked.

“It’s a loaner from a garage. My car is broken again.”

“Hah!” my father said from the dining room.

“We were just sitting down,” my mother said. “Roast leg of lamb with mashed potatoes and asparagus.”

“Is that Stephanie?” Grandma Mazur hollered from the table. “Have you got your gun? I want to show it around.”

“I’ve got my gun, but you can’t see it,” I said.

There was a man sitting next to Grandma Mazur.

“This here’s Fred,” Grandma said. “He’s my boyfriend.”

Fred nodded to me. “Howdy-do.”

Fred looked to be about three hundred years old. Gravity had pulled the skin from
the top of his head down to his neck, and Fred had tucked it into his shirt collar.

I took my seat across from Grandma and noticed a set of false teeth neatly placed beside Fred’s salad fork.

“Those are my choppers,” Fred said. “Got them for free from the VA, but they don’t fit right. Can’t eat with them in.”

“Had to put his lamb through the meat grinder,” Grandma said. “That’s what the lump of gray stuff is on his plate.”

“So,” my father said to Fred. “You pretty well fixed?”

“I do okay. I get disability from the army.” He tapped a finger against his right eye. “Glass,” he said. “World War Two.”

“Were you overseas?” my father asked.

“Nope. Lost my eye at Camp Kilmer. I was inspecting my bayonet, and then next thing you know I’d poked my eye out with it.”

“The fact he’s only got one eye don’t slow him down none,” Grandma said. “I’ve seen him handle ten bingo cards and never miss a single call. And he’s an artist, too. He hooks rugs. You should see the beautiful rugs he makes. He made one with a picture of a tiger on it.”

“I imagine you got a house of your own?” my father asked him.

Fred gummed some of the gray glop. “Nope. I just got a room at Senior Citizens. I sure would like to have a house though. I’d like to marry someone like Sweetie here, and I’d be happy to move right in. I’d be quiet too. You wouldn’t hardly know I was here.”

“Over my dead body,” my father said. “You can take your teeth and get the hell out of here. You’re nothing but a goddamn gold digger.”

Fred opened his eyes wide in alarm. “I can’t get out of here. I haven’t had dessert yet. Sweetie promised me dessert. And besides, I don’t have a ride back to the Seniors.”

“Call him a cab,” my father ordered. “Stephanie, go call him a cab. Ellen, wrap up his dessert.”

Ten minutes later Fred was on his way.

Grandma Mazur helped herself to a cookie and a second cup of coffee. “There’s plenty more where he came from,” she said. “Tell you the truth he was kind of old for me anyway. And he was creeping me out with that glass eye…the way he’d tap on it all the time. It was okay that he took his teeth out, but I didn’t want to see that eye rolling around next to his soup spoon.”

The Rangers were playing Montreal, so I stayed to see the game. Watching the game
also involved eating a lot of junk food since my father is an even worse junk food addict than I am. By the time the third period rolled around we’d gone through a jar of cocktail wieners, a bag of Chee•tos and a can of cashews and were working on a two-pound bag of M&M’s.

When I finally waved good-bye I was considering bulimia.

The upside to lacking self-control was that the threat of masked men paled in comparison to worry over the Chee-tos working their way to my thighs. By the time I remembered to be afraid I was inserting the key in my front door.

My apartment felt relatively safe. Only one phone message, and no cocktail wieners tempting me from cupboard shelves. I punched up the message.

It was from Ranger. “Call me.”

I dialed his home number and received a single-word answer. “Go.”

“Is this a message?” I asked. “Am I talking to a machine?”

“This is very weird, babe, but I could swear your friend Lula is trying to tail me.”

“She thinks you’re a superhero.”

“Lot of people think that.”

“You know how you give everybody that
vacant lot as your home address? She thinks that’s a little odd. She wants to find out where you live. And by the way, where
do
you live?”

I waited for an answer, but all I heard was a disconnect.

I woke up feeling guilty about the junk food binge, so for penance I cleaned the hamster cage, rearranged the jars in the refrigerator and scrubbed the toilet. I looked for ironing, but there was none. When something needs to be ironed I put it in the ironing basket. If a year goes by and the item is still in the basket I throw the item away. This is a good system since eventually I end up only with clothes that don’t need ironing.

Bucky had said my car would be ready at ten. Not that I doubted Morelli or Bucky, but I’d come to regard car repairs with the same sort of cynicism I’d previously reserved for Elvis sightings.

I parked the green Mazda against the garage fence and saw that my pickup was waiting for me in front of one of the open bays. It had been freshly washed and was sparkly clean. It would have been slick if only it didn’t have a big crumple in its hood and a big dent in its back bumper.

Bucky sauntered out from the other bay.

I looked at the pickup skeptically. “Is it fixed?”

“Emission control valve needed a doohickey,” Bucky said. “Two hundred and thirty dollars.”

“Doohickey?”

“That’s the technical term,” Bucky said.

“Two hundred and thirty dollars sounds high for a doohickey.”

“Mr. Fix It don’t come cheap.”

I drove back to my apartment building without a hitch. No stalls. No backfires. And no confidence that this would last. The honeymoon period, I thought skeptically.

I returned to my building and parked in my usual Dumpster spot. I cautiously got out of the truck and looked for possible assailants. Finding none, I crossed the lot and swung through the door into the lobby.

Mr. Wexler was in the lobby, waiting for the senior citizens’ minibus to pick him up. “You hear about Mo Bedemier?” Mr. Wexler asked. “Isn’t he a pip? I tell you, the man’s got a lot of jewels. It’s about time somebody did something about the drug problem.”

“He’s suspected of killing a whole bunch of men!”

“Yep. He’s on a roll, all right.”

The elevator doors opened, and I got in, but I didn’t feel like going to my apartment. I felt like striking out at someone.

I got out of the elevator and confronted Mr. Wexler. “Killing is wrong.”

“We kill chickens,” Mr. Wexler said. “We kill cows. We kill trees. So big deal, we kill some drug dealers.”

It was hard to argue with that kind of logic because I like cows and chickens and trees much better than drug dealers.

I got back into the elevator and rode to the second floor. I stood there for a few minutes, trying to talk myself into a relaxing afternoon of doing nothing, but I couldn’t sell the idea. I returned to the lobby, stomped over to my truck and wedged myself behind the steering wheel. As long as I was already in a fairly vicious mood I thought I might as well visit Dickie, the little crumb. I wanted to know what he told Morelli.

I parked in a lot a block from Dickie’s office, barreled through the lobby and gave his receptionist my power smile.

“I need to have a few words with Dickie,” I said. And before she could answer I turned on my heel and stalked off to Dickie’s office.

Dickie didn’t look happy to see me. In fact, Dickie didn’t look happy at all. He was sitting at his desk with his head in his hands and his hair rumpled. This was serious stuff, because Dickie’s hair was always perfect. Dickie woke up in the morning with every hair neatly in place. That he was having a bad day did nothing to dampen my spirits.

He jumped in his seat when he saw me. “You! Are you nuts? Are you wacko?” He shook his head. “This is too much. This time you’ve gone too far.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about restraining orders. Harass
ment charges. Attempts at intimidating an attorney.”

“Are you putting that funny white powder in your coffee again?”

“Okay, so I fooled around a little while we were married. Okay, our divorce didn’t go smooth as silk. Okay, I know you have some hostile feelings for me.” He unconsciously ran his hand through his hair, causing it to stand on end. “That’s no reason to turn into the Terminator. Christ, you need help. Have you ever thought of getting some counseling?”

“I get the feeling you’re trying to tell me something.”

“I’m talking about sending your goon to attack me in my parking lot this morning!”

“Lula attacked you?”

“Not Lula. The other one.”

“I don’t have another one.”

“The big guy,” Dickie said. “In the ski mask and coveralls.”

“Hold the phone. I’ve got the picture. That wasn’t my goon. And there’s more than one. There’s a whole pack of them, and they’ve been threatening me, too. Just exactly what did he say to you?”

“He said Mo didn’t need a lawyer, and I was off the case. I said Mo would have to tell
that to me personally. And then the guy pulled a gun on me and said that for a lawyer I wasn’t very smart at reading between the lines. I told him I was getting smarter with each passing minute. He put the gun away and left.”

“He drive away? You get a plate number?”

Dickie’s face flushed. “I didn’t think.”

“Mo’s got a fan club,” I said. “Concerned citizens.”

“This is too weird.”

“What was the deal with Mo? What’s your contribution here?”

“You’re wasting your time. I’m not discussing this with you.”

“I know a lot of stuff about you that you probably wouldn’t want to get around. I know about your coke habit.”

“That’s history.”

“I know about Mallory’s wife.”

Dickie was out of his seat. “You were the one who told Morelli!”

“That Mallory is a mean son of a gun. No telling what he’d do if he found out someone was fooling around with his wife. He could plant drugs in your car, Dickie. Then you’d get arrested, and just think what fun that’d be…the strip search, the beating you got when you resisted arrest.”

Dickie’s eyes shrunk into hard, glittery little marbles. I figured his gonads were undergoing a similar transformation.

“How do I know you won’t go to Mallory even if I tell you about Mo?” Dickie asked.

“And lose my edge? I might want to blackmail you again.”

“Shit,” Dickie said. He pushed back in his chair. He stood and paced and returned to his seat. “There’s client confidentiality involved here.”

“As if you ever cared about client confidentiality.” I looked at my watch. “I haven’t got a lot of time. I have other things to do. I need to get in touch with the dispatcher before Mallory goes off shift.”

“Bitch,” Dickie said.

“Dickhead.”

His eyes narrowed. “Slut.”

“Asshole.”

“Fat cow.”

“Listen,” I said. “I don’t have to take this. I got a divorce.”

“If I tell you about Mo, you’ve got to promise to keep your mouth shut.”

“My lips are sealed.”

He rested his elbows on his desk, laced his fingers together and leaned forward. If it had been a normal-sized desk we would have
been nose to nose. Fortunately, the desk was as big as a football field so we still had some space between us.

“First off, Mo didn’t do any of the killing. He got mixed up with some bad guys…”

“Bad guys? Could you be more specific than that?”

“I don’t know any more than that. I’m working as an intermediary. All I’m doing right now is setting up a line of communication.”

“And it’s these bad guys who did the killing?”

“Mo was fed up with the gangs and the drugs inching closer to his store, and Mo didn’t think the cops could do much. He figured the cops were bound up by laws and plea bargaining.

“But Mo knew a lot from listening to the kids. He knew the dealers’ names. He knew who specialized in kiddie sales. So Mo started his own little sting. He’d go to the dealer and suggest a partnership.”

“Let the dealer work from Mo’s store.”

“Yes. He’d set up a meeting, usually in his store or garage, someplace else if the dealer was jumpy. Then Mo would give the meeting information to a friend of his. Mo would disappear from the scene and the dealer would be taken care of by this friend. In the begin
ning, Mo didn’t know the dealers were being killed. I guess he thought they’d get roughed up or threatened and that would be the end of it. By the time he figured it out it was late in the game.”

“Why’d Mo jump bail?”

“Mo freaked. The gun he was carrying when Gaspick pulled him over was a murder weapon. It had been used to kill a dealer who subsequently floated in on the tide. I guess Mo had bought into some of it by then. Got caught up in the righteousness of being a vigilante. Mo said he never used the gun. In fact, it was empty when he was pulled over. Mo probably felt like John Wayne or something carrying it around. Don’t forget we’re talking about a shy, nerdy sort of guy who spent his entire life behind the counter of a candy store in the burg.”

I felt a painful stab in the midsection. Morelli had withheld that information from me. He’d never told me about the gun connection and the floater. Now it made sense. Now I realized why Morelli was interested in Mo from the very beginning. And why Mo had jumped bail.

“Why has Mo suddenly decided to turn himself in?”

“Just came to his senses, I suppose,” Dickie
said. “Realized he was getting more and more involved and started to get scared.”

“So what’s the deal? Mo sells out his friend for a reduced sentence?”

“I suppose, but it hasn’t actually gotten to that yet. Like I said, I’m just setting up a line of communication. And I advised Mo of his rights and the consequences of his participation.”

“So maybe these ski mask guys aren’t protecting Mo anymore. Maybe sentiments have changed and now they’re trying to find Mo before I do…. Very noble of you to remain as counsel after being threatened.”

“Fuck noble,” Dickie said. “I’m off this gig.”

I dropped a card on Dickie’s desk. “Call me if you hear from anyone.”

I found myself smiling in the elevator, comforted by the fact that Dickie had been harassed and threatened. I decided to continue the celebration by paying another visit to Mr. Alexander. If Mr. Alexander could make my hair orange, surely he could make it brown again.

“Impossible!” Mr. Alexander said. “I’m totally booked. I would love to help you out, lovey. I really would, but just look at my schedule. I haven’t a free moment.”

I held some orange frizz between thumb and forefinger. “I can’t live like this. Isn’t there
anyone
here who can help me?”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

“I’ve got a gun in my pocketbook. I’ve got pepper spray and an electric gizmo that could turn you into a reading lamp. I’m a dangerous woman, and this orange hair is making me crazy. There’s no telling what I might do if I don’t get my hair fixed.”

The receptionist hastily thumbed down the day page. “Cleo has a cancellation at two o’clock. It was only for a cut, but she might be able to squeeze a color in.”

“Cleo is a marvel at color,” Mr. Alexander said. “If anyone can help you, it’s Cleo.”

Three hours later, I was back in my apartment building, and I still had orange hair. Cleo had given it her best shot, but the orange had resisted change. It was a shade darker and perhaps not quite so bright, but it was still basically orange.

Okay, fuck it. So I have orange hair. Big deal. It could be worse. It could be ebola. It could be dengue fever. Orange hair wasn’t permanent. The hair would grow out. It wasn’t as if I’d wrecked my life.

I was alone in the lobby. The elevator doors opened, and I stepped in, my thoughts
turning to Mo. Speaking of someone who’d wrecked his life. If Dickie could be believed, here was a man who’d lived his entire life selling candy to kids and then had snapped in frustration and made some bad choices. Now he was stuck in a labyrinth of judgment errors and terrible crimes.

I considered my own life and the choices I’d made. Until recently those choices had been relatively safe and predictable. College, marriage, divorce, work. Then, through no fault of my own, I didn’t have a job. Next thing, I was a bounty hunter, and I’d killed a man. It had been self-defense, but it was still a regrettable act that came creeping back to me late at night. I knew things about myself now, and about human nature, that nice girls from the burg weren’t supposed to know.

I traveled the length of the hall, searched for my key and opened my front door. I stepped inside, relieved to be home. Before I had a chance to turn and close the door, I was sent sprawling onto the foyer floor with a hard shove from behind.

There were two of them. Both in masks and coveralls. Both too tall to be Maglio. One of them pointed a gun at me. The other held a lunch bag. It was the sort of soft-sided insulated bag an office worker might use.
Big enough for a sandwich, an apple and a soda.

“You make a sound, and I’ll shoot you,” the guy with the gun said, closing and locking the door. “Shooting you isn’t what I want to do, but I’ll do it if I have to.”

“This isn’t going to work,” I told him. “Mo is talking to the police. He’s telling them all about you. He’s naming names.”

“Mo should have stuck to selling candy. We’ll take care of Mo. What we’re doing is for the good of the community…for the good of America. We’re not going to stop just because an old man got squeamish.”

“Killing people is for the good of America?”

“Eliminating the drug scourge.”

Oh boy. Scourge removers.

The man carrying the lunch bag jerked me to my feet and shoved me toward the living room. I thought about screaming or simply walking away, but I wasn’t sure how these lunatics would act. The one seemed comfortable with his gun. It was possible that he’d killed before, and I suspected killing was like anything else…the more you did it, the easier it got.

I was still wearing my jacket, still carrying my shoulder bag, the warning of retaliation
ringing in my ears. I still had the blister from my last meeting with Mo’s vigilantes, and the thought of being burned again sickened my stomach. “I’m going to give you a chance to leave, before you do something really stupid,” I said, working to keep the panic out of my voice.

The guy carrying the lunch bag set it on my coffee table. “You’re the stupid one. We keep reasoning with you and warning you, and you refuse to listen. You’re still sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. You and that lawyer you keep visiting. So we figured we’d give you a product demo. Show you the threat firsthand.” He removed a small glassine packet from the lunch bag and held it up for me to see. “High-quality boy.” The next item to be removed from the carrier was a small bottle of spring water. Then a bottle cap with a wire handle fashioned around it. “The best cooker comes from a wine bottle. Nice and deep. The dopers like this better than a spoon or a soda bottle cap. Do you know what boy is?”

Boy was heroin. Coke was girl. “Yeah, I know what it is.”

The man filled the cap with water and mixed in some of the powder from the packet. He pulled a lighter out of his pocket
and held it under the cap. Then he produced a syringe from the carrier and filled the syringe with the liquid.

I still had my pocketbook on my shoulder. I ran a shaky hand over the outside, feeling for my .38.

The gunman stepped forward and ripped the bag off my shoulder. “Forget it.”

Rex was in his cage on the coffee table. He’d been running on his wheel when we’d come into the room. When the lights flashed on, Rex had paused, whiskers whirring, eyes wide with the expectation of food and attention. After a few moments he’d resumed his running.

The man with the syringe flipped the lid off Rex’s cage, reached in and scooped Rex up in his free hand. “Now we get to begin the demonstration.”

My heart gave a painful contraction. “Put him back,” I said. “He doesn’t like strangers.”

“We know a lot about you,” the man said. “We know you like this hamster. We figure he’s like family to you. Now suppose this hamster was a kid. And suppose you thought you were doing all the right things, like feeding that kid good food and helping with his homework and raising him in a neighborhood with a good school. And then some-
how, in spite of everything you did, that kid got started experimenting with drugs. How would you feel? Wouldn’t you feel like going after the people who were giving him the drugs? And suppose your kid was sold some bad stuff. And your kid died of an overdose. Wouldn’t you want to go out there and kill the drug dealer who killed your kid?”

“I’d want him brought to justice.”

“The hell you would. You’d want to kill him.”

“Are you speaking from personal experience?”

The man with the syringe paused and stared at me. I could see his eyes behind the ski mask, and I guessed my question had hit home.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Then you understand why we have to do this. It’s essential that our work isn’t jeopardized. And it’s essential that you understand our commitment. We’d prefer not to kill you. We’re fair and reasonable people. We have ethics. So, pay attention. This is the last warning. This time we kill the hamster. Next time we kill you.”

I felt tears starting behind my eyes. “How can you justify killing an innocent animal?”

“It’s a lesson. You ever see anyone die
from an overdose? It’s not a nice way to go. And it’s what’s going to happen to you if you don’t take a vacation.”