Hot Six

11

THE FIRST FLOOR was clear. The basement rooms were clear, too. Hannibal had a small utility room down there, and a larger game room with a large-screen television, a billiard table, and a wet bar. It occurred to me that someone could be in the basement, watching television, and the house would appear dark and unlived-in. There were three bedrooms on the second floor. Also empty of human beings. One bedroom was obviously the master bedroom. Another had been converted into an office, with built-in bookshelves and a large leather-topped desk. And the third bedroom was a guest room. It was the guest room that caught my interest. It looked as if someone was living in it. Bed linens rumpled. Men's clothes draped over a chair. Shoes kicked off in a corner of the room.

I rifled the drawers and closet, checking pockets for something that might identify the guest. Nothing to be found. The clothes were expensive. I guessed their owner to be average height and build, under six feet and probably around 180 pounds. I checked the trousers against the trousers in the master bedroom. Hannibal had a larger waist size and his taste was more conservative. Hannibal's bath was attached to the master bedroom. The guest bathroom was off the hall. Neither held any surprises, with the possible exception of condoms in the guest bathroom. The guest had expected to see some action.

I moved to the office, scanning the bookshelves first. Biographies, an atlas, some fiction. I sat at his desk. No Rolodex or address book. There was a notepad and pen. No messages. A laptop computer. I turned it on. Nothing on the desktop. Everything on the hard drive was benign. Hannibal was very careful. I turned the computer off and went through his drawers. Again, nothing. Hannibal was neat. His clutter was minimal. I wondered if his suite at the shore was like this, too.

The guy in the guest room wasn't nearly so neat. His desk, wherever it was, would be a mess.

I hadn't found any weapons in the upstairs rooms. Since I knew, firsthand, that Hannibal had at least one gun, this probably meant he had the gun with him. Hannibal didn't seem like the kind of guy to leave his armaments in the cookie jar.

I went to the basement next. Not much to investigate down there.

"This is disappointing," I said to Lula, closing the basement door behind me. "There's nothing here."

"I couldn't find anything on this floor, either," Lula said. "No matchbooks from bars, no guns stuck under the couch cushions. There's some food in the refrigerator. Beer, juice, loaf of bread, and some cold cuts. There's some cans of soda, too. That's about it."

I went to the refrigerator and looked at the wrapper on the cold cuts. They'd been bought at the Shop Rite two days earlier. "This is really creepy," I said to Lula. "Someone's living in this house." And my unspoken thought was that they could be home any minute.

"Yeah, and he don't know much about cold cuts," Lula said. "He got turkey breast and Swiss cheese when he could have got salami and provolone."

We were in the kitchen, looking in the refrigerator and not paying a lot of attention to what was happening in front of the house. There was the sound of a lock clicking open, and Lula and I both stood up straight.

"Uh-oh," Lula said.

The door opened. Cynthia Lotte stepped into the room and squinted at us in the dim light. "What the hell are you doing here?" she asked.

Lula and I were speechless.

"Tell her," Lula said, giving me an elbow. "Tell her what we're doing here."

"Never mind what we're doing here," I said. "What are you doing here?"

"None of your business. And anyway, I have a key, so obviously I belong here."

Lula hauled out a Glock. "Well, I got a gun, so I guess that one-ups you."

Cynthia whipped a.45 out of her purse. "I've got a gun, too. We're even."

They both turned to me.

"I've got a gun at home," I said. "I forgot to bring it."

"That doesn't count," Cynthia said.

"It counts for something," Lula said. "It isn't like she don't have a gun at all. And besides, she's wicked when she got the gun. She killed a man, once."

"I remember reading about it. Dickie almost went into cardiac arrest. He thought it reflected badly."

"Dickie's a hemorrhoid," I said.

Cynthia smiled without humor. "All men are hemorrhoids." She looked around the apartment. "I used to come here with Homer when Hannibal was out of town."

That explained the key. And maybe the condoms in the bathroom. "Did Homer keep clothes in the guest room?"

"A couple shirts. Some underwear."

"There are clothes, upstairs, in the guest room. Maybe you could take a look and tell me if they're Homer's."

"First, I want to know what you're doing here."

"A friend of mine is a possible suspect for the fire and shooting. I'm trying to get a fix on what actually happened."

"And you're thinking, what? That Hannibal killed his brother?"

"I don't know. I'm fishing."

Cynthia headed for the stairs. "Let me tell you about Homer. Everyone wanted to kill Homer. Including me. Homer was a lying, cheating worm. His family was always bailing him out. If I was Hannibal, I'd have shot Homer a long time ago, but the Ramos family ties are strong."

We followed her up the stairs to the guest room and waited at the door while she went in and looked around.

"Some of these are definitely Homer's," she said, going through the drawers. "And some I've never seen before now." She kicked at a pair of red silk paisley boxers lying on the floor. "You see these boxers?" She took aim and fired five rounds into the shorts. "These were Homer's."

"Dang," Lula said. "Don't hold back."

"He could be very charming," Cynthia said. "But he had a short attention span when it came to women. I thought he was in love with me. I thought I could change him."

"What happened to make you think otherwise?"

"Two days before he was shot he told me the relationship was over. He said some very unflattering things to me, told me if I gave him any trouble he'd kill me, and then he cleaned out my jewelry box and took my car. He said he needed money."

"Did you report him to the police?"

"No. I believed him when he said he'd kill me." She shoved her gun into her jacket pocket. "Anyway, I got to thinking that Homer might not have had a chance to fence my jewelry… that he might have stashed it here."

"I've been through the whole house," I said, "and I didn't see any women's jewelry, but you're welcome to look for yourself."

She shrugged. "It was a long shot. I should have checked sooner."

"Weren't you afraid you'd run into Hannibal?" Lula asked.

"I was counting on Alexander being here for the funeral, and Hannibal being in residence at the shore house."

We all trooped downstairs.

"What about the garage?" Cynthia asked. "Did you look in there? I don't suppose you found my silver Porsche."

"Damn," Lula said, all impressed. "You drive a Porsche?"

"I used to. Homer gave it to me for our six-month anniversary." She sighed. "Like I said, Homer could be very charming."

"Charming" being synonymous with "generous."

Hannibal had a two-car garage that attached to the house. The door to the garage was off the foyer and was locked with a slide bolt. Cynthia opened the door and flicked the light on in the garage. And there it was… the silver Porsche.

"My Porsche! My Porsche!" Cynthia yelped. "I never thought I'd see it again." She stopped yelping and wrinkled her nose. "What's that smell?"

Lula and I looked at each other. We knew the smell.

"Uh-oh," Lula said.

Cynthia ran to the car. "I hope he left me the keys. I hope-" She stopped short and looked in the car window. "Someone's sleeping in my car."

Lula and I grimaced.

And Cynthia started screaming. "He's dead! He's dead! He's dead in my Porsche!"

Lula and I approached the car and looked inside.

"Yep. He's dead all right," Lula said. "The giveaway is those three holes in his forehead. You're lucky," she told Cynthia. "Looks like this guy bought it with a twenty-two. If he'd been shot with a forty-five there'd be brains all over the place. A twenty-two goes in and rattles around like PacMan."

It was hard to tell with him slumped over on the seat, but he looked about five ten and maybe fifty pounds overweight. Dark hair, cut short. Mid-forties. Dressed in a knit shirt and sports coat. Diamond pinky ring. Three holes in his head.

"Do you recognize him?" I asked Cynthia.

"No. I never saw him before. This is terrible. How could this happen? There's blood on my upholstery."

"It's not so bad, considering he took three to the head," Lula said. "Just don't use hot water on it. Hot water sets blood."

Cynthia had the door open and was trying to wrestle the dead guy out of the car, but the dead guy wasn't cooperating. "I could use some help, here," Cynthia said. "Someone go around to the other side and push."

"Hey, wait a minute," I said. "This is a crime scene. You should leave everything alone."

"The hell I will," Cynthia said. "This is my car, and I'm driving away with it. I work for a lawyer. I know what happens. They'll impound this car until the world comes to an end. And then his wife'll probably get it." She had the body halfway out, but the legs were stiff and wouldn't unbend.

"We need Siegfried and Roy here," Lula said. "I saw them on television, and they sliced someone in half, and they didn't even make a mess."

Cynthia had the guy by the head, hoping for some leverage. "His foot is stuck around the gear shift," she said. "Someone give his foot a kick."

"Don't look at me," Lula said. "Dead people give me the creeps. I'm not touching no dead person."

Cynthia grabbed his jacket and pulled. "This is impossible. I'm never going to get this idiot out of my car."

"Maybe if you greased him up," Lula said.

"Maybe if you helped," Cynthia said. "Go around to the other side and put your foot to his ass while Stephanie helps me pull."

"Long as it's only my foot," Lula said. "Guess I could do that."

Cynthia got the guy's head in a hammerlock, and I grabbed hold of his shirtfront, and Lula pushed him out with one good shove.

We instantly dropped him and stepped back.

"Who do you think killed him?" I asked. Not actually expecting an answer.

"Homer, of course," Cynthia said.

I shook my head. "He hasn't been dead long enough for it to have been Homer."

"Hannibal?"

"Don't think Hannibal would leave a body in his own garage."

"Well, I don't care who killed him," Cynthia said. "I got the Porsche, and I'm going home."

The dead guy was lying in a heap on the floor, legs bent at odd angles, hair mussed, shirt out.

"What about him?" I asked. "We can't just leave him like this. He looks so… uncomfortable."

"It's his legs," Lula said. "They froze up in a seated position." She pulled a lawn chair off a stack at the back of the garage and set the chair next to the dead guy. "If we put him in a chair he'll look more natural, like he was waiting for a ride or something."

So we picked him up, set him into the chair, and backed away to take a look. Only, when we backed away, he fell out of the chair. Smash, right on his face.

"Good thing he's dead," Lula said, "or that would have hurt like the devil."

We heaved him back into the chair and this time we wrapped a bungee cord around him. His nose was a little smashed and one eye had been jarred closed from the impact when he fell, so one was open and one was closed, but aside from that he looked okay. We backed away again, and he stayed in place.

"I'm outta here," Cynthia said. She rolled all the windows down in the car, hit the garage-door opener, backed out, and took off down the street.

The garage door slid closed, and Lula and I were left with the dead guy.

Lula shifted foot to foot. "Think we should say something over the deceased? I don't like to disrespect the dead."

"I think we should get the hell out of here."

"Amen," Lula said, and she made the sign of the cross.

"I thought you were Baptist."

"Yeah, but we don't got any hand signals for an occasion like this."

We vacated the garage, peeked out the back window to make sure no one was around, and scurried out the patio door. We closed the gate behind us and walked the bike path to the car.

"I don't know about you," Lula said, "but I'm gonna go home and stand in the shower for a couple hours, and then I'm gonna rinse myself off with Clorox."

That sounded like a good plan. Especially since a shower would give me a chance to put off seeing Morelli. I mean, what would I say to him? "Guess what, Joe, I broke into Hannibal Ramos's house today and found a dead guy. Then I destroyed the crime scene, helped a woman remove evidence, and left. So, if you still find me attractive after ten years in jail…" Not to mention, this was the second time Ranger had been seen walking away from a homicide.

By the time I got home I had all the makings of a bad mood. I'd gone to Hannibal's town house looking for information. Now I had more information than I really wanted to have, and I didn't know what any of it meant. I paged Ranger and made lunch, which in my distracted state consisted of olives. Again.

I took the phone into the bathroom with me while I showered. I changed clothes, dried my hair, and gave my lashes a couple swipes of mascara. I was contemplating eyeliner when Ranger called.

"I want to know what's going on," I said. "I just found a dead guy in Hannibal's garage."

"And?"

"And I want to know who he is. And I want to know who killed him. And I want to know what you were doing sneaking out of Hannibal's town house last night."

I could feel the force of Ranger's personality at the other end of the line. "You don't need to know any of those things."

"The hell I don't. I just involved myself in a murder."

"You happened on a crime scene. That's different from being involved in a murder. Have you called the police yet?"

"No."

"It would be a good idea to call the police. And you might want to be vague about the breaking-and-entering part."

"I might want to be vague about a lot of things."

"Your call," Ranger said.

"You have a rotten attitude!" I yelled at him over the phone. "I'm fed up with this Mysterious Ranger thing. You have a problem sharing, do you know that? One day you have your hands up my shirt, and next day you're telling me nothing's any of my business. I don't even know where you live."

"If you don't know anything, you can't pass anything on."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence."

"It's the way it is," Ranger said.

"And another thing, Morelli wants you to call him. He's been watching somebody for a long time, and now you're involved with this somebody, and Morelli thinks you could be of some help to him."

"Later," Ranger said. And he hung up.

Fine. If that's the way he wants it, then that's just peachy fine.

I huffed off to the kitchen, got my gun out of the cookie jar, grabbed my shoulder bag, and stomped down the hall, down the stairs, through the lobby to the Buick. Joyce was parked in the lot, in the car with the crumpled bumper. She saw me come out of the building and gave me the finger. I gave it back to her and took off for Morelli's house. Joyce was following one car length behind. Okay by me. She could follow me all she wanted today. As far as I was concerned Ranger was on his own. I was taking myself out of the picture.

MORELLI AND BOB were sitting side by side on the couch, watching ESPN, when I came in. There was an empty Pino's Pizza box on the coffee table, an empty container of ice cream and a couple crushed beer cans.

"Lunch?" I asked.

"Bob was hungry. And don't worry, he didn't get any beer." Morelli patted the seat next to him. "There's room for you, here."

When Morelli was being a cop, his brown eyes were hard and assessing, his face was lean and angular, and the scar that sliced through his right eyebrow gave the correct impression that Morelli had never lived a cautious life. When he was feeling sexy, his brown eyes were molten chocolate, his mouth softened, and the scar gave the mistaken impression that he might need a teensy bit of mothering.

And right now, Morelli was feeling very sexy. And I was feeling very unsexy. In fact, I was feeling absolutely grumpy. I plopped myself down on the couch and scowled at the empty pizza box, remembering my lunch of olives.

Morelli slid his arm around my shoulders and nuzzled my neck. "Alone at last," he said.

"I have something to tell you."

Morelli went still.

"I sort of happened on a dead guy today."

He slouched back on the couch. "I have a girlfriend who finds dead guys. Why me?"

"You sound like my mother."

"I feel like your mother."

"Well, don't," I snapped. "I don't even like when my mother feels like my mother."

"I suppose you want to tell me about this."

"Hey, if you don't want to hear it, that's no problem. I can just call it in to the station."

He sat up straighter. "You haven't called it in? Oh shit, let me guess: you broke into someone's house and stumbled onto a homicide."

"Hannibal's house."

Morelli was on his feet. "Hannibal's house?"

"But I didn't break in. His back door was open."

"What the hell were you doing walking into Hannibal's house?" he yelled. "What were you thinking?"

I was on my feet, too, and I was yelling back. "I was doing my job."

"Breaking and entering isn't your job."

"I told you, it wasn't breaking. It was only entering."

"Well, that makes all the difference. Who did you find dead?"

"I don't know. Some guy got whacked in the garage."

Morelli went into the kitchen and dialed dispatch. "I have an anonymous tip here," he said. "Why don't you send someone over to Hannibal Ramos's town house on Fenwood and take a look in the garage. The back door should be open." Morelli hung the phone up and turned to me. "Okay, that's taken care of," he said. "Let's go upstairs."

"Sex, sex, sex," I said. "That's all you ever think about." Although, now that I was rested and had the dead guy off my chest, an orgasm didn't sound like such a bad idea.

Morelli backed me against the wall and leaned into me. "I think about other things besides sex… just not lately." He kissed me and put some tongue into it, and the orgasm was sounding better and better.

"Just a quick question about the dead guy," I said. "How long do you think it'll be before they find him?"

"If there's a car in the area, it'll only take five or ten minutes."

Chances were pretty good they'd call Morelli when they took a gander at the guy in the garage. And on my best day, I need more than five minutes. But then probably it would take more than five minutes to get a car to the house, then for the cops to walk to the back and go through to the garage. So, if I didn't waste time taking all my clothes off, and we got right to it, I might be able to do the whole program.

"Why don't we do it here?" I said to Morelli, popping the top snap on his Levi's. "Kitchens are so sexy."

"Hold on," he said. "I'll pull the blinds."

I kicked my shoes off and shucked my jeans. "No time for that."

Morelli gave me a long look. "I'm not complaining, but I can't help feeling this is too good to be true."

"You've heard of fast food? This is fast sex."

I wrapped my hand around him, and he sucked in a quick breath. "How fast do you want this to be?" he asked.

The phone rang.

Damn!

Morelli had one hand on the phone and the other on my wrist. After a moment on the phone he cut his eyes to me. "It's Costanza. He was in the neighborhood, so he took the call to check on the Ramos house. He says I've got to come over to see for myself. Something about a guy having a bad hair day, waiting for a bus. At least that's what it sounded like, over the laughter."

I gave him a big shrug and a palms-up. Like, well, gosh, I don't know what he's talking about. Just looked like an ordinary of dead guy to me.

"Anything you want to tell me about this?" Morelli asked.

"Not without a lawyer present."

We put our clothes back on, gathered our things, and went to the front door. Bob was still sitting on the couch, watching ESPN.

"It's kind of weird," Morelli said, "but I swear it's like he's following the game."

"Maybe we should just let him keep watching."

Morelli locked the door behind us. "Listen, cupcake, you tell anybody I let that dog watch ESPN, and I'll get even." His eyes drifted to my car, and then to the car parked behind me. "Is that Joyce?"

"She's following me."

"Want me to give her a ticket for something?"

I gave Morelli a fast kiss and drove off to the food store with Joyce close on my bumper. I didn't have a lot of money and my Visa was maxed, so I just got the essentials: peanut butter, potato chips, bread, beer, Oreos, milk, and two scratch-off lottery tickets.

Next stop was Home Depot, where I got a bolt for the front door to replace the broken security chain. The plan was to trade a beer for the bolt-installing expertise of my building super and good buddy Dillan Rudick.

After Home Depot I headed back to my apartment. I parked in the lot, locked Big Blue, and waved bye-bye to Joyce. Joyce inserted her thumbnail behind her two front teeth and gave me a genuine Italian gesture.

I stopped off at Dillan's basement apartment and explained my needs. Dillan grabbed his toolbox and we trooped upstairs. He was my age and lived in the bowels of the building, like a mole. He was a really cool guy, but he didn't do much, and as far as I know he didn't have a girlfriend… so, as you might expect, he drank a lot of beer. And since he didn't make a lot of money, free beer was always welcome.

I checked my answering machine while Dillan installed my bolt. Five calls for Grandma Mazur, none for me.

Dillan and I were relaxing in front of the television when Grandma came in.

"Boy, did I have a day," Grandma said. "I drove all over, and I almost got the stopping thing figured out." She squinted at Dillan. "And who's this nice young man?"

I introduced Dillan, and then since it was dinnertime I made all of us peanut-butter-and-potato-chip sandwiches. We ate them in front of the television and between Grandma and Dillan, somehow, the six-pack disappeared. Grandma and Dillan were feeling pretty happy, but I was starting to worry about Bob. I was imagining him alone in Morelli's house with nothing to eat but the cardboard pizza box. And the couch. And the bed. And the curtains and rug and Morelli's favorite chair. Then I imagined Morelli shooting Bob, and that wasn't a good picture.

I called Morelli but there was no answer. Rats. I should never have left Bob alone in the house. I had my keys in my hand and was putting my jacket on when Morelli arrived with Bob in tow.

"Going somewhere?" Morelli asked, taking in the keys and jacket.

"I was worried about Bob. I was going to drive over to your house and see if everything was okay."

"I thought maybe you were leaving the country."

I gave him a big fake smile.

Morelli unhooked Bob's leash, said hello to Grandma and Dillan, and dragged me into the kitchen. "I need to talk to you."

I heard a yelp from Dillan and figured Bob was getting acquainted.

"I'm armed," I said to Morelli, "so you better be careful. I have a gun in my purse."

Morelli took the purse and threw it across the room.

Uh-oh.

"That was Junior Macaroni in Hannibal's garage," Morelli said. "He works for Stolle. Very weird to find him in Hannibal's garage. And it gets even weirder."

I did a mental grimace.

"Macaroni was sitting in a lawn chair."

"It was Lula's idea," I said. "Well, okay, so it was mine too, but he looked so uncomfortable lying on the cement floor."

Morelli cracked a grin. "I should arrest you for tampering with a crime scene, but he was such a vicious bastard, and he looked so fucking stupid."

"How do you know I wasn't the killer?"

"Because you carry a thirty-eight and he was shot with a twenty-two. And more than that, you couldn't hit a barn at five paces. The only time you ever shot anyone, there was divine intervention."

True.

"How many people know I sat him in the lawn chair?"

"Nobody knows, but about a hundred have guessed. No one will tell." Morelli looked at his watch. "I have to go. I have a meeting set up for tonight."

"This isn't a meeting with Ranger, is it?"

"No."

"Liar."

Morelli pulled a pair of bracelets out of his jacket pocket, and before I realized what was happening I was cuffed to the refrigerator.

"Excuse me?" I said.

"You were going to follow me. I'll leave the key in your mailbox downstairs."

Is this a relationship, or what?

"I'M READY TO go," Grandma said.

She was dressed in her purple warm-up suit and white tennies. Her hair was neatly curled, and she was wearing pink lipstick. She had her big black leather purse tucked into the crook of her arm. My fear was that she was packing the long-barrel, and might threaten the DMV guy if he didn't give her a license.

"You don't have your gun in there, do you?" I asked.

"Of course not."

I didn't believe her for a second.

When we got downstairs to the lot, Grandma went to the Buick. "I figure I stand a better chance of getting my license if I'm driving the Buick," she said. "I heard they worry about young chicks in sports cars."

Habib and Mitchell pulled into the lot. They were back in the Lincoln.

"Looks good as new," I said.

Mitchell beamed. "Yeah, they did a great job on it. We just got it this morning. We had to wait for the paint to dry." He looked at Grandma, sitting behind the wheel of the Buick. "What's up for today?"

"I'm taking my grandmother to get her driver's license."

"That's real nice of you," Mitchell said. "You're a good granddaughter, but isn't she kind of old?"

Grandma clamped down on her dentures. "Old?" she yelled. "I'll show you old." I heard her purse click open, and Grandma reached down and came up with the long-barrel. "I'm not too old to shoot you in the eye," she said, leveling the gun.

Mitchell and Habib ducked flat on the seat, out of sight.

I glared at Grandma. "I thought you said you didn't have the gun with you."

"Guess I was wrong."

"Put it away. And you better not threaten anyone at the DMV either, or they'll arrest you."

"Crazy old broad," Mitchell said from low in the Lincoln.

"That's better," Grandma said. "I like being a broad."