Smokin Seventeen

TWENTY-FIVE

LULA AND I went back to Connie at my place. We pushed Connie’s computer and stacks of files to the side and took the food and bottle of wine to the dining room table.

Lula poured wine for everyone and raised her glass. “Here’s a toast. When it rains it pours.”

We drank to that, and we dug in.

“This is delicious,” Connie said. “He’s a really good cook.”

Lula spooned out more casserole and looked over at me. “You should marry him. You could have perfectly good sex all by yourself, but you’ll never be able to cook this good.”

Connie agreed. “She has a point. If you don’t want to marry him, maybe I’ll marry him.”

“If I married Ranger I could have good sex and good food,” I said. “Ranger has Ella.”

Connie paused with her fork halfway to her mouth. “Does Ranger want to marry you?”

“No.”

“So that would be a problem,” Connie said.

I made a conscious effort not to sigh. I’d been doing a lot of sighing lately. “Sometimes Joe wants to marry me.”

Connie and Lula looked at me. Hopeful.

“Can he cook?” Connie asked.

“No,” I said. “Mostly he dials food. But he dials really good pizza and meatball subs.”

“I might go with Dave,” Lula said. “Someday you’ll be old, and you won’t want sex anymore, but you’ll always want food.”

“This is true,” Connie said. “I vote for Dave.”

“I love these little corn muffins,” Lula said. “These are outstanding muffins.”

By the time we were done we’d eaten the entire batch of muffins, and there wasn’t a lot of Tex-Mex Fiesta left either.

“What about dessert?” Lula wanted to know.

“That last muffin was my dessert,” Connie said. “I’m packing up and going home.”

Lula carted her plate to the kitchen. “I’m thinking I need ice cream.”

I looked in my freezer to see if ice cream had magically been deposited. Nope. No ice cream.

“I have to drive you back to your car,” I told Lula. “We can stop on the way for ice cream.”

“If we go to Cluckin-a-Bucket I can get soft-serve. I like when they mix the vanilla and chocolate and put them chocolate sprinkles on top.”

We stacked everything in the sink, I gave Rex a chunk of muffin I’d set aside for him, and Lula and I locked up and headed out. I’m pretty good at walking in heels, but Lula is the champion. Lula can go all day in five-inch spikes. I think she must have no nerve endings in her feet.

“How do you walk in those shoes for hours on end?” I asked her.

“I can do it on account of I’m a balanced body type,” she said, hustling across the lot to my Escort. “I got perfect weight distribution between my boobs and my booty.”

I drove down Hamilton, past the construction site with Mooner’s bus parked curbside, and pulled into the Cluckin-a-Bucket parking lot. Lula went inside to get her ice cream, and I stayed behind to take a call from Morelli.

“I just got rid of Terry,” he said. “I have some paperwork to clear out, and then I’m done. I thought I’d stop by.”

“How did it go with Terry?”

“It was a big zero,” Morelli said. “She didn’t recognize the killer. And she couldn’t find a connection between Juki Beck and Lou Dugan. But just so it wasn’t a complete waste of my time she wore a little skirt that had Roger Jackson falling out of his seat across the room.”

“And you?”

“I couldn’t get a really good look from where I was sitting. Not to change the subject, but I spoke to Jerry about Belmen. Jerry picked up on the gun, too. And turns out the gun belonged to the bartender. Jerry went out to talk to him, and the charges have been dropped. Connie should be getting the paperwork tomorrow.”

“Let me take a guess. The bartender shot himself.”

“Yeah, it was an accident, but he thought it wouldn’t play well with the ladies, so he pinned it on Belmen. He figured Belmen was so drunk he wouldn’t know what the hell happened.”

“So I’m off the hook with the bear.”

“Looks that way. Maybe you want to think about getting a different job. Something with better work conditions … like roach extermination or hazardous waste collection.”

“You sound like my mother.”

“After I talked to you earlier I did some checking, and found out that Jimmy Alpha’s brother just got out of prison on an early parole. Until last month he’d been locked away on racketeering charges. I’m told there’s a strong resemblance.”

“Do you think he’d have ties to Lou Dugan?”

“I’m on it.”

“I have to go. Lula’s here with her ice cream.”

“I got an idea,” Lula said, getting into the Escort. “We should hunt down Ziggy while we got all this good juju. We’re so hot with juju right now you could probably walk up to Ziggy and he’d come without a fuss.”

“Are you sure you want to go after Ziggy without your garlic?”

“I could chance it. I’ve been carrying a cross in my pocketbook as backup.”

I motored onto Hamilton and told Lula about Jimmy Alpha’s brother.

“I should have thought of him,” Lula said. “Nick Alpha. He was a bad guy. He had his hand in lots of stuff. You didn’t ho on Stark Street without knowing Nick Alpha. He might not be happy with you for killing his baby brother.”

I turned into the Burg, meandered around, and hit Kreiner Street. The sun had set and streetlights were on. A sliver of moon hung in the sky over the housetops, and light poured from downstairs windows … with the exception of Ziggy’s house. Ziggy’s house was dark.

“He could be in there,” Lula said. “He got those black curtains closed so you can’t tell what’s going on.”

“His car isn’t parked in front of his house.”

“It could be in his garage.”

“He doesn’t have a garage,” I said.

Lula worked at her cone. She’d gotten the giant enormous size and had whittled it down to extra large. “Maybe he sold the car.”

I was parked directly across the street from Ziggy, and my gut told me Ziggy wasn’t home. Ziggy liked to step out at night. When the sun went down Ziggy went bowling, he played bingo, he did his grocery shopping.

Lula leaned forward. “Did you see that? There’s something moving alongside Ziggy’s house. Someone’s creeping along over there.”

I squinted into the darkness. “I don’t see anything.”

“On the right side of his house. He’s coming to the front. It’s Ziggy!”

Lula wrenched the door open, hurled herself out of the car, and took off. She was running flat out in her five-inch heels, and she was still holding her ice cream cone.

I saw the man stand straight when Lula charged him. He was Ziggy’s height and build, but he was lost in shadow. He turned and ran, and Lula ran after him. I grabbed the keys and ran after Lula.

Hard to believe it was Ziggy. Ziggy was seventy-two years old. He was in decent shape for his age, but this man from the shadows was really moving. They disappeared behind a house, and I followed the sound of stampeding footsteps. I heard someone shriek and grunt, and then a thud. I rounded a corner and almost fell over Lula. She was sitting on some poor guy who was facedown in a flower bed, and she was still holding her ice cream.

The guy looked up at me and mouthed help.

“Good grief,” I said to Lula. “That’s not Ziggy. Get off the poor man.”

“It used to be Ziggy,” Lula said. “I caught a look at him in the moonlight, and I saw fangs.”

“To begin with, there’s hardly any moonlight tonight.”

“Well it was some kind of light. It glinted off his fangs.”

“Is this a mugging?” the man asked. “Are you going to rob me? I don’t have any money.”

Lula rolled off, and I helped him to his feet. “Mistaken identity,” I said. “Sorry you got tackled.”

He brushed dirt off his shirt. “I can’t believe she caught me in those heels.”

“Why did you run?”

“I was searching for my cat, and I saw this big, crazy woman barreling across the road at me. Anyone would run.”

Lula narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean big woman? You think I’m fat or something?”

Even in total darkness I could see the guy go pale.

“N-n-no,” he said, taking a couple steps back.

I marched Lula back to Ziggy’s house, and we prowled around and knocked on doors. There was nothing to indicate anyone was home, and the key was gone from its hiding place. We returned to the Escort, and we sat for a while longer doing house surveillance.

Lula finished her ice cream, texted everyone she knew, and reorganized her purse. When she was done reorganizing she plugged an ear bud into her ear and dialed into music on her smartphone.

She tapped her nails on the dash and sang along. “Rox-annnnnne.”

“Hey.”

She sang louder. “You don’t have to put on the red light.”

“HEY!”

She pulled out an earbud. “What?”

“You’re driving me nuts with the tapping and the singing. Can’t you just listen?”

“I’m trying to occupy myself. I can’t sit here anymore. My ass is asleep, and I gotta tinkle.”

I rolled the engine over and drove Lula to her car.

“See you tomorrow,” she said. “And I’m still not convinced that wasn’t Ziggy. Vampires are known for being sneaky.”

She’d parked on Hamilton, behind Mooner’s bus. The construction trailer was no longer there. Presumably moved to improve visibility from the road and make the lot less appealing as a burial ground. I idled at the curb for a moment, staring across the scarred earth to the alley and the fence on the far side. The crime scene tape had been removed, but the chilling memory of the video remained. In my mind I could see the car drive onto the lot, and I could see the killer dump the body. It wasn’t a vision I enjoyed replaying. It sent tendrils of fear and horror curling along my spine. Three people had been murdered. And the unshakable feeling that I knew the killer burned in my chest. I put Nick Alpha in the overalls and Frankenstein mask. He was a possibility. I hit the automatic door locks and left the scene.