Lean Mean Thirteen

TWO

I rolled out of bed a little after eight a.m. and went to the window. Not snowing or sleeting, but not great weather either. Gray skies, and it looked cold. Morelli was gone. He'd caught a double homicide at ten last night and never returned. Bob had stayed with me, and Bob was now pacing between my bedroom and the front door.

I pulled on some sweats, stuffed my feet into my boots, grabbed my coat, and hooked Bob up to his leash.

"Okay, big guy," I said to Bob. "Lets make tracks."

We walked around a couple blocks until Bob was empty, and then we went back to my apartment for breakfast. I made coffee, and while the coffee brewed, Bob and I ate the cold spaghetti.

I dropped a couple noodles into Rex's food dish, and gave him fresh water. There was some upheaval in the wood chips in front of the soup can, Rex's nose poked through and did some twitching, and Rex emerged. He scurried to his food dish, packed the noodles into his cheeks, and scurried back to his soup can. This is pretty much the extent of my relationship with Rex. Still, he was a heartbeat in the apartment, and I loved him.

I carried my coffee into the bathroom and took a long, hot shower. I blasted my hair with the hair dryer and swiped some mascara on my lashes. I got dressed in a sweater and jeans and boots, and took the phone and my paperwork into the dining room. I was working my way through Diggery's neighbors and a second cup of coffee when I heard the lock tumble on my front door.

Morelli strolled into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee. "I have news."

"Good news or bad news?"

"Hard to tell," Morelli said. "I guess it depends on your point of view. Dickie Orr is missing."

"And?"

"Forced entry on his front door. Blood on the floor. Two bullets extracted from his living room wall. Skid marks on the wood floor in the foyer as if something had been dragged across it."

"Get out!"

"Police responded when his neighbors called saying they heard shots. Chip Burlew and Barrelhead Baker were the first on the scene. They got there a few minutes before midnight. Front door open. No Dickie. And it gets better. Marty Gobel caught the case, and when he talked to Dickie's office first thing this morning everyone fingered you."

"Why would they do that?"

"Possibly because you went gonzo on him yesterday?"

"Oh yeah. I forgot."

"What was that about?"

"Lula and Connie and I wanted to get some legal advice, and I sort of lost it when I saw a picture of Dickie and Joyce Barnhardt. He had it on his desk."

"I thought you were over Dickie."

"Turns out there was some hostility left."

And now Dickie might be dead, and I wasn't sure what I felt. It seemed mean-spirited to be happy, but I wasn't experiencing a lot of remorse. The best I could manage on short notice was that there would be a hole in my life where Dickie used to reside. But then, maybe not. Maybe there wasn't even much of a hole.

Morelli sipped his coffee. He was wearing a gray sweatshirt under a navy jacket, and his black hair curled over his ears and fell across his forehead. I had a flashback of him in bed when his hair was damp against the nape of his neck, and his eyes were dilated black and focused on me.

"Good thing I have an alibi," I said.

"And that would be what?"

"You were here."

"I left at ten to take the murders in the Berringer Building."

Uh oh. "Do you think I killed Dickie?" I asked Morelli.

"No. You were naked and satisfied when I left. I can't see you leaving that mellow state and going off to Dickie's house."

"Let me analyze this a little," I said to Morelli. "Your expertise in bed is my alibi."

"Pretty much."

"Do you think that will hold up in a court of law?"

"No, but it'll look good for me in the tabloids."

"And if it wasn't for all that good sex and spaghetti, you'd think I was capable of killing Dickie?"

"Cupcake, I think you're capable of most anything.''

Morelli was grinning, and I knew he was playing with me, but there was some truth in what he was saying as well.

"I have limits," I told him.

He slipped an arm around my waist and kissed my neck. "Fortunately, not too many."

Okay, so probably I should tell Morelli about Ranger and the bugging, but things were going so well I hated to put a fly in the ointment. If I tell Morelli about the bugging, he'll do his Italian thing, yelling at me and waving his arms and forbidding me to work with Ranger. Then, since I'm of Hungarian descent on my mother's side, I'll have to do my Hungarian thing and glare at him, hands on hips, and tell him I'll work with whoever I damn well want. Then he'll stomp out of my apartment, and I won't see him for a week, during which time we'll both be upset.

"Are you staying for a while?" I asked Morelli.

"No. I need to talk to someone in Hamilton Township about the Berringer murders. I was passing by and thought you'd want to know about Dickie." Morelli looked over my shoulder at the open file. "Diggery again? What's he done this time?"

"Got drunk and trashed a bar on Ninth Street with his shovel. Smashed about two thousand dollars' worth of booze and glassware, and chased the bartender down the street."

"You aren't spending the night in the cemetery, are you?"

"Wasn't planning on it. The ground is frozen. Diggery will wait until someone new is planted and the digging is easier. I checked the obits. No one was buried yesterday, and there aren't any funerals today. Is there a specific reason you're interested, or are you just making conversation?"

"I was thinking about the leftover spaghetti."

"Bob and I ate it for breakfast."

"In that case, I'll bring dinner," Morelli said. "Do you have a preference? Chinese? Pizza? Fried chicken?"

"Surprise me."

Morelli set his cup on the dining room table and kissed the top of my head. "Gotta go. I'll take Bob with me."

And Morelli and Bob were gone.

I dialed Lula. "I'm not having any luck getting information out of Diggery's relatives. I'm going to take a ride over there and look around for myself. Do you want to ride along?"

"Hell no. Last time we were in his shit-hole trailer, you opened a closet door and a twenty-foot snake fell out."

"You can stay in the car. That way, if the snake gets me, and you don't see me after an hour's gone by, you can call to have someone haul my cold dead body out of the house."

"As long as I don't have to get out of the car."

"I'll pick you up in a half hour."

I gathered my files together, turned my computer off, and called Ranger.

"Yo," Ranger said.

"Yo yourself. Dickie's disappeared."

"That's what I hear."

"I have a few questions."

"It wouldn't be smart to answer those questions on the phone," Ranger said.

"I'm going out with Lula this morning to look for Diggery, but maybe we can get together this afternoon."

"Keep your eyes open for the snake."

And Ranger disconnected.

I bundled myself up in my big quilted coat, scarf, and gloves, took the elevator to the lobby, and pushed out into the cold. I walked to the burgundy Crown Vic and gave it a kick to the driver's side door with my boot.

"I hate you," I said to the car.

I got in, cranked the engine over, and drove to the office.

Lula came out when I drove up. She wrenched the passenger side door open and looked in at me. "What the heck is this?"

"A Crown Vic."

"I know it's a Crown Vic. Everybody knows a Crown Vic. What are you doing driving one? Three days ago, you were driving an Escape."

"A tree fell on it. It was totaled."

"Must have been a big tree."

"Are you going to get in?"

"I'm weighing the consequences. People see me in this they think I'm arrested… again. It's gonna be damaging to my good reputation. Even without that, it'll be humiliating. Hard enough being hot without overcoming a humiliating automotive experience. I got a image to think about."

"We could use your car."

"Yeah, but suppose by some miracle you catch Diggery? I'm not putting his moldy ass in my Firebird."

"Well, I'm not driving to Bordentown in this POS all by myself. I'll buy you lunch if you'll get in the car."

Lula slid onto the passenger seat and buckled up. "I got a craving for a Cluck Burger Deluxe today. And a large fries. And maybe one of them Clucky Apple Pies."

I had sixteen dollars and fifty-seven cents in my purse, and it had to last me until I brought in a skip and got a new infusion of money. Two-fifty for a Cluck Burger Deluxe. A dollar-fifty for fries. Another dollar for the pie. Then she'd need a drink. And I'd get a bargain-meal cheeseburger for ninety-nine cents. That would give me ten dollars left for an emergency. Good thing Morelli was bringing dinner.

I took Hamilton to Broad and headed south. I thought I was hearing a strange grinding sound coming from under the hood, so I turned the radio up.

"You're not gonna guess what Connie picked up on the police band this morning," Lula said. "Dickie's missing, and it don't look good. There was blood and bullets all over the place. Hope you got a alibi."

"I was with Morelli." Earlier in the evening.

"Don't come much better than that," Lula said.

"Did you hear if they have any suspects?"

"You mean besides you?"

"Yeah."

"Nope. You're it, so far as I could tell." Lula cut her eyes to me. "I don't suppose it was you."

"No."

"Okay, so it wasn't you directly, but it might have had something to do with the bugs you put on him."

"You didn't just say that. And you're never going to say that again," I said to Lula. "In fact, yesterday you didn't see or hear anything about bugs."

"I must have hallucinated it."

"Exactly."

"My lips are sealed."

I turned off South Broad and took Route 206 to Groveville Road. I crossed the railroad tracks and started looking for the road that led to Diggery's house.

"This don't look familiar," Lula said.

"That's because we were here in the summer last time."

"I think it's 'cause we're in the wrong place. You should have MapQuested this," Lula said. "I always MapQuest."

"We're not in the wrong place. We just missed a road."

"Do you know the name of the road?"

"No."

"See, you needed to MapQuest."

A rusted-out pickup blew past us. It had a gun rack across the back window, a Grateful Dead sticker on the bumper, and a rebel flag flying from the antenna. It looked to me like it belonged in Diggery's neighborhood, so I hung a U-turn and kept it in sight, leaving Groveville Road for a winding two-lane road strewn with potholes.

"This looks more like it," Lula said, watching the countryside fly by. "I remember some of these pathetic excuses for a house."

We passed a shanty constructed of tar paper and particleboard, eased around a bend in the road, and Diggery's trailer was to the left, set back about fifty feet. I continued driving until I was out of sight of the trailer. I turned around, cruised past Diggery's again, and parked just beyond the bend. If Diggery saw me parking in front of his house, he'd be halfway to Newark by the time I got out of my car.

"I don't think anybody's home," Lula said. "I didn't see any cars in the yard."

"I'm going to snoop around anyway. Are you coming?"

"I suppose, but if I see that snake, I'm outta there. I hate snakes. I don't care if that snake wraps itself around your neck, I'm telling you right now, I'm not staying to help."

Diggery lived on a sad patch of parched and frozen hardscrabble. His double-wide trailer had rust stains running from top to bottom, with cankerous rot eating at the trailer floor. The piece of junk was set a foot off the ground on cinderblocks and was held together with duct tape. Grave robbing obviously didn't pay all that well. There were hardwoods behind the trailer. No leaves at this time of year, just barren, naked stalks of trees. It was late morning, but there was little light filtering through the thick gray cloud cover.

"There's a back door on the other side," I said to Lula. "You take the back door, and I'll take the front door."

"The hell I will," Lula said. "First off, I don't want no Diggery opening that door and knocking me on my ass trying to get to the woods. And second… well, that's all there is. There's no second. I'm going in behind you, so I can be first out if the snake's there."

There was no answer when I knocked on the door, but then I hadn't expected an answer. The little Diggerys were in school. The big Diggerys were probably picking through Dumpsters, looking for lunch. I pushed the door open and cautiously looked inside. I flipped a switch by the door and a forty-watt bulb blinked on in what might pass for the living room. I stepped in and listened for rustling, slithering sounds.

Lula stuck her head in and sniffed the air. "I smell snake," she said.

I didn't know what a snake smelled like, but I suspected it was a lot like a Diggery.

"Snoop around and see if you can find something that tells us where Simon is working," I said to Lula. "A pay stub, a matchbook, a map with a big orange X on it."

"We should have brought rubber gloves," Lula said. "I bet this place is covered with snake spit."

"The snake stuff is getting old," I said to her. "Could you back off from the snake stuff?"

"Just trying to be vigilant. If you don't want me reminding you to be careful, hey, okay by me. You're on your own."

Lula opened a closet door and a mop fell out at her.

"Snake!" Lula screamed. "Snake, snake, snake!" And she ran out of the trailer.

I looked out at Lula. "It was a mop."

"Are you sure? It looked like a snake to me."

"It was a mop."

"I think I wet my pants."

"Too much information," I said to her.

Lula crept back into the trailer and looked at the mop lying on the floor. "Scared the bejeezus out of me," she said.

We made our way through the living area and the kitchen. We looked through a tiny bedroom that was stacked with bunks. We opened the door to the master bedroom and there it was… the snake. It was curled on the bed, and it was looking at us with lazy snake eyes. It had a lump in its throat that was about the size of the family dog, or maybe a small Diggery.

I was paralyzed with fear and horror and gob-stopping fascination. My feet wouldn't move, and I could barely breathe.

"We're disturbing him," Lula whispered. "We should leave now and let him finish his breakfast."

The snake swallowed and the lump moved six inches farther down its throat.

"Oh crap," Lula whispered.

And next thing I knew, I was in my car.

"How did I get in the car?" I asked Lula.

"You let out a shriek and ran out of the trailer and all the way here. I bet I got footprints on my back where you ran over me."

I slouched in my seat and concentrated on getting my heart to stop racing. "That wasn't a snake. Snakes aren't that big, are they?"

"It was the snake from hell. It was a motherfucking mutant reptile." Lula shook her finger at me. "I told you we didn't want to go in there. You wouldn't listen."

I was still shaky enough that I had to two-hand the key to get it in the ignition. "Took me by surprise," I said.

"Yeah, me too," Lula said. "Do I get my lunch now?"

I dropped Lula at the office and looked at my watch, it was a little after one. I had more skips sitting in my bag, waiting to get found, but I was having a hard time working up enthusiasm for the whole bounty hunter thing. I decided procrastination was the way to go, so I called Morelli.

"Is there anything new on Dickie?" I asked him.

"No. As far as I know, he's still missing. Where are you?"

"I'm in my car in front of the office, and I'm trying to calm myself."

I could hear Morelli smile over the phone line. "How's the snake?"

"Big."

"Did you catch a Diggery?"

"No. Didn't even come close."

I disconnected Morelli and called Ranger.

"Can we talk?" I asked him.

"Your place or mine?"

"Yours."

"I'm parked behind you."

I looked in my rearview mirror and locked eyes with him. He was in the Porsche Cayenne.

"Sometimes you freak me out," I said to Ranger.

"Babe."

I got out of my garbage-scow Crown Vic and into Rangers shiny, immaculate SUV.

"You involved me in a murder," I said to Ranger.

"And you have no alibi," Ranger said.

"Is there anything you don't know?"

"I don't know what happened to Dickie."

"So I guess that means you didn't snatch him?"

"I don't leave bloodstains," Ranger said.

Ranger was dressed in his usual black. Black Vibram-soled boots, black jeans, black shirt, black wool pea coat, and his black Navy SEAL ball cap. Ranger was a shadow. A mystery man. A man who had no time or desire to mix and match colors.

"Those bugs I planted on Dickie… what was that about?" I asked him.

"You don't want to know."

"Yes, I do."

"You don't."

I stared him down. "I do."

Ranger did what for him was a sigh. The barest whisper of expelled breath. I was being a pain in the keester.

"I'm looking for a guy named Ziggy Zabar. His brother, Zip, works for me and came to me for help when Ziggy disappeared last week. Ziggy's a CPA with a firm downtown. They prepare the tax reports for Petiak, Smullen, Gorvich, and Orr. Every Monday, the partners hold a meeting off-site, and Ziggy had the meeting on his calendar. He was seen getting into his car to go to the meeting, and then he disappeared. The four partners swear Zabar never showed up, but I don't believe it. There's something not right about the firm. Dickie has legitimate credentials and has passed the Jersey bar. His partners have law degrees from Panama. Right now, I can't tell if Dickie is dumb or dirty."

"Did the bugs work?"

"The meeting was canceled. We listened until a little after ten and packed up when Dickie went to bed."

"So you weren't listening when shots were fired."

"No, but I was in his house after the police sealed it, and it looks to me like Dickie left the house wearing the same clothes he had on all day. We've tried scanning to pick up a bug, but haven't had any luck. Either he's out of range, or the bugs have been found and destroyed."

"Now what?"

Ranger took a little plastic bag from his pocket. It contained another bug. "Do you think you can plant this on Peter Smullen?"

I felt my jaw drop and my eyebrows shoot up into my forehead. "You're not serious."

Ranger took a file off the dashboard and handed it to me. "Smullen wasn't in the office yesterday. He had a dentist appointment. So he shouldn't recognize you. Here are a couple pictures of Smullen, a short bio, plus our best guess at what his schedule will be like tomorrow. He divides his time between Trenton and Bogotá. When he's in town, he's a creature of habit, so running into him won't be a problem. Try to tag him tomorrow morning, so I can listen to him all day."

"And I'm going to do this, why?"

"I'll let you wrestle with that one," Ranger said. He looked through the Cayenne windshield at my car. "Is there a reason you're driving the Vic?"

"It was cheap."

"Babe, free wouldn't be cheap enough."

"You haven't asked me if I killed Dickie," I said to Ranger.

"I know you didn't kill Dickie. You never left your apartment."

There was a time when I considered Ranger's surveillance an invasion of privacy, but that time was long gone. There's not much point to worrying about things you can't control, and I had no control over Ranger.

"Where is it? On my car?" I asked him, doing a pretty decent job of not sounding completely pissed off.

Rangers mouth didn't smile, but his eyes crinkled a little at the corners. "GPS unit in your bag. Please don't remove it."

I took the file and the bug-in-a-bag and got out of the Cayenne. "I imagine you'll be watching my every move."

"Just like always," Ranger said.

I got into the Crown Vic, cranked the engine over, and turned the heat on full blast. I looked in my rearview mirror. No Ranger.

I studied the pictures of Peter Smullen. He was an average-looking guy with receding brown hair and a beer belly. Heavy five o'clock shadow in all the photos. Lips like a flounder. His file put him at five feet eight inches. Forty-six years old. Married with two kids, ages twenty and twenty-two. Both kids and the wife were in Colombia. Smullen kept a bachelor apartment in Hamilton Township. When Smullen was in town, at precisely eight A.M., he'd roll into a parking garage that was a block from his office at the law firm and get a triple-shot Frappuccino at the Starbucks on the corner.

I'd get him at the Starbucks.

I closed the file, turned to lay it on the seat next to me, and the Vic's driver's side door was suddenly wrenched open. Joyce Barnhardt glared in at me and called me the "c" word.

Joyce was six feet tall in four-inch, spike-heeled black boots. She was wearing a black leather duster lined with fake fur, her eyes were enhanced with rhinestone-studded fake eyelashes, her red enameled nails were long and frightening. The package was lopped with a lot of shoulder-length brilliant red hair arranged in curls and waves. Joyce had never moved beyond Farrah Fawcett.

I narrowed my eyes at her. "Is there a point to this conversation?"

"You killed him. You found out we were a couple, and you couldn't handle it. So you killed him."

"I didn't kill him."

"I was inches from marrying the little turd, and you ruined it all. Do you have any idea how much he's worth? A fucking fortune. And you killed him, and now I get nothing. I hate you."

I turned the key in the ignition and put the Vic into drive. "I have to go now," I said to Joyce. "Good talk."

"I'm not done," Joyce said. "I'm just beginning. I'm going to get even. I'm going to make your life a misery." Joyce pulled a gun out of her coat pocket and aimed it at me. "I'm going to shoot out your eye. And then I'm going to shoot you in the foot, and the knee, and the ass…"

I stomped on the gas pedal and rocketed off with my door still open. Joyce squeezed off two rounds, putting a hole in the rear window. I looked in my mirror and got a glimpse of her standing in the middle of the road, giving me the finger. Joyce Barnhardt was nuts.

I drove one block down Hamilton and turned into the Burg. I was thinking that after the traumatic Joyce experience, I needed something to calm myself… like a piece of the raspberry Entenmann's. Plus, my dad had all kinds of things stashed in his cellar, like electrician's tape, that I could use to patch my rear window. Wind was whistling through the bullet hole, creating a draft on the back of my neck. It would have been perfectly okay in July, but it was damn cold in February. I wound through the maze of Burg streets to my parents' house and parked in the driveway. I got out and examined the car. Hole in the rear window, and Joyce had taken out a taillight.

I hunched against the sleet and ran to the front door. I let myself in, dropped my bag on the sideboard in the foyer, and went to the kitchen. My mother was at the sink, washing vegetables. Grandma was at the little table with a cup of tea. The Entenmann’s box was on the small kitchen table. I held my breath and approached the box. I nipped the lid. Two pieces left. I anxiously looked around. "Anyone want this Entenmann’s?" I asked.

"Not me," Grandma said.

"Not me either," my mother said.

I shrugged out of my jacket, hung it on the back of the chair, and sat down.

"Anything new in the world of crime?" Grandma asked.

"Same ol’, same ol’." I told her. "What's new with you?"

"I'm outta that glue stuff for my dentures. I was hoping you could run me out to the drugstore."

"Sure." I wolfed down the last of the cake and scraped back in my chair. "I can take you now, but then I need to get back to work."

"I’ll just go upstairs to get my purse," Grandma said.

I leaned toward her and lowered my voice. "No gun."

Grandma Mazur carried a.45 long barrel named Elsie. It wasn't registered, and she didn’t have a permit to carry concealed. Grandma thought being old gave her license to pack. She called it the equalizer. My mother kept taking the gun away, and the gun kept mysteriously returning.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Grandma said.

"I've got enough problems with the police right now. I can't afford to get pulled over for a broken taillight and have them discover you're armed and dangerous."

"I never go anywhere without Elsie," Grandma said.

"What's all the whispering about?" my mother wanted to know.

"We were trying to decide if I needed to put on some fresh lipstick," Grandma said.

I looked over at her. "You don't need lipstick."

"A woman always needs lipstick."

"Your lipstick is fine."

"You're getting to be just like your mother," Grandma said.

There was a time when that statement would have freaked me out, but now I was thinking maybe it wouldn't be so bad to have some of my mother's qualities. She was a stabilizing influence on the family. She was the representative of accepted social behavior. She was the guardian of our health and security. She was the bran muffin that allowed us to be jelly doughnuts.

Grandma and I were at the front door, and I remembered the hole in the windshield. "Duct tape," I called to my mother. "Where would I find it, the garage or the cellar?"

My mother came with a roll. "I keep some in the kitchen. Are you fixing something?"

"I have a hole in my back window."

Grandma Mazur squinted at the Vic. "Looks like a bullet hole."

"Dear God," my mother said. "It's not a bullet hole, is it?"

"No," I told her. "Absolutely not."

Grandma Mazur buttoned herself into her long royal blue wool coat. She buckled a little under the weight but managed to right herself and get to the car.

"Isn't this the kind of car the cops use?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Does it have one of them flashing lights?"

"No."

"Bummer," Grandma said.