Three to Get Deadly

  “Maybe he needed to go off to think,” Morelli said. “Did he have an attorney?”

  “Waived an attorney.”

  “I think you're jumping to conclusions.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe, but it still feels strange.”

  “Out of character for Mo.”

  “Yeah.”

  Mrs. Turkevich came out of Fiorello's Deli carrying a grocery bag.

  I nodded to her. “Pretty cold today.”

  “Hmmmph,” she said.

  “Listen, it's not my fault!” I told her. “I'm just doing my job.”

  The grin widened on Morelli's face. “Us crime stoppers have a tough life, huh?”

  “Are you still working vice?”

  “I'm working homicide. Temporarily.”

  “Is that a promotion?”

  “It's more like lateral movement.”

  I wasn't sure I could see Morelli as a homicide cop. Morelli liked to get out there and make things happen. Homicide was a more cerebral, reactive position.

  “Was there a reason for this visit?” I asked.

  “I was in the area. Thought I'd see how things were going.”

  “You mean things like Moses Bedemier?”

  “You need to be more careful. Mo has some very protective, very noisy neighbors.”

  I held my coat collar tight to my neck. “I don't get it. What's so great about this guy?”

  Morelli did a palms up. “I guess he's just one of those lovable types. Friends with everyone.”

  “What I'm finding is that he's friends with no one. He's a very private person. Doesn't even confide in his sister. My grandmother says it's like he's married to the store. Like a priest.”

  “A lot of people let their work take over their life. It's the American way,” Morelli said.

  Morelli's pager beeped.

  “Christ,” Morelli said. “I hope this is something horrible. A decapitation or maybe a bullet-riddled body found in a Dumpster. Homicide in Trenton is like watching grass grow. We just don't have enough good ones to go around.”

  I opened the door to my car and slid behind the wheel. “Let me know if it turns out to be Mo.”

  Morelli had his own keys in hand. His black Toyota 4x4 was parked directly behind me. “Try to stay out of trouble.”

  I drove off wondering what to do next. I'd covered all of the information given on Mo's bond agreement. I'd canvassed the neighborhood, searched his apartment, spoken to his only sister.

  After ten minutes of cruising I found myself in the parking lot of my apartment building. The building and the lot were sterile in January. Brick and macadam unsoftened by summer shrubbery. Leaden Jersey sky, dark enough for the streetlights to blink on.

  I got out of the car and walked head down to the building's back entrance, pushed through the double glass doors and was grateful for the sudden warmth.

  I stepped into the elevator and punched the button for the second floor, wondering what I'd missed in my search for Bedemier. Usually something popped up in the initial investigation . . . a girlfriend, a hobby, a favorite bakery or liquor store. Nothing had popped up today.

  The elevator doors opened, and I walked the short distance down the hall, planning out phone calls. I could check on Mo's bank account to see if there were any recent withdrawals. I could check his credit rating. Sometimes a credit check turned up hidden problems. I could run down utilities accounts on a possible second home. I could call Sue Ann Grebek, who knew everything about everyone.

  I unlocked my apartment door, stepped into the quiet foyer and took stock of my apartment. My hamster, Rex, was sleeping in the soup can in his glass cage. There were no lights blinking on my answering machine. There were no sounds of big, hairy, snaggle-toothed guys scrambling to hide under my bed.

  I dumped my pocketbook on the kitchen counter and draped my jacket over a chair. I poured some milk into a mug, nuked it for two minutes and dumped a couple spoons of instant hot chocolate mix into the hot milk. I added two marshmallows, and while they were getting gooey I made myself a peanut butter sandwich on mushy, worthless white bread.

  I took all this, plus my cordless phone, to the dining room table and dialed Sue Ann.

  “Stephanie, Stephanie, Stephanie,” Sue Ann said. “My phone's been ringing off the hook. Everybody's talking about how you're out to get Uncle Mo.”

  “I'm not out to get Uncle Mo. He needs to reschedule a court date. It's no big deal.”

  “So why is everybody in such a snit?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I don't know,” Sue Ann said. “Not much to tell. Everybody likes him. He minds his own business. He's nice to the kids.”

  “There must be something. Haven't you ever heard any rumors?”

  “Do you care if they're true?”

  “Not at all.”

  “So, in other words, you're looking for unsubstantiated dirt.”

  “Exactly.”

  Silence.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “My niece says sometimes Mo's store smells like dookey.”

  “Yuk.”

  “That's about it,” Sue Ann said.

  “That's not much.”

  “He's a saint. What can I say?”

  “Saints don't smell like dookey” I told her.

  “Maybe old ones do.”

  After I talked to Sue Ann I ate my sandwich and drank my cocoa and thought about Moses Bedemier. His apartment had been neat, and his furniture had been worn but comfortable. Sort of like mine. The television set was the focal point of the living room. The TV Guide on the coffee table had been a week old. The food in the fridge had been simple. Lunch meat, bread, juice, milk.

  Mo had been living alone for a lot of years, and I suspected his life relied heavily on routine. No real surprises in his apartment. The one note of whimsy had been the movie magazines. A stack of them in the bedroom. Moses Bedemier must have read himself to sleep with soap opera gossip.

  I put in a call to my cousin Bunnie at the credit bureau, and drew another blank. There'd been nothing derogatory or recent under either personal or business files.

  I tipped back in my chair and stared aimlessly across the room. The window glass was black and reflective. Occasionally headlights flashed into the parking lot below. Car doors slammed. My neighbors were returning from a hard day at whatever.

  Mo was missing, and I hadn't a clue and I didn't know how to go about getting one. I'd run all the usual drills. What was left was to wait. And waiting wasn't my strong suit.

  I carted my dishes back to the kitchen and thought some more about Uncle Mo. The problem with finding a missing person is that they could be missing very far away. Here I am looking all around Trenton for Moses Bedemier, and he could be in Guadeloupe wearing thick glasses and a fake nose. Truth is, if he was in Guadeloupe I was out of luck, so best not to think about it. Better to assume Mo is close to home, and then I can feel hopeful.

  Most of the time people stay close to home anyway.

  They'd be much better off if they ran far away, but far away doesn't feel safe. Home feels safe. Sooner or later most FTAs touch base with their relatives, girlfriends, neighborhood cronies. And usually it's sooner rather than later.

  I exchanged my flannel shirt for a Rangers jersey and zapped the television on. Probably I should make more phone calls, but the Rangers were playing and priorities were priorities.

  My alarm rang at 7 A.M. I slammed my hand on the off button and peered at the clock, wondering why I had set the thing for such an ungodly hour. There was no sign of the sun anywhere, and rain pinged against my windowpane. Even at the best of times, morning is not my favorite part of day, and this wasn't nearly the best of times.

  The next time I awoke it was eight-thirty. Rain still slashed at my window, but at least the sky had lightened from black to gray. I dragged myself out of bed and into the bathroom and stood under the shower for a while. I thought about Mel Gibson and Joe Morelli and tried to decide who had the best butt
. Then I thought about Mike Richter, the goalie for the Rangers, because he was no slouch either.

  By the time I was towel-drying my hair I'd gone from Richter to Uncle Mo. The conclusion I reached about Uncle Mo was that I'd dead-ended. Intuition told me Uncle Mo hadn't gone far and would eventually surface. Unfortunately, the word “eventually” was not favored in the bounty hunter vocabulary. Eventually did not pay this month's rent.

  I gassed my hair with some maximum-hold hair spray, dressed in my usual uniform of jeans and flannel shirt and snapped my bedroom curtains open.

  I chanted Rain, rain, go away, come again some other day. But the rain didn't go away, so I revisited my dresser and added thick socks and a sweatshirt to my outfit.

  For lack of something better to do, I took myself down to the office. On the way, I cruised past Blue Ribbon Used Cars and wistfully glanced over the lot. Every morning I got up and hoped the car fairy had visited me overnight. Every morning I was disappointed. Maybe it was time to take matters into my own hands.

  I parked at the curb and squinted through the rain at the lineup of cars. All very boring . . . except for a little blue Nissan pickup at the end of the lot. The little blue pickup was CUTE. I got out to take a closer look. New paint. Bench seat, slightly worn but not torn. Standard transmission.

  A man in a yellow slicker ran over to me. “Want to buy this car?”

  “How much?”

  “For you? We can make a deal. It's an eighty-four. Runs like a top.”

  I looked in my checkbook. “I probably can't afford it.”

  “Hey,” he said. “Your credit's good here. We can finance it for you. You'll hardly notice the payments.”

  “I'd have to take it on a test drive.”

  “Hold on a minute, and I'll pop some plates on for you.”

  I did a four-block test drive and I was sold. So I'd give up eating oranges. And I'd cut back on movie rentals. The sacrificing would be worth it. I'd have a truck!

  Lula glanced up from the files when I slogged through the door, dripping water on the utility-grade carpet. “Hope you didn't spend a lot of time on your hair this morning,” she said.

  I took a swipe at the wet mess with my hand. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

  “Hah,” Lula replied. “If that isn't some load of cocky doody.”

  “Is the man in?” I asked Connie.

  “Not yet.”

  I slouched back on the brown Naugahyde couch. “I'm not having any luck with Uncle Mo, and I need money. Don't suppose you'd have any quickies?”

  “Only got one Failure to Appear yesterday, and it's strictly chump change. Stuart Baggett.” She took a manila folder from her “in” box and flipped the file open. “Age twenty-two. White male Caucasian. Five feet six. Went on a drunken late-night joyride three weeks ago with two of his buddies and shot up fourteen parked cars. Did it with an air rifle. Missed his court date and is now a fugitive . . . not to mention an idiot. Two of the cars he shot up were unoccupied police cars.”

  I was surprised anyone noticed the damage on the cop cars. Trenton's blue-and-whites had not gone gently into the night. Trenton's blue-and-whites all looked like they'd survived Bosnia.

  I took the folder from Connie.

  “He lives on Applegate with his parents,” she said. “Works at the hot dog place at the mall. Looks like his mother put up the bond.”

  I dialed his home phone and got his mother. I asked if Stuart was working today and was told he was working until four.

  “I could use to go to the mall,” Lula said. “I could use to take a break, and then I could watch your bounty huntering technique when you make this apprehension.”

  “There won't be any technique to watch,” I said. “This is just some stupid guy who got drunk and did a stupid stunt. Either he forgot his date, or else he was too embarrassed to show up at court.”

  “Yeah, but you're gonna finesse him, right? You're gonna pull some bogus shit on him and lure him out to the parking lot where we cuff him and kick his ass into the car.”

  “I'm going to very nicely inform him of his error and request that he accompany me to the station to reschedule his court date.”

  “They never gonna make a TV series out of this job,” Lula said.

  “If you're going near Macy's get me some nail polish. Something real red,” Connie said.

  I dropped the file into my big black shoulder bag and zipped my jacket. Lula buttoned herself into an anklelength dark brown oiled canvas duster and settled a matching brown leather cowboy hat on her head.

  “Do I look like a bounty hunter or what?” she said.

  I just hoped poor Stuart Baggett didn't fall over dead at the sight of her.

  The door opened and Ranger stepped in from the rain.

  Ranger had been my mentor when I'd started in the business and was one very bad bounty hunter. In this case, bad meaning ultracool. He'd been one of those army guys who went around disguised as the night, eating tree bark and beetles, scaring the bejeezus out of emerging third-world insurgents. He was a civilian now, of sorts, sometimes working for Vinnie as an apprehension agent. He supposedly lived in the 'hood among his Cuban relatives, and he knew things I'd never, ever know.

  He wore his black hair slicked back into a ponytail, dressed in black and khaki, had a washboard belly, cast-iron biceps and the reflexes of a rattler.

  His mouth twitched into a smile at the sight of Lula in her Wild West garb. He acknowledged my presence with eye contact and an almost imperceptible nod, which was the Ranger equivalent to a double-cheek kiss.

  “Congratulations,” I said to him. “I heard you captured Jesus Rodrigues.” Jesus Rodrigues skipped out on a $500,000 bond and was howling-dog crazy. Ranger always got the biggies. Fine by me. I don't have a death wish.

  “Had some luck,” Ranger said, pulling a police body receipt from his jacket pocket—the body receipt certifying that Ranger had delivered a wanted body to the authorities.

  He brushed past us on his way to Connie's desk, and I thought Lula would keel over on the spot. She clapped a hand to her heart and staggered out the door after me.

  “Gives me a fit every time he comes in,” she confided. “You get close to that man, and it's like being close to a lightning strike. Like all the little hairs are standing on end all over your body.”

  “Sounds like you've been watching X-Files.”

  “Hmm,” Lula said, eyeing the key chain. “Maybe we should take my car again. That Buick you drive don't say 'Law Enforcement,' you know what I'm saying? It ain't no Starsky and Hutch car. What you need is to work on your image. You need one of these bad-ass coats. You need a car with real wheels. You need to be a blonde. I'm telling you honey, blond is where it's at.”

  “I have a truck,” I said, gesturing to the Nissan. “Bought it this morning.” After signing the papers I'd gotten my father to drive back with me, so he could take the Buick home, and I could go with my new pickup. You're making a mistake, he said. Japs don't know how to make cars for Americans. This truck isn't half the car the Buick is.

  And that was exactly why I preferred the truck . . . it was half the car the Buick was.

  “Isn't this cute as a bug,” Lula said. “A baby truck!” She looked in the window. “I don't suppose you'd let me drive. I always wanted to drive one of these itty-bitty trucks.”

  “Well, sure,” I said, handing her the keys. “I guess that'd be okay.”

  Lula cranked the engine over and pulled away from the curb. The rain had turned sleety and shavings of ice slapped against the windshield. Chunks of slush stuck to the wipers and tracked across the arc of cleared glass.

  I looked at the snapshot attached to the bond papers and memorized the face. Didn't want to nab the wrong person. I rooted through my pocketbook and did a fast paraphernalia inventory. I was carrying defense spray, which was a big no-no in a crowded mall. And I carried a stun gun, which on close examination turned out to need a new battery. My two pairs of cuffs were in w
orking order, and I had an almost full can of hair spray. Okay, probably I wasn't the world's best-equipped bounty hunter. But then what did I really need to bring in an old guy with a nose that looked like a penis and a loser hot dog vendor?

  “We gotta be professional about this,” Lula said, aiming us toward Route 1. “We need a plan.”

  “How about we get the nail polish first, then we get the guy?”

  “Yeah, but how are we going to do this? We can't just stand in line, and when it's our turn we say, 'Two chili dogs to go, and you're under arrest.' ”