Three to Get Deadly

  “Maybe your car's been impounded,” I suggested.

  “I already checked impound,” Connie said. “They don't have it.”

  “Was a ninety-two Chrysler LeBaron. Dark blue. Got it used six months ago,” Jackie said. She handed me a file card. “Here's the license number. Last I saw it was two days ago.”

  “Anything else missing? Money? Clothes? This guy pack a bag when he leave?” I asked.

  “Only thing missing is his worthless body and my car.”

  “Maybe he just out drunk somewhere,” Lula said. “Maybe he just ho'in' around.”

  “Nuh-uh. I would of known. He's gone, I'm telling you.”

  Lula and I exchanged glances, and I suspected Jackie was right about the worthless body part.

  “Why don't we take Jackie home,” Lula said to me. “And then we could kind of cruise around and see what we can see.”

  The tone surprised me. Soft and serious. Not the Lula who played bounty hunter at the mall.

  “We could do that,” I said. “We might find something.”

  All of us watching Jackie. Jackie not showing much but anger at losing her car. That was Jackie's way.

  Lula had her hat on her head and her duster buckled up. “I'll be back later to do the filing,” she told Connie.

  “Just don't go into any banks in that getup,” Connie said.

  Jackie rented a two-room apartment three blocks from Uncle Mo's. Since we were in the neighborhood, we made a short detour to Ferris Street and looked things over.

  “Nothing new here,” Lula said, letting her Firebird idle in the middle of the empty street. “No lights, no nothing.”

  We drove down King and turned into the alley behind Mo's store. I hopped out and peeked into the garage. No car. No lights on in the back of the upstairs apartment.

  “There's something going on here,” I said. “It doesn't make sense.”

  Lula slowly made her way to Jackie's rooming house, taking a street for four blocks and then doubling back one street over, the three of us on the lookout for Jackie's car. We'd covered a sizable chunk of neighborhood by the time we reached Jackie's house, but nothing turned up.

  “Don't you worry,” Lula said to Jackie. “We'll find your car. You go on in and watch some TV. Only thing good to do on a day like this is watch TV. Go check out the bitches on them daytime shows.”

  Jackie disappeared behind a screen of rain, into the maroon-shingled two-story row house. The street was lined with cars. None of them Jackie's Chrysler.

  “What's he like?” I asked Lula.

  “Jackie's old man? Nothing special. Comes and goes. Sells some.”

  “What's his name?”

  “Cameron Brown. Street name is Maggot. Guess that tell you something.”

  “Would he take off with Jackie's car?”

  “In a heartbeat.” Lula pulled away from the curb. “You're the expert finder here. What we do next?”

  “Let's do more of the same,” I said. “Let's keep driving. Canvass the places Brown would ordinarily hang at.”

  Two hours later Lula missed a street in the rain, and before we could make a correction we were down by the river, weaving our way through a complex of high-rises.

  “This is getting old,” Lula said. “Bad enough straining my eyeballs looking for some dumb car, but now I'm lost.”

  “We're not lost,” I told her. “We're in Trenton.”

  “Yeah, but I've never been in this part of Trenton before. I don't feel comfortable driving around buildings that haven't got gang slogans sprayed on them. Look at this place. No boarded-up windows. No garbage in the gutter. No brothers selling goods on the street. Don't know how people can live like this.” She squinted into the gray rain and eased the car into a parking lot. “I'm turning around,” she said. “I'm taking us back to the office, and I'm gonna nuke up some of them leftover hot dogs and then I'm gonna do my filing.”

  It was okay by me because riding around in the pouring rain in slum neighborhoods wasn't my favorite thing to do anyway.

  Lula swung down a line of cars and there in front of us was the Chrysler.

  We both sat dumbstruck, barely believing our eyes. We'd painstakingly covered every likely street and alley, and here was the car, parked in a most unlikely place.

  “Sonovabitch,” Lula said.

  I studied the building at the edge of the lot. Eight stories high. A big cube of uninspired brick and low-energy window glass. “Looks like apartments.”

  Lula nodded, and we returned our attention to the Chrysler. Not especially anxious to investigate.

  “I guess we should take a look,” Lula finally said.

  We both heaved a sigh and got out of the Firebird. The rain had tapered to a drizzle, and the temperature was dropping. The cold seeped through my skin, straight to my bones, and the possibility of finding Cameron Brown dead in the trunk of Jackie's car did nothing to warm me from the inside out.

  We gingerly looked in the windows and tried the doors. The doors were locked. The interior of the car was empty. No Cameron Brown. No obvious clues . . . like notes detailing Brown's recent life history or maps with a bright orange X to mark the spot. We stood side by side, looking at the trunk.

  “Don't see no blood dripping out,” Lula said. “That's a good sign.” She went to her own trunk and returned with a crowbar. She slipped it under the Chrysler's trunk lid and popped the lid open.

  Spare tire, dirty yellow blanket, a couple grimy towels. No Cameron Brown.

  Lula and I expelled air in a simultaneous whoosh.

  “How long has Jackie been seeing this guy?” I asked.

  “About six months. Jackie doesn't have good luck with men. Doesn't want to see what's real.”

  Lula tossed the crowbar onto her backseat and we both got back into the Firebird.

  “So what's real this time around?” I asked.

  “This Maggot's a user from the word go. He pimping Jackie and then using her car to deal. He could of got a car of his own, but he uses Jackie's because everybody knows she a ho, and if the cops stop him and there's stuff in the trunk he just say he don't know how it got there. He say he just borrowed the car from his ho girlfriend. And everybody knows Jackie do some drugs. Only reason anybody be a ho is 'cause they do drugs.”

  “Think Brown was selling drugs here?”

  Lula shook her head, no. “He don't sell drugs to this kind of folks. He pushes to the kiddies.”

  “Then maybe he has a girlfriend upstairs.”

  Lula rolled the engine over and pulled out of the lot. “Maybe, but it looks kind of high-class for Cameron Brown.”

  By the time I dragged into my apartment at five o'clock I was thoroughly depressed. I was back to driving the Buick. My pickup was at a Nissan service center awaiting repairs after Blue Ribbon Used Cars refused responsibility, citing a clause on my sales receipt that said I'd bought the car “as is.” No returns. No guarantees.

  My shoes were soaked through, my nose was running and I couldn't stop thinking about Jackie. Finding her car seemed totally inadequate. I wanted to improve her life. I wanted to get her off drugs, and I wanted to change her profession. Hell, she wasn't so dumb. She could probably be a brain surgeon if she just had a decent haircut.

  I left my shoes in the hall and dropped the rest of my clothes on the bathroom floor. I stood in the shower until I was defrosted. I toweled my hair dry and ran my fingers through it by way of styling. I dressed in thick white socks, sweatpants and sweatshirt.

  I took a soda from the fridge, snatched a pad and pen from the kitchen counter and settled myself at the dining table. I wanted to review my ideas on Mo Bedemier, and I wanted to figure out what I was missing.

  I awoke at nine o'clock with the spiral binding of the steno pad imprinted on the left side of my face and my notebook pages as blank as my mind. I shoved the hair out of my eyes, punched 4 on my speed dial and ordered a pizza to be delivered—extra cheese, black olives, peppers and onions.

  I took ho
ld of the pen and drew a line on the empty page. I drew a happy face. I drew a grumpy face. I drew a heart with my initials in it, but then I didn't have anyone else's initials to write next to mine, so I went back to thinking about Mo.

  Where would Mo go? He left most of his clothes behind. His drawers were filled with socks and underwear. His toiletries were intact. Toothbrush, razor, deodorant in the medicine chest over the bathroom sink. That had to mean something, right? The logical conclusion was that he had another apartment where he kept a spare toothbrush. Trouble was . . . life wasn't always logical. The utilities check hadn't turned up anything. Of course that only meant that if Mo had a second house or apartment, it wasn't registered under his name.

  The other possibility, that Mo was snatched and most likely was dead somewhere, waiting to be found, was too depressing to ponder. Best to set that one aside for now, I decided.

  And what about Mo's mail? I couldn't remember seeing a mailbox. Probably the mailman brought the mail into the store and gave it to Mo. So what was happening to the mail now?

  Check the post office, I wrote on the pad.

  I smelled pizza get off the elevator, and I hustled to the foyer, flipped the chain, threw the bolts back on the two Yale locks, opened the door and stared out at Joe Morelli.

  “Pizza delivery” he said.

  I narrowed my eyes.

  “I was at Pino's when the order came in.”

  “So this really is my pizza?”

  Morelli pushed past me and set the pizza on the kitchen counter. “Cross my heart and hope to die.” He got two beers out of the refrigerator, balanced the pizza box on one hand and carted everything into the living room and set it all on the coffee table. He picked the channel changer off the sofa and punched the Knicks game on.

  “Make yourself at home,” I said.

  Morelli smiled.

  I set two plates, a roll of paper towels and a pizza cutter next to the pizza box. Truth is, I wasn't completely unhappy to see Morelli. He radiated body heat, which I seemed to be lacking today, and as a cop he had resources that were useful to a bounty hunter. There might be other reasons as well, having to do with ego and lust, but I didn't feel like admitting to those reasons.

  I recut the pizza and slid pieces onto plates. I handed one plate to Morelli. “You know a guy named Cameron Brown?”

  “Pimp,” Morelli said. “Very oily. Deals some dope.” He looked at me over the edge of his pizza. “Why?”

  “You remember Jackie? Lula's friend?”

  “Jackie the hooker.”

  “Yeah. Well she came to Vinnie's office today to see if I could find her car. Seems her boyfriend, Cameron Brown, took off with it.”

  “And?”

  “And, Lula and I cruised around awhile and finally found the car parked in the RiverEdge Apartments parking lot.”

  Morelli stopped eating. “Keep going.”

  “That's about it. Jackie said she didn't care about finding Cameron. She just wanted her car.”

  “So what's your problem?”

  I chewed some pizza. “I don't know. The whole thing feels . . . nasty. Unfinished.”

  “Stay out of it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It's Jackie's problem,” Morelli said. “Mind your own business. You got her car back. Let it rest.”

  “She's sort of my friend.”

  “She's a doper. She's nobody's friend.”

  I knew he was right, but I was still surprised at the harsh comment and at the emphatic tone. A little alarm sounded in my brain. Usually when Morelli felt this strongly about my not getting involved in something it was because he didn't want me muddying waters he'd staked out for himself.

  Morelli sank back into the couch with his bottle of beer. “What ever happened to the all-out search for Mo?”

  “I'm all out of ideas.” I had wolfed down two pieces of pizza and was eyeing a third. “So tell me,” I said to Morelli. “What's going on with Jackie and her old man? Why don't you want me getting involved?”

  “Like I said, it's none of your business.” Morelli leaned forward, raised the lid on Rex's hamster cage and chucked a chunk of pizza crust into Rex's little ceramic food dish.

  “Tell me anyway,” I said.

  “There's not much to tell. I just think there's a funny climate on the streets. The dealers are pulling back, getting cautious. Rumor has it some have disappeared.”

  His attention was diverted to the television. “Watch this,” he said. “Watch the replay of this layup.”

  “The guys in vice must be ecstatic.”

  “Yeah,” Morelli said. “They're sitting around playing cards and eating jelly doughnuts for lack of crime.”

  I was still debating the third piece of pizza. My thighs really didn't need it, but life was so short, and physical gratification was hard to come by these days. The hell with it. Eat the damn thing and get it over with, I thought.

  I saw a smile twitch at the corners of Morelli's mouth.

  “What?” I yelled at him.

  He held two hands in the air. “Hey, don't yell at me just because you have no willpower.”

  “I have plenty of willpower.” Man, I hated when Morelli was right. “Why are you here anyway?”

  “Just being sociable.”

  “And you want to see if I have anything new on Mo.”

  “Yeah.”

  I'd expected him to deny it, and now I was left with nothing accusatory to say.

  “Why are you so interested in Mo?” I asked.

  Morelli shrugged. “Everyone in the burg is interested in Mo. I spent a lot of time in that store as a kid.”

  Morning dawned late under a tedious cloud cover that was the color and texture of cement curbing. I finished up the pizza for breakfast and was feeding Rex Cheerios and raisins when the phone rang.

  “Man, this is one ugly morning,” Lula said. “And it's getting uglier by the minute.”

  “Are you referring to the weather?” I asked.

  “That too. Mostly I'm referring to human nature. We got a situation on our hands. Jackie's got herself staked out in the FancyAss parking lot, looking to catch her old man doin' the deed. I told her to go home, but she don't listen to me. I told her he probably isn't even there. What would he be doing with a woman could afford to live in a place like that? I told her that motherfucker got capped. I told her she be better off checking the Dumpsters, but it go on deaf ears.”

  “And?”

  “And I thought you could talk to her. She's gonna freeze to death. She's been sitting there all night.”

  “What makes you think she'll listen to me?”

  “You could tell her you got some surveillance going on, and she don't need to butt in.”

  “That would be a lie.”

  “What, you never lied before?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I'll see what I can do.”

  Half an hour later, I turned the Buick into the RiverEdge Apartments parking lot. Jackie was there, all right, parked in her Chrysler. I pulled up behind her, got out, and rapped on her window.

  “Yeah?” Jackie said by way of greeting, not sounding all that happy.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I'm waiting for that shit-ass car thief to come out, and then I'm going to put a hole in him big enough to drive a truck through.”

  I don't know a whole lot about guns, but the cannon resting on the seat next to Jackie looked like it could do the job.

  “That's a pretty good idea,” I said, “but you look cold. Why don't you let me take over the surveillance for a while?”

  “Thanks all the same, but you found him, and now I get to kill him.”

  “Makes perfect sense to me. I just thought it might be better to kill him when it warms up some. After all, there isn't any real rush. No point sitting out here, catching a cold, just to kill a guy.”

  “Yeah, but I feel like killing him now. I don't feel like waiting. Besides, I'm not gonna do any business today what with this
weather. Only crazy men go out to get their oil changed on a day like this, and I don't need any of that lunatic dick shit. Nope, I might as well sit here. Better than standing on my corner.”

  She could be right.

  “Okay,” I said. “Be careful.”

  “Hunh,” Jackie said.