Hot Six

  “You been here before?” Lula asked.

  “Yep.”

  “What happened?”

  “He shot at me.”

  “Hunh,” Lula said.

  I put my hand to the patio door and shoved. The door was unlocked.

  “You may as well go first,” Lula said. “I know how you like to do that.”

  I pulled the curtain aside and stepped into Hannibal's house.

  “It's dark in here,” Lula said. “This guy must be a vampire.”

  I turned and looked at her.

  “Uh-oh,” she said. “I just scared myself ”

  “He's not a vampire. He keeps his drapes drawn so no one can look in. I'll do a preliminary check to make sure the house is empty. And then I'll go room by room and see if anything interesting turns up. I want you down here doing lookout.”

  Stephanie Plum 6 - 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.”

  “Tha
nks 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.”