Go with dinner, I thought. Do the coat closet later.
My mother wasn’t smiling when she opened the door.
“Now what?” she said.
“I didn’t do it.”
“You used to say that when you were a little girl, and it was always a fib.”
“Cross my heart,” I said. “I didn’t shoot anybody. I accidentally got knocked out, and when I came to I was sharing a hallway with a dead guy.”
“You got knocked out!” My mother smacked the heel of her hand against her forehead. “I have to have a daughter who goes around getting herself knocked out.”
Grandma Mazur was in line behind my mother.
“Are you sure you didn’t pop him one? I could keep a secret, you know.”
“I didn’t pop him!”
“Well that’s a big disappointment,” she said. “I had a good story all ready to tell the girls at the beauty parlor.”
My father was in the living room, hiding in front of the TV. “Unh,” he said, never moving a muscle.
I sniffed the air. “Meat loaf.”
“Got a new recipe from Betty Szajack,” my mother said. “She puts sliced olives in her meat loaf, and she makes it with soaked bread instead of crackermeal.”
The best way to defuse my mother is to talk about food. For thirty years, we’ve expressed love and anger in terms of gravy and mashed potatoes.
“So are you staying for supper?” my mother wanted to know. “I have spice cake with chocolate mocha icing for dessert.”
“Sure,” I said. “That would be nice.”
I helped Grandma Mazur set the table while my mother finished up in the kitchen. We were about to sit down when the doorbell rang.
“Probably the paperboy trying to juice us out of more money,” Grandma said. “I’m wise to his tricks.”
I answered the door and found myself looking into Joe Morelli’s brown eyes.
He grinned when he saw me. “Surprise.”
“What do you want?”
“You asking for the long list or the short list?”
“I don’t want any list.” I made an attempt to close the door, but he muscled his way into the foyer. “Out!” I said. “This isn’t a good time.”
He ignored me and strolled into the dining room. “Evening,” he said to my mother. He acknowledged my father with a nod of his head, and he winked at my grandmother.
“We’re having meat loaf with olives,” Grandma Mazur said to Morelli. “You want some? We got plenty.”
“I wouldn’t want to impose,” Morelli said.
This triggered eye rolling on my part.
My mother pulled an extra side chair up next to me and laid out another plate. “We wouldn’t think of having you leave without supper,” she said to Morelli.
“I’d think of it,” I said.
My mother smacked me on the top of my head with a wooden serving spoon. “Miss Fresh Mouth.”
Morelli helped himself to two slabs of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, green beans and applesauce. He made polite conversation with my mother and grandmother and discussed sports scores with my father. On the surface Morelli seemed relaxed and smiling, but there were unguarded moments when I caught him watching me with the offhand intensity of a tree toad eyeing a tasty insect.
“So what’s going on between you and my granddaughter?” Grandma asked Morelli. “Being that you’re here for supper I guess everything’s pretty serious.”
“Getting more serious by the minute,” Morelli said.
“Morelli and I have a working relationship,” I said to Grandma. “Nothing more.”
Morelli slouched back. “You shouldn’t fib to your grandma. You know you’re crazy about me.”
“Well, listen to that,” Grandma said, clearly charmed. “Isn’t he the one.”
Morelli leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “Speaking of work, I have a matter I’d like to discuss with you in private. I thought maybe we could go for a ride together after the table is cleared.”
“Sure,” I said. And maybe I’ll poke out my eye with the turkey baster.
I gathered the plates together and hauled them off to the kitchen. My mother and Grandma Mazur followed with the serving dishes.
“You go ahead and cut the cake,” I told my mother. “I’ll get the coffee going.”
I waited a moment until I had the kitchen to myself, then I promptly did a quiet exit through the back door. I had no intention of going for a ride that would culminate in a body cavity search. Not that a body cavity search would be a new experience. Morelli had already performed this procedure on me at various ages, with varying degrees of success. The new twist would be that this time the search might be done by a prison matron—and that was even less appealing than falling prey to Morelli.
I was wearing jeans and boots and a flannel shirt over a T-shirt, and my teeth were chattering by the time I’d cut through my parents’ backyard and run the two blocks to Mary Lou’s house. Mary Lou’s been my best friend for as long as I can remember. For six years now she’s been more or less happily married to Leonard Stankovic of Stankovic and Sons, Plumbing and Heating. She has two kids and a mortgage and a part-time job as a bookkeeper for an Oldsmobile dealership.
I didn’t bother with the formality of knocking on her door. I just barged in and stood there stomping my feet and flapping my arms in her living room, and saying, “D-d-damn it’s c-c-cold!”
Mary Lou was on her hands and knees picking up little plastic cars and men that looked like fireplugs. “Maybe it would help if you tried wearing a coat.”
“I was at my parents’ house and Morelli showed up, and so I had to sneak out the back door.”
“I don’t buy into that one,” Mary Lou said. “If you were with Morelli just now you’d be missing a lot more clothes than your coat.”
“This is serious. I’m afraid he might want to arrest me.”
Mary Lou’s two-year-old, Mikey, toddled in from the kitchen and latched onto Mary Lou’s leg dog style.
I thought kids were okay from a distance, but I wasn’t all that excited about the way they smelled up close. I suppose when they belong to you it makes a difference.
“You probably should stop shooting guys,” Mary Lou said. “You shoot a lot of guys, and eventually the cops get cranky about it.”
“I didn’t shoot this one. Anyway, I had to sneak out of the house, and I had to leave my coat and everything behind.”
Lenny and the four-year-old were sitting in front of the TV watching a rerun of The Munsters. Lenny was an okay person but sort of a mouth breather. Mary Lou had always gone for that type, preferring brawn to brain. Not that Lenny was entirely stupid. It’s just that you’d never get him confused with Linus Pauling.
Mary Lou dumped the fireplug people into a plastic laundry basket that was filled with toys, and the two-year-old let out a howl. He cried flat out with his hands clasping and unclasping, reaching for who knows what. Mary Lou, I suppose. Or maybe for his toys that were being put away for the night. He cried with his mouth wide open and his eyes scrunched tight, and in between sobs he shrieked, “No, no, no!”
Mary Lou took a graham cracker from her pocket and gave it to Mikey.
Mikey shoved the cracker into his mouth and continued to blubber, chewing and rubbing his face with his fat baby hands. Cracker mush mixed with tears and baby snot worked its way into his hair and onto his face. Brown drool rolled off his chin and stained his shirt.
Mary Lou gave Mikey a “been there, seen this” look. “Mikey’s tired,” she said.
Like I said before, kids were okay from a distance, but I didn’t think they’d ever replace hamsters.
“I need to use your phone to call home,” I said to Mary Lou.
She wiped at the mush with her shirttail. “Help yourself.”
I dialed from the kitchen, straining to hear over the racket in Mary Lou’s living room. “Is Morelli still there?” I asked my mother.
“He just left.”
“Are you sure? He’s not hanging around outside, is he?”
“I heard his car drive away.”
I borrowed a sweatshirt from Mary Lou and ran back to my parents’ house. I cut through the backyard and jogged down the driveway to check the street. The street looked clear. No Morelli. I retraced my steps to the kitchen door and let myself in.
“Well,” my mother said, “what gives?”
“Never catch me walking out on a hunk like Joe Morelli,” Grandma said. “I guess I’d know what to do with a man like that.”
I guessed I knew what to do with him too, but probably it was illegal to neuter a cop. “You didn’t give him any spice cake to take home, did you?” I asked my mother.
My mother tipped her chin up a fraction of an inch. “I gave him the whole thing. It was the least I could do after you left him sitting here high and dry.”
“The whole thing!” I shouted. “How could you do that? I didn’t get a single piece!”
“That’s what happens when you walk out. And how was I to know where you were? You could have been kidnapped. You could have had a brain seizure and wandered off with amnesia. How was I to know you’d be back and want spice cake?”
“I had reasons for leaving,” I wailed. “Perfectly good reasons.”
“What reasons?”
“Morelli was going to arrest me…maybe.”
My mother took a deep breath. “Arrest you?”
“There’s a small possibility that I might be a homicide suspect.”
My mother made the sign of the cross.
Grandma didn’t look nearly so glum. “There was a woman on TV the other day. On one of them talk shows. She said she’d been arrested for smoking dope. She said when you get arrested the cops lock you up in a little cell and then sit around watching you on closed-circuit TV, waiting for you to go to the bathroom. She said there’s this stainless steel commode in one corner of your cell, and it hasn’t got a toilet seat or anything, and that’s where you have to go. And she said the commode faces the TV camera just so they can all get a good view of the whole thing.”
My stomach went hollow and little black dots danced in front of my eyes. I wondered if I had enough money in my bank account to buy a ticket to Brazil.
Grandma’s expression got crafty. “The woman on TV said what you needed to do before you got arrested was to drink a lot of Kaopectate. She said you needed to get good and plugged up so you could wait until you got out on bail.”
I sat down in a chair and put my head between my knees.
“This is what comes of working for your father’s cousin,” my mother said. “You’re a smart girl. You should have a decent job. You should be a schoolteacher.”
I thought of Mary Lou’s kid with the graham crackers smeared in his hair, and felt better about being a bounty hunter. You see, it could always be worse, I thought. I could be a schoolteacher.
“I need to go home,” I said, retrieving my coat from the hall closet. “Lots of work to do tomorrow. Got to get to bed early.”
“Here,” my mother said, handing me a grocery bag. “Some meat loaf. Enough for a nice sandwich.”
I looked in the bag. Meat loaf. No spice cake.
“Thanks,” I said to my mother. “Are you sure there isn’t any spice cake left?”
“A homicide suspect,” my mother said. “How could such a thing happen?”
I didn’t know. I wondered the same thing. In fact, I wondered all the way home. I wasn’t such a bad person. I only cheated a little on my taxes, and I paid most of my bills. I didn’t cuss at old people (at least not to their face). I didn’t do drugs. So why was I having such rotten luck? Okay, so I didn’t go to church as often as I should, but my mother went regularly. I thought that should count for something.
I rolled Big Blue into the lot. It was late. All the good spots were taken, so I was back by the Dumpster again. What’s new. At least it afforded me cover from a drive-by. Maybe I’d park here all the time.
I looked up at my apartment and realized my lights were on. That was weird, because I was almost positive I’d shut them off when I left this afternoon. I got out of the car and walked to the middle of the lot. I looked up at my windows again. The lights were still on. What did this mean? It could mean the lights had been on when I left, and I was suffering from early onset of dementia. Probably I could add a touch of paranoia to the dementia.
A shadowy figure appeared briefly toward the far wall of my living room, and my heart skipped a beat. Someone was in my apartment. I was relieved to be able to rule out the dementia, but I still had a problem. I really didn’t want to do my own investigating and get shot at for the third time today. Unfortunately, the alternative was to call the police. Since I was low on Kaopectate, I didn’t think calling the police was a good alternative.
The figure reappeared. Long enough for me to decide it was a man. He moved closer to the window, and I was able to see his face.
The face belonged to Morelli.
Of all the nerve. Morelli had broken into my apartment. And that wasn’t even the worst of it. He was eating something. I suspected it was spice cake.
“PIG!” I yelled. “Creep!”
He didn’t seem to hear. Probably the TV was on.
I did a fast walk around the lot and found Morelli’s black Toyota 4x4. I gave the back bumper a kick, and the alarm went off.
Faces appeared in the windows above me while the alarm wailed away.
Mrs. Karwatt on the second floor threw her window open and leaned out. “What’s going on out there?”
A shotgun barrel poked from Mr. Weinstein’s window. “Whose alarm is that? It’s not my Cadillac, is it?”
The only window without a face was mine. I figured that was because Morelli was thundering down the stairs.
I ran to my car with my keys in my hand.
“Stay away from that car, or I’ll shoot,” Mr. Weinstein shouted.
“It’s my car,” I yelled back.
“The hell it is,” Mr. Weinstein said, squinting at me through his inch-thick trifocals. BOOM! Mr. Weinstein fired and took out the windshield on the car next to me.
I bolted across the grass median into the street and streaked for the houses on the other side. I stopped and looked back. Morelli was pacing under the rear overhang, shouting at Mr. Weinstein, obviously afraid to venture out into the lot for fear of getting shot.
I slipped into the shadows between two houses, hopped a backyard fence and came out onto Elm Street. I crossed Elm and repeated the pattern, bringing me to Hartland. I jogged a block up Hartland, crossed Hamilton and plastered myself against the brick wall of an all-night convenience store.
The previous owner of the store had been Joe Echo. He’d sold it in November, and the new Asian owner, Sam Pei, had changed the name to The American Store. I thought the name was appropriate. The American Store contained a sampling of everything an American might need at four times the price. A box of Fig Newtons for $7.50. No matter that there were only twelve in a box. I guess when you needed a Fig Newton in the middle of the night, you damn well didn’t care what it cost.
I pulled a knit cap out of my pocket and tugged it down over my ears. The battery was low on my cell phone, so I searched in my shoulder bag for a quarter, found one, dropped it into the pay phone and dialed my number.
Morelli answered on the fourth ring.
I unclenched my teeth enough to get a few words out. “What the hell are you doing in my apartment?”
“Waiting for you,” Morelli said.
“What were you eating just now?”
“Spice cake. There’s still some left, but you’d better hurry.”
I neatly clicked the phone back into the receiver. “Ugh!”
I bought a Snickers from Mr. Pei and ate it while I walked. Time to be realistic. Morelli was a lot better at this cops-and-robbers stuff than I was. It seemed to me that if he wanted to arrest me, he would have done it by now. For that matter, if he was serio
us about bringing me in for further questioning he would have done it. Probably there was no immediate need for the Kaopectate.
So why was Morelli harassing me? Because he wanted something. What did he want? Information that I might be withholding? Maybe he thought he could worm some missing details out of me better under more casual circumstances. Or maybe he wanted to threaten me without witnesses. Or maybe he wanted to ask me for a date.
I turned the corner at Hartland and decided I should talk to Morelli. This was no longer a simple recovery. Mo was still missing. A man had been killed. I’d been threatened. And there were some details I’d neglected to tell Morelli when I’d been questioned at the station. Not to mention the spice cake.
Everything looked status quo when I got to my parking lot. Lights were on in my apartment. Morelli’s car hadn’t been moved. A small gathering of people were clustered around the Chrysler Mr. Weinstein had used for target practice. Mr. Weinstein was there with a big piece of plastic bagging and a roll of duct tape in his hand.
“Another minute and he would have been driving off in this car, I’m telling you,” Mr. Weinstein was saying. “Better a broken windshield than a stolen car.”
“Isn’t that the truth,” Arty Boyt said. “Good thing you had that gun handy.”
Everyone else nodded. Good thing, they all said.
I slipped into the building and went to the pay phone at the front of the small lobby. I dropped a quarter and called upstairs.
“It’s me again,” I said when Morelli answered.
“Where are you?”
“Far away.”
“Liar.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “I saw you cross the parking lot.”
“Why are you stalking me?”
“Cops don’t stalk. Cops pursue.”
“Okay. Why are you pursuing me?”
“We need to talk,” Morelli said.
“That’s it? Just talk?”
“You had something else in mind?”
“Nope.”
We were both silent for a moment, contemplating the something else.
“Well,” I said, “what do you want to talk about?”
“I want to talk about Mo, and I don’t want to do it on the phone.”
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