Hardcore Twenty-Four (Stephanie Plum #24)(26)

“I just got off the phone with Maureen Segal,” Connie said to Lula. “She was on police dispatch last night. She said your next-door neighbor let his dog out to do his business around midnight, and the dog found a body in the bushes.”

“Nothing new about that,” Lula said.

“Yes, but the body didn’t have a head.”

I suppose this explained why I hadn’t heard back from Morelli.

Lula’s eyes opened wide. “Get the heck out! I should have known. It’s the zombies. That’s why I couldn’t sleep. I got ESP for zombies. I got zombie radar. I thought I smelled something too. It was like carnations and outhouse.” She looked into the donut box. “What do you think this is with the pink icing? Strawberry? Cherry? Anybody mind if I eat it?”

Connie and I shook our heads. We didn’t mind. After the carnation and outhouse sensory message the pink donut wasn’t doing it for me.

“I need to roll,” I said to Lula and Connie. “I have a plan.”

It wasn’t a good plan, but it was the best I could come up with, and it would look like I was working.

“What’s your plan?” Lula asked. “I might need to join you.”

“I’m going to check on Ethel, then I’m going to cruise around Slick’s burned-out building and maybe pay another visit to his parents. Then I’m going to have lunch with Grandma to see if she’s got any more information on Johnny Chucci.”

“I like that plan,” Lula said. “I especially like the lunch part.”

We went to my car, and Lula looked in the back seat.

“Do you have food for Ethel?” Lula asked. “I don’t see no food.”

I ran back into the office and returned with the donut box. I handed it to Lula and got behind the wheel.

“I might need to eat one more of these before we give them to Ethel,” Lula said.

By the time we got to Ethel there were only two donuts left in the box. I unlocked the door to the double-wide and looked in. Ethel was curled on the dinette table. I said hello and told her hopefully Diggery would be home soon. I left the box on the floor just inside the door, locked up, and went back to my car.

“How’d that go?” Lula asked.

“Okay. Ethel was on the table. Nothing looked out of the ordinary.”

I drove to the building Slick burned down and made a slow pass around the block. The crime scene tape had been taken down, and it looked like the neighborhood had normalized. There were some street people sitting out in the morning sun. I glanced at Lula and decided she would have more luck talking to the street people than I would. She sort of looked like one of them today.

“I’m going to drop you off,” I told Lula. “Ask the locals about Slick. I’ll continue to drive and explore the area, and I’ll pick you up in a half hour.”

“No problemo. Now that I’m all sugared up I’m ready to go. Lula is my name, and undercover is my game.”

I gave her double thumbs-up and rolled away. I methodically worked a nine-block grid, driving the streets. I looked for Slick, and I looked for abandoned buildings.

Lula was waiting on the corner for me when I circled back to her.

“This was an unsatisfying experience,” she said. “Those street people are rude. They said I was a disgrace to street people on account of I have a coffee stain.”

“Did you get any information on Slick?”

“Yeah. He stops around to get lunch sometimes. No one’s seen him lately. They all think he’s a genius. Like he has ideas about how to be a billionaire. One of them was to be a drug lord. So how did that turn out?”

“You have a new stain on your shirt.”

Lula looked down at herself. “One of the volunteers gave me some soup. It was in a Styrofoam cup with a plastic spoon, and it wasn’t all that easy to get at.”

“Not like eating a donut.”

“Not nearly. Did you get anything on your drive-around?”

“No. Not a lot of people out at this time of the morning, and I didn’t see any vacant buildings that could be used to cook drugs.”

“From what I heard today, Slick probably gave up on the drug empire. Sounded to me like he has a short attention span. Like he jumps around from one scheme to the next.”

“Do we have a clue about his new scheme?”

“They said he was talking about being a movie star. And he was also thinking about going to Tuscany and starting a vineyard.”

“Oh boy.”

“Yeah, it’s a little out there, but you gotta respect a man who dreams big.”

“You smell like minestrone,” I said to Lula.

“It’s my shirt. The minestrone was the homeless soup of the day. I wouldn’t mind a short stop at my apartment, so I could beautify myself.”

I thought that was an excellent idea, and there was a chance that Morelli would still be at the crime scene.

Lula lived in a lavender and pink two-story frame house that had been converted into four apartments. The owner of the house lived on the ground floor. Lula lived on the second floor. And a crazy woman lived in the attic. The street was narrow and lined with trees. The residents were ethnically mixed and uniformly straddling the poverty line. It was a nice street that was too close to some very bad, gang-infested streets.