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“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
