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Lula was hands on hips, starting to look pissed. “We called you,” she said to Morelli.
Morelli did a fast office scan. “You don’t have the head here, do you?”
“So far as I know, the head and everything else is still in front of the Sunshine Hotel,” Lula told him. “And I’m not sure I like your attitude. I’m not sure you’re takin’ this seriously.”
Morelli stared down at his shoe. Hard to tell if he was trying hard not to laugh or if he was getting a migraine. After a five-count, he took out his cell phone, called dispatch, and sent a uniform to the Sunshine Hotel.
“Okay, ladies,” Morelli said when he got off the phone. “Let’s take a field trip.”
I made a big show of looking at my watch. “Gee, I’ve got to run. Things to do.”
“No way,” Lula said. “I need someone with me in case I get faint or something.”
“You’ll have him,” I said.
“He’s a fine man, but he’s the cop representative here, and I need someone from my posse, you see what I’m saying. I need a BFF.”
“It’s not gonna be me,” Connie said. “Vinnie is picking up a skip in Atlanta, and I have to run the office.”
Morelli looked at me and gave his head a small shake, like he didn’t believe any of this. Like I was a huge, unfathomable pain in the ass, and in fact maybe that was how he felt about women in general right now.
I understood Morelli’s point of view because it was precisely my current feeling about men.
“Terrific,” I said on a sigh. “Let’s get on with it.”
Lula and I followed Morelli in my ten-year-old Ford Escort that used to be blue. We didn’t take the Escort because we liked riding in it. We took it because Lula thought she might be too overwrought to drive her Firebird, and she suspected she would need a bacon cheeseburger after visiting the scene of the crime and Morelli might not be inclined to find a drive-through for her.
THERE WERE ALREADY two cruisers angled into the curb in front of the Sunshine Hotel when Lula and I arrived. I parked, and Lula and I got out and stood next to Morelli and a couple uniforms. We all looked down at a red splotch that sprayed out over about a four-foot diameter. A couple smaller splotches trailed off the big splotch, and I assumed that was where the head had hit the pavement. I felt a wave of nausea slide through my stomach, and I started to sweat.
“This here’s the spot,” Lula said. “You can see it’s just like I told you. There was a big gusher of blood when they whacked the head off. It was like Old Faithful going off, only it was blood. And then the head rolled down the sidewalk. It was like the head was a bowlin’ ball with eyes. And the eyes were like big googly eyes kinda popping out of the head and lookin’ at me. And I think I might have heard the head laughin’, or maybe it was the guys who did the whackin’ who were laughin’.”
The uniforms all did a grimace, Morelli was impassive, and I threw up. Everyone jumped away from me, I gagged one last time and did some deep breathing.
“Sorry,” I said.
“No problem,” Morelli told me. “I feel like throwing up a lot on this job.”
One of the uniforms brought me some paper towels and a bottle of water, and Lula stood a good distance away.
“You got lots of room for lunch now that you’re empty,” she yelled to me. “I could get a early start with one of them extra-crispy bird burgers they’re servin’ at Cluck-in-a-Bucket. Have you heard about them? They got some new secret sauce.”
I wasn’t interested in secret sauce. I wanted to go home and go to bed and not get up until it was a new day. I was done with this one.
“We got a couple footprints heading south,” a uniform said. “One of these guys had real big feet. Looks like a size fourteen. And there’s some skid marks where they dragged the body to the curb. Imagine they dumped it into a car and took off.”
“You need to come downtown and give me some information,” Morelli said to Lula.
“No way. Nuh-ah. I got a allergic reaction to police stations. I get irritable bowel and hives and the heebie-jeebies.”
“You witnessed a murder.”
“Yeah, but there’s extenuating circumstances here. I got a medical condition. I got a extreme sensitivity to cops.”
Morelli looked like he wanted to pull his gun out of its holster and shoot himself.
“I’ll get you some cheeseburgers and a side of onion rings,” he said to Lula.
Lula stood hands on hips. “You think I could be bought for some lame-ass burgers? What kinda woman you think I am?”
