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I pointed to my eye, which was now a dark green with touches of navy and magenta. “Hit and run. By the time my head cleared Slick was gone. Where is Vinnie?”
“He’s at a conference in Atlanta.”
Lula shuffled into the office. She looked like someone set off a bomb in her head and her hair exploded. She was wearing red sneakers, gray sweatpants, and a pink T-shirt with a coffee stain down the front of it.
“God bless someone, on account of I see a box of donuts on the desk,” Lula said. “Tell me there’s still donuts left in that box.”
“Tough night?” Connie asked.
“The worst. Dogs barking and cats howling. Then there was people yelling at the dogs and cats to shut up. Then there were sirens and flashy lights in my window. Not that any of this is unusual in my neighborhood. I’ve grown skills that help me to ignore these distractions. It’s that none of my skills helped last night. I finally gave up trying to sleep somewhere around five in the morning. I got dressed and went out to see what the fuss was about. I thought maybe I would take a jog around the block. I’ve been planning on taking up exercise.”
Lula crammed a donut into her mouth and selected a second. “Healthy body, healthy mind. That’s what I’m all about. Who picked these donuts out? There’s only two of them Boston Kreme. I mean, I’m in a donut emergency. I need at least four Boston Kremes. And I need coffee.”
“Looks like you already had coffee,” Connie said.
Lula looked down at herself. “This isn’t my coffee. I was out in front of my house, and I was thinking about going for a walk or a run or something, and I bumped into a cop. The place was crawling with them. This is his coffee.”
“What was the problem?” I asked. “Why were the police there?”
“I don’t know,” Lula said. “After I got the coffee spilled on me I went back inside and fell asleep on the couch. I woke up a couple hours later and there were still dogs barking and cop cars with their stupid radios squawking, so I came here to get some quiet.” She ate two more donuts and went to the coffee machine at the back of the room. “I should move out of that neighborhood, but I like my apartment. It’s got a big closet.” She returned with coffee and ate another donut.
“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.
