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“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.
I left downtown, drove to Lula’s neighborhood, and took the alley that ran past the back of Lula’s apartment. Lul
a had a dedicated parking spot that I was able to slide into. The rest of the street and alley space was clogged with police vehicles, satellite TV trucks, and clumps of curious bystanders. Some of the bystanders were dressed like zombies.
Lula disappeared inside her house, and I went in search of Morelli. I found him on the sidewalk, in front of the CSI van, standing back on his heels, looking lost in thought.
“What’s going on?” I asked him.
“This is turning into a freak show.”
“Are you still in charge?”
“No one’s in charge,” Morelli said. “The state is here. The feds are here. Zombie National Chapter 103 is here.”
“Those are the guys in rags?”
“Yeah, they’re waiting for the apocalypse.”
