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I hung up and Lula looked over at me. “I didn’t hear it all, but I’m thinking he didn’t believe a word you said.”
“Not a word,” I said.
“I’m here in the middle of it, and I don’t believe it,” Lula said.
I checked Marcus out in my rearview mirror. He was looking much more alert.
“I didn’t do it,” Marcus said.
“What didn’t you do?” I asked him.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said. “Whatever you think I did… I didn’t do it.”
“We know what you did,” I told him. “And we don’t care.”
He looked at Nutsy. “I know you. You’re the doorman at Plover’s.”
“Yeah,” Nutsy said. “And you handed the bag of jewelry off to me after Plover shot your friend.”
“That was you? It was dark and I was freaked out. After Stump got shot it was all a blur. I just wanted to get out of there. I figured Plover was going to shoot me too.” He looked down at his hands. “Why am I in handcuffs? Are you taking me to Plover?”
“No,” I said. “We aren’t working for Plover. We’re trying to put a bunch of pieces together about the robbery.”
“The jewelry is all fake,” Marcus said.
“I was in the alley when you and Stump were talking to Plover,” Nutsy said. “It sounded like you were trying to blackmail him.”
“That was Stump’s idea. It turned out we couldn’t get much money for the jewelry, but Stump thought Plover would pay to get it back. He figured Plover was passing the junk off as the real thing. Like scamming customers and then his insurance company.”
“How did you get the bag of jewelry?” I asked Marcus.
“We saw the guy who robbed the store run out and drop the bag. We were standing right there. And there was all this commotion with police and people on the street, and no one was paying any attention to the bag. So, we took it. We just walked away with it. We didn’t know it was filled with jewelry. We would have been happy if it was filled with halfway-decent garbage.”
“I want to know about Stump,” I said to Marcus. “What was he wearing when he was shot?”
“Same thing he always wore. Pants and a shirt and a hooded sweatshirt.”
“Did he have a belt?”
“No.”
“A watch?”
“No.”
“A ring?”
“No.”
“A phone?”
“No.”
“Any jewelry?”
“Yeah,” Marcus said. “He always wore a cross that he got in Mexico years ago. It was big with stuff engraved on it.”
“Did he have anything else on him that was metal?”
