Hot Six

and there's no answer. I've called all the hospitals-'

'Mom, they're adults. They could be doing lots of stuff. When Grandma was living with me I never knew where she was.'

'She's running wild!' my mother said. 'Do you know what I found in her room? Condoms! What does she want with condoms?'

'Maybe she makes balloon animals out of them.'

'Other women have mothers who get sick and go to nursing homes or die in their beds. Not me. I have a mother who wears spandex. What did I do to deserve this?'

'You should go to bed and stop worrying about Grandma.'

'I'm not going to bed until that woman comes home. We're going to have a talk. And your father is here, too.'

Oh great. There'll be a big scene, and Grandma will be back, living in my apartment.

'Tell Daddy he can go to bed. I'll come over and sit up with you.' Anything to keep Grandma from moving back in with me.

I called Joe and told him I might be over later, but he shouldn't wait up. Then I reborrowed the Cherokee and drove to my parents' house.

My mother and I were sleeping on the couch when Grandma came in at two o'clock.

'Where were you?' my mother hollered at her. 'We were worried sick.'

'I had a night of sin,' Grandma said. 'Boy, that Myron is some kisser. I think he might even have got an erection, except it was hard to tell what with the way he hikes his pants up.'

My mother made the sign of the cross, and I looked in my purse for some Rolaids.

'Well, I gotta go to bed,' Grandma said. 'I'm pooped. And I got another driving test tomorrow.'

WHEN I WOKE up I was stretched out on the couch with a quilt over me. The house was filled with the smell of coffee cooking and bacon frying, and my mother was banging pots around in the kitchen.

'Well, at least you're not ironing,' I said. When my mother got out the ironing, we knew there was big trouble brewing.

She slammed a lid on the stockpot and looked at me. 'Where's your underwear?'

'I got caught in the rain, and I borrowed dry clothes from Dougie Kruper, only he didn't have any underwear. I would have gone home to change, but there are these two guys who want to chop off one of my fingers, and I was afraid they were at my apartment waiting for me.'

'Well, thank God,' she said. 'I was afraid you left your bra in Morelli's car.'

'We don't do it in his car. We do it in his bed.'

My mother had the big butcher knife in her hand. 'I'm going to kill myself.'

'You can't fool me,' I said, helping myself to coffee. 'You'd never kill yourself in the middle of making soup.'

Grandma trotted into the kitchen. She was wearing makeup, and her hair was pink.

'Omigod,' my mother said. 'What next?'

'What do you think of this hair color?' Grandma asked me. 'I got one of them rinses at the drugstore. You just shampoo it in.'

'It's pink,' I said.

'Yeah, that's what I thought, too. It said on the label that it'd be Jezebel Red.' She looked at the clock on the wall. 'I gotta get a move on. Louise will be here any minute. I got the first appointment for my driving test. Hope you don't mind I asked Louise to take me. I didn't know you were going to be here.'

'No sweat,' I said. 'Knock yourself out.'

I made myself some toast and finished my coffee. I heard the toilet flush overhead and knew my father would be down momentarily. My mother looked like she was thinking about ironing.

'Well,' I said, jumping up from my seat. 'Things to do. Places to go.'

'I just washed some grapes. Take some home,' my mother said. 'And there's ham in the refrigerator for a sandwich.'

I DIDN'T SEE Habib or Mitchell when I pulled into my lot, but I had the Glock in hand, just in case. I parked illegally, next to the back entrance, leaving as little space as possible between me and the door, and went directly to my apartment, taking the stairs. When I got there I realized I didn't have a key, and Joe had locked the door when he left.

Because I was the only one in the entire universe who couldn't open my door without a key, I got the spare from my neighbor Mrs. Karwatt.

'Isn't this a nice day?' she asked. 'It feels just like spring.'

'I guess everything's been pretty quiet here this morning,' I said. 'No loud noises or strange men out here in the hall?'

'Not that I've noticed.' She looked down at my gun. 'What a nice Glock. My sister carries a Glock, and she just loves it. I was thinking about trading in my forty-five, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. My dead husband gave it to me for our first anniversary. Rest his soul.'

'What a romantic.'

'Of course, I could always use a second gun.'

I nodded my head in agreement. 'You can never have too many guns.'

I said good-bye to Mrs. Karwatt and let myself into my apartment. I went room by room, checking closets, looking under the bed and behind the shower curtain to make sure I was alone. Morelli had been right-the apartment was a wreck, but not too many things looked destroyed. My visitors hadn't taken the time to slash upholstery or put their foot into the television screen.

I took a shower and got dressed in clean jeans and a T-shirt. I put some gel in my hair and worked with the big roller brush so I had a lot of loose curls and looked like a cross between Jersey Girl and Baywatch Bimbo. I felt dwarfed by the volume of hair, so I added extra mascara to my lashes to balance things out.

I spent some time straightening the apartment, but then I started to get nervous that I was a sitting duck. Not just for Habib and Mitchell, but for Ranger as well. It was past my nine o'clock deadline.

I called Morelli at the office.

'Did your grandmother ever come home?' he asked.

'Yes. And it wasn't pretty. I need to talk to you. How about meeting me for early lunch at Pino's?'

After I hung up with Morelli I called into the office to see if Lula knew anything about Morgan.

'He's fine,' Lula said. 'But I don't think those guys Habib and Mitchell are gonna get their Christmas bonus.'

I called Dougie and told him I was going to keep the Cherokee for a little longer.

'Keep it forever,' he said.

By the time I got to Pino's, Morelli was already at a table, working on breadsticks.

'I'll make a deal with you,' I said, shrugging out of my denim jacket. 'If you tell me what's going on between you and Ranger, I'll let you keep Bob.'

'Oh boy,' Morelli said. 'How can I pass that up?'

'I have an idea about this Ramos business,' I said. 'But it's pretty far out. I've been thinking about it for three or four days now.'

Morelli grinned. 'Woman's intuition?'

I smiled, too, because as it's turned out, intuition is the big gun in my arsenal. I can't shoot, I can't run all that fast, and the only karate I know is from Bruce Lee movies. But I have good intuition. Truth is, most of the time I don't know what the hell I'm doing, but if I follow my instincts things usually work out okay. 'How was Homer Ramos identified?' I asked Morelli. 'Dental records?'

'He was identified by jewelry and circumstance. There were no dental records. They mysteriously disappeared.'

'I've been thinking-maybe it wasn't Homer Ramos who got shot. No one in his family seems upset that he's dead. Even if a father thinks his son is rotten to the core, I find it hard to believe there's no emotion at his death.