“Nothing personal,” Connie said.
“Hunh,” Lula replied, hand on hip.
I zipped my jacket and wrapped my scarf around my neck. “You sure about knowing Uncle Mo?” I asked Lula.
She took one last look at the picture. “Hard to say. You know how all them old white men look alike. Maybe I should come with you to check this dude out in person.”
“No!” I shook my head. “Not a good idea.”
“You think I can’t do this bounty hunter shit?”
Lula hadn’t yet embarked on the language makeover.
“Well, of course you can do it,” I said. “It’s just that this situation is sort of…delicate.”
“Hell,” she said, stuffing herself into her jacket. “I can delicate your ass off.”
“Yes, but…”
“Anyway, you might need some help here. Suppose he don’t want to come peaceful. You might need a big, full- figure woman like me to do some persuading.”
Lula and I had crossed paths while I was on my first felon hunt. She’d been a street-walker, and I’d been street-stupid. I’d unwittingly involved her in the case I was working on, and as a result, one morning I found her battered and bloody on my fire escape.
Lula credited me with saving her life, and I blamed myself for endangering it. I was in favor of wiping the slate clean, but Lula formed a sort of attachment to me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was hero worship. It was more like one of those Chinese things where if you save a person’s life they belong to you…even if you don’t want them.
“We’re not doing any persuading,” I said. “This is Uncle Mo. He sells candy to kids.”
Lula had her pocketbook looped over her arm. “I can dig it,” she said, following me out the door. “You still driving that old Buick?”
“Yeah. My Lotus is in the shop.”
Actually, my Lotus was in my dreams. A couple months ago my Jeep got stolen, and my mother, in a burst of misguided good intentions, strong-armed me into the driver’s seat of my uncle Sandor’s ’53 Buick. Strained finances and lack of backbone had me still peering over the mile-long powder-blue hood, wondering at the terrible acts I must have committed to deserve such a car.
A gust of wind rattled the Fiorello’s Deli sign next to Vinnie’s office. I pulled my collar up and searched in my pocket for gloves.
“At least the Buick’s in good shape,” I told Lula. “That’s what counts, right?”
“Hunh,” Lula said. “Only people who don’t have a cool car say things like that. How about the radio. It got a bad radio? It got Dolby?”
“No Dolby.”
“Hold on,” she said. “You don’t expect me to ride around with no Dolby. I need some hot music to get me in the mood to bust ass.”
I unlocked the doors to the Buick. “
“Sure,” Lula said, settling herself in, giving a disgusted glare to the radio. “I know that.”
I drove one block down Hamilton and turned left onto Rose into the burg. There was little to brighten the neighborhood in January. The blinking twinkle lights and red plastic Santas of Christmas were packed away, and spring was still far in the future. Hydrangea bushes were nothing more than mean brown sticks, lawns were frost- robbed of color and streets were empty of kids, cats, car washers and blaring radios. Windows and doors were shut tight against the cold and gloom.
Even Uncle Mo’s felt sterile and unwelcoming as I slowed to a stop in front of the store.
Lula squinted through my side window. “I don’t want to rain on your parade,” she said, “but I think this sucker’s closed.”
I parked at the curb. “That’s impossible. Uncle Mo never closes. Uncle Mo hasn’t been closed a day since he opened in nineteen fifty-eight.”
“Well guess what? I’m telling you he’s closed now.”
I hopped out of Big Blue and walked to Mo’s door and looked inside. No lights were on, and Uncle Mo was nowhere to be seen. I tried the door. Locked. I knocked on the door good and loud. Nothing. Damn.
“He must be sick,” I said to Lula.
The candy store sat on a corner, facing Ferris Street, with the side of the store running down King. A long line of neat duplexes stretched the length of Ferris, pushing their way to the heart of the burg. King, on the other hand, had fallen on hard times, with most of its duplexes converted to multiple families. The tidy white sheers and starched Martha Washington curtains of the burg weren’t in evidence on King. Privacy on King came by way of tacked-up sheets and tattered shades, and from an unpleasant sense that this was no longer a desired community.
“Some scary old lady’s looking at us out of the window of that house next door,” Lula said.
I looked one house down on Ferris and shivered. “That’s Mrs. Steeger. She was my teacher when I was in the third grade.”
“Bet that was fun.”
