in, the door was locked. At first it sounded like he had a key, but the door wouldn’t open. He fiddled with it for a couple minutes, and the door clicked open. Did you find anything on him that he could have used to pick a lock?”
“No.”
“Did you find a key to the store on him?”
“No.”
I raised my eyebrows.
Morelli raised his eyebrows.
“Either someone needed a set of picks, or else someone lifted a key that doesn’t work especially well,” I said. “Or maybe someone opened the door with a sticky key, let Ronald Anders into the store, disappeared for a few minutes, returned and killed Anders.”
Morelli and I sighed. The logical person to have a sticky key would be Uncle Mo. And it wasn’t so far-fetched that Mo would know Anders in light of the fact that Mo had been seen on Stark Street from time to time. Maybe this was drug related. Maybe Mo was buying. Hell, maybe Mo was selling. After perusing Mo’s bedtime books I was willing to believe almost anything about him.
“You have anybody talking to the kids who hang at the store?” I asked Morelli. “When you were working vice did you hear anything about drugs coming out of Mo’s?”
“Just the opposite,” Morelli said. “Mo’s was a safe zone. Mo was militant against dope. Everyone knew.”
I had another idea. “How militant?” I asked. “Militant enough to kill a dealer?”
Morelli looked at me with his unreadable cop face.
“That would be strange,” I said. “Lovable, out-of-shape ice cream guy turns killer. Revenge of the small businessman.”
Anders was shot in the back. He’d been carrying a gun, but the gun hadn’t been touched. The gun had been found when the police rolled the body. The gun had been stuffed into the waistband of Anders’s double-pleated rapper slacks. Whoever got nailed for the murder would have a hard time pleading self-defense.
“Is that it?” I asked Morelli.
“For now.”
Morelli was wearing jeans, boots and a long-sleeved driver’s shirt with the sleeves pushed up. He had his service pistol clipped to his belt. He grabbed his khaki jacket from one of the wall hooks in the entrance hall and shrugged into it.
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take any vacations in foreign countries for a couple days,” he said.
“Gee, and I have tickets to Monaco.”
He gave me a chuck under my chin, smiled and left.
I stared at the closed front door for a moment. A chuck under the chin. What was that? In the past, Morelli had tried to stick his tongue down my throat. Or at the very least he’d make a lewd suggestion. I was suspicious of a chuck under the chin. Now that I thought about it, he’d been a perfect gentleman when he’d brought the pizza. And what about last night? He’d left without so much as a handshake.
I checked myself out in the hall mirror. My hair was still squashed under the knit cap. Not real sexy, but that had never slowed Morelli down before. I pulled the cap off and my hair sprang out. Eek. Good thing I’d left the cap on.
I went back to the kitchen and dialed Ranger.
“Yo,” Ranger said.
“Anyone bragging about killing Ronald Anders?”
“No one’s bragging about anything these days. The streets are quiet.”
“Turf war?”
“Don’t know. A couple players are missing. A couple dopers are dead. Got some hot shit going around killing people.”
“ODs?”
“That’s the way the death certificates read.”
“You think something different?”
“Feels dark, babe.”
I disconnected and a minute later the phone rang.
“We got a situation on our hands,” Lula said.
“A situation?”
“Just got a call from Jackie, and I can’t make any sense of what she’s saying. Something about how her old man jacked her over again.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s at the FancyAss Apartments. She’s been there day and night, and she sounds flipped out. I told her to wait right where she was, and we’d come fast as we could.”
Fifteen minutes later I pulled into the RiverEdge lot. The sky was black and dense above evenly spaced pools of artificial light thrown by the overhead halogen lamps. Jackie had parked her Chrysler on the fringe of one of those
