Lula was wearing a hot-pink down ski jacket and white fake-fur knee-high boots. She pulled the jacket collar up around her neck and glanced up at Mo’s second-story back porch. “We would of found his car. And if he was dead he would of started to smell by now.”
That’s what I thought, too.
“Course, he could have locked himself in the ice cream freezer,” Lula said. “Then he wouldn’t smell on account of he’d be frozen. Probably that didn’t happen though because Mo would have had to take the ice cream out before he could fit himself in, and we already looked in the store window, and we didn’t see a lot of ice cream cartons sitting around melting themselves into next year. Of course, Mo could have eaten all the ice cream first.”
Mo’s garage was wood and shingle with an old-fashioned double wood door that swung open on hinges and had been left ajar. The garage accessed from the alley, but it had a side door toward the rear that led to a short cement sidewalk running to the back of the store.
The interior of the garage was dark and musty, the walls lined with boxes of Tastee Straws, napkins, cleanser, Drygas, Del Monte fruit cup, Hershey’s syrup and 10W40 motor oil. Newspapers were stacked in the corner, awaiting recycling.
Mo was a popular person and presumably a trusting soul, but leaving his garage doors open when his garage was filled with store supplies seemed like an excessive burden on human nature. Possibilities were that he left in a hurry and was too distracted to think about the door. Or perhaps he wasn’t planning to return. Or maybe he’d been forced to leave, and his abductors had other things on their minds besides garage doors.
Of all the possibilities I liked the last one the least.
I pulled a flashlight out of my pocketbook and gave it to Lula with instructions to search the garage for a house key.
“I’m like a bloodhound on a scent when it comes to house keys,” Lula said. “Don’t you worry about that house key. It’s as good as found.”
Mrs. Steeger glared at us from the window next door. I smiled and waved, and she stepped back. Most likely en route to the telephone to call the cops on me again.
There was a small yard stuck between the store and the garage, and there were no signs of recreational use of the yard. No swing sets, grills, rusting lawn chairs. Only the sidewalk broke the scrubby grass and hard-packed dirt. I followed the sidewalk to the store’s back entry and looked in the trash cans lining the brick wall. All cans were full, garbage neatly bagged in plastic sacks. Some empty cardboard cartons had been stacked beside the garbage cans. I toed through the area around the cans and the boxes, looking for some sign of a hidden key. I found nothing. I felt over the doorjamb on the back door that led to the candy store. I walked up the stairs and ran my hand under the railing on the small back porch. I knocked on the door one more time and looked in the window.
Lula emerged from the garage and crossed the yard. She climbed the stairs and proudly handed me a key.
“Am I good, or what?” she said.
CHAPTER 2
I plunged the key into the Yale lock on Mo’s door, and the door opened.
“Mo?” I yelled.
No answer.
Lula and I looked around. No cops. No kids. No nosy neighbors. Our eyes met, and we silently slid into the apartment. I did a fast walk-through, noting that Mo wasn’t dead in the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen or living room. There was food in the refrigerator and clothes in his bedroom closet.
The apartment was clean and tidy. He didn’t have an answering machine, so I couldn’t snoop on his messages. I riffled through drawers but didn’t find an address book. There were no hastily scribbled notes left lying around, detailing plane reservations or hotel accommodations. No brochures advertising Disney World.
I was about to trip downstairs and search the store when Carl Costanza appeared on the back porch. Carl was one of my favorite cops. We’d done Communion together, among other things.
“I should have known,” Carl said, standing flat-footed, gravity pulling hard on his gun and utility belt. “I should have known when the call came in that it would be you.”
“I gotta go,” Lula said, easing past Carl, tiptoeing down the stairs. “I can see you two want to have a conversation. Wouldn’t want to be an interference.”
“Lula,” I shouted, “don’t you dare leave without me!”
Lula was already rounding the corner of the building. “I might even be coming down with a cold, and I wouldn’t want to pass that on to you-all.”
“Well,” Carl said, “want to tell me about this?”
“You mean about Lula and me being in Uncle Mo’s apartment?”
Carl grimaced. “You’re going to make up some ridiculous story, aren’t you?”
“Mo’s FTA. I came here looking for him, and his door was wide open. Must have been the wind.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And then Lula and I got worried. What if Mo was injured? Like maybe he’d fallen in the bathroom and hit his head and was unconscious.”
Carl held his hands up. “Stop. I don’t want to hear any more. Are you finished with your search?”
“Yes.”
“Did you find Mo unconscious on the bathroom floor?”
“No.”
