help it. He's just a baby horse and he doesn't know any better.'
'Blackie's a new horse, isn't he?' Grandma asked.
'Yep. He came to play with me just today,' Mary Alice said.
'It was nice of you to clean it up,' Grandma said.
'Next time you should put his nose in it,' Kloughn said. 'I heard that works sometimes.'
Valerie impatiently looked around the table. She folded her hands and bowed her head. 'Thank God for this food,' Valerie said. And she dug in.
We all crossed ourselves, mumbled thank God, and started passing dishes.
There was a rap on the front door, the door opened, and Joe strolled in. 'Is there room for me?' he asked. My mother beamed. 'Of course,' she said. 'There's always room for you. I set an extra plate just in case you could make it.'
There was a time when my mother warned me about Joe. Stay away from the Morelli boys, my mother would say. They can't be trusted. They're all sex fiends. And no Morelli man will ever amount to anything. A while back my mother had decided Joe was the exception to the rule and that somehow, in spite of genetic disadvantage, he'd actually managed to grow up. He was financially and professionally stable. And he could be trusted. Okay, so he was still a sex fiend, but at least he was a monogamous sex fiend. And most important, my mother had come to think that Joe was her best, and possibly only, shot at getting me off the streets and respectably married.
Grandma shoveled a wedge of lasagna onto her plate. 'I've got to get the facts straight on the shooting,' she said, 'Mitchell Farber just got laid out and Mabel and me are going to his viewing at Stiva's funeral parlor right after dinner, and people are gonna be on me like white on rice.'
'There's not much to tell,' I said. 'Lula and I stopped for lunch and the man eating across from me was shot. No one knows why, but it's not a great neighborhood. It was probably just one of those things.'
'One of those things!' my mother said. 'Accidentally dinging your car door with a shopping cart is one of those things, Having someone shot right in front of you is not one of those things. Why were you in such a bad neighborhood? Can't you find a decent place to have lunch? What were you thinking?'
'I bet there's more to it than that,' Grandma said. 'I bet you were after a bad guy. Were you packin' heat?'
'No. I wasn't armed. I was just having lunch.'
'You aren't giving me a lot to work with here,' Grandma said.
Kloughn turned to Morelli. 'Were you there?'
'Yep.'
'Boy, it must be something to be a cop. You get to do all lands of cool stuff. And you're always in the middle of everything. Right there where the action is.'
Joe forked off a piece of lasagna.
'So what do you think about Stephanie being there? I mean, she was sitting right across from this guy, right? How far away? Two feet? Three feet?'
Morelli sent me a sideways glance and then looked back at Kloughn. 'Three feet.'
'And you're not freaked? If it was me, I'd be freaked. But hey, I guess that's the way it is with cops and bounty hunters. Always in the middle of the shooting.'
'I'm never in the middle of the shooting,' Joe said. 'I'm plainclothes. I investigate. The only time my life is in danger is when I'm with Stephanie.'
'How about last week?' Grandma asked. 'I heard from Loretta Beeber that you were almost killed in some big shoot-out. Loretta said you had to jump out of Terry Gilman's second-story bedroom window.'
I swiveled in my seat and faced Joe and he froze with his fork halfway to his mouth. There'd been rumors about Joe and Terry Gilman all through high school. Not that a rumor linking Morelli to a woman was unusual. But Gilman was different. She was a cool blonde with ties to the Mob and an ongoing relationship with Morelli. Morelli swore the relationship was professional and I believed him. That isn't to say that I liked it. It bore a disturbing parallel to my relationship with Ranger. And I knew that as hard as I tried to ignore the chemistry between Ranger and me, it still simmered below the surface.
I narrowed my eyes just a tiny bit and leaned forward, invading Morelli's space. 'You jumped out of Terry Gilman's window?'
'I told you.'
'You didn't tell me. I would have remembered.'
'It was the day you wanted to go out for pizza and I said I had to work.'
'And?'
'And that was it. I told you I had to work. Can we discuss this later?'
'I wouldn't put up with that,' Valerie said, working the lasagna around in her mouth, grabbing a meat-and- cheese roll-up from the antipasto tray. 'I ever get married again, I want full disclosure. I don't want any of this 'I have to work, honey' baloney. I want all the answers up front, in detail. You don't keep your eyes open and next thing your husband's in the coat closet with the baby-sitter.'
Unfortunately, Valerie was speaking from firsthand experience.
'I've never jumped out of a window,' Kloughn said. 'I thought people just did that in the movies. You're the first person I've ever met who jumped out of a window,' he said to Morelli. 'And a bedroom window, too. Did you have your clothes on?'
'Yeah,' Morelli said. 'I had my clothes on.'
