Smokin' Seventeen

“That’s better,” Lula said. “Now it just looks like a tumor.”

Lovely.

“As far as tumors go, it’s not a real big tumor,” Lula said. “It’s one of them starter tumors.”

“Forget the tumor!” I told her.

“It’s hard to forget when you gotta stare at it,” Lula said. “Now that I know it’s there I can’t see anything else. It’s like Rudolph with the red nose.”

I looked at Connie. “How bad is it?”

“It’s a big pimple.”

“It’s just a big pimple,” I said to Lula.

Lula thought for a beat. “Maybe it would help if you had bangs to cover it up.”

“But I don’t have bangs,” I said. “I’ve never had bangs.”

“Yeah, but you could,” Lula said.

I dropped the concealer into my bag and pulled out Merlin Brown’s file. Vinnie had written bond for Brown two years ago without a problem. The charge had been shoplifting, and Brown had done some minor time for it. Hard to know what the issue was now that he’d been brought in for armed robbery. Either Brown simply forgot his court date, or else he wasn’t excited about the idea of doing more time. I tapped his number into my cell phone and waited. A man picked up on the third ring, and I hung up.

“He’s home,” I said to Lula. “Let’s roll.”

SEVEN

MERLIN BROWN LIVED in a low-rent apartment complex that made my cheapskate apartment building look good. The buildings were red brick, three stories tall, and utterly without adornment unless you counted the spray-painted graffiti. No balconies, no fancy front doors, seventies aluminum windows, no landscaping. They sat perched on hard-packed dirt in no-man’s-land between the junkyard and the gutted lead pipe factory on upper Stark Street.

A discarded refrigerator and sad-sack couch had been left by the dumpster at the end of the parking lot. Four men sat on the couch, chugging from bottles wrapped in brown paper bags. The guy on the end weighed somewhere in the vicinity of three hundred pounds and the whole couch sloped in his direction.

“Maybe I should be more careful what I eat,” Lula said. “I don’t mind being a big woman, but I don’t want to get to be a huge woman. I don’t want no couch slopin’ in my direction.”

Here’s the thing I’ve noticed about Lula. I’ve seen her when she’s on a healthy eating plan, holding her calories down, I’ve seen her on ridiculous fad diets, and I’ve seen her when she eats everything in sight. And so far as I can tell, her weight never changes.

“He’s in Building B,” I told Lula. “Third floor. Apartment three-oh-seven.”

“Who we gonna be? Pizza delivery? Census taker? Local ho?”

“I thought I’d just ring his bell and see what happens.”

“He might be happy to see you. Going to jail might be a treat after living here.”

We entered a small lobby with a bank of mailboxes on one side and an elevator on the other. There was a sign next to the elevator that said it was out of service. The sign looked like it had been up there for a long time. Lula pushed the elevator button anyway, and we waited a couple minutes. Eventually we heard groaning and creaking and the elevator doors opened. We looked into the dark interior of the elevator and decided to take the stairs.

“This isn’t so bad,” Lula said when we got to the third floor. “So far I haven’t seen any rats or blood splatter. No alligators, either. Mostly from what I can tell the problem is this place don’t have amenities, aside from the recreational area by the dumpster.”

We walked halfway down the hall and stood outside unit 307, listening at the door. A television was droning inside the apartment.

“Probably he’s got a gun,” Lula said, “being that he’s wanted for armed robbery. I guess if I’m turning into a vampire I don’t have to worry so much about getting shot, so maybe I should be the one to go through the door first.”

“Okay. You can go first.”

“But then suppose I’m not turning into a vampire? There might not have been any vampire venom transferred since I just got a hickey.”

“No problem. I’ve got it.”

I knocked on the door, and Lula stood to one side. The door opened, and Merlin looked out at us.

“What?” Merlin said.

Merlin Brown was 6?2? and built like a linebacker for Dallas. His skin was a shade past Lula’s, he had a lightning bolt carved into his forehead, two gold teeth in the front of his mouth, and he’d answered the door buck- naked. His Mr. Happy was hanging at half-mast and was about the size of a wanger on a champion stud Clydesdale.

Lula looked Merlin up and down. “Mother of God!”

“B-b-bond engorgement,” I said. I blew out some air and corrected myself. “Bond enforcement.”

“I’m busy,” Brown said.

That was pretty much stating the obvious.

“You got a lady friend here?” Lula asked him.

“Nope.”