Fearless Fourteen - Janet Evanovich [1]
Loretta is a half a head shorter than me. She has curly black hair and a body kept toned by hefting serving trays for catered affairs at the firehouse. She hasn’t changed much since high school. A few crinkle lines around her eyes. A little harder set to her mouth. She’s Italian-American and related to half the Burg, including my off-and-on boyfriend, Joe Morelli.
“This was your first offense. And you didn’t shoot anyone. Probably you’ll get off with a hand-slap,” I told Loretta.
“I had my period,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking right.”
Loretta lives in a rented row house on the edge of the Burg. She has two bedrooms, one bath, a scrubbed-clean, crackerbox kitchen, and a living room filled with secondhand furniture. Hard to make ends meet when you’re a single mother without a high school diploma.
The back door swung open and my sidekick, Lula, stuck her head in. “What’s going on in here? I’m tired of waiting in the car. I thought this was gonna be a quick pickup, and then we were going for breakfast.”
Lula is a former ’ho, turned bonds office file clerk and wheelman. She’s a plus-size black woman who likes to squash herself into too small clothes featuring animal print and spandex. Lula’s cup runneth over from head to toe.
“Loretta is having a bad morning,” I said.
Lula checked Loretta out. “I can see that. She’s still in her nightie.”
“Notice anything else?” I asked Lula.
“You mean like she’s tryin’ to style her hair with a Smith & Wesson?”
“I don’t want to go to jail,” Loretta said.
“It’s not so bad,” Lula told her. “If you can get them to send you to the workhouse, you’ll get dental.”
“I’m a disgrace,” Loretta said.
Lula shifted her weight on her spike-heeled Manolo knock-offs. “You be more of a disgrace if you pull that trigger. You’ll have a big hole in your head, and your mother won’t be able to have an open-casket viewing. And who’s going to clean up the mess it’ll make in your kitchen?”
“I have an insurance policy,” Loretta said. “If I kill myself, my son, Mario, will be able to manage until he can get a job. If I go to jail, he’ll be on his own without any money.”
“Insurance policies don’t pay out on suicides,” Lula said.
“Oh crap! Is that true?” Loretta asked me.
“Yeah. Anyway, I don’t know why you’re worried about that. You have a big family. Someone will take care of Mario.”
“It’s not that easy. My mother is in rehab from when she had the stroke. She can’t take him. And my brother, Dom, can’t take him. He just got out of jail three days ago. He’s on probation.”
“What about your sister?”
“My sister’s got her hands full with her own kids. Her rat turd husband left her for some pre-puberty lap dancer.”
“There must be someone who can baby-sit for you,” Lula said to Loretta.
“Everyone’s got their own thing going. And I don’t want to leave Mario with just anybody. He’s very sensitive . . . and artistic.”
I counted back and placed her kid in his early teens. Loretta had never married, and so far as I know, she’d never fingered a father for him.
“Maybe you could take him,” Loretta said to me.
“What? No. No, no, no, no.”
“Just until I can make bail. And then I’ll try to find someone more permanent.”
“If I take you in now, Vinnie can bond you out right away.”
“Yeah, but if something goes wrong, I need someone to pick Mario up after school.”
“What can go wrong?”
“I don’t know. A mother worries about these things. Promise you’ll pick him up if I’m still in jail. He gets out at two-thirty.”
“She’ll do it,” Lula said to Loretta. “Just put the gun down and go get dressed so we can get this over and done. I need coffee. I need one of those extra-greasy breakfast sandwiches. I gotta clog my arteries on account of otherwise the blood rushes around too fast and I might get a dizzy spell.”
_______
LULA WAS SPRAWLED on the brown Naugahyde couch hugging the wall in the bonds office, and Vinnie’s office manager, Connie Rosolli, was at her desk. Connie and the desk had been strategically placed in front of Vinnie’s inner-office door with the hope it would discourage pissed-off pimps, bookies, and