Fearless Fourteen - Janet Evanovich [65]
We glanced at the kitchen and moved into the hall. It was a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment, and the bedroom door was open. Lula and I looked through the open door and froze. There was a man on the floor, toes up, eyes open, bullet hole in the middle of his head. Dead.
“I hate when we find dead people,” Lula said. “Dead people give me the heebie-jeebies. I’m not doing this no more if we keep finding dead people. And I’m getting out of here. I’m not staying in no room with a guy with a hole in his head.”
Don’t panic, I told myself. Take it one step at a time. I followed Lula back to the living room, did some deep breathing, and punched Morelli’s number into my cell phone.
“Talk,” Morelli said.
“I found another dead guy.”
“You want to run that by me again?”
“Lula and I decided we’d talk to Stanley Zero, so we knocked on his door, and the door swung open, and we found a dead guy in the bedroom.”
There was a moment of silence, and I knew Morelli was either popping Rolaids or counting to ten. Probably both. “The door swung open when you touched it,” he finally said.
“Yeah.” No need to go into details on how the door got unlocked, right? I mean, he didn’t ask how it got unlocked.
“Where are you now?”
“In the living room,” I told him.
“Anything else I need to know before I call this in?”
“Nope. That’s the whole enchilada.”
I disconnected and noticed Lula had her keys in her hand.
“Are you going somewhere?” I asked Lula.
“I figure you don’t need me anymore, so I thought I’d go home. I got things to do. I gotta think about a honeymoon. And this place is gonna be swarming with cops, and I hate cops. Except for Morelli. Morelli is fine.”
“If you leave, I have no way to get home.”
“What about Morelli? What about Ranger? What about calling a cab?”
“What about waiting in your car in the parking lot?” I said to her.
“I guess I could do that.”
She hotfooted it out of the apartment, and I thought there was a twenty percent chance she’d be in the lot when I was ready to go home. Not that Lula was unreliable, more that her cop phobia overrode her best intentions.
I figured I had five to ten minutes before the first cop showed up, so I told myself to get over the dead guy and think about rescuing Loretta. I did a quick run through the kitchen, being careful not to leave prints. I found leftover fast-food chicken and expired milk in the refrigerator, and dots of blue mold on the bread that was sitting on the counter. Not enough mold to slow down a big, tough construction guy from Trenton. No scraps of paper lying around with a phone number or address.
I walked back into the bedroom, and as best I could, I avoided looking at the body. A pair of beat-up CAT boots had been kicked off beside the bed, and a framed photograph of a large powerboat was propped on the dresser. I’d found the third partner’s apartment. And probably the guy on the floor was the third partner, since he was in socks. I guess I could have seen if the boots fit, but I didn’t want to know who he was that bad. Let the police figure it out.
There were clothes all over the place. Hard to tell if the apartment had been tossed, since Zero wasn’t the world’s best housekeeper. I went through all pockets, omitting the ones attached to the dead guy, and I looked through drawers. I did a fast bathroom check.
I looked out the bedroom window and saw the first police car angle to a stop in the lot. He’d come in without a siren, probably at Morelli’s suggestion. A second squad car followed. Eddie Gazarra got out of the second squad car. That was a relief. We’d grown up together and he’d married my cousin, Shirley the Whiner. Eddie wouldn’t come at me with a suspicious, hostile attitude, and that would make my life much more pleasant.
I stepped out of the apartment and waited in the hall. I got an eye roll from Gazarra when he walked out of the elevator, and then concern.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yes. The door was open when I got here. He was dead on the floor in the bedroom. No one else was here. I assume it’s Stanley Zero, but I don’t