High Five

3 

I LEFT THE pork roll factory's parking lot and headed across town. It was almost five and government workers were clogging the roads. That was one of the many good things about Trenton. If you needed to practice Italian hand signals, there was no shortage of deserving bureaucrats.

I made a fast stop back at my apartment for some last-minute beautifying. I added an extra layer of mascara, fluffed my hair, and headed out.

Morelli was at the bar when I got to Pino's. He had his back to me, and he was lost in thought, elbows on the bar, head bent over his beer. He wore jeans and running shoes and a green plaid flannel shirt unbuttoned over a Gold's Gym T-shirt. A woman at the opposite end of the bar was watching him in the behind-the-bar mirror. Women did that now. They watched and wondered. When he was younger and his features were softer, women did more than watch. When he was younger, mothers statewide warned their daughters about Joe Morelli. And when he was younger, daughters statewide didn't give a darn what their mothers told them. Morelli's features were more angular these days. His eyes were less inviting to strangers. Women included. So women watched and wondered what it would be like to be with Morelli.

I knew, of course, what it was like to be with Morelli. Morelli was magic.

I took the stool next to him and waved a "beer, please" signal to the bartender.

Morelli gave me an appraising look, his eyes dilated black in the dim bar light. "Business suit and heels," he said. "That means you've either been to a wake, a job interview, or you tried to trick some nice old lady out of information she shouldn't be giving you."

"Door number three."

"Let me guess . . . this has to do with your uncle Fred."

"Bingo,"

"Having any luck?"

"Hard to say. Did you know Fred fooled around? He had a girlfriend."

Morelli grinned. "Fred Shutz? Hell, that's encouraging."

I rolled my eyes.

He took our beer glasses off the bar and motioned to the area set aside for tables. "If I was Mabel I'd be happy Fred was going elsewhere," he said. "I don't think Fred looks like a lot of fun."

"Especially since he collects pictures of dismembered bodies."

"I gave the pictures to Arnie. He didn't look happy. I think he was hoping Fred would turn up hitching a ride down Klockner Boulevard."

"Is Arnie going to do anything on this?"

"He'll probably go back and talk to Mabel some more. Run the photos through the system to see what comes up."

"Did you already run them through?"

"Yeah. And I didn't get anything."

There was nothing fancy about Pino's. At certain times of the day the bar was filled with cops unwinding after their shift. And at other times of the day the tables set aside for diners were filled with hungry Burg families. In between those times, Pino's was home to a few regular drunks, and the kitchen was taken over by cockroaches as big as barn cats. I ate at Pino's in spite of the roach rumor because Anthony Pino made the best pizza in Trenton. Maybe in all of Jersey.

Morelli gave his order and tipped back in his chair. "How friendly are you feeling toward me?"

"What'd you have in mind?"

"A date."

"I thought this was a date."

"No. This is dinner, so I can ask you about the date."

I sipped at my beer. "Must be some date."

"It's a wedding."

I sat up straighter in my chair. "It isn't my wedding, is it?"

"Not unless there's something going on in your life that I don't know about."

I blew out a sigh of relief. "Wow. For a minute there I was worried."

Morelli looked annoyed. "You mean if I asked you to marry me, that's the reaction I'd get?"

"Well, yeah."

"I thought you wanted to get married. I thought that was why we stopped sleeping together . . . because you didn't want sex without marriage."

I leaned forward on the table and cocked a single eyebrow at him. "Do you want to get married?"

"No, I don't want to get married. We've been all through this."

"Then my reaction doesn't matter, does it?"

"Jesus," Morelli said. "I need another beer."

"So what's with the wedding?"

"My cousin Julie's getting married on Saturday, and I need a date."

"You're giving me four days' notice to go to a wedding? I can't be ready for a wedding in four days. I need a new dress and shoes. I need a beauty parlor appointment. How am I going to do all this with four days' notice?"

"Okay, fuck it, we won't go," Morelli said.

"I guess I could do without the beauty parlor, but I definitely need new shoes."

"Heels," Morelli said. "High and spiky."

I fiddled with my beer glass. "I wasn't your last choice, was I?"

"You're my only choice. If my mother hadn't called this morning I wouldn't have remembered the wedding at all. This case I'm on is getting to me."

"Want to talk about it?"

"That's the last thing I want to do."

"How about Uncle Fred, want to talk about him some more?"

"The playboy."

"Yeah. I don't understand how he could just disappear."

"People disappear all the time," Morelli said. "They get on a bus and start life over. Or they jump off a bridge and float out with the tide. Sometimes people help them disappear."

"This is a man in his seventies who was too cheap to buy a bus ticket and would have had to walk miles to find a bridge. He left his cleaning in the car. He disappeared in the middle of running errands."

We both momentarily fell silent while our pizza was placed on the table.

"He'd just come from the bank," Morelli said when we were alone. "He was an old man. An easy mark. Someone could have driven up to him and forced him into their car."

"There were no signs of struggle."

"That doesn't mean one didn't take place."

I chewed on that while I ate my pizza. I'd had the same thought, and I didn't like it.

I told Morelli about my conversation with Winnie Black.

"She know anything about the pictures?"

"No."

"One other thing," Morelli said. "I wanted to tell you about Benito Ramirez."

I looked up from the pizza. Benito Ramirez was a heavyweight professional boxer from Trenton. He liked to punish people and didn't limit the punishing to inside the ring. He liked to beat up on women. Liked to hear them beg while he inflicted his own brand of sick torture. And in fact, I knew some of that torture had ended in death, but there'd always been camp followers who'd gotten posthumous credit for the worst of Ramirez's crimes. He'd been involved in my very first case as a bounty hunter, and I'd been instrumental in putting him behind bars. His incarceration hadn't come soon enough for Lula. Ramirez had almost killed her. He'd raped her and beat her and cut her in terrible places. And then he'd left her naked, bloody body on my fire escape for me to find.

"What about Ramirez?" I asked Morelli.

"He's out."

"Out where?"

"Out of jail."

"What? What do you mean, he's out of jail? He almost killed Lula. And he was involved in a whole bunch of other murders." Not to mention that he'd stalked and terrorized me.

"He's released on parole, doing community service, and getting psychiatric counseling." Morelli paused to pull off another piece of pizza. "He had a real good lawyer."

Morelli had said this very matter of fact, but I knew he didn't feel matter of fact. He'd put on his cop face. The one that shut out emotion. The one with the hard eyes that gave nothing away.

I made a display of eating. Like I wasn't too bothered by this news either. When in fact, nausea was rolling through my stomach. "When did this happen?" I asked Morelli.

"Yesterday."

"And he's in town?"

"Just like always. Working out in the gym on Stark."

A big man, Mrs. Bestler had said. African-American. Polite. Prowling in my hall. Sweet Jesus, it might have been Ramirez.