Hardcore Twenty-Four by Janet Evanovich Page A

the box on the floor just inside the door, locked up, and went back to my car.
    â€œHow’d that go?” Lula asked.
    â€œOkay. Ethel was on the table. Nothing looked out of the ordinary.”
    I drove to the building Slick burned down and made a slow pass around the block. The crime scene tape had been taken down, and it looked like the neighborhood had normalized. There were some street people sitting out in the morning sun. I glanced at Lula and decided she would have more luck talking to the street people than I would. She sort of looked like one of them today.
    â€œI’m going to drop you off,” I told Lula. “Ask the locals about Slick. I’ll continue to drive and explore the area, and I’ll pick you up in a half hour.”
    â€œNo problemo. Now that I’m all sugared up I’m ready to go. Lula is my name, and undercover is my game.”
    I gave her double thumbs-up and rolled away. I methodically worked a nine-block grid, driving the streets. I looked for Slick, and I looked for abandoned buildings.
    Lula was waiting on the corner for me when I circled back to her.
    â€œThis was an unsatisfying experience,” she said. “Those street people are rude. They said I was a disgrace to street people on account of I have a coffee stain.”
    â€œDid you get any information on Slick?”
    â€œYeah. He stops around to get lunch sometimes. No one’s seen him lately. They all think he’s a genius. Like he has ideas about how to be a billionaire. One of them was to be a drug lord. So how did that turn out?”
    â€œYou have a new stain on your shirt.”
    Lula looked down at herself. “One of the volunteers gave me some soup. It was in a Styrofoam cup with a plastic spoon, and it wasn’t all that easy to get at.”
    â€œNot like eating a donut.”
    â€œNot nearly. Did you get anything on your drive-around?”
    â€œNo. Not a lot of people out at this time of the morning, and I didn’t see any vacant buildings that could be used to cook drugs.”
    â€œFrom what I heard today, Slick probably gave up on the drug empire. Sounded to me like he has a short attention span. Like he jumps around from one scheme to the next.”
    â€œDo we have a clue about his new scheme?”
    â€œThey said he was talking about being a movie star. And he was also thinking about going to Tuscany and starting a vineyard.”
    â€œOh boy.”
    â€œYeah, it’s a little out there, but you gotta respect a man who dreams big.”
    â€œYou smell like minestrone,” I said to Lula.
    â€œIt’s my shirt. The minestrone was the homeless soup of the day. I wouldn’t mind a short stop at my apartment, so I could beautify myself.”
    I thought that was an excellent idea, and there was a chance that Morelli would still be at the crime scene.
    Lula lived in a lavender and pink two-story frame house that had been converted into four apartments. The owner of the house lived on the ground floor. Lula lived on the second floor. And a crazy woman lived in the attic. The street was narrowand lined with trees. The residents were ethnically mixed and uniformly straddling the poverty line. It was a nice street that was too close to some very bad, gang-infested streets.
    I left downtown, drove to Lula’s neighborhood, and took the alley that ran past the back of Lula’s apartment. Lula had a dedicated parking spot that I was able to slide into. The rest of the street and alley space was clogged with police vehicles, satellite TV trucks, and clumps of curious bystanders. Some of the bystanders were dressed like zombies.
    Lula disappeared inside her house, and I went in search of Morelli. I found him on the sidewalk, in front of the CSI van, standing back on his heels, looking lost in thought.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” I asked him.
    â€œThis is turning into a freak show.”
    â€œAre you still in charge?”
    â€œNo