“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 o