Page 99 of Now or Never

“Not yet.”

“Are you going into Zoran’s house?”

“Jimmy’s working on it. We have your statement puttingZoran at the crime, so the search warrant should go through. Right now it’s sitting on a desk, waiting its turn.”

“It would be easier and faster if someone prowled through his garbageoutsidethe house and found his hairbrush or whatever,” I said.

“There was no garbage outside his house,” Morelli said. “We looked.”

“Yes, but there might be later today.”

“I didn’t hear you say that.”

Bob did everything he had to do, and we returned to Morelli’s house. We went into the kitchen and stared into his refrigerator.

“Omigod,” I said. “Is that your mom’s lasagna?”

“Yeah, looks like it. She comes over and leaves stuff when I’m at work.”

Morelli had his mom, and I had Herbert.

“Your mom makes the world’s best lasagna,” I said. “I’m voting on lasagna for lunch.”

We pulled the lasagna out along with extra red sauce and grated cheese. We plated it, nuked it, and took it to Morelli’s kitchen table. His mom had also brought salad greens, but we left them for another day.

“How’s it going with the sorting your life out?” Morelli asked me.

I forked in some lasagna. “Honestly, I haven’t had time to think about it. It would help if you guys could get Zoran off the street.”

“We’re working on it.”

A half hour later I was back at the office. I was still in the sparkly tank top, but Lula had stopped off at her apartment and exchanged my T-shirt for a silky poison-green shirt with a low V-neck.

“You can keep the tank top,” Lula said, handing me my T-shirt.“You finally got a gun with bullets in it, now you need to get some glam in your wardrobe.”

“Thanks. This will be my first step toward more glam.”

“We were watching the new Hoodie video when you walked in,” Lula said. “It’s a good one. Hoodie hijacked a soft-serve truck. Ice cream sundaes for everyone. And then there was a short video of him breakdancing. It wasn’t terrible but it wasn’t good, either. And it had to be hard on account of he had one of those whole-head rubber masks on.”

I moved behind Connie, and she ran the videos for me. The ice cream truck was wild. Everyone was laughing and eating ridiculous amounts of ice cream. It was easy to see why people liked Hoodie. He made happiness. The breakdancing came next.

“Whoa,” I said. “This is awful! This is the equivalent of Herbert playing the clarinet.”

“He’s got a good move coming up,” Lula said. “He sticks a Michael Jackson thing in here.”

“Why would he do this?” I asked.

“He’s entertaining,” Lula said. “He does these odd bits every now and then. Breaks up the monotony of watching homeless folks.”

“And he keeps his income stream up,” Connie said. “People keep tuning in, so he keeps getting paid. I heard he uses the money to compensate people for their losses. Like when all those UPS packages didn’t get delivered.”

“That’s a lot of money,” I said. “I saw the video. There were a lot of packages.”

“It’s rumored that he’s made over a million dollars from his YouTube channel,” Connie said.

“So what’s up for the rest of the day?” Lula asked. “Now what?”

“I want to go back to Zoran’s house.”

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