Do I know how to have a good time, or what?
At six-thirty I was coming off a two-hour MTV stint and was approaching a vegetative state. I was trying to choose between a Turner classic and the news when a thought straggled into the front of my brain.
Mo had a lawyer.
Since when? The paperwork I'd been given said he'd waived an attorney. The only one I could think to ask was Joe Morelli.
“Yeah?” Morelli said when he answered the phone.
Just yeah. No hello. “You have a bad day?”
“I didn't have a good day.”
“Do you know who Mo is using for a lawyer?”
“Mo waived counsel.”
“I ran into him, and he said he had a lawyer.”
There was a pause at the other end. “You ran into Mo?”
“He was at the candy store.”
“And?”
“And he got away.”
“I hear they're hiring at the button factory.”
“At least I know he has a lawyer. That's more than you know.”
“You got me there,” Morelli said. “I'll check with the court tomorrow, but to the best of my knowledge, we haven't been informed of counsel.”
>
A new question to add to the list. Why would Mo get a lawyer? Mo would get a lawyer if he was thinking of turning himself in. Probably there were other reasons, too, but I couldn't think of them.
I went to the window and peered outside. It had stopped snowing, and the streets looked cleared. I paced in my bedroom. I paced in my living room. I went to the dining room table and wrote, “Mo gets a lawyer” on the steno pad. Then I wrote, “Three people think they might have seen Mo on Montgomery Street.”
I drew a big round head and filled it with question marks. It was my head.
I did some more pacing. Montgomery Street nagged at me. Hell, I thought, I'll take a ride over there. I haven't got anything else to do.
I got dressed and plowed through the night in the Buick. I parked on Montgomery in almost precisely the same spot I'd parked on previous snooping sessions. I saw precisely the same things. Yellow apartment building, mission, church, appliance store. The only difference was that it was dark now, and it had been light then. Technically it had been dark for the first two hours I'd spent here with Ranger, but I'd been in a sleep-deprived stupor, so it hadn't counted.
Just for kicks, I trained my binoculars on the apartment building, peeping into the lit, undraped windows. I didn't see any nudity, or any murders or any Mo. Peeping isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Lights were out in the mission, but the church next to the mission was getting some traffic. The mission and the church occupied two buildings that were two stories each. They'd been shops at one time. An office supply store and a dry cleaner. The Reverend Bill, a fire-and-brimstone preacher, had bought the buildings five years ago and set up his storefront church. He was one of those hooray for people, let's get back to family values preachers. Every now and then his picture would be in the paper for picketing an abortion clinic or for throwing cow's blood on some woman in a fur coat.
The people entering the church looked normal enough. Nobody carried a picket sign or a bucket of blood. Mostly families. A few single men. I counted twenty-six men, women and children in a half-hour period and then the meeting or the service must have started, because the front door remained closed, and no one else showed up. It wasn't an ethnically diverse group, but that wasn't shocking. The surrounding neighborhood was predominantly white, bluecollar. People usually choose a church that's within their community.
The appliance store and Sal's Cafe closed at nine. A half hour later, the twenty-six people filed out of the church. I scanned the apartment building windows one more time with the binoculars. I had my eyes glued to the third floor when someone rapped on my passenger-side window.
It was Carl Costanza in cop uniform. He looked in at me and shook his head. I unlocked the door, and Carl took a seat.
“You really need to get a social life,” Carl said.
“You sound like my mother.”