"You want to cut down on the breakfast drugs," Lula said to Sally. "You keep going like this all your nose hairs are gonna fall out."
I unbuckled my seat belt. "There's a little wooden bench on the front porch. With any luck, we won't have to go in the house."
We crossed the patchy lawn, and Lula tested the bottom porch step, pausing when it groaned under her weight. She moved to the next step and picked her way around floorboards that were obviously rotted.
Sally tiptoed behind her. Clonk, clonk, clonk with his clogs. Not exactly the stealth transvestite.
They each took an end of the bench and flipped it over.
No note stuck to the bottom.
"Maybe it blew away," Lula said.
There wasn't a stray breath of air in all of Jersey, but we checked the surroundings anyway, the three of us fanning out, covering the yard.
No note.
"Hunh," Lula said. "We been given the runaround."
There was a crawl space under the porch, enclosed with wooden lattice. I dropped to hands and knees and squinted through the lattice. "The note said 'under the bench.' It could have meant under the porch, under the bench." I jogged to the car and retrieved a flashlight from the glove compartment. I returned to the porch, scrunched low and flashed the beam around the dirt floor. Sure enough, there was a glass jar directly under the part of the porch that supported the bench.
Two yellow eyes caught in the light, held for a second, and skittered away.
"Do you see it?" Lula wanted to know.
"Yep."
"Well?"
"There are eyes under there. Little beady yellow ones. And spiders. Lots of spiders."
Lula gave an involuntary shiver.
Sally made another adjustment on his thong.
"I'd go get it, but a big woman like me wouldn't fit," Lula said. "Sure is a shame it isn't just a little roomier."
"I think you'd fit."
"Nope, unh ah, I know I wouldn't fit."
I considered the spiders. "I might not fit, either."
"I'd fit," Sally said, "but I'm not doing it. I paid twenty bucks for this manicure, and I'm not fucking it up crawling under some rat-infested porch."
I hunkered down for another look. "Maybe we can stick a rake in there and pull the jar out."
"Nuh ah," Lula said. "A rake isn't gonna be big enough. You gotta go in from the end here, and it's too far away. Where you gonna get a rake anyway?"
"We can ask Mrs. Nowicki."
"Oh yeah," Lula said. "From the looks of this lawn she does lots of gardening." Lula stood on tiptoes and looked in a window on the side of the house. "Probably not even home. Seems like she'd be out by now what with us up on her porch and all." Lula moved to another window and pressed her nose to the glass. "Uh oh."
"What uh oh?" I hated uh oh.
"You'd better look at this."
Sally and I trotted over and pressed our noses to the glass.
Mrs. Nowicki was stretched out on the kitchen floor. She had a bloody towel wrapped around the top of her head, and an empty bottle of Jim Beam was on the floor beside her. She was wearing a cotton nightgown, and her bare feet were splayed toes out.
"Looks to me like dead city," Lula said. "You want a rake, you better get it yourself."
I knocked on the window. "Mrs. Nowicki!"
Mrs. Nowicki didn't move a muscle.
"Think this must have just happened," Lula said. "If she'd laid there for any amount of time in this heat she'd be swelled up big as a beach ball. She'd have burst apart. There'd be guts and maggots all over the place."
"I hate to miss seeing the guts and maggots," Sally said. "Maybe we should come back in a couple hours."
I turned from the window and headed for the car. "We need to call the police."
Lula was on my heels. "Hold the phone on the we part. Those police people give me the hives."
"You're not a hooker anymore. You don't have to worry about the police."
"One of them traumatic emotional things," Lula said.
Ten minutes later, two blue-and-whites angled to the curb behind me. Carl Costanza emerged from the first car, looked at me and shook his head. I'd known Carl since grade school. He was always the skinny kid with the bad haircut and wise mouth. He'd bulked up some in the last few years, and he'd found a good barber. He still had the wise mouth, but under it all, he was a decent person and a pretty good cop.