07 Seven Up (6 page)

There was a washer and dryer in the cellar. A pegboard with tools . . . screwdrivers, wrenches, hammers. A workbench with a vise attached. None of the tools looked recently used. Some cardboard cartons were stacked in a corner. The boxes were closed but not sealed. The tape that had sealed them was left on the floor. I snooped in a couple of the boxes. Christmas decorations, some books, a box of pie plates and casserole dishes. No bread crumbs.

I climbed the stairs and closed the cellar door. Lula was still looking out the window.

“Uh-oh,” Lula said.

“What uh-oh?” I hate uh-oh!

“Cop car just pulled up.”

“Shit!”

I grabbed Bob's leash, and Lula and I ran for the back door. We exited the house and scooted over to the stoop that served as back porch to Angela's house. Lula wrenched Angela's door open and we all jumped inside.

Angela and her mother were sitting at the small kitchen table, having coffee and cake.

“Help! Police!” Angela's mother yelled when we burst through the door.

“This is Stephanie,” Angela shouted to her mother. “You remember Stephanie?”

“Who?”

“Stephanie!”

“What's she want?”

“We changed our mind about the cake,” I said, pulling a chair out, sitting down.

“What?” Angela's mother yelled. “What?”

“Cake,” Angela yelled back at her mother. “They want some cake.”

“Well for God's sake give it to them before they shoot us.”

Lula and I looked at the gun in my hand.

“Maybe you should put that away,” Lula said. “Wouldn't want the old lady to mess her pants.”

I gave the gun to Lula and took a piece of cake.

“Don't worry,” I yelled. “It's a fake gun.”

“Looks real to me,” Angela's mother yelled back. “Looks like a forty-caliber, fourteen-round Glock. You could put a good hole in a man's head with that. I used to carry one myself, but I switched to a shotgun when my eyesight went.”

Carl Costanza rapped on the back door and we all jumped.

“We're making a security patrol and I saw your car outside,” Costanza said, helping himself to the piece of cake in my hand. “Wanted to make sure you weren't thinking of doing anything illegal . . . like violating the crime scene.”

“Who, me?”

Costanza smiled at me and left with my cake.

We turned our attention back to the table, where there was now an empty cake plate.

“For goodness sakes,” Angela said, “there was a whole cake here. What on earth could have happened to it?”

Lula and I exchanged glances. Bob had a piece of white confectioners' sugar icing clinging to his lip.

“We should probably be going anyway,” I said, dragging Bob to the front door. “Let me know if you hear from Eddie.”

“That didn't do us much good,” Lula said when we were on the road. “We didn't find out nothing about Eddie DeChooch.”

“He buys sliced turkey breast from Giovichinni,” I said.

“So what are you saying? We should bait our hook with turkey breast?”

“No. I'm saying this is a guy who's spent his whole life in the Burg and isn't going anywhere else. He's right here, driving around in a white Cadillac. I should be able to find him.” It would be easier if I'd been able to get the number off the Cadillac's license plate. I had my friend Norma do a search at the DMV for white Cadillacs, but there were too many to check out.

I dropped Lula off at the office and went in search of the Mooner. Mooner and Dougie mostly spend their days watching television and eating Cheez Doodles, living off a shared semi-illegal windfall. Sometime soon I suspect the windfall will all have gone up in wacky tabacky smoke, and Mooner and Dougie will be living a lot less luxuriously.

I parked in front of Mooner's house and Bob and I marched up to the front stoop and I knocked on the door. Huey Kosa opened the door and grinned out at me. Huey Kosa and Zero Bartha are Mooner's two roommates. Nice guys but, like Mooner, they were living in another dimension.

“Dude,” Huey said.

“I'm looking for Mooner.”

“He's at Dougie's house. He like had to do laundry, and the Dougster has a machine. The Dougster has everything.”

I drove the short distance to Dougie's house and parked. I could have walked, but that wouldn't have been the Jersey way.

“Hey dude,” Mooner said when I rapped on Dougie's door. “Nice to see you and the Bob. Mi casa su casa. Well, actually it's the Dougster's casa, but I don't know how to say that.”

He was wearing another one of the Super Suits. Green this time and without the M sewn onto the chest, looking more like PickleMan than MoonMan.

“Saving the world?” I asked.

“No. Doing the laundry.”

“Have you heard from Dougie?”

“Nothing, dude. Nada.”

The front door opened to a living room sparsely furnished with a couch, a chair, a single floor lamp, and a big-screen TV. Bob Newhart got offered a bag of roadkill from Larry, Daryl, and Daryl on the big-screen TV.

“It's a Bob Newhart retrospective,” Mooner said. “They're playing all the classics. Solid gold.”

“So,” I said, looking around the room, “Dougie's never disappeared like this before?”

“Not as long as I've known him.”

“Does Dougie have a girlfriend?”

Mooner went blank-faced. Like this was too big a question to comprehend.

“Girlfriend,” he said finally. “Wow, I never thought of the Dougster with a girlfriend. Like, I've never seen him with a girl.”

“How about a boyfriend?”

“Don't think he's got one of them, either. Think the Dougster's more . . . um, self-sufficient.”

“Okay, let's try something else. Where was Dougie going when he disappeared?”

“He didn't say.”

“He drove?”

“Yep. Took the Batmobile.”

“Just exactly what does the Batmobile look like?”

“It looks like a black Corvette. I rode around looking for it, but it's nowhere.”

“Probably you should report this to the police.”

“No way! The Dougster will be up the creek on his bond.”

I was getting a bad vibe here. Mooner was looking nervous, and this was a seldom-seen side of his personality. Mooner is usually Mr. Mellow.

“There's something else going on,” I said. “What aren't you telling me?”

“Hey, nothing, dude. I swear.”

Call me crazy, but I like Dougie. He might be a schnook and a schemer, but he was kind of an okay schnook and schemer. And now he was missing, and I was having a bad feeling in my stomach.

“How about Dougie's family? Have you spoken to any of them?” I asked.

“No, dude, they're all in Arkansas someplace. The Dougster didn't talk about them a lot.”

“Does Dougie have a phone book?”

“I've never seen one. I guess he could have one in his room.”

“Stay here with Bob and make sure he doesn't eat anything. I'll check out Dougie's room.”

There were three small upstairs bedrooms. I'd been in the house before, so I knew which room was Dougie's. And I knew what to expect of the interior design. Dougie didn't waste time with the petty details of housekeeping. The floor in Dougie's room was littered with clothes, the bed was unmade, the dresser was cluttered with scraps of paper, a model of the starship Enterprise, girlie magazines, food-encrusted dishes and mugs.

There was a phone at bedside but no address book beside the phone. There was a piece of yellow notepaper on the floor by the bed. There were a lot of names and numbers scribbled in no special order on the paper, some obliterated by a coffee cup stain. I did a fast scan of the page and discovered several Krupers were listed in Arkansas. None in Jersey. I scrounged through the mess on his dresser and just for the hell of it snooped in his closet.

No clues there.

I didn't have any good reason to look in the other bedrooms, but I'm nosey by nature. The second bedroom was a sparsely furnished guest room. The bed was rumpled, and my guess was Mooner slept there from time to time. And the third bedroom was stacked floor-to-ceiling with hijacked merchandise. Boxes of toasters, telephones, alarm clocks, stacks of T-shirts, and God-knows-what-else. Dougie was at it again.

“Mooner!” I yelled. “Get up here! Now!”

“Whoa,” Mooner said when he saw me standing at the doorway to the third bedroom. “Where'd all that stuff come from?”

“I thought Dougie gave up dealing?”

“He couldn't help himself, dude. I swear he tried, but it's in his blood, you know? Like, he was born to deal.”

Now I had a better idea of the origin of Mooner's nervousness. Dougie was still involved with bad people. Bad people are just fine when everything's going good. They become a concern when your friend shows up missing.

“Do you know where these boxes came from? Do you know who Dougie was working with?”

“I'm like, clueless. He took a phone call and then next thing there's a truck in the driveway and we've got this inventory. I wasn't paying too much attention. Rocky and Bullwinkle were on, and you know how hard it is to tear yourself away from ol' Rocky.”

“Did Dougie owe money? Was there something wrong with the deal?”

“Didn't seem like it. Seemed like he was real happy. He said the stuff he got was a quick sale. Except for the toasters. Hey, you want a toaster?”

“How much?”

“Ten bucks.”

“Sold.”

I MADE A quick stop at Giovichinni's for a few food-type essentials, and then Bob and I hustled home for lunch. I had my toaster under one arm and my grocery bag in another when I got out of the car.

Benny and Ziggy suddenly materialized from nowhere.

“Let me help you with that bag,” Ziggy said. “A lady like you shouldn't be carrying her own bag.”

“And what's this? A toaster,” Benny said, relieving me of the toaster, looking at the box. “This is a good one, too. It's got those extra-wide slots so you can do English muffins.”

“I'm fine,” I said, but they already had the bag and the toaster and were ahead of me, going through the door to my building.

“We just thought we'd stop by and see how things were going,” Benny said, punching the elevator button. “You have any luck with Eddie yet?”

“I saw him at Stiva's, but he got away.”

“Yeah, we heard about that. That's a shame.”

I opened my door and they handed me my bag and toaster and peeked inside my apartment.

“You don't got Eddie in here, do you?” Ziggy asked.

“No!”

Ziggy shrugged. “It was a long shot.”

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” Benny said.

And they left.

“You don't have to pass an intelligence test to get into the mob,” I said to Bob.

I plugged my new toaster in and fed it two slices of bread. I made Bob a peanut butter sandwich with untoasted bread, I took the toasted peanut butter sandwich, and we ate, standing in the kitchen, enjoying the moment.

“I guess it's not so hard to be a housewife,” I said to Bob, “as long as you have peanut butter and bread.”

I called Norma at the DMV and got the license number for Dougie's 'Vette. Then I called Morelli to see if he'd heard anything about anything.

“The autopsy report on Loretta Ricci hasn't come back yet,” Morelli said. “No one's nabbed DeChooch, and Kruper hasn't floated in with the tide. The ball's in your court, Cupcake.”

Oh great.

“So I guess I'll see you tonight.,” Morelli said. “I'll pick you and Bob up at five-thirty.”

“Sure. Anything special?”

Phone silence. “I thought we were invited to your parents' house for dinner.”

“Oh rats! Damn. Shit.”

“Forgot, huh?”

“I was just there yesterday.”

“Does this mean we don't have to go?”

“If only it was that easy.”

“Pick you up at five-thirty,” Morelli said, and he hung up.

I like my parents. I really do. It's just that they drive me nuts. First of all, there's my perfect sister, Valerie, with her two perfect children. Fortunately, they live in L.A., so their perfection is lessened by distance. And then there's my alarming marital status, which my mother feels compelled to fix. Not to mention my job, my clothes, my eating habits, my church attendance (or lack of).

“Okay, Bob,” I said, “time to get back to work. Let's go cruising.”

I thought I'd spend the afternoon looking for cars. I needed to find a white Cadillac and the Batmobile. Start with the Burg, I decided, and then enlarge the search area. And I had a mental list of restaurants and diners with earlybird specials that catered to seniors. I'd save the diners for last and see if the white Cadillac turned up.

I dropped a chunk of bread into Rex's cage and told him I'd be home by five. I had Bob's leash in my hand and was about to take off when there was a knock on my door. It was StateLine Florist.

“Happy Birthday,” the kid said. He handed me a vase of flowers and left.

This was a little strange since my birthday's in October and it was now April. I set the flowers on the kitchen counter and read the card.

Roses are red. Violets are blue. I've got a hard-on and it's because of you.

It was signed Ronald DeChooch. Bad enough he creeped me out at the social club, now he was sending me flowers.

“YUCK. ICK. GROSS!” I grabbed the flowers and tried to throw them away, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I had a hard enough time throwing dead flowers away, much less flowers that were all fresh and hopeful and pretty. I dropped the card on the floor and jumped up and down on it. Then I tore it into tiny pieces and pitched it into the garbage. The flowers were still on my counter, looking happy and colorful but giving me the creeps. I picked them up and carefully set them out in the hall. I jumped back into my apartment and closed the door. I stood there for a couple beats to see how it felt.

“Okay, I can live with this,” I said to Bob.

Bob didn't look like he had much of an opinion.

I snagged a jacket off the hook in the foyer. Bob and I exited my apartment, hustled past the flowers in the hall, then calmly walked down the stairs and out to the car.

After half an hour of riding around the Burg I decided looking for the Cadillac was a dumb idea. I parked on Roebling and dialed Connie on my cell phone.