Seven Up - By Janet Evanovich Page 0,17

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