Stephanie Plum - Seven Up Part 5

"I didn't exactly see her leave, but I noticed the car was gone. She must have been in there for about an hour."

"How about gunshots?" Lula asked. "Did you hear her get whacked? Did you hear screaming?"

"I didn't hear any screaming," Angela said. "Mom's deaf as a post. Once Mom puts the television on you can't hear anything anything in here. And the television is on from six to eleven. Would you like some coffee cake? I got a nice almond ring from the bakery." in here. And the television is on from six to eleven. Would you like some coffee cake? I got a nice almond ring from the bakery."

I thanked Angela for the coffee cake offer but told her Lula and Bob and I had to keep on the job.

We exited the Marguchi house and stepped next door to the DeChooch half. The DeChooch half was off limits, of course, ringed with crime-scene tape, still part of an ongoing investigation. There were no cops guarding the integrity of the house or shed, so I a.s.sumed they'd worked hard yesterday to finish the collection of evidence.

"We probably shouldn't go in here, being that the tape's still up," Lula said.

I agreed. "The police wouldn't like it."

"Of course, we were in there yesterday. We probably got prints all over the place."

"So you're thinking it wouldn't matter if we went in today?"

"Well, it wouldn't matter if n.o.body found out about it," Lula said.

"And I have a key so it isn't actually breaking and entering." Problem is, I sort of stole the key.

As a bond enforcement officer I also have the right to enter the fugitive's house if I have good reason to suspect he's there. And if push came to shove, I'm sure I could come up with a good reason. I might be lacking a bunch of bounty hunter skills, but I can fib with the best of them.

"Maybe you should see if that's really Eddie's house key," Lula said. "You know, test it out."

I inserted the key into the lock and the door swung open. "d.a.m.n," Lula said. "Look at what happened now. The door's open."

We scooted into the dark foyer and I closed and locked the door behind us.

"You take lookout," I said to Lula. "I don't want to be surprised by the police or by Eddie."

"You can count on me," Lula said. "Lookout's my middle name."

I started in the kitchen, going through the cabinets and drawers, thumbing through the papers on the counter. I was doing the Hansel and Gretel thing, looking for a bread crumb that would start me on a trail. I was hoping for a phone number scribbled on a napkin, or maybe a map with a big orange arrow pointing to a local motel. What I found was the usual flotsam that collects in all kitchens. Eddie had knives and forks and dishes and soup bowls that had been bought by Mrs. DeChooch and used for the life of her marriage. There were no dirty dishes left on the counter. Everything was neatly stacked in the cupboards. Not a lot of food in the refrigerator, but it was better stocked than mine. A small carton of milk, some sliced turkey breast from Giovichinni's Meat Market, eggs, a stick of b.u.t.ter, condiments.

I prowled through a small downstairs powder room, the dining room, and living room. I peered into the coat closet and searched coat pockets while Lula watched the street through a break in the living room drape.

I climbed the stairs and searched the bedrooms, still hoping to find a bread crumb. The beds were all neatly made. There was a crossword book on the nightstand in the master bedroom. No bread crumbs. I moved on to the bathroom. Clean sink. Clean tub. Medicine chest filled to bursting with Darvon, aspirin, seventeen different kinds of antacids, sleeping pills, a jar of Vicks, denture cleaner, hemorrhoid cream.

The window over the tub was unlocked. I climbed into the tub and looked out. DeChooch's escape seemed possible. I got out of the tub and out of the bathroom. I stood in the hall and thought about Loretta Ricci. There was no sign of her in this house. No bloodstains. No indication of struggle. The house was unusually clean and tidy. I'd noticed this yesterday, too, when I'd gone through looking for DeChooch.

No notes scribbled on the pad by the phone. No matchbooks from restaurants tossed on the kitchen counter. No socks on the floor. No laundry in the bathroom hamper. Hey, what do I know? Maybe depressed old men get obsessively neat. Or maybe DeChooch spent the entire night scrubbing the blood from his floors and then did the laundry. Bottom line is no bread crumbs no bread crumbs.

I returned to the living room and made an effort not to grimace. There was one place left to look. The cellar. Yuck. Cellars in houses like this were always dark and creepy, with rumbly oil burners and cobwebby rafters.

"Well, I suppose I should look in the cellar now," I said to Lula.

"Okay," Lula said. "The coast is still clear."

I opened the cellar door and flipped the light switch. Scarred wood stairs, gray cement floor, cobwebby rafters, and creepy rumbly cellar sounds. No disappointment here.

"Something wrong?" Lula asked.

"It's creepy."

"Uh-huh."

"I don't want to go down there."

"It's just a cellar," Lula said.

"How about if you go down."

"Not me. I hate cellars. They're creepy."

"Do you have a gun?"

"Do bears s.h.i.t in the woods?"

I borrowed Lula's gun and crept down the cellar stairs. I don't know what I was going to do with the gun. Shoot a spider, maybe.

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 ca.s.serole 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 hate uh-oh! uh-oh!

"Cop car just pulled up."

"s.h.i.t!"

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 G.o.d'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 M sewn onto the chest, looking more like PickleMan than MoonMan. 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 spa.r.s.ely 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 cla.s.sics. 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.