Notorious Nineteen

NINE

LULA AND I climbed into the Buick, I rolled the engine over and pulled into traffic.

“I almost forgot about Tiki back there,” Lula said. “You don’t suppose he really talks, do you?” She swiveled in her seat. “Hey, Tiki, how’s it goin’?”

I stopped for a light and glanced at Lula. “Well? Is he saying anything to you?”

“No, but I think he might be smiling. Hold on here. Something’s coming through. He’s telling me it’s lunchtime and he wants a bucket of chicken.”

“Tiki said that?”

“Well, someone said it. It was in my head.”

“It might have been you thinking it.”

“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure it had a Hawaiian accent.”

Cluck-in-a-Bucket was all the way across town. I took Broad to Hamilton, and we made a fast stop for chicken. Lula got a bucket of extra crispy, a side of fries, and a side of slaw. I got a biscuit. My stomach wasn’t in top form after last night’s poisoning. We took the food to the office, and I lugged Tiki in, along with my biscuit.

“We had a good day,” Lula said to Connie. “We had all kinds of success. Do you want a piece of chicken? I got the big bucket in case I had to share.”

Connie passed on the chicken, and Vinnie popped out of his office.

“What kind of success? Did you get Cubbin?”

“Not yet,” Lula said. “But we got Melvin Barrel.”

“Melvin Barrel is good,” Vinnie said. “Does he want to get rebonded?”

“Probably not,” Lula said. “He’s dead.”

I showed Vinnie the picture on my cellphone.

“Are those tire tracks on his chest?” Vinnie asked. “And bullet holes? Christ, how many times did you shoot him?”

“I didn’t shoot him,” I said. “He got hit by a car, and the driver got out and shot him . . . five times.”

“And we went after Brody Logan too,” Lula said, digging into the bucket of chicken. “Except he got away.”

I set the tiki on Connie’s desk. “Logan ran off, so I confiscated his tiki.”

“That’s the tiki?” Vinnie asked, eyes bulging out of their sockets. “Are you nuts? You brought the tiki here?”

“I thought you wanted it.”

“Yeah, but not here! That thing’s evil. It’s a bad influence.”

“That could be true,” Lula said. “I was planning on just getting a couple pieces of chicken, and it told me to get the big bucket.”

I did such a gigantic eye roll I almost fell over.

“Get that thing out of here, and go find Cubbin,” Vinnie said. “I’ve got enough problems without a tiki putting ideas in my head. Lucille has me going to Sex Addicts Anonymous.”

“How’s that working for you?” Lula asked.

“It’s a nightmare. I go there, and I’m in a room filled with perverts. It’s like being in a bakery where everything is free and you can’t eat anything.”

“Speaking of bakery, I wouldn’t mind having some dessert,” Lula said. “I need something sweet to get my mind off the grease and salt attack I’m having.”

I hefted Tiki and tucked him under my arm. “I want to talk to Mrs. Cubbin again. We can stop at Tasty Pastry on the way.”

Ten minutes later Lula came out of Tasty Pastry with a box of Italian cookies, six fresh-made cannoli, and a bag of donuts.

“That’s a lot of dessert,” I said.

“I just wanted a cookie. I was gonna get one of them black-and-whites, but Tiki couldn’t make up his mind.”

“Tiki told you to buy all this?”

“Yeah. I’m pretty sure it was Tiki. It was like someone was whispering in my ear.”

“That’s ridiculous. You’re using Tiki as an excuse.”

“I don’t think so. I definitely heard someone whispering.” Lula selected a cannoli. “I don’t usually get cannoli, but Tiki had a good suggestion here.” She held the box out to me. “You want one? They’re good for you on account of there’s dairy in them.”

“Sure,” I said. “Give me a cannoli.”

I ate my cannoli while I drove to Susan Cubbin’s house. Okay, I get that it’s not the perfect marriage, but it seems to me if anyone had a lead on Cubbin it would be his wife. Wives know things. They snoop around. They especially snoop around if they think they’re getting screwed out of money.

I parked in front of the white ranch with the black shutters, told Tiki to behave himself, and Lula and I went to the door.

“You want me to go looking in the windows?” Lula asked.

“No!”

I rang the bell and waited. No answer. I rang again. Nothing.

“Maybe she’s shopping,” Lula said. “Taking her mind off her troubles. The other possibility is she fell down the stairs and broke her hip and can’t get up like that lady in the commercial. In which case we have a obligation to break in and help her. Least that’s what Tiki says.”

“I’m surprised you can hear Tiki when he’s in the car and you’re in the bakery or standing here on the porch.”

“Yeah, he’s got good range for a chunk of wood.” Lula pushed on the door and it swung open. “Hunh, look at this. The door’s not locked. It wasn’t even all closed.”

I stepped inside. “Hello,” I called. “Anybody home?”

No answer.

Lula followed me in and closed the door. “Look at the bottom of the stairs. That’s where they land when they fall.”

“This is a ranch house. There are no stairs.”

Lula looked around. “You’re right. I never thought of that.”

I walked through the house to the kitchen. Susan Cubbin had decorated the house in American Farmhouse style. Upholstered pieces were slipcovered in ill-fitting floral fabric. End tables looked like they’d been beaten with a chain. The chandelier over the trestle dining room table was fashioned to look like a wagon wheel.

“Only thing missing from this house is chickens,” Lula said. “Maybe she’s got some in the backyard.”

I looked in the fridge. “No food,” I said. “Ketchup, mustard, mayo, but no milk or orange juice.”

“Sounds like your house,” Lula said.

“Yes, but Susan cooks. She has spices, and pots and pans, and a waffle iron.” I opened the door to the pantry. Flour, sugar, rice, breadcrumbs, oatmeal, graham crackers, macaroni. “She cleaned the perishables out of her refrigerator.”

“Like she was going on a trip,” Lula said. “Maybe her husband sent her a check, and she went on vacation.”

The counters were clean. A cat’s water bowl and food dish were in the dish drain. There was a landline phone on the counter. A basket with assorted scraps of paper and miscellaneous receipts sat next to the phone. One of the receipts caught my attention. It was a printout from an online store selling surveillance equipment. On Thursday, Susan had bought binoculars, a camera with motion sensors, and a remote-controlled audio amplifier.

“Susan was going to snoop on someone,” I said.

I opened the door leading to the attached garage and flipped the light on. No car. I walked through the rest of the house. The guest bedrooms looked like they were seldom used. No clothes in the closets and dressers. No toiletries in the bathroom. No room designated as a home office. I investigated the master bedroom last. The bed was made. I went through the dresser drawers and bathroom medicine chest. Nothing out of the ordinary. Hard to tell if anything was missing.

I opened the closet door in the master, and a monster jumped out at me. He was easily 6'6". He had long snow-white hair, bushy white eyebrows, and one blue eye and one brown eye. And he had a stun gun.

“It’s the Yeti!” Lula screamed. “Lord help me.”

The next thing I heard was zzzzzzzt. And I was incapacitated, on my back on the carpet.

It took a couple minutes for my brain to unscramble and start sending coherent messages to my nerve endings. My head cleared and I looked over at Lula. She was sprawled next to me, and she was twitching.

I got to my hands and knees, and then to my feet. “Hey,” I said to Lula. “Are you okay?”

“Yuh,” Lula said. “Did I wet myself? I hate when that happens.”

I leaned against the dresser, taking deep breaths while my muscle memory returned. The house was quiet. No one walking around. No one slamming doors. No one making Yeti sounds. I carefully made my way to the closet and looked inside. It was a large walk-in. Geoffrey Cubbin’s clothes were on one side, and Susan’s on the other. Again, nothing looked out of the ordinary.

Lula was on her feet, adjusting her boobs, tugging her skirt back into place. “What the heck was that about?” she asked. “That scared the crap out of me. I thought she just had a cat. Nobody said anything about having a Yeti.”

“That wasn’t a Yeti. It was a big albino guy.”

“I don’t think so. I know a Yeti when I see one. I saw a Yeti at Disney World. It’s like Chewbacca but it’s all white.”

“A Yeti is an Abominable Snowman. The Himalayan version of Bigfoot.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s not what you saw. You saw a big, hairy albino guy.”

“Maybe he was an Abominable Albino.”

“That works for me. Do you have your gun with you?”

Lula pulled a Glock out of her purse. “We going Abominable Albino hunting?”

“Yes.”

I made another pass through the house with Lula close on my heels, gun in hand. We went through every room, and opened every door. Nothing jumped out at us.

“He flew the coop,” Lula said when we got back to the front door.

I took a moment to look around one last time. “Where’s the cat? Susan had an indoor cat. Where is it? And where’s the kitty litter? I think Susan split and took the cat with her.”

“If I had a Yeti hiding in my closet I’d take the cat and go someplace else too,” Lula said.

We left the house and sat in the Buick, eating cookies, thinking about where to go next.

“I can’t shake the feeling that the clue to Cubbin is in the hospital,” I said. “There’s got to be something we missed. If we could find out how he got out of the hospital, we might be able to find out where he went.”

“Yeah, and you could find that out on your own because I don’t want to go back into the hospital and get more cooties. Besides, I might need to go shopping. I heard Junior Moody got some new merchandise last night, and he’ll be open for business in the projects this afternoon.”

“What kind of merchandise?”

“I don’t know, but he usually has good stuff.”

Junior Moody was a small-time opportunistic vendor who operated out of the trunk of his Cadillac Eldorado. Depending on what had been hijacked, robbed, or shoplifted, Junior might be selling cubic zirconia earrings, Cuisinart toasters, Hello Kitty watches, or Izod shirts.

“I’ll drop you off at the office. Call me if he’s got evening purses.”