“I can't give you that kind of stuff.”
“Of course you can,” I said. “Anyway, this is about Uncle Fred.”
“The missing Uncle Fred?”
“That's the one.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything.”
“Hold on.”
He was back on the line a couple minutes later, and I could hear him leafing through papers. “It says here Fred was reported missing on Friday, which is technically too early for a missing person, but we always keep our eyes open anyway. Especially with old folks. Sometimes they're out there wandering around looking for the road to Oz.”
“You think that's what Fred's doing? Looking for Oz?”
“Hard to say. Fred's car was found in the Grand Union parking lot. The car was locked up. No sign of forced entry. No sign of struggle. No sign of theft. There was dry cleaning laid out on the backseat.”
“Anything else in the car? Groceries?”
“Nope. No groceries.”
“So he got to the dry cleaner but not the supermarket.”
“I have a chronology of events here,” Gazarra said. “Fred left his house at one o'clock, right after he ate lunch. Next stop that we know of was the bank, First Trenton Trust. Their records show he withdrew two hundred dollars from the automatic teller in the lobby at two thirty-?five. The cleaner, next to Grand Union in the same strip mall, said Fred picked his cleaning up around two forty-?five. And that's all we have.”
“There's an hour missing. It takes ten minutes to get from the Burg to Grand Union and First Trenton.”
“Don't know,” Gazarra said. “He was supposed to go to RGC Waste Haulers, but RGC says he never showed up.”
“Thanks, Eddie.”
“If you want to return the favor, I could use a baby-?sitter Saturday night.”
Gazarra could always use a baby-?sitter. His kids were cute but death on baby-?sitters.
“Gee, Eddie, I'd love to help you out, but Saturday's a bad day. I promised somebody I'd do something on Saturday.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Listen, Gazarra, last time I baby-?sat for your kids they cut two inches off my hair.”
“You shouldn't have fallen asleep. What were you doing sleeping on the job, anyway?”
“It was one in the morning!”
My next call was to Joe Morelli. Joe Morelh is a plainclothes cop who has skills not covered in the policeman's handbook. A couple months ago, I let him into my life and my bed. A couple weeks ago, I kicked him out. We'd seen each other several times since then on chance encounters and arranged dinner dates.
The chance encounters were always warm. The dinner dates took the temperature up a notch and more often than not involved loud talking, which I called a discussion and Morelli called a fight.
None of these meetings had ended in the bedroom. When you grow up in the Burg there are several mantras little girls learn at an early age. One of them is that men don't buy goods they can get for free. Those words of wisdom hadn't stopped me from giving my goods away to Morelli, but they did stop me from continuing to give them away. That plus a false pregnancy scare. Although I have to admit, I had mixed feelings about not being pregnant. There was a smidgen of regret mixed with the relief. And probably it was the regret more than the relief that made me take a more serious look at my life and my relationship with Morelli. That and the realization that Morelli and I don't see eye-?to-?eye on a lot of things. Not that we'd entirely given up on the relationship. It was more that we were in a holding pattern with each of us staking out territory . . . not unlike the Arab-?Israeli conflict.
I tried Morelli's home phone, office number, and car phone. No luck. I left messages everywhere and left my cell phone number on his pager.
“Well, what did you find out?” Grandma wanted to know when I hung up.
“Not much. Fred left the house at one, and a little over an hour later he was at the bank and the cleaner. He must have done something in that time, but I don't know what.”