“What the hell?” she said.
An old brown Dodge rolled to a stop beside us. Bunchy.
Okay, who do we know who can open doors without keys? Who has a score to settle with Lula? And who has returned to the scene of the crime?
“Not bad,” I said to Bunchy. “Sort of a sadistic sense of humor . . . but not bad.”
He smiled at my comment and eyed the car. “You ladies got a problem?”
“Someone took the wheels off my Firebird,” Lula said, looking like she'd figured it out, too. “Don't suppose you know who could've done something like this.”
“Vandals?”
“Vandals, my ass.”
“I have to be getting along now,” Bunchy said, smiling ear to ear. “Toodles.”
Lula hauled a small cannon out of her shoulder bag and pointed it at Bunchy. “You slime-?faced bag of monkey shit.”
The smile was gone in a flash, and Bunchy laid rubber out of the lot.
“Good thing I got auto club,” Lula said.
An hour later, I was back in my Buick. I was running short on time, but I wanted to talk to Mabel.
I almost zipped right past her house, because the '87 Pontiac station wagon wasn't parked at the curb. In its place was a new silver-?gray Nissan Sentra.
“Where's the station wagon?” I asked Mabel when she answered the door.
“Traded it in,” she said. “I never did like driving that big old boat.” She looked at her new car and smiled. “What do you think? Isn't it zippy-?looking?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Zippy. I ran into someone today who said she might have seen Fred.”
“Oh, dear,” Mabel said. “Don't tell me you've found him.”
I blinked twice because she hadn't sounded like that would be happy news. “No.”
She put her hand to her heart. “Thank goodness. I don't mean to sound uncaring, but you know, I just bought the car, and Fred wouldn't understand about the car.”
Okay, now we know where Fred stacks up against a Nissan Sentra. “Anyway, this woman said she might have seen Fred on the day he disappeared. She said she thought she saw Fred talking to a man in a suit. Do you have any idea who the man might be?”
“No. Do you?”
Question number two. “It's very important that I know everything Fred did the day before he disappeared.”
“It was just like all the other days,” Mabel said. “He didn't do anything in the morning. Puttered around the house. Then we ate lunch, and he went out to the store.”
“Grand Union?”
“Yes. And he was only gone about an hour. We didn't need much. And then he worked in the yard, cleaning up the last of the leaves. That was all he did.”
“Did he go out at night?”
“No . . . wait, yes, he went out with the leaves. If you have too many bags of leaves, you have to pay extra to the garbage company. So whenever Fred had more than his allotted number of bags, he'd wait until it was dark, and then he'd drive one or two bags to Giovichinni's. He said it was the least Giovichinni could do for him being that he always overcharged on his meat.”
“When did Fred leave the house Friday morning?”
“Early. Around eight, I guess. When he came home he was complaining because he had to wait for RGC to open.”