“I'm a superhero, dude,” the Mooner said.
“Super fruitcake is more like it. You walk around in this suit all day?”
“No way, dude. This is my secret suit. Ordinarily I only wear this when I'm doing super deeds, but I wanted the dudette here to get the full impact, so I changed in the hall.”
“Can you fly like Superman?” Benny asked Mooner.
“No, but I can fly in my mind, dude. Like, I can soar.”
“Oh boy,” Benny said.
Ziggy looked at his watch. “We gotta go. If you get a line on Choochy you'll let us know, right?”
“Sure.” Maybe.
I watched them leave. They were like Jack Sprat and his wife. Benny was about fifty pounds overweight with chins spilling over his collar. And Ziggy looked like a turkey carcass. I assumed they both lived in the Burg and belonged to Chooch's club, but I didn't know that for certain. Another assumption was that they were on file as former Vincent Plum bondees since they hadn't felt it necessary to give me their phone numbers.
“So what do you think of the suit?” Mooner asked me when Benny and Ziggy left. “Dougie and me found a whole box of them. I think they're like for swimmers or runners or something. Dougie and me don't know any swimmers who could use them, but we thought we could turn them into Super Suits. See, you can wear them like underwear and then when you need to be a superhero you just take your clothes off. Only problem is we haven't got any capes. That's probably why the old dude didn't know I was a superhero. No cape.”
“You don't really think you're a superhero, do you?”
“You mean like in real life?”
“Yeah.”
Mooner looked astonished. “Superheroes are like, fiction. Didn't anyone ever tell you that?”
“Just checking.”
I'd gone to high school with Walter “MoonMan” Dunphy and Dougie “The Dealer” Kruper.
Mooner lives with two other guys in a narrow row house on Grant Street. Together they form the Legion of Losers. They're all potheads and misfits, floating from one menial job to the next, living hand-to-mouth. They're also gentle and harmless and utterly adoptable. I don't exactly hang with Mooner. It's more that we keep in touch, and when our paths cross he tends to generate maternal feelings in me. Mooner is like a goofy stray kitten that shows up for a bowl of kibble once in a while.
Dougie lives several units down in the same row of attached houses. In high school Dougie was the kid who wore the dorky button-down shirt when all the other kids wore T-shirts. Dougie didn't get great grades, didn't do sports, didn't play a musical instrument, and didn't have a cool car. Dougie's solitary accomplishment was his ability to suck Jell-O into his nose through a straw.
After graduation it was rumored that Dougie had moved to Arkansas and died. And then several months ago Dougie surfaced in the Burg, alive and well. And last month Dougie got nailed for fencing stolen goods out of his house. At the time of his arrest his dealing had seemed more community service than crime since he'd become the definitive source for cut-rate Metamucil, and for the first time in years Burg seniors were regular.
“I thought Dougie shut down his dealership,” I said to Mooner.
“No, man, I mean we really found these suits. They were like in a box in the attic. We were cleaning the house out and we came across them.”
I was pretty sure I believed him.
“So what do you think?” he asked. “Cool, huh?”
The suit was lightweight Lycra, fitting his gangly frame perfectly without a wrinkle . . . and that included his doodle area. Not much left to the imagination. If the suit was on Ranger I wouldn't complain, but this was more than I wanted to see of the Mooner.
“The suit is terrific.”
“Since Dougie and me have these cool suits, we decided we'd be crime-fighters . . . like Batman.”
Batman seemed like a nice change. Usually Mooner and Dougie were Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.
Mooner pushed the Lycra cap back off his head, and his long brown hair spilled out. “We were going to start fighting crime tonight. Only problem is, Dougie's gone.”
“Gone? What do you mean gone?”
“Like he just disappeared, dude. He called me on Tuesday and told me he had some stuff to do, but I should come over to watch wrestling last night. We were gonna watch it on Dougie's big screen. It was like an awesome event, dude. Anyway, Dougie never showed up. He wouldn't have missed wrestling unless something awful happened. He wears like four pagers on him and he's not answering any of them. I don't know what to think.”