Janet Evanovich - Notorious Nineteen

“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.”

TEN

“BE CAREFUL OFTiki,” Lula said when she got out of the Buick. “Don’t listen to him when he tells you to order a extra pizza.”

“No worries.”

I put the Buick in gear and slid a glance at Tiki in the backseat. “Well?” I said.

Nothing. No pizza advice. No requests to be returned to the volcano. No complaints that the seat belt was too tight.

I took Hamilton to Greenwich, turned onto Joy, and swung into the hospital garage. I told Tiki under no circumstances should he open the car doors to strangers, locked him in, and headed for the building. I walked through the lobby and went straight to Randy Briggs’s office.

“Oh jeez,” he said when I walked in. “Now what?”

“I want to talk.”

“I’m working.”

“Looks to me like you’re surfing porn sites.”