Smokin Seventeen

dinner party, but he’d burn all the food if a ball game was on. Dave was a perfect fit in the kitchen and at the dinner party, but I wasn’t especially attracted to him. He felt bland compared to Ranger and Morelli.

• • •

I was asleep on the couch when Morelli slipped his arm around me, and Bob gave me a lick on the cheek with his giant tongue.

“Who? What?” I said, disoriented on waking.

Morelli clicked through channels on the television. “You must have had a hard day. It’s only nine o’clock.”

“I ate too much at dinner. Lasagna and chocolate cake at my parents’ house. It’s going to take me days to digest it.” I looked down at my jeans. The top snap was open and there was no hope of closing it. “I brought a piece of cake home for you. It’s in the kitchen.”

He kissed me on the top of my head, went to the kitchen, and returned with his cake. He forked some into his mouth and nodded approval. “This is really good.”

“It’s the icing.”

“Yeah. It’s like fudge.”

“Dave Brewer made it. Turns out he likes to cook.”

“I’m missing something. How did you get Dave Brewer to make you a cake?”

“My mom met Dave’s mom in Giovichinni’s, and they decided I should be his girlfriend. So I’ve gotten sucked into two dinners with him. One of which he made.”

“And?”

“And what?”

Morelli ate the last piece. “Are you going to be his girlfriend?”

“No. He makes great cake, but I’m sticking with you.”

“Just checking. Nice to know I don’t have to beat the crap out of him.”

“You can’t smack him around anyway. We’re supposed to have an open relationship, right? Were you and Dave friends in high school?”

“He was a year younger than me and a world away. I was the screwup with the bad reputation, and he was the football hero. He was dating Julie Barkalowski, the pom-pom queen.”

“How about you? Did you ever date Julie Barkalowski?”

“I dated every girl in that school. I was a horn dog back then.”

“And now?”

Morelli put his plate down and wrapped his arms around me. “And now I’m your horn dog.”

“Lucky me.”

He clicked the television off, slipped his hands under my T-shirt, and kissed me. Minutes later we were in bed, we were naked, and Morelli was doing a demo for me on the various ways I was lucky. He found the way I was most lucky and just as I was moments away from scoring a home run, a vision of Dave Brewer in an apron popped into my head and broke my concentration.

“Damn!” I said through clenched teeth.

Morelli picked his head up and looked at me. “Is there an issue?”

“I lost it.”

“No problemo. I’ll start over. I have to work off the chocolate cake, anyway.”

SIXTEEN

THE NEXT MORNING I dragged myself into the coffee shop and ordered a grande with extra caffeine. Connie and Lula were already hard at work, settled into the window seating area. Lula was doing the day’s Jumble, and Connie was tweeting on her laptop.

Lula stared up at me. “You look like you been run over by a truck.”

I eased myself down to the couch. “Long night. I couldn’t get Dave Brewer out of my head. It was like he was haunting me.”

“You’re just all clogged up with men,” Lula said. “You got confused hormones.”

“I don’t feel confused. Mostly I feel tired.”

“Hope you’re not too tired,” Connie said. “Ziggy violated his bond last night, and you need to bring him in.”

“What did he do?”

“He attacked Myra Milner at bingo. He said he just wanted to get cozy, but he had his teeth in, and he gave her a couple punctures. I guess he has a thing for the ladies. Anyway, she pressed charges. He was long gone by the time the police got to the bingo hall.”

“Myra Milner is eighty-two years old,” I said to Connie. “What the heck was he thinking?”

Connie gave me the RIGHT TO APPREHEND papers. “Probably he was thinking she was easy. Myra told the police the batteries conked out on her hearing aid, and she didn’t hear him sneaking up on her.”

“I don’t like this,” Lula said. “I had a close call last time, and I still don’t know if I’m outta the woods here. I had a real craving for a Bloody Mary and a rare hamburger last night.”

“There’s no blood in a Bloody Mary,” I told her.

“Yeah, but it’s the idea.”

Mooner’s bus pulled up at the curb, and Mooner and Vinnie got out and came into the coffee shop.

“We got a problem,” Vinnie said. “Genius here was walking Bruce, and Bruce wandered away.”

“He looked like he had to poop,” Mooner said, “but he was having a problem, like finding the right spot, and I thought maybe he needed privacy. I mean, not everyone can poop with an audience, right? So I turned my back for a minute. But then when I looked around he was gone.”

We all went dead still, absorbing the fact that a large bear was loose in the Burg.

“We’ve been riding around, but we can’t find him,” Vinnie said. “You need to help us look.”

A man sitting at a table in the other window area leaned toward us. “I couldn’t help overhearing. I saw a bear walking down Hamilton when I was on my way here. I thought I was seeing things. A white Camry pulled alongside the bear, the driver whistled, and the bear got into the backseat. And then the car drove away.”

“Describe the driver,” Vinnie said.

“He was in the car, so I couldn’t see all of him, but he was Caucasian with brown hair that was kind of long. Middle-aged. I think he had sort of a thin face. And when he talked to the bear it wasn’t in English. I think it might have been Russian.”

“Boris,” Vinnie said. “That’s Boris Belmen, the idiot who owns the bear.”

Connie typed Belmen into her computer and came up with his temporary address in Trenton and his cell phone number.

Vinnie called the cell phone. “I want my bear back,” Vinnie said to Boris.

Even from where I was sitting I could hear Boris yelling at Vinnie, how Vinnie let his prize bear loose to walk around on a busy street, how now he was going to Vegas with Bruce, and Vinnie could go screw himself. And then Boris hung up and wouldn’t answer his phone again.

“Don’t look at me,” Lula said. “I’m not going to get the bear. He growled at me when all I was doing was bringing him chicken. And on top of that he has bad breath.”

I capped my coffee and stood. “Give me the address. I’ll talk to Belmen.”

“I’m not going,” Lula said. “This job gets worse and worse. Vampires and bears and big guys with boners. Okay, so maybe I didn’t mind the big guy with the boner so much.”

Connie wrote Belmen’s address on a note card and handed it to me. “If you want the whole file I have to go into the bus to print it.”