My pager went off at my waist. I looked down to check the read-out and slam. Briggs closed and locked his door.
"Loser," he called from inside.
Well, that didn't go as smoothly as I'd hoped. I had a choice now. I could break down his door and beat the bejeezus out of him, or I could answer my mother's page. Neither was especially appealing, but I decided on my mother.
My parents live in a residential pocket of Trenton nicknamed the Burg. No one ever really leaves the Burg. You can relocate in Antarctica, but if you were born and raised in the Burg you're a Burger for life. Houses are small and obsessively neat. Televisions are large and loud. Lots are narrow. Families are extended. There are no pooper-scooper laws in the Burg. If your dog does his business on someone else's lawn, the next morning the doodoo will be on your front porch. Life is simple in the Burg.
I put the Buick into gear, rolled out of the apartment building lot, headed for Hamilton, and followed Hamilton to St.FrancisHospital. My parents live a couple blocks behind St. Francis on Roosevelt Street. Their house is a duplex built at a time when families needed only one bathroom and dishes were washed by hand.
My mother was at the door when I pulled to the curb. My grandmother Mazur stood elbow to elbow with my mother. They were short, slim women with facial features that suggested Mongol ancestors . . . probably in the form of crazed marauders.
"Thank goodness you're here," my mother said, eyeing me as I got out of the car and walked toward her. "What are those shoes? They look like work boots."
"Betty Szajak and Emma Getz and me went to that male dancer place last week," Grandma said, "and they had some men parading around, looking like construction workers, wearing boots just like those. Then next thing you knew they ripped their clothes off and all they had left was those boots and these little silky black baggie things that their dingdongs jiggled around in."
My mother pressed her lips together and made the sign of the cross. "You didn't tell me about this," she said to my grandmother.
"Guess it slipped my mind. Betty and Emma and me were going to bingo at the church, but it turned out there wasn't any bingo on account of the Knights of Columbus was holding some to-do there. So we decided to check out the men at that new club downtown." Grandma gave me an elbow. "I put a fiver right in one of those baggies!"
"Jesus H. Christ," my father said, rattling his paper in the living room.
Grandma Mazur came to live with my parents several years ago when my grandpa Mazur went to the big poker game in the sky. My mother accepts this as a daughter's obligation. My father has taken to reading Guns & Ammo.
"So what's up?" I asked. "Why did you page me?"
"We need a detective," Grandma said.
My mother rolled her eyes and ushered me into the kitchen. "Have a cookie," she said, setting the cookie jar on the small Formica-topped kitchen table. "Can I get you a glass of milk? Some lunch?"
I lifted the lid on the cookie jar and looked inside. Chocolate chip. My favorite.
"Tell her," Grandma said to my mother, giving her a poke in the side. "Wait until you hear this," she said to me. "This is a good one."
I raised my eyebrows at my mother.
"We have a family problem," my mother said. "Your uncle Fred is missing. He went out to the store and hasn't come home yet."
"When did he go out?"
"Friday."
I paused with a cookie halfway to my mouth. "It's Monday!"
"Isn't this a pip?" Grandma said. "I bet he was beamed up by aliens."
Uncle Fred is married to my grandma Mazur's first cousin Mabel. If I had to guess his age I'd have to say somewhere between seventy and infinity. Once people start to stoop and wrinkle they all look alike to me. Uncle Fred was someone I saw at weddings and funerals and once in a while at Giovichinni's Meat Market, ordering a quarter pound of olive loaf. Eddie Such, the butcher, would have the olive loaf on the scale and Uncle Fred would say, "You've got the olive loaf on a piece of waxed paper. How much does that piece of waxed paper weigh? You're not gonna charge me for that waxed paper, are you? I want some money off for the waxed paper."
I shoved the cookie into my mouth. "Have you filed a missing persons report with the police?"
"Mabel did that first thing," my mother said.
"And?"
"And they haven't found him."
I went to the refrigerator and poured out a glass of milk for myself. "What about the car? Did they find the car?"
"The car was in the Grand Union parking lot. It was all locked up nice and neat."
"He was never right after that stroke he had in ninety-five," Grandma said. "I don't think his elevator went all the way to the top anymore, if you know what I mean. He could have just wandered off like one of those Alzheimer's people. Anybody think to check the cereal aisle in the supermarket? Maybe he's just standing there 'cause he can't make up his mind."
My father mumbled something from the living room about my grandmother's elevator, and my mother slid my father a dirty look through the kitchen wall.
I thought it was too weird. Uncle Fred was missing. This sort of thing just didn't happen in our family. "Did anybody go out to look for him?"
"Ronald and Walter. They covered all the neighborhoods around the Grand Union, but nobody's seen him."
Ronald and Walter were Fred's sons. And probably they'd enlisted their kids to help, too.
"We figure you're just the person to take a crack at this," Grandma said, "on account of that's what you do . . . you find people."
"I find criminals."
"Your aunt Mabel would be grateful if you'd look for Fred," my mother said. "Maybe you could just go over and talk to her and see what you think."
"She needs a detective," I said. "I'm not a detective."
"Mabel asked for you. She said she didn't want this going out of the family."
My internal radar dish started to hum. "Is there something you're not telling me?"
"What's to tell?" my mother said. "A man wandered off from his car."
I drank my milk and rinsed the glass. "Okay, I'll go talk to Aunt Mabel. But I'm not promising anything."
* * * * *
UNCLE FRED AND Aunt Mabel live on Baker Street, on the fringe of the Burg, three blocks over from my parents. Their ten-year-old Pontiac station wagon was parked at the curb and just about spanned the length of their rowhouse. They've lived in the rowhouse for as long as I can remember, raising two children, entertaining five grandchildren, and annoying the hell out of each other for over fifty years.
Aunt Mabel answered my knock on her door. She was a rounder, softer version of Grandma Mazur. Her white hair was perfectly permed. She was dressed in yellow polyester slacks and a matching floral blouse. Her earrings were large clip-ons, her lipstick was a bright red, and her eyebrows were brown crayon.
"Well, isn't this nice," Aunt Mabel said. "Come into the kitchen. I got a coffee cake from Giovichinni today. It's the good kind, with the almonds."
Certain proprieties were observed in the Burg. No matter that your husband was kidnapped by aliens, visitors were offered coffee cake.
I followed after Aunt Mabel and waited while she cut the cake. She poured out coffee and sat opposite me at the kitchen table.
"I suppose your mother told you about your uncle Fred," she said. "Fifty-two years of marriage, and poof, he's gone."
"Did Uncle Fred have any medical problems?"
"The man was healthy as a horse."
"How about his stroke?"
"Well, yes, but everybody has a stroke once in a while. And that stroke didn't slow him down any. Most of the time he remembered things no one else would remember. Like that business with the garbage. Who would remember a thing like that? Who would even care about it? Such a fuss over nothing."