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“It's a Bob Newhart retrospective,” Mooner said. “They're playing all the classics. Solid gold.”
“So,” I said, looking around the room, “Dougie's never disappeared like this before?”
“Not as long as I've known him.”
“Does Dougie have a girlfriend?”
Mooner went blank-faced. Like this was too big a question to comprehend.
“Girlfriend,” he said finally. “Wow, I never thought of the Dougster with a girlfriend. Like, I've never seen him with a girl.”
“How about a boyfriend?”
“Don't think he's got one of them, either. Think the Dougster's more . . . um, self-sufficient.”
“Okay, let's try something else. Where was Dougie going when he disappeared?”
“He didn't say.”
“He drove?”
“Yep. Took the Batmobile.”
“Just exactly what does the Batmobile look like?”
“It looks like a black Corvette. I rode around looking for it, but it's nowhere.”
“Probably you should report this to the police.”
“No way! The Dougster will be up the creek on his bond.”
I was getting a bad vibe here. Mooner was looking nervous, and this was a seldom-seen side of his personality. Mooner is usually Mr. Mellow.
“There's something else going on,” I said. “What aren't you telling me?”
“Hey, nothing, dude. I swear.”
Call me crazy, but I like Dougie. He might be a schnook and a schemer, but he was kind of an okay schnook and schemer. And now he was missing, and I was having a bad feeling in my stomach.
“How about Dougie's family? Have you spoken to any of them?” I asked.
“No, dude, they're all in Arkansas someplace. The Dougster didn't talk about them a lot.”
“Does Dougie have a phone book?”
“I've never seen one. I guess he could have one in his room.”
“Stay here with Bob and make sure he doesn't eat anything. I'll check out Dougie's room.”
There were three small upstairs bedrooms. I'd been in the house before, so I knew which room was Dougie's. And I knew what to expect of the interior design. Dougie didn't waste time with the petty details of housekeeping. The floor in Dougie's room was littered with clothes, the bed was unmade, the dresser was cluttered with scraps of paper, a model of the starship Enterprise, girlie magazines, food-encrusted dishes and mugs.
There was a phone at bedside but no address book beside the phone. There was a piece of yellow notepaper on the floor by the bed. There were a lot of names and numbers scribbled in no special order on the paper, some obliterated by a coffee cup stain. I did a fast scan of the page and discovered several Krupers were listed in Arkansas. None in Jersey. I scrounged through the mess on his dresser and just for the hell of it snooped in his closet.
No clues there.
I didn't have any good reason to look in the other bedrooms, but I'm nosey by nature. The second bedroom was a sparsely furnished guest room. The bed was rumpled, and my guess was Mooner slept there from time to time. And the third bedroom was stacked floor-to-ceiling with hijacked merchandise. Boxes of toasters, telephones, alarm clocks, stacks of T-shirts, and God-knows-what-else. Dougie was at it again.
“Mooner!” I yelled. “Get up here! Now!”
