“Moses Bedemier.”
My mother made the sign of the cross. “Holy mother of God, you're hunting down Uncle Mo.” She threw her hands into the air. “The man is a saint!”
“He's not a saint. He got arrested for carrying concealed, and then he didn't show up for a court appearance. So now I have to find him and get him rescheduled.”
“Carrying concealed,” my mother said, rolling her eyes. “What moron would arrest a good man like Mo Bedemier for carrying concealed?”
“Officer Gaspick.”
“I don't know any Officer Gaspick,” my mother said.
“He's new.”
“That's what comes of getting new cops,” Grandma said. “No telling what they might do. I bet that gun was planted on Mo. I saw a TV show the other night about how when cops want a promotion they plant drugs on people so they can arrest them. I bet that's what happened here. I bet that Officer Gaspick planted a gun on Mo. Everybody knows Mo would never do anything wrong.”
I was getting tired of hearing how Mo would never do anything wrong. In fact, I was beginning to wonder what sort of person this wonderful Uncle Mo really was. It seemed to me everyone knew him, but no one knew him.
My mother had her hands up in supplication. “How will I ever explain this? What will people say?”
“They'll say I'm doing my job,” I told my mother.
“Your job! You work for your no-good cousin. If it isn't bad enough you go around shooting people, now you're hunting down Uncle Mo as if he was a common criminal.”
“I only shot one person! And Uncle Mo is a common criminal. He broke the law.”
“Course it wasn't one of those laws we care much about,” Grandma said, weighing the crime.
“Has Mo ever been married?” I asked. “Does he have a girlfriend?”
“Of course not,” my grandmother said.
“What do you mean, of course not? What's wrong with him?”
My mother and my grandmother looked at each other. Obviously they'd never thought of it in those terms before.
“I guess he's sort of like a priest,” Grandma Mazur finally said. “Like he's married to the store.”
Oh boy. Saint Mo, the celibate candyman . . . better known as Old Penis Nose.
“Not that he doesn't know how to have a good time,” Grandma said. “I heard him tell one of those lightbulb jokes, once. Nothing blue, though. He would never say anything off-color. He's a real gentleman.”
“Do you know anything about him?” I asked. “Does he go to church? Does he belong to the VFW?”
“Well, I don't know,” Grandma said. “I just know him from the candy store.”
“When was the last time you talked to him?”
“Must have been a couple months ago. We stopped to buy ice cream on the way home from shopping. Remember that, Ellen?”
“It was before Christmas,” my mother said.
I made hand gestures for her to elaborate. “And?”
“There's no more,” she said. “We went in. We talked about weather. We got ice cream and left.”
“Mo looked okay?”
“He looked like he always looks,” my mother said. “Maybe a little less hair, a little more of a roll around his middle. He was wearing a white shirt that said UNCLE MO over the pocket, just like always.”