“I'm not wearing pants,” he said.
“Not my problem.”
I walked him out of the house and settled him onto a newspaper on my backseat.
“The desk sergeant is gonna love this,” Lula said.
An hour later, Andy was in line at the courthouse, waiting to see the judge, and Lula and I were back on Hamilton Avenue, coming up to Tasty Pastry.
“Pull over!” Lula said. “I want to go into the bakery. I gotta look at wedding cakes, and I wouldn't mind getting an eclair to settle my stomach. I think I got wedding jitters.”
I thought that was a great idea. I didn't have wedding jitters, but I had guy-in-basement jitters, and Loretta jitters, and Joe Morelli fatherhood jitters. I might need three eclairs.
I parked the Sentra, and Lula and I marched into the bakery. Betty Kuharchek was behind the counter, setting out a cookie display. Betty is an apple dumpling woman who has worked at Tasty Pastry forever. If you pass her on the street, there's the lingering scent of powdered sugar icing.
“I'm gonna be a June bride and I need to consider some wedding cakes,” Lula said to Betty. “I like the one in the window with the three tiers and the big white roses with the green leaves, but before I get down to business, I need an eclair.”
“Me, too,” I said to Betty. “I need three.”
“Three?” Lula said. “I'm the one with the wedding jitters, and you're trumping me on eclairs. What's with that?”
“I have Zook and Loretta jitters.”
“That don't seem like three-eclair jitters to me,” Lula said. “That's barely a single eclair. That might be a half a eclair. Maybe I need more eclairs.” She looked over at Betty. “You might want to put a couple more eclairs in that box.”
Betty boxed up six eclairs and handed them over. “What kind of cake are you thinking about?” Betty asked. “Chocolate, vanilla, carrot cake, rum cake, chocolate chip, spice, banana? And then you get to choose the filling between the layers. Lemon pudding, chocolate mousse, whipped cream, coconut cream, tropical fruit filling?”
“I like all them cakes,” Lula said. “The part I want to talk about is the bride and groom. The little people on top the cake have to be right. Tank and me are darker than the little people you got displayed. And we're more... full-bodied. You see what I'm saying?”
The door to the bakery opened and Morelli sauntered in, draped an arm around my shoulders, and gave me a friendly kiss just above my ear. “Saw your car parked at the curb,” he said. “Nice paint job.”
“Protects me from Moondog.”
“One less thing for me to worry about,” Morelli said.
I took the box of eclairs and went outside to talk. I opened the box and offered it to Morelli. “Hungry?”
Morelli's eyes went beyond the box to my T-shirt and traveled south. “Yeah,” he said.
“Right now, I'm only offering eclairs.”
Morelli blew out a sigh and took one. I did the same, and we stood in the sun with our backs to the building and ate our eclairs.
“I had a disturbing conversation with Dominic Rizzi,” I said to Morelli. “His contention is that not only did you steal his Aunt Rose's house out from under him, but that you're Mario's father.”
“That's ridiculous,” Morelli said.
“Dora claims he caught you in the act with Loretta in her father's garage, and nine months later Mario was born.”
Morelli chewed slowly and thought about it.
“I went through a lot of women back then. I don't remember all of them.”
“Seems to me you'd remember having sex with your cousin.”
“To begin with, Loretta's not exactly part of the family tree. It's more like she's in the forest.”
“What the heck is that supposed to mean?”