“No, man. I was caught in the cinnamon roll tractor beam.”
“Okay, so what did she look like?” I asked him.
Mooner grinned. “She had real big gazongas.”
“We’ve already established that,” I said.
“He got a gazonga fixation,” Lula said. “What is it with men and gazongas? It’s not like women got a nut fixation. It’s not like we go around looking for some guy with basketballs hangin’ down to his knees.”
“Back to the woman,” I said. “How old was she?”
“She was about our age.”
“Pretty?”
“Yeah. She was, like, porn-star pretty.”
“What the heck is porn-star pretty?” Lula wanted to know.
“Like, out there with the gazongas, you know?”
“You say gazongas one more time, and I’m gonna hit you,” Lula said.
“Moving on,” I said. “What else?”
“She was wearing a lot of eye makeup, and she had big fat shiny lips, and she was in one of those black leather tops with the shoestrings. And it was, like, hardly holding the . . . you-know-whats in.”
“She was wearing a bustier,” Lula said.
“And she was in a black leather skirt that was, wow, really short. And stilleto heels.”
“Yep, that’s a porn star all right,” Lula said.
I was pretty sure I knew the porn star, and she was only a porn star in her home movies. “What about hair?” I asked.
“Red. Like Lula’s, but there was, like, a lot of it, and it was all in waves and curls. Like a red-haired Farrah Fawcett.”
“Joyce Barnhardt,” I said.
“Yeah,” Mooner said.
“You knew it was Joyce?”
“Sure.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You didn’t ask me if I knew her name,” Mooner said.
“Can I hit him now?” Lula wanted to know.
I cut my eyes to her. “You’d hit the brownie maker?”
“Yeah, good point,” Lula said.
“At least we know where Vinnie’s hiding out,” Connie said.
“Yeah, he took off sniffing after Barnhardt,” Lula said. “I’m just surprised he’s still there. Barnhardt uses ’em up and kicks ’em out.”