"Who, me? Hell, no," Lula said. "I don't know why I said that. It just come out of my mouth. Everybody knows leprechauns aren't real, right?" Lula turned onto Broad. "Still, there's a lot of talk about them, and that talk has to come from somewhere. Remember that Christmas when Trenton was overrun with elves? If there's elves, there might be leprechauns."

"They weren't elves," I told her. "They were vertically challenged people wearing pointy rubber ears, and they were trucked in from Newark as a marketing strategy for a toy factory."

"I knew that," Lula said. "But some people thought they were elves."

It takes about an hour and a half to get from Trenton to Atlantic City. Forty minutes, if Lula's behind the wheel. It's flat-out highway driving until you get to Pleasantville. After that, it's not all that pleasant since the Jersey poor back up to the Jersey Shore in Atlantic City. We drove past several blocks of hookers and pushers and empty-eyed street kids, and then suddenly the landscape brightened and we were at Daffy's. Lula parked in the garage, and we fixed our makeup, sprayed our hair, and hoofed it through the maze that leads to the casino floor.

"It's going to be hard to spot Grandma Mazur," Connie said. "This place is filled with old people. They bring them in by bus, give them a carton of cigarettes, a ticket to the lunch buffet, and show them how to stick their credit cards in the slot machines."

"Yeah, people in Jersey know how to enjoy old age," Lula said.

It was true. All over the country, we were warehousing old people in nursing homes, feeding them Jell-O. And in Jersey, we were busing them into casinos. Dementia and heart disease didn't slow you down in Jersey.

"You could probably order dialysis off the room service menu here," Lula said. "I tell you, I'm glad I'm gonna spend my golden years in Jersey."

"We'll all go in a different direction and look for Grandma," I said. "We'll keep in touch by cell phone."

I was halfway through a tour of the blackjack tables and my phone rang.

"I found her," Connie said. "She's at the slots, playing poker. Go to the big dog in the middle of the room and turn left."

Daffy's was one of the larger, newer casinos on the Boardwalk. In a misguided effort to out-theme Caesars, the conglomerate owners had chosen to design the casino after the chairman's ten-year-old beagle... Daffy. There was a Daffy Doodle bar and a Daffy Delicious restaurant, and Daffy paw prints on the purple-and-gold carpet. The crowning glory was a twenty-foot, two-ton, bronze Daffy that shot laser beams out of its eyes. The dog barked on the hour and was located dead center in the main casino.