Whose Number Is Up, Anyway?
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Stevi Mittman
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CHAPTER 1
Before redecorating a room, I always advise my clients to empty it of everything but one chair. Then I suggest they move that chair from place to place, sitting in it, until the placement feels right. Trust your instincts when deciding on furniture placement. Your room should “feel right.”
—TipsFromTeddi.com
Gut feelings. You know, that gnawing in the pit of your stomach that warns you that you are about to do the absolute stupidest thing you could do. Something that will ruin life as you know it.
I’ve got one now, standing at the butcher counter in King Kullen, the grocery store in the same strip mall as L.I. Lanes, the bowling alley cum billiard parlor I’m in the process of redecorating for its “Grand Opening.”
I realize being in the wrong supermarket probably doesn’t sound exactly dire to you, but you aren’t the one buying your father a brisket at a store your mother will somehow know isn’t Waldbaum’s.
But then, June Bayer isn’t your mother.
The woman behind the counter has agreed to go into the freezer to find a brisket for me since there aren’t any in the case. There are packages of pork tenderloins, piles of spareribs and rolls of sausage, but no briskets.
Warning number two, right? I should so be out of here.
But no, I’m still in the same spot when she comes back out, brisketless, her face ashen. She opens her mouth like she is going to scream, but only a gurgle comes out.
And then she pinballs out from behind the counter, knocking bottles of Peter Luger Steak Sauce to the floor on her way, hitting the tower of cans at the end of the prepared-foods aisle and sending them sprawling, making her way down the aisle, careening from side to side as she goes.
Finally, from the distance, I hear her shout. “He’s deeeeeeaaaad! Joey’s deeeeeaaaad.”
My first thought is, you should always trust your gut.
My second thought is that now my mother will know I was in King Kullen. For weeks I will have to hear “What did you expect?” as though whenever you go to King Kullen someone turns up dead. And if the detective investigating the case turns out to be Detective Drew Scoones…well, I’ll never hear the end of that from her, either.
Several people head for the butcher’s freezer and I position myself to block them. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from finding people dead—and this guy is not my first—it’s that the police get very testy when you mess with their murder scenes.
“You can’t go in there until the police get here,” I say, stationing myself at the end of the butcher’s counter and in front of the Employees Only door, acting like I’m some sort of authority. “You’ll contaminate the evidence if it turns out to be murder.”
Shouts and chaos. You’d think I’d know better than to throw the word murder around. Cell phones are flipping open and tongues are wagging.
I amend my statement quickly. “Which, of course, it probably isn’t. Murder, I mean. People die all the time and it’s not always in hospitals or their own beds, or…” I babble when I’m nervous and the idea of someone dead on the other side of the freezer door makes me very nervous.
So does the idea of seeing Drew Scoones again. Drew and I have this on-again, off-again sort of thing…that I kind of turned off.
Who knew he’d take it so personally when he tried to get serious and I responded by saying we could talk about us tomorrow—and then caught a plane to my parents condo in Boca the next day? In July. In the middle of a job.
For some crazy reason, he took that to mean that I was avoiding him and the subject of us.
That was three months ago. I haven’t seen him since.
The manager, who identifies himself and points to his name tag in case I don’t believe him, says he has to go into his cooler. “Maybe Joey’s not dead,” he says. “Maybe he can be saved, and you’re letting him die in there. Did you ever think of that?”
In fact, I hadn’t. But I had thought that the murderer might try to go back in to make sure his tracks were covered, so I say that I will go in and check.
Which means that the manager and I couple up and go in together while everyone pushes against the doorway to peer in, erasing any chance of finding clean prints on that Employee Only door.
I expect to find carcasses of dead animals hanging from hooks and maybe Joey hanging from one, too. I think it’s going to be very creepy and I steel myself, only to find a rather benign series of shelves with large slabs of meat laid out carefully on them, along with boxes and boxes marked simply “chicken.”
Nothing scary here, unless you count the body of a middle-aged man with graying hair sprawled faceup on the floor. His eyes are wide open and unblinking. His shirt is stiff. His pants are stiff. His body is stiff. And his expression, you should forgive the pun—is frozen. Bill-the-manager crosses himself and stands mute while I pronounce the guy dead in a sort of happy-now? tone.
“We should not be in here,” I say, and he nods his head emphatically and helps me push people out of the doorway just in time to hear the police sirens and see the cop cars pull up outside the big store windows.
Bobbie Lyons, my partner in Teddi Bayer Interior Designs (and also my neighbor, best friend and private fashion police), and Mark, our carpenter (and my dog-sitter, confidant and ego-booster), rush in from next door. They beat the cops by a half step and shout out my name. People point in my direction.
After all the publicity that followed the unfortunate incident during which I shot my ex-husband, Rio Gallo, and then the subsequent murder of my first client—which I solved, I might add—it seems like the whole world, or at least all of Long Island, knows who I am.
Mark asks if I’m all right. (Did I remember to mention that the man is drop-dead-gorgeous-but-a-decade-too-young-for-me-yet-too-old-for-my-daughter-thank-God?) I don’t get a chance to answer him because the police are quickly closing in on the store manager and me.
“The woman—” I begin telling the police. Then I have to pause for the manager to fill in her name, which he does: Fran.
I continue. “Right. Fran. Fran went into the freezer to get a brisket. A moment later she came out and screamed that Joey was dead. So, I’d say she was the one who discovered the body.”
“And you are…?” the cop asks me. It comes out a bit like who do I think I am, rather than who am I really?
“An innocent bystander,” Bobbie, hair perfect, makeup just right, says, carefully placing her body between the cop and me.
“And she was just leaving,” Mark adds. They each take one of my arms.
Fran comes into the inner circle surrounding the cops. In case it isn’t obvious from the hairnet and blood-stained white apron with “Fran” embroidered on it, I explain that she was the butcher who was going for the brisket. Mark and Bobbie take that as a signal that I’ve done my job and they can now get me out of here. They twist around, with me in the middle, like we’re a Rockettes line, until we are facing away from the butcher counter. They’ve managed to propel me a few steps toward the exit when disaster—in the form of a Mazda RX-7 pulling up at the loading curb—strikes.
Mark’s grip on my arm tightens like a vise. “Too late,” he says.
Bobbie’s expletive is unprintable. “Maybe there’s a back door,” she suggests, but Mark is right. It’s too late.
I’ve laid my eyes on Detective Scoones. And while my gut is trying to warn me that my heart shouldn’t go there, regions farther south are melting at just the sight of him.
“Walk,” Bobbie orders me.
And I try to. Really.
Walk, I tell myself. Just put one foot in front of the other.
I can do this because I know, in my heart of hearts, that if Drew Scoones were still interested in me, he’d have gotten in touch with me after I returned from Boca. And he didn’t.
Since he’s a detective, Drew doesn’t have to wear one of those dark blue Nassau County Police Department uniforms. Instead, he’s got on jeans, a tight-fitting T-shirt and a tweedy sports jacket. If you think that sounds good, you should see him. Chiseled features, cleft chin, brown hair that’s naturally a little sandy in the front, a smile that…well, that doesn’t matter. He isn’t smiling now.
He walks up to me, tucks his sunglasses into his breast pocket and looks me over from head to toe.
“Well, if it isn’t Miss Cut and Run,” he says. “Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere in Florida or something?” He looks at Mark accusingly, as if he were covering for me when he told Drew I was gone.
“Detective Scoones?” one of the uniforms says. “The stiff’s in the cooler and the woman who found him is over there.” He jerks his head in Fran’s direction.
Drew continues to stare at me.
You know how when you were young, your mother always told you to wear clean underwear in case you were in an accident? And how, a little farther on, she told you not to go out in hair rollers because you never knew who you might see—or who might see you? And how now your best friend says she wouldn’t be caught dead without makeup and suggests you shouldn’t either?
Okay, today, finally, in my overalls and Converse sneakers, I get it.
I brush my hair out of my eyes. “Well, I’m back,” I say. Like he hasn’t known my exact whereabouts. The man is a detective, for heaven’s sake. “Been back a while.”
Bobbie has watched the exchange and apparently decided she’s given Drew all the time he deserves. “And we’ve got work to do, so…” she says, grabbing my arm and giving Drew a little two-fingered wave goodbye.
As I back up a foot or two, the store manager sees his chance and places himself in front of Drew, trying to get his attention. Maybe what makes Drew such a good detective is his ability to focus.
Only what he’s focusing on is me.
“Phone broken? Carrier pigeon died?” he asks me, taking in Fran, the manager, the meat counter and that Employees Only door, all without taking his eyes off me.
Mark tries to break the spell. “We’ve got work to do there, you’ve got work to do here, Scoones,” Mark says to him, gesturing toward next door. “So it’s back to the alley for us.”
Drew’s lip twitches. “You working the alley now?” he says.
“If you’d like to follow me,” Bill-the-manager, clearly exasperated, says to Drew—who doesn’t respond. It’s as if waiting for my answer is all he has to do.
So, fine. “You knew I was back,” I say.
The man has known my whereabouts every hour of the day for as long as I’ve known him. And my mother’s not the only one who won’t buy that he “just happened” to answer this particular call. In fact, I’m willing to bet my children’s lunch money that he’s taken every call within ten miles of my home since the day I got back.
And now he’s gotten lucky.
“You could have called me,” I say.
“You’re the one who set tomorrow for our talk and then flew the coop, chickie,” he says. “I figured the ball was in your court.”
“Detective?” the uniform says. “There’s something you ought to see in here.”
Drew gives me a look that amounts to in or out?
He could be talking about the investigation, or about our relationship.
Bobbie tries to steer me away. Mark’s fists are balled. Drew waits me out, knowing I won’t be able to resist what might be a murder investigation.
Finally he turns and heads for the cooler.
And, like a puppy dog, I follow.
Bobbie grabs the back of my shirt and pulls me to a halt.
“I’m just going to show him something,” I say, yanking away.
“Yeah,” Bobbie says, pointedly looking at the buttons on my blouse. The two at breast level have popped. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
THE GUY IN THE FREEZER looks very familiar, but I can’t quite place him. I mean the dead one. The other guy I know so well that it’s hard not to just pick up where we left off.
If where we left off hadn’t been a precipice I wasn’t ready to fall from.
“You wanna tell me what happened?” Drew asks.
I tell him about how I should have gone to Waldbaum’s for the brisket, but that since I’m working next door…And here I segue into how the original decorator quit and I am finishing up her work and how I don’t get paid if I don’t get it done in time for their grand opening in just over a month—though they aren’t closed during the renovations so “Grand Opening” is really a misnomer—
He gives me the get-to-the-point look. It’s one of those benefits of knowing someone well: they don’t really have to use words.
“So I came here because it would save time. I thought I could pick up the meat first thing this morning, put it in the fridge at the alley and then take it home with me tonight. This month is all about saving time, because of the grand-opening thing—”
He knows I babble when I’m nervous, so he’s being patient. He only sighs rather than signaling me to hurry up.
“And there was no brisket in the case, so I asked the woman who was putting out the chicken breasts—the cutlet kind, sliced thin—if she had any in the back and she went to get some and, well—” I point at the guy on the floor.
Drew looks as though, when he asked what happened, he really meant it in the larger sense—the us sense.
I tell him that I’ve seen the guy before. He isn’t impressed. I tell him, no, really recently, only I can’t place him.
“Picture him upright,” Drew says. “Blinking. Maybe behind the meat counter?” he suggests sarcastically.
Gently two cops turn the body over. Across the back of the man’s shirt, through the ice that coats it, I see some bowling pins and a ball. Above the flying pins are the words The Spare Slices.
I gasp.
“Bad taste? Your mother wouldn’t approve?” Drew asks testily as he crouches over the body. Not surprisingly, there’s no love lost between Drew and my mother.
“Last night,” I say, remembering seeing the team at the bowling alley. They stood out because Max, the deli guy I know from Waldbaum’s, the one who always gives my youngest daughter, Alyssa, extra slices of Sweet Muenster while I order cold cuts, was one of them. “I saw him last night.”
“Really?” Drew asks, like this would be the sort of thing a person might make up. “When was that, exactly?”
“All night,” I say, then realize how that sounds. “All evening. Until about eleven-thirty.” I’m about to explain that I was working on the grand opening and this guy was bowling, but Drew doesn’t ask and I decide to let him make his own assumptions. I think, alive, Joey wasn’t bad-looking. A little old for me, but hey, I’m getting older every day myself.
“I’d like you to come down to the station,” he says, and I think he’s having too much fun busting my chops. I say something that sounds a lot like in your dreams—if you happen to be listening carefully.
Seems the two uniforms are. Their jaws drop.
Drew lets it roll off his back. He comes to his feet and takes my chin in his hand. “You, my dear, are a material witness. You may have been the last person to see your date alive.”
AFTER EXPLAINING that the man was not with me, but with an entire bowling league, I’m released. I’m back at the bowling alley when my cell phone, announcing a call from my mother, plays the theme from Looney Tunes.
“How do you do it?” I ask her while Mark gestures for me to show him how high I want the new dark green Formica-that-looks-like-granite paneling to go.
“I have spies,” she says matter-of-factly, as I place my hand about hip high on the wall. We’re going ultra modern for the billiards area, with brushed steel above faux-marble wainscoting. Wouldn’t have been my choice, but all the materials were already ordered when Percy Michaels decided she was too good to decorate bowling alleys and took a powder.
That’s when Teddi the scavenger Bayer, the hungriest (and some say most dangerous) decorator on Long Island, swooped in. I get a premium if I finish the job on time and nothing for my end of the work if I don’t. And as of today, nothing seems only too real.
“They’re everywhere, so don’t think you can get away with seeing that Detective Spoonbreath again. I didn’t lend you my condo for two weeks so that you could come home and pick up where you left off with him.”
“You didn’t, but I did,” my father says into the extension. “If that’s what she wants. Leave her be, for God’s sake, June.”
I love my father.
Not that I don’t love my mother—I just don’t like her very much.
My mother continues as if my father hasn’t said anything at all. “Mildred Waynick said you barricaded the freezer door and were in there alone with him for twenty minutes. And you weren’t cold when you came out.”
“Leave her be, June,” my father says without enthusiasm—probably because he knows, after all these years, that his words are falling on deaf ears.
“Did Mildred mention there was a dead body in there?” I ask, checking on angles to make sure that the light won’t reflect into a player’s eyes when he’s taking a pool shot. “Not what you’d call romantic, exactly.”
“It must have been very upsetting,” my father says. I hear him tsking. Or he could be cleaning between his teeth with a matchbook cover.
“Teddi’s used to it by now,” my mother snaps back. “And it gave her an excuse to see Detective Dreamboat.”
“My, my. He’s moving up in the world,” I say, putting my hand just under my breasts to show Mark how high the bar should be. He gestures for me to stand still while he measures. Yeah, fat chance. “What happened to Spoonbreath?”
“Nothing bad enough, it seems,” my mother counters.
I remind her that she’s caught me at work and tell her that I’ve got to go. Not that this stops her.
“Who were you on the phone with before I called?” she asks. “I got voice mail.”
I tell her it was a wrong number, which, although true, doesn’t satisfy her. So I admit it was Mel Gibson, out of rehab and looking for a nice Jewish girl.
She makes an ugly noise and moves on. “You joke, but my reputation gets dragged through the mud along with yours,” she says dramatically. “I have a daughter who decorates bowling alleys, shops in goyish food stores and lusts after cops. And she lies to me. Can you just tell me what it was I did to you that was so awful, so terrible, that you need to punish me like this?”
“I’m earning an honest living here, Mother. There’s no cross over King Kullen’s doors and I’m not lusting after anyone.” Okay, so that part’s a lie. “What did I do to deserve this?”
“Be that way, Teddi.” I hear her exhale her cigarette smoke. “Go ahead. I won’t even tell you about the lottery ticket I bought for you. The mega-millions one they drew last night.”
My heart stops. “What about it?” I ask her, having heard this morning on the radio that it wasn’t claimed yet. Though they also said the winning ticket—for thirty-seven million dollars—was purchased in Plainview and I know that there is no way my mother would shop in Plainview, just a stone’s throw (and a step down, according to her) from where I live in Syosset. Not even for a lottery ticket.
“You didn’t win,” she tells me while I look at the phone with utter amazement. “But you could have, so don’t blame me. At least I tried to fix your life. Imagine the man you could get if you’d won that lottery.”
I tell her to keep trying, and until she wins me either a fortune or a man, I better keep working. And that includes doing bowling alleys and any other places that will pay me.
“Will brothels be next, Teddi? Or funeral homes? Do you get some sort of perverse pleasure embarrassing me like this? Are you getting back at me?” my mother asks. “Is that it?”
She probably says a few other nasty things, but I don’t know, because I’ve already pressed End.
Bobbie opens her mouth to weigh in on Drew Scoones’s place in my life, but I tell her we have work to do. Between Bobbie’s I-don’t-smoke-anymore-but-I-still-deserve-a-break breaks, her shopping, her trips to her husband, Mike’s, chiropractic office in the middle of the day to find this patient’s file or that one’s X-rays, it’s no wonder she occasionally forgets we’re actually working.
She was not the one who was here until nearly midnight last night, measuring and leaving notes for Mark so that he could get the Formica cut at the lumber yard and ready to install before L.I. Lanes opened today. She didn’t have to fend off two drunk guys who didn’t understand any part of no even after the jukebox played Lorrie Morgan’s song twice.
She wasn’t the one who locked up the place and had to walk to her car alone in the dark, her heels clicking on the asphalt so loudly in her ears that it nearly drowned out the sound of the men arguing in front of the bagel shop.
I close my eyes and try to picture them because, if my mind isn’t playing tricks on me, they were The Spare Slices and they were pretty angry.
“You okay?” Mark asks, taking my elbow. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
“I may have,” I say, trying to remember what they were arguing about.
Whatever it was, Drew needs to know.
“I’ve got to call him,” I say, and neither Mark nor Bobbie needs to ask who.
“What a surprise,” Bobbie says, rolling her eyes and holding out her hand, palm up, to Mark.
“Thanks,” Mark tells me sarcastically, taking out a five and putting it in Bobbie’s hand as I dial Drew’s number from memory.
“I just remembered something,” I say when he answers the phone.
“What’s that?” Drew asks.
“Okay, we need to talk…”
There’s a beat before he answers me. “Sure,” he says. “Tomorrow.”
