скачать книгу бесплатно
“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.”
CHAPTER 2
Anyone who has ever repainted a wall or replaced a carpet or even gotten a new set of kitchen pots knows one thing just leads inexorably to another. The bright walls make the ceiling look dull. The new light to make the ceiling brighter reveals the wear spots in the carpet. The carpet installation wrecks the molding. As long as the base molding is being replaced…
—TipsFromTeddi.com
I may not love decorating a bowling alley, but I have to admit there are certain perks to it. Like that the owner has agreed to let my kids and their friends bowl free whenever I’m on the job. This makes my eleven-year-old son, Jesse, very happy. It ought to make all the moms in the neighborhood happy, too, since I’m making sure the place is really kid-friendly so they’ll all have a viable alternative to the usual weekend mall-ratting.
L.I. Lanes isn’t just a cheaper way for the kids to spend a Saturday afternoon, it’s also only a good, hearty walk from our house. Not that Dana, my thirteen-going-on-thirty daughter will admit it’s walkable. She’s the original princess, requiring chauffeuring everywhere. If she’d been born a century or two ago in China, she’d be demanding her feet be bound so that no one could expect her to go as far as the refrigerator to get her own ice cream.
Anyway, my kids have found that if they stay on the school bus past our stop, they get dropped only a few blocks from the bowling alley and Carvel. And in they walk now, separately so that, God forbid!, no one thinks they came in together.
“Is it true?” Dana asks me. She’s connected to my mother by more than simple DNA. They’ve both read the elusive Secret Handbook of Long Island—the one everyone tries to tell me doesn’t exist—and I’m sure their spy networks overlap.
I feign ignorance. “Is what true?” Of course, I know what she knows. I just don’t know how she could already know it.
“You found another dead guy and the cops want to question you.”
Note there is no question mark at the end of that sentence.
“It is getting to be a habit,” Jesse adds as he checks out where the new pool tables are slated to be, making fake shots with an imaginary pool cue and checking behind him to see if I’ve left enough room.
I have my doubts myself, but I’m pretty sure I can get in the four tables I’m planning. And I’ve finally found someone who can get them for me within my rapidly shrinking time frame.
Anyway, I assure my children that while a man was found dead, it in no way means—
And then a cop walks in the door. We watch him stop at the desk and talk to Steve, the owner of L.I. Lanes. Steve points me out and, with a nod, the cop heads in my direction.
“Detective Scoones wants you down at the precinct tomorrow at nine a.m.,” he says, handing me one of Drew’s cards.
“Sure,” I say, trying to be offhanded about it as I shove the card in the back pocket of my jeans.
“Guess it’s not just in his dreams,” he says. He snickers and heads for the door.
“This is so embarrassing,” Dana announces loudly, in case anyone has missed the entire episode, which, judging from the stares, no one has. “Why do I have to have a mother who is a murder magnet?” She storms out the back door to the alley, headed, I suppose, for someplace where she can actually spend money.
Not too long after I’ve embarrassed my children, my mother calls, because life was just a bowl of cherries until now. It’s like that foul they’re always calling in football—piling on.
“I forgot to tell you that I got you a new job,” she says when I answer my cell. I remind her that I have a job and that I’m actually doing it at the moment.
“That?” she asks. “The bowling alley? That’s not a job, it’s penance. This is a real job. And I’m still in shock, so listen carefully. You remember Rita and Jerry Kroll from around the corner?”
How could I forget the Krolls? They had a son, Robert, who, despite being at least a decade older than we were, used to ride around the neighborhood on his bicycle every day, all day, in any kind of weather, speeding up behind little kids and honking his horn, scaring the wits out of us. He was Cedarhurst’s answer to To Kill a Mockingbird. Our very own Boo Radley. And it wasn’t until we’d grown up that we learned he wasn’t scary at all, just mentally disabled. Robby, as his parents called him, was simply never going to grow up.
“They bought a house in Woodbury last month and she wants you to decorate it. Can you believe this? What can she be thinking?”
“Excuse me, but I’m a good decorator, Mom,” I remind her. “Of course people are going to want to hire me.” That is, if my mother doesn’t convince them otherwise.
“Sure, sure,” my mother says dismissively. It comes out like we can discuss the possibility that I might have talent some other time. “But moving from the South Shore to Woodbury? From Cedarhurst yet? I mean, leaving Mel the butcher? Dominick at Tresses? The World’s Best dry cleaners. For Woodbury?”
I assure her that we actually have overpriced hairdressers and butchers and dry cleaners on the North Shore, too. Especially in Woodbury, which borders Syosset on “the good side”—which is to say the side that isn’t Plainview or Hicksville. Up, up, up the social ladder you go as you get closer to the Long Island Sound.
My mother reminds me that you get what you pay for.
“Which is why you have to double your prices for Rita. She’s used to being overcharged. It’s how she knows what something’s worth.”
Sometimes I believe that Cedarhurst is just north of Bizarro Land and just south of Topsy Turvy.
