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“I made an appointment for you last week. Maybe it was the week before. Anyway, it’s a good thing I remembered because it’s for nine o’clock tomorrow morning.” She recites the address and starts giving me directions as if I have a pen and paper at the ready.
I tell her I can’t make it at nine and she somehow worms out of me the fact that I am wanted down at the police station.
“He called you?” she asks. “That’s why I got voice mail? For Spoonbreath?”
“No, that was the pool table salesman,” I say, accepting the fact that she all but monitors my phone and always knows when I’ve gotten a call. “A policeman dropped by the bowling alley to tell me I’m wanted at the precinct in the morning.”
“Of course he wants you,” my mother says. “Tell him too bad. Tell him you’ve got a job to do. Tell him to sniff at someone else’s skirts…”
I, OF COURSE, tell him none of those things.
Sitting across the desk from him at the station the next morning, I tell him that I saw Joey arguing with several other men outside the bowling alley the night before he died. And they all had The Spare Slices shirts on.
“You hear what they were arguing about?” he asks me. He’s all business, but I notice his leg is going up and down a mile a minute, which he only does when he’s nervous.
I shake my head. “Was it murder?” I ask.
“Doesn’t really look like it,” he says. “But there are a few loose ends I want to tie up.”
He waits for me to respond. And he waits. The air in the room gets stuffy. Finally I say, “Okay, fine. Because I was scared.”
“Was that an answer to an old question or to one I didn’t ask yet?” he asks me.
I nod.
“Come on, Teddi,” he says. He’s almost whining. “Help me out here, okay? Just a clue what we’re talking about.”
“I ran because I was alone, which is scary,” I say.
“Is that you-leave-me-before-I-leave-you?” Drew asks.
I take a moment to figure out where that came from. He means running to Boca. I meant running to my car. I explain that because I was running, I couldn’t hear what the men were shouting about.
“Right,” he says.
Leave him before he left me? Is that what he thinks? Is that what he was going to do? “Were you going to leave me?” I ask.
He has the file open on his desk. A picture of Joey—frozen—is on top and he fingers it and pulls out a report sheet from behind it. “Where?” he says.
I figure we’re back to the investigation, so I say, “In front of the bagel place—you know, between L.I. Lanes and King Kullen. The one with the mini-everything bagels. Not too many places do the everythings in mini-size.”
He grimaces. “Leave you where?” he asks.
Is your head spinning yet? Because mine is. And while it’s been three months, I’m still not ready to talk about us. “What did he die of?” I ask instead of answering him.
“Heart attack,” he says. “Guy had a history of heart disease. He was living on borrowed time.”
I pick Dana’s old purse up off the floor and throw the strap over my shoulder. Bobbie would kill me if she saw the depths to which I’ve sunk, but Alyssa, my seven-year-old, painted my purse with magic marker. A new purse is not exactly in the budget at the moment, not even one from T.J.Maxx, which would pain Bobbie almost as much as Dana’s old one, I think. Nowadays you need to take out a second mortgage to buy a nice handbag. I can’t imagine what you’re left with to put inside it. You certainly don’t need a wallet cause there’d be nothing to keep in it.
“So that’s it then,” I say, coming to my feet.
“Looks like,” he says. “Only…”
He’s baiting me, but I refuse to get hooked. Still, asking “Only what?” doesn’t seem like much of a risk.
“Only the guy works in the deli, not the meat department. It’s after hours and he’s just had an argument with his buddies.”
“So why was he in the freezer?” I ask.
“And why was his shirt frozen?” he adds.
“He was locked in?” I ask. “Like you see in old movies?”
Drew shakes his head at me and smiles like it amuses him that I’m once again relating the world to some movie I’ve seen. “They don’t use that kind anymore. There are always latches on the inside to prevent accidental lock-ins.”
“And so he goes into the freezer, maybe to steal some filets, and the door closes behind him—” I start.
“One, they call it a cooler. The freezer’s where they keep the real frozen stuff—ice cream and the like. And two, there’s no reason he can’t just let himself out.”
“But he doesn’t.” I sit back down. “He has a sudden pain in his chest.” I clutch my chest. “He knows it’s the big one. He gropes for the door in the dark—” I flail my arms with my eyes closed.
“Light goes on automatically when you open the door.”
I open my eyes and remind him that the door is closed behind him.
“Stays on for thirty minutes,” Drew says. “And there’s an emergency button to push.”
“His shirt was wet?” I ask. “From sweat?”
Drew shakes his head. “Coroner says tap water.”
“And you say?” I ask.
Drew looks at the file. He leafs through a paper or two, studies the photograph of Joey. “Suspicious,” he says.
He doesn’t have to ask what I’d say.
Murder.
CHAPTER 3
Just like you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can’t judge a house by its appearance from the street. But you can provide a hint of what’s to be found inside so that the result doesn’t jar the senses. A Chinese umbrella stand on the porch, an arts and crafts mailbox, Victorian cornices—these all signal your style.
—TipsFromTeddi.com
I am not investigating anything, I tell myself. I am merely picking up some deli at Waldbaum’s for the kids’ lunches. Or just in case my father should happen to drop by. I mean, really, how can you not have some corned beef around, just in case?
“And maybe some potato salad,” I tell Max, who seems a bit more flushed than usual.
He hands me one of those white deli bags with some chocolate-covered raspberry Jell Rings for Alyssa. “No charge,” he says with a wink.
I thank him and remark how funny it was to see him a few nights ago. He doesn’t seem to think there was anything odd about it.
“I’m really sorry about your friend,” I say, lowering my voice as though at work he isn’t allowed to have friends.
“Joey?” he asks, surprised that I know. “Damn shame. Just when things were looking up.”
“Looking up?” I ask. Someone nudges my arm while reaching for the Turn-O-Matic machine.
“We’re not taking numbers,” someone else informs her, which I take to mean that she was here first and didn’t take one.
“Could have been looking up,” he hedges. “Who knows?”
Why is he backtracking? I can’t help but wonder. Only it doesn’t seem like a line I can pursue, so I go back to how odd it was to see him at the alley. With the dead guy.
“I mean seeing you there out of context,” I say. “At first I didn’t even recognize you.”
“You think this is my whole life?” he asks, fanning his hands out to encompass his domain. The counters are full of twenty kinds of turkey, every manner of pastrami, salami, bologna and corned beef. There’s herring salad, white-fish salad, crab salad…He slaps his hand on the top of the counter. “God, no. I got a life outside of here.”
“I know,” I say with a big smile, like bowling once a week is a whole life—and don’t I know it? “I saw last night.”
He shakes his head.
“I got a lot more in mind than bowling once a week with those losers,” he says. “A new car, a boat. Maybe even a house on some island. Hawaii, maybe. You think the houses are cheaper in Hawaii or Florida?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him, putting a bag of onion rolls in my cart so that the women around me know I’m shopping and not just shooting the breeze. “But I do know you can live pretty cheaply in the Bahamas. I’ve got a brother who’s lived down there ever since college.” I don’t go into how the trip was a graduation present from my parents and David simply decided not to come back, even though my father’s store, Bayer Furniture (the home of headache-free buying and hassle-free finance), was waiting for him.
Max asks if maybe I could give him David’s name and he might get in touch one day.
Okay, by now, people around me are getting testy. I tell Max just a half pound of the potato salad and maybe a pound of coleslaw. He nods, but he doesn’t make a move to fill my order.
“He like it in the Bahamas? Your brother?” he asks me.
I nod and smile and gesture toward the potato salad without trying to appear rude. There are sounds of disgruntlement growing behind me.
Bernie, another counter guy, comes over from the cheese portion of the counter and clicks the Turn-O-Matic, calls out the number after mine, and helps the woman beside me.
“Finally,” someone says.
“He have a Web site?” Max asks.
I picture my brother in cutoffs, no shoes, chasing after a naked little boy named Cody while Izzy, his pregnant wife, laughs at him. “I don’t think so.”
“E-mail?” Max asks. “I got a new computer last week. First one. Gotta keep up, you know?”
“I do.” I look at my watch and gesture toward the wrapped package of corned beef that is still on his side of the glass. “You know what? I think I’ll just take the corned beef,” I say.
“No, no. I’ll get your salads.” He waves his hand like filling my order isn’t important, like it’s not why he’s here, never mind why I’m here. “So are you working over there? At the alley, I mean?”
I explain how I’ve taken over the job of decorating the place while a woman pushes me out of the way on the pretense of reaching for a package of rugelach.
“Remind me nevah to go thayh,” the woman behind me says in a loud gravelly voice thick with Long Island.
I tell Max that I’m in kind of a rush and that maybe I’ll see him next week at the bowling alley.
“Isn’t it next week already?” the same woman asks in an even louder voice.
“You don’t like my service?” Max asks her. He squints his eyes at her like he could burn her with them. “Go to King Kullen.”
I want to warn her that King Kullen’s a bad idea, but she’s off looking for a manager.
“I won’t miss her,” Max says, handing me my corned beef, my potato salad, my coleslaw and a loose piece of halvah. “You, I’m gonna miss.”
“When you buy your island?” I ask, happy to feed the fantasy now that I’m backing away from the counter.
“Exactly,” he says as he listens to someone else’s order and nods. “A pound of pastrami. Got it. You want it should be lean? Sliced thin?”
“MO-OM!” Dana whines in response to my innocently mentioning at dinner in Pastaeria (the local pizza joint no one is sure how to pronounce), that Max was acting strangely and that I think I should tell Drew about his pie-in-the-sky plans. “You don’t know what kind of money he has stashed away. He could be a millionaire. He could be Donald Trump’s long-lost father and—”
I remind her that Max is around my age, which makes him way too young to be The Donald’s father. Dana seems skeptical, like maybe I don’t know just how old I really am. Remember when everyone who’d graduated from high school more than two years before you did was old? That’s what my kids think.
They may be right.
Jesse thinks it’s a great idea and I should pull out my cell phone and call Drew immediately. This, of course, has nothing to do with his fondness for Drew and his fervent wish that I marry the handsome detective.
Dana, picking all the cheese off her pizza and giving me a look which implies I should be doing the same, tells Jesse that he—and I—are just using Max as an excuse to call Drew. But, unlike her usual carping tone that implies I’m leading Drew on and ruining her life, she sounds like she’s actually teasing me. Could she be growing up? Adjusting to the fact that her father and I will not get back together in this lifetime?
“If it was murder, then maybe you and he would, you know, get together again,” she says. “At least, you hope.”
Unfortunately, she may have me dead to rights.
In the meantime, little Alyssa ate so many garlic knots before the pizza showed up that she can’t even pretend to eat her slice. That doesn’t mean she isn’t interested in dessert and she asks whether Max sent her anything.
I avoid answering because then I’d have to admit that on my way home I ate the Jell Rings meant for her.
I’ve got to go back to work if I’ve any hope of getting done before the grand opening, so I beg them to pass on dessert, remind everyone there is ice cream in the freezer, prevail and head for home. I arrive in my driveway at the same time my father pulls up at the curb. He’s there to watch the Mets game with Jesse, who doesn’t have the heart to tell him that he’s gone over to the dark side. He’s now a Yankees fan.
“Once a week I can root for the Mets for Grandpa,” he tells me, reminding me why it is I still like the kid. “Sometimes you have to bend the truth a little for someone you love.”
It’s taken me years to learn what he already knows at eleven.
I kiss the kids and Dad goodbye and I’m back at the alley, knee-deep in lighting wires when Drew and his partner, Hal Nelson, saunter in.
Saying that Hal and I don’t care for each other is like saying there may be a little traffic on the Long Island Expressway at rush hour. I don’t know what I ever did to him—except maybe show up the police department once or twice.
And I didn’t really do that, even.
Newsday just made it sound that way.
