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Drew asks what happened this time. My mother tells him how the man in the john was “taken” with me, couldn’t take his eyes off me and blatantly flirted with both of us. To his credit, Drew doesn’t laugh, but his smirk is undeniable to the trained eye. And I’ve had my eye trained on him for nearly a year now.
“While he was noticing you,” he asks me, “did you notice anything about him? Was he waiting for anyone? Watching for anything?”
I tell him that he didn’t appear to be waiting or watching. That he made no phone calls, was fairly intent on eating and apparently flirted with my mother. This last bit Drew takes with a grain of salt, which was the way it was intended.
“And he had a short conversation with Tony,” I tell him. “I think he might have been unhappy with the food, though he didn’t send it back.”
Drew asks what makes me think he was dissatisfied, and I tell him that the discussion seemed acrimonious and that Tony appeared distressed. Drew makes a note and says he’ll look into it and asks about anyone else in the restaurant. Did I see anyone who didn’t seem to belong, anyone who was watching the victim, anyone looking suspicious?
“Besides my mother?” I ask him, and Mom huffs and blows her cigarette smoke in my direction.
I tell him that there were several deliveries, the kitchen staff going in and out the back door to grab a smoke, that sort of thing. He stops me and asks what I was doing checking out the back door of the restaurant.
Proudly—because while he was off forgetting me, dropping in every once in a while to say hi to my son, Jesse, or leave something for one of my daughters, I was getting on with my life—I tell him that I’m decorating the place.
He looks genuinely impressed. “Commercial customers? That’s great,” he says. Okay, that’s what he ought to say. What he actually says is “Whatever pays the bills.”
“Howard Rosen, the famous restaurant critic, got her the job,” my mother says. “You met him—the good-looking, distinguished gentleman with the real job, something to be proud of. I guess you’ve never read his reviews in Newsday.”
Drew, without missing a beat, tells her that Howard’s reviews are on the top of his list, as soon as he learns how to read.
“I only meant—” my mother starts, but both of us assure her that we know just what she meant.
“So,” Drew says. “Deliveries?”
I tell him that Tony would know better than I, but that I saw some come in. Fish. Maybe linens. “And there was produce, I guess,” I say, recalling seeing a delivery man leave wearing the usual white jacket, this one with a picture of a truck covered with vegetables and fruits all over its side.
“This is the second restaurant job Howard’s got her,” my mother tells Drew.
“At least she’s getting something out of the relationship,” he says.
“If he were here,” my mother says, ignoring the insinuation, “he’d be comforting her instead of interrogating her. He’d be making sure we’re both all right after such an ordeal.”
“I’m sure he would,” Drew agrees, then studies me as if he’s measuring my tolerance for shock. Quietly he adds, “But then maybe he doesn’t know just what strong stuff your daughter’s made of.”
It’s the closest thing to a tender moment I can expect from Drew Scoones. My mother breaks the spell. “She gets that from me,” she says.
Both Drew and I take a minute, probably to pray that’s all I inherited from her.
“I’m just trying to save you some time and effort,” my mother tells him. “My money’s on Howard.”
Drew withers her with a look and mutters something that sounds suspiciously like “fool’s gold.” Then he excuses himself to go back to work.
I catch his sleeve and ask if it’s all right for us to leave. He says sure, he knows where we live. I say goodbye to Tony. I assure him that I will have some sketches for him in a few days, all the while hoping that this murder doesn’t cancel his redecorating plans. I need the money desperately, the alternative being borrowing from my parents and being strangled by the strings.
My mother is strangely quiet all the way to her house. She doesn’t tell me what a loser Drew Scoones is—despite his good looks—and how I was obviously drooling over him. She doesn’t ask me where Howard is taking me tonight or warn me not to tell my father about what happened because he will worry about us both and no doubt insist we see our respective psychiatrists.
She fidgets nervously, opening and closing her purse over and over again.
“You okay?” I ask her. After all, she’s just found a dead man on the toilet, and tough as she is, that’s got to be upsetting.
When she doesn’t answer me I pull over to the side of the road.
“Mom?” She refuses to look at me. “You want me to take you to see Dr. Cohen?”
She looks out the window, elegant as ever in yet another ecru knit outfit, hair perfectly coiffed and spritzed within one spray of permanently laquered, and appears confused. It’s as if she’s just realized we’re on Broadway in Woodmere. “Aren’t we near Marvin’s Jewelers?” she asks, pulling something out of her purse.
“What have you got, Mother?” I ask, prying open her fingers to find the murdered man’s pinky ring.
“It was on the sink,” she says in answer to my dropped jaw. “I was going to get his name and address and have you return it to him so that he could ask you out. I thought it was a sign that the two of you were meant to be together.”
“He’s dead, Mom. You understand that, right?” I ask.
“Well, I didn’t know that,” she shouts at me. “Not at the time.”
I ask why she didn’t give it to Drew, realize that she wouldn’t give Drew the time in a clock shop and add, “…or to one of the other policemen.”
“For heaven’s sake,” she tells me. “The man is dead, Teddi, and I took his ring. How would that look?”
Before I can tell her it would look just the way it is, she pulls out a cigarette and threatens to light it.
“I mean, really,” she says, shaking her head like it’s my brains that are loose. “What does he need it for now?”
CHAPTER 2
Design Tip of the Day
“A wonderful trick for unifying a room is to use a repeating motif. For example, you could purchase a fleur-de-lis stamp and use it above the chair rail, repeat the pattern with the drapery rod finials, a lamp finial, etc. Keep in mind, though, that too much repetition can lead to monotony.”
—TipsFromTeddi.com
My best friend and business partner, Bobbie Lyons, is watching for me out her window and she runs over to greet me in my driveway before I’m out of the car. It’s the middle of the afternoon and I happen to know for a fact that she was home all day and has no plans to go out. Despite that, she is wearing silk capris, kitten-heel suede slides and more diamonds than you’ll find in the window of Kay Jewelers. “I can’t believe it happened to you again!” she says as she slips one of her slides on and off repeatedly.
I tell her, as I already did on the cell the minute I dropped off my mother, that it was horrible, that my mother was impossible, and that she took the man’s ring. I don’t mention, however, that Drew Scoones was the investigating detective on the case.
“Diane says the guy was shot between the eyes while he was on the can,” she tells me and shrugs at her sister’s choice of words. “She’s pissed because she was investigating a robbery when the call came in so she didn’t get to see it. She hates being low man on the police totem pole.”
“Well, it wasn’t a pretty sight,” I assure her. Then I add that it sure would have been nice to see a friendly face there. Bobbie’s left eyebrow shoots up and I feel as though I’ve got one of those electronic banners running across my forehead announcing every thought in my head.
“He was there,” she says, her short red hair glinting in the sunlight, the new blond streaks blinding me.
I am silent.
“Oh…my…God! He was there!”
“He?” I ask, trying to be oh-so-casual. Unfortunately, her look cuts off this avenue of escape.
“What did he say? Is he still gorgeous? Did your stomach hurt at the sight of him? Are you sorry you didn’t get those highlights I told you to get?”
“What are you? Eleven years old?” I ask. Okay, that might be a little harsh, but she is really bugging me. “I just saw another dead body. I really thought that the first one would hold me for this lifetime. So yes, Drew Scoones was there. So yes, he’s still good-looking.”
This last bit is the understatement of the year. And, so yes, my stomach did do flip-flops at the sight of him, but I’ll never admit it, because it was clear his didn’t do flip-flops at the sight of me. Maybe I should have sprung for the highlights after all.
“For all I know, he’s married by now.”
“He’s not.” Bobbie says this like she absolutely knows. When I give her the how-can-you-possibly-know-that? look, she smiles and says, “Diane.”
I imagine Drew Scoones thinking that I am keeping tabs on him and want to crawl into a hole and die.
“Mom!” Jesse yells out the front door to me, opening it enough to let loose Maggie May, the bichon frise I “inherited” from Elise Meyers, the woman I found murdered last year. (Okay, fine. So I stole the dog. She was dead and her husband, who was trying to kill her before someone else beat him to it, wasn’t going to take care of her dog, now was he?) Jesse gestures with his hand that there is someone on the phone.
“It’s probably Howard,” I tell Bobbie. “He’s taking me out to some Iron Chef cook-off thing tonight. Maybe I can beg off.”
Bobbie gives me the look. The one that says I’m breaking yet another Long Island rule—canceling an engagement the same day. It seems like, much to Bobbie and my mother’s dismay, I will never learn how to get ahead on Long Island. At nearly forty, it’s probably too late.
Then she concedes that maybe, under the circumstances, it could be all right.
“Maybe,” she says, grabbing Maggie May’s collar and dragging her into the house. “Like if you make up some wild story about seeing some murdered guy on the john….”
“It’s Drew,” Jesse says breathlessly, and his face is lit up like it’s Superman calling. “You should invite him to dinner, Mom,” he says, then scrunches up his nose at the thought of my cooking. “Or something, anyway,” he adds.
I pretend to be offended by my eleven-year-old’s suggestion as I ruffle his hair on my way to the kitchen, where I pick up the portable from the counter and say, “Hello.”
“You’re gonna love this one,” he says, like there hasn’t been a three-month lull in our conversations, like I haven’t jumped every time the phone rang since the last time he called me, eighty-six days ago. “Your dead guy? He’s the one who shut down Sheldon’s of Great Neck. Isn’t that where you were planning to have Dana’s bat mitzvah?”
He knows exactly where her bat mitzvah was supposed to be. He even went with me to look Sheldon’s over, to make plans, to pick which room to have the meal in, which one to serve the hors d’oeuvres.
And then he just stopped calling. “What do you mean, ‘he was the one who shut it down’?” I ask.
“He’s…that is, he was, with the Board of Health. He was the food inspector who claimed Sheldon’s didn’t meet the County’s standards. Looks like you are S.O.L. As usual.”
“As long as it doesn’t make me a suspect,” I say. I mean, been there, done that, and “shit outta luck” beats having to prove I’m innocent—or that my best friend is—again.
Drew just laughs.
“Well, I do have a motive,” I concede. “Though you know that I didn’t know who he was until this moment. And okay, I had opportunity. I admit I was there in the restaurant when he was killed. But means?”
I think for just a nanosecond and I can’t believe what crosses my mind.
“Please don’t tell me you’ve found the gun and it’s registered to Rio.”
Drew laughs again at the mention of my thank-God-he’s-behind-me ex-husband, a man who believed in the principle of survival of the slickest. “I forgot how funny you are,” he says.
There’s a silence while he waits for me to ask whose fault that is.
I don’t.
“So anyway,” he says, “I just thought you’d want to know the guy who screwed you is dead.”
Ha. The guy who screwed me is on the other end of the phone telling me the guy who screwed me is dead.
“So whatcha been up to?” he asks, just baiting me into asking him why he vanished off the face of my earth.
“Business,” I say. “I told you today, I’m doing a lot of commercial properties, restaurants, things like that.”
He doesn’t say anything, waiting, I suppose, for me to ask him what he’s been doing. Bobbie will give up buying shoes before I ask that.
“Is there anything else?” I ask, as in: is there a reason I’m sitting here holding on to the phone, unable to breathe, wishing that we were still friends? Still more than friends?
“You doing anything tonight?” he asks. I tell him I’ve got a date, but the cocky bastard sounds like he doesn’t believe me.
“Howard is taking me to some charity cook-off,” I say.
“Oh,” he says. “Howard. That doesn’t exactly count as a date.”
“He’s picking me up, paying for my dinner, taking me to a show, and bringing me home. What part of that isn’t a date?” I ask. Bobbie, putting her little crocheted shrug over my shoulders in an attempt to influence what I’m going to wear tonight, gives me a thumbs-up. She seems to think that the right sweater will always win the day.
He tells me, “the part that comes next.”
“What comes next is none of your business,” I tell him and hang up. I give Bobbie a look that says it’s none of hers, either, and head upstairs to get dressed without my fairy godmother to give me her glass slippers, though I think I still have the Manolos she loaned me a few weeks ago.
Howard is simply glowing this evening. It’s like he’s been lit from within, and he is devastatingly handsome in a beige linen jacket over a chocolate-brown T-shirt that hugs his torso like…Well, I’m not going there, so suffice it to say that Howard is over six feet tall, filled out without any fat, and he has the fastest smile I’ve ever seen. Nothing lights a face like a smile.
He has told me three times how his friend Nick, the chef at Madison on Park, has been practicing for this evening, how he has made all kinds of entrées and desserts and how Howard has had to try them all. He throws around words like Provençale and forestiere like I’m supposed to know what he means. He says Nick did a dish with roasted Maine lobster and kabocha squash gnocchi with sautéed black trumpets in sage oil. When I look stricken he assures me that the trumpets are mushrooms and not swans, and shakes his head at me.
“You’ve no appreciation for good food,” he complains as if I’m just being stubborn. He glances at our tickets and gestures with his chin to keep progressing down the aisle of the cavernous high school auditorium where they have set up several kitchens on the stage and placed big TV screens around the room so they can zoom in on the stovetops and prep areas.
What he means is that the other night when he took me out to review a new Italian restaurant for Newsday, the Dentice Mare Monte was absolutely wasted on me. As is anything with olives or artichokes or a host of other foods he thinks God invented just to pleasure man.
We get to our row and he grimaces because we are obviously farther back than row B ought to be. He hurries up ahead, sees that there are rows AA to FF before the single alphabet begins, and, with obvious disappointment, waves me into our row in front of him. Excusing ourselves, we clamber over people who refuse to stand up to let us get to our seats—and who then have the nerve to glare at us when we stumble over their purses and toes. I remind Howard as we navigate the various obstacles that the gâteau au chocolat wasn’t wasted on me.
He pulls a laugh from his inexhaustible supply as we take our seats, and he wonders aloud how it is that I can remember the French names only for desserts or things that involve chocolate.
“Chocolat,” I correct, saying it with what I hope is a convincing French accent.
He waves away my attempt at being seductive and tells me that I should have been there for the practice run. “Cockle Bruschetta,” he says, like cockles were likely to be the surprise ingredient they’d have the chefs use tonight. “Then a choucroute Royale Alsacienne, done not with sauerkraut but with a pickled mushroom…” He closes his eyes like he’s having sex and it is too perfect to describe.
At least, I think he’d close his eyes during sex. It’s not something I know firsthand.
“And just this morning I had to go on a scavenger hunt for tamarind paste,” he tells me as I settle into my seat and take in our surroundings. “Took me until nearly noon to find it in this little Indian spice place on Broadway down on the South Shore.”
“The Taj? The one next to The Steak-Out?” I ask. I remind him that was where I was at lunchtime, and it was where I discovered the murdered man I’ve already told him about.
He stops helping me off with Bobbie’s shrug and asks me if I’m sure. I tell him it’s not the sort of thing that one forgets. And then I could swear he shudders.
“You all right?” I ask and he gets all defensive, like I’ve impugned his manhood or something.
“I suppose you talked to the police,” he says. I tell him that yes, they interviewed my mother and me. But, because the chip on his shoulder is the size of Shea Stadium when it comes to Drew Scoones, I don’t mention just who “they” were.
