I didn’t know what that had to do with anything, besides her curiosity, but Crawford answered that he was a police detective. Lydia nodded slowly. “Here?” she asked.
“No. New York City,” he said.
She nodded again, and by the grim set of her mouth, I could tell that she wasn’t impressed. In fact, she seemed disgusted. Maybe she had had a run-in with a cop? Unpaid parking tickets? A jaywalking fine? All I knew was that she was not pleased to meet Crawford, even though she said so as she started off down the apple aisle, careful to avoid the glances of any other shoppers who were rubbernecking with gusto. The Hermès scarf and sunglasses notwithstanding, everyone knew exactly who she was.
Crawford looked at me and mouthed, “What was that?”
I shrugged and went with a full-blown lie. “You’re handsome. You’re going to get looks.” I pushed the cart down the aisle and toward the deli counter, Crawford following behind me.
“That wasn’t what that was,” he said, looking over his shoulder to see where Lydia had gone, but she had disappeared into one of the vast aisles in another part of the store. When he determined that she wasn’t in earshot, he turned back toward the deli counter. “Is it our turn?”
I showed him our number. Nine hundred and seven. The number on the neon counter read “three.” There were four other people ahead of us, waiting for cold cuts. “We’re going to be here a while,” I said.
The deli man approached and moved the number ahead. “Four!”
When no one answered, the woman at the head of the line interrupted. “I have forty-eight,” she said, proffering her ticket.
“Five!”
The man behind her offered his input. “I have ninety.”
“Six!”
Crawford let out a loud exhale.
“Seven!”
I looked at my ticket again. “I have nine hundred and seven,” I offered weakly.
“Eight!” The counter guy was more exasperated than the customers were but clearly couldn’t find his way toward waiting on the lady who was first on line. “Eight?”
Crawford steered the cart away from the counter and me out of the store. “Hey, what are we doing?” I asked as he grabbed my elbow and pushed me toward the car, leaving the cart behind.
“We’re getting out of here, that’s what we’re doing,” he said. “We’re going to Tony’s.”
My heart sank. Did we need cold cuts that badly? Couldn’t we have pizza instead? The last time I had been to Tony’s, his new wife, Lucia, had hurled an invective at me from the kitchen, suspicious that I wanted in on Tony’s sexagenarian deliciousness. Trust me—I don’t. I’ve got a guy who’s all that and more. Okay, so Crawford doesn’t have unlimited access to Boar’s Head cold cuts, but he’s got a lot of other things going for him. Not being in his sixties is one of them. And being taller than me is the other. Tony is pushing seventy, bald, fat, and short. Sure, he’s loaded, but that’s not going to cut the mustard with me. Lucia can have all two hundred and fifty pounds of him stretched across his five-foot-four frame.
I had never actually laid eyes on Lucia, but I had incurred her wrath so much that once she had thrown a pot of meatballs at my head from her hiding place in the kitchen. Fortunately, it had missed me but it would have left a mark had it not. Tony seemed terrified of her, too; clearly, she was as dangerous as she seemed. My heart was racing as we pulled up in front of the deli, my hands clammy. Crawford jumped out of the car. This was a man in need of a sandwich. I was still in the car when he pressed his face to the passenger side window and asked, “Are you coming?”
I wasn’t going to and then I thought about Wilmott’s blog and review of Tony’s deli. It wouldn’t hurt to go in, smile a little at Tony, flash a little boob, and ask some questions about how he felt about the blog. Crawford saw the change in my demeanor and immediately asked what I was up to. I feigned ignorance. “What are you talking about?”
He threw a look over his shoulder; he didn’t know exactly what I was up to but he knew I was up to something. I followed him into the deli, resisting the urge to shudder when the bell rang over the door, announcing our arrival. That bell always reminded me of Tony and his love for me, along with flying pots of meatballs. I couldn’t help it. Tony looked up at the sound, took in my face, and broke out into a smile so wide I feared his face would crack.
“Mi amore!” he called, and then realizing he was married to a character from Dante’s Inferno, he dropped his voice. “My love,” he whispered.
I looked at Crawford, who rolled his eyes.
“Hi, Tony,” I said, maintaining a decent distance from the counter so that he wouldn’t grab me in a sweaty, cold-cut-smelling embrace. “We need some cold cuts.”
“You need some cold cuts,” he repeated. “You need some cold cuts! Is that how you greet me after all this time?” He threw his arms open, expecting me to reach over the counter and lean into them.
I started coughing; there had been a nasty strain of the flu traveling about the county and I begged off, citing some general malaise. “I’m sorry, Tony,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to get you sick.” I fake-sneezed for extra effect.
He leaned over the counter. “For you?” he asked dramatically. “I would die.”
And you just might, I thought, if Lucia gets wind of this. I wondered where she was and why I still didn’t have spaghetti sauce all over the front of my shirt; I decided not to tempt fate and kept my voice low. I heard Crawford let out a loud and impatient sigh.
Tony studied my face. “What happened to you?”
I went with my old standby: “Long story.”
He didn’t really accept that as an answer but I wasn’t going to elaborate. He continued to stare at me. And then at Crawford. And then back at me. “Right. So back to the cold cuts,” I said. “Crawford? What would you like?”
Crawford can’t order a cup of coffee in a fancy coffee shop because he gets too confused by sizes that are listed in other languages and descriptions that aren’t in his lexicon. He still hasn’t figured out that foam is regular old milk all frothed up. But order cold cuts the man can do. He rattled off an array of cold cuts, some of which I had never heard of, but all of which Tony had. Tony set about slicing meat through the big slicer and putting thin cuts of meat onto paper. When he was done, we had about six packages, along with several bags of chips, a couple of loaves of Italian bread, and a six-pack of beer, which Crawford had set about amassing as we waited for our order.
Tony looked at me forlornly. “You never come here anymore.”
I shrugged. “I’m sorry, Tony. I’ll come by soon,” I said, even though I had no intention of doing so. I heard some pots and pans rattling around in the back of the store and knew I had only a minute or two to find out what I had come in for: just how much Tony and Lucia hated Carter. “Tony, did you know Carter Wilmott?”
He blessed himself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, kissed the Jesus head around his neck, and then spat on the floor in fury. “Son of a bitch,” he said, quickly adding, “God rest his soul.”
Crawford had his hand on the door handle and was anxious to leave. “You didn’t like him?” I asked, feigning ignorance. I didn’t like him, either, and that was just from reading his blog; I had no personal experience with the guy. Oh, right, except for the dying-in-front-of-me part. That’s about as personal as it gets.
Tony leaned across the counter and was close enough to grab my hand and bring me close. My midsection hit the ice-cream case fronting the counter with a thud, and with an indelicate “oof,” the breath left my lungs. “He was a very bad man.”
I struggled to catch my breath and listen to Tony at the same time, which wasn’t easy.
“He said very bad things about my store,” he whispered conspiratorially, looking over his shoulder to see if Lucia was in sight. I had never seen her, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t somewhere else in the store. “I thought Lucia was going to kill him.”
I was feeling faint. Between the heat
of the kitchen, the lack of oxygen, my growing hunger, and the pungent odor of roast beef combined with mayonnaise wafting off Tony, I knew I wasn’t going to last long. I decided to ask the question I had come in to ask. “Does Lucia know anything about explosives?” I could almost read Crawford’s mind: way to cut to the chase, Alison. Whether or not Carter had died from a blow to the head was irrelevant in my mind. Someone wanted to kill him, and for some unknown reason, I wanted to find out. That, coupled with a misguided allegiance to Greg and bad coffee, was enough for me to poke around.
Tony smiled proudly. “No, but I was a cook in Korea,” he said. “Learned a lot about blowing things up from the guys we fed. Once we blew up a whole pig!”
I was aware of Crawford’s hand gripping my elbow as I slid down in front of the ice-cream case. “That’s interesting,” I said before I passed out, thinking about how good a roast beef on Italian bread would taste when I finally woke up.
Seven
I’m a fainter. Always have been. Even worse, I’m a puker. Fortunately, when I awoke, propped against the counter with a dirty dish towel pressed to my head, I was free of puke. I had slid down the counter into a sitting position before I had really conked out completely. The bag of cold cuts was on the floor where Crawford had dropped it; he knew I was going to faint even before I did.
Crawford asked me if I could get to my feet and I tried to put them under me. After a few tries, I managed to get into a standing position. Tony handed me a cold bottle of water, and the genuine concern on his face made me forget that he was more attracted to me than my first husband had been, a thought that gave me pause. Crawford thanked Tony for his help and helped me out of the store and into the car. He turned it on and put the air conditioner on full blast.
“Are you okay?” he asked, directing the vents toward my face.
“I don’t know what happened,” I said, truly at a loss. “I think it was when he pulled me into the counter. I lost my breath.”
“You looked queasy long before that,” Crawford said, taking a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiping my brow. “You haven’t looked well since I picked you up yesterday.”
“Do you blame me?” I asked. “I saw a dead body.”
“Not your first.”
“No. Not my first. But hopefully my last.” I leaned my head on the air-conditioning vent closest to me and sighed. “Take me home.”
Crawford kept an eye on me most of the way home, but he also kept looking in his rearview mirror quite a bit, raising my hackles. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“Who do you know who drives a beat-up blue Subaru Outback?”
I scanned my memory. “No one.” I swallowed again, hoping that the taste of bile in my throat would dissipate with each gulp. “But does the Tony thing give you pause?”
“What Tony thing?”
“Korea. The pig. The explosives.”
Crawford kept an eye on the rearview mirror. “No.”
“No?” I was incredulous.
“No,” he repeated. “He’s an old man with a cranky wife who he might someday kill, but for the Wilmott murder? I don’t see it.”
“Carter Wilmott wrote some really nasty things about him on his blog.”
“I just don’t think Tony would have shared an anecdote about blowing up a pig in Korea if he was the one who put the explosive on the car engine. Doesn’t make sense. Too obvious.”
“Sure, it’s obvious, but Tony …” I started. He took a hard right down a one-way street and I banged into my door. “Hey!” I straightened up after he slowed down. “What are you doing? If that’s your way to get me to stop talking about this, a polite ‘shut up’ would have sufficed.”
“Someone’s been following us since we left Tony’s.” He threw the car in park, and jumped out. I turned and saw that the car was behind us but now backing up, dangerously, down the one-way street. Crawford began running after the car, yelling at the driver to stop, who continued driving backward until they were down the narrow residential street and back out onto the main drag.
Crawford jumped back in the car and went into reverse.
“No! Not the backward car chase!” I said. “I’m already ready to throw up.”
“I have to see who that is,” he said, his head facing the back of the car, his foot pressing the accelerator down almost to the floor. He swung out onto the main street and drove into the traffic, only managing to cut two cars off in the process. The Subaru was nowhere to be found and he dejectedly pulled over to see if I was still in one piece. I hit him with a salami that I had pulled from the bag from Tony’s.
“What are you trying to do? Kill me?” I asked, my breath short after holding it during a very brief, but very tense, car chase in reverse.
“No, I’m not trying to kill you,” he said. “But I wonder why someone would be following us. Aren’t you the least bit curious?”
“No. Not curious. Not interested in the least.” I leaned my head against the seat rest. “About the same level of curiosity as you have for Tony and explosives. Can we please just go home now?”
Max was her usual caring self when I walked in through the back door. “You look like shit.” Sometimes I wondered why we were friends.
Fred grunted in agreement. They were still at the kitchen table in exactly the same positions as when I left. The screen was still torn, but the window was closed and locked. I guess I was going to be calling my friend Hernan to fix it during the week. It appeared that they were waiting for food and hadn’t moved since Crawford and I had set off on our grocery journey.
“Did you take my dog out?” I asked.
“I can’t find her,” Max said. She slid something into her pocketbook.
“Was that a tape measure?” I asked.
She smiled insincerely. “Can’t fix the screen if I don’t know how big the window is.”
I didn’t believe a word of that. “But you didn’t know that the screen would be broken when you left for here. Or do you just carry a tape measure around in your Marc Jacobs bag?”
“It’s a Michael Kors,” she said.
“Whatever.” I waited. “Well?”
“Yes, I do. I do carry a tape measure around in my pocketbook. It comes in handy when I want to measure something.”
The conversation could have gone on indefinitely but I let it go. I grabbed the dog’s leash from the hook by the back door.
Crawford put the bag of deli products on the counter. “Do you want me to go with you?” he asked, knowing that I was going to walk the dog in the absence of any responsible dog walkers in the house. He came over and took my cheeks in his hands. “Are you feeling better?”
I nodded. “I just need some air,” I said. I felt like Lydia Wilmott all of a sudden; I just wanted to be alone. Walking Trixie by myself was just the ticket. “You guys eat. I don’t have much of an appetite.” I knew I wouldn’t be two minutes out of the house before those scavengers had eaten everything but the wrappers the cold cuts had come in. Max is as voracious an eater as her six-foot-five husband and my tall drink of water of a boyfriend; she can pack it away with the best of them despite her diminutive stature.
I put Trixie on the leash and headed down toward the river. This route would lead me away from the village and away from anything that brought up bad memories. I would avoid Beans, Beans and the police station, and be able to enjoy the peace and serenity that walking with my dog along a beautiful waterway would bring. I had made it halfway down the street and was almost to the river when a pickup truck pulled around the corner and screeched to a stop in front of me. A woman with short spiky hair and a better body than her blog pictures would suggest jumped out of the truck and came toward me. Trixie let out a low growl, assuming that this wasn’t a friend.
“You Bergeron?”
I recognized her as the lovely Mrs. Miller from the blog. “I am.” This woman had obviously spent some time in the gym since Carter or one of his blog staff had taken those pictures of her. Her upper arms
were toned and tight, jutting out from a fitted tank top that accentuated a large, but impressively perky, set of boobs. Her stomach was flat. Her workouts, however, hadn’t seemed to do much about chunky thighs and a rather comprehensive bottom; I assumed she would get to those parts now that the upper body was such a specimen of fitness.
“Come with me,” she commanded, getting back into her truck cab.
I stood by the side of the road without moving, curling Trixie’s leash into my hand, drawing the dog closer to me. Mrs. Miller waited expectantly in her car. Finally, when she saw that I wasn’t getting in, she rolled down the passenger side window. “I said to get in!” She stared at me with big round blue eyes, unadorned by makeup but with the longest, darkest lashes I had ever seen. Mrs. Miller had probably been a looker before she had fallen prey to the physical horrors of middle age. Once she got the thighs and the butt worked out, she would be a fine-looking lady.
She was obviously used to people listening to her but she had never met me. I decided that just walking away would be the best course of action, so I pulled Trixie to my side and began to amble down the street, even though my instincts told me to run like the dickens. Behind me, I heard Mrs. Miller make a sharp U-turn, knocking over a garbage can that had been set out for Monday morning pickup, and follow behind me at a slow pace.
“You know they’ve got my husband in jail, right?” she called from her truck window. Her tone had a faint overtone of accusation.
I kept staring straight ahead. The woman was scaring the crap out of me although I wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t trying to run me down, but she was clearly agitated and she had the “guns” that Greg could only dream of. And that could probably crush my trachea with one chop. “No, I didn’t know,” I said. That was certainly an interesting turn of events, though.
Third Degree Page 6