He thought about that for a minute. “I don’t think so. I doubt she’d come sniffing around here. She’s smart enough to know that we don’t have any claim to the money. Besides, she knows I’m a cop.”
Your point? I wanted to ask. Having a cop husband hadn’t helped me all that much in the past, but if he wanted to tell himself that his law enforcement background was a deterrent to the wiles of Sassy Du Pris, I had to believe him.
He walked over to the refrigerator and pulled out a beer. “On the other hand, if you see a gal, say, six feet and one-fifty, wandering around the village in stripper heels, I would say that you should be alert to her movements.”
I saluted him. “Gotcha. Good advice.”
He elaborated. “If I know Sassy, and she wasn’t exactly what I’d call complicated, she’s looking for Christine mostly. Christine’s the one with the money. Or so Sassy thinks.”
I wondered how that made him feel, a question he obviously anticipated, judging by his response.
“Which is why I’ve got Greenwich PD on alert and I’ve let Tim know that he should impress upon his wife to set the alarm, keep the doors locked, and just be aware of her surroundings.”
“Do you think Sassy is capable of murder?” I asked again.
Crawford shrugged. “She knocked out her husband’s teeth on their wedding day. That, to me, speaks of a certain propensity for violence, don’t you think?”
“Propensity for violence?” I asked. “Stop getting fancy with vocabulary. It makes me think you’ve been drinking.”
“How about ‘she’s crazy as catshit and I wouldn’t put anything past her’?”
“Better,” I said. “So if she’s that crazy, how come no one is looking for her?”
He raised an eyebrow in my direction.
“They are?”
“What do you think?” he asked.
“That I should never doubt you,” I said.
“Everyone in a fifty-mile radius has a picture of Sassy Du Pris.”
“That’s Sassafras to you.”
“She won’t get within ten feet of anyone we know. Trust me.”
“I will.” I had a thought. “Your professional opinion, please. Did Chick commit suicide or get murdered?”
He crossed his arms over his chest and looked up at the ceiling. I thought I was going to get something really profound but all he said was “Suicide.”
That’s what I thought.
The weight of Max’s loss suddenly fell on me again. “I have to see Max tomorrow. What does your day look like?”
“What do any of my days look like? Why?”
“I figure I’ll teach and then get over to her apartment or her mother’s house, wherever she is. I just need to know if I should call the dog sitter for an extra walk in the evening.”
“Probably not a bad idea.” He drained his beer and put the bottle next to the sink. “You hungry?”
“More tired than hungry.” I knew the question meant that he was hungry, though. “What do you want to eat?” I pulled my shoes off, holding them above my head lest Trixie get any ideas. “Just don’t say Indian. I can’t stomach the thought of it after being in Chick’s building again.”
He looked at me quizzically, but I didn’t elaborate. I headed upstairs and changed out of my work clothes into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. I hoped that by the time I emerged, he would have a plan for dinner and I wouldn’t have to think any more about it. I stifled a little sob when I thought about a man who had taken such good care of me, a man I never got to say good-bye to. I decided that I would try Max’s apartment one more time to see if she felt like talking. Fred answered.
“I know I just called, but…”
“She’s sleeping.”
“Really?”
“Valium.”
That explained it. “Did you tell her that I called?” I asked.
His grunt indicated to me that he had.
“I’ll call tomorrow,” I said, feeling dejected. I found it strange that she didn’t want to talk to me, but as I had learned over the years, Max’s reaction to things were never what I expected or considered normal.
Fred’s phone manners were as decorous as Max’s. He hung up without saying good-bye, leaving me to stare at the phone in my hand.
My inclination was to strip off my clothes and climb under the covers, but downstairs was a very handsome and very hungry man, someone who recognized and freely admitted his own foibles and emotional baggage. Who was I to deny him a chicken parm wedge at his favorite Italian place now that he had come clean? I knew that if push came to shove, he would always help Christine, but getting him to admit that the situation was becoming a needless pain in the butt was a step in the right direction. I would never leave her stranded either, but I needed to vent, and thankfully, he didn’t think me a rotten person for doing so.
He had already walked Trixie when I came down to the kitchen, and she was gnawing happily on a giant bone under the dining room table, her favorite place in the house.
“Ready?” I asked.
We took his car. The backseat was still down, a reminder of when we had taken our very sick dog to the veterinary hospital a few weeks earlier. On top of it lay the bag that Crawford kept in the car to hold a change of clothes and some toiletries—and maybe a framed picture of me? I could only hope. I resisted my natural urge to peek inside.
“So the village PD really has nothing on our break-in?” I asked as we made our way through the darkened streets of our little village. Since he hadn’t mentioned any progress on the case, that seemed like a safe assumption. Still, it never hurts to ask. “Are they actually investigating it?”
“Not a thing,” he said, angling into a parking spot behind the restaurant, “and now they’re dealing with those loons who have occupied the park in the center of the village, so they have their hands full.” He was referring to a group of protesters who had taken umbrage at the pipeline that might come through the village at some point in the not-too-distant future.
“You mean the people exercising their right to assembly? Free speech?” I asked, getting out of the car. The night was cloudless, the stars twinkling over the Hudson River, the moon almost full.
“Don’t go all ACLU on me. I agree with what they’re doing, but I’d like a little more manpower on our case. I’d love to know who poisoned our dog so I could hit them over the head, accidentally of course, with my radio.”
We went into the restaurant, a knotty-pine paneled affair that smelled like garlic after years of the kind of old-school Italian cooking that went on in the kitchen. Crawford and I took a booth toward the back of the place, me ordering what was sure to be a really crappy Chianti and him sticking with the safer beer choice. Once we ordered, he reached across and squeezed my hand.
“Thanks for being so patient.”
“I haven’t been patient. Trust me.”
“Well, there are few women who would do what you’re doing with my ex-wife. I know that.”
“You’re already getting laid tonight, Crawford. Don’t lay it on so thick,” I said.
“Too much?” he asked.
“Way.”
The topic of Christine and anything related to the Stepkowskis off the conversational menu, he asked about Max’s father. I immediately welled up. “He was a doll. You know that.”
“I only met him at the wedding and one other time, I think.”
“He was very good to me after my parents died.”
“I know,” he said, his own eyes getting misty at some thought, maybe me at a young age with no siblings and no parents, doing my best to make a broken and irreparable marriage work. Although he was a stiff, according to his former in-laws, he had compassion to spare. He looked down.
“Did Fred like him?” I asked. I knew that Fred talked to Crawford more than to anyone else, Max included, sometimes.
“Loved him.”
“This is going to be hard all around, then,” I said.
We were way overdu
e for a quiet evening like this, and I felt like we were turning the corner on the amount of activity we were going to be required to be involved in. Just as Crawford signed his name to the credit card slip, someone turned on the jukebox. “Your Cheatin’ Heart” blasted through the speakers, and Crawford got a look on his face that let me know that he had just remembered something.
“Hey,” he started.
“All taken care of,” I lied, thinking that Meaghan’s involvement in Joanne Larkin’s midterm debacle still needed to be dealt with. Keeping Crawford in the dark was part of my master plan; if I could make the whole thing go away without bothering him with it, my transformation to “Alison Bergeron, Redeemed Stepmother” would be complete.
Before we got outside, the sound of a car alarm broke through the sound of Conway Twitty’s warbling serenade. Crawford hustled me out of the restaurant only to find the lights of his sensible station wagon blinking on and off, the horn blaring. All of the doors were closed, but the car locks had definitely been tampered with. Crawford hit the keypad and stopped the cacophony, much to the delight of an older couple exiting the car next to his.
“You should tell your girlfriend not to pull so hard on the doors if she doesn’t have the keys,” the man said, his face a study in consternation.
I looked at Crawford. “Girlfriend?”
The woman, a rotund meatball as round as she was tall, chimed in. “Yes. The big blonde.”
Crawford and I looked at each other, realization dawning on us simultaneously. “Which way did she go?” he asked.
The woman had a flare for the dramatic, obviously. Her hands fluttered as she described the woman’s exit. “It was like she vanished into the wind, never to be seen again.”
Twenty-Nine
Now we were sure that Sassy Du Pris was back in town, looking for something that none of us had—money. As we lay in bed that night, I voiced a thought that had been nagging at the back of my brain for a few days now.
“Do you think she’s involved with Tim?”
From under his bent arm, Crawford let out a sigh. “Now what would make you say that?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t, really.
Crawford did. “You overheard a conversation that you had no context for about a guy who was hoping to get two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. To draw a line from him to Sassy is really a stretch,” he said, his voice muffled. “Go to sleep.”
I couldn’t. There was too much going on. Between the afternoon at Chick’s and then a lovely dinner that turned ugly with the thwarted attempt to break in to our car, my mind was awhirl with theories and loose ends and a host of other things. Then there was Max’s father’s death. That was sad enough in itself, but it also nagged at me because I had been too busy—make that preoccupied—with life as I knew it to go visit a man who had done just about everything he could to help me even though he wasn’t a blood relation. I felt sick not that he was dead, but that he had died attempting a breakout from the medical center, still convinced of his own immortality and ability to move on like nothing had ever happened.
Come to think of it, Max was a chip off the old block.
Crawford was asleep, deep breaths coming from between his parted lips. The guy was a study in extremes; wide awake one minute, sound asleep the next. I envied his ability to turn off the dialogue that was surely in his head, the same one that was in mine. What had happened, what did Sassy have to do with it, and what could we do to figure it out? Those were the questions that were circulating in the card carousel of my mind.
Crawford stopped breathing for a second, as he often did when he was in a really deep sleep, and I nudged him to make him turn on his side so that he wouldn’t suffocate. He changed position grudgingly, as if I were being completely unreasonable. After another half hour of listening to him snore, stop breathing, and then choke back to life, I made a mental note to call a sleep clinic to get him straight so that I didn’t have small heart attacks every night, thinking that he wouldn’t wake up. I finally got out of bed and padded down to the kitchen, Trixie on my heels, not content to let me rustle around in the refrigerator by myself.
I don’t know what I was expecting to find, but a peek into the refrigerator confirmed what I should have already known: There was nothing in there. Crawford’s schedule is hectic, and I could exist solely on vodka and pretzels, so grocery shopping is the one chore that often gets tossed to the side in favor of takeout food or dining out. Looking into the barren refrigerator made me sad. I vowed then and there to start watching Food Network all the time and figuring out this thing that they called “cooking.”
Trixie was placid one minute and on alert the next, her ears up and the hair on the back of her neck standing at attention. A low growl started deep in her gut and traveled up to her mouth, coming out as a warning bark that startled even me. The only light in the kitchen came from the open refrigerator, and my hand on the appliance handle felt like it had turned to stone. To turn around or not to turn around; that was the stupid question. My hand dropped from the handle, and slowly I turned toward the kitchen window over the sink. It looked out into the backyard, the one where Christine’s stepchildren, nieces, and nephews had attempted to start a bonfire what seemed like a hundred years ago. I don’t know what I expected to see in the window, but I was surprised when I saw nothing at all, just the blackness of the vacant backyard and a light in the distance coming from someone’s porch light on another block.
I looked down at Trixie. “Just a raccoon, my friend. Nothing to worry about.”
My dog was smarter than I was. I learned that the hard way when I heard the sound of something sharp hitting glass, a violent and sudden noise, breaking the silence of what should have been a dull evening in a sleepy suburban town. For the second time that evening, I heard the wail of Crawford’s car alarm, a sound that I hoped never to hear again. It sounded like a banshee screaming, and I’m not even entirely sure what a banshee is.
I opened the back door without thinking and took off across the backyard, my feet bare, the dog nipping at my heels. I reached the driveway, where Crawford’s car alarm was singing a sad, sad song, one that kept time with the flashing lights illuminating the tacky weave that belonged to none other than the elusive Sassy Du Pris.
Girl could move. She was tearing down my driveway, in her hand Crawford’s bag of extra clothes—the one that possibly contained the framed picture of me, though I wasn’t holding my breath—as she took a hard left and started down the street, running on impossibly high heels.
“Sassy!” I screamed. “Sassafras!” I fumbled around in Crawford’s car, trying to figure out how to turn off the alarm before the whole neighborhood woke up and realized that I really was the giant pain in the ass that about 40 percent of the neighbors already thought I was.
Although Crawford falls asleep with no trouble, waking up is another story. He appeared in the back door, clad in a pair of boxer shorts and dress shoes, a gun in his hand. “What’s going on?” he asked as he made his way across the backyard, the gun dangling in his limp hand.
“It’s Sassy,” I said, pointing down the street.
He was still half asleep. “Should I chase her?”
“Of course you should,” I said, pushing him in the direction of her departure. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I took an Advil PM. Maybe three. Things are kind of cloudy.” He slumped against the car. “She broke my windshield.”
I sighed. He couldn’t chase her now even if he wanted to. Judging from the haste with which she had beat it down our driveway, only a racehorse on speed would have been able to catch her.
It was cold. I pulled my arms into my T-shirt. “She’s fast.”
He looked at me, his senses dulled by the sleep aid.
“Maybe we should call 911?” I suggested. He lumbered back into the house, and I followed him. I found him staring at the phone, wondering what he had come in to do. “I’ll call 911,” I said, “and make some
coffee. You go put on some pants and a shirt.” He started off down the hallway. “Leave the gun!” I called after him. He walked back and placed it on the counter.
The 911 operator—who either hadn’t heard of me or was professional enough not to have a reaction when I said my name and gave my address—promised to send someone right over. I said a silent prayer that it was none of the cops who had already been here. Then I wondered if my homeowner’s insurance would go up. My propensity for using public servants so freely might put me into a new category.
Crawford came back looking like the old Crawford—the one who could string a few words together well enough to form a sentence and/or dial 911—dressed in jeans and an NYPD T-shirt, I suppose to let the village PD know who was boss. On the law enforcement food chain, NYPDers consider themselves higher than all others, and since peeing in public, even to mark one’s territory, is considered a “public nuisance” misdemeanor, they opt instead to flash their badges, wear their police-issue clothing, or brandish their big guns in the presence of other cops.
“You look better,” I said.
“Cold shower,” he said.
“That was a little drastic, don’t you think?”
“Not if you felt like your head was filled with cotton candy.”
It was only a few minutes later that our driveway was filled with local police, who regarded Crawford’s car as if it were a hunk of kryptonite. I helpfully offered that the car had been broken into by a woman named Sassafras Du Pris and she was on the loose.
One of the responding officers, a woman who looked young enough to be my daughter, asked me how I knew the woman’s name.
“Long story.” I looked at Crawford. “Can you explain?”
He could. With his usual economy of words, he described Sassy and her relationship to our family and explained why, possibly, she would want to break into our car and steal a bag of giant man clothes that would fit only a small percentage of the population. “She’s looking for money,” he finished. “Money we don’t have.”
Extra Credit Page 17