Jo-Ann Lamon Reccoppa - Jersey Girl 01 - New Math Is Murder

by Jo-Ann Lamon Reccoppa

  Kevin Sheffield did a double take and recognized me immediately. He dug a few bills out of his pants pocket and tossed them on the bar, then hopped off the stool and bolted out the door.

  I turned on Rhodes. “Thanks for blowing my cover. I was trying to follow Kevin Sheffield. He never would have noticed me!”

  “In that outfit? Get real, Colleen. Harried housewives don’t stroll into bars wearing sweatpants and bug-eyed sunglasses in the late afternoon. They sit on their own sofas and get quietly plastered at home. Sit down. I want to talk to you.”

  “I have to follow Sheffield!”

  “You’ve been made, kid. Forget Sheffield. Sit a minute.”

  I whipped off my sunglasses and took a long, hard look at the Crier’s executive editor. Ken Rhodes dressed like a banker on a bender. His jacket had been cast aside on the seat next to him. His tie was loosened. The sleeves of his dress shirt were rolled up to just below his elbows to reveal the coarse, masculine hair on his forearms. He smelled fabulous—a mixture of aftershave and scotch, his favorite refreshment. I thought of Meredith and the other women in their cubicles across the highway. If they could just see me in a bar with Mr. Macho grabbing my wrist and urging me to join him, they’d eat their hearts out. I took my reaction as a sign I was getting over Neil and my disintegrated marriage, and the thought didn’t exactly displease me.

  “Oh, okay. I’ll sit!” I relented, like it was the biggest sacrifice I would ever make.

  I slid into the other side of the booth.

  “Would you like a daiquiri? You look like the daiquiri type.”

  I wasn’t a namby-pamby little housewife. I wore bug-eyed sunglasses, after all. “Not on your life. Gin and tonic. Tanqueray if you’re paying.”

  “Tanqueray ? I beg your pardon. Did you skip lunch? You shouldn’t drink on an empty stomach.”

  “I had half a pack of Twinkies.”

  “I see. Would that be an individual package or the family pack?” he inquired.

  I had been busted. “The family pack,” I confessed.

  “Vic!” Rhodes called to the bartender. “I’ll take another scotch and water, and bring a Tanqueray and tonic for Mata Hari.”

  I hunkered down on the bench, glad there was no one around from the newspaper to hear. “Where is everyone? I thought the Crier crew heads straight for this place on Friday nights.”

  “The youngsters at the Crier head down the shore to Belmar for Memorial Day weekend. You were born and raised here. You should know that.”

  “I forgot it was Memorial Day weekend, and I haven’t been a youngster for a very long time.”

  “No. You only act like one. I told you to drop the whole Whitley thing. And what exactly did you hope to find by following Sheffield again? Another body?”

  “I thought he might meet up with Jennifer Whitley. I guess that won’t happen until later tonight. I wanted to know where they go, what they do—stuff like that.”

  Vic brought over the drinks and we stopped talking.

  “Sheffield isn’t the prime suspect, but you already know that,” Rhodes said when Vic was out of earshot. “Neither is Jennifer Whitley, so don’t waste your time. Your hot red-haired friend, Bevin Thompson, is still at the top of the list.”

  Fear and resentment tore through me. Fear for Bevin, who could never kill anyone. Resentment because men always called her hot, while I endured the label of perky. I took a long gulp of my gin and tonic before turning on Rhodes.

  “Who said Bev is still the prime suspect?”

  “No one told me outright. I just know.”

  “How brilliant of you!” I snapped.

  “Yeah. That’s me. Brilliant.”

  I wasn’t in the mood for Rhodes’s self-deprecating humor. “Bevin’s no killer—regardless of what you and Ron Haver think. Kevin Sheffield had the most compelling reason to want Jason Whitley dead, which is why I followed him here.”

  “Your reasoning is flawed. Jilted lovers have been known to kill on occasion. It’s called a crime of passion.”

  I took another sip of the gin and tonic. It soared through my circulatory system and my fingers started to tingle. I could have sat in the booth with Rhodes and drunk the night away, but I had a lot to think over and needed to stay conscious. I pushed the drink aside.

  “Jason Whitley had several jilted lovers—not just Bev,” I reminded him.

  “Bevin Thompson came last.”

  “But Jennifer Whitley was also jilted, as was Betty Vernon. Kevin Sheffield and the widow Whitley killed Jason. It fits.”

  “Perfect fits can be deceiving. Besides, weren’t you convinced Jennifer Whitley was incapable of murder?”

  “Maybe I was wrong. Jason Whitley stayed late at school the night he got himself killed. Whoever murdered him was close to him on a day-to-day basis. Who saw Whitley every single day? His wife did. Who saw him at work? His wife’s lover.”

  Rhodes knocked back the rest of his drink and signaled the bartender for another. “Bevin Thompson knew Whitley well enough. She would have known his work schedule. Even the Little League connection is there. Bevin’s kid is on Jay Whitley’s team. How many parallels do you need?”

  “A whole lot more to make me think my best friend is a murderer,” I said. “I have this sneaking suspicion the reason Whitley was killed is right in front of our noses, but we’re so focused on finding a reasonable explanation that we’re overlooking the obvious. By the way, why are you sitting here drinking yourself blind?”

  “Not to change the subject, of course. How very perceptive of you, Colleen.”

  Two empty glasses stood near the corner of the table, and Rhodes had just ordered another drink. “I know how to count. You’re on your third drink, and it’s barely six o’clock.”

  Rhodes glanced at the amazing gold Rolex on his wrist. “Too bad I wasted so much time actually eating lunch here.”

  “I guess you didn’t buy that watch from a Lower East Side street vendor,” I said.

  Rhodes smiled. “Not on your life.”

  “Editors earn a tad more than freelancers, I suppose.”

  Rhodes removed his hand from the table as if ashamed of the blatant display of wealth. “I believe we were discussing my drinking habits.”

  “Is something wrong at the paper that I don’t know about?” I asked.

  The bartender came to deliver a fresh drink and left with the empty glasses.

  “I met with the publisher this afternoon,” Rhodes said, which explained the suit. “Let’s just say advertising hasn’t increased quite as much as we anticipated, and publishers really hate when that happens. But I’ve never felt the need to drink myself blind despite life’s little ups and downs, and I don’t intend to start now.”

  “What happens if advertising doesn’t pick up?”

  “What do you think?”

  Rhodes swallowed more scotch, and I watched, fascinated. He reminded me of some brooding literary character with a tragic past—Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights or Edward Rochester in Jane Eyre. Much as I needed the pittance the paper paid me, I had my own life to worry about and no real desire to contemplate the publisher’s bottom line.

  I slid out of the booth. “I have enough on my plate right now, so I’ll leave that problem for you to solve. Thanks for the drink. And thanks again for making me scream. Now Sheffield will be looking over his shoulder for me, and I won’t be able to follow him.”

  Rhodes raised his fresh drink in mock salute. “You’re very welcome!”

  19

  My kids abandoned me over the muggy Memorial Day weekend. Sara left town with my brother and his clan late Friday night to stay at their cute little beach house in Belmar. Bobby went with the Thompsons to spend the weekend at their cabin on Lake Wallenpaupack in Pennsylvania. Even Kate deserted me. She and Ron Haver would be spending their first overnight weekend together in Atlantic City.

  I read a book and did the laundry on Saturday. There were no phone calls, no visits with neighbors, and no
Memorial Day sales or barbecues for me. The temperature inside the house hovered at a tropical eighty-two degrees. The central air was on the fritz again. Neil, who always did things on the cheap, hired a local handyman to tinker with it last summer. It hadn’t worked right since.

  I had no car to drive to the climate-controlled malls and no money to spend there. By Sunday, I was so desperate for company, I broke down and called my mother. She reminded me about our Memorial Day weekend tradition—the annual trip to the family graves.

  We drove west on dead man’s row, a stretch of road along Buck Avenue where three cemeteries, Chestnut Hill, Holy Cross, and Eternal Rest, competed for business.

  “There must be a thousand other things we could be doing, Ma,” I said, pulling her little Sentra alongside a group of headstones on the narrow road in my grandparents’ section of Holy Cross cemetery. “I don’t see why we have to waste an entire afternoon doing this.”

  “Because your grandfather was a veteran, that’s why!”

  “Remind me again, Ma. Which army? Ours or Mussolini’s?”

  My mother gave me one of her infamous dagger looks. Determined to get in and out of the cemetery as quickly as possible, I jumped out of the car and popped the trunk. Inside were flats of impatiens, coleus, and fuzzy flowers that looked like ragweed. I found a hand spade and the watering can used exclusively for decorating the gardens of the dead and gave them to my mother. I hoisted the flats and trudged over a few dozen graves to reach my grandparents’ headstone.

  Tears welled in my mother’s eyes. “My mother and father. They were saints! Both of them!”

  I dropped the flats and stomped my feet to jar the dirt from my sneakers. Stella Fleming didn’t fool me one bit. We both knew my tiny grandmother, Antonia, was a nasty matriarch who ruled the Trani family with an iron fist. My father was scared to death of her, even though he outweighed her by fifty pounds and was nearly a foot taller. I recalled my sainted Grandpa Rocco’s retirement years. He mostly sat around the house all day sipping homemade wine from noon until long after sunset.

  “Grandpa was more juiced than Welch’s and you told me your mother used to hit you with a hairbrush.”

  “Back then, we called it tipsy and discipline.”

  I sighed and dropped to my knees to dig up the ground near the headstone. All around us, plants in full bloom covered the graves of dead Italian-Americans. One plot over, the grave of Giovanna Di Napoli resembled the Botanical Gardens. In the next row, Paul Catalano’s plot looked like a float in the Rose Bowl Parade. I hoped my mother didn’t expect me to keep up with the Joneses, graveyard-style.

  “Does all this really matter, Ma? They’re dead. They can’t see the flowers.”

  “How do you know they can’t?” she asked.

  My little spade tore through the compacted soil. Dirt flew. Small rocks bounced off the marble headstone. I figured the faster I worked, the more we’d have time to do something fun, like a nice lunch out or a stroll down by the bay.

  “Plant the coleus in front of the headstone, Colleen,” my mother said.

  I shoved the leafy pink-and-green plants into holes and filled in the dirt. The ragweed-looking things came next, in front of the coleus. All that was left were impatiens. I hurried them into the ground and patted soil around them.

  “Done!” I stood and brushed the loose dirt off my knees.

  My mother examined my handiwork. “I guess that’s okay, but they’ll need water. And there’s a small flag in the trunk. Bring it over.”

  I grabbed the watering can from my mother and hiked back to the car. I retrieved the flag from the trunk and filled the can at a nearby spigot. The grounds were peaceful with tall, comforting trees, newly planted shrubs, a few religious statues for consolation, and marble benches for those who, unlike me, wished to linger. Beyond one of the nearby mausoleums, activity on the other side of Buck Avenue caught my eye. Two sections back from the front gates of Eternal Rest Cemetery stood an Amazonian woman with long, blond-streaked spirals.

  I shut off the valve and ran back to my grandparents’ grave, dumped all the water in the can on the new plants, and unceremoniously jammed the flag into the soil.

  “What are you doing, Colleen? You’re going to drown them!”

  “We gotta leave right now, Mom! We have to go to Eternal Rest.”

  “I’ll be sending you there soon enough if you drowned those plants!” she threatened.

  “Ma, Betty Vernon’s in the boneyard across the street. I want to see what she’s doing.”

  My mother shook her head. “I thought you’d let this Whitley thing drop.”

  “That’s not gonna happen, Mom. Get in the car. I need to see who she’s visiting.”

  We drove across the road and entered Eternal Rest through a side gate. Betty Vernon glanced briefly at our car and looked away. We parked near an old maple tree, dismissed as ordinary visitors.

  “Would that be Jason Whitley’s grave?” my mother asked.

  I stuck my head out the open window to get a better look. “I guess so. It doesn’t look like there’s any grass growing there yet—and I don’t see a headstone.”

  “Could be one of those flat ones,” my mother said.

  “No, the surrounding graves all have big headstones. I think the flat headstones are all in a different section.”

  Betty Vernon walked off toward her car, a small, blue Hyundai Tiburon. She had to practically fold herself up to get inside, and she drove off hunched over the steering wheel.

  My mother elbowed me. “I just thought of something. If that’s her car …”

  “… then it wasn’t Betty Vernon who tried to run me down in the parking lot and followed me down at the bay!” I finished. “You must be a mind reader, Ma.”

  “You said the car was white or beige. And she never had any involvement with the Little League either. She couldn’t have gotten her hands on the baseball bat. She’s not your killer, Colleen.”

  “Unless she’s in cahoots with someone we don’t know about yet,” I said.

  “You sound like Dick Tracy.”

  I opened the car door. “Yeah, well, Tranquil Harbor could use Dick Tracy right now. Let’s put this to rest, Ma. Want to go see whose grave Betty visited?”

  My mother reached across the seat and yanked my shirt. “Quick! Close that door. Another car just pulled up alongside that section.”

  I eased the door shut and watched. A silver sedan stopped, and three doors opened. Out stepped Kevin Sheffield, Jennifer Whitley, and little Jay Whitley.

  “No need to see whose grave that is after all,” my mother told me.

  Jennifer Whitley gave a small bouquet to young Jay, the $3.99-for-six-blooms kind they sell at the grocery store. The kid skipped over to the fresh grave where Betty Vernon had stood minutes before and knelt to place the flowers he brought. Jennifer and Kevin Sheffield followed, and waited solemnly for the child to finish the visit with his father. When Jay was done, Sheffield placed a protective hand on the boy’s shoulder and guided him back to the car. Jennifer Whitley stayed behind, as though reluctant to leave. Then she did something only a disgruntled wife could appreciate. She turned back toward her husband’s plot and spit on his grave.

  20

  I drove straight home, parked the Sentra in my mother’s driveway, and used the shortcut to get into my own backyard. I noticed the smashed patio door immediately. The vertical blinds blew through a gaping hole where the sliding door had been and flapped in the faint, humid spring breeze. I stuck my head inside. Glass covered the kitchen tiles. My countertop appliances were in pieces. Paper napkins fluttered everywhere. Disposable plastic cups were crushed and scattered across the room. I ran back to the fence and yelled for my mother to call the police, and went around to the front of the house to wait for help to arrive.

  My mother used the backyard shortcut and came around the side of the house to wait with me. “Do you think you can stop now this Whitley thing now?” she said, nearly breathless. “Do you
want to end up dead, too?”

  Clean-shaven Officer James O’Reilly pulled up to the curb and stepped out of the squad car. His pained expression almost made me laugh. “Please tell me there isn’t another corpse!” he said.

  “I came home and found the patio door smashed in,” I explained. “I haven’t actually stepped inside yet, so we won’t know for sure if there’s a body until we check it out.”

  I led O’Reilly around back. He stopped at the shattered door and used his arm to block my passage.

  “I already looked in the kitchen,” I told him. “It’s the rest of the house I’m worried about.”

  “I know, Mrs. Caruso, but you have to wait outside until I’m sure it’s safe. Was there anyone home when this happened?”

  “No, the kids are away for the weekend.”

  O’Reilly nodded. “At least they’re okay. Just stay here, please. This won’t take a minute.”

  A minute stretched into five, then to ten. My mother joined me at the picnic table. I got tired of waiting and didn’t care to listen to my mother’s unending warnings. I doubted there was any real danger in my kitchen, unless the glass on the floor should slice through my sneaker and open a vein. I left her sitting alone at the table and went inside.

  The shattered glass was the least of my worries. My kitchen wasn’t just upside down, it qualified as a disaster area. Someone had pulled out the junk drawer and scattered screws, clothespins, dead batteries, and hastily scribbled recipes all over the floor.

  “Dear God!” I said.

  At the sound of my voice, Officer O’Reilly came back to the kitchen. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  I shrugged, dejected by the chaos.

  “If you think this looks bad, you should see your den.” I braced myself and followed the young cop. “Whoever broke in here really tore it apart,” he said.

  I was too embarrassed to admit the den looked pretty much the way I had left it. “What a mess!” I agreed.

  I frowned at the empty soda cans on the coffee table that Bobby had forgotten to recycle and Sara’s various shoes and socks left abandoned near the sofa. The afghan we used to snuggle under on chilly nights was on the floor, as were the decorative throw pillows. I pursed my lips disapprovingly at the stacks of old newspapers and candy wrappers that spilled off the coffee table. The desk was another matter. Scattered papers covered every inch of it—which meant something very important was missing.