Whose Number Is Up, Anyway?

by Stevi Mittman

  “Really? She looks too young to be a vascular surgeon,” I say.

  “Don’t you watch Grey’s Anatomy? They’re all young and gorgeous.”

  “Dreamy,” I say.

  “McDreamy,” she corrects.

  We turn our attention back to the screen. According to the reporter, Dr. Doris Peterson, who worked at Plainview Hospital, was found in the far end of the parking lot of her office building on Jericho Turnpike this morning at seven forty-five by a fellow doctor who was on his way in.

  “Who names their daughter Doris these days?” Bobbie asks.

  “There must be twenty cops there,” I say, pointing at the screen as they go to a long shot of the parking lot. “Look at that!”

  “So?” Bobbie asks me.

  “So did you see that many cops in King Kullen? It’s just like when that girl vanished in Aruba. You tell me how much news that would have made if she’d been some old guy instead of some young, pretty blonde.”

  “You’re jealous,” Bobbie says. “Your boy toy is investigating this pretty blond lady’s murder instead of your old guy’s.”

  “It’s not jealousy,” I insist. “It’s a sense of justice. It doesn’t bother you that poor Joey is on a slab at the morgue while—”

  “His funeral was over a week ago, Ted. He’s not on some slab.”

  “He had a funeral?” I ask. “How come I didn’t know that?”

  WHEN THE PHONE RINGS at 11:30 p.m., I’m livid. Private caller has called and hung up three times tonight and my patience is now nonexistent. It’s enough to make me want to cave and get Dana a cell phone of her own.

  I pick up the phone and don’t say anything.

  “Teddi?”

  “Drew?”

  “Who were you expecting at this time of night?” he asks. He almost sounds jealous.

  “How’s the case coming?” I ask instead of going into the whole thing.

  “It’s not,” he says. “Dead ends all over the place. Everybody’s got alibis. We’re checking out patients she lost for grudges.”

  “Did you check into Joey Ingraham’s spending, because—”

  “Don’t start,” he tells me. “I’m tired and I’ve got to get up in four hours and start in at square one again.”

  “On the blonde,” I say.

  “On the doctor with a hole in her skull. Yeah.”

  “And Joey?” I ask. “Are you planning to just sweep his death under the rug in favor of some dead blonde you’re more interested in?”

  Drew tells me that no one is sweeping anything under any rug. The man had a heart attack and died. Happens every day. Maybe not in a cooler, but a man’s got to die somewhere and that doesn’t make it murder.

  I say something juvenile, like that all he cares about is this dead blond woman.

  Which turns out to be quite a mistake when he assures me that I’ve got it wrong. “I’m interested in live blondes, too, Teddi. Plenty of them.”

  And I’m twirling my dark brown hair nervously when I hear him hang up.

  He doesn’t even bother to say good night.

  IT’S NOT THAT I consider myself an unlucky woman—despite having the mother from hell who I can’t even be mad at, the ex-husband from hell who I can’t get rid of, the mortgage from hell because we borrowed against it, etc. Still, it does take me by surprise when things go right.

  Which is why, when I woke up this morning and looked out my window to see Bobbie’s sister Diane’s car in her driveway, I almost couldn’t believe my eyes. Diane’s only been a cop a couple of years, and if there’s one thing she loves more than the Police Academy movies (all of them) it’s showing off the newest way she’s learned to find things out about people.

  Ever since she helped me prove that Rio was trying to drive me crazy before I divorced him, thanks to her honed-by-the-department skills, she’s been regaling Bobbie and me with tales of her emerging detective skills. Anyway, she’s at her sister’s now. I hurry to get dressed in something Bobbie won’t make me change out of and run across our backyards to Bobbie’s kitchen door.

  “Love it!” Bobbie says of my layers, the lace from the camisole sticking out under the U-necked cotton T-shirt like the mannequin in Express was wearing it. She pulls me into her kitchen and before I can even say hello to Diane I’ve got a cup of coffee in my hand and a muffin on a plate in front of me.

  “Some people don’t like their wardrobes critiqued,” Diane tells Bobbie as she rolls her eyes at me. “You do look good,” she adds.

  “She’s got a glow,” Bobbie says, eyeing my face critically. “A sort of…oh, shit. You’re investigating that murder, aren’t you?”

  “The doctor?” Diane asks, coming down off the kitchen stool to brush the crumbs from her uniform. “You know something about that?”

  When I tell her it’s Joey Ingraham I have on my mind, she quickly loses interest.

  “Why does nobody care about this case?” I ask. It comes out a little whiny, which doesn’t escape unnoticed.

  “Because, Teddi,” Bobbie says in the tone you use to address a small, unreasonable child, “there isn’t any case. Drew told you, his partner told you. The man just died. Heart attack. End of story. Why don’t you investigate the doctor’s murder? That’s much juicier.”

  Diane suggests a cogent reason. “Uh…because she’s not a police officer? Jeesh!”

  I tell them about the seventeen-thousand dollar pool table. Bobbie says we should try to sell it to our next client, since the commission would be huge.

  “So you don’t know anything about the doctor, then?” Diane asks, clearly disappointed. “What about Detective Scoones? Does he?” Cracking a high-profile case like this would be good for her career and we all know it. And looking into Joey Ingraham’s finances would be just the opposite.

  If anyone found out.

  “You couldn’t find out what else Joey was planning to buy without leaving even one little track, could you?” I ask her, knowing how Diane loves a challenge. “And maybe even a teammate or two?”

  “Of course I can,” she says.

  Bobbie pours us each another cup of coffee. “Nobody’s fooling anybody here, right?” she asks.

  Diane grabs a notepad from Bobbie’s counter and pulls a pen from her breast pocket. “No promises,” she tells me, and I nod.

  And then I tell her everything I know so far.

  A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER I find out who the rest of The Spare Slices are by simply opening up the League Register that Steve keeps behind the counter and finding the application they had to submit to the alley to join the league. I carefully write down the names, addresses and telephone numbers for Milt Sherman, Max Koppel, Dave Blumstein, Miles Weissman and Russ Oberman. I figure while Diane’s doing her snooping, I can do some of my own. My first job is to be sure that all the men go in on the lottery tickets and Dave seems like the easiest mark to pry information from, so I give his home number a ring.

  “Who is this?” a woman wants to know.

  “I’m calling from L.I. Lanes,” I say. Absolutely true. Here I stand at the counter of the bowling alley. “I’m just checking some information on his league application.” I am so much better with the truth than I am with fibbing. I mean, you can always tell I’m fibbing because I babble.

  She tells me he’s at work.

  “Is this his wife?” I ask.

  “This isn’t about the bowling, is it?” she asks me. “You’re trying to find out if he’s married. You girls are all alike. Desperate. You see a man who has a few bucks in his pocket and you—”

  “This is his mother, isn’t it?” I say, though I really don’t have to ask. Teamed up with my mother, these two could be Starsky and Hutch, Nick and Nora, McMillan and wife. Aren’t there any famous female pairs of detectives? Even on Google? “I just want to ask him a couple of questions.”

  “Well, you’ve got his name, you’ve got his phone number. What more could you need to know for a damn bowling league? He wears a ten and a half.”
>
  “Excuse me?” I say.

  “His bowling shoes,” she tells me. I realize I’m not going to get anything out of this gatekeeper.

  “Thank you,” I tell her. “That’s what I needed to know. We’re ordering some new shoes and we want to be sure that we order enough of the popular sizes, but to tell you the truth, I’m new here and I don’t know much about men’s bowling shoes, so—”

  “Recently divorced?” she asks me.

  I don’t answer her at first. Then I ask how she could possibly know that.

  “New job. What grown woman takes a job in a bowling alley at your stage in life, honey, except one who’s been home taking care of kids and suddenly is forced back out into the workforce. Been there, done that, as the kids say.”

  I sigh heavily for effect. I feel a bit of luck coming my way.

  “My Davey’s a rare one,” she says.

  “I’ve seen him around,” I admit. “He looks nice. I mean, like a nice guy.”

  By the time I’m done, I’ve wangled an invitation to dinner tomorrow night.

  Score one for the designing dick.

  CHAPTER 7

  When shopping for accessories, think outside the box. You don’t have to go to a home goods shop to find something good for your home. Rope tie-backs from the hardware store add to a nautical theme. Garden shops can bring the outdoors into a country theme. Office supply places are full of ultra modern for every room in the house. And even the supermarket has accessories to use throughout the house—how about putting your bubble bath into a fancy olive oil decanter with a spout?

  —TipsFromTeddi.com

  It takes some deep breathing to get myself to walk back into King Kullen again. I know what they say about the murderer always returning to the scene of the crime, but it’s different for witnesses.

  Not that I am one. Technically, I mean. Can you be a witness-after-the-fact like you can be an accessory-after-the-fact? Somehow I think I’d make a lousy accessory. None of my shoes match Dana’s old purse.

  Anyway, I’ve gone back to murder scenes before. There was that trip back to Elise Meyer’s house after I found her murdered. That was great—I found her newly widowed husband in bed with his sister-in-law and wound up stealing the dog.

  So maybe their motives are different, but it seems to me that when something awful happens you can’t help but be drawn back to the place it happened so that you can make sense of it.

  My point is, I’m not in King Kullen for another brisket.

  I feel incredibly conspicuous. Maybe those two cashiers aren’t whispering about me and how bossy I was when they wanted to see Joey’s body in the cooler and I wouldn’t let them. Maybe they are just trying to decide if the coupon one of them is holding is still good.

  But I don’t think so.

  And it’s not like I’m the millionth customer and the manager is rushing my way to give me a shopping cart’s worth of free groceries.

  I mean, I don’t think so.

  I have the feeling I should have come incognito. Maybe if I were wearing Bobbie’s hooker outfit again no one would even bother looking at my face.

  “Have you heard anything?” Bill-the-manager asks me.

  I explain that I’m not with the police, that I just came for a pound of ground beef and then it occurs to me that maybe he’s heard something I haven’t.

  “I thought—” he says, looking confused.

  Finding dead people makes you a liar. At least it makes me one and I put my finger to my lips like the fact that I’m investigating the crime is supposed to be a secret. Hey, it’s a secret from the police, isn’t it?

  He nods at me. Now it’s our secret. He takes me by the arm, announcing loudly that they are out of stock on that item, but he thinks he has something else I’d like.

  In an empty aisle he asks “Is there anything you can tell me?” in a whisper.

  I explain—patiently, of course—that it really doesn’t work that way. I’m here to be told, not to tell. “Have you noticed any odd behavior on the part of the other employees?” I ask. Hey, years of Law & Order haven’t been wasted on me.

  Bill-the-manager suggests I talk with Fran. He thinks, though he isn’t sure, that she and Joey might have had “something going,” he says with a wink. “Strictly against store policy,” he adds.

  This is because he’s afraid they’ll sneak off into the stockroom and…? Or sneak into the cooler. I think to myself.

  “Yes,” I say. “Fran might be a good place to start.” And besides, now that I think about it, I actually could use a pound of lean ground beef.

  Fran is behind the counter at the butcher department. She’s wearing a slightly bloody white apron, a hairnet and a worried expression. She perks up when she sees me.

  “Have you found Joey’s killer?” she asks me.

  Now, I could tell her that I’m not the police. I could tell her that the police wouldn’t be less interested if Joey had been a homeless man living under a bridge in another county. Or I could tell her the truth. My version of the truth.

  “I’m working on it.”

  She seems to take heart at the news.

  “Hasn’t anyone else been in to take your statement?” I ask, and her look says I must be kidding.

  “Not since the day it happened,” she says. “When you were here.”

  I’m really not a great liar, but as you can see, I’m a whiz at slightly bending the truth. So I put it to her this way: “What do you want the police to know?”

  She tells me that she and Joey weren’t exactly a couple or anything, though he’d parked his boots under her bed once or twice, if I knew what she meant. Thanks to country music, I do.

  “And we talked, Joey and me,” she says. “About what we wanted out of life, you know?”

  My nod encourages her.

  “Joey, he had all these dreams….” She stops and wipes at her eye with her apron—the dirty, bloody apron. And I try not to cringe.

  “So he wanted expensive things?”

  She asks me who doesn’t. She’s got a point.

  The pool table comes to mind and I ask her about it.

  “He bought it?” she asks. “Really? I mean, he was always talking about stuff like that. And he had a whole list of the things he was gonna get when he won the lottery—”

  “He planned on winning the lottery?”

  Again, she asks me who doesn’t. “Ya gotta dream, don’t cha? I mean, is this all there is?” she waves her hands over the piles of raw meat. “’Cause if it is, you can just lock me in the cooler, too.”

  I don’t have a good comeback for that. But it does raise a question. “Technically, you can’t get locked in the cooler, can you?” I ask.

  “Nah,” she says. “’Course, with the light out in there, and not knowing your way around…”

  The fact that Joey would be unfamiliar with the setup and safety features of the cooler hadn’t occurred to me. I wonder if it has to the police.

  “Funny thing is,” she says, and I know I’m not going to find this funny, “the light wasn’t out. Damn bulb was just loose. Imagine that.”

  I’m imagining. Of course, with my imagination, I’m imagining that someone purposely loosened it.

  “All the opening and slamming of the door, it sometimes happens,” she says.

  “Do you think that Joey knew he couldn’t get locked in?” I ask.

  Fran considers my question for a minute. She gestures for me to follow her and heads for the deli counter. “Nancy,” she says to the woman slicing cheese, “you ever go in my meat locker?”

  Nancy shudders. “No way,” she says. “You think I want to get locked in there like Joey?”

  Fran puts up her hands and gives me a there-you-have-it look.

  I thank her and stop by the case to pick up my ground beef. On the way out of the store I notice the stacks of newspapers, Newsday, Daily News, New York Post.

  On each is a picture of Dr. Doris and various headlines that all mirror the o
ne on the Post: Police Baffled.

  And all I can think is on this one, at least they’re trying.

  I CALL MY DAD to ask if he might drop by this evening to check on the kids. With Dana too old for a sitter and Alyssa too young to be without one but too used to Dana to obey her, and on top of this the recent window incident, I’m just a little uncomfortable leaving them to their own devices. Unfortunately, I reach my mother, who wants to know who has invited me to dinner. Because I am a rotten daughter and a nasty person with a twisted sense of humor, I tell her the truth.

  “And he lives at home?” she asks me. I hear her unwrapping the cellophane on a new pack of Newport Menthols. I’ve asked her a million times to give up smoking, the kids have begged her, quoting statistics and showing her pictures of blackened lungs. She claims cigarettes are her one vice.

  Which means that badgering her daughter to death isn’t considered a vice in her Secret Handbook.

  I assure her he lives at home. Closing in on fifty, I’d guess, and still home with mama.

  “Don’t be so quick to judge. He sounds like a good son to me,” she says, proving she’s even more desperate for me to get married than I thought. “An angel to put up with a mother like that. Imagine giving someone the third degree on the phone. So what does he do for a living, this bowler of yours?”

  I could tell her that he works in a deli or that he plays the lottery every week. Instead I go for the gusto. “He gambles.”

  “Like on TV? Texas hold’em? Or like at the tables in Vegas?”

  “Like scratching off silver circles on cardboard cards,” I tell her. I think of him behind a deli counter. “He’s into numbers.”

  “The numbers racket?” she asks me. “Maybe Carmine knows him.”

  I GO LOOKING FOR my father and my mother shows up to watch the kids. Best laid plans and all that. And she’s not alone. She’s got Carmine De’Guisseppe in tow. Carmine’s been very good to me, saving Dana’s bat mitzvah from becoming a total disaster, and his men actually saved my life when a crazed restaurateur went after me. He hired me to refurbish his beach house and forgave me when I walked (or ran) away from the project for a few weeks to avoid Drew Scoones.