Whose Number Is Up, Anyway?

by Stevi Mittman

  “Or is Max still out of it? They told me he was under heavy sedation.” He takes a sip of coffee and motions for me to take a bite of my cruller.

  “Right,” I say, coming back to reality. “No, he wasn’t awake. But I did see one of the other Slices—Dave.”

  He takes a large bite of his jelly doughnut. Sugar disperses on the table and a drop of jelly clings to his pinky. “Oh,” he says, licking it off. “Your new boyfriend. Not the brightest light on the runway.”

  “I went to dinner at his mama’s, and you know why,” I say with a laugh. “And no, he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed.”

  With his mouth full, Drew tries to talk. “Not the—”

  “Yeah, yeah. We’re talking about the same guy. A couple of slices short of a sandwich. Anyway, he says that Miles is scared for his life.”

  Do you have any idea how sexy and appealing a man with powdered sugar on his upper lip is?

  Where was I?

  Oh, yeah, Miles. And Drew tells me that one of the guys is going around in Groucho Marx glasses, afraid that someone is after all The Slices and is going to kill him.

  “Because of the lottery tickets?” I ask.

  “Because—get this—they have the best chance of winning the big trophy and the $350 prize. Or they did, before Max got hit by the truck.”

  I ask if he’s kidding, but he isn’t.

  “So you’re thinking they’re killing each other for the mega-million jackpot and they’re thinking it’s over a few hundred bucks.” He breaks off part of my doughnut and tries to feed it to me. “What’s wrong with this picture?”

  Maybe it’s a sugar rush. Maybe it’s his finger against my lips. I’m thinking, What picture? Where?

  “I know you think I’m crazy,” I say after I’ve managed to swallow. “But I just know that somehow your case and mine are intertwined.”

  He does that one-eyebrow-up thing that cartoon characters do. I’ve practiced in the mirror and I can’t do it. Anyway, he does it and he says, “Your case?”

  Okay, so I don’t have a case. I’m just a lowly interior designer who gets her kicks trying to solve crimes the police department doesn’t seem to care about. Not that I say that, because, after being married to Rio Gallo for twelve years, I know where minefields are and I’m not about to make the same mistakes with Drew that I made with Rio. And don’t think, just because of sentence structure here, that I’m implying anything about marrying Drew Scoones.

  Marriage is off the table. Not in the equation. Marriage is…I get the shudders just thinking about it.

  “Teddi?” Drew says. “Something wrong?”

  “No,” I say, and ask him, “Why?”

  He says I’m not yelling at him. Hmm. Lesson learned. When I don’t rise to the bait, he stops baiting me.

  “As it happens,” he starts. And then he leans in toward me like he’s going to tell me some police secret he shouldn’t. I don’t lean forward because I’m convinced that he’ll tell me something stupid, like he’s got a detective badge for me—found it in a box of Cracker Jacks—or something.

  I can see it’s driving him crazy that I’m not hanging on his every word. I throw him a crumb. “As it happens, what?”

  “Not that I’m conceding or condoning your assertion that you have a case, but it does seem like there may be some connection.”

  Man, he can work me like a light switch. Just flip me on.

  “What connection?” I ask, and I’m nearly climbing over the table to hear it.

  He tells me that police records show that Dr. Doris Peterson had an appointment at the sixth precinct the morning she died. In fact, she was probably on her way there when she went to her car in the medical building parking lot.

  “And?” I ask.

  “A check of her phone records show that before she called the police to make that appointment, she called Joey Ingraham’s sister, Rita Kroll.” He sits back, arms folded across his chest with a how-do-you-like-them-apples look on his face.

  “Why?” I ask.

  He shrugs and says the detective working the case hasn’t found that out yet.

  “No,” I say, because he’s misunderstood me. “Why did you tell me? You don’t just hand over that sort of information. It’s not like you.”

  He doesn’t answer me.

  And then it occurs to me. “Are you asking me to find out why Dr. Doris called Rita?”

  He feigns shock. “I would never do that. It would be against department regulations. What could you find out that a detective couldn’t? Especially a detective who is investigating a high-profile case and isn’t really the least bit interested in another murder that’s closer at hand?”

  “So you think that Joey was murdered?” I ask.

  He tells me, “Not officially.” Pressing his fingers to my doughnut crumbs and licking them off, he adds, “Lots of coincidences, don’t you think?”

  I wonder if my mother, Rita’s good friend, knows anything.

  “Teddi?”

  If maybe my mother and Rita and I went out for a nice little lunch, to discuss the decorating project…

  “Teddi?”

  Better still, if I brought Rita to my mother’s for coffee and cake, so that she could point out to me what she likes in my mother’s house…I could bring some vivid colors to show her how accent pieces could bring the dead back to life…

  “Teddi!”

  Drew, handsome, sexy Drew, is sitting across from me, playing footsies under the table. And I’m in my mother’s house with a potential witness. “Hmm?”

  “You know, you’re a detective junkie. Give you a scrap of potential evidence and you’re tripping out on me.”

  I fear he’s right. I’m not just tripping out, I’m turning on. “Wanna go some place and neck?”

  The man doesn’t have to be asked twice.

  “Oh, wait,” I say as we begin to extricate ourselves from a booth that wasn’t made to accommodate frequent doughnut eaters. “Rio is at the house. Shoot. I really better go home.”

  This does not make Drew happy. He makes some noises about me being a tease.

  “No,” I say, taking a deep breath. “I’m a mother. I’ve got three kids and an ex-husband and responsibilities. I have a job. And before you say it, you may have a job, too, but when you’re off duty, you’re off duty. Mom’s don’t go off duty.”

  He doesn’t take this well.

  I remind him that I told him stuff was going on with Dana.

  “But you made it out to see Max Koppel,” he says resentfully.

  I explain how I didn’t want to be at the house when Rio came over, how I had to let him come because Dana was mad at him for running off a boy who was too old for her, yadda, yadda, yadda.

  He doesn’t look appeased.

  “Don’t you think I’d rather be at your place screwing our brains out than going home to a sullen teenager, a secretive preteen and a whiny seven-year-old snitch?” Apparently I say this very loudly, because everyone in the doughnut shop is staring at me.

  A bunch of women in hospital scrubs are sitting at the table to the side of us. “Wouldn’t you rather be going home with him?” I ask one of them, pointing at Drew, who is trying to hustle me out of the shop.

  The woman nearly drools.

  At this point Drew has his arm around me and is half-carrying me out of the place.

  “Wouldn’t you?” I ask a woman as old as my mother as we pass her booth.

  “You bet I would,” she answers back, but by then we’re all but out the door.

  “You are off sugar,” he tells me when we get outside. He puts my coat around my shoulders, but the air is still cold, and so is his body language.

  “Sugar and evidence,” I tell him. “And then there’s the thought of sex. You can’t offer me all that and not expect a reaction.”

  He leans me up against the window of Dunkin’ Donuts. He takes my face in his hands and looks into my eyes like he’s going to find evidence of crack or cocaine. “Are y
ou all right?” he asks me.

  I shut my eyes and swallow hard. And then, out it comes. “I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to watch Dana cry or tell her that her father was right or ask Jesse what’s going on with him or find Alyssa still awake. I don’t want Rio to still be there, and I don’t want to hear six messages from my mother, all telling me what a mistake I made taking on L.I. Lanes and how I’ll never finish it.

  “I don’t want to hear the other half-dozen messages from her telling me the other mistakes I’ve made since the last time we spoke. I don’t want to try to fix the downstairs bathroom toilet because I can’t afford to replace it like Mark says I have to and I don’t want—”

  Drew looks helpless.

  Can’t fix this, can you, big guy?

  And then he leans in and kisses me. Softly at first, but then almost brutally.

  “I have to—” I try to say between his lips and mine, but it only makes his mouth more urgent, more insistent.

  “I guess she changed her mind,” a few of the nurses, or maybe they’re doctors, say as they come out of the doughnut shop.

  “Who wouldn’t?” another one answers.

  Drew drags me away from the harsh lights in front of the store. “I wish I could fix—” he starts to say.

  I put my finger against his lips. “You just did,” I tell him.

  And then I head for my car and the long ride home.

  CHAPTER 14

  Some great places to get ideas for redecorating are in movies and on television, in magazines, in museums that feature furniture exhibits, the furniture departments of better stores, open houses, the Net. But as beautiful as any of these may be, keep asking yourself would this work for me? Remember your family members, your locale, your budget and your lifestyle. Most of us don’t have Marie Antoinette’s space, budget, maids, etc. We don’t even have Sofia Coppola’s.

  —TipsFromTeddi.com

  “You’re never going to get that farkakte alley done and you’re ruining your reputation in the process,” my mother says when I phone her the next morning while posting a tip. I assure her that I got all that last night from her messages. Not to mention the time I had with the kids and their visit with Rio, which apparently went about as poorly as my marriage to him did. “You should be concentrating on cultivating clients who can enhance your image, who can introduce you to a better class of people, who will then become your future clients.

  “Who do you think is going to walk into a bowling alley and think ‘I’d like my home to look just like this. I wonder who the designer was?’”

  I hate it when she has a point.

  “You need to concentrate on Rita’s house.” She goes on at length, telling me about how she won’t be able to recommend me if I don’t give her friends preferential treatment.

  “We need to eat, Mom,” I say, rather dramatically. “I take whatever jobs I can get and this one will pay nicely.”

  “Provided you get it done in time,” my mother says for the millionth time, making me regret yet again having told her the conditions on this job. “Which you never will. I don’t know how you could have—”

  Actually, she goes on for quite a while, but since I’m not listening anymore I can’t really tell you what she says. We can all guess, right?

  I tell her she is absolutely right. Even that doesn’t shut her up, but at least it kind of slows her down.

  “Did I tell you that Rita is very fond of your house and would like to do hers in a similar palette?”

  “Well, of course she does,” my mother says. “I told you she had taste, didn’t I?”

  No, she told me Rita was cheap. But I don’t correct her because that’s not what I’m after. “I thought it would be nice if I brought Rita over to your house—I could pick up some pastries at that little bakery you like and she could show me what she likes about your house.”

  My mother hesitates. Finally: “What’s not to like?” she asks.

  I say how I’d just like her to point out to me what especially appeals to her, whether it’s the palette or the style or the tone…

  “Fine, Teddi,” she says. “But what do you really want?”

  “WHAT I REALLY WANT TO KNOW,” I say when we’ve taken off our raincoats and toured my mother’s taupe terrain, her ecru environs, her beige boudoir, and we’re sitting down to calories with chocolate coating, “is what it is you like about this house. Does it give you a sense of calm? Monochromatic color schemes tend to do that. Spas are often shades of taupe or gray for that reason. Are you looking for a—”

  My mother waves my words away with her hand. “It shouts class and Rita would like to feel she’s part of a certain strata in life, a level above the hoi polloi.”

  I’m getting nowhere. Not in the investigation and not in the designing.

  “So tell me the truth, Rita,” my mother says suddenly, putting several pastries on Rita’s plate and refilling her coffee cup. “You think that sweet brother of yours was murdered?”

  I don’t know whose jaw drops farther, mine or Rita’s. “Mom!” I say sharply.

  “Please,” she tells me while the rain turns to sleet and pelts the window behind her. “We’re all thinking about it. Unless…it didn’t occur to you, Rita?”

  She tells us that it did, but that Jerry said she was being ridiculous. “The police say it was an accident,” she tells us.

  “Did the doctor, the one who got killed after she operated on him, think it was anything other than a heart attack?” I ask.

  My mother leans forward. Clearly she didn’t know there was any connection. She asks for an explanation. What she really wants is not an explanation, but an apology for why I didn’t tell her. Only she’s not looking at me. She’s looking at Rita, who says she doesn’t know.

  “I thought you mentioned that she called you after Joey died,” I say. My mother stares at my forehead like there’s a neon sign there blinking liar, liar, liar.

  Rita denies any call from Dr. Doris.

  “The day she died,” I say. “Remember?”

  Rita says Jerry is so right about the Alzheimer’s. She doesn’t remember speaking to the doctor.

  “What a nice woman she was,” Rita says. “Before Joey’s operation he was cracking us all up, her included.”

  My mother and I hang on her words.

  “They’d given Joey some sort of medication, to relax him for the surgery, I guess. He was really scared. So he had a reaction to the medicine and instead of getting sleepy, he was all wound up and talking a blue streak. He was like a stand-up comedian, my Joey. And the doctor was there, trying to relax him.”

  I ask what sort of things he was saying.

  Rita says he was trying to seduce the doctor. “He told her if she wanted him to relax she should come lay down next to him. Then he said that no, that would excite him. And it actually did.”

  She gestures with her napkin, putting a finger up inside it like an erection.

  “It was terrible. Then he starts telling her about how one day he’ll be rich.”

  “A man who slices meat in the deli department,” my mother says, shaking her head. She immediately realizes her faux pas. “Good, honest work. You know, that’s the kind of man who wins the lottery. It could happen.

  “Not for Joey, but…” her voice trails off.

  “No one’s claimed that jackpot yet, have they?” I ask. “The thirty-seven million dollar one?” Not that I mean Joey could. Not now, anyway.

  Rita shrugs. I see she’s eaten all the mini-eclairs my mother put on her plate. I slide a cream puff on for her. She says, “No more,” but still she pops it whole into her mouth, while my mother rolls her eyes in a gesture that all but shouts Rita will be finishing off the platter.

  “So what do you like best about my humble abode?” my mother asks Rita. “Teddi needs to know so she doesn’t blow your job like Deena Fishbein’s.”

  “Mom!”

  I ask you: With a mother like mine, who needs an ex? “What?” my mothe
r asks defensively. “You didn’t paint the hallway the wrong color?”

  “IF I TOOK OUT A CONTRACT on my mother,” my telephone conversation with Drew starts.

  He interrupts me. “There’s been another death,” he says, stopping me in my tracks. Well, I don’t actually stop. I start pacing, but I do stop talking. “Another bowler.”

  “A Spare Slice?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” And he adds that this one is possibly suspicious.

  Well, duh.

  “And then there were three,” I say. “Who?”

  He tells me it was the guy with the boat. He calls him Sherman. I tell myself the roads are icy. Accidents happen. Don’t get carried away.

  “You talked to him about the boat, right?” Drew asks. The police don’t think it was an accident. Not from Drew’s tone of voice.

  I assure him that I did, that it cost almost half a million dollars and that when I told Drew that, he wasn’t the least bit interested. I’m snippy because I knew Milt Sherman. I didn’t like him, particularly, but I knew him. He smelled my hair.

  “So I want you to stay out of this, Teddi. Understand me?”

  I’m not sure I do. Am I supposed to read between the lines? When he says understand me? does he mean this-is-the-official-line-but-you-should-know-I-don’t-mean-it?

  Or does stay out of it really mean stay out of it?

  “It’s a police matter now. And it’s dangerous.”

  Is that supposed to warn me off? Or be an irresistible enticement?

  Where’s my decoder ring when I need it?

  “Teddi? It was one thing when we didn’t think there was any foul play involved, but this is different.”

  As in: we didn’t mind when you were chasing your tail, but now that it’s turned out that your tail is worth chasing…I mean, that it’s something worth investigating, you’re off and we’re on.

  He’s digging himself a very deep hole.

  “So any role you thought you had in this is over.”

  Right. Without implying any link at all, I casually mention that, oh, by the way, did I tell him that I had a nice coffee klatch with Rita Kroll?