Whose Number Is Up, Anyway?

by Stevi Mittman

  He tells me it’s going okay, but I can tell he’s as nervous as an ostrich at a Vegas showgirl convention.

  “It must be pretty hard on you,” I say, and I can’t help looking at him out of the corner of my eye. His nose is red, his eyes are watery. “First Joey and now Milt.”

  “Damndest what day a call it…when things happen kind of at the same time but they’re not connected?”

  “Coincidence?” I ask him. Even Dave can’t think this is simply a coincidence.

  But apparently he does.

  I ask after Russ and Miles. Dave’s talked to them. Neither one is going to go to Milt’s funeral because they think it’s too dangerous.

  I ask if Dave is going.

  “Hell yeah, I am,” he says, and he turns to me. “Milt was my buddy. Joey was my buddy. Max is my buddy. Ain’t nothing gonna keep me from my buds.”

  I gotta admit, I like Dave. I ask him how Max is doing.

  “He’s going to be okay,” Dave tells me. “He can’t like, you know, talk or nothing yet, but they say he’s got waves of brain or something.”

  I tell him that’s very good news. “He’s lucky to have a friend like you to see him through his recovery,” I say.

  Dave assures me Max has lots of friends, though, “like I said, they’re mostly afraid to come out at the moment.”

  I ask him who he’s seen visit Max. He names some people he tells me are from Waldbaum’s, a couple of bowlers from other teams, some family. And some of the guys.

  Steve, who has become significantly slimier since I showed up in Bobbie’s belt-masquerading-as-a-skirt, sidles up next to me. “You know,” he says, putting an arm around me, “you could get arrested for chatting up the customers in an outfit like that.”

  “She’s probably hoping just that,” Mark says, trying to wedge himself between Steve and me. “Provided it’s a certain detective that arrests her.”

  He gives me the once-over and frowns.

  “You gonna have time to check the positioning of these lamps over here?”

  Happy to leave the gang at the bar, I follow Mark over to the billiards area where he warns me about Steve coming on too strong. “He’s planning on screwing you both ways.”

  I must blush, because then Mark does.

  “Not—” he can’t quite find the words “—front door, back door. I mean besides wanting to jump your bones, gorgeous, he’s counting on you not getting this place finished by Friday night.”

  “It’ll be done,” I say, way more breezily than the situation warrants.

  Where did the time go?

  Uh—maybe it was investigating two murders and an assault, not to mention one daughter’s inappropriate liaison.

  “Gorgeous, unless you got some secret weapon under that skirt—one that can get the fixtures in the bathrooms installed and the bar refinished, not just make no one care whether they are—we’re in one deep doo-doo pit.”

  I ask him how long he thinks it’ll take him to get the restrooms ready.

  “With or without my elves?” he asks, like we have time for fairy tales and fun and games.

  “Alone?” he asks. “And it looks like I’m gonna be alone, no way they’ll be done before next week.”

  “And not alone?” I ask him.

  “If I had someone helping me full-time, someone who was really here and not just saying she was here and then taking advantage of her father and going to meet some jerk who doesn’t know how lucky he is—” and here he takes a breath, but not long enough for me to come up with any defense “—and if that person was willing to work nights along with me, I might be able to get it done by Friday.”

  He looks at my skimpy little skirt.

  “But I don’t see that happening.”

  I promise him that I’ll be back in an hour or so and that I’ll work with him all night. “I just have an appointment I can’t break.”

  “Appointment, huh? With your gynecologist?”

  I tug at my skirt, or what there is of it. “Huh?” I ask, wishing I could blame Bobbie, except I’m the one who forked over the cash and I’m the one who put it on tonight. Ofcourse, tonight I have a special reason for wearing it. It’s sort of undercover.

  “Aren’t you dressed for someone to check out your privates?” Mark asks.

  I tell him I’ll be back in an hour, tops, and he suggests that if I actually do come back—and he sounds really doubtful—that I might want to wear something I can bend over in. “If you want to help and not get us even farther behind.”

  I SHOW UP AT DREW’S PLACE and I have to say that he looks less than thrilled to see me. He takes me in from head to toe and sort of drawls, “Intent on frostbite?”

  I ask if I’m invited in or if he wants me to freeze out here, where my legs are nearly as cold as they were in the Sound. He doesn’t pretend not to notice how I’m dressed.

  “Leave your pimp in the car?” he asks, pulling me into his condo and slamming the door shut with his foot.

  I tell him I thought I’d cut out the middleman.

  “Do you have any idea how good you look?” he asks me.

  “If you like the ho look,” I say, tugging again at my skirt.

  He asks why I wore the outfit if I think I look trashy.

  I don’t have a good answer, but he does.

  “Unless, of course, you wanted to turn me on. And you have.” He sits down on his couch, leans back and locks his hands behind his head. “Wanna show me whatcha got?”

  What I’ve got is a huge dose of embarrassment. “I’m gonna go back to the bowling alley,” I say quietly, picking up my purse and heading for the door.

  “Please, don’t.” His voice is low, earnest.

  I admit I don’t know what I was thinking.

  He says it’s probably the skirt. He can’t think, either.

  “You do things to me, Teddi Bayer,” he says. “Scare me. I say things I’d never say, like I’m someone I don’t even know, when I’m around you.”

  I stay facing the door, but I’m not going out. I ask what he means.

  “Suddenly I’m protective, possessive. I was always the guy with the sexiest woman in the room on my arm and I wanted every guy in the place to know I was going to take her home and that piece of tail was mine. Eat your hearts out.

  “Only I don’t want anyone looking at you like that. I want you to wear glasses and overalls and false buck teeth. I don’t want anyone seeing those legs but me. You know how many cases I’ve had of guys killing because someone else wanted their woman, touched their woman? Cases I never understood?”

  I knew coming was a mistake. I knew that the skirt was going to turn him on and that was what I had in mind, but I didn’t think he was going to go mushy on me. Scary mushy. “I’m flattered,” I say. “Really. But no one else is interested. Honest.”

  He looks skeptically at my legs. “How about we do something with the kids this weekend?” he asks. “The Bronx Zoo? Miniature golf?”

  And I thought he was scary mushy before. The only thing worse would be him asking me home to meet his mother.

  “And then we could—”

  I slide the zipper of my skirt down and shimmy out of it, still not facing him, still in my jacket. I’ve got a furry little short parka, fishnet hose and four-inch heels.

  And I’m figuring he won’t bring up his mother now.

  His footsteps are soft as he comes up behind me and slips my jacket off my shoulders. He breathes in deeply and says I smell good as my jacket slides to the floor.

  He kisses the back of my neck. As good as his kisses are in other places, my neck is still my favorite. And he knows it. He holds up my hair and rains little kisses up and down and up and down until my knees go weak. And he leads me back to the couch where he lays me down and undoes the little buttons on my sweater.

  Men don’t talk when they are making love. At least, in my limited experience, I don’t think they do. Rio didn’t. Drew doesn’t. I’m relieved to lose myself in pure sensation wi
thout the complicated declarations or instructions or even murmurs of appreciation.

  I don’t want to think about forever, or even tomorrow. I don’t want to know I’ll ever leave this room, this couch, these arms. I don’t want to acknowledge after.

  I only want to be lost in right now, right here.

  His skin is warm. Hot where it touches mine. And he dizzies me and thrills me and satisfies me.

  “This isn’t what I had in mind.” I am shocked when I realize the words have come out aloud.

  “Really?” Drew says drolly. He is trying to extricate his watch from my fishnet pantyhose and I’m not sure it’s an accident when he rips them. “You came over in these—” He shakes my pantyhose at me. He’s still fighting with them, only now they seem to be winning.

  I tell him I fully intended to do what we did, I just thought that I’d be the one doing the…uh…pleasuring. “And then I thought we could talk about Miles and—”

  It’s a mistake. I see the wheels turning in his head and I see he doesn’t like where the train is going.

  “I’m not telling you anything about this case, if that’s what you thought you were buying with this,” he says, sitting up and pushing my legs off his lap.

  “I wasn’t buying anything,” I say, reaching for something to cover myself with. Okay, maybe I was bartering…

  He accuses me of virtually seducing him so that he’d owe me.

  “I just thought—” I start, but he isn’t interested in what I thought and, besides, I don’t really have any good excuse. I didn’t think I needed one for making love and I say so.

  Only he contends I wasn’t making love, I was making a trade, a bargain. I give you my body, you give me information. “What if I made love to you and expected something in return?” he asks me.

  I think about what it is Drew wants from me. “Don’t you?” I ask him.

  I THINK MARK IS SURPRISED to see me back. He’s down on his knees in the bathroom attaching the plumbing under the sinks. He pokes his head out and studies me from the knees down.

  “Look who finally showed up,” he says.

  He touches the rolled-up cuffs on the jeans I borrowed from Drew, noting that they’re several sizes too big.

  “I don’t suppose you want to do any work, do you?”

  I pick up a wrench, but I just stand there with it, trying to decide what I’m supposed to do.

  “You okay?” he asks, and I realize I probably look as shaky as I feel.

  “Hunky-dory,” I say.

  He looks at me strangely.

  “Peachy keen.”

  “That’s it. I’ll kill him,” Mark says, uncurling himself and starting to get up.

  “No need,” I say. After all, I seem to have cut him to the quick myself. I sink down to the floor and hold the pipe while Mark wields the wrench. “I really screwed up.”

  Mark asks me if I want to talk about it—while we work. I think not. What happened between Drew and me seems incredibly private—and I don’t mean the sex. It was that he was offering his commitment to me and I saw it as a negative, something he’d have to bribe to get out of me.

  I just shake my head and Mark acknowledges that it’s out of bounds with a nod.

  “If it makes you feel any better—and trust me, this won’t,” he says. “You’re not the only one who screwed up.”

  It’s nearly midnight, and I think this is probably not something I want to hear.

  “Rio—” he starts, and now I’m sure this is not something I want to hear.

  In a flash I see my mother in the bridal room of the Meadowbrook Country Club as I’m getting into my wedding gown. “You will regret this for the rest of your life,” she’s telling me. “Every day there will be a new reason for you to regret this.”

  Not that she didn’t like Rio, or anything. She just didn’t think he was good enough for me. Or anyone else who was still breathing.

  I ask what Rio did now, hoping that it (a) did not involve our children, and (b) is fixable by Friday.

  “You know how the security systems were working fine,” he says.

  I try not to blush as I nod.

  Mark avoids eye contact, busying himself with the J-trap. “There’s a short in them now. We’re going to have to pull up every piece of molding, check the wires and replace the molding.”

  “We?” I ask. “We? It’s Rio’s mistake. He—”

  Mark cuts me off. “Your ex is some piece of work, gorgeous. He decided that it was Steve who actually cut the wire so that you wouldn’t get finished in time and he wouldn’t have to pay you.”

  It doesn’t seem to me that far-fetched, but it’s more the sort of thing Rio, not Steve, would do.

  “And now he’s not allowed within ten feet of the place or Steve’s gonna call the cops.”

  “Why does everything always come back to the cops?” I ask.

  “You and the good detective have a fight?” he asks.

  I think about my answer. I cried and he was angry, so I guess it qualified as a fight. “Yeah,” I say softly, handing him the plumber’s tape and a paper towel to check for leaks.

  “Over…?” Mark asks.

  Over my family? Over my fishnet stockings? Over what he’s feeling about me versus what I’m feeling about him? About how he’s free to feel whatever he wants and I’m in this box that includes three children, two parents and an ex with a new family and a dog.

  Well, the dog is mine. The new baby is his.

  “Over that he thinks he loves me,” I say. And I put my head against Mark’s big, broad shoulder and press my lips together before I say any more.

  CHAPTER 16

  The most important room of your house, the one that gives others the impression of just who you are, may not be a room at all. It’s your entryway, and some people will never get farther than that. Does yours say come in, or beat it? Draw the eye and the visitor into the next room with an inviting color, use a mirror with a shelf hung below it if there isn’t room for a small table. Have a small rug for wiping feet both inside and outside the door so people don’t hesitate to step farther in. And don’t forget the door itself. Color, a door knocker, a wreath of flowers—anything that shouts, I live here!

  —TipsFromTeddi.com

  I should go directly back to the alley. Despite how much progress Mark and I made last night, and we did, it still will be down to the wire. I think that’s another sports metaphor. I hate thinking that Rio rubbed off on me. Makes me want to scrub my skin with lye and a loofah.

  Anyway, having collapsed on the couch after three this morning, I am stealing an hour—half of it to pay the Krolls a visit and half to check on Max at the hospital. Now, I could pretend to myself, or to Drew, that the visit to Max is just because he’s a dear friend—who I hardly know—and that the visit to the Krolls is business. I just want to shore up that account. But the truth is that I can’t let go of the nagging feeling in my gut that somehow the deaths of Dr. Doris and Joey Ingraham and Milt are all tied together along with Max’s being in the hospital, and that somewhere in that pile lie the Krolls.

  You remember the last time I ignored a gut feeling? Well, I’m not about to do it again. And if I’m right and somehow the Krolls are tied up in this—Dr. Doris did, after all, call Jerry Kroll, and he did lie about it—then they, too, could be in danger. That makes me really crazy because Rita is my mother’s friend and if something were to happen to her, I just might be visiting my mother at South Winds Psychiatric Center for years to come.

  If she’d let me, since she’d hold me responsible for not preventing it.

  So, here I am, standing at the Krolls’ front door, trying to come up with some excuse for stopping by.

  Jerry Kroll answers the door in his bathrobe. He seems very surprised to see me. Maybe that’s because it’s early in the morning and I’ve arrived unexpectedly. I apologize for not calling first, but say that I was on my way out of the driveway this morning when I was struck with a brilliant idea for their house and
would he mind terribly if I just came in for a few minutes?

  He gestures for me to come in, one of those my-house-is-your-house sort of waves.

  Idea, idea, please have an idea.

  Nothing.

  I stand in the hallway. Staring up the steps to the bedrooms.

  Please, please! An idea. Any idea.

  “Yes!” I shout brightly, I suppose because I’m so happy to have thought of anything. “It would work perfectly. Where’s Rita? I’d like to present this to both of you.”

  He calls her and she toddles out of her bedroom in her bathrobe. I glance at my watch. Eight-thirty. I’ve shown up unannounced at a client’s house at eight-thirty. I will never hear the end of this from my mother.

  And she’ll be right, unfortunately.

  “Stay right there,” I tell her, raising my hand to stop her at the head of the stairs. “Now. Imagine double-width stairs,” I say, stretching the stairs in the air with my hands.

  Jerry smiles. Rita looks like she’s been anointed queen.

  “It will give the entryway elegance, formality, gravitas. Instead of merely being access to the upstairs, it will be a statement.”

  Jerry is nodding. Rita, I think, is imagining herself coming down the staircase at Tara.

  “Tiled?” Jerry asks.

  I shake my head. “Too cold and austere. Either dark wood—mahogany, maybe—or sculptured carpet. Champagne beige.”

  Rita looks down at the steps.

  “Let’s talk about it,” Jerry says. “Come. I’ve got coffee and fresh bagels.”

  I’m quick to agree because it gets me into their kitchen, sitting around the breakfast table with them, sort of shooting the breeze. And I’m hungry and it gets me a bagel.

  “Tell us, darling, how your work is going,” Rita says. “Your mother says you’ll never get done in time and you won’t get paid if you don’t finish. I told her she had it wrong, but she insisted—”

  I admit that she has it right, though it pains me.

  “It’s too bad Jerry can’t help you,” Rita says, she pats his hand affectionately. “He used to be very handy.”