—TipsFromTeddi.com
We’re both on edge when we get to the library. I see the “boy” before Dana does. After seeing Robby, this kid doesn’t look quite so old. Our eyes meet and he knows I’m aware of who he is. He does the same shoulder swag I’ve seen Rio do a million times. What is it that the goyim say? The sins of the father?
Very patriarchal.
I’m thinking it’s more like the sins of the mother. Which fits, since in Jewish families matrilineality is the rule. Technically, it means that Jewish descent is passed on from the mother to the child. Apparently, in our family it also means that mistakes are passed on from mother to child. I mean, look at my mother and Carmine De’Guisseppe. Me and Rio. Dana and this tough kid in a leather jacket daring me with a look to tell him where to get off.
“He’s over there,” I tell Dana, jerking my head in the jerk’s direction. “Do you want me to come with you?”
She gives a tiny shake of her head and then flips her hair back and walks over to him like she owns the world. She gets that from my mother, too, and maybe it’s the one thing about both of them I envy. That page is missing from my Secret Handbook.
Oh, wait. I don’t have The Handbook at all.
I watch the boy’s face as he denies one thing after another. Dana’s back is to me and her body language isn’t telling me much. Not until she turns on her heel and starts to come back to me. The boy reaches out and grabs her arm and before I can do anything, she wrenches her arm away and walks slowly and deliberately toward me.
“Talk about retards,” she says and I flash her a look that says even under these circumstances that’s not okay.
She shrugs it off. “Come on,” she says, looking over her shoulder once last time and raising her head high. “I can do the research over the Internet.”
I BEGGED AND I PLEADED, but Dana insisted she was perfectly fine and could stay home instead of coming along to keep me company at the alley. I reminded her I’m only a phone call away and took off.
And now here I am, up to my elbows in plumbing fixtures with Mark and Bobbie—and wishing that I was the mother I want my children to have.
Mark has done an incredible job. I’ve decided that he either never sleeps or he has a crew of elves that come in after we leave. Or both. I don’t know how I’ll ever thank him if we actually get done in time for the grand opening—a term I’ve come to hate.
The theme from NYPD Blue gets louder and louder until Bobbie refuses to let me ignore it.
“If you don’t want to talk to him, tell him,” she says, pulling my phone out of my purse. “Or do you want me to?”
She opens it, expecting me to grab it from her, but I don’t.
“Hello?” she says into it, her voice not as sure as it usually is. He must ask if it’s me, because she says, “No. It’s Bobbie. She’s in the bathroom with Mark…”
She watches me hand Mark a long-handled screwdriver to tighten one of the hose clamps.
“They’re screwing at the moment,” she says brightly into the phone. “Can I take a message? Drew? Detective Scoones?”
She raises her shoulders at me.
“He hung up.”
Mark calls her a troublemaker and offers to call Drew back, but I shrug it off.
“You gonna tell us what he did or should we just hate him on general principles?” Bobbie asks. “Past performance and all that?”
I tell them that if they want to hate someone, they should hate me. I was the heavy this time. But I refuse to give them details.
“He said he loved her,” Mark tells Bobbie.
“No he didn’t,” she says, fishing around in her purse for a pack of cigarettes. When she finds them, she pulls one out and stares at me. “Because I’d know. She’d tell me first. Wouldn’t you?”
I remind her she can’t smoke in the building and she tells me she was just going out. She slips out of her canvas slides and hikes on her suede boots with the hooker heels on them.
Fifteen minutes or so go by. “She’s not coming back, is she?” I say to Mark.
“It’s a girl thing, I think,” Mark explains to me, like I’m not one. “Best friends, giggle, giggle, giggle, run to the ladies’ room together…”
“Share Tampax…”
Mark looks stricken.
“Sorry,” I say. I think best friends—not to mention partners—help when they are needed. They don’t go off and sulk because they weren’t the first to learn something. I mean, we are grown-ups and we should be past—
Steve bursts into the ladies’ room looking frantic. “Bobbie…uh—”
I’m on my feet and out the door before he can get the rest of it out. I find Bobbie inside, on a chair by the front door, her left foot up on a second chair, her face contorted in pain.
“I was lying there for hours,” she tells me. “Why didn’t you come looking for me?”
I ask her what happened. She winces in agony and tells me that three hours ago, maybe four by now, maybe two weeks, she fell on the sidewalk. Steve found her and carried her in.
“It’s not wet, it’s not slick, it’s not my fault,” Steve says. “And I should get points for carrying her in.”
“Points?” she shouts. “Somebody’s gonna pay for my freakin’ boots,” she tells him, pointing at the heel-less left one.
“We should get that off before your foot gets too swollen,” I say. Bobbie screams when I touch the shoe. “They’ll have to cut it off.”
Bobbie asks again why I didn’t come looking for her, but luckily I don’t have to answer her because in flies Drew—like public enemy number one is bowling on lane three and it’s his big chance to make the papers.
He stares at me, stares at Bobbie and slowly his shoulders sag. “It’s you,” he tells Bobbie, clearly relieved.
I’d ask what he means, but I hear the wail of a siren and realize that an ambulance is coming to take Bobbie for X-rays. And you know who heard the call.
I have to admit that I’m touched.
“This was not my fault,” Steve repeats. He is telling Drew this time. “Look outside. No negligence. Do you see loose gravel? Ice? Anything I could have done? I can’t be responsible for stilt walkers.”
Bobbie says he’ll hear from her husband, who walks in the door followed by the ambulance people.
“I’m over here,” she shouts to the EMS pair as they come into the alley. “I’m pretty sure I broke it.”
Mike kneels by Bobbie’s chair and asks what happened. I’m hoping against hope she has some excuse other than falling off her heels, since I’m sure that’s what Drew is thinking.
“Some jerk on a bicycle came whizzing by,” she says. “I jumped back to avoid getting run over and the next thing I knew, I was on the cement, writhing in agony.” She looks at me and adds, “For hours.”
“Kids,” Steve says with disgust, as if they don’t account for more than half his business.
“Not,” Bobbie says as they transfer her to a wheelchair, her shrieking as they do. “This wasn’t any kid. He was older than me.”
“And he didn’t stop?” Steve asks. He’s so like Rio. I know he’s thinking Bobbie could sue the rider and not him.
“Stop?” Bobbie asks as they are wheeling her out the door. “Son of a bitch sped up. I think he meant to hit me.
“I really do.”
Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is Robby Kroll and I hate myself for even thinking it. Think eight-year-old, I tell myself. It’s dark out, late. There’s no way…
Just because someone rides a bicycle…and is creepy…and likes to scare people…
Stop it! I tell myself.
Easier said than done.
IT’S LATE, everyone’s gone home but Mark and me. And Drew, who called in a report for patrol cars to keep watch for a crazed cyclist.
“I don’t like the idea of you working here so late,” he tells me, watching Mark out of the corner of his eye.
I tell him I don’t have a choice and that he
doesn’t have to worry about me because Mark will see me home. This doesn’t seem to reassure him in the least.
I ask him if he’s found out anything about Russ Oberman or Miles Weissman and he looks at me blankly. “The remaining Slices.” I remind him.
Assuring me that he knows who they are, he gently reminds me that I’ve been told to stay out of it. Okay, he isn’t gentle and it isn’t a reminder. It’s more like a warning. A very stern warning. In fact, it’s like a threat. To lock me up. And press charges for interfering in a police investigation.
And throw away the key.
“Then you are investigating,” I say. “You do think that Joey was murdered and that it’s all linked—”
“What part of ‘stay out of it, Teddi,’ don’t you understand?” he asks me.
I tell him that it’s great that he’s investigating, because I really don’t have time to. He mumbles some sort of thank you to higher powers.
“And if you want to stay and help—” I say, even though I want him to get right to his investigating, because (a) I need the help, and (b) maybe this will somehow patch things up between us.
He laughs at the request. “Anything else you want me to do for you, Teddi? Maybe I could drive your mother to her nail appointment in a squad car?”
Before I can tell him where to get off, he apologizes. “I’m taking a lot of heat on the Dr. Doris case,” he says. Then he adds in a voice that’s low and confidential, “I’ve checked the files on the remaining Slices already—they’ve all got ironclad alibis. Russ Oberman’s been in the hospital under observation since Sunday with some sort of nervous condition.
“Your friend Dave’s got himself barricaded in his mother’s house with two neighbors vouching for him and Miles Weissman—he’s a real nut job—is traveling around incognito. Only he’s so obvious we know just where he’s been since your friend got hit.”
“So you do think they’re all connected,” I say.
“What’s that expression you always use?” he asks me. His lips are nearly against my forehead.
“Duh?” I suggest.
“Yeah,” he says. “Duh.”
“And you are investigating?” I ask. He tells me it’s not a department priority. Softly, into my hair, he says that yeah, he’s looking into it.
I thank him for coming to the alley. He doesn’t bother hiding the fact that when he heard the ambulance call on the scanner he thought it was me. He tells me he’s sorry about Bobbie.
“I don’t know how I’m going to get this place done in time,” I say. “I’ve got a payment due on my business loan and I can’t ask my father for the money because for the rest of my life I’ll have to hear my mother tell me how she told me not to take this job.”
He offers to help me out. “No strings,” he says.
I touch his cheek, which is rough against my fingers. I imagine that someday I could tell time by that stubbly cheek. So many things he doesn’t understand about me, like why I need to make this business a success on my own terms, be my own source of strength, be able to depend on me. “I can’t,” I say softly. “I appreciate it more than you’ll ever know, but I can’t go through another day depending on someone else to take care of me and mine.”
His cell phone rings and he looks at me apologetically. I put my hand over his to stop him from opening his phone.
“Do you, can you understand that?” I ask him.
He flips open the phone but doesn’t put it to his ear. “No,” he says simply, before he lifts the phone and says, “Scoones here.”
CHAPTER 18
Working without a decorator (or at least a talented friend) is like walking the tightwire without a net. It’s a long way down and while going without a decorator won’t leave you with a broken neck, you might break the bank. That’s why most people decorate cautiously. But you can go it alone if you bounce your ideas off someone you trust. It doesn’t have to be me, though I can be reached by simply clicking on e-mail Teddi. It’s scary out there alone. Take a buddy with you to the store.
—TipsFromTeddi.com
After three or four hours sleep and getting the kids off to school, I head back for the alley. Waiting there I find Carmine De’Guisseppe and a couple of his boys. Carmine’s “boys” are pushing seventy, but they still swagger like they’re twenty-five.
“Teddi, dear,” Carmine says, taking both my hands in his and kissing first one cheek and then the other. “Just came by to check on my investment. The place secure?”
His boys laugh at the little joke.
“Rio’s done here,” I say. Just stick a fork in him. “I tested out the system and it’s working fine.”
“And you? You keeping your nose clean?” he asks me, touching his like they do in gangster movies.
I tell him that of course I am. He looks dubious. “What? What’s my mother been telling you?”
Both hands go up like he’s not touching that question. “Not a thing,” he says. The looks that pass between his “boys” say otherwise. “I know you got a penchant for trouble, is all.”
I feign disbelief. “Me?” I squeak and all his boys laugh like I’m Jon Stewart on a good night.
“So, honey—you gonna get this joint done in time?” he asks, looking around dubiously. “’Cause you know, I could have Vito here lend you a couple of hands.”
Vito, Carmine’s driver, offers up his hands. He’s the one who’s missing two fingers.
“Sorry,” Carmine says, “but he already lent a few fingers to somebody else.”
The boys all laugh.
“I’ll be finished in time,” I say with great conviction, which isn’t bad, considering that I haven’t a prayer of making my deadline.
“Some people don’t think so,” he says.
I assure him that some people are wrong. Of course, I’m talking out of my hat because, looking around, it’s probably hopeless.
“No one gets where they are without a little help,” Carmine says. His cronies mutter their agreement. It’s like a Greek chorus—the group all speaking as one.
I tell him that I was raised to admire the man who raised himself up by his own bootstraps, whatever that expression means.
He looks me straight in the eye, like I shouldn’t miss the implication when he says, “Nobody ever did that.”
I know he’s talking about my father. I wonder, though, if my father has any inkling of this. He’s always taken great pride in being a self-made man.
“You need help, you know where to come, right?” Carmine says.
I doubt anyone understands loyalty the way the man rocking on his toes in front of me does.
“Yes,” I say. “I do. I will call my father if I need a hand.” There. You can’t be any clearer than that, right?
“He’d be happy if you asked him,” he says, like he’d know what my father wants in life. He wags a finger at me. “Fathers, they wanna be there for their kids. Doesn’t matter how old those kids are.”
Hey, it’s not my fault my mother didn’t tell him about David, is it?
“And sometimes mothers gotta let ’em. You know what I mean?” Of course I know. But he’s making the point nearly fifty years too late and to the wrong woman.
“’Cause I don’t think you do.”
And suddenly all his cronies seem to find the wall, the floor, the ceiling interesting.
Carmine snaps his fingers and like something out of West Side Story, his boys fall into line behind him and they all swagger out.
SOME PEOPLE CAN SIT AROUND and watch paint dry. I leave Mark to do that (and remove all our ladders and drop cloths and clean out the brushes) while I take a quick run over to the Krolls, ostensibly to go over some more decorating ideas. I stop at Waldbaum’s to get some rugelach because you can’t just drop by empty-handed, and find the deli department in shambles, people screaming at each other and the store manager giving out pagers to call the next customer while he or she continues to shop in the store.
And if I thought tensions
were running high at the supermarket, the atmosphere in the Kroll house when I arrive is so thick you could spread it on a scooped-out sesame bagel and still not be able to get your mouth around it.
Jerry and I sit down at the kitchen table while Rita fusses with a new coffee machine. “You just put this little plastic pot in here,” she says as though it couldn’t be simpler, yet she’s having a good deal of difficulty doing it.
“Robby out riding?” I ask.
Jerry says he is, at the same time Rita says he isn’t. Then they try to cover for each other. Jerry gives me the look, the one that says that Rita’s gone over the edge and there’ll be no pulling her back.
“She thinks he’s sweet on a girl,” Jerry says. “Pure fantasy. He doesn’t know from girls.”
“He’s got a man’s body,” Rita reminds him. “I know. Believe me.”
“Don’t go there,” he warns her.
“Physical needs,” she says. “The doctor said—”
“Doctors are idiots,” Jerry says, getting up from the table and taking his cup to the sink. “They think they know everything. They think they know better than you, doesn’t matter about what. About everything. They’re in their sterilized, hermetically-sealed towers doing whatever they want and they think they know all about what you should do. What you shouldn’t do. How the world works.
“How the heart works.” I can see his shoulders shaking and I watch Rita get up and go to him, take him around and soothe him.
“He’s mad about Joey,” she tells me.
“She cries for him every morning,” he says.
They plead their case in front of me. And she says Joey was murdered and he says that if it was murder it was the doctor who killed him by not fixing his heart and now she’s dead, so Rita should let it rest.
“And his friends? Milt and Max? That was coincidence?” she says.
Whose Number Is Up, Anyway? Page 16