Quick Study

by Maggie Barbieri

  “You’re a terrible liar,” he said. Kevin had entered the bridge of the song and was singing the heck out of it, distracting both of us. He turned back to me when Kevin started dancing like the eighties’ George Michael. “Yes, I’m leaving Long Island City.” His eyes narrowed. “Why are you so interested in Richie Kraecker and Riviera Pointe?”

  Pwant, I wanted to correct him, but didn’t. “No reason.”

  “God, you are maybe the worst liar I’ve ever met.”

  I didn’t want to go into the whole Jose Tomasso/soup kitchen/community service connection, so I gratefully accepted my new martini from the waitress and took a huge sip. “I’m interested in a condo?” I said weakly.

  “You’ll never leave Dobbs Ferry.” He shook his head, taking a long swig of his beer. “What the hell do they teach you at St. Thomas anyway?”

  “Well, they don’t teach us how to lie, obviously.” I grabbed another olive from my glass and ate it.

  Kevin attempted a split which left him in a precarious position at the edge of the stage. Patrick came to his rescue and brought him to his feet to thunderous applause. The opening strains of “SexyBack” began and Patrick began his portion of the show.

  Jack shook his head sadly as he watched Patrick gyrate, not unlike Justin Timberlake, but not really like him either. Had I just arrived, I would have thought he was having a seizure. Jack looked back at me, something occurring to him. “Listen. Richie Kraecker is having a cocktail party for investors at a place not far from here next Wednesday night. Any interest?”

  I thought about that for a moment. I wanted to meet Richie Kraecker and I also wanted to know why he had illegals working at the site. “I think I would like to go,” I said.

  Jack looked at me for a moment. “It’s going to cost you.”

  More than you know, my friend, I thought, but pushed the image of Crawford’s face out of my mind. I nodded. “OK. What are we talking about here?”

  Jack pushed away from the table and approached the stage. He looked through the song book and after a few minutes, settled on a song. Patrick had taken off his shirt and was swinging it over his head, which was his big finale. Apparently, hoisting beer all day did a good job of developing one’s abdominal six pack; you could bounce a quarter off Patrick’s midsection. So far, we had the brother with the great teeth, the one with the great abs, and the one with a devotion to the almighty Lord. Quite a group. Jack wiggled a finger at me, beckoning me to come to the stage, which snapped me out of my fugue state. I finished my martini in one gulp and got up.

  Patrick was writhing on the stage to the hooting and hollering of the crowd, especially the women. When the song finished, he jumped up and threw his arms in the air in a gesture of triumph. “Woo!”

  Jack and I got on the stage. “What are we singing?” I asked. When I heard the opening notes of the song, my stomach dropped. A mic was thrust into my right hand while Jack grabbed my left.

  “Don’t go breaking my heart . . .” he sang.

  I stood in silence while the crowd called out the next line.

  Jack chimed in with his next line, looking expectantly at me.

  I responded, my voice weak. My knees were knocking together as I looked out at the crowd and saw all of the smiling faces. A few bars later, I started to relax a bit and when Jack turned to face me, I sang to him instead of the drunk guy at the bar who had captured my attention and who seemed to be mesmerized by my lackluster performance.

  We reached the chorus and the martini began to take effect.

  Jack grabbed me around the waist and began to slow dance with me while singing the words to the song, which he knew by heart. I consulted the screen every now and again but realized that I knew the words, too. I stared at his teeth, wondering who his orthodontist might have been. That guy deserved the dental equivalent of an Academy Award.

  Despite being completely into my performance, it was hard not to notice the two giant men who entered through the front door of the restaurant.

  Especially when one was as handsome as Crawford.

  Seven

  The next morning, I went to school with a heavy heart. I didn’t know what was worse: the look on Crawford’s handsome face, or Fred’s sad shake of his head as he saw me gyrating on the stage with a man who wasn’t Crawford. I didn’t know neanderthals were capable of judgment, but clearly, this was one upset caveman.

  I didn’t attempt any kind of explanation then or when I got home; I know screwed when I see it. I’m incapable of lying, but I’m not stupid.

  I’m just horribly misguided. Yes, that’s it.

  Crawford had taken one look at me and walked out. I myself had left the stage after the performance and, after punching Kevin a few hundred times, the restaurant. Jack had offered to go after Crawford, but I reminded him that he had a huge gun on his hip and another concealed weapon on his ankle and that he was prone to violent outbursts. He thought better of his suggestion, chivalry dying a quick death on the karaoke stage of the Garden Path.

  I entered the office area and said hello to Dottie Cruz, the office secretary and all-around busybody. I’ll admit it: I looked like hell in a handbasket, and this fact didn’t get by Dottie. She looked up at me, a vision in lavender and pink, eye shadow artfully applied to look like butterfly wings and buffeted by the longest false eyelashes I had ever seen.

  “Hi, honey,” she said, pushing her bagel aside to make room on the edge of her desk for my behind. She patted it with her hand, her nail tips making a tapping sound on the formica.

  She’s also insane. I wasn’t putting my behind on the edge of her desk or anywhere near her. I looked down at her and grimaced. “Good morning, Dottie.”

  “What’s the matter, sweetheart?” she asked. “You look down.”

  I’ve decided that I’m one of those people who, when not smiling broadly, always looks unhappy. The sides of my mouth just naturally turn down when I’m not smiling or lost in thought. If I had a nickel for every person who said “cheer up!” when I was just thinking about how to conjugate a French verb correctly, I’d be a rich lady. I plastered a big smile on my face. “Not down. Just thinking,” I said. I decided to make her earn her pay, something I did occasionally if only to amuse myself. “You don’t happen to remember when Flag Day falls this year, do you?”

  She looked perplexed. “I don’t,” she admitted. “But I can find out.” She turned to her computer.

  I took the opportunity to scamper away and got to my office just as she was calling out, “June 14!” I thanked her and closed the door. I put my hand on my phone, thinking about my next move.

  One good thing about having a boyfriend who’s a cop is that someone always answers the phone at his job. After one ring, I heard, “Montoya. Fiftieth Detective Squad.”

  I knew of Carmen Montoya but had never met her. According to Crawford, she was a wife, mother, and excellent detective. Based on his physical description—one I always demanded of his female colleagues—which was probably kinder than reality, she was cursed with an enormous behind. I knew he wasn’t an ass man, so I was cheered to learn that news. However, I wasn’t a wife, mother, or excellent detective, so I was instantly intimidated when I heard her voice, big ass or not. “Hi, Detective Montoya. This is Alison Bergeron. Is Bobby Crawford in?”

  She hesitated for a second longer than was necessary, in my opinion. “Uh, no he’s not, Alison. Can I take a message?”

  I thought for a second. “Yes. Tell him that I called and said ‘to take it up with Kevin.’ ”

  She read the message back to me. “That it?”

  “That’s it. Many thanks,” I said, hanging up before she could ask any more probing detective questions. I stared at the phone and jumped when it rang a few seconds after I had hung up. It was Max.

  “Guess where I’m going Wednesday night?”

  Ah, Wednesday night. The night we were supposed to meet for dinner. The night on which I would continue my deception and go out with Jack McManus, a conven
ient foil for my sleuthing. “Listen, Max, I have to talk to you about that. . . .”

  “Richie Kraecker’s cocktail party for Riviera Pointe!” she hollered. “And I have a ‘plus one’!”

  I had no idea what that meant but I was happy to hear that we would be in the same place on Wednesday night, even if my date would not be the person it should have been. “I’m going, too,” I said.

  “I know!” she said, excited. “You’re my ‘plus one’!”

  I took a deep breath. “I’m actually not.”

  Let the eating commence. She put a healthy portion of something in her mouth and then attempted to speak. “Huh?”

  I took another deep breath. “Without going into too much detail, let’s just say that Jack McManus invited me.”

  It was Max’s turn to take a deep breath but it sounded more like she was suffocating. “What?”

  I told her about karaoke night at the Garden Path, “Sexy-Back,” and “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart.” “The upshot is that Jack McManus knows Richie Kraecker and I need to meet him. Case closed.”

  She snorted. “Yeah, ‘case closed’ if you didn’t have a boyfriend.”

  “It’s business, Max. I’m trying to find out who killed Jose Tomasso and the only way I can do that is by getting inside Richie’s head and business and finding out why he’s got undocumented workers pouring his foundation.” It sounded reasonable, but even I knew it was pretty thin.

  “ ‘Pouring his foundation’? Does that sound dirty to you or is it just me?” When I didn’t answer, she continued, speaking slowly. “You are to get nowhere near those straight McManus teeth of his. Especially with your lips or tongue. Or any other naked body part for that matter.”

  I’m not that experienced in the bedroom, but even I got her drift.

  “You understand me?”

  “I’m not going to kiss him, Max. He understands what this is about. Actually, I think he’s kind of interested in helping me figure this out.” The digital clock on the phone ticked off to 9:45 and I pushed back from my desk. “I have class in fifteen minutes and I want to get ready.” I really didn’t want to talk about this anymore. I was prepared for class but I didn’t tell Max that. “I gotta go. I’ll see you on Wednesday?”

  “You will.”

  “And you won’t be weird?”

  “Oh, I’ll be weird,” she said. “You can count on that.”

  “About Jack. Don’t be weird about Jack.”

  “Oh, that. All right, I promise. No weirdness about Jack.” She hung up.

  I had a few minutes before class so I decided to do a little Web research on Richie Kraecker. When Max was dating him I didn’t understand what she saw in him. I recalled that she had broken up with some guy prior to that and was looking at Richie as her “rebound man.” Whatever. I only knew what I read about him and, from what I gathered, he was a guy who had coasted along on his father’s construction empire coattails. Which was fine. Except if he was dating my best friend. For her, I expected someone of a little higher caliber.

  I googled his name, and it all came rushing back to me. Of the couple hundred thousand hits that came from typing in Richie’s name, number one? A photo of Max sitting on Richie’s lap in a downtown club wearing the shortest, tightest leather dress I had ever seen. Suffice it to say it was the kind of dress that for me would require massive amounts of latex, never mind plastic surgery. But Max was ensconced on Richie’s lap, no latex in site, looking gorgeous, as the two of them sipped champagne. I had forgotten about the picture, although once I saw it, I remembered having seen it in one of Dottie’s gossip rags at the time. And feeling a weird combination of envy and shame. Just like a good Catholic girl should.

  I knew the people that Crawford worked with, and more than one of them would be delighted to leave that picture on Fred’s locker just to let him know that they knew what his wife had been up to prior to their marriage, even if he didn’t. And if Fred was anything like most men, that wouldn’t be such a good thing.

  I gathered up my books, put the sight of Max sitting on that cretin’s lap out of my brain, and took stock of my workday. It was Monday and I was teaching creative writing. I headed out of my office. Dottie looked up from her New York Post (tucked into the Webster’s New Abridged Dictionary) and said, “Big plans for Flag Day?”

  I stopped short. “Pardon?”

  She smiled. “Flag Day? June 14? Big plans, huh?”

  “Oh, that. Yes, it’s a huge holiday in Canada. I’ll probably celebrate it with my cousins,” I lied.

  She looked confused. “But don’t they have a different flag?”

  “Right,” I said, looking at my watch. I had two minutes to get to class, two floors above the floor I was on. “Canadians love all things American. Old Glory is huge up there,” I said. I smiled, throwing my arms out to illustrate just how much Canadians love the American flag. She was clearly dubious but she bought it, and that allowed me to get off the floor and up to my class.

  I got to the fifth floor and turned the corner toward my classroom, running smack into Kevin, who wasn’t where he was supposed to be at that hour. I had never seen him on a classroom floor during actual classes, which indicated to me that he was there for one reason: to find me. I gave him a hard stare. “There are no words to describe just how pissed I am with you,” I hissed. A couple of students were clustered outside the classroom door, and the last thing they needed to witness was a contretemps between their professor and the college chaplain. That would set tongues a-waggin’ for sure. Especially when just last year said college professor had endured a very public cuckolding at the hands of her late ex-husband. Some might conclude that a priest was just what the love doctor had ordered.

  He stared back at me, his eyes wide behind his Coke-bottle lenses. “Sorry?” he said, more of a question than a sincere apology.

  I grabbed his arm and pulled him into an alcove between two classrooms. “I don’t know what it is that you can’t understand about my situation with Crawford, but we are very happy and very much together.”

  “Which is why you’re going on a date to a black-tie affair with my brother on Wednesday night?” he asked, going all patronizing man of the cloth on me.

  I sputtered for a minute. “That’s about a case!” I protested.

  “A case?” he asked. “Last time I checked, you were an English professor, not an investigator.”

  I looked at my watch. In another five minutes, one intrepid creative writing student who had been conscientious enough to read the school catalog would discover that if I didn’t show up, the class was within its rights to leave the classroom and not be charged a cut for the day. I gave Kevin a sad head shake and started to move away from him.

  “I want in,” he said, just as I turned the corner.

  I stopped and turned back around. “What?”

  “I want in,” he repeated.

  “You want in on what?”

  “The case. I want in on the case.” He took in my shaking head and frown and continued. “I speak Spanish. Fluently. And my collar gets me in places and gets people talking faster than you can say ‘extreme unction.’ ”

  My books, housed in my messenger bag and hanging on my shoulder, were getting heavy. I had one minute to get to class before the students bailed. “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  That seemed to placate him and he drifted off, back to where he was supposed to be: upstairs in his office, next to the chapel.

  But as I jogged down the hall, my book bag jostling against my hip, I thought about his request and came to a conclusion.

  He could come in very handy indeed.

  Eight

  We were now approaching seventy-two hours since the karaoke incident and the last time I had seen or heard from Crawford. Even someone who lacks as much common sense as I do could conclude that that wasn’t a good sign. Tonight was my not-a-date with Jack “we’re just friends” McManus, and the only reason I was nervous was because I knew that if Crawford go
t wind of things, it would be the final nail in our relationship coffin.

  But part of me still believed that I was doing a good deed. Helping move things along in the investigation and finding out what had happened to Jose were my main motivations, and I was convinced that my altruism could only help, not hinder. I’m not stupid enough to think that the NYPD would agree with me and that there was no way that I could get in the way.

  I tried not to think about the not-a-date or the fact that I was poking my nose into a situation where it didn’t belong as I gussied myself up, throwing an Asian-inspired red raw-silk dress over my head and slipping my feet into matching sling-backs. I wasn’t dressing to impress; just trying to look halfway decent at an event that would boast the crème of New York society. In the Bronx. In the middle of the week. Heck, I would take what I could get.

  I had done a little research on Richie Kraecker. OK, maybe “research” is too strong a term. I actually called Max and picked her brain. I learned that Richie didn’t like onions, drank Veuve Cliquot by the case, and was “dynamite in the sack.” (I didn’t need to know any of that, really; none of it shed any light on the case.) I also learned that although he came off as a bit of a buffoon, he had gone to business school at Wharton, where he had specialized in finance. Not bad. But not great if you considered that one of the business buildings on campus was called Kraecker Hall. Max had dated him three years earlier. She had moved on and married; he was still single and dated what seemed like a different model every week. This week, according to Page Six in Dottie’s New York Post—which I surreptitiously read while she was ostensibly researching the origins and upcoming dates of Boxing Day for me—that model’s name was Morag Moragna.

  I’m not kidding.

  As I brushed some mascara onto my eyelashes, the phone rang; my hand slipped, and I stabbed myself in the iris. “Good god!” I screamed, cupping my palm over my eye, which was tearing ferociously. I picked my way across the room and with my good eye, saw Crawford’s cell phone number illuminated on my caller ID. Karma is a vengeful whore, I decided. I took a deep breath and put on my best casual voice. “Hello?”