Whose Number Is Up, Anyway?

MILLS & BOON

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I usually dedicate my books to the wonderful friends

who read my drafts, laugh in all the right places and

applaud when I ask them to, but lately I’ve had so many

wonderful e-mails from readers telling me how much they

are enjoying this series that I think this book should be

dedicated to them. It’s those e-mails that keep my bottom

glued to the chair and send my fingers flying over the

keyboard even when the sun is shining and there are sales

at the mall. Thanks for the praise, the encouragement,

the loyalty, and for taking the time to write and tell me

I’m doing something right!

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 1

Before redecorating a room, I always advise my clients to empty it of everything but one chair. Then I suggest they move that chair from place to place, sitting in it, until the placement feels right. Trust your instincts when deciding on furniture placement. Your room should “feel right.”

—TipsFromTeddi.com

Gut feelings. You know, that gnawing in the pit of your stomach that warns you that you are about to do the absolute stupidest thing you could do. Something that will ruin life as you know it.

I’ve got one now, standing at the butcher counter in King Kullen, the grocery store in the same strip mall as L.I. Lanes, the bowling alley cum billiard parlor I’m in the process of redecorating for its “Grand Opening.”

I realize being in the wrong supermarket probably doesn’t sound exactly dire to you, but you aren’t the one buying your father a brisket at a store your mother will somehow know isn’t Waldbaum’s.

But then, June Bayer isn’t your mother.

The woman behind the counter has agreed to go into the freezer to find a brisket for me since there aren’t any in the case. There are packages of pork tenderloins, piles of spareribs and rolls of sausage, but no briskets.

Warning number two, right? I should so be out of here.

But no, I’m still in the same spot when she comes back out, brisketless, her face ashen. She opens her mouth like she is going to scream, but only a gurgle comes out.

And then she pinballs out from behind the counter, knocking bottles of Peter Luger Steak Sauce to the floor on her way, hitting the tower of cans at the end of the prepared-foods aisle and sending them sprawling, making her way down the aisle, careening from side to side as she goes.

Finally, from the distance, I hear her shout. “He’s deeeeeeaaaad! Joey’s deeeeeaaaad.”

My first thought is, you should always trust your gut.

My second thought is that now my mother will know I was in King Kullen. For weeks I will have to hear “What did you expect?” as though whenever you go to King Kullen someone turns up dead. And if the detective investigating the case turns out to be Detective Drew Scoones…well, I’ll never hear the end of that from her, either.

Several people head for the butcher’s freezer and I position myself to block them. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from finding people dead—and this guy is not my first—it’s that the police get very testy when you mess with their murder scenes.

“You can’t go in there until the police get here,” I say, stationing myself at the end of the butcher’s counter and in front of the Employees Only door, acting like I’m some sort of authority. “You’ll contaminate the evidence if it turns out to be murder.”

Shouts and chaos. You’d think I’d know better than to throw the word murder around. Cell phones are flipping open and tongues are wagging.

I amend my statement quickly. “Which, of course, it probably isn’t. Murder, I mean. People die all the time and it’s not always in hospitals or their own beds, or…” I babble when I’m nervous and the idea of someone dead on the other side of the freezer door makes me very nervous.

So does the idea of seeing Drew Scoones again. Drew and I have this on-again, off-again sort of thing…that I kind of turned off.

Who knew he’d take it so personally when he tried to get serious and I responded by saying we could talk about us tomorrow—and then caught a plane to my parents condo in Boca the next day? In July. In the middle of a job.

For some crazy reason, he took that to mean that I was avoiding him and the subject of us.

That was three months ago. I haven’t seen him since.

The manager, who identifies himself and points to his name tag in case I don’t believe him, says he has to go into his cooler. “Maybe Joey’s not dead,” he says. “Maybe he can be saved, and you’re letting him die in there. Did you ever think of that?”

In fact, I hadn’t. But I had thought that the murderer might try to go back in to make sure his tracks were covered, so I say that I will go in and check.

Which means that the manager and I couple up and go in together while everyone pushes against the doorway to peer in, erasing any chance of finding clean prints on that Employee Only door.

I expect to find carcasses of dead animals hanging from hooks and maybe Joey hanging from one, too. I think it’s going to be very creepy and I steel myself, only to find a rather benign series of shelves with large slabs of meat laid out carefully on them, along with boxes and boxes marked simply “chicken.”

Nothing scary here, unless you count the body of a middle-aged man with graying hair sprawled faceup on the floor. His eyes are wide open and unblinking. His shirt is stiff. His pants are stiff. His body is stiff. And his expression, you should forgive the pun—is frozen. Bill-the-manager crosses himself and stands mute while I pronounce the guy dead in a sort of happy-now? tone.

“We should not be in here,” I say, and he nods his head emphatically and helps me push people out of the doorway just in time to hear the police sirens and see the cop cars pull up outside the big store windows.

Bobbie Lyons, my partner in Teddi Bayer Interior Designs (and also my neighbor, best friend and private fashion police), and Mark, our carpenter (and my dog-sitter, confidant and ego-booster), rush in from next door. They beat the cops by a half step and shout out my name. People point in my direction.

After all the publicity that followed the unfortunate incident during which I shot my ex-husband, Rio Gallo, and then the subsequent murder of my first client—which I solved, I might add—it seems like the whole world, or at least all of Long Island, knows who I am.

Mark asks if I’m all right. (Did I remember to mention that the man is drop-dead-gorgeous-but-a-decade-too-young-for-me-yet-too-old-for-my-daughter-thank-God?) I don’t get a chance to answer him because the police are quickly closing in on the store manager and me.

“The woman—” I begin telling the police. Then I have to pause for the manager to fill in her name, which he does: Fran.

I continue. “Right. Fran. Fran went into the freezer to get a brisket. A moment later she came out and screamed that Joey was dead. So, I’d say she was the one who discovered the body.”

“And you are…?” the cop asks me. It comes out a bit like who do I think I am, rather than who am I really?

“An innocent bystander,” Bobbie, hair perfect, makeup just right, says, carefully placing her body between the cop and me.

“And she was just leaving,” Mark adds. They each take one of my arms.

Fran comes into the inner circle surrounding the cops. In case it isn’t obvious from the hairnet and blood-stained white apron with “Fran” embroidered on it, I explain that she was the butcher who was going for the brisket. Mark and Bobbie take that as a signal that I’ve done my job and they can now get me out of here. They twist around, with me in the middle, like we’re a Rockettes line, until we are facing away from the butcher counter. They’ve managed to propel me a few steps toward the exit when disaster—in the form of a Mazda RX-7 pulling up at the loading curb—strikes.

Mark’s grip on my arm tightens like a vise. “Too late,” he says.

Bobbie’s expletive is unprintable. “Maybe there’s a back door,” she suggests, but Mark is right. It’s too late.

I’ve laid my eyes on Detective Scoones. And while my gut is trying to warn me that my heart shouldn’t go there, regions farther south are melting at just the sight of him.

“Walk,” Bobbie orders me.

And I try to. Really.

Walk, I tell myself. Just put one foot in front of the other.

I can do this because I know, in my heart of hearts, that if Drew Scoones were still interested in me, he’d have gotten in touch with me after I returned from Boca. And he didn’t.

Since he’s a detective, Drew doesn’t have to wear one of those dark blue Nassau County Police Department uniforms. Instead, he’s got on jeans, a tight-fitting T-shirt and a tweedy sports jacket. If you think that sounds good, you should see him. Chiseled features, cleft chin, brown hair that’s naturally a little sandy in the front, a smile that…well, that doesn’t matter. He isn’t smiling now.

He walks up to me, tucks his sunglasses into his breast pocket and looks me over from head to toe.

“Well, if it isn’t Miss Cut and Run,” he says. “Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere in Florida or something?” He looks at Mark accusingly, as if he were covering for me when he told Drew I was gone.

“Detective Scoones?” one of the uniforms says. “The stiff’s in the cooler and the woman who found him is over there.” He jerks his head in Fran’s direction.

Drew continues to stare at me.

You know how when you were young, your mother always told you to wear clean underwear in case you were in an accident? And how, a little farther on, she told you not to go out in hair rollers because you never knew who you might see—or who might see you? And how now your best friend says she wouldn’t be caught dead without makeup and suggests you shouldn’t either?

Okay, today, finally, in my overalls and Converse sneakers, I get it.

I brush my hair out of my eyes. “Well, I’m back,” I say. Like he hasn’t known my exact whereabouts. The man is a detective, for heaven’s sake. “Been back a while.”

Bobbie has watched the exchange and apparently decided she’s given Drew all the time he deserves. “And we’ve got work to do, so…” she says, grabbing my arm and giving Drew a little two-fingered wave goodbye.

As I back up a foot or two, the store manager sees his chance and places himself in front of Drew, trying to get his attention. Maybe what makes Drew such a good detective is his ability to focus.

Only what he’s focusing on is me.

“Phone broken? Carrier pigeon died?” he asks me, taking in Fran, the manager, the meat counter and that Employees Only door, all without taking his eyes off me.

Mark tries to break the spell. “We’ve got work to do there, you’ve got work to do here, Scoones,” Mark says to him, gesturing toward next door. “So it’s back to the alley for us.”

Drew’s lip twitches. “You working the alley now?” he says.

“If you’d like to follow me,” Bill-the-manager, clearly exasperated, says to Drew—who doesn’t respond. It’s as if waiting for my answer is all he has to do.

So, fine. “You knew I was back,” I say.

The man has known my whereabouts every hour of the day for as long as I’ve known him. And my mother’s not the only one who won’t buy that he “just happened” to answer this particular call. In fact, I’m willing to bet my children’s lunch money that he’s taken every call within ten miles of my home since the day I got back.

And now he’s gotten lucky.

“You could have called me,” I say.

“You’re the one who set tomorrow for our talk and then flew the coop, chickie,” he says. “I figured the ball was in your court.”

“Detective?” the uniform says. “There’s something you ought to see in here.”

Drew gives me a look that amounts to in or out?

He could be talking about the investigation, or about our relationship.

Bobbie tries to steer me away. Mark’s fists are balled. Drew waits me out, knowing I won’t be able to resist what might be a murder investigation.

Finally he turns and heads for the cooler.

And, like a puppy dog, I follow.

Bobbie grabs the back of my shirt and pulls me to a halt.

“I’m just going to show him something,” I say, yanking away.

“Yeah,” Bobbie says, pointedly looking at the buttons on my blouse. The two at breast level have popped. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

THE GUY IN THE FREEZER looks very familiar, but I can’t quite place him. I mean the dead one. The other guy I know so well that it’s hard not to just pick up where we left off.

If where we left off hadn’t been a precipice I wasn’t ready to fall from.

“You wanna tell me what happened?” Drew asks.

I tell him about how I should have gone to Waldbaum’s for the brisket, but that since I’m working next door…And here I segue into how the original decorator quit and I am finishing up her work and how I don’t get paid if I don’t get it done in time for their grand opening in just over a month—though they aren’t closed during the renovations so “Grand Opening” is really a misnomer—

He gives me the get-to-the-point look. It’s one of those benefits of knowing someone well: they don’t really have to use words.

“So I came here because it would save time. I thought I could pick up the meat first thing this morning, put it in the fridge at the alley and then take it home with me tonight. This month is all about saving time, because of the grand-opening thing—”

He knows I babble when I’m nervous, so he’s being patient. He only sighs rather than signaling me to hurry up.

“And there was no brisket in the case, so I asked the woman who was putting out the chicken breasts—the cutlet kind, sliced thin—if she had any in the back and she went to get some and, well—” I point at the guy on the floor.

Drew looks as though, when he asked what happened, he really meant it in the larger sense—the us sense.

I tell him that I’ve seen the guy before. He isn’t impressed. I tell him, no, really recently, only I can’t place him.

“Picture him upright,” Drew says. “Blinking. Maybe behind the meat counter?” he suggests sarcastically.

Gently two cops turn the body over. Across the back of the man’s shirt, through the ice that coats it, I see some bowling pins and a ball. Above the flying pins are the words The Spare Slices.

I gasp.

“Bad taste? Your mother wouldn’t approve?” Drew asks testily as he crouches over the body. Not surprisingly, there’s no love lost between Drew and my mother.

“Last night,” I say, remembering seeing the team at the bowling alley. They stood out because Max, the deli guy I know from Waldbaum’s, the one who always gives my youngest daughter, Alyssa, extra slices of Sweet Muenster while I order cold cuts, was one of them. “I saw him last night.”

“Really?” Drew asks, like this would be the sort of thing a person might make up. “When was that, exactly?”

“All night,” I say, then realize how that sounds. “All evening. Until about eleven-thirty.” I’m about to explain that I was working on the grand opening and this guy was bowling, but Drew doesn’t ask and I decide to let him make his own assumptions. I think, alive, Joey wasn’t bad-looking. A little old for me, but hey, I’m getting older every day myself.

“I’d like you to come down to the station,” he says, and I think he’s having too much fun busting my chops. I say something that sounds a lot like in your dreams—if you happen to be listening carefully.

Seems the two uniforms are. Their jaws drop.

Drew lets it roll off his back. He comes to his feet and takes my chin in his hand. “You, my dear, are a material witness. You may have been the last person to see your date alive.”

AFTER EXPLAINING that the man was not with me, but with an entire bowling league, I’m released. I’m back at the bowling alley when my cell phone, announcing a call from my mother, plays the theme from Looney Tunes.

“How do you do it?” I ask her while Mark gestures for me to show him how high I want the new dark green Formica-that-looks-like-granite paneling to go.

“I have spies,” she says matter-of-factly, as I place my hand about hip high on the wall. We’re going ultra modern for the billiards area, with brushed steel above faux-marble wainscoting. Wouldn’t have been my choice, but all the materials were already ordered when Percy Michaels decided she was too good to decorate bowling alleys and took a powder.

That’s when Teddi the scavenger Bayer, the hungriest (and some say most dangerous) decorator on Long Island, swooped in. I get a premium if I finish the job on time and nothing for my end of the work if I don’t. And as of today, nothing seems only too real.

“They’re everywhere, so don’t think you can get away with seeing that Detective Spoonbreath again. I didn’t lend you my condo for two weeks so that you could come home and pick up where you left off with him.”

“You didn’t, but I did,” my father says into the extension. “If that’s what she wants. Leave her be, for God’s sake, June.”

I love my father.

Not that I don’t love my mother—I just don’t like her very much.

My mother continues as if my father hasn’t said anything at all. “Mildred Waynick said you barricaded the freezer door and were in there alone with him for twenty minutes. And you weren’t cold when you came out.”

“Leave her be, June,” my father says without enthusiasm—probably because he knows, after all these years, that his words are falling on deaf ears.

“Did Mildred mention there was a dead body in there?” I ask, checking on angles to make sure that the light won’t reflect into a player’s eyes when he’s taking a pool shot. “Not what you’d call romantic, exactly.”

“It must have been very upsetting,” my father says. I hear him tsking. Or he could be cleaning between his teeth with a matchbook cover.

“Teddi’s used to it by now,” my mother snaps back. “And it gave her an excuse to see Detective Dreamboat.”

“My, my. He’s moving up in the world,” I say, putting my hand just under my breasts to show Mark how high the bar should be. He gestures for me to stand still while he measures. Yeah, fat chance. “What happened to Spoonbreath?”

“Nothing bad enough, it seems,” my mother counters.

I remind her that she’s caught me at work and tell her that I’ve got to go. Not that this stops her.

“Who were you on the phone with before I called?” she asks. “I got voice mail.”

I tell her it was a wrong number, which, although true, doesn’t satisfy her. So I admit it was Mel Gibson, out of rehab and looking for a nice Jewish girl.

She makes an ugly noise and moves on. “You joke, but my reputation gets dragged through the mud along with yours,” she says dramatically. “I have a daughter who decorates bowling alleys, shops in goyish food stores and lusts after cops. And she lies to me. Can you just tell me what it was I did to you that was so awful, so terrible, that you need to punish me like this?”

“I’m earning an honest living here, Mother. There’s no cross over King Kullen’s doors and I’m not lusting after anyone.” Okay, so that part’s a lie. “What did I do to deserve this?”

“Be that way, Teddi.” I hear her exhale her cigarette smoke. “Go ahead. I won’t even tell you about the lottery ticket I bought for you. The mega-millions one they drew last night.”

My heart stops. “What about it?” I ask her, having heard this morning on the radio that it wasn’t claimed yet. Though they also said the winning ticket—for thirty-seven million dollars—was purchased in Plainview and I know that there is no way my mother would shop in Plainview, just a stone’s throw (and a step down, according to her) from where I live in Syosset. Not even for a lottery ticket.

“You didn’t win,” she tells me while I look at the phone with utter amazement. “But you could have, so don’t blame me. At least I tried to fix your life. Imagine the man you could get if you’d won that lottery.”

I tell her to keep trying, and until she wins me either a fortune or a man, I better keep working. And that includes doing bowling alleys and any other places that will pay me.

“Will brothels be next, Teddi? Or funeral homes? Do you get some sort of perverse pleasure embarrassing me like this? Are you getting back at me?” my mother asks. “Is that it?”

She probably says a few other nasty things, but I don’t know, because I’ve already pressed End.

Bobbie opens her mouth to weigh in on Drew Scoones’s place in my life, but I tell her we have work to do. Between Bobbie’s I-don’t-smoke-anymore-but-I-still-deserve-a-break breaks, her shopping, her trips to her husband, Mike’s, chiropractic office in the middle of the day to find this patient’s file or that one’s X-rays, it’s no wonder she occasionally forgets we’re actually working.

She was not the one who was here until nearly midnight last night, measuring and leaving notes for Mark so that he could get the Formica cut at the lumber yard and ready to install before L.I. Lanes opened today. She didn’t have to fend off two drunk guys who didn’t understand any part of no even after the jukebox played Lorrie Morgan’s song twice.

She wasn’t the one who locked up the place and had to walk to her car alone in the dark, her heels clicking on the asphalt so loudly in her ears that it nearly drowned out the sound of the men arguing in front of the bagel shop.

I close my eyes and try to picture them because, if my mind isn’t playing tricks on me, they were The Spare Slices and they were pretty angry.

“You okay?” Mark asks, taking my elbow. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

“I may have,” I say, trying to remember what they were arguing about.

Whatever it was, Drew needs to know.

“I’ve got to call him,” I say, and neither Mark nor Bobbie needs to ask who.

“What a surprise,” Bobbie says, rolling her eyes and holding out her hand, palm up, to Mark.

“Thanks,” Mark tells me sarcastically, taking out a five and putting it in Bobbie’s hand as I dial Drew’s number from memory.

“I just remembered something,” I say when he answers the phone.

“What’s that?” Drew asks.

“Okay, we need to talk…”

There’s a beat before he answers me. “Sure,” he says. “Tomorrow.”

CHAPTER 2

Anyone who has ever repainted a wall or replaced a carpet or even gotten a new set of kitchen pots knows one thing just leads inexorably to another. The bright walls make the ceiling look dull. The new light to make the ceiling brighter reveals the wear spots in the carpet. The carpet installation wrecks the molding. As long as the base molding is being replaced…

—TipsFromTeddi.com

I may not love decorating a bowling alley, but I have to admit there are certain perks to it. Like that the owner has agreed to let my kids and their friends bowl free whenever I’m on the job. This makes my eleven-year-old son, Jesse, very happy. It ought to make all the moms in the neighborhood happy, too, since I’m making sure the place is really kid-friendly so they’ll all have a viable alternative to the usual weekend mall-ratting.

L.I. Lanes isn’t just a cheaper way for the kids to spend a Saturday afternoon, it’s also only a good, hearty walk from our house. Not that Dana, my thirteen-going-on-thirty daughter will admit it’s walkable. She’s the original princess, requiring chauffeuring everywhere. If she’d been born a century or two ago in China, she’d be demanding her feet be bound so that no one could expect her to go as far as the refrigerator to get her own ice cream.

Anyway, my kids have found that if they stay on the school bus past our stop, they get dropped only a few blocks from the bowling alley and Carvel. And in they walk now, separately so that, God forbid!, no one thinks they came in together.

“Is it true?” Dana asks me. She’s connected to my mother by more than simple DNA. They’ve both read the elusive Secret Handbook of Long Island—the one everyone tries to tell me doesn’t exist—and I’m sure their spy networks overlap.

I feign ignorance. “Is what true?” Of course, I know what she knows. I just don’t know how she could already know it.

“You found another dead guy and the cops want to question you.”

Note there is no question mark at the end of that sentence.

“It is getting to be a habit,” Jesse adds as he checks out where the new pool tables are slated to be, making fake shots with an imaginary pool cue and checking behind him to see if I’ve left enough room.

I have my doubts myself, but I’m pretty sure I can get in the four tables I’m planning. And I’ve finally found someone who can get them for me within my rapidly shrinking time frame.

Anyway, I assure my children that while a man was found dead, it in no way means—

And then a cop walks in the door. We watch him stop at the desk and talk to Steve, the owner of L.I. Lanes. Steve points me out and, with a nod, the cop heads in my direction.

“Detective Scoones wants you down at the precinct tomorrow at nine a.m.,” he says, handing me one of Drew’s cards.

“Sure,” I say, trying to be offhanded about it as I shove the card in the back pocket of my jeans.

“Guess it’s not just in his dreams,” he says. He snickers and heads for the door.

“This is so embarrassing,” Dana announces loudly, in case anyone has missed the entire episode, which, judging from the stares, no one has. “Why do I have to have a mother who is a murder magnet?” She storms out the back door to the alley, headed, I suppose, for someplace where she can actually spend money.

Not too long after I’ve embarrassed my children, my mother calls, because life was just a bowl of cherries until now. It’s like that foul they’re always calling in football—piling on.

“I forgot to tell you that I got you a new job,” she says when I answer my cell. I remind her that I have a job and that I’m actually doing it at the moment.

“That?” she asks. “The bowling alley? That’s not a job, it’s penance. This is a real job. And I’m still in shock, so listen carefully. You remember Rita and Jerry Kroll from around the corner?”

How could I forget the Krolls? They had a son, Robert, who, despite being at least a decade older than we were, used to ride around the neighborhood on his bicycle every day, all day, in any kind of weather, speeding up behind little kids and honking his horn, scaring the wits out of us. He was Cedarhurst’s answer to To Kill a Mockingbird. Our very own Boo Radley. And it wasn’t until we’d grown up that we learned he wasn’t scary at all, just mentally disabled. Robby, as his parents called him, was simply never going to grow up.

“They bought a house in Woodbury last month and she wants you to decorate it. Can you believe this? What can she be thinking?”

“Excuse me, but I’m a good decorator, Mom,” I remind her. “Of course people are going to want to hire me.” That is, if my mother doesn’t convince them otherwise.

“Sure, sure,” my mother says dismissively. It comes out like we can discuss the possibility that I might have talent some other time. “But moving from the South Shore to Woodbury? From Cedarhurst yet? I mean, leaving Mel the butcher? Dominick at Tresses? The World’s Best dry cleaners. For Woodbury?”

I assure her that we actually have overpriced hairdressers and butchers and dry cleaners on the North Shore, too. Especially in Woodbury, which borders Syosset on “the good side”—which is to say the side that isn’t Plainview or Hicksville. Up, up, up the social ladder you go as you get closer to the Long Island Sound.

My mother reminds me that you get what you pay for.

“Which is why you have to double your prices for Rita. She’s used to being overcharged. It’s how she knows what something’s worth.”

Sometimes I believe that Cedarhurst is just north of Bizarro Land and just south of Topsy Turvy.

“I made an appointment for you last week. Maybe it was the week before. Anyway, it’s a good thing I remembered because it’s for nine o’clock tomorrow morning.” She recites the address and starts giving me directions as if I have a pen and paper at the ready.

I tell her I can’t make it at nine and she somehow worms out of me the fact that I am wanted down at the police station.

“He called you?” she asks. “That’s why I got voice mail? For Spoonbreath?”

“No, that was the pool table salesman,” I say, accepting the fact that she all but monitors my phone and always knows when I’ve gotten a call. “A policeman dropped by the bowling alley to tell me I’m wanted at the precinct in the morning.”

“Of course he wants you,” my mother says. “Tell him too bad. Tell him you’ve got a job to do. Tell him to sniff at someone else’s skirts…”

I, OF COURSE, tell him none of those things.

Sitting across the desk from him at the station the next morning, I tell him that I saw Joey arguing with several other men outside the bowling alley the night before he died. And they all had The Spare Slices shirts on.

“You hear what they were arguing about?” he asks me. He’s all business, but I notice his leg is going up and down a mile a minute, which he only does when he’s nervous.

I shake my head. “Was it murder?” I ask.

“Doesn’t really look like it,” he says. “But there are a few loose ends I want to tie up.”

He waits for me to respond. And he waits. The air in the room gets stuffy. Finally I say, “Okay, fine. Because I was scared.”

“Was that an answer to an old question or to one I didn’t ask yet?” he asks me.

I nod.

“Come on, Teddi,” he says. He’s almost whining. “Help me out here, okay? Just a clue what we’re talking about.”

“I ran because I was alone, which is scary,” I say.

“Is that you-leave-me-before-I-leave-you?” Drew asks.

I take a moment to figure out where that came from. He means running to Boca. I meant running to my car. I explain that because I was running, I couldn’t hear what the men were shouting about.

“Right,” he says.

Leave him before he left me? Is that what he thinks? Is that what he was going to do? “Were you going to leave me?” I ask.

He has the file open on his desk. A picture of Joey—frozen—is on top and he fingers it and pulls out a report sheet from behind it. “Where?” he says.

I figure we’re back to the investigation, so I say, “In front of the bagel place—you know, between L.I. Lanes and King Kullen. The one with the mini-everything bagels. Not too many places do the everythings in mini-size.”

He grimaces. “Leave you where?” he asks.

Is your head spinning yet? Because mine is. And while it’s been three months, I’m still not ready to talk about us. “What did he die of?” I ask instead of answering him.

“Heart attack,” he says. “Guy had a history of heart disease. He was living on borrowed time.”

I pick Dana’s old purse up off the floor and throw the strap over my shoulder. Bobbie would kill me if she saw the depths to which I’ve sunk, but Alyssa, my seven-year-old, painted my purse with magic marker. A new purse is not exactly in the budget at the moment, not even one from T.J.Maxx, which would pain Bobbie almost as much as Dana’s old one, I think. Nowadays you need to take out a second mortgage to buy a nice handbag. I can’t imagine what you’re left with to put inside it. You certainly don’t need a wallet cause there’d be nothing to keep in it.

“So that’s it then,” I say, coming to my feet.

“Looks like,” he says. “Only…”

He’s baiting me, but I refuse to get hooked. Still, asking “Only what?” doesn’t seem like much of a risk.

“Only the guy works in the deli, not the meat department. It’s after hours and he’s just had an argument with his buddies.”

“So why was he in the freezer?” I ask.

“And why was his shirt frozen?” he adds.

“He was locked in?” I ask. “Like you see in old movies?”

Drew shakes his head at me and smiles like it amuses him that I’m once again relating the world to some movie I’ve seen. “They don’t use that kind anymore. There are always latches on the inside to prevent accidental lock-ins.”

“And so he goes into the freezer, maybe to steal some filets, and the door closes behind him—” I start.

“One, they call it a cooler. The freezer’s where they keep the real frozen stuff—ice cream and the like. And two, there’s no reason he can’t just let himself out.”

“But he doesn’t.” I sit back down. “He has a sudden pain in his chest.” I clutch my chest. “He knows it’s the big one. He gropes for the door in the dark—” I flail my arms with my eyes closed.

“Light goes on automatically when you open the door.”

I open my eyes and remind him that the door is closed behind him.

“Stays on for thirty minutes,” Drew says. “And there’s an emergency button to push.”

“His shirt was wet?” I ask. “From sweat?”

Drew shakes his head. “Coroner says tap water.”

“And you say?” I ask.

Drew looks at the file. He leafs through a paper or two, studies the photograph of Joey. “Suspicious,” he says.

He doesn’t have to ask what I’d say.

Murder.

CHAPTER 3

Just like you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can’t judge a house by its appearance from the street. But you can provide a hint of what’s to be found inside so that the result doesn’t jar the senses. A Chinese umbrella stand on the porch, an arts and crafts mailbox, Victorian cornices—these all signal your style.

—TipsFromTeddi.com

I am not investigating anything, I tell myself. I am merely picking up some deli at Waldbaum’s for the kids’ lunches. Or just in case my father should happen to drop by. I mean, really, how can you not have some corned beef around, just in case?

“And maybe some potato salad,” I tell Max, who seems a bit more flushed than usual.

He hands me one of those white deli bags with some chocolate-covered raspberry Jell Rings for Alyssa. “No charge,” he says with a wink.

I thank him and remark how funny it was to see him a few nights ago. He doesn’t seem to think there was anything odd about it.

“I’m really sorry about your friend,” I say, lowering my voice as though at work he isn’t allowed to have friends.

“Joey?” he asks, surprised that I know. “Damn shame. Just when things were looking up.”

“Looking up?” I ask. Someone nudges my arm while reaching for the Turn-O-Matic machine.

“We’re not taking numbers,” someone else informs her, which I take to mean that she was here first and didn’t take one.

“Could have been looking up,” he hedges. “Who knows?”

Why is he backtracking? I can’t help but wonder. Only it doesn’t seem like a line I can pursue, so I go back to how odd it was to see him at the alley. With the dead guy.

“I mean seeing you there out of context,” I say. “At first I didn’t even recognize you.”

“You think this is my whole life?” he asks, fanning his hands out to encompass his domain. The counters are full of twenty kinds of turkey, every manner of pastrami, salami, bologna and corned beef. There’s herring salad, white-fish salad, crab salad…He slaps his hand on the top of the counter. “God, no. I got a life outside of here.”

“I know,” I say with a big smile, like bowling once a week is a whole life—and don’t I know it? “I saw last night.”

He shakes his head.

“I got a lot more in mind than bowling once a week with those losers,” he says. “A new car, a boat. Maybe even a house on some island. Hawaii, maybe. You think the houses are cheaper in Hawaii or Florida?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him, putting a bag of onion rolls in my cart so that the women around me know I’m shopping and not just shooting the breeze. “But I do know you can live pretty cheaply in the Bahamas. I’ve got a brother who’s lived down there ever since college.” I don’t go into how the trip was a graduation present from my parents and David simply decided not to come back, even though my father’s store, Bayer Furniture (the home of headache-free buying and hassle-free finance), was waiting for him.

Max asks if maybe I could give him David’s name and he might get in touch one day.

Okay, by now, people around me are getting testy. I tell Max just a half pound of the potato salad and maybe a pound of coleslaw. He nods, but he doesn’t make a move to fill my order.

“He like it in the Bahamas? Your brother?” he asks me.

I nod and smile and gesture toward the potato salad without trying to appear rude. There are sounds of disgruntlement growing behind me.

Bernie, another counter guy, comes over from the cheese portion of the counter and clicks the Turn-O-Matic, calls out the number after mine, and helps the woman beside me.

“Finally,” someone says.

“He have a Web site?” Max asks.

I picture my brother in cutoffs, no shoes, chasing after a naked little boy named Cody while Izzy, his pregnant wife, laughs at him. “I don’t think so.”

“E-mail?” Max asks. “I got a new computer last week. First one. Gotta keep up, you know?”

“I do.” I look at my watch and gesture toward the wrapped package of corned beef that is still on his side of the glass. “You know what? I think I’ll just take the corned beef,” I say.

“No, no. I’ll get your salads.” He waves his hand like filling my order isn’t important, like it’s not why he’s here, never mind why I’m here. “So are you working over there? At the alley, I mean?”

I explain how I’ve taken over the job of decorating the place while a woman pushes me out of the way on the pretense of reaching for a package of rugelach.

“Remind me nevah to go thayh,” the woman behind me says in a loud gravelly voice thick with Long Island.

I tell Max that I’m in kind of a rush and that maybe I’ll see him next week at the bowling alley.

“Isn’t it next week already?” the same woman asks in an even louder voice.

“You don’t like my service?” Max asks her. He squints his eyes at her like he could burn her with them. “Go to King Kullen.”

I want to warn her that King Kullen’s a bad idea, but she’s off looking for a manager.

“I won’t miss her,” Max says, handing me my corned beef, my potato salad, my coleslaw and a loose piece of halvah. “You, I’m gonna miss.”

“When you buy your island?” I ask, happy to feed the fantasy now that I’m backing away from the counter.

“Exactly,” he says as he listens to someone else’s order and nods. “A pound of pastrami. Got it. You want it should be lean? Sliced thin?”

“MO-OM!” Dana whines in response to my innocently mentioning at dinner in Pastaeria (the local pizza joint no one is sure how to pronounce), that Max was acting strangely and that I think I should tell Drew about his pie-in-the-sky plans. “You don’t know what kind of money he has stashed away. He could be a millionaire. He could be Donald Trump’s long-lost father and—”

I remind her that Max is around my age, which makes him way too young to be The Donald’s father. Dana seems skeptical, like maybe I don’t know just how old I really am. Remember when everyone who’d graduated from high school more than two years before you did was old? That’s what my kids think.

They may be right.

Jesse thinks it’s a great idea and I should pull out my cell phone and call Drew immediately. This, of course, has nothing to do with his fondness for Drew and his fervent wish that I marry the handsome detective.

Dana, picking all the cheese off her pizza and giving me a look which implies I should be doing the same, tells Jesse that he—and I—are just using Max as an excuse to call Drew. But, unlike her usual carping tone that implies I’m leading Drew on and ruining her life, she sounds like she’s actually teasing me. Could she be growing up? Adjusting to the fact that her father and I will not get back together in this lifetime?

“If it was murder, then maybe you and he would, you know, get together again,” she says. “At least, you hope.”

Unfortunately, she may have me dead to rights.

In the meantime, little Alyssa ate so many garlic knots before the pizza showed up that she can’t even pretend to eat her slice. That doesn’t mean she isn’t interested in dessert and she asks whether Max sent her anything.

I avoid answering because then I’d have to admit that on my way home I ate the Jell Rings meant for her.

I’ve got to go back to work if I’ve any hope of getting done before the grand opening, so I beg them to pass on dessert, remind everyone there is ice cream in the freezer, prevail and head for home. I arrive in my driveway at the same time my father pulls up at the curb. He’s there to watch the Mets game with Jesse, who doesn’t have the heart to tell him that he’s gone over to the dark side. He’s now a Yankees fan.

“Once a week I can root for the Mets for Grandpa,” he tells me, reminding me why it is I still like the kid. “Sometimes you have to bend the truth a little for someone you love.”

It’s taken me years to learn what he already knows at eleven.

I kiss the kids and Dad goodbye and I’m back at the alley, knee-deep in lighting wires when Drew and his partner, Hal Nelson, saunter in.

Saying that Hal and I don’t care for each other is like saying there may be a little traffic on the Long Island Expressway at rush hour. I don’t know what I ever did to him—except maybe show up the police department once or twice.

And I didn’t really do that, even.

Newsday just made it sound that way.

There are only about a half-dozen patrons left in the place, only a couple still bowling. The others are taking off their shoes, packing up their bags, reliving a frame or two and sharing a joke. I see Drew take note of each and every one as he makes his way over to where I’m waiting for the glue to cure on a section of wall.

“You wanted to tell me something?” Drew asks. I stare at him blankly for a minute, unable to believe he’d bring Hal with him to talk about us. I guess he sees my confusion, because he offers a hint. “About the guy in the cooler? You called the precinct?”

“Oh, right,” I say, looking like the dolt Hal has me pegged for. Maybe I can blame it on the glue fumes. “I just wanted to tell you about a conversation I had with Max. He’s one of The Spare Slices—”

“Oh hell,” Hal says, blowing a balloon of air out toward his thinning hairline and addressing Drew. “She’s not suggesting this was a murder or that we need her help, is she? That’s not why we came all the way over here, is it, Scoones?”

It’s his way of daring me to say I think I’m smarter than the police. I tell him that first of all, he can talk to me directly. He doesn’t have to do it through Drew, who’s leaning back against the wall looking thoroughly amused.

In fact, he appears so amused that I decide not to tell him about the adhesive for the brushed steel sheets.

The police don’t screw up investigations, Hal tells me, snicker, snicker, snicker. “At least, I don’t.”

I’m hoping he leans up against the same wall Drew is going to find himself stuck to.

“Not that I’m implying Detective Scoones over here screws up, either,” he says, gesturing at Drew with his thumb and adding a few more gratuitous snickers. “He just screws. Right, honey?” He looks at me to drive the point home. When Drew says nothing, any guilt I was harboring about his ruined jacket dissolves.

So, fine. I get to the point. “One of the other Spare Slices is talking about buying an island,” I say. “Could be wishful thinking, could be a pipe dream. On the other hand, it could mean something.”

“An island?” Hal says. Actually, he sneers. Hal always sneers. In my presence, anyway. Drew maintains he’s really a nice guy. I’ve seen no evidence. Not that the police seem to rely on little things like evidence all that much, in my experience. “What was he smoking at the time?”

“Salmon,” I say.

Drew licks his pointer finger and draws an imaginary one in my air column.

“Been determined to be an accident,” Hal says, and he leans right up against the wall beside Drew. “Familiar territory for you.”

I run the scenario, perhaps a tad contemptuously. “So he goes into the cooler, for whatever reason, and he brings in a pitcher of water, because, hey, he might get thirsty in there, right? And he pours it all over himself because—I don’t know—he was warm? No accounting for someone’s body temperature, I suppose. And then he feels the pain of a heart attack in his chest, but he doesn’t reach for the emergency button or anything and—”

“Light was out,” Hal says. “Burned out bulb, probably.”

“And you’re not investigating any further?” I ask.

“Oh, we’re investigating,” he says, his face contorted with an even more intense sneer than usual. “You’re not. It was an accident, we’ll tie up a couple of loose ends and that will be that. Got it?”

He goes to look at his watch, only he has trouble raising his hand. He tries to jerk it away from the wall, but it’s not going anywhere. “What the—?” he says, trying to pull away from the wall.

Drew pushes himself off the wall easily. Behind him are two squares of brushed steel which I pretend I knew were there all along.

“You wanna get some coffee?” he asks me, ignoring Hal, who is fighting with his jacket and cursing a blue streak, causing every head left in the place to look our way. Drew ignores the stares. “Maybe a little something to eat?”

I tell him I’ve got to stay. Otherwise, someone might accidentally touch the wall—though the fact that Hal’s jacket is now hanging there and he’s swearing down the house and turning red in the face would probably provide a strong enough deterrent. Besides, it seems pretty clear that in a minute or two there will be no one left around.

“Right,” he says, only it sounds more like he gets my unintended message and he won’t ask twice.

“I’ll be out of here in about an hour,” I say. It might actually take a little longer now that I’ve got to scrape off Hal’s jacket and reapply the adhesive. “Maybe we could—”

“Fuck!” Hal says, ripping most of his jacket from the wall, leaving a good portion of the back panel there.

Drew says something to the effect that that wasn’t exactly what he had in mind, but hey, if I’m game…

It gives me pause, because Drew and I have made love a number of times. We’ve fooled around, we’ve brought each other satisfaction, we’ve even screwed, but we have never done the F word. Not as far as I’m concerned, because for me, if the F word has any emotion attached to it, it’s anger.

And I’ve been there and done that and banished the anger from my bed and my heart and it’s not coming back.

Not ever.

“You!” Hal shouts at me, pointing his finger and being struck dumb for words.

“It’s going to turn out to be a murder,” I tell him.

He sputters something about murder all right—he’d be happy to kill me on the spot.

And I’m thinking that I’d so love to prove it was murder and shove a warrant right up his…uniform.

CHAPTER 4

Accommodating everyone’s needs can be a challenge in the family room. Essentials include a good reading light beside a comfortable chair; a stain-resistant couch facing the TV with a coffee table in front of it for the sports fan and the kids; music for the rare moment the TV is not on; carpeting or a rug to absorb the noise; and a healthy dose of good cheer. A large bottle of Prozac is not a bad idea, as well.

—TipsFromTeddi.com

I spend all day working with Bobbie on the walls in the “billiard parlor” at L.I. Lanes. And I totally get why Percy Michaels, who originally had this job, gets the big bucks. This place is coming out unbelievably gorgeous. I bet even the high-roller executive types from Woodbury would come down here for a few racks and a cup of cappuccino.

Did I mention I convinced Steve to put in an espresso bar? He’s so sure I won’t get finished in time that he’s spending my forfeited fee in advance.

At any rate, I posted new TipsFromTeddi on my Web site and the kids and I have had dinner at home—Dana is on her vegetarian kick again, so she had cheese quesadillas with no cheese and Jesse had a hot dog and I had some leftover chicken. Alyssa picked at some French toast. Just a typical dinner at the Bayers, all of us sitting down to a nice meal together—except for Dana who was in her bedroom doing a chat with the school drama club. And Alyssa who wanted to see the end of SpongeBob. Oh, and Jesse, who was reading the new Harry Potter.

So Maggie May, the bichon frise I stole from my first client after she was murdered, kept me company while I ate.

Now I could take the night off, but it’s clear the kids don’t need me, don’t want me, wouldn’t miss me if I were gone. If I pay Dana her usual babysitting fee—five downloads from iTunes—I can go back to the bowling alley and get a jump on tomorrow’s work.

I’m not even sure they’ll notice I’m gone.

And it is league night at the Lanes, so I yell to the children that I’m off to work and out I go, hoping to run into The Spare Slices again.

Which I do.

I find them huddled together just outside the door as I am walking in, and I go up to them to offer my condolences.

You know how in old movies there’ll be a bunch of guys shooting craps and when the police show up they all jump about six feet? Well, I come up to the group and that’s just what they do.

Maybe it’s the money that several of them are holding that brings that image to mind. They stare at me until Max introduces me as a customer from the store who’s redecorating the alley.

Then they look at me expectantly, waiting for me to go on into L.I. Lanes, and frankly, there really is nothing stopping me.

“I just wanted to say how sorry I was to hear about your friend,” I say, flashing them all a tentative smile and not mentioning how I was there when they found Joey.

They mumble a bit and act contrite, making noises about how bad they feel about bowling just a week after their teammate was found dead.

“He’d have wanted you to carry on the game,” I say, like they are being brave despite their heartbreak, and a couple of them nod. One, Milt according to the embroidery on his shirt pocket, says that he told them all they shouldn’t play.

“Outta respect for the dead,” he says.

“Is that what you’re doing?” I ask, gesturing toward the money in his teammate’s hand. “Collecting for flowers or something, because I’d like to—”

“We should do that,” Dave says.

Note to myself—never let my kids wear their names on anything. It’s too easy to pretend familiarity.

“Well, Dave,” I start to say, but Max jumps in before I can finish.

“We’re gonna,” Max says like he’s reminding Dave, who I take it might be a little dim-witted. “If we win, we’re gonna use Joey’s share for a big headstone or something, remember?”

“No, we gotta give his share to his kids,” Dave says. “If he’s got some, I mean.” He looks confused, but on him it looks like a familiar state.

“Win?” I ask.

“The lottery,” Max explains, while Milt says, “Ya gotta be in it to win it,” in a sing-songy voice. “We’ve been going in on twenty tickets every week for years. We never win, but we figure we’re due. Right, guys?”

They all agree and I do, too, saying that you always hear about winners who’ve been playing as a group for years. There were those workers who changed the lightbulbs in Rockefeller Center, I think…

“And this week ain’t any different than any other,” Milt says.

“Except for Joey’s being dead,” Dave adds. “Maybe he could bring us luck.” He shrugs like hey, you never know.

Russ—I know from his shirt pocket—scoffs. “Yeah, Joey was real lucky, wasn’t he?” He sighs a heavy sigh and adds, “Poor dumb jerk.”

WHEN I GET HOME, Drew’s car is in the circular driveway in front of my split-level and every light in the house is on. I rush up the front steps and Dana lets me in. Maggie does her best to tell me what’s happened, circling my legs and woofing.

At least someone is trying to tell me.

“I told him to call Daddy,” Dana says over her shoulder as she heads down the freshly wallpapered hallway toward my beautiful salmon-colored kitchen which looks alternately like an early sunrise or a deep sunset depending on where the real sun is at the moment. Of course, there is no sun now. “But no, your son had to call Drew.” She says his name like it’s covered in bird droppings.

“Call for what?” I ask, hurrying into the living room where I find Drew and Jesse playing cards and Alyssa in her pajamas all but asleep in Drew’s lap. My living room is a beautiful deep hunter-green. Drew looks like he belongs there. And he looks good with my little girl in his lap, too. Damn good.

“Turned out to be nothing,” Jesse says, while Drew points at Alyssa and smiles apologetically to indicate that if he moves Alyssa will wake up. She’s got her thumb in her mouth and her face is tear-stained.

“What turned out to be nothing?” I ask while Jesse picks a card from the deck like I’m not even there.

“Your idiot son thought someone was shooting at us,” Dana says. She’s got her arms crossed over her chest, where I know her sleep shirt says Bite Me.

“Shooting—” I start to say, but Drew interrupts me.

“Everything is fine,” he says in a voice that insists don’t lose it now, while he casts a warning glance at Dana. “Jesse had the presence of mind to call me, I happened to be in the neighborhood. There were no gunshots.”

“And no one called me because…?” I ask.

“Because I thought someone was shooting at us. When there are gunshots, you call the police,” Jesse says.

Alyssa stirs in Drew’s arms and I take her and head for the stairway, carrying her up to bed while Dana reminds Jesse he didn’t call the police. He called Drew.

“I thought you were never coming home,” Lys says against my neck.

I want to tell her that she could have called me. That my cell phone is on the kitchen phone’s automatic dial, which she certainly knows how to use—heck, she does it often enough—but I figure we can have that talk tomorrow. This is just the animated feature and I’ve got the best-picture-of-the-year award waiting downstairs. So I just kiss her forehead, slip her under the covers and go back to the living room.

“From the beginning,” I order Jesse. He discards a seven of clubs before I take his cards away. “Now.”

“I heard a series of cracks,” Jesse says. Dana says she heard nothing and he’s crazy.

“Well, not entirely crazy,” Drew says, and I feel my heart skip a beat—and not the romantic, he-walks-in-the-room-and-you-see-him-for-the-first-time kind of beat-skipping. More like the-masked-men-arrive-at-your-door-and-it’s not-Halloween kind of beat-skipping.

Two years ago my ex-husband, Rio, tried to drive me crazy—literally. He moved things, made me think I’d done things I hadn’t and hadn’t done things I had. And all because he wanted to start his own business and I wouldn’t let him put up the house as collateral.

At any rate, he didn’t quite succeed. But I’m well acquainted with mind games and what I call the Chinese insanity torture, and tonight I realize that if Rio had had the help of the three people lounging in my living room, I’d be a permanent resident of my mother’s home-away-from-home, the South Winds Psychiatric Center.

“Tell me what happened,” I order from between gritted teeth.

“I’m trying to,” Jesse says. “So I heard a noise and then the window in Dana’s room broke.”

Before I can say, “It what?” Dana corrects him and says it’s just a little cracked.

“And there’s a little hole in it,” Jesse says. He leaves off the so there, but we all hear it just the same. “So I thought it was a bullet hole and I called Drew.”

“And not me,” I say, just making sure I’m clear on this.

“I told him to call Daddy,” Dana says again. “But no, he had to make a federal case out of it.”

“And nobody, not you, not your brother and not you,” I say, looking pointedly at Drew, “thought you should call me.”

“We knew you’d have to come home eventually,” Drew says. Maggie jumps up on the couch she’s forbidden to sit on, makes two circles and then snuggles down next to Drew. “And I think I’m better equipped to handle this sort of thing, don’t you?”

I ignore the dig. “What broke the window?” I ask, snapping my fingers for Maggie to get down. She ignores me and closes her eyes.

“It was a tiny pebble,” Dana says. I could swear she’s almost proud of it. “Probably got kicked up by a car, you know, like when our windshield got broken? He found it by my bed.”

It’s a long way from the street to her window on the second floor, not to mention that her bedroom is on the side of the house.

Drew says that it could have happened the way Dana surmises.

“Right,” I say—like on the other hand it could have been a small asteroid from the planet Moron. “So really, someone threw a rock at Dana’s window.”

“That’s possible, too,” he says, hiding a smile.

I ask him if he thinks we should sleep at my mother’s, thinking that my children’s safety has to come before my own desires, which include never, ever, throwing myself on my mother’s mercy. But he tells me he doesn’t think it’s necessary.

As a precaution, he offers to hang around for a while.

The idea doesn’t sound half bad to me, so I try sending the kids to bed. After the protests that it’s too early, that they are too shaken to sleep (this from Jesse, the card shark), that Dana shouldn’t have to go to bed as early as Jesse since she’s older, and blah, blah, blah, they finally go upstairs.

Making coffee in the kitchen, I ask Drew what he thinks really happened.

“Best guess? Someone with the hots for your daughter was trying to get her attention. Wouldn’t hurt for her to pull down her shades when she’s undressing, Ted.”

I feel my cheeks go red. After watching me do a striptease through the window of a cottage I was doing in the Hamptons over the summer, is he thinking like mother, like daughter?

“And I think that Jesse saw it as the perfect excuse to get me over here,” he adds, rubbing my back while I get the coffee going.

Better he think Jesse’s plotting to get him here than me.

“And no one called me because…?” I ask.

“Maybe Hal isn’t the only one tired of you playing cop, Teddi.” He reaches over my shoulder and pulls out the mugs and the sugar bowl from the cabinets like the house is his. “Maybe your kids have had all they can take, too. And maybe they’d like a mom who’s home at night, watching TV with them, watching over them.”

It’s so easy for people without kids to know what’s right for parents. “Maybe they like eating, too, and having a roof over their heads,” I say in my own defense. Of course, I say this despite the fact that I’m feeling like a negligent parent, like something could have happened tonight and I wouldn’t have been here to protect them. “Maybe it’s not fair that they have to live with my mistakes—but they do,” I say. And with that I manage to spill the coffee I’m pouring and burn my hand.

Drew grabs the pot and my hand and in one motion manages to put the carafe back in the Mr. Coffee unit and my hand under the faucet. “They’re fine,” he tells me. “Nothing happened. Nothing’s gonna happen.”

I should have been here, and I say as much.

“You had work to do,” he says, examining my hand and pronouncing with a look that it’s fine. “Right?”

When I don’t answer, he knows it was more than that.

“You saw the slice and dice boys,” he says with a sigh.

I admit that I ran into Max and his teammates. Drew waits. Finally I tell him about how the team goes in on lottery tickets together every week.

He makes a production of reaching around behind him to make sure his handcuffs are in his back pocket. “Ooh! I better run ’em in,” he says sarcastically. “Think I should call for backup?”

“Mock me,” I say, “but there could be millions involved and—”

“Mega millions,” he corrects.

“I’m not kidding. Let’s say that Joey had the winning ticket and one of the others knew it and pushed him into the freezer—”

“The cooler. And this Slicer counted on the light being burned out?” Drew says. “And then what? He’s still got to kill off an entire team’s worth of players so that he can claim all the winnings himself. You don’t think that would be a little obvious?”

“Still,” I say. After all, a couple of The Spare Slices are a slice short of a sandwich.

He orders me to sit down, but I refuse. One thing I’ve become adamant about in my single life is that no one can order me around.

“Fine,” he says. “Stand there.”

Now, if I stand, I’m listening to him and if I sit I’m listening to him.

“Try pacing,” he offers, like he’s read my mind.

“No one’s claimed last week’s lottery,” I remind him.

“Look,” he says, watching me go back and forth. “Could you please sit? I’ll sit first.”

And he does.

“So happens we knew about the lottery tickets. That woman—Fran—over at King Kullen told the detectives on the case all about it. Said that Joey was always planning what he’d do if he won. Like your friend at Waldbaum’s.”

“Max.”

“Right,” he says. “Max. Only I checked with the detectives assigned to the case and they assured me that the five remaining Spare Slices all say they saw the twenty losing tickets, same as every week for the last three years.”

“But—” I start to say.

He waits. The truth is, I’ve got nothing.

“Has it occurred to you that maybe you’ve got murder on the brain? That you’re seeing conspiracies where there aren’t any? And that your imagination is running away with your common sense?”

I suppose my body language says No, that hasn’t occurred to me. And furthermore, I do not think that is the case here.

I mean, a man is dead under very suspicious circumstances.

“The man’s death has been ruled an accident, Teddi. Why he brought that water in with him, I don’t know, but I do know what happened after that. Some spilled, he slipped on it, hit his head, got disoriented, panicked, heart attack, done. Or, he gets the pain in his chest, clutches it, spills the water, takes a nose dive, done. Whichever, it was the heart attack that killed him. Live with it.”

“How do you know he banged his head?” I ask. “And how do you know someone didn’t bang it for him?”

“And if the man went to sleep in his bed and died there, you’d figure it was murder because his pajamas were buttoned wrong.” He doesn’t say this like that would be a clue. Which, of course, I think it would. I remember a Columbo where the woman’s panties were on backward and that was how he knew that she hadn’t dressed herself.

“Let it go,” he says, like he can see the wheels turning in my head.

“Okay, but what if,” I hypothesize, “I’m on to something and that rock through Dana’s window was a warning?”

He agrees it was a warning. “That your daughter is growing up and boys are interested in her.”

I ask what makes him so sure.

“Been there, done that.” He plays with a lock of my hair and I jerk my head away. “And there are times I’d like to throw a rock at her mother’s window.”

CHAPTER 5

Service men (or women) can make or break your project. Always investigate their qualifications, check their references, and let reputation guide you. Remember that when they finish a job is more important than when they start it, and you’ll have to live with the results for a long time.

—TipsFromTeddi.com

“This is a joke, right?”

My ex-husband, the bane of my existence, the pain in my butt, the rain on the parade of my life, the—well, you get the general idea—is standing with Steve when I get to L.I. Lanes in the morning.

Now, this morning has been bad enough already. Dana’s window will cost me almost two hundred dollars to fix. I want to have the boy’s parents pay for the repair, only Dana insists there is no boy. And no boy’s parents. She’s beyond adamant and she has no trouble looking me in the eye about it.

Jesse, who has probably never ratted on anyone, appears unwilling to start now and all I can get out of him is a shrug.

And I learned from Alyssa that Drew isn’t Daddy and that Daddy should live with us.

Which brings me back to Daddy, otherwise known as Rio the rat Gallo, standing in my place of business, chatting up the owner.

“Hey Teddi,” he says. “You see my new truck?” He points with his chin toward the bowling alley doors through which I’ve just come without noticing anything except that I have a message on my cell phone from Rita Kroll, that friend of my mother’s who is moving up to Woodbury.

Or down to Woodbury, in my mother’s eyes.

I bother looking—against my better instincts—and outside is a big white truck with the words Rio Grande Security written on the side. The O in Rio is a camera and a wire snakes its way through the words. It’s actually a nice logo. Not that I’d tell him so if my life depended on it.

I put two and two—and two—together and hope I’m not getting the right sum. There’s Rio’s name on the truck, the truck is here at L.I. Lanes and I think Steve casually mentioned something to me the other day about putting in some security cameras.

Steve asks if Rio and I know each other. I pray that Rio doesn’t answer “in the Biblical sense.”

Do I have to tell you?

I didn’t think so.

Before Steve gets ideas, I tell him that we were once married, a long, long time ago.

Rio corrects me and tells him we’ve only been divorced a couple of years.

“Rio’s putting in a system for me,” Steve says.

I bite my tongue so that “well then, I’m out of here,” can’t slip out. “Great,” I say instead, drawing out the word like I’m drowning.

“It’ll be like old times,” Rio says, throwing an arm around me and hugging me against his side. “Remember when we did Lys’s room? You doing all the painting and me wiring up her lights?”

“How could I forget?” I say with a weak smile. I doubt the fire department has forgotten either. And in the damp weather you can still faintly smell the smoke in her room.

He’s still hugging me against him when the phone on the counter rings and Steve turns to answer it.

“Please don’t blow this for me,” Rio whispers. “I gotta pay Carmine back for the truck and I’ve got—”

Carmine? He borrowed money from my mother’s old boyfriend to start his business? The old boyfriend who is so blatantly mafioso that he could give James Gandolfini lessons?

“Problem?” Steve asks, hanging up the phone.

I consider my options. I can either tell Steve how inept Rio is, how, when he tried to get naked pictures of me to sell to a girly magazine, billing me as Long Island’s Most Dangerous Decorator after poor Elise Meyers, my first client, got murdered, he didn’t know the camera had to be attached to anything. I could tell him that Rio and wires in the same vicinity can only lead to disaster, thereby lousing up his new business and any chance I might have to be free of his constant requests for financial assistance so that he can fulfill the ridiculous promises he makes to our children. And in the process come off like a bitchy, vindictive ex-wife—not unlike the one Steve is always complaining about.

Not so good. And that’s not even considering what my mother’s old boyfriend, Carmine De’Guisseppe, would have his goons do to Rio if he couldn’t make his payments.

Since I really don’t want to see my children’s father castrated…

Oh, wait.

Let me think.

No. Despite some sort of poetic justice for his misdeeds, I can see clearly that my only viable option is to oversee his job myself and simply check on his work after hours when no one else is around. Maybe with a little help from Drew, even. He knows surveillance inside and out, so to speak. And the idea of testing it with ourselves—in a pool hall, no less—just might appeal to him, too.

I GET MARK SET doing the steel squares, which I’ve tested to my satisfaction, and then attempt to convince Bobbie to spend a couple of hours helping me win Rita Kroll as a client before my appointment with the pool-table salesman.

Rita no doubt remembers me as the dumpy little girl around the corner who had no sense of style. The girl who wore black for six years running and even went goth before it had its moment in the sun.

Which is why it’s so important that Bobbie come with me. She exudes a certain air of confidence which, to be honest, I lack. It’s not that I don’t know I’m talented, professional and competent. It’s just that, from her perfectly-styled-and-colored hair (red with gold highlights this week) to her freshly-pedicured toes (with French tips, of course), Bobbie’s whole persona seems to shout that she knows what she’s doing. And if you have any desire to appear the same way, she’s who you’d hire.

Not that Bobbie knows a thing about decorating or anything beyond the right person to hire to acquire “the look.”

I’m the one with the degree.

Bobbie’s the one with panache.

We’re a good team.

While it takes me a good half hour and the promise that we can stop at DSW (Designer Shoe Warehouse) to look for Jimmy Choos—which I can guarantee won’t be there—on the way back, she does agree to go with me. At which point I remember that there is a message from Rita waiting for me on my cell phone.

Punching up the message, I listen to a tearful voice canceling our appointment. Great. I really can’t afford to lose clients, especially ones I don’t even have yet. Even if they are referrals from my mother and sure to be disasters.

I reach Rita to tell her that I’ve gotten her message. Okay, I admit that I thought about pretending I didn’t receive it and just showing up because it would be really hard for her to send me from her doorstep. But I don’t.

“It’s a bad time, Teddi dear,” she tells me.

I offer to rearrange my schedule and see her later in the week, if that would help.

It won’t. “It’s not that I’m avoiding you,” she says. “You know I’d do anything for your mother. It’s just…” She sniffs and I hear her blowing her nose before she continues. “I lost my brother last week. We just finished sitting shivah the day before yesterday. I really can’t think about decorating now.”

I make all the requisite noises, tell her I’m so sorry for her loss, that of course I understand, that whenever she’s ready to reschedule, just let me know.

“Call me next week,” she says, taking me by surprise. My mother must have really put the screws to her.

As for me, I’m relieved to have the extra time to put in at the alley without losing a potential customer.

And no, that does not mean I’m glad the woman’s brother died, for heaven’s sake. She’s a sweet old lady. Her brother was probably a hundred and two.

“Good,” Bobbie says when I tell her. “Then I’m off to get gorgeous shoes while the sale is still on.”

Mark clucks as Bobbie leaves. He’s up on a ladder and he asks me to hand him a few squares.

“A man is dead,” I say as I hold up the pieces of steel and he leans down to take them. “Doesn’t anybody care?”

“I don’t know, Teddi. Maybe they’re used to it. With you, there’s usually a body, beautiful.”

His eyes stray down my cleavage and because I’m reaching up and my hands are full there isn’t much I can do about it.

“Or maybe I should say, ‘With you, there’s usually a beautiful body.’”

Before I can tell him that teasing an old lady isn’t nice, someone sidles up from behind and reaches around me. “Want me to help you hold those?” a deep voice asks and I realize it’s Rio.

Ordinarily, Mark would think the remark was funny…it’s the kind he’d make. But he dislikes my ex-husband almost as much as I do, and almost as much as he dislikes Drew.

I take a hard step back, right on Rio’s instep, and get him in the ribs with my elbow, apologizing profusely as I do, claiming I didn’t realize he was there.

“Do give these to Mark,” I say, trying to hand him the steel sheets, but he’s busy looking for a chair or maybe a sympathetic witness.

THIS AFTERNOON, my little one, Alyssa, is going home with Jill Roseman. My big ones are meeting me at L.I. Lanes. Dana will be thrilled to see her dad. Jesse will be morose.

They will both be watching for signs that I might be softening toward their father—Dana hoping, Jesse dreading.

Before I head for the alley, I stop by Bobbie’s to pick up some carpet samples I left there. Under the pretext of not knowing where she’s put them, she drags me up to her bedroom, where she’s got several outfits laid out on her bed.

“Try this,” she says, holding her shortest skirt up in front of my jeans. “It’s stretch and it’ll go perfectly with my little strippy strappy Manolos.”

Looking down, I notice that—ta da—I’m already dressed. And I point this out to Bobbie, who looks me over and simply says, “Not.”

“Try the skirt,” she insists.

I remind her that I am going to work, and not as a streetwalker.

“Part of your work is attitude,” she tells me. I swear she and my mother have read and reread the same chapter of that Secret Handbook of Long Island Rules a hundred times. “And to exude attitude you’ve got to feel it—feel in charge. More than in charge. You’ve got to feel and project superiority. In this skirt and a pair of stilettos, you’re too good for the likes of your ex-husband and for decorating bowling alleys and for everything—except me, of course.”

She isn’t kidding.

“Try it on. See if it doesn’t make you feel like an authority.”

“On what?” I ask, slipping out of my jeans and holding the skirt up in front of my ratty underwear—which I really ought to replace if Drew Scoones is back in my life.

I can barely make myself put the skirt on, but I know that Bobbie won’t let me refuse it until I do. Meanwhile she roots around in the closet, no doubt looking for shoes I could break an ankle in.

“Perfect!” she shouts when she reemerges from the closet and takes a look at me. I look in the mirror, trying to see what she sees, while she straightens my shoulders before taking a step back. “What do you think?”

I stare at the woman in the mirror. “I think I’d never again be able to tell Dana any of her clothes were out of the question.”

“Maybe, but Rio will eat his two-timing, scum-sucking heart out. Here, you need these, too,” she says, throwing a pair of fishnet pantyhose at me. I don’t make any effort to catch them. “Don’t you want—”

No, I don’t. It’s been a long time since I cared what Rio Gallo thought about me. And while Bobbie fusses around, picking up piles of discarded clothes, I tell her as much. I have a job, I have kids, I have more important things to worry about.

“My, my,” Bobbie says, tsking when she looks at her watch. “Don’t you have to meet some salesman over at the Lanes? Where does the time go?”

I look at my watch. It’s a half hour later than the clock on her nightstand—the one I’ve been carefully watching—reads.

“I wonder where your jeans are,” she says. I look down and the carpet is completely devoid of any clothing—including mine. “I know they were here earlier.”

I tell her that this isn’t funny, that I’m late and that I can’t go to the alley looking like I want to have a tryst in one.

She offers to loan me a pair of her jeans, knowing that I couldn’t get them up higher than my knees, and I order her into her closet to get mine.

Instead, she comes out with high boots and a white shirt to wear with the little skirt.

“Couldn’t find them,” she says.

I look in the mirror. Another job well done by Bobbie Lyons, I think to myself. Not.

SO THIS IS HOW I come to be standing in L.I. Lanes in very high-heeled boots, a very short skirt, a blouse with very few buttons and a pair of very red cheeks.

“Wow,” Steve, standing behind the counter counting cash, says, and adds a whistle. Mark leans over on his ladder to see what has Rio’s tongue hanging out and nearly topples over.

“Is the pool-table salesman here yet?” I ask, feigning that superior attitude the skirt was supposed to give me.

“Back here,” Mark says, only his voice breaks and it sounds like he’s croaking. “With your kids,” he adds, like it’s a warning.

I walk carefully, because if I don’t, I’ll wind up showing even more leg, not to mention my underwear, when I fall flat on my face.

The pool-table salesman is facing me, leaning over the table, intent on his shot. His fingers make a bridge through which the cue goes back and forth, back and forth.

“Oh, God!” Dana, just coming in from the back door of the alley, says when she sees me. She looks quickly around the joint. Her eyes are wide, her jaw drops and out comes a very plaintive “Mo-om! What if my friends or someone who knows me, saw you in that?”

Which causes Jesse to look up and gasp, which makes the pool-table salesman glance away from his shot and wind up seeing me. That causes him to nearly rip the table with the cue, sending the cue ball over the rail, which hits me in the chest and nearly knocks me over.

All in the house that Jack built.

Mark hurries down his ladder, Rio comes running, no doubt to massage my wound, and the pool-table salesman rushes toward me telling me he can’t say he’s sorry enough. Only, with everyone coming at me so fast, I lose my balance on Bobbie’s idiotic shoes and stumble backward.

Steve, reaching out to catch me before I go down, winds up providing a soft landing as the two of us slip down the two steps and slide past a bunch of kids trying to figure out how to score a second spare in the settee area. We don’t stop until we’re halfway down the alley where, with Bobbie’s skirt around my waist, the heel of her left boot wedges in the gutter.

Dana dies on the spot. I wish I could, but everyone is making a fuss over me so I can’t just cry and run out of the bowling alley the way she does.

Jesse is staring and trying not to stare at the same time.

Rio’s holding up his new camera phone and I just know he’s snapping pictures.

And Mark is laughing his head off as he heads toward me, taking off his overshirt as he comes.

“You might wanna…” he says as he drops it in my lap.

“Wanna what?” I ask him. “Die?”

He helps me up, despite Steve’s offer to let me stay where I am as long as I’d like.

The pool-table salesman slicks back his hair and smiles at me. His eyes go up and down any parts of my body he hasn’t gotten a good enough look at. I can’t imagine what parts those could be.

“Don Pardol,” he says, offering me his hand.

Ignoring his outstretched hand I scoot past him to the ladies’ room, cursing Bobbie Lyons and her stupid shoes the entire way.

In the restroom, another area that needs redoing before the grand opening, I tug at my belt until it’s a skirt again, put Mark’s shirt on, grateful it comes down to my knees, and take a look at myself in the mirror.

I am a wreck, but things could be worse.

Oh, wait. They are.

Someone sticks her head into the ladies’ room. “Are you Teddi Bayer?”

I try pleading the fifth.

She tells me there’s a policeman outside who wants to talk to me.

Have you ever heard God laughing? I mean, yeah, it’s possible what I’m hearing is just thunder, but under the circumstances…

Drew is leaning up against a pole when I emerge. His hair is slightly wet, the shoulders on his jacket are sprinkled with rain. He looks like a commercial for a Jeep or Irish Spring.

He pushes himself off the post and tells me he caught Dana walking in the rain and gave her a lift home. Okay, it’s more like “that kid doesn’t have the sense to come in outta the rain. And stubborn? Had to nearly drag her ass into the car. Don’t know where she gets that from.”

And all the while he’s talking, he’s taking in my outfit.

“I can’t imagine what you did to piss her off,” he says and he’s measuring the height of my heels with his eyes while he talks. “Noticed your ex is here, too,” he adds.

“Everyone’s here but my mother and the press,” I tell him. And the way my luck is going, one or the other will be next.

Unlike the usually cocky Drew, he almost seems self-conscious, standing there—like he’s trying to be casual, but knows he isn’t pulling it off. “So, you want to maybe grab something to eat when you’re done here?” he asks me.

Actually, he asks my legs.

I tell him what I really need is for him to help me check over Rio’s work after hours. He tells my legs that sounds okay and then his cell rings.

“Gotta run,” he says, and he tilts his head slightly at the hem of my skirt. “She’s probably just jealous,” he says over his shoulder as he leaves.

That was a compliment, I think. I’m not flattered and the last thing I want is for my thirteen year-old to feel in competition with me.

But at least I know she’s home and safe, even if she is pissed.

Not something I can worry about now, I figure, so I go back to the billiards area, where Don is anxious to show me how to play pool.

“Your son’s got a natural aptitude,” he tells me, being careful to keep his eyes averted when he thinks I’m looking. Rio, who is supposed to be working on the wiring for the security system, puffs out his chest, as though hanging around in a pool hall and being a pool shark is the avocation he had in mind for our son.

It might be.

“Dad’s getting me my own stick,” Jesse says as he sinks three balls in a row. Gently, Don corrects him and calls it a cue. I call it a bribe and can see the writing on the wall—Rio earning some money means that he’ll be buying the kids’ favors before his paycheck even makes it into his pocket.

While Jesse impresses his father and a bunch of boys who have gathered around to watch, I explain to Don that I need the new tables, four of them, in two weeks. He promises that he can deliver.

Two of the boys whistle as Jesse hits the white ball into the red one, causing it to hit the yellow one into the pocket.

“Combination shot,” Don says. “Boy’s good. How long has he been playing?”

Jesse looks at his watch.

“No,” Don says. “Really.”

Jesse looks guiltily at me. “Dad and I have played a few times,” he says.

This, of course, is news to me. All I’ve heard is how much he hates his father.

“How much would a pool table for the house cost?” I ask Don. If Jesse is going to play pool, I figure it’s better if I know where and with whom. Jesse’s eyes light up like it’s Christmas and immediately I regret asking in front of him.

Don tells me that I can get “junk” for under a thousand, or a good one for a little over that.

“Just sold a gorgeous antique one for seventeen big ones,” he tells me. “But the guy froze to death before the deal was done. How’s that for rotten luck? Almost sixty degrees out and a guy freezes to death.”

“Seventeen thousand?” Rio asks, and his voice cracks. He’s standing on a ladder with a bunch of wires in his hands and I’m hoping he knows what to do with half of them. “You can get that much for a pool table?”

“Nope,” Don says, “for a billiards table.”

“What’s the difference?” Jesse asks him.

“About ten grand,” Don says with a laugh.

“The man who froze to death,” I say, wondering out loud. “His name didn’t happen to be Joey, did it?”

Don looks at me and nods. “It sure did.”

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