Praise for the writing of bestselling author Stevi Mittman

“Humor, excitement, a good mystery and romantic uncertainty make this series a winner.” Top Pick! 4½ stars

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on What Goes With Blood Red, Anyway?

“A vibrant, funny story that wraps around your heart— Mittman makes you laugh, makes you think, makes you feel…and always makes you smile.”

—USA TODAY bestselling and RWA Hall of Fame author Jennifer Greene on Who Makes Up These Rules, Anyway?

“Don’t miss this book—it has all the heart that her historicals held, as well as Stevi’s wonderful and wacky sense of humor.”

—USA TODAY bestselling author Elizabeth Boyle on Who Makes Up These Rules, Anyway?

“Who Makes Up These Rules, Anyway? is filled with humor. Teddi jokes even while her life is falling apart, and there’s a great surprise ending. A keeper.” Top Pick! 4½ stars

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

“If any writer is going to sit on the throne so recently vacated by the wonderful LaVyrle Spencer, it just may be Stephanie Mittman…. She can spin a story of real people dealing with genuine problems as love—not fantasy love, but true love—grows between them.”

—Barnesandnoble.com on A Kiss To Dream On

Stevi Mittman

has always been a decorator at heart. When she was little she cut the butterflies from her wallpaper and let them fly off the walls onto her ceiling and across her window shades. She remembers doing an entire bathroom in black-and-white houndstooth patent leather contact paper and putting strips of trim on her cupboards.

The Teddi Bayer murder mysteries have allowed her to combine her love of writing and her passion for decorating, and she couldn’t be happier. As a fictional decorator she doles out advice on Teddi’s Web site, TipsFromTeddi.com, and receives and responds to e-mails on behalf of Teddi.

Decorating is a third career for the prolific Mittman, who is also a stained-glass artist with work in the Museum of the City of New York and private commissions around the country and, of course, an award-winning author. Watch for another of her Teddi stories in the NEXT summer anthology, coming later this year.

In her spare time (you must be kidding) she also makes jewelry and indulges in gourmet cooking. Visit her at www.stevimittman.com.

For those of you who are putting any TipsFromTeddi.com advice to use, please e-mail her your successes and failures at Teddi@TipsFromTeddi.com, and be sure to visit Teddi’s Web site, www.TipsFromTeddi.com, for more murder, mayhem and sage advice on decorating!

Why Is Murder on the Menu, Anyway?
Stevi Mittman

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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This book is dedicated to all the usual suspects: my wonderful husband, Alan; my terrific agent, Irene Goodman; my fabulous editor, Tara Gavin; my oldest and dearest friend, Janet Rose; and especially to my Ithaca family, Miriam, Isaac, Glenn and Cathy, who helped me give birth to Why Is Murder on the Menu, Anyway?, named it and made me want to write it. Special thanks have to go to Janet, Miriam and Cathy for their ability to still laugh on the fourth and fifth reads, and to gently point out any inconsistencies the plot may have. I love you all.

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

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER 1

Design Tip of the Day

“Ambience is everything. Imagine eating foie gras at a luncheonette counter or a side of coleslaw at Le Cirque. It’s not a matter of food, but one of atmosphere. Remember that when planning your dining room design.”

—TipsFromTeddi.com

“Now, that’s the kind of man you should be looking for,” my mother, the self-appointed keeper of my shelf-life stamp, says. She points with her fork at a man in the corner of The Steak-Out Restaurant, a dive I’ve just been hired to redecorate. Making this restaurant look four-star will be hard, but not half as hard as getting through lunch without strangling the woman across the table from me. “He would make a good husband.”

“Oh, you can tell that from across the room?” I ask, wondering how it is she can forget that when we had trouble getting rid of my last husband, she shot him. “Besides being ten minutes away from death if he actually eats all that steak, he’s twenty years too old for me and—shallow woman that I am—twenty pounds too heavy. Besides, I am so not looking for another husband here. I’m looking to design a new image for this place, looking for some sense of ambience, some feeling, something I can build a proposal on for them.”

My mother studies the man in the corner, tilting her head, the better to gauge his age, I suppose. I think she’s grimacing, but with all the Botox and Restylane injected into that face, it’s hard to tell. She takes another bite of her steak salad, chewing slowly so that I don’t miss the fact that the steak is a poor cut and tougher than it should be. “You’re concentrating on the wrong kind of proposal,” she says finally. “Just look at this place, Teddi. It’s a dive. There are hardly any other diners. What does that tell you about the food?”

“That they cater to a dinner crowd and it’s lunchtime,” I tell her.

I don’t know what I was thinking bringing her here with me. I suppose I thought it would be better than eating alone. There really are days when my common sense goes on vacation. Clearly, this is one of them. I mean, really, did I not resolve just a few months ago that I would not let my mother get to me anymore?

What good are New Year’s resolutions, anyway?

Tony, the owner of The Steak-Out, approaches the man’s table and my mother studies him while they converse. Eventually he leaves the table in a huff, after which the diner glances up and meets my mother’s gaze. I think she’s smiling at him. That or she’s got indigestion. They size each other up.

I concentrate on making sketches in my notebook and try to ignore the fact that my mother is flirting. At nearly seventy, she’s developed an unhealthy interest in members of the opposite sex to whom she isn’t married.

According to my father, who has broken the TMI rule and given me way Too Much Information, she has no interest in sex with him. Better, I suppose, to be clued in on what they aren’t doing in the bedroom than have to hear what they might be.

“He’s not so old,” my mother says, noticing that I have barely touched the Chinese chicken salad she warned me not to get. “He’s got about as many years on you as you have on your little cop friend.”

She does this to make me crazy. I know it, but it works all the same. “Drew Scoones is not my little ‘friend.’ He’s a detective with whom I—”

“Screwed around,” my mother says. I must look shocked, because my mother laughs at me and asks if I think she doesn’t know the “lingo.”

What I thought she didn’t know was that Drew and I actually had tangled in the sheets. And, since it’s possible she’s just fishing, I sidestep the issue and tell her that Drew is just a couple of years younger than me and that I don’t need reminding.

I dig into my salad with renewed vigor, determined to show my mother that Chinese chicken salad in a steak place was not the stupid choice it’s proving to be.

After a few more minutes of my picking at the wilted leaves on my plate, the man my mother has me nearly engaged to pays his bill and heads past us toward the back of the restaurant. I watch my mother take in his shoes, his suit and the diamond pinky ring that seems to be cutting off the circulation in his little finger.

“Such nice hands,” she says after the man is out of sight. “Manicured.” She and I both stare at my hands. I have two popped acrylics that are being held on at weird angles by bandages. My cuticles are ragged and there’s blue permanent marker decorating my right hand from carelessly measuring when I did a drawing for a customer.

Twenty minutes later she’s disappointed that the man managed to leave the restaurant without our noticing. He will join the list of the ones I let get away. I will hear about him twenty years from now when—according to my mother—my children will be grown and I will still be single, living pathetically alone with several dogs and cats.

After my ex, that sounds good to me.

The waitress tells us that our meal has been taken care of by the management and, after thanking Tony, complimenting him on the wonderful meal and assuring him that once I have redecorated his place people will flock here in droves (I actually use those words and ignore my mother when she looks skyward and shakes her head), my mother and I head for the restroom.

My father—unfortunately not with us today—has the patience of a saint, hard-won from years of living with my mother. She, perhaps as a result, figures he has the patience for both of them and feels justified having none. For her, no rules apply, and a little thing like a picture of a man on the door to a public restroom is certainly no barrier to using the john. In all fairness, it does seem silly to stand and wait for the ladies’ room if no one is using the men’s.

Still, it’s the idea that rules don’t apply to her, signs don’t apply to her, conventions don’t apply to her. She knocks on the door to the men’s room. When no one answers, she gestures to me to go in ahead. I tell her that I can certainly wait for the ladies’ room to be free and she shrugs and goes in herself.

Not a minute later there is a bloodcurdling scream from behind the men’s room door.

“Mom!” I yell. “Are you all right?”

Tony comes running over, the waitress on his heels. Two customers head our way while my mother continues to scream.

I try the door, but it is locked. I yell for her to open it and she fumbles with the knob. When she finally manages to unlock it, she is white behind her two streaks of blush, but she is on her feet and appears shaken but not stirred.

“What happened?” I ask her. So do Tony and the waitress and the few customers who have migrated to the back of the place.

She points toward the bathroom and I go in, thinking it serves her right for using the men’s room. But I see nothing amiss.

She gestures toward the stall, and, like any self-respecting and suspicious woman, I poke the door open with one finger, expecting the worst.

What I find is worse than the worst.

The husband my mother picked out for me is sitting on the toilet. His pants are puddled down around his ankles, his hands are hanging at his sides. Pinned to his chest is some sort of Health Department certificate.

Oh, and there is a large, round, bloodless bullet hole between his eyes.

Four Nassau County police officers are securing the area, waiting for the detectives and crime scene personnel to show up. I was hoping one of them would turn out to be Diane, my best friend, Bobbie’s, sister, who knows how to handle my mother better than probably anyone except my dad. Anyway, she’s not here and the cops are trying, though not very hard, to comfort my mother, who in another era would be considered to be suffering from the vapors. In the twenty-first century, I’d just say she was losing it. That is, if I didn’t know her better, know she was milking it for everything it was worth.

My mother loves attention. As it begins to flag, she swoons and claims to feel faint. Despite four No Smoking signs, she insists it’s all right for her to light up because, after all, she’s in shock. Not to mention that signs, as we know, don’t apply to her.

When asked not to smoke, she collapses mournfully in a chair and lets her head loll to the side, all without mussing her hair.

Eventually, the detectives show up to find the four patrolmen all circled around her, debating whether to administer CPR or smelling salts or simply to call the paramedics. I, however, know just what will snap her to attention.

“Detective Scoones,” I say loudly. My mother parts the sea of cops.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” he says lightly to me, but I can feel him checking me over with his eyes, making sure I’m all right while pretending not to care.

“What have you got in those pants?” my mother asks him, coming to her feet and staring at his crotch accusingly. “Bay-dar? Everywhere we Bayers are, you turn up. You don’t expect me to buy that this is a coincidence, I hope.”

Drew tells my mother that it’s nice to see her, too, and asks if it’s his fault that her daughter seems to attract disasters.

Charming to be made to feel like the bearer of a plague.

He asks how I’ve been.

“Just peachy,” I tell him. “I seem to be making a habit of finding dead bodies, my mother is driving me crazy and the catering hall I booked two freakin’ years ago for Dana’s bat mitzvah has just been shut down by the Board of Health!”

“Glad to see your luck’s finally changing,” he says, and he stares at me a minute longer than I sense he wants to before turning his attention to the patrolmen, asking what they’ve got, whether they’ve taken any statements, moved anything, all the sort of stuff you see on TV, without any of the drama. That is, if you don’t count my mother’s threats to faint every few minutes when she senses no one’s paying attention to her.

Tony tells his waitstaff to bring everyone espresso, which I decline because I’m wired enough. Drew pulls him aside and a minute later I’m handed a cup of coffee that smells divinely of Kahlúa.

The man knows me well. Too well.

His partner, Harold Nelson, whom I’ve met once or twice, says he’ll interview the kitchen staff and goes off toward the back of the restaurant with a nod of recognition toward me. Hal and I are not the best of friends.

Drew asks Tony if he minds if he takes statements from the patrons first and gets to him and the waitstaff afterward.

“No, no,” Tony tells him. “Do the patrons first.” Drew glances at me like he wants to know if I’ve got the double entendre. I try to look bored.

“What it is with you and murder victims?” he asks me when we sit down at a table in the corner.

I search them out so that I can see you again, I almost say, but I’m afraid it will sound desperate instead of sarcastic.

My mother, lighting up and daring him with a look to tell her not to, reminds him that she was the one to find the body.

Drew asks what happened this time. My mother tells him how the man in the john was “taken” with me, couldn’t take his eyes off me and blatantly flirted with both of us. To his credit, Drew doesn’t laugh, but his smirk is undeniable to the trained eye. And I’ve had my eye trained on him for nearly a year now.

“While he was noticing you,” he asks me, “did you notice anything about him? Was he waiting for anyone? Watching for anything?”

I tell him that he didn’t appear to be waiting or watching. That he made no phone calls, was fairly intent on eating and apparently flirted with my mother. This last bit Drew takes with a grain of salt, which was the way it was intended.

“And he had a short conversation with Tony,” I tell him. “I think he might have been unhappy with the food, though he didn’t send it back.”

Drew asks what makes me think he was dissatisfied, and I tell him that the discussion seemed acrimonious and that Tony appeared distressed. Drew makes a note and says he’ll look into it and asks about anyone else in the restaurant. Did I see anyone who didn’t seem to belong, anyone who was watching the victim, anyone looking suspicious?

“Besides my mother?” I ask him, and Mom huffs and blows her cigarette smoke in my direction.

I tell him that there were several deliveries, the kitchen staff going in and out the back door to grab a smoke, that sort of thing. He stops me and asks what I was doing checking out the back door of the restaurant.

Proudly—because while he was off forgetting me, dropping in every once in a while to say hi to my son, Jesse, or leave something for one of my daughters, I was getting on with my life—I tell him that I’m decorating the place.

He looks genuinely impressed. “Commercial customers? That’s great,” he says. Okay, that’s what he ought to say. What he actually says is “Whatever pays the bills.”

“Howard Rosen, the famous restaurant critic, got her the job,” my mother says. “You met him—the good-looking, distinguished gentleman with the real job, something to be proud of. I guess you’ve never read his reviews in Newsday.”

Drew, without missing a beat, tells her that Howard’s reviews are on the top of his list, as soon as he learns how to read.

“I only meant—” my mother starts, but both of us assure her that we know just what she meant.

“So,” Drew says. “Deliveries?”

I tell him that Tony would know better than I, but that I saw some come in. Fish. Maybe linens. “And there was produce, I guess,” I say, recalling seeing a delivery man leave wearing the usual white jacket, this one with a picture of a truck covered with vegetables and fruits all over its side.

“This is the second restaurant job Howard’s got her,” my mother tells Drew.

“At least she’s getting something out of the relationship,” he says.

“If he were here,” my mother says, ignoring the insinuation, “he’d be comforting her instead of interrogating her. He’d be making sure we’re both all right after such an ordeal.”

“I’m sure he would,” Drew agrees, then studies me as if he’s measuring my tolerance for shock. Quietly he adds, “But then maybe he doesn’t know just what strong stuff your daughter’s made of.”

It’s the closest thing to a tender moment I can expect from Drew Scoones. My mother breaks the spell. “She gets that from me,” she says.

Both Drew and I take a minute, probably to pray that’s all I inherited from her.

“I’m just trying to save you some time and effort,” my mother tells him. “My money’s on Howard.”

Drew withers her with a look and mutters something that sounds suspiciously like “fool’s gold.” Then he excuses himself to go back to work.

I catch his sleeve and ask if it’s all right for us to leave. He says sure, he knows where we live. I say goodbye to Tony. I assure him that I will have some sketches for him in a few days, all the while hoping that this murder doesn’t cancel his redecorating plans. I need the money desperately, the alternative being borrowing from my parents and being strangled by the strings.

My mother is strangely quiet all the way to her house. She doesn’t tell me what a loser Drew Scoones is—despite his good looks—and how I was obviously drooling over him. She doesn’t ask me where Howard is taking me tonight or warn me not to tell my father about what happened because he will worry about us both and no doubt insist we see our respective psychiatrists.

She fidgets nervously, opening and closing her purse over and over again.

“You okay?” I ask her. After all, she’s just found a dead man on the toilet, and tough as she is, that’s got to be upsetting.

When she doesn’t answer me I pull over to the side of the road.

“Mom?” She refuses to look at me. “You want me to take you to see Dr. Cohen?”

She looks out the window, elegant as ever in yet another ecru knit outfit, hair perfectly coiffed and spritzed within one spray of permanently laquered, and appears confused. It’s as if she’s just realized we’re on Broadway in Woodmere. “Aren’t we near Marvin’s Jewelers?” she asks, pulling something out of her purse.

“What have you got, Mother?” I ask, prying open her fingers to find the murdered man’s pinky ring.

“It was on the sink,” she says in answer to my dropped jaw. “I was going to get his name and address and have you return it to him so that he could ask you out. I thought it was a sign that the two of you were meant to be together.”

“He’s dead, Mom. You understand that, right?” I ask.

“Well, I didn’t know that,” she shouts at me. “Not at the time.”

I ask why she didn’t give it to Drew, realize that she wouldn’t give Drew the time in a clock shop and add, “…or to one of the other policemen.”

“For heaven’s sake,” she tells me. “The man is dead, Teddi, and I took his ring. How would that look?”

Before I can tell her it would look just the way it is, she pulls out a cigarette and threatens to light it.

“I mean, really,” she says, shaking her head like it’s my brains that are loose. “What does he need it for now?”

CHAPTER 2

Design Tip of the Day

“A wonderful trick for unifying a room is to use a repeating motif. For example, you could purchase a fleur-de-lis stamp and use it above the chair rail, repeat the pattern with the drapery rod finials, a lamp finial, etc. Keep in mind, though, that too much repetition can lead to monotony.”

—TipsFromTeddi.com

My best friend and business partner, Bobbie Lyons, is watching for me out her window and she runs over to greet me in my driveway before I’m out of the car. It’s the middle of the afternoon and I happen to know for a fact that she was home all day and has no plans to go out. Despite that, she is wearing silk capris, kitten-heel suede slides and more diamonds than you’ll find in the window of Kay Jewelers. “I can’t believe it happened to you again!” she says as she slips one of her slides on and off repeatedly.

I tell her, as I already did on the cell the minute I dropped off my mother, that it was horrible, that my mother was impossible, and that she took the man’s ring. I don’t mention, however, that Drew Scoones was the investigating detective on the case.

“Diane says the guy was shot between the eyes while he was on the can,” she tells me and shrugs at her sister’s choice of words. “She’s pissed because she was investigating a robbery when the call came in so she didn’t get to see it. She hates being low man on the police totem pole.”

“Well, it wasn’t a pretty sight,” I assure her. Then I add that it sure would have been nice to see a friendly face there. Bobbie’s left eyebrow shoots up and I feel as though I’ve got one of those electronic banners running across my forehead announcing every thought in my head.

“He was there,” she says, her short red hair glinting in the sunlight, the new blond streaks blinding me.

I am silent.

“Oh…my…God! He was there!”

“He?” I ask, trying to be oh-so-casual. Unfortunately, her look cuts off this avenue of escape.

“What did he say? Is he still gorgeous? Did your stomach hurt at the sight of him? Are you sorry you didn’t get those highlights I told you to get?”

“What are you? Eleven years old?” I ask. Okay, that might be a little harsh, but she is really bugging me. “I just saw another dead body. I really thought that the first one would hold me for this lifetime. So yes, Drew Scoones was there. So yes, he’s still good-looking.”

This last bit is the understatement of the year. And, so yes, my stomach did do flip-flops at the sight of him, but I’ll never admit it, because it was clear his didn’t do flip-flops at the sight of me. Maybe I should have sprung for the highlights after all.

“For all I know, he’s married by now.”

“He’s not.” Bobbie says this like she absolutely knows. When I give her the how-can-you-possibly-know-that? look, she smiles and says, “Diane.”

I imagine Drew Scoones thinking that I am keeping tabs on him and want to crawl into a hole and die.

“Mom!” Jesse yells out the front door to me, opening it enough to let loose Maggie May, the bichon frise I “inherited” from Elise Meyers, the woman I found murdered last year. (Okay, fine. So I stole the dog. She was dead and her husband, who was trying to kill her before someone else beat him to it, wasn’t going to take care of her dog, now was he?) Jesse gestures with his hand that there is someone on the phone.

“It’s probably Howard,” I tell Bobbie. “He’s taking me out to some Iron Chef cook-off thing tonight. Maybe I can beg off.”

Bobbie gives me the look. The one that says I’m breaking yet another Long Island rule—canceling an engagement the same day. It seems like, much to Bobbie and my mother’s dismay, I will never learn how to get ahead on Long Island. At nearly forty, it’s probably too late.

Then she concedes that maybe, under the circumstances, it could be all right.

“Maybe,” she says, grabbing Maggie May’s collar and dragging her into the house. “Like if you make up some wild story about seeing some murdered guy on the john….”

“It’s Drew,” Jesse says breathlessly, and his face is lit up like it’s Superman calling. “You should invite him to dinner, Mom,” he says, then scrunches up his nose at the thought of my cooking. “Or something, anyway,” he adds.

I pretend to be offended by my eleven-year-old’s suggestion as I ruffle his hair on my way to the kitchen, where I pick up the portable from the counter and say, “Hello.”

“You’re gonna love this one,” he says, like there hasn’t been a three-month lull in our conversations, like I haven’t jumped every time the phone rang since the last time he called me, eighty-six days ago. “Your dead guy? He’s the one who shut down Sheldon’s of Great Neck. Isn’t that where you were planning to have Dana’s bat mitzvah?”

He knows exactly where her bat mitzvah was supposed to be. He even went with me to look Sheldon’s over, to make plans, to pick which room to have the meal in, which one to serve the hors d’oeuvres.

And then he just stopped calling. “What do you mean, ‘he was the one who shut it down’?” I ask.

“He’s…that is, he was, with the Board of Health. He was the food inspector who claimed Sheldon’s didn’t meet the County’s standards. Looks like you are S.O.L. As usual.”

“As long as it doesn’t make me a suspect,” I say. I mean, been there, done that, and “shit outta luck” beats having to prove I’m innocent—or that my best friend is—again.

Drew just laughs.

“Well, I do have a motive,” I concede. “Though you know that I didn’t know who he was until this moment. And okay, I had opportunity. I admit I was there in the restaurant when he was killed. But means?”

I think for just a nanosecond and I can’t believe what crosses my mind.

“Please don’t tell me you’ve found the gun and it’s registered to Rio.”

Drew laughs again at the mention of my thank-God-he’s-behind-me ex-husband, a man who believed in the principle of survival of the slickest. “I forgot how funny you are,” he says.

There’s a silence while he waits for me to ask whose fault that is.

I don’t.

“So anyway,” he says, “I just thought you’d want to know the guy who screwed you is dead.”

Ha. The guy who screwed me is on the other end of the phone telling me the guy who screwed me is dead.

“So whatcha been up to?” he asks, just baiting me into asking him why he vanished off the face of my earth.

“Business,” I say. “I told you today, I’m doing a lot of commercial properties, restaurants, things like that.”

He doesn’t say anything, waiting, I suppose, for me to ask him what he’s been doing. Bobbie will give up buying shoes before I ask that.

“Is there anything else?” I ask, as in: is there a reason I’m sitting here holding on to the phone, unable to breathe, wishing that we were still friends? Still more than friends?

“You doing anything tonight?” he asks. I tell him I’ve got a date, but the cocky bastard sounds like he doesn’t believe me.

“Howard is taking me to some charity cook-off,” I say.

“Oh,” he says. “Howard. That doesn’t exactly count as a date.”

“He’s picking me up, paying for my dinner, taking me to a show, and bringing me home. What part of that isn’t a date?” I ask. Bobbie, putting her little crocheted shrug over my shoulders in an attempt to influence what I’m going to wear tonight, gives me a thumbs-up. She seems to think that the right sweater will always win the day.

He tells me, “the part that comes next.”

“What comes next is none of your business,” I tell him and hang up. I give Bobbie a look that says it’s none of hers, either, and head upstairs to get dressed without my fairy godmother to give me her glass slippers, though I think I still have the Manolos she loaned me a few weeks ago.

Howard is simply glowing this evening. It’s like he’s been lit from within, and he is devastatingly handsome in a beige linen jacket over a chocolate-brown T-shirt that hugs his torso like…Well, I’m not going there, so suffice it to say that Howard is over six feet tall, filled out without any fat, and he has the fastest smile I’ve ever seen. Nothing lights a face like a smile.

He has told me three times how his friend Nick, the chef at Madison on Park, has been practicing for this evening, how he has made all kinds of entrées and desserts and how Howard has had to try them all. He throws around words like Provençale and forestiere like I’m supposed to know what he means. He says Nick did a dish with roasted Maine lobster and kabocha squash gnocchi with sautéed black trumpets in sage oil. When I look stricken he assures me that the trumpets are mushrooms and not swans, and shakes his head at me.

“You’ve no appreciation for good food,” he complains as if I’m just being stubborn. He glances at our tickets and gestures with his chin to keep progressing down the aisle of the cavernous high school auditorium where they have set up several kitchens on the stage and placed big TV screens around the room so they can zoom in on the stovetops and prep areas.

What he means is that the other night when he took me out to review a new Italian restaurant for Newsday, the Dentice Mare Monte was absolutely wasted on me. As is anything with olives or artichokes or a host of other foods he thinks God invented just to pleasure man.

We get to our row and he grimaces because we are obviously farther back than row B ought to be. He hurries up ahead, sees that there are rows AA to FF before the single alphabet begins, and, with obvious disappointment, waves me into our row in front of him. Excusing ourselves, we clamber over people who refuse to stand up to let us get to our seats—and who then have the nerve to glare at us when we stumble over their purses and toes. I remind Howard as we navigate the various obstacles that the gâteau au chocolat wasn’t wasted on me.

He pulls a laugh from his inexhaustible supply as we take our seats, and he wonders aloud how it is that I can remember the French names only for desserts or things that involve chocolate.

“Chocolat,” I correct, saying it with what I hope is a convincing French accent.

He waves away my attempt at being seductive and tells me that I should have been there for the practice run. “Cockle Bruschetta,” he says, like cockles were likely to be the surprise ingredient they’d have the chefs use tonight. “Then a choucroute Royale Alsacienne, done not with sauerkraut but with a pickled mushroom…” He closes his eyes like he’s having sex and it is too perfect to describe.

At least, I think he’d close his eyes during sex. It’s not something I know firsthand.

“And just this morning I had to go on a scavenger hunt for tamarind paste,” he tells me as I settle into my seat and take in our surroundings. “Took me until nearly noon to find it in this little Indian spice place on Broadway down on the South Shore.”

“The Taj? The one next to The Steak-Out?” I ask. I remind him that was where I was at lunchtime, and it was where I discovered the murdered man I’ve already told him about.

He stops helping me off with Bobbie’s shrug and asks me if I’m sure. I tell him it’s not the sort of thing that one forgets. And then I could swear he shudders.

“You all right?” I ask and he gets all defensive, like I’ve impugned his manhood or something.

“I suppose you talked to the police,” he says. I tell him that yes, they interviewed my mother and me. But, because the chip on his shoulder is the size of Shea Stadium when it comes to Drew Scoones, I don’t mention just who “they” were.

“Well, luckily you didn’t see anything,” he says, slipping out of his jacket and carefully folding it behind him on the chair.

“Just a dead man,” I say a bit sarcastically, since he seems to think that watching someone cook a fancy French meal trumps discovering a dead body.

I could see his argument if we were at least going to taste the results. And if they were chocolate.

He suggests that we leave our stuff on our seats and go backstage to see his friend Nick. We exit our row in the opposite direction and, after convincing the powers that be that we are vital to the survival of Earth, we are permitted to go behind the scenes to look for Nick and Madison Watts, owners of Madison on Park. Howard has described Nick in detail, but has never even mentioned Madison before tonight, so I am taken aback when he allows himself to be greeted with kisses on both cheeks by an elegant thirtysomething-just-younger-than-me woman who seems as surprised to see me as I am to see her kissing the man I’ve come in with.

She’s dressed all in black, like, well, like a black swan. Or like Mrs. Danvers, from Rebecca with Joan Fontaine. And let me tell you, if I were crumbs, I’d know better than to stick to her outfit. You know how interviewers always ask stupid questions like, “If you were a flower, what kind of flower would you be?” Well, Madison Watts would be a rare orchid that you know would cost thousands of dollars and would die if you looked at it wrong. And it would be your fault, not the flower’s.

Or maybe a Venus flytrap.

Something intimidating.

Yes, if I had to find one word to describe Madison Watts, it would be intimidating.

“Madison,” Howard says, and my ordinarily warm, garrulous date has suddenly gone cold and distant. “I’d like you to meet Teddi Bayer.”

“Your…?” Madison says, as if daring him to introduce me as his girlfriend. She waits, not giving him an out.

“Nick around?” he asks instead.

Madison eyes me critically while I try not to stare at her perfect complexion and huge gray eyes. I struggle to remember if I put on lipstick before Howard picked me up and figure it’s probably gone by now, anyway. I am wearing one of Bobbie’s crocheted tops with the matching shrug from last year and a pair of Ann Taylor pants which, I admit, are a good five years old. I feel mismatched, underdressed, out of style and fat. Where are this woman’s Hadassah arms? If Nick is such a great cook, why doesn’t her figure show that she ever, ever eats?

I’d credit Madison with an uncanny ability to reduce me to shame and self-loathing, but heck, nearly anyone can do it. It’s not like I don’t try. I’m sure I look good when I look in the mirror at home, or at the very least, good enough. And then I get where I’m going, see someone wearing the right thing, someone whose hair looks like she just stepped out of the salon, someone whose makeup isn’t smudged under her eyes, whose shoes apparently don’t cripple her feet, and all I want to do is crawl back into bed.

With the slightest hint of an accent, Madison, who looks like she’s primped all afternoon when I know she had to be preparing for the show, asks, “I know you, don’t I?” Those exquisite gray eyes of hers narrow slightly, as if she’s seeing through my disguise as a socially-acceptable, upwardly-mobile person who could pay for her own ticket and dinner if she had to. Which, luckily, I don’t.

I tell her that I don’t think we’ve ever met at the same time that Howard tells her that I am a decorator. “She’s doing a lot of commercial work,” he says. “Redecorating restaurants…” He pauses like he’s suddenly put two and two together and gotten Reese’s peanut butter cups. “You two should talk.”

My heart thumps wildly in my chest. Doing Madison on Park would be quite the notch in my glue gun. I can almost see the wheels turning in Madison’s head, too, and I smile at her like it’s an open invitation for her to watch the same process in mine—as long as we come to the same conclusion.

“You look so familiar to me,” she says, taking a step or two back and eyeing me from head to toe. “Have you been to the restaurant?”

I tell her I’ve been dying to come, but I’ve been so very busy. And poor, I think, but I don’t tell her as much.

“She’s doing The Steak-Out,” Howard tells her and we all exchange one of those oh, right, looks.

“You weren’t there today? When it happened, were you?” Madison asks, putting her hand on my arm as if ready to console me if I was.

And I admit that, unfortunately, I was.

“So sad about Joe,” she says as someone official-looking approaches her and she has to excuse herself to see to something about the show. “We’ll talk later,” she says to me, and maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but I get the sense she is going to let me do the restaurant.

“‘So sad about Joe,’” Howard mimics as he looks around, I suppose for Nick. “She hated him just as much as the rest of us.”

I’m about to ask him how he came to know someone from the Health Department when he brightens and points toward the back of the stage. “Look! There’s Nick!”

Nick, who even with a chef’s hat on his head only comes up to Howard’s chin, pumps my hand until my arm goes numb. He is a cherub of a man, a little too chubby, a little too short, a little too bald to be considered good-looking, or even cute. But his eyes sparkle when he sees us and his pudgy hands clasp mine in a warm welcome.

“You’re here! I’m so glad! Now go away!” he says cheerily. “I must set up le mise en place.” I have no idea what that is, but I don’t dare ask Howard because he’s probably already told me three times and because if he tells me again I still won’t care. “They’re going to tell them the ingredients fifteen minutes before they’re supposed to start cooking,” Howard tells me.

“Yeah,” I say. I am getting testy because all we’ve talked about is food, on every monitor is food, and I’m getting hungrier by the minute. I still can’t believe we get to watch and not sample. “Like cockles.”

Howard, not offended that I clearly think cockles—which I have only heard of in the nursery rhyme—haven’t a chocolate bar’s chance in a gynecologist’s office of being the “designated food,” tells me, “It could be anything, and he has to be prepared. I mean, he’s got to have a million recipes in his head that need only the ingredients that are supplied, along with the spices and stuff he’s allowed to bring with him.”

I wonder for a moment about whether Howard would be more interested in me if I were a great cook, and whether Howard’s interest would make Drew jealous. And then my reality check kicks in. Drew doesn’t get jealous because Drew doesn’t really care. Remember this, I tell myself.

I watch the TV screens as the chefs lay out their wares, line up their knives, peelers, microplanes.

“What’s that?” I ask Howard, pointing at a stainless-steel gadget on one of the TV screens. He pulls his eyes away from Nick’s setup for a second. “A culinary torch,” he says dismissively before pointing out that Nick’s is newer and bigger and that he usually uses a salamander for caramelizing sugar.

I know better than to ask what a salamander is.

The emcee is apparently someone from the Food Network. I have been able to cram raising kids, running a business, trying to date and coping with my parents into one life, but it’s meant there’s no time for the Food Network. Howard seems to find this impossible to believe.

“You’ve never heard of him?” he asks. “He’s on after Rachel Ray.” I look at him blankly. He asks if I am pulling his leg.

“I know Emeril,” I offer gamely. “‘Kick it up a notch,’ right?”

Howard pats my leg affectionately and looks at me with something akin to pity while Mr. Food Network calls everyone to order and announces the rules.

“And now,” he says—and Howard takes my hand and squeezes it like they’re announcing the nominees for Best Actor in a Documentary Starring Food—“the ingredients.”

Howard raises a fist and shouts, “Yes!” at the mention of duck. I smile at him as if I care, while I imagine how best to redecorate Madison on Park, and how to present my ideas in a way that will convince Nick and Madison to take me up on my offer. Like one of Rio’s NASCAR races, Mr. Food Network tells the chefs to start their ovens. All around me people sit forward in their seats.

Around me, but not me. I’m thinking about traditional colors that go with oak, and how forest green has been so overdone. I want Madison on Park to take people by surprise. Not dead-guy-in-the-bathroom surprise, but something that will distinguish it from every other nice restaurant they’ve ever been in. I try to picture deep red with the oak. I like it, but I feel it still needs something to make it pop, to give it pizzaz. Touches of a pale chartreuse? A bold lavender? A deep purple?

A sharp whack jerks me from my reverie, and Howard tells me that the chef at the second station couldn’t cut the rind off an orange, never mind the head off a duck. I watch Nick’s monitor and see Madison put her hands on her hips and stamp her foot like Nick is purposely not getting on with it. There’s something Lady Macbethian about her as she directs Nick’s cleaver to some exact spot on the poor duck’s neck.

Howard says something about a perfectly cooked foie gras with poached pear and a port wine reduction sauce, but I’m trying to imagine the chartreuse and finding it unappetizing.

Maybe because now I’m associating it with dead duck.

Meanwhile, no one seems the least bit concerned that knives are being tossed about the stage with dangerous abandon. No one except me and a fire marshal stationed just off to the right of the stage. Sure—he and I are well acquainted with disasters. I arrive in time to report them and he gets to clean up after them.

An oven door is slammed, followed by an outraged shout about a soufflé and another about a rising cake.

A time warning is issued and the chefs go into double time. The monitors look like someone’s hit the fast-forward button on TiVo.

And I decide to go with the deep purple. Maybe it’s all the surrounding drama.

At each station, one chef is tending the stove and the other is at the chopping block. Almost every monitor shows vegetables being julienned with knives the size of light sabers.

A sudden gasp. Mine. Blood seeps onto the cutting board on Monitor Number Three—Nick and Madison’s station. Howard rises from his seat as Nick rushes to Madison’s side, wrapping her hand in a dishcloth and raising it up.

Someone in the crowd announces that he is a doctor. A half dozen others jump to their feet and announce that they, too, are doctors, throwing specialities around the room like baseball statistics.

“I’m a plastic surgeon.”

“I’m a surgeon.”

“I’m a urologist.”

A urologist?

Two or three doctors head for the stage, one even leaping up without bothering to use the stairs. And then Madison starts to scream, like she’s just realized what happened, and someone, I’m not sure who, knocks over one of those crème brûlée scorcher things. And suddenly there are flames leaping from the stage and people in the audience are screaming and Howard’s looking at me like it’s all my fault and he shouldn’t have brought me.

People clamber over seats despite the fact that all the flames are confined to the stage and that the fire marshal is ordering everyone to stay calm. Someone keeps shouting about the nightclub in Rhode Island, and several lawyer-types are yelling something that sounds like, “Sue, sue!”

Twenty minutes later, after we have been drenched by the automatic sprinklers, a police car has taken Madison, her severed fingertip and Nick to a hospital, and I have managed to pick the little padlock on Nick’s travel case with a bobby pin, Howard and I are gathering up his knives and tools.

“Wish you hadn’t touched that,” a familiar voice drawls and there, in the flesh, twice in one day, is Drew Scoones.

I drop the knife. “My mother’s right,” I say. “You are a stalker.”

Drew tells me to feel free to put the knife away, now that my prints are all over it. I assure him that, despite the fact that I was here, there wasn’t any crime.

“The woman just cut herself,” I say. “Heat of the moment,” I add, pointing toward the ceiling from whence, hair plastered to my forehead, I have been reduced to looking like a drowned rat.

He looks at the debris-strewn floor and hands me what I think is a citrus reamer. “So what is it with you and disasters?” he asks.

CHAPTER 3

Design Tip of the Day

“When we think of fooling the eye we tend to think only of trompe l’oeil, but there are many more ways of tricking the viewer than simply painting scenes on walls. There are faux finishes. There are fiber-board tables hidden under the fanciest of cloths. And of course, there are metallic paints and gold leaf, reminding us that ‘all that glitters is not gold.’”

—TipsFromTeddi.com

Until now the best thing about going out with Howard has been the food. I mean, only the finest restaurants, and all at Newsday’s expense, as long as I let him order for me and sample what’s on my plate. I mean, how great is that? I thought it couldn’t get any better.

Only it has. Now the best thing about going out with Howard is that I get to tell Drew Scoones, when he calls this afternoon, that I am busy dressing for dinner at Madison on Park and can’t really talk.

And no, I can’t possibly see him.

Perhaps he’d like a raincheck? I say cooly.

He says it’s not raining. “Gonna see old Nine Fingers? She gonna be there?”

I tell him that I don’t know, that again I’m sorry, but like I said, I’m busy.

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” he says. “I’m sure I can find something to do. It’s not like I’ll be sitting in my apartment pining, sweetheart. I can always go hang out in a pool hall, drop in at Hooters, find somebody to keep the old bed warm.”

I tell him I’m sure he can, while I hold earrings up to my ears and pick a pair of long, dangly chandeliers that Bobbie would tell me are so “last year.”

I don’t know why he feels he’s got to be mean to me.

“Won’t be quite the same, though,” he says, like he doesn’t know why, either.

And I say, “I wish we were still friends,” then gasp when I realized I’ve said it aloud.

“I’m still your friend,” Drew says and his voice is so low and soft that it does that thing to me I don’t want done, deep in the pit of my stomach. So I tell him that I’ve really got to go, but just before I hang up the phone he says that maybe he’ll just spend the night working on my murder investigation with old Hal instead of me. And he adds that he’s surprised I’m not more interested.

And, of course, I don’t hang up. “It’s not my murder investigation,” I say in my own defense. “I didn’t even know the man. And I want to just put it behind me. I don’t like feeling like a murder magnet.”

Drew is pretty silent, no doubt giving me time to play the whole scene out again in my head, to smell that sharp bitterness that filled the men’s room at The Steak-Out, to see the look of surprise on the dead man’s face. And, in some small, petty recess of my mind, to remember that the dead man is the reason Dana’s bat mitzvah may wind up being held in some Korean restaurant where kimchee accompanies every dish.

“Well,” Drew says, “you might ask your friend tonight if he isn’t interested. I’m pretty certain he knew him.”

Howard is stunning in his navy sports jacket and his khaki shirt, which he wears open at the collar so that he is not overly formal, but still well-dressed. The man truly knows how to put himself together. He looks out of place in the parking lot that serves both the strip of stores and restaurants on Park Avenue in Rockville Centre and the local Long Island Railroad station. Spring is in the air, and there is just the slightest warm breeze, promising the summer to come. My skirt with the sequins scattered over the flowers catches the breeze and propels me toward Madison on Park, where Howard says that Madison wants to talk to me.

The restaurant is dim—usually a sign that they are hiding worn carpeting, frayed linens and a chipping paint job, but, maybe because of the soft music playing in the background, the place still manages to pull off a romantic air.

It’s warm, in that homey sort of way where you get the sense that people come here fairly often, but only as the default choice. Despite its reputation, it doesn’t look to me like the kind of place you’d celebrate a new job (unless you’re me and the job is redecorating the place), or that you’d take your boss if you wanted to impress him. It’s upscale, but just barely hanging on by a thread. It’s comfortable, sort of.

In fact, that’s what’s wrong with it. It’s not anything enough.

It’s one of those places you agree on when he doesn’t feel like Chinese and you don’t feel like Italian, and Thai sounds too exotic and a hamburger too ordinary. Judging from the diners, it’s nobody’s first choice, but everyone can agree on it.

Madison, her right index finger heavily bandaged, greets us at the door as though we are long-lost relatives from the old country. She is what my mother would call “on.” I think it has to do with being in her element.

“What a fiasco,” she says and laughs a tinny laugh. “Well, at least the publicity hasn’t hurt us any.” She shepherds us through the half-empty restaurant to a spot against the back wall. It’s apparent to me that Madison on Park can’t live on its six-year-old Zagat rating much longer.

A waiter appears and pulls the table out for me. I slide into the banquette while Howard takes the seat facing me and asks Madison how Nick is taking last night’s disappointment.

She says they’ll surely never forget it and looks down at her bandages. She leans into the table and says quietly, “If it didn’t hurt so damn much, I’d cut off another one just to keep the sympathy diners coming in.”

Howard looks just as appalled as I feel, and Madison seems to sense her mistake. She once again laughs her tinny laugh to signal she was only joking and then disappears toward the kitchen.

I pick up my menu, open it and am surprised by the offerings. The choices are exotic. The prices are through the roof. I’m thrilled because I now have a bead on what the restaurant needs. Forget homey. Forget comfortable. You don’t pay these kinds of prices just for the food, you pay them for atmosphere.

And if there’s one thing I know how to create, it’s ambience.

I close my eyes, imagining this place with chandeliers rather than high hats, fabric walls rather than paneling, a fabulous window treatment. When I open them, I catch the faintest glimpse of someone through the window, just now walking out of view. Though I didn’t see his face, I’d know that leather jacket anywhere. So when Howard asks me if there is anything I see that I want, I nearly choke on my water. When I can catch my breath I tell him, as I always do, to order for both of us.

Howard orders the inzimino, which he tells me is calamari, spinach, chickpeas and nero d’avola served on a crouton. I don’t have a clue what nero d’avola is, but I say, “and for me?” which tells him I’d only eat his choice at gunpoint, and even then I might not. He suggests the foie gras and braised duck terrine, and I give him my please take pity on me look. He orders me a tricolor salad and then goes on to order three different entrées of which he requests petit portions for us to share and taste. Like I would really touch a braised pork shank with pepperoncini and wild mushrooms over a ragout of root vegetables.

While he orders, I watch Drew Scoones pantomiming outside the window. The best I can tell, he’s asking me to go ahead and ask Howard something. I shake my head. Howard catches me, shifts around in his seat so that he can see out the window, and asks what I’m looking at since Drew is no longer in view.

I tell him the window treatment is dreadful. He turns back to me. Drew comes back into view. Howard turns for another look. Drew manages to disappear again.

If Drew wants to know what Howard knows, he can ask him himself. What does he think? That Howard is a murderer? As far as I know, Howard’s never done an illegal thing in his life—if you don’t count the turn he made against the light the night that Drew followed us and pulled him over to give him a ticket.

And that was entrapment.

And Howard is not duplicitous—except maybe the whole trolling thing on JDate when we were first going out. But I don’t count that since he thought he was flirting with me and not with my mother, who’d registered me without my knowledge or participation.

So what if he knew the Health Department Inspector? He’s a food critic. Shouldn’t he know the man who makes sure he isn’t going to get food poisoning doing his job?

“So, Teddi, about The Steak-Out…” he starts. “I wanted to ask you—” But Nick comes over, his chef’s hat askew, and interrupts him.

“Howard’s girl,” he says, nodding at me and grabbing up my hand to shake it. “Good to meet you again. Madison see you yet?” he asks, but he doesn’t wait for an answer. Instead he asks Howard if he can talk to him alone for a minute, apologizing to me as he asks.

Howard, looking horrified, says, “No,” really weirdly. Like just “no,” without any “sorry,” or “something wrong?” or anything. I remind myself that another of my New Year’s resolutions was to stop seeing perfectly ordinary things as suspicious. Just because Drew Scoones put a bug in my ear (or wherever he put it) is no reason to let my imagination run away with me.

“I have to powder my nose, anyway,” I say, putting my napkin beside my plate and coming to a stand.

Nick apologizes again and says he only needs a minute while Howard reaches out his hand to stop me from leaving the table. Drew is still watching, now from across the street, and I can just see relating this to him and listening to him guess that Howard’s credit card was refused.

I pat Howard’s hand and get up from the table. The layouts of most restaurants fall into two categories. Cheaper, funkier ones often have their restroom toward the side or front of the place. The ones that want to appear classier, more exclusive, have them in the back, near the kitchen, because they aren’t afraid of what a patron might see. The layout of Madison on Park and The Steak-Out are nearly identical—loos near the kitchen, only the placement of the Male/Female rooms are reversed.

Which explains why I am frozen in my tracks in front of the restroom doors, feeling slightly nauseated and just a trifle dizzy.

“Are you all right?” I hear someone say, and turn to find Madison standing beside me. “You look kind of green, dear.”

I assure her I’m fine, but my hand just won’t reach out and grasp the doorknob. I feel sweat break out on my upper lip.

“Shall I get Howard?” she asks, seemingly caught between leaving me to possibly fall down in a dead faint and wanting someone else to deal with it.

I explain about The Steak-Out and being the one to open the men’s room door and find the body.

“Oh, you poor thing,” she coos over me solicitously. Or, should I say, salaciously. She, like everyone else, no doubt wants the gory details. “So sad about Joe. Who would do a thing like that? In a men’s room, no less. Leave it to a man, right? I swear, it’s the sort of thing you see on television. A regular mob hit, or made to look like one, I’d say. So sad.”

“So you knew him?” I ask, wishing I could pull my antennae in. None of my business. None of my business.

Still…

“Don’t tell Nick,” she says, lowering her voice dramatically. “Especially now. But this was before I even knew Nick, anyway. Joe and I…we were kind of an item for a while. Not that anyone knew. We kept it hush-hush. I mean, a restaurateur and the health inspector. It could be misinterpreted.”

“You owned this restaurant before you knew Nick?” I ask.

“Not this one,” she says. “Another restaurant. In Boston, in fact. Nothing like this one. And I was just a chef, anyway. I’m embarrassed to even tell you the name.”

She can tell me who she slept with, but not where she used to cook. Howard always tells me that chefs take their knives to bed. Now I believe him.

My cell phone rings. It’s the theme from Home Alone, which means one of my kids is calling from home. I apologize to Madison, who didn’t even appear to notice, and I take the call. It’s Jesse, who tells me that his father wants to borrow my car. Only he doesn’t call him “my father.” He calls him “your ex-husband.”

Rio gets on the phone. Before he gets past “How ya doing?” I tell him he cannot borrow my car.

“You really get a kick out of busting my balls, don’t you? In front of our kids, too. You don’t even wanna know what I need it for?” he says like it’s an accusation.

I tell him I don’t. “Unless one of my children is bleeding on the floor and you need to take him or her to the hospital, you can’t borrow the car.”

“It’s something like that,” he says. “And I only need it for a couple of days.”

I ask him what he means by it’s something like that.

He says one of his kids needs to go the hospital.

“I’ll be right there,” I tell him, signaling to Madison that I’m sorry, waving to Howard that we’ve got to leave. He’s deep in conversation with Nick and I decide I can get home faster with Drew and his siren. I should never have left the kids alone. I am a terrible mother. I should be arrested for child abuse.

Only, then who’d raise my kids?

I dash out of the restaurant like a maniac, searching for Drew, while I try to get a straight answer out of Rio.

I should know better.

“Who is hurt?” I demand. Drew appears from nowhere.

“What’s happening?” he demands.

The kids, I mouth. “Rio, I swear to God I will kill you if you don’t tell me, this instant, who is hurt and how they are hurt.”

Drew hustles me toward his car.

“Nobody’s hurt,” Rio says. “I didn’t say anyone was hurt. Did I say anyone was hurt?”

I put up my hand to stop Drew, who looks pretty pale for a man who sees dead people on a daily basis. “If no one is hurt, why are you taking my kids to the hospital?”

“I didn’t say your kids,” Rio says. His voice changes like he’s cupping the phone. “I said mine.”

“What? My kids aren’t your kids?” I ask before I realize what he’s saying.

“I’m gonna be a father again,” he says. I lean against Drew’s car. My legs have turned to gummi worms. Relief? Jealousy? Drew leans into me the better to hear Rio’s news. “The kids are gonna have a new little sister, sometime in the next couple a days.”

“Put Jesse on the phone,” I tell Mr. High Sperm Count while Drew laughs at me and Howard comes charging toward us.

“Mom?” Jesse says, and my heart goes out to this middle child of mine who is always caught in the middle.

“Listen to me, Jesse,” I say as evenly as I can. “Go into my office. In my desk, in that little drawer behind the door that opens for the printer, is some money. Give your father fifty dollars and tell him to use it for a cab to take Marion to the hospital when the time comes. Do not, I repeat, do not, give him the keys to my car.”

Jesse asks if I’m sure he should give him the money and I tell him softly that we do not take out our anger at his dad on a pregnant lady and her new baby. Hell, how else is he going to learn to be a good man? A mensch? Surely not from his father.

When I hang up, the men at my side seem to have nothing to say.

“My ex is going to be a father again,” I say, trying to sound breezy about the whole thing. “What does that make me?”

“Mad?” Howard asks.

“Even crazier than usual?” Drew suggests.

“I mean, Marion is my kids’ stepmother, or will be if Rio ever bothers to marry her. But we’re already divorced, so what would his baby be to me?”

“A thorn in your side?” Howard says.

“A pain in the ass?” Drew suggests.

“I’m glad you two are so thoroughly enjoying yourselves. Too bad it’s at my expense.”

Both men stand around with their hands in their pockets as if they don’t want to touch this situation literally or figuratively.

Finally, Howard asks Drew what he’s doing here. Drew claims that he was hungry, saying that even cops eat, and somehow the three of us wind up back in Madison on Park like we’re the best of friends.

Nick comes by to tell us to order freely. Everything is on the house. He brings a bottle of wine, which Howard tries to decline as too generous, but Nick insists.

Drew, making some Everyman statement, orders a beer.

With some difficulty, Madison pulls up a chair and all of us reach to help her a moment too late. She waves away our belated attempts as if to say “It’s nothing,” and declines the offer to join us in any wine, our gazes connecting as she does. Then, as if brushing the moment aside, she asks me what I think of the decor.

I try to find something nice to say and mention the romantic air. Drew looks amused.

“You can be honest,” she says. “God knows, they’re always saying honesty is the best policy.”

“So, what kind of name is Madison, anyway?” Drew asks. I don’t know if he is somehow implying that the woman hasn’t come by the name honestly, or just making conversation. I never can tell exactly what Drew is up to, which is how I wound up in his bed in the first place.

Anyway, she explains that she was born on Madison Avenue to Yugoslavian immigrants. I want to say, “So there.”

I tell her the restaurant has good bones, but the colors are off, and so much more could be done for the place with very little expense. And then I tell her that I would be happy to do the work at cost since the restaurant would be a great showcase for my talents. I tell her that Bobbie and I are still establishing our credentials and that it would be worth it to us to give her a great deal.

“A win-win situation,” Howard calls it while Drew indicates that his phone is vibrating and that he has to go.

“Ask them about Joe Greco,” he whispers in my ear as he gets up to leave. I glare at him while he shakes hands with Howard and takes Madison’s uninjured left hand. “You take care now,” he tells her as she rises along with him and sees him out, greeting new diners at the door.

“So what did Nick want to talk to you about, anyway?” I ask Howard while he waxes on about braised remembrance farm greens, whatever they are.

“Wanted to tell me about the health inspector being murdered,” Howard says. “I told him I already knew from you.”

“Why did he want to tell you about Joe Greco?” I ask. Howard doesn’t ask me if that was the man’s name.

He just says that Nick always treats him like he’s “in the business,” what with him being a food critic and all and that I shouldn’t go reading anything into it, the way I always do. “It’s not like he had anything to do with it,” he adds.

“Fine,” I say, dropping it in favor of talking about decorating Madison on Park.

“Can you really keep the cost down?” he asks me. This from a man who is having caviar-encrusted salmon on the house.

“It doesn’t look like they’re hurting,” I tell him, imagining Scalamandré silks on the window with layer upon layer of passementerie.

Howard looks around the room. “Appearances,” he says, “can be deceiving.”

CHAPTER 4

Design Tip of the Day

“Family photos can personalize your space, but they have their place. Limit your office to two or three, and save your rogues’ gallery for a hallway or small wall where they can be studied in relation to one another and serve to reveal how you came to be who you are.”

—TipsFromTeddi.com

I hit “post” and the tip appears on my Web site. Unfortunately, the two photos that are supposed to accompany it disappear. If only it were that easy to dispose of a couple of the people in my life. And their baby-to-be.

Family, even ex-family, sure can make your life interesting. For example, there’s my mother, who certainly makes life…interesting.

And I wish Bobbie would stop laughing about what that mother of mine did, because she’s spitting soda on my kitchen counter and my laptop, and because what happened at my parents’ house is not really funny. But you be the judge. I stopped by my parents’ house to check on my mother—you know, see how she was doing after finding Joe Greco and all. She answered the door and told me that my father was “washing his hands.”

While I hit computer keys in an attempt to find what happened to the pictures of my bathroom wall and Bobbie’s husband, Mike’s, credenza, which are supposed to illustrate my point about family photos, Bobbie tells me she thinks that so far my story is “the first normal thing you’ve ever told me happened in your mom’s house.”

Of course, since it’s my mother’s house, it doesn’t stay normal for long. My father took forever, and it turned out he wasn’t in the bathroom, but in the kitchen, really washing his hands.

Bobbie whines that I already told her this part. She’s holding up earrings to her ears and checking out her reflection in the glass of my kitchen cabinets, seeking my opinion, which she will ultimately ignore. “Tell me again how your mother told him she bought him the ring.”

“And that he shouldn’t let me see it because I’m so poor and I’ll think she’s being extravagant?” I ask, copying and pasting the pictures back where they belong and indicating the dangly earrings over the studs while I tell the story. “It’s so totally my mother. So I tell my dad that she didn’t buy it, she stole it from a dead man. Which doesn’t help get the ring off his finger and now he’s desperate to get it off like it’s cursed or something. Only the harder he tries, the tighter it gets.”

“Windex,” Bobbie says in that matter-of-fact, doesn’t-everyone-know-this way she has. “They use it in jewelry shops when you can’t get the diamonds off your hand.” I tell her we could have used her at my mom’s house.

“Instead, we had to go to the emergency room because his finger was swelling up,” I tell her. “Four hours later, after my mother has made up half a dozen cock-and-bull stories for every nurse and physician in the hospital about how the ring was smuggled into the country by her Russian ancestors, he’s handing me the ring.”

“And he wasn’t furious with her?” Bobbie asks. I tell her we’ve all learned that there isn’t any point in being mad at my mother. It doesn’t bother her in the slightest and it just drives us insane.

“Anyway, now I’m the one who’s got to get rid of the thing,” I say, pushing Joe Greco’s diamond pinky ring across the kitchen counter toward Bobbie with one finger while I peruse the questions posted on my site—in the hopes that I can answer one of them. I’m amazed that people out there are actually seeking my advice. Especially when Bobbie opts for the diamond studs instead of the longer earrings.

“Sell it,” Bobbie says, flicking the ring back toward me as I settle on the question of how to remove blood stains from draperies. “You could use the money.”

I remind her it isn’t mine to sell and type in a question of my own. I hate to ask, but how does one get blood on the draperies in the first place? I know the right thing to do is to just turn it over to the police, but my mother’s had enough trouble with them, and then again, Drew is already calling it my murder. I push the ring back toward her and it dances off the counter onto the floor and caroms off the baseboard.

“But it would give you a good excuse to see him again,” Bobbie says while I stoop to pick it up off the floor.

I tell her that I’m afraid that is precisely how it will look. Like I took the ring so that I could “produce evidence” and get involved with him on a case again.

Frankly, if that didn’t seem so embarrassingly obvious, I’d consider it.

“And maybe it’s some family heirloom or something,” I say, though it looks like a pretty generic Zales sort of thing.

“Okay then, Miss Goody Two-Shoes, give it back to the dead guy, why don’t you?” Bobbie says as if she doesn’t care much one way or the other, while I type The best way to deal with blood stains on draperies is to take them to the dry cleaners and let a professional do it. However, if you are sure they are washable, you could try an enzyme presoak and then wash as usual. Good luck!

“Give it back? How?” I ask her, closing down Windows and shutting off the computer. “Put it in an envelope and mail it to heaven?”

“I don’t know,” Bobbie says. “Why don’t you just take it to his funeral and ask him if he still wants it.”

I don’t know what else there is to do but that. “Right. We have to give it back to him at the funeral.”

Bobbie chokes on her soda. “We?”

I tell her that if I’m going to put the ring on a dead man’s finger, the least she can do is come along as moral support.

She says she’ll bring bail money in her enormous new Michael Kors bag.

Four days later the police release the body and Bobbie and I traipse into Queens for Joe Greco’s funeral. Bobbie insists that I drive because she hates Queens Boulevard. “It’s city driving,” she claims. Somewhere in the Secret Handbook of Long Island Rules it explains when the Borough of Queens is the City (like when you have to drive through it) and when it’s not (like when you want to buy nice things—is there a Bloomingdale’s in Flushing, Queens? A Nordstrom’s in Astoria, Queens?).

In my purse, which sits on the floor of my Toyota by Bobbie’s feet, is Joe’s ring. Having had his ring for several days now, I’m on a first-name basis with Joe. Which is closer than I am to my mother, who isn’t talking to me because I’ve taken her booty. I keep telling her that the word has a different meaning these days, but since she isn’t talking to me she isn’t hearing me, either.

I know this whole thing is a mistake. But sometimes, even when you know something is going to go badly, there’s nothing to do but go ahead with it, so, despite all the misgivings, I join the line of cars waiting to turn into the parking lot at the Anthony Verderame Funeral Home in Flushing.

In front of me is a black Mercedes like Howard’s, only bigger. In front of that is a black Cadillac Esplanade. Behind me is a black sports car with a silver jaguar lunging for the tail of my dented red Toyota RAV4. Every other car appears to be a black Lincoln Town Car.

Bobbie and I exchange glances that question whether we could be any more conspicuous. The line crawls, and if our car is a tip-off that we don’t belong here, the preponderance of men in black suits with dark glasses heading for the funeral steps really cinches it.

“We should not do this,” Bobbie says emphatically. “This is a mistake.”

The line of cars turning into the lot has multiplied into two lanes and we are part of the inner one, next to the curb. We couldn’t leave if we wanted to. Which, despite the looks we are getting from the mourners, I don’t.

“At least we shouldn’t park here, so that we can make a quick getaway,” Bobbie says, and she has a point. Of course, there isn’t one available spot on the street as far as the eye can see.

I tell her she is worried about nothing. I don’t tell her that my heart is pounding so hard I can hardly breathe around it, that I am drenched from my armpits right down to my waist. I also don’t tell her that I still haven’t come up with a plan beyond getting in the door.

We park the car, leaving our keys with the attendant, and climb the steps to the chapel.

It occurs to me that the casket could be closed, an eventuality I hadn’t planned for. Of course, that assumes I’ve planned at all, beyond “bring the ring to the funeral.”

A man whose chest strains the confines of his size 48 suit welcomes us. He points out Joe’s mother. I expect an old Italian woman in a black dress with her stockings rolled below her knees. Mrs. Greco doesn’t disappoint. The man offers to take us over to pay our respects. It sounds like one of those offers you don’t refuse, and I nod my thanks.

“I’m so sorry,” I say to Joe’s mother, and of course, I am, because there must be nothing harder for a mother than to bury her child, no matter how old he is. I don’t tell her how I come to know this, how my mother’s life was ruined by my younger brother’s death and what it’s done to the rest of us, but I do tell her that I know. She tells me Joe was a good boy. A good son. And she introduces me to her other son, Frank, who is bigger than the usher who greeted us.

Frank, towering over me, asks me how I knew Joe.

“We’d see each other at The Steak-Out,” I say, and sense Frank’s body stiffen, so I add, “occasionally,” to sort of soften the statement.

“Wednesdays?” he asks. I don’t know what the right response is.

“Sometimes,” I say. “Just a lunch every now and then.”

“Like once a month,” he says. I get the sense that we are talking in code, only he’s a cryptographer and I’m talking Pig Latin.

His jaw is working overtime and the grip he has on my arm tightens as he leads me toward the casket. I look back at Bobbie, who gives me a what-do-I-do-now? face. “My friend,” I say, pointing toward Bobbie, but Frank’s hold on my elbow is firm and unyielding.

“You’ll want to say goodbye,” he says firmly, all but ordering me to look into the casket at poor, dead Joe. This is what I wanted, after all, isn’t it? The chance to look in that casket and replace Joe’s ring.

“Well, I…” I start to say, realizing I should have put the damn thing in my pocket instead of my purse. I pretend to tear up, though it’s not hard to force out tears when you’re scared to death, and I open my purse for a tissue.

Naturally, Frank offers me a clean handkerchief. I have to say that Mrs. Greco raised her boys right, damn her. I cough into the handkerchief until I sound like I’m about to die on the spot.

“I think I’ve a lozenge in my purse,” I tell Frank and root around until I find the ring.

I cough one more time and put the ring under my tongue as I do.

Now all I have to do is not swallow it before I look into the casket, cough it into my hand and then touch dear, dear Joe one last time.

I realize I can’t do this with my eyes closed, and so I look down at Joe. The hole in his head has been plugged up, and if my mother could see him now, spiffy in his gray suit, serene in repose, she’d tell me how wrong I was to let this one go.

Frank puts his arm around my shoulder. I smile at him, lips closed, ring beneath my tongue, and I wish he’d give me a little space. Sniffling, I bow my head and look over at Bobbie, who is still standing with Mrs. Greco. I signal her as best I can that I’m stuck with Frank at my side, and spit the ring into Frank’s handkerchief.

“Is your mother all right?” I ask Frank loudly, hoping that Bobbie will get the hint. I fan my face with the handkerchief to clue her in about what she can do, and the ring falls out. I look down and cover it with my foot, claiming it’s my lozenge.

Frank offers to get it, and just as he begins to bend down Bobbie starts fanning Mrs. Greco and calls Frank’s name. “Your mother,” she says, and Frank is gone as fast as a guy who makes Refrigerator Perry look small can vanish.

I bend down, pick up the ring, and lean over the coffin. “Frank,” I say, and then realize I’m bidding a fond farewell to the wrong Greco. “Joe,” I start again, reaching my hand into the coffin and touching Joe’s hands, which are placed low on his lap.

They are clammy. Cold. They feel waxen. I manage to slide the ring on as far as the first knuckle. And then two men approach the coffin from different sides.

Softly, patting his hands with one of mine, I say, “I’ll miss our lunches.”

“Not as much as he will,” the man near Joe’s head says.

I’m still holding Joe’s hands. My left hand is trying to push the ring on and my right is trying to hide what I’m doing. The ring refuses to budge. If I let go now, it will look like I was trying to get the ring off, not on.

If I don’t let go, with his hands basically on his crotch, it will look like I’m sexually assaulting a dead man.

I could try to faint, but I’m not the world’s best actress. Beside me, both men appear to be waiting for me to finish saying goodbye to Joe.

“Oh, my God,” I hear Bobbie shout. “She’s fainting!” I turn, along with everyone else, to see poor Mrs. Greco sliding to the floor.

I jam the ring as far as I can up Joe’s finger and turn.

“Get out now,” one of the men whispers at me, and I take off, grab Bobbie’s hand, and we run out of the chapel like Jimmy Choo is giving out free samples down on the corner.

The parking lot is hopeless, so we hobble a few extra blocks to catch the LIRR heading for home. Ordinarily, women from Long Island only use the railroad to get to and from the city, and even then, the rule is pretty much only for Wednesday matinees and only if you’re too old or too poor to drive in. Don’t get the wrong idea. There’s nothing wrong with the railroad. The cars are clean and the service is good. I don’t understand it, either. It’s just one of those Long Island Rules.

I figure we can take a cab home from the station and go back tomorrow for my car. And we hide in the ladies’ room until we hear them announce the train.

“How in the world did you get Joe’s mother to faint?” I ask Bobbie after we’ve caught our breath. She claims that luck was just with us.

As we slip into the railroad car and the doors slide closed behind us, I notice a man in a black suit watching us. He rubs at his nose and I see there are two fingers missing on his right hand.

I tell Bobbie it looks like our luck has just run out.

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