Whose Number Is Up, Anyway?

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.