Whose Number Is Up, Anyway?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which I do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Outta respect for the dead,” he says.

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

“We should do that,” Dave says.

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

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

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

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

“Win?” I ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least someone is trying to tell me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mega millions,” he corrects.

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

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

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

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

“Fine,” he says. “Stand there.”

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

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

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

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

And he does.

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

“Max.”

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

“But—” I start to say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I ask what makes him so sure.

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

CHAPTER 5

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

—TipsFromTeddi.com

“This is a joke, right?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do I have to tell you?

I didn’t think so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, wait.

Let me think.

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

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

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

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

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

I’m the one with the degree.

Bobbie’s the one with panache.

We’re a good team.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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