What Goes With Blood Red, Anyway?

“So you’d say that their marriage was not exactly made in heaven?” he asks.

“Elise got along with maybe three people, and Jack wasn’t one of them. I don’t know who started the cheating, but it was like they were in a competition. I know she slept with one of their neighbors, a man who Jack owed money to. And I know that he slept with one of Elise’s friends.”

He waits for me to continue, sensing that there is more, and of course, there is.

Not able to look him in the eye, I tell my salad that, “She kept a score sheet. I saw it once—”

His eyes are penetrating and I refuse to look at him. I’m not guilty of anything, but I feel like he’s thinking that if I’d be friends with someone who would do that kind of thing, maybe I would. I suppose it’s no more of a stretch than me thinking every man has the potential to do what Rio did. And yes, I know there’s a lesson in here, but frankly I’m not really interested in it. My wounds haven’t healed yet, and I’m not about to start picking at the scabs.

He asks if I know where she kept the list, but I don’t. It wasn’t in the notebooks.

And then it occurs to me what was missing in Elise’s kitchen.

He asks if I can remember any names on the cheat sheet. “There were initials,” I say, but I’m trying to decide if I should tell him about the notebooks.

He asks if that’s all. There must be something about the way I say things. People always pick up vibes. He knows if he waits long enough I’ll divulge more.

“There were grades,” I say. “A, B…I don’t know if they were for performance or you know, like importance or something.” I have a feeling that my cheeks are redder than the checks on the tablecloth. I excuse myself to go to the ladies’ room while he ponders what Elise’s criteria might have been.

In the bathroom I dial up Bobbie on my old cell because I still haven’t programmed the new one my father gave me. “I think all her Shit Lists were gone,” I say.

“What are the bets Teddi Bayer and Bobbie Lyons are on them?” Bobbie asks.

“Seriously, Bobbie, there’s incriminating stuff in there. People’s darkest secrets.”

“Just Elise’s,” Bobbie says. “Right?”

“Wrong. She had plenty of dirt on other people. She had stuff that other people did that somehow she knew about. People who bought clothes at Saks, wore them and then returned them. People who left restaurants without paying.” Bobbie wants to know who, but instead of telling her I throw out a line to see if she’ll bite. “People, happily married people, who had affairs.”

Bobbie and I never ever mention her mistake. I don’t think we could be easy around each other if we acknowledged it. I don’t know who she cheated with and I don’t want to know. I know she felt she had to even the score after Mike had the affair and that she did.

“So how did you wind up with a friend like that?” Bobbie asks. Does she mean a friend who was happily married and had an affair, or does she mean Elise? “Teddi? You there?”

“Elise wasn’t a friend, she was a client. And I don’t know if I should tell Detective Scoones about the notebooks. I mean, I’m pretty sure she made some horrible accusations that could ruin people’s lives. Everyone would hate her for the rest of her—” I stop myself.

“—and even after that,” Bobbie adds.

“They could just all be lies,” I say, “but they could still do an awful lot of damage.”

Bobbie asks if I’m sure the notebooks are gone. “Only one way to be sure,” I say.

“You aren’t thinking of going back there?” Bobbie asks, and there is a slight quiver in her voice. I don’t know which one of us she is scared for.

I tell her I’ve gotta go, the detective is waiting, and I close the phone while she’s warning me that I could get into trouble.

When I return to the table Drew asks if everything is all right. Remind me never to play poker.

“So you were telling me about this list,” he says. This is my chance to come clean.

“What would you do if you found it?” I ask.

He gives me that intent look that demands that I tell him the truth. But first, I demand an answer.

“Up to the Department, I guess,” he says. Is that a warning? That he’d have to turn it over and it would be out of his hands?

I’ve already told him about the Jack and Elise Scorecard, so I reiterate that there were grades on it.

“And you said the grades might have been for importance?”

I explain that, first off, Jack had powerful clients and friends. There was a celebrity element. And then there was a one-upmanship sort of thing, a what-would-hurt-the-most, be-the-most-vindictive thing. Because I feel I’m withholding information, I wind up fumbling for the right words, hoping he won’t ask me for an example, which, of course, he does.

“I’m not saying she did this,” I say, making myself clear. “But like if Jack had a brother and they were sort of rivals and she were to sleep with the brother…”

He asks if Jack has a brother. I remind him it was just an example. He asks if Jack knew about the list, but I have to admit that I don’t know. He gives me a little smile and asks who was winning, and I’m not sure if he is joking or not.

“So your theory is that he was losing? Or maybe tiring of the game?” It’s a good question, except I don’t really have a theory. Just a suspect. And a burning need to get myself into Elise Meyers’s kitchen one more time.

“Maybe it was the only way he could win,” I suggest.

“Maybe,” he agrees. “But why hit her on the head when there are so many less traceable, less obvious ways to do her in?”

I ask what he means.

“Well, poison, for one,” he says. “A slow, untraceable poison that he could have, for example, put into capsules that she was taking anyway for some other condition.”

I ask if they found poison in the capsules that were on Elise’s floor.

“It was just an example,” he says.

Yeah. Right.

CHAPTER 4

Design Tip of the Day

Custom furniture is all in the details. Which means that if you can add some details to ready-made, you can customize your own. Fabric trims are available by the yard in any fabric store, and metal trims can be found in hardware stores or lighting fixture stores. Wrap the chair seat support in metal, hang some beads or chandelier tears from it and you’ve got a WOW look for only a few dollars and a little time.

—From TipsfromTeddi.com

At home, my parents are playing cards on my hand-painted green-and-white-checked kitchen table with the cute chairs I covered and trimmed to match with green glass beads that hang just below the seats. My father tells me that Alyssa is asleep and my mother announces that someone named Howard has called.

“Twice,” Jesse adds while I tell my parents that there really isn’t any need for them to stay over.

My mother frets about how it will look if she “abandons me in my hour of need,” but my father can take a hint and he all but pushes her out the door, saying he’s sure I’ll hear from her in the morning.

No kidding.

No sooner are they out the front door than Bobbie knocks on the back one. Jesse lets her in and she flips on my coffeepot and takes June’s vacated seat at the table. This is Jesse’s cue to watch TV in his own room, like his sister.

“I’ve got to get in there,” I tell her. “Maybe the books are still sitting there.”

“And if they are?” she asks.

“Then maybe the police missed them.” I know this isn’t the case. I was there before they came. I’d have seen them take them, wouldn’t I?

“And if they did?”

I don’t answer her. Bobbie’s husband Mike would be devastated, even though his affair was what started the whole thing. Frankly, I don’t know if they’d survive. I know that I’ve got to get those books before the police do.

Bobbie sighs the sigh of defeat. “I called Parkside Chapel. Jack’s going to be there in the morning to make the funeral arrangements.”

“I’ll just look in through the patio doors,” I promise her. “I won’t even have to go inside. Probably.”

She rolls her eyes at me and mumbles something about how I shouldn’t get involved. And then she puts her hands out like I’m supposed to fork over something.

“What?” I ask.

“Tell me about dinner with The Handsome Detective,” she says. “Tell me everything!” While I am going over everything in minute detail, which I don’t mind doing because getting Bobbie’s take on things is always worth the effort, I casually mention that while I was out with the detective, which I am very careful not to make sound like any sort of date, Howard Rosen has called twice.

Bobbie picks up my phone and tells Dana, who of course is talking on it, to hang up and go to bed. A short argument ensues, with Bobbie telling her to for God’s sake, pretend to go to bed and use her cell phone, then hands the receiver to me.

“Call him right now,” she orders. Bobbie has been trying to get me to date since the morning I came out of the lawyer’s office an almost-free woman. “Men who can take you to The Polo Grill don’t come along every day, Ted.”

I don’t want to ask what kind of man needs his sister to fix him up, so I don’t say anything.

Bobbie raises her hands like two scales. “Christiano’s…” She lowers her left hand slightly. “Polo Grill…” Her right hand plummets down and hits the table.

I put my hands up to weigh my options in response. “A sexy detective with very long fingers,” I say, letting my left hand drift slowly down while Bobbie giggles. “An unknown quantity with an unlimited expense account.” My right hand begins to lower. “Being responsible for myself and not having a man mucking up my life—” I raise both hands toward the ceiling “—priceless!”

Bobbie reminds me that every man is not Rio. She has completely forgiven and forgotten when it comes to Mike, and it only serves to remind me how important it is that I find Elise’s damn notebooks before they wind up on the front page of Newsday. And she warns me that I am beginning to sound cynical when it comes to men.

I’m afraid that she is right, and so I reach for the phone to call Howard Rosen, meal ticket extraordinaire. This is supposed to prove I’m not cynical, but I’m not sure how.

You might think that my dialing a potential date would mean that Bobbie would leave, but then you wouldn’t know Bobbie. She sits, her short, L’Oréal Féria–red hair framing her little girl face, her dark eyes sparkling, her chin perched on her folded hands, and she smiles while she waits for me to dial.

Howard answers on the first ring, before I’ve figured out what I want to say. He is funny and pleasant. I am morose and finally admit that it’s been a bad day, which he apparently knows from talking to Helene. While he tries to convince me that the only way we are going to get her off our case is to go out once and report that it was awful, Bobbie gets up, kisses me on the top of my head and slips out the back door.

He tells me to get some sleep and that he’ll call again in a few days. If that’s all right, he adds. I want to tell him it’s not, but I can’t think of any reason why not and it just seems simpler to agree. I picture myself at the altar next to a man with no face, saying “I don’t have any reason not to.”

I also imagine facing Helene after Howard lets her know that he called and I blew him off.

I tell him he can call and then kick myself up to bed, where I sleep more soundly than I expect to and wake only when the phone rings. Gayle Weiss, the neighbor who hooked me up with Elise to begin with, is calling to give me the details about Elise’s funeral, which is scheduled for tomorrow.

“I just can’t believe it,” she says four or five times. “Elise Meyers! So what do the police say? Was it murder?” Gayle has one of those thick Long Island accents everyone likes to imitate, and she leaves the r off murder, making it murdah.

“I really can’t say,” I reply, knowing that isn’t going to wash. “I mean, I don’t think they’ve made an official determination yet. It only happened yesterday, Gayle.”

“So they don’t know the murdahrah,” she says, as if using r’s costs extra. “She was hit over the head, right?”

I tell her that I think that was what happened. I am cradling the phone between my ear and my shoulder while I wander down the hall to make sure that my kids have got themselves up and off to school.

“And you and I know it was Jack, right?” Gayle says, without waiting for me to answer. “Listen. My David and her Jack are friends, so I can’t really get involved, but—”

In the kitchen I find a note on the table written by Dana and signed by Jesse as well, telling me that they put Alyssa on the bus, that they hope I’m all right, that they let me sleep because of “you know” and that they’ll come right home from school in case I need anything. I am so grateful my genes outweighed their father’s that I send a kiss skyward while I give half my attention to Gayle.

“You know Marvin Katzmann? The jeweler?” she asks.

I stop fussing with the coffeepot to listen.

“The police should talk to him.” I wait, my French vanilla decaf in hand. She says nothing more, which is so uncharacteristic I fear for her life.

“Gayle?” I say. “Why should the police talk to him?”

“I’m just saying,” she says, “that they should.”

“But—”

“I’m just saying,” she repeats. “You wanna go to the funeral together? We could go to the diner for some coffee before the service.”

I tell her that Bobbie is coming with me and she suddenly remembers an errand she has to run on her way to the funeral home because she and Bobbie are like two shades of green. Separately they are each fine but together they inevitably clash.

I call Bobbie’s and get no answer. I guess I’m on my own.

I slip into what I suppose a cat burglar in Woodbury would wear at midmorning: a Ralph Lauren skirt I scored at T.J. Maxx and crisp white blouse, something no one would notice on Remsen Court. I rehearse my excuse if Jack is there. I’m just coming to see if there is anything I can do to help? The man doesn’t like me or my decorating so I’m not too confident that would work. I think I left something in the kitchen? What if he tells the police I came back? They’ll think I’m trying to cover my tracks or whatever it is that criminals do when they return to the scene of the crime.

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