Читать книгу Whose Number Is Up, Anyway? - Stevi Mittman - Страница 9

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

—TipsFromTeddi.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which I do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Outta respect for the dead,” he says.

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

“We should do that,” Dave says.

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

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

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

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

“Win?” I ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least someone is trying to tell me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mega millions,” he corrects.

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

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

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

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

“Fine,” he says. “Stand there.”

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

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

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

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

And he does.

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

“Max.”

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

“But—” I start to say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I ask what makes him so sure.

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