Whose Number Is Up, Anyway? Read online

  “You didn’t, but I did,” my father says into the extension. “If that’s what she wants. Leave her be, for God’s sake, June.”

  I love my father.

  Not that I don’t love my mother—I just don’t like her very much.

  My mother continues as if my father hasn’t said anything at all. “Mildred Waynick said you barricaded the freezer door and were in there alone with him for twenty minutes. And you weren’t cold when you came out.”

  “Leave her be, June,” my father says without enthusiasm—probably because he knows, after all these years, that his words are falling on deaf ears.

  “Did Mildred mention there was a dead body in there?” I ask, checking on angles to make sure that the light won’t reflect into a player’s eyes when he’s taking a pool shot. “Not what you’d call romantic, exactly.”

  “It must have been very upsetting,” my father says. I hear him tsking. Or he could be cleaning between his teeth with a matchbook cover.

  “Teddi’s used to it by now,” my mother snaps back. “And it gave her an excuse to see Detective Dreamboat.”

  “My, my. He’s moving up in the world,” I say, putting my hand just under my breasts to show Mark how high the bar should be. He gestures for me to stand still while he measures. Yeah, fat chance. “What happened to Spoonbreath?”

  “Nothing bad enough, it seems,” my mother counters.

  I remind her that she’s caught me at work and tell her that I’ve got to go. Not that this stops her.

  “Who were you on the phone with before I called?” she asks. “I got voice mail.”

  I tell her it was a wrong number, which, although true, doesn’t satisfy her. So I admit it was Mel Gibson, out of rehab and looking for a nice Jewish girl.

  She makes an ugly noise and moves on. “You joke, but my reputation gets dragged through the mud along with yours,” she says dramatically. “I have a daughter who decorates bowling alleys, shops in goyish food stores and lusts after cops. And she lies to me. Can you just tell me what it was I did to you that was so awful, so terrible, that you need to punish me like this?”

  “I’m earning an honest living here, Mother. There’s no cross over King Kullen’s doors and I’m not lusting after anyone.” Okay, so that part’s a lie. “What did I do to deserve this?”

  “Be that way, Teddi.” I hear her exhale her cigarette smoke. “Go ahead. I won’t even tell you about the lottery ticket I bought for you. The mega-millions one they drew last night.”

  My heart stops. “What about it?” I ask her, having heard this morning on the radio that it wasn’t claimed yet. Though they also said the winning ticket—for thirty-seven million dollars—was purchased in Plainview and I know that there is no way my mother would shop in Plainview, just a stone’s throw (and a step down, according to her) from where I live in Syosset. Not even for a lottery ticket.

  “You didn’t win,” she tells me while I look at the phone with utter amazement. “But you could have, so don’t blame me. At least I tried to fix your life. Imagine the man you could get if you’d won that lottery.”

  I tell her to keep trying, and until she wins me either a fortune or a man, I better keep working. And that includes doing bowling alleys and any other places that will pay me.

  “Will brothels be next, Teddi? Or funeral homes? Do you get some sort of perverse pleasure embarrassing me like this? Are you getting back at me?” my mother asks. “Is that it?”

  She probably says a few other nasty things, but I don’t know, because I’ve already pressed End.

  Bobbie opens her mouth to weigh in on Drew Scoones’s place in my life, but I tell her we have work to do. Between Bobbie’s I-don’t-smoke-anymore-but-I-still-deserve-a-break breaks, her shopping, her trips to her husband, Mike’s, chiropractic office in the middle of the day to find this patient’s file or that one’s X-rays, it’s no wonder she occasionally forgets we’re actually working.

  She was not the one who was here until nearly midnight last night, measuring and leaving notes for Mark so that he could get the Formica cut at the lumber yard and ready to install before L.I. Lanes opened today. She didn’t have to fend off two drunk guys who didn’t understand any part of no even after the jukebox played Lorrie Morgan’s song twice.

  She wasn’t the one who locked up the place and had to walk to her car alone in the dark, her heels clicking on the asphalt so loudly in her ears that it nearly drowned out the sound of the men arguing in front of the bagel shop.

  I close my eyes and try to picture them because, if my mind isn’t playing tricks on me, they were The Spare Slices and they were pretty angry.

  “You okay?” Mark asks, taking my elbow. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  “I may have,” I say, trying to remember what they were arguing about.

  Whatever it was, Drew needs to know.

  “I’ve got to call him,” I say, and neither Mark nor Bobbie needs to ask who.

  “What a surprise,” Bobbie says, rolling her eyes and holding out her hand, palm up, to Mark.

  “Thanks,” Mark tells me sarcastically, taking out a five and putting it in Bobbie’s hand as I dial Drew’s number from memory.

  “I just remembered something,” I say when he answers the phone.

  “What’s that?” Drew asks.

  “Okay, we need to talk…”

  There’s a beat before he answers me. “Sure,” he says. “Tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Anyone who has ever repainted a wall or replaced a carpet or even gotten a new set of kitchen pots knows one thing just leads inexorably to another. The bright walls make the ceiling look dull. The new light to make the ceiling brighter reveals the wear spots in the carpet. The carpet installation wrecks the molding. As long as the base molding is being replaced…

  —TipsFromTeddi.com

  I may not love decorating a bowling alley, but I have to admit there are certain perks to it. Like that the owner has agreed to let my kids and their friends bowl free whenever I’m on the job. This makes my eleven-year-old son, Jesse, very happy. It ought to make all the moms in the neighborhood happy, too, since I’m making sure the place is really kid-friendly so they’ll all have a viable alternative to the usual weekend mall-ratting.

  L.I. Lanes isn’t just a cheaper way for the kids to spend a Saturday afternoon, it’s also only a good, hearty walk from our house. Not that Dana, my thirteen-going-on-thirty daughter will admit it’s walkable. She’s the original princess, requiring chauffeuring everywhere. If she’d been born a century or two ago in China, she’d be demanding her feet be bound so that no one could expect her to go as far as the refrigerator to get her own ice cream.

  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 ta
lk 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.<
br />
  “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.