Whose Number Is Up, Anyway?. Stevi Mittman

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ