Whose Number Is Up, Anyway?

“You could have called me,” I say.

“You’re the one who set tomorrow for our talk and then flew the coop, chickie,” he says. “I figured the ball was in your court.”

“Detective?” the uniform says. “There’s something you ought to see in here.”

Drew gives me a look that amounts to in or out?

He could be talking about the investigation, or about our relationship.

Bobbie tries to steer me away. Mark’s fists are balled. Drew waits me out, knowing I won’t be able to resist what might be a murder investigation.

Finally he turns and heads for the cooler.

And, like a puppy dog, I follow.

Bobbie grabs the back of my shirt and pulls me to a halt.

“I’m just going to show him something,” I say, yanking away.

“Yeah,” Bobbie says, pointedly looking at the buttons on my blouse. The two at breast level have popped. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

THE GUY IN THE FREEZER looks very familiar, but I can’t quite place him. I mean the dead one. The other guy I know so well that it’s hard not to just pick up where we left off.

If where we left off hadn’t been a precipice I wasn’t ready to fall from.

“You wanna tell me what happened?” Drew asks.

I tell him about how I should have gone to Waldbaum’s for the brisket, but that since I’m working next door…And here I segue into how the original decorator quit and I am finishing up her work and how I don’t get paid if I don’t get it done in time for their grand opening in just over a month—though they aren’t closed during the renovations so “Grand Opening” is really a misnomer—

He gives me the get-to-the-point look. It’s one of those benefits of knowing someone well: they don’t really have to use words.

“So I came here because it would save time. I thought I could pick up the meat first thing this morning, put it in the fridge at the alley and then take it home with me tonight. This month is all about saving time, because of the grand-opening thing—”

He knows I babble when I’m nervous, so he’s being patient. He only sighs rather than signaling me to hurry up.

“And there was no brisket in the case, so I asked the woman who was putting out the chicken breasts—the cutlet kind, sliced thin—if she had any in the back and she went to get some and, well—” I point at the guy on the floor.

Drew looks as though, when he asked what happened, he really meant it in the larger sense—the us sense.

I tell him that I’ve seen the guy before. He isn’t impressed. I tell him, no, really recently, only I can’t place him.

“Picture him upright,” Drew says. “Blinking. Maybe behind the meat counter?” he suggests sarcastically.

Gently two cops turn the body over. Across the back of the man’s shirt, through the ice that coats it, I see some bowling pins and a ball. Above the flying pins are the words The Spare Slices.

I gasp.

“Bad taste? Your mother wouldn’t approve?” Drew asks testily as he crouches over the body. Not surprisingly, there’s no love lost between Drew and my mother.

“Last night,” I say, remembering seeing the team at the bowling alley. They stood out because Max, the deli guy I know from Waldbaum’s, the one who always gives my youngest daughter, Alyssa, extra slices of Sweet Muenster while I order cold cuts, was one of them. “I saw him last night.”

“Really?” Drew asks, like this would be the sort of thing a person might make up. “When was that, exactly?”

“All night,” I say, then realize how that sounds. “All evening. Until about eleven-thirty.” I’m about to explain that I was working on the grand opening and this guy was bowling, but Drew doesn’t ask and I decide to let him make his own assumptions. I think, alive, Joey wasn’t bad-looking. A little old for me, but hey, I’m getting older every day myself.

“I’d like you to come down to the station,” he says, and I think he’s having too much fun busting my chops. I say something that sounds a lot like in your dreams—if you happen to be listening carefully.

Seems the two uniforms are. Their jaws drop.

Drew lets it roll off his back. He comes to his feet and takes my chin in his hand. “You, my dear, are a material witness. You may have been the last person to see your date alive.”

AFTER EXPLAINING that the man was not with me, but with an entire bowling league, I’m released. I’m back at the bowling alley when my cell phone, announcing a call from my mother, plays the theme from Looney Tunes.

“How do you do it?” I ask her while Mark gestures for me to show him how high I want the new dark green Formica-that-looks-like-granite paneling to go.

“I have spies,” she says matter-of-factly, as I place my hand about hip high on the wall. We’re going ultra modern for the billiards area, with brushed steel above faux-marble wainscoting. Wouldn’t have been my choice, but all the materials were already ordered when Percy Michaels decided she was too good to decorate bowling alleys and took a powder.

That’s when Teddi the scavenger Bayer, the hungriest (and some say most dangerous) decorator on Long Island, swooped in. I get a premium if I finish the job on time and nothing for my end of the work if I don’t. And as of today, nothing seems only too real.

“They’re everywhere, so don’t think you can get away with seeing that Detective Spoonbreath again. I didn’t lend you my condo for two weeks so that you could come home and pick up where you left off with him.”

“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?”