guys—and you’re looking for a warm place for him to sleep tonight. The dead guy’s girlfriend was here and takes off down the fire escape, and you think
I picked at a chicken and sun-dried tomato salad that wasn’t half bad. Note to self, ask Babe to put this on the menu at the Paradise Diner.
“Not that it isn’t always lovely to see you, Lucy, and it
Lucy had been off on another adventure. This time to a spa that guaranteed a seven-pound weight loss to guests who paid a tidy sum for a one-week stay that included a secret Mayan treatment.
“I’m keeping the world safe from unscrupulous and unhealthy diet factories,” she said, one arm raised, the other hand plucking a rippled chip from Jamal’s deluxe burger platter.
“Does it work?” I asked.
“Of course it does. The Mayans didn’t have a Walgreens or Burger King, much less a decent restaurant in sight. They barely feed you and what they do let you eat and drink has you running to the bathroom all day.”
She turned to J. C. and Jamal. “Excuse me … but somehow I feel as if we’ve fast-forwarded and it’s okay to mention bodily functions even at this early stage of our relationships.” They agreed.
“No probs,” Jamal said. “They talk about manure all the time at the flower show.”
Lucy didn’t recommend the program unless you were going to an awards show or an event where your old boyfriend was expected with his new and younger girlfriend, but even then the weight would all come back the minute you ate a normal meal or drank a glass of water.
“There was more smuggling going on at that spa than there was in … I don’t know.”
“Tijuana, dear,” J. C. said. “So you left early?”
“Hell, no. Seven pounds is seven pounds. I wanted to see that lower number on the scale, even if it only lasted for a few hours. Look, I have proof.” She pulled a cell phone out of the waistband of her pants and, after pressing a few buttons, passed around the still-warm phone so we could all be witnesses to her success. “We weren’t supposed to bring cell phones—how ridiculous is that? How could I not take a picture?”
“Nice pedicure,” I said, handing the phone back.
Lucy yanked off a mukluk and wiggled five perfectly painted toes in a color I would have called Jungle Red. She looked around the room for approval.
“This is okay, right? I haven’t offended anyone. I thought having already discussed the smallest room in the house…”
She replaced her boot and looked at our plates to see what else she could nibble on, clearly subscribing to the “if it’s on someone else’s plate, the calories don’t count” rule. This time it was a pickle slice from me.
“I know this probably isn’t the hot issue—and I’ll admit I haven’t done much decorating upstairs—but what’s the deal with the duct tape and the plastic tablecloths in my bedroom? Did you guys have a party? Not that I mind, but poor Harold will be crushed to have missed it.”
“Who’s Harold?” I asked. It was unlike Lucy not to share romantic details.
“I never told you about Harold?” she said. I shook my head.
It turned out Harold was Harold Bergstein, the one neighbor she had connected with. He was a former editor at
“I don’t usually read it,” she said. “Too many articles and not enough pictures.”
Harold lived around the corner and had a direct line of sight into Lucy’s bedroom. Given the fact that he was in his eighties, Lucy had never minded the occasional fashion advice in her mailbox and had even left her card once so she could make sure she got Harold’s expert opinion right before going out.
“It’s a joke. C’mon, the guy can barely see, for Pete’s sake. I bumped into him once at the Food Emporium with his caregiver—unless that was some other old guy giving me the eye.”
Did I want to know that my best friend was an exhibitionist? Or that she was dancing around in her undies, as the cops had suggested? For an old guy who might have a heart attack if she modeled some of the things I saw hanging in her closet? Lucy didn’t see the problem with it.
“He’s a friend. All he can see are the colors anyway. I tested him once. All he ever says is, ‘I like the green’ or ‘I like the black.’ He’s very partial to red.”
Sounded like Guy Anzalone was off the hook as my Peeping Tom.
“I have nothing to be ashamed of,” Lucy said.
Jamal thought it was a riot. J. C. wasn’t so sure. “No, dear, you don’t, but we’ve had enough personal revelations for one evening.”
She was right. We needed to decide what we were going to do next. In an attempt to redeem herself Lucy suggested she call a friend of hers, a fledgling novelist who taught writing at Penn State, to see if she knew anything about a professor who sounded like the one Emma had described.
“He may not even exist—that young girl probably wouldn’t know the truth if it came up and bit her on the butt.” J. C. was still fuming over the lattice she’d have to repair.
“Maybe not, but the best lies are the ones that have a grain of truth in them,” I said. “Lucy, do you mind calling her?”
“We’re overdue for a phone call anyway. Sarah knows everyone. If this guy was within a hundred miles of her, she either knew him, dated him, or knew someone who did.”
Fifty
Like Emma the night before, Jamal Harrington must have decided he needed to get out of Dodge, because the next morning he was gone. No note. Nothing was missing. He’d repositioned the stone planter that held J. C.’s
“Not easy to do in broad daylight, much less the early morning light of a gray day,” J. C. said. We stood in her apartment and she stretched to find something good to say about the boy’s unexplained disappearance. Even Lucy, who’d just met him, didn’t want to believe he’d been guilty of anything other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Probably his sympathetic reaction to the Harold story.
It was the last day of the flower show and I still had a job to do, despite whatever else was going on and a restless night on Lucy’s sofa. I hadn’t been able to shake the unsettling feeling there was another old dear who had a direct line of sight into Lucy’s living room and images of me tossing and turning were going to wind up on some geezer’s YouTube page.
I had five hours to sell the rest of Primo’s creations, or otherwise pack them up and get them ready for shipping. I hadn’t heard from Hank Mossdale, so I enlisted Lucy’s help. She promised to arrive just after the doors opened to the public. I found Emma’s fake badge on the coffee table and told Lucy to flash it with her customary aplomb if anyone gave her trouble.
“Please, I’ve gotten into A-list parties with attitude and a smile. I think I can handle the security guards at a flower show.” She pocketed the badge. Perversely I almost told her to look for one guard in particular when she showed up—Rolanda Knox. Lucy took a bag of popcorn from the fridge and shoved it in the microwave. So that explained the abundance of Orville Redenbacher’s.
“Popcorn for breakfast?” I said.
“Why not? It’s a grain.”
By the time I left Lucy’s, my head was filled with theories about Jamal and Emma. Where had they gone? Was Jamal meeting her? Even if he and Emma weren’t involved in the murder, they were brushing up against some ruthless people who probably were. I didn’t want to think either of them was involved in murder, especially Jamal. He seemed like a good kid, but was I prejudiced just because he was a gardener? If he’d been a basketball player or a rap artist, would I be more likely to think he was guilty?
I closed the lobby door behind me and tucked my chin into my jacket against the damp spring morning. As I did, I glimpsed a scene reminiscent of the old television show
