What Goes With Blood Red, Anyway?. Stevi Mittman

to you now that you’ve had some time to come to yourself.”

      “And you can’t get in trouble for this?” I ask.

      “For what? Eating?” he says, trying to push me into defining it as something more than that.

      I fumble with a few words and then, more forcefully, say that I don’t think there’s anything else, though I have thought about what might be important. I don’t tell him that I’ve also thought a lot about what might not be, like the rants in Elise’s journals.

      “Well, let’s just grab a little something to eat, have a couple of beers, talk it out a bit,” he says. “Sometimes a little memory jog can produce the smallest thing. It’s always the smallest things that solve the biggest cases, you know.

      “And you’re sharp,” he says. “Like about the dog knocking over the pills, and the alarm.”

      “You knew all that,” I say, not about to be swayed by flattery. “Why pretend otherwise?”

      He smiles shyly. “You never know. Sometimes it pays to be dumb.”

      “Play dumb,” I correct. “Like on Columbo, when he asks all the murderers ‘Why’ and they come up with explanations that innocent people wouldn’t bother with?”

      “I’ve got a wrinkled raincoat in the trunk,” he says with a shrug.

      He pulls out of the driveway, his hand on the seat behind me as he backs up. If I sit any more erect, I’ll be kissing the windshield. He drives up to Christiano’s, a little Italian place in town that is supposedly the little Italian restaurant that Billy Joel made famous. Actually, I heard that after they’d put it on their menu and everything, one night Billy did a concert at Nassau Coliseum and refuted the whole rumor, just like that.

      Everyone still believes it though. Sometimes people have a hard time letting go of mythology.

      Anyway, they are nice to the regulars there, and I’ve been going there for years. The hostess’s eyebrows rise when she sees me without the kids or Bobbie. I suppose it’s Drew that’s raising her eyebrows. She says something like, “Don’t you look nice?” and gives me a covert thumbs-up behind Drew’s back as she takes us to a secluded table in the corner.

      On the way, we pass half a dozen families I know, and they all notice Drew, and frankly I enjoy every minute of it. They don’t know that Drew isn’t interested in me, but only in what I might know.

      For that matter, I don’t know that, either. I don’t stop at any of their tables and I know that at least three of the women will call Bobbie before I get home and just casually mention that they saw me. Is that Teddi’s cousin from L.A. I saw her with? So what are you having for dinner? I was just at Christiano’s. Yeah, I saw Teddi there…

      He asks if I have any more pictures of the Meyers’s place, and I tell him that they are in my computer and that I can forward them to him at the precinct. He tells me his e-mail is on the card he gave me yesterday. I offer to give him my e-mail address, but he says he’s already got it.

      Once we’ve ordered (linguini with clam sauce for him, a salad, which I won’t touch, for me), I ask if he ever thought I really was the murderer. He says they aren’t sure yet that there’s even been a murder. That’s the second time he’s evaded answering me about whether I’m a suspect.

      “Do they know anything?” I ask.

      “Well, they do know that she took a blow to the side of the head, just above the ear, and that the blow is what caused her death.”

      “So then they do know she was murdered.” A waiter fills our water glasses and deposits a basket of warm garlic bread that smells divine and that I won’t touch because who wants bad breath? We are silent until he leaves, and then Drew says that she could have hit her head on the edge of the counter.

      When I look at him skeptically he adds, “Okay. The M.E. says it’s consistent with being struck by a blunt object, like a metal pipe, or—”

      “—a faucet.” So then, it’s true. I’m the one who bought the murder weapon. I paid for it. Well, technically, I suppose Jack Meyers has the bill, but I carried it in, I left it just where someone could pick it up and whack it into a living, breathing person’s skull. Elise’s skull.

      “You okay?” Drew is half out of his seat, a hand on my arm. One of us is listing badly to one side. Apparently, it’s me.

      I put my hand on my chest. “My faucet killed her.” I don’t want to think it’s amusement I see in Drew’s eyes, that cops really are as hardened to matters of life and death as Jerry Orbach always made them seem. I think it is.

      “I don’t suppose you were wearing gloves when you brought it in?” he asks.

      “Oh my God,” I say, as I realize that my fingerprints are on the murder weapon.

      He tells me to relax—as if that’s possible—and explains that my prints will serve to show whether or not anyone touched it after me, and whether they then wiped my prints off along with theirs.

      “Not that we’ve found it,” he says. “Yet. But we will.”

      I ask if he’s going to fingerprint me, hiding my hands because of those two missing nail tips.

      “Got ’em, sweetheart,” he says. I’ve never been fingerprinted, not even after the whole Rio fiasco, and it must show on my face. “The bottle of Scotch,” he says. “Can you believe the maid must have dusted the bottle? Yours were the only ones on it. They matched the ones on the glass you gave Jack Meyers. Of course, now we’ve got his, too.”

      I decide that they did that to isolate Jack’s prints, and not because they suspect me. To be sure that this is the case, and because this is a murder investigation and there are things I know that the police should know, I decide I need to fill him in on a few things.

      I take a deep breath. I do not like to carry tales, but… Our dinner comes and again we are silent until we are alone.

      “You should understand…” I tell him off the bat “…that I am not a fan of cheating husbands. And that I might be overly suspicious and prejudiced, because of…well, my experience.”

      “I know,” he says, and I get the feeling that this murder wasn’t the only investigating he did this afternoon. He nods, like yeah, I saw your file. I nod, too. Fine. I have nothing to be ashamed of, except my naiveté.

      “Okay, so you know that I think Jack probably did it, alibi or not. I mean, even if it checks out, which I doubt it will, he could have hired someone, right?”

      Drew’s elbow knocks his knife off the table and he bends down to pick it up. He makes a fairly big deal of getting the waiter’s attention to replace it, and it seems to me that it’s all some sort of diversionary tactic. I think about how you’re always hearing about hit men.

      Only if Jack had hired a hit man to kill Elise, wouldn’t he have put himself center court at a Knicks game where a gazillion witnesses would have seen him? And wouldn’t the hit man have taken Elise’s ring and some other stuff to make it look like a robbery? When I ask him this, Drew appears noncommittal.

      “So you’d say that their marriage was not exactly made in heaven?” he asks.

      “Elise got along with maybe three people, and Jack wasn’t one of them. I don’t know who started the cheating, but it was like they were in a competition. I know she slept with one of their neighbors, a man who Jack owed money to. And I know that he slept with one of Elise’s friends.”

      He waits for me to continue, sensing that there is more, and of course, there is.

      Not able to look him in the eye, I tell my salad that, “She kept a score sheet. I saw it once—”

      His eyes are penetrating and I refuse to look at him. I’m not guilty of anything, but I feel like he’s thinking that if I’d be friends with someone who would do that kind of