Whose Number Is Up, Anyway?. Stevi Mittman

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 talk 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