Stevi Mittman - What Goes With Blood Red, Anyway?

The car is low and sleek and if I knew sports cars the way I know SUVs and minivans, I’m sure I’d recognize what it is. Detective Scoones, Drew, gets out of the car and adjusts his sunglasses. He has on pressed jeans and a casual sports jacket over an Izod sort of shirt in deep green, a favorite color of mine. I know it’s not just me who can’t breathe at the sight of him because my mother gasps and my daughter’s jaw drops.

June beats me to the door, proving that when she wants to she can move like lightning, and introduces herself, establishing immediately that 1) she knows all about everything that happens in my life and 2) that she is staying over to protect her grandchildren from whatever he might have in mind. Marty, his protective instincts in full gear, manages to mention the best lawyer on the South Shore twice before the man has both feet in the foyer. The good detective makes a point of taking note, nodding his head and muttering something about the lawyer’s reputation.

He bothers to murmur compliments as he looks around at my house, noting that the dark green walls make the place look cozy and the salmon color of the bedroom, which he can glimpse from the hall, looks inviting. Yes, that is the word he uses. He says I look nice, too. A lot better might be what he actually says.

Dana and Jesse bound down the stairs, Alyssa lagging slightly behind, and he introduces himself to them, assuring them this is just routine and that their mother is in no way a suspect (as in: your mom’s just helping the police out) and this is not any sort of date.

There are now seven of us occupying approximately four square feet of floor space in my foyer. I invite him into the living room and the group moves like we are bound by bungee cords. I motion for him to sit but after the kids jump onto the sofa and my parents take the club chairs, he remembers that he actually hasn’t had a chance to stop for dinner and wonders if I would mind if he held the “interview” in a restaurant.

“Isn’t that a bit irregular?” my elder daughter asks. Her tone hints that she thinks the handsome detective is up to no good.

“A bit,” he admits with a smile that appears to win her over. “But pretty soon my stomach will be talking louder than my voice can cover.”

When Alyssa starts to list all the Yu-Gi-Oh cards she has, I acquiesce because going to dinner with Drew Scoones is not exactly abhorrent. And because the alternative—spending an evening with my mother—has the potential of landing both of us back at South Winds Psychiatric Center. And then, too, there are a few things I’d like to tell the good detective that I don’t want my kids to overhear.

Somehow we extricate ourselves, my father yelling down the walk after us to have a nice time and my mother fussing at him that we should do no such thing. Drew opens the car door for me, waits while I pull in my flowery skirt and wrestle with the seat belt. Then he closes me in.

As he slides into the driver’s seat, he says, “I just wanted to check up on you and see if anything else might have occurred 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.