Third Degree (7 page)

I wasn’t going to and then I thought about Wilmott’s blog and review of Tony’s deli. It wouldn’t hurt to go in, smile a little at Tony, flash a little boob, and ask some questions about how he felt about the blog. Crawford saw the change in my demeanor and immediately asked what I was up to. I feigned ignorance. “What are you talking about?”

He threw a look over his shoulder; he didn’t know exactly what I was up to but he knew I was up to something. I followed him into the deli, resisting the urge to shudder when the bell rang over the door, announcing our arrival. That bell always reminded me of Tony and his love for me, along with flying pots of meatballs. I couldn’t help it. Tony looked up at the sound, took in my face, and broke out into a smile so wide I feared his face would crack.

“Mi amore!”
he called, and then realizing he was married to a character from Dante’s
Inferno,
he dropped his voice. “My love,” he whispered.

I looked at Crawford, who rolled his eyes.

“Hi, Tony,” I said, maintaining a decent distance from the counter so that he wouldn’t grab me in a sweaty, cold-cut-smelling embrace. “We need some cold cuts.”

“You need some cold cuts,” he repeated. “You need some cold cuts! Is that how you greet me after all this time?” He threw his arms open, expecting me to reach over the counter and lean into them.

I started coughing; there had been a nasty strain of the flu traveling about the county and I begged off, citing some general malaise. “I’m sorry, Tony,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to get you sick.” I fake-sneezed for extra effect.

He leaned over the counter. “For you?” he asked dramatically. “I would die.”

And you just might, I thought, if Lucia gets wind of this. I wondered where she was and why I still didn’t have spaghetti sauce all over the front of my shirt; I decided not to tempt fate and kept my voice low. I heard Crawford let out a loud and impatient sigh.

Tony studied my face. “What happened to you?”

I went with my old standby: “Long story.”

He didn’t really accept that as an answer but I wasn’t going to elaborate. He continued to stare at me. And then at Crawford. And then back at me. “Right. So back to the cold cuts,” I said. “Crawford? What would you like?”

Crawford can’t order a cup of coffee in a fancy coffee shop because he gets too confused by sizes that are listed in other languages and descriptions that aren’t in his lexicon. He still hasn’t figured out that foam is regular old milk all frothed up. But order cold cuts the man can do. He rattled off an array of cold cuts, some of which I had never heard of, but all of which Tony had. Tony set about slicing meat through the big slicer and putting thin cuts of meat onto paper. When he was done, we had about six packages, along with several bags of chips, a couple of loaves of Italian bread, and a six-pack of beer, which Crawford had set about amassing as we waited for our order.

Tony looked at me forlornly. “You never come here anymore.”

I shrugged. “I’m sorry, Tony. I’ll come by soon,” I said, even though I had no intention of doing so. I heard some pots and pans rattling around in the back of the store and knew I had only a minute or two to find out what I had come in for: just how much Tony and Lucia hated Carter. “Tony, did you know Carter Wilmott?”

He blessed himself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, kissed the Jesus head around his neck, and then spat on the floor in fury. “Son of a bitch,” he said, quickly adding, “God rest his soul.”

Crawford had his hand on the door handle and was anxious to leave. “You didn’t like him?” I asked, feigning ignorance. I didn’t like him, either, and that was just from reading his blog; I had no personal experience with the guy. Oh, right, except for the dying-in-front-of-me part. That’s about as personal as it gets.

Tony leaned across the counter and was close enough to grab my hand and bring me close. My midsection hit the ice-cream case fronting the counter with a thud, and with an indelicate “oof,” the breath left my lungs. “He was a very bad man.”

I struggled to catch my breath and listen to Tony at the same time, which wasn’t easy.

“He said very bad things about my store,” he whispered conspiratorially, looking over his shoulder to see if Lucia was in sight. I had never seen her, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t somewhere else in the store. “I thought Lucia was going to kill him.”

I was feeling faint. Between the heat of the kitchen, the lack of oxygen, my growing hunger, and the pungent odor of roast beef combined with mayonnaise wafting off Tony, I knew I wasn’t going to last long. I decided to ask the question I had come in to ask. “Does Lucia know anything about explosives?” I could almost read Crawford’s mind: way to cut to the chase, Alison. Whether or not Carter had died from a blow to the head was irrelevant in my mind. Someone wanted to kill him, and for some unknown reason, I wanted to find out. That, coupled with a misguided allegiance to Greg and bad coffee, was enough for me to poke around.

Tony smiled proudly. “No, but I was a cook in Korea,” he said. “Learned a lot about blowing things up from the guys we fed. Once we blew up a whole pig!”

I was aware of Crawford’s hand gripping my elbow as I slid down in front of the ice-cream case. “That’s interesting,” I said before I passed out, thinking about how good a roast beef on Italian bread would taste when I finally woke up.

“Are you okay?” he asked, directing the vents toward my face.

“I don’t know what happened,” I said, truly at a loss. “I think it was when he pulled me into the counter. I lost my breath.”

“You looked queasy long before that,” Crawford said, taking a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiping my brow. “You haven’t looked well since I picked you up yesterday.”

“Do you blame me?” I asked. “I saw a dead body.”

“Not your first.”

“No. Not my first. But hopefully my last.” I leaned my head on the air-conditioning vent closest to me and sighed. “Take me home.”

Crawford kept an eye on me most of the way home, but he also kept looking in his rearview mirror quite a bit, raising my hackles. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Who do you know who drives a beat-up blue Subaru Outback?”

I scanned my memory. “No one.” I swallowed again, hoping that the taste of bile in my throat would dissipate with each gulp. “But does the Tony thing give you pause?”

“What Tony thing?”

“Korea. The pig. The explosives.”

Crawford kept an eye on the rearview mirror. “No.”

“No?” I was incredulous.

“No,” he repeated. “He’s an old man with a cranky wife who he might someday kill, but for the Wilmott murder? I don’t see it.”

“Carter Wilmott wrote some really nasty things about him on his blog.”

“I just don’t think Tony would have shared an anecdote about blowing up a pig in Korea if he was the one who put the explosive on the car engine. Doesn’t make sense. Too obvious.”

“Sure, it’s obvious, but Tony …” I started. He took a hard right down a one-way street and I banged into my door. “Hey!” I straightened up after he slowed down. “What are you doing? If that’s your way to get me to stop talking about this, a polite ‘shut up’ would have sufficed.”

“Someone’s been following us since we left Tony’s.” He threw the car in park, and jumped out. I turned and saw that the car was behind us but now backing up, dangerously, down the one-way street. Crawford began running after the car, yelling at the driver to stop, who continued driving backward until they were down the narrow residential street and back out onto the main drag.

Crawford jumped back in the car and went into reverse.

“No! Not the backward car chase!” I said. “I’m already ready to throw up.”

“I have to see who that is,” he said, his head facing the back of the car, his foot pressing the accelerator down almost to the floor. He swung out onto the main street and drove into the traffic, only managing to cut two cars off in the process. The Subaru was nowhere to be found and he dejectedly pulled over to see if I was still in one piece. I hit him with a salami that I had pulled from the bag from Tony’s.

“What are you trying to do? Kill me?” I asked, my breath short after holding it during a very brief, but very tense, car chase in reverse.

“No, I’m not trying to kill you,” he said. “But I wonder why someone would be following us. Aren’t you the least bit curious?”

“No. Not curious. Not interested in the least.” I leaned my head against the seat rest. “About the same level of curiosity as you have for Tony and explosives. Can we please just go home now?”

Max was her usual caring self when I walked in through the back door. “You look like shit.” Sometimes I wondered why we were friends.

Fred grunted in agreement. They were still at the kitchen table in exactly the same positions as when I left. The screen was still torn, but the window was closed and locked. I guess I was going to be calling my friend Hernan to fix it during the week. It appeared that they were waiting for food and hadn’t moved since Crawford and I had set off on our grocery journey.

“Did you take my dog out?” I asked.

“I can’t find her,” Max said. She slid something into her pocketbook.

“Was that a tape measure?” I asked.

She smiled insincerely. “Can’t fix the screen if I don’t know how big the window is.”

I didn’t believe a word of that. “But you didn’t know that the screen would be broken when you left for here. Or do you just carry a tape measure around in your Marc Jacobs bag?”

“It’s a Michael Kors,” she said.

“Whatever.” I waited. “Well?”

“Yes, I do. I do carry a tape measure around in my pocketbook. It comes in handy when I want to measure something.”

The conversation could have gone on indefinitely but I let it go. I grabbed the dog’s leash from the hook by the back door.

Crawford put the bag of deli products on the counter. “Do you want me to go with you?” he asked, knowing that I was going to walk the dog in the absence of any responsible dog walkers in the house. He came over and took my cheeks in his hands. “Are you feeling better?”

I nodded. “I just need some air,” I said. I felt like Lydia Wilmott all of a sudden; I just wanted to be alone. Walking Trixie by myself was just the ticket. “You guys eat. I don’t have much of an appetite.” I knew I wouldn’t be two minutes out of the house before those scavengers had eaten everything but the wrappers the cold cuts had come in. Max is as voracious an eater as her six-foot-five husband and my tall drink of water of a boyfriend; she can pack it away with the best of them despite her diminutive stature.

I put Trixie on the leash and headed down toward the river. This route would lead me away from the village and away from anything that brought up bad memories. I would avoid Beans, Beans and the police station, and be able to enjoy the peace and serenity that walking with my dog along a beautiful waterway would bring. I had made it halfway down the street and was almost to the river when a pickup truck pulled around the corner and screeched to a stop in front of me. A woman with short spiky hair and a better body than her blog pictures would suggest jumped out of the truck and came toward me. Trixie let out a low growl, assuming that this wasn’t a friend.

“You Bergeron?”

I recognized her as the lovely Mrs. Miller from the blog. “I am.” This woman had obviously spent some time in the gym since Carter or one of his blog staff had taken those pictures of her. Her upper arms were toned and tight, jutting out from a fitted tank top that accentuated a large, but impressively perky, set of boobs. Her stomach was flat. Her workouts, however, hadn’t seemed to do much about chunky thighs and a rather comprehensive bottom; I assumed she would get to those parts now that the upper body was such a specimen of fitness.

“Come with me,” she commanded, getting back into her truck cab.

I stood by the side of the road without moving, curling Trixie’s leash into my hand, drawing the dog closer to me. Mrs. Miller waited expectantly in her car. Finally, when she saw that I wasn’t getting in, she rolled down the passenger side window. “I said to get in!” She stared at me with big round blue eyes, unadorned by makeup but with the longest, darkest lashes I had ever seen. Mrs. Miller had probably been a looker before she had fallen prey to the physical horrors of middle age. Once she got the thighs and the butt worked out, she would be a fine-looking lady.

She was obviously used to people listening to her but she had never met me. I decided that just walking away would be the best course of action, so I pulled Trixie to my side and began to amble down the street, even though my instincts told me to run like the dickens. Behind me, I heard Mrs. Miller make a sharp U-turn, knocking over a garbage can that had been set out for Monday morning pickup, and follow behind me at a slow pace.

“You know they’ve got my husband in jail, right?” she called from her truck window. Her tone had a faint overtone of accusation.

I kept staring straight ahead. The woman was scaring the crap out of me although I wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t trying to run me down, but she was clearly agitated and she had the “guns” that Greg could only dream of. And that could probably crush my trachea with one chop. “No, I didn’t know,” I said. That was certainly an interesting turn of events, though.

“Manslaughter,” she spat out.

Just as Crawford had predicted. I wondered how the police could arrest Miller without the ME’s report, but Crawford had seemed pretty sure that this was the way it would go down. “I’m sorry?” I said, not convinced that I should be.

“You were there. You tell the cops that he had nothing to do with it,” she continued, now parallel to me and close enough to touch. Riding in a pickup gave her the advantage of being at eye level, something a car wouldn’t.

“I can’t do that. I
was
there.”

“Yeah, but they had a fight. Instigated by that louse Wilmott.”

“Your husband punched him in the head. Hard. He died. Draw your own conclusions.” Although I still wasn’t convinced that was the cause of death, I wanted Mrs. Miller to consider the fact that it could possibly be.

She thought about that for a minute, resting her head on the steering wheel. When she picked her head up, her face had gone slack. “Oh, and sorry about the black eye.” Something in her now nonthreatening tone made me stop walking. I turned toward her. “Eat a lot of papaya and pineapple and mix two tablespoons of salt with two tablespoons of lard or vegetable oil and spread it over your eye. Make sure it’s closed.” She saw the look on my face; I wasn’t a lard type of girl. Vaseline was the closest I got to anything moisturizing. “Trust me. It helps with blood circulation. And the papaya and the pineapple make the discoloration go away faster.” Her tone was rough but her suggestions kind. I wondered if Mrs. Miller was a Gemini. The abrupt change in her demeanor surely hinted at two sides of the astrological coin.

“Thanks.”

“No problem. I’m a nurse,” she said, gripping the steering wheel of her idling truck; she was my second nurse of the day, counting Elaine. “Do you want to help me or not? They’ve got George in lockup and it’s only a matter of time before he’s shipped off to stay with the general population in White Plains.” She set her mouth in a grim line. “That’s not going to be good for him.”

That was probably an understatement. I commanded Trixie to sit because this was obviously going to take a while. “Listen, there’s nothing I can do to help you. I told the police everything I know. Your husband and Wilmott had a fight and then Wilmott died. I don’t know what he died from—”

“Blunt force trauma to the head,” she said, interrupting me. “From a punch. That’s what they’re saying. That’s the coroner’s best guess. The Wilmotts are very powerful in this town and the cops want to close this case fast.”

Talk about the wheels of justice turning quickly. “I still don’t know what I can do.” I wanted to mention that there were two cops on the scene—as well as Greg—who could also verify that George had hit him in the head but I didn’t mention that. She was pretty agitated already.

“Tell the cops it was just a fight. Tell them that you never saw George hit Wilmott in the head. Tell them that Wilmott fell and hit his head and that my husband’s fist did not come in contact with Carter Wilmott’s head. Case closed.” She dropped her hands into her lap and looked up at the interior roof of her car. “Tell them anything that will help me get George out of there.”

“I can’t do that, Mrs. Miller.”

“Ginny.”

“I told them what I saw, Ginny. That’s exactly what I saw. To me, that’s exactly what happened.”

And that’s when she cracked. I don’t know why I was surprised, but when the tears started falling, I saw the softer side of Mrs. Miller. “They’re going to at least get him on manslaughter. You’re not going to press charges, too, are you?”

I shook my head. “It was an accident.”

Her lips quivered as a tear fell onto her tank top. “Thank you.” She rested her head on the steering wheel. “I don’t know why I tracked you down. I don’t even know you. I should have assumed that you had already told them everything you know. I’m just grasping at straws.”

I didn’t know what to say. Her tough façade gone, I now saw a woman who would do anything to help her husband and who loved him deeply. Not unlike Lydia Wilmott. “Where are you a nurse?” I asked.

“Phelps,” she said, referencing a hospital in Tarrytown, where I grew up. It was about ten minutes north of where we stood. “I’ve been there for twenty years. I’m the head nurse in oncology.”