just wanted to say that I may have been just a little bit, you know, teensy bit, maybe, just a bit overly…”
Yes, I get it. “Little bit” would have sufficed.
She took a deep breath and regrouped. “I may have accused Jackson of doing…Ray’s…you know…prematurely and unnecessarily.”
A Dale Carnegie graduate she was not. I continued to look at her. “Got it,” I said. “Jackson didn’t do it. Not that you know of.”
“Well, you know, the police came back again,” she said, a little outraged. “They questioned us once and then they questioned us again. It was very upsetting.”
Boo-hoo. I’ve been accused of murder, so I know it’s upsetting. Something occurred to me, so I decided to ask her. “You didn’t kill him, did you, Terri?” Feeling a bit peckish, I decided to push her buttons a teensy bit, as she would say.
The look on her face was one that I had never seen before. It took a few seconds before the rage that immediately registered in her eyes after my question softened into mild anger. “What?”
“You know, kill Ray. Did you do it?”
Tears appeared behind her thick, mascaraed lashes. “I’m going to forget that you ever asked me that and walk away, Alison. In case you’ve forgotten, I loved Ray.”
Well, that makes one of us, I thought. I wondered how long it would take her to realize that professing your love for another’s husband—albeit another’s former husband—was really not acceptable in polite society. She turned and walked away, pulling at Trixie’s collar. Trixie turned back one last time to look at me sadly.
I watched them walk away and looked at the fifty feet that separated me from the interior of my house. If I can just make it up the driveway, I thought, I’ll be home free. I went in through the front door—the back door, which opened up into the kitchen, was still a bit of a roadblock for me—and stood in the hallway, gazing at the hall closet door, which sat ajar.
Hanging in the closet were my garment bag and overnight bag, the two items that I had left in Peter Miceli’s limousine.
Chapter 15
I’m a big believer in napping to cure all ills. That is, when martinis are either unavailable or not appropriate, given the hour. I was out of vodka and it was just after noon, so a nap was the next best thing.
Although I was distressed that either Peter Miceli or one of his cohorts had been in my house, it was clear that they had only entered to return the stuff that I had left in the limousine. That was actually kind of polite, when you stop to think about it. If they had really wanted to cause me harm, they would have been waiting for me upon my return, right? That’s what I told myself. So, after my heart stopped racing, I went straight to my bedroom, where I stripped down to my bra and underpants and dove under the covers, pulling them over my head in an attempt to block out the rest of the world.
I probably would have slept straight through to the next morning had the phone not started ringing at around five o’clock. Groggy from my five-hour nap, I picked up the receiver and held it upside down against my face. After attempting to speak to the person on the other end through the mouthpiece, I finally figured out what was wrong and turned the receiver the right way.
“Alison? It’s Jack McManus.”
Oh, boy.
“Alison? Are you there?”
I cleared my throat. “Uh, yes. Hi, Jack.” I closed my eyes and lay back on the pillows.
“Kevin said it would be okay to give you a call. I’m at the Rangers’ practice facility and was wondering if you might be available for an early dinner? It’s not far from you.”
How much more complicated could things get? I had a sort-of-married boyfriend who was a homicide detective, of all things (I was starting to appreciate my mother’s decision to marry a UPS man—regular hours and no dead bodies); I had a gangster following me around; my deli guy wanted to marry me; my neighbors were psychotic; and now I had a completely available, gorgeous man interested in me. While I should have been jumping for joy, I was dumbstruck.
“Alison?”
“Uh, yes.” I meant that response as an affirmative, that indeed, I was Alison, but Jack took it another way.
“You’re free? Great!” His cell phone crackled. “I’m losing you. I’ll be over in about fifteen minutes. See you