my seeing someone in the shadows. I ended with the traffic stop in front of Stew Leonard’s (shopping for farm-fresh eggs would never seem the same) and my being taken in and handcuffed to the chair.
He looked across at me, narrowing his eyes. “They say you resisted arrest.”
I sighed. “I tried to get back in the car to get my cell phone. I wanted to call Crawford…um…Bobby.”
He rolled his eyes. “That wasn’t very smart. Trooper thought you were going for a gun. Although I don’t know why.” He wrote a couple of unintelligible notes on his pad. “You tell them about my brother?”
“About our relationship?” I asked, clueless.
He was still in serious lawyer mode, but he couldn’t help cracking a smile. “Uh, no. Did you tell them that my brother is a cop?”
I nodded. Lot of good it did me to drop that nugget of information.
“They also said they got a call from the driver of the red car saying that you were following him or her. They couldn’t tell which. Lousy Westchester cell phone reception.”
I nodded. “I was following them.”
He dropped his pen on the paper. “You’re not making this easy.”
“Did Crawford fill you in on what’s been happening?” I asked.
“Sort of,” he said, leaning back and running his fingers through thick, unruly black hair. “You were following the red car because you thought it was either the husband or wife of the couple who used to live next door.”
“Correct.”
“Aforementioned wife was having an affair with your late ex-husband.”
“Right.”
He looked at me. “And what were you going to do once you caught up to said husband or wife?”
It suddenly dawned on me what the situation looked like. No wonder I had been handcuffed to the chair. I tried to come up with an excuse. “Ask them if they wanted their dog back?” I offered lamely.
He rolled his eyes. “That ain’t gonna work, sister.”
I leaned forward. “All I wanted to do was find out who it was, and if it was Jackson or Terri, why they left, where they were going, and yes, if they wanted Trixie back.” I relayed the story of the 911 call coming from inside their vacated house, too, but Jimmy still wasn’t buying it. It didn’t even sound true to me, and based on the look on Jimmy’s face, not to him, either.
“The dog.”
“The dog,” I said, giving him a solemn nod. Sounded reasonable to me.
He drew a couple of lines on the paper and seemed to get lost in thought. After a few minutes of silence, he jumped up. “Wait here.”
He left the room and me alone with my thoughts. Now, instead of just dragging Crawford into my increasingly sordid business, I was dragging members of his family into it as well. I had a lawyer now, and he was a chubbette named Jimmy who I hoped was much smarter than his appearance suggested. He clearly was tough in a street kind of way but I wasn’t sure if that translated into book smarts. I had a city cop and a lawyer at my disposal but I couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble. I licked my lips, chapped and dry after hours in this institutional environment, and waited for him to return.
He came back fifteen minutes later. “Let’s go,” he said, grabbing his satchel from the table.
“What?” I was a little confused by the sudden turn of events.
“Let’s go,” he repeated. He leaned in close to me and dropped his voice. “You’ve still got the speed, but I got the reckless driving, harassment, and resisting arrest dropped. You’ve got four points on your license and need to take a defensive driving course.” He took my arm and steered me out into the hallway. “A little community service probably wouldn’t hurt, either. Got any orphans around you could feed or make clothes for? Any nuns at the college need sponge baths?”
I kept my eyes to the ground as we passed the front desk of the barracks, careful not to do anything that would make them change their minds. My slippers made a shuffling noise on the hard linoleum. Once outside, Jimmy handed me a small plastic bag with my keys and cell phone. He had browbeat the trooper into having my car towed to the barracks and it was sitting in a spot right next to his minivan. I thanked him profusely for coming out on a Saturday, for not mentioning my pajamas, and for getting most of my charges dropped. “It was nice