Third Degree (4 page)

He knew what I was thinking. “Nope. Count me out. I don’t want anything to do with this.”

“How do you even know what I’m going to say before I say it?”

He took my hand and led me down the street. “Because I know you too well. And I’ve been down this road before. You,” he said, stopping me from crossing into traffic, “are on your own.”

“This could ruin Greg,” I said.

“How?” he asked. “It was an accident. A fight. You think everyone’s going to stay away from the store because some guy died in there?”

I reminded him that where he worked, it was a different story. Sure, people died in public places all the time, and if he was involved, chances were good that they had been murdered. Still, people frequented the little bodegas where someone had been shot, or the diner where someone was found dead in a bathroom stall, or worse, with their head in a plate of eggs. (It had happened. Crawford had told me.) Here, it’s not like that. The people of my sleepy village weren’t used to death being so close and might have a problem with it. I voiced my concerns aloud.

He threw his hands up. “Do what you want. You’re going to anyway.”

On that point, we definitely could agree.

He looked at his watch and downed his beer quickly. “I’ve got to go.”

I had advance warning that he’d be leaving but I was still disappointed. His girls were at the pool party and needed to be picked up so that they could spend the night with him in the city as they did every Saturday night. “See you tomorrow?” We had left my concern about the future of Beans, Beans back by the police station and hadn’t discussed it again.

He nodded before leaning in and giving me a kiss. He studied the black eye. “Got any frozen peas?” He thought for a moment and reconsidered that request; I had iced the eye when I had first arrived home but had tired of the sensation on my face and the feeling of melting ice. “Of course you don’t. Want to hold a frozen bottle of vodka against your eye? Because that’s the only item in your freezer.”

“You’ve got that right,” I said. “I’ll be fine. It’s a black eye. No big deal.”

But it was a big deal, which I found out when I was awakened after being asleep for only about a half hour. I turned and looked at the clock and saw that it was just past midnight and my face was throbbing, pain emanating from my nose up to my forehead and reaching around to the back of my head as if my whole cranium were encased in a vise. I sat up and didn’t know which part of my face to rub first to relieve the ache, so I decided to go into the bathroom, rummage around in the cabinet for anything stronger than an Advil, and chase it with a big glass of water. I had had a prescription for Vicodin at one time but I enjoyed the opiate so much that I had decided to flush the remainder down the toilet, a decision I came to rue at that moment. I settled on three aspirin and a half dose of NyQuil to help me sleep.

An hour later, after taking another, full dose of NyQuil, I was still wide awake, staring at the shadow pattern the tree branches outside my window were making on my ceiling. I looked around the room, Trixie sleeping peacefully on the floor beside me, and spied my briefcase, my laptop resting on top of it. I got out of bed, trying not to wake the dog, who opened one eye and regarded me warily. When she saw that I only had word processing in mind, she went back to sleep.

I crawled back into bed with my laptop. A year earlier, Max had implored me to get a wireless router, even though I’m a cheapskate at heart and couldn’t stomach the expense of what seemed, at the time, to be a useless purchase. I usually sit at my desk when I do work, so why I had to be mobile with my laptop confounded me. Tonight, I thanked her, because I could get back under the covers, look up every fact I wanted about Carter Wilmott, and not have to sit in the steaming heat of the guest bedroom where I kept my desktop. I opened the computer and turned it on, listening to Trixie’s noisy exhalations as I waited for it to warm up. I was searching the Internet for Carter facts before she had snored four times.

I started by reading the latest entries on the blog. Wilmott had a cadre of regular posters: HappyVillager201; Old Timer; Coffee Lover; BadgeGal; the prolific Wonder Woman. And the intellectual FancyPantz who could quote sections of the village building code with alarming accuracy and ease. That was someone I wanted to meet. He also had his fair share of detractors, led by RepubVoter and his sidekick, MuchAdo. These two were vociferous in their rants about Wilmott’s political leanings, and being as the village was in the hands of a Democratic majority at the moment, they were none too happy about anything. Conversely, posters such as Crazee About Cats, Straight A, and Law School Val were completely in love with him and his unabashed support of the village mayor and trustees. It was like an online Dodge City, with a post by Wilmott, and then a multitude of comments, some referencing earlier comments on a post or even comments on earlier posts; these people clearly had a history.

I scrolled through various posts and accessed the archive, where I read more of Wilmott’s reporting about various members of the town. It was fairly sleazy and one-sided, and while he obviously thought of himself as a purveyor of truth in a town of dishonest officials, he was quite plaintive and biased in his reporting. There were no photos of Carter except for those that accompanied his restaurant reviews, reviews that I hadn’t read prior to tonight’s online reconnaissance mission. I read the reviews dispassionately; this was a guy who clearly had a high opinion of himself and his culinary expertise. Then, I got to a post about my favorite restaurant, Sadie’s, and my unbiased opinion of him turned definitely sour. Sadie’s was the first place that Crawford had taken me and I had warm feelings toward it. To read that Wilmott had called it “a dive—at best” got my hackles up and I must have let out a little sound because Trixie picked her head up from the floor and growled at me in agreement. He continued: “… the ambiance is poor, the service even worse, and the food abysmal. The only good thing I can say is that I got drunk on the rotgut house wine but only because the owner bought me a carafe in the hopes of getting a good review.” I hadn’t realized that Wilmott was also a restaurant reviewer, but he took on every restaurant and eating establishment in town.

Even delis.

I clicked on the link that was titled “Tony’s—I’d Rather Eat a Can of Worms Than His Chicken Salad”—a most unoriginal title written by a guy with a limited knowledge of adjectives. Again, we returned to “abysmal,” “poor,” and “worst.” The commenters who weighed in below the post were split between outrage—“Tony’s is a village institution”—to complete agreement with Wilmott’s assessement. Me? I loved Tony’s, but since Tony loved me, in the romantic sense, I didn’t go there very often anymore. Add in the crazy, jealous wife he had recently acquired and I was staying away for good. But he didn’t deserve to be lambasted on this hack’s Web site, that was certain. Tony was a kind man with a good heart, and a wife I was pretty sure had created the torture technique we had all come to know as “waterboarding.” She was that mean. And she didn’t like me.

But Tony’s chicken salad was the best. I knew that for sure.

There was a picture of Wilmott standing outside of Tony’s; he was making a face that conveyed his disdain for the place. In his hand was a wrapped sub—chicken salad, I presumed—which he was in the process of pitching into a garbage can. I looked closely at the picture. Although he was dressed similarly to how he had been dressed that morning in his oxford shirt and khakis, they were clearly one or two sizes larger than the ones he had been wearing when I saw him. He was a husky and robust man in the picture, not the thin, almost frail-looking guy that I had met and watched die. I wondered if his wife had put him on a diet, because no man would want to go from the way he had looked in the picture to a ninety-eight-pound weakling. From the looks of things, he should have eaten that sub. He had obviously been wasting away.

Or maybe Tony’s wife, Lucia, had been poisoning him. I wouldn’t put it past her.

One of the most recent, and as it turned out, last entries was about the DPW and, specifically, George Miller. I could see why Miller might have a problem with Wilmott after he was described as having a “bulbous nose—one that could only belong to a full-blown alcoholic” and a “less than stellar record on environmentally sound methods of waste disposal.” Wilmott also took issue with Miller’s wife, saying that she was the most flagrant scofflaw in town when it came to recycling or lack thereof. Pictures taken of an unsuspecting Ginny Miller were posted on the blog in various stages of scofflawness. In the photos, she was shown throwing beer cans into the regular garbage and shoving plastic shopping bags down into the sewer grate at the side of her house. Besides getting joy from posting extremely unflattering photos of the rather hefty Mrs. Miller, what purpose did dragging her into this serve? I had already decided that Carter Wilmott was a jaded, cynical, angry man with too much time on his hands. But last time I checked, besides being not good for the environment, you could still throw beer cans into the garbage and put anything you wanted down the sewer with the only punishment being a stern talking-to from the head of the DPW or a passing cop. And if you’re married to the guy who runs the garbage removal in town, you can basically do whatever you want.

But now at least I had an idea of what had precipitated the fight that morning. I think if Wilmott had posted shots of me lugging out the garbage in spandex leggings and a too tight Syracuse University T-shirt, like he had of Mrs. Miller, I would have beaten the crap out of him myself.

Before turning in for the night, I found something on the blog that piqued my interest: Lydia Wilmott’s advice column. Having met Lydia earlier and watched her identify the remains of her husband calmly and coolly, I was drawn to her column to see what might be in there that would give me insight into a woman who was extremely composed in the face of death. I read a couple of the “Ask Lydia” columns that appeared under the masthead. Lydia, it turned out, answered questions from the community on everything from getting your grout clean, to Botox, to setting up a book club, to marriage. It was the marriage postings that were of most interest to me, because from the sound of it, Lydia and Carter’s marriage was like Jean and Billy Graham’s crossed with Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee. Solid, holy, steamy, and full of great sex. Lucky Lydia. A sampling to a poster with doubts about his or her upcoming nuptials: “The first time Carter kissed me, it was like the ground moved. My loins trembled. And that, ColdFeet, is what it should be like. No doubts. If you don’t feel overwhelming love for this person you’ll be marrying—if you wouldn’t DIE for this person—or them for you—don’t get married.” I groaned. That was way too much information. Especially for a town blog that focused on the irregular holiday schedule of the garbage department and the not-green ways of the DPW head’s wife.

I, for one, had no idea where my loins were and if they trembled. I would have to ask Crawford. I bet he knew. He knows stuff like that.

But I had to admit that it wasn’t bad advice, except for the dying part. Lydia was extremely descriptive about her love, but she was right about her counsel to ColdFeet. Where had Lydia Wilmott been when I was in the process of marrying Ray Stark, the man with the golden penis? Had I had the luxury of posting anonymously to a blog lo all those years ago and gotten Lydia’s sage advice, I might have avoided nine years of heartache and humiliation.

One more thing crossed my mind, and although I was starting to feel the effects of the NyQuil, or was slowly dying from a NyQuil overdose, I searched for “bomb-making.” After getting hits for about three million pages on how to make a bomb—and I’m exaggerating only slightly—I concluded that one wouldn’t necessarily have to be a munitions expert to create a car bomb that one could attach to a car engine. It wouldn’t hurt, though. I’m the kind of person who gives up on preparing a dish if I don’t recognize an ingredient listed early in the recipe; same would be true for making a bomb. While it looked like most of the things you would need to create said bomb would be found in the hardware store, some wouldn’t. And that’s where I’d be out of the bomb-making business.

I had read enough. I was just about to turn off the computer when the phone rang. And when the phone rings at two o’clock in the morning, it can only be one person.

The music was loud and thumping and I had to strain to hear Max, who sounded as if she were inside an amp. “Hi, Max!” I shouted, even though I was sure she could hear me.

“Hear you have a black eye!” she hollered back into the phone. “How did that happen?” To someone in the club, she yelled, “Ketel One! Up! With three olives!”

“I didn’t know you drank martinis,” I said.

“I don’t. Queen does.”

“Queen who?”

“Queen Martinez.”

As usual, we were off topic the minute we had gotten on one. Was it worth it to ask who Queen Martinez was? Or why Max was with this person in a club on a Saturday night? Probably not, so I returned to the subject of my black eye. I could only assume that Queen was a Hooters waitress. “So, my black eye …”

“Yeah! I’m coming over tomorrow to see it,” she said and promptly hung up. I rolled over on my side and grabbed a pen and paper next to my bed and wrote, “Find out who Queen Martinez is. Max coming over on Sunday.” I knew that when I woke up in the morning, I would have forgotten all about this phone call and to ask about the identity of this royal friend of Max’s.

Trixie was now wide awake and standing next to the bed. Rather than give her a complimentary middle-of-the-night walk, I pulled my comforter aside and patted the bed next to me. “Come on in,” I said. She wasn’t Crawford, but she would have to do.