“Did he call you?” Helene, who owns the shop where just yesterday I picked up Elise’s custom-covered bar stools, asks before I’ve got one foot in the door. “I told him to call you last night. If he didn’t, he’s in big trouble.”
He is her brother, newly single, just squeaking past the Dr. Joy one-year rule. According to Helene, he is my soul mate. In fact, he did call and he does sound nice. And if I was the least bit interested in ever allowing a man into my life again, I would consider him.
“Elise Meyers was murdered this morning,” I say just as the phone rings. Helene tilts her head slightly, as if she is having trouble processing what I’ve said, and chirps a greeting into the phone. While she talks, she keeps one eye on me, rearranges some ebony candlesticks on the counter, and weaves a stray strand of her highlighted brown hair into her French knot at the same time. Her makeup is flawless and her short nails sport a perfect deep red manicure. In the last week I have popped two acrylics, which makes my left hand look like it’s missing the ends of two fingers, and the last time my makeup looked as good as hers, I was leaving the Bobbi Brown counter at Bloomingdale’s.
She points at the receiver, gives me a knowing glance and then says into the phone, “Well, Audrey, I could certainly sell it to you direct, but it will cost you the same thing as paying for it through your decorator. I can’t very well undercut her and expect her to keep doing business with me, now can I?”
Audrey Applebaum. Just yesterday she told me she changed her mind about redecorating.
“I’m not saying I charge people who come in off the street more, Audrey. I’m saying I charge decorators less. It’s how business is done. You redecorate one house every few years. They redecorate several houses every month….”
Helene rolls her eyes at me while she points to some new glass-and-wrought-iron stacking tables she thinks I might like.
Only I’m more interested in her telephone call than her telephone tables. I grab the phone out of her hand and shout into it. “Don’t you feel any obligation to your decorator? Don’t you think you ought to pay for her advice, her expertise? You think she can pay for her kids’ braces with your thanks?”
I want to slam it down, but portables don’t give you that satisfaction, so I just hit Off and throw it toward Helene, who barely catches it. For a minute Helene doesn’t say anything.
And then she begins to laugh, saying between the bursts how she can’t believe I did that.
I can’t, either. I don’t know what the connection is to Elise’s murder, except that it pushed me over the edge. When I don’t laugh, too, Helene studies me.
“Teddi, what’s wrong?” she asks, leading me toward the only piece of furniture in the shop not covered with swatch books or cords of trim. It’s a red plush chair in the shape of a spiked heel and it has a big Sale sign on it, marking it clearly as a mistake in judgment.
I sit on the instep.
“I told you,” I say flatly. “Elise Meyers is dead.”
“Oh my God!” she says, covering her mouth. There’s a silent beat. Another. Then, “Which one’s Elise Meyers?”
I remind her that Elise is the customer who couldn’t wait for Gina, Helene’s assistant, to arrange for the delivery of her furniture. Elise is the woman who had to have everything yesterday, always, all the time. I don’t mean to make her sound difficult. She was, but still, that doesn’t mean she deserved to be murdered.
“Murdered?” Helene whispers, as if not saying it aloud gives it some dignity. I think of Elise in that hot-pink satin job and dignity goes out the window.
I start at the beginning because, except for the police, I really haven’t told anyone, not even Bobbie. I tell Helene how I’d just hung up with Bobbie—whom she knows almost as well as she knows me—turned off my cell phone and got out of the car, when I noticed the dog on the lawn. At this point in my story, Gina, the twentysomething young woman who works for Helene, comes out from the back of the store with some swatches of fabric for Elise that have just come in. Helene tells her about Elise and she says how awful it is. They want to know everything, not so much because either of them care but because there’s something about being the first to know, to know before it’s on the six o’clock news, that appeals to people. I tell them everything I know and then Gina asks if I’m going to the funeral.
“How can she not?” Helene says as if Gina has asked if Helene wants to sell the high-heel chair.
You should be warned that How Can You Not? is the national anthem of Long Island. It explains the Perrier-filled water glasses at the bar mitzvahs, the catered first birthday parties, the BMWs for seventeen-year-olds, and the four-carat diamonds given to wives who have found out their husbands are cheating. There are a lot of large diamonds on Long Island.
Don’t let me give you the wrong impression. How Can You Not? also applies to allowing your neighbors to run a one-hundred-foot extension cord from their refrigerator to the outlet in your house because a storm has knocked the power out on their side of the street. It means letting some kid move into your house for the last three months of his senior year because his parents have found the perfect house in another state and you can’t imagine the poor kid transferring with only months to go. It means inviting a couple you hate to your daughter’s bat mitzvah because they’re friends with a couple you love. The rules are complicated, but they’re a comfort, too. Like in Tevye’s shtetl, everyone knows what’s expected of them.
Okay, not everyone.
It is my firm belief that somewhere there is a Secret Handbook of Long Island Rules and that certain women are given copies. My mother has one. Actually, she may be its original author. Bobbie has one. These women have been sworn to secrecy and refuse to admit it exists, but there just isn’t any way they could know all the rules without it.
I’m still waiting for mine to arrive in the mail.
Men don’t seem to know the rules, or maybe they don’t care. They surely don’t have to live by them. Which brings us to Gina’s question.
“So where was Mr. Meyers when Elise was bludgeoned to death?”
It seems wrong to tell Gina about the sham of a marriage that Elise and her husband had. First off, who am I to judge how blind Elise was or wasn’t? I mean, Rio, my ex, pulled the wool down over my eyes so far that I didn’t know what I was doing, never mind what he was up to! Second, Elise was one of those Long Islanders who would have been appalled if I aired her dirty laundry in front of anyone beneath what she perceived as her social station. I don’t really know how she’d feel about my sharing it with those above or within her circle, but since I’m from the Plainview side of Syosset, and not from Woodbury, I don’t really swim in her social pool.
And while I don’t subscribe to it, I do understand the hierarchy because I was born in the Five Towns, that area on the South Shore of Long Island where the nouveau riche have riched their limit, and clawing your way to the top of the social ladder while appearing not to care (or even notice) is not simply an art form, but a requisite survival skill.
As luck would have it, I married out of it. Just ask my mother. It’s hard to know which she and my father view as more of a disgrace—my marrying out of the faith or out of the neighborhood.
Besides, Elise is dead. And everyone knows that you don’t speak ill of the dead.
At least not until after they’re buried.
“Jack Meyers claims to have an alibi,” I tell her, but still, my money is on him. When I admit that the police seemed to suspect me for a minute, Helene stops me and flips the Back in Ten Minutes sign on the door, then locks it. She and Gina lead me back to their offices in the rear of the store and Helene puts on a pot of fresh coffee.
Gina doesn’t really have an office, but a corner of the storeroom seems to belong to her. She works there at a computer surrounded by a bunch of Snoopy paraphernalia and some family photos. There’s the