LITMIR.BIZ

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asks me what I think of the decor.

      I try to find something nice to say and mention the romantic air. Drew looks amused.

      “You can be honest,” she says. “God knows, they’re always saying honesty is the best policy.”

      “So, what kind of name is Madison, anyway?” Drew asks. I don’t know if he is somehow implying that the woman hasn’t come by the name honestly, or just making conversation. I never can tell exactly what Drew is up to, which is how I wound up in his bed in the first place.

      Anyway, she explains that she was born on Madison Avenue to Yugoslavian immigrants. I want to say, “So there.”

      I tell her the restaurant has good bones, but the colors are off, and so much more could be done for the place with very little expense. And then I tell her that I would be happy to do the work at cost since the restaurant would be a great showcase for my talents. I tell her that Bobbie and I are still establishing our credentials and that it would be worth it to us to give her a great deal.

      “A win-win situation,” Howard calls it while Drew indicates that his phone is vibrating and that he has to go.

      “Ask them about Joe Greco,” he whispers in my ear as he gets up to leave. I glare at him while he shakes hands with Howard and takes Madison’s uninjured left hand. “You take care now,” he tells her as she rises along with him and sees him out, greeting new diners at the door.

      “So what did Nick want to talk to you about, anyway?” I ask Howard while he waxes on about braised remembrance farm greens, whatever they are.

      “Wanted to tell me about the health inspector being murdered,” Howard says. “I told him I already knew from you.”

      “Why did he want to tell you about Joe Greco?” I ask. Howard doesn’t ask me if that was the man’s name.

      He just says that Nick always treats him like he’s “in the business,” what with him being a food critic and all and that I shouldn’t go reading anything into it, the way I always do. “It’s not like he had anything to do with it,” he adds.

      “Fine,” I say, dropping it in favor of talking about decorating Madison on Park.

      “Can you really keep the cost down?” he asks me. This from a man who is having caviar-encrusted salmon on the house.

      “It doesn’t look like they’re hurting,” I tell him, imagining Scalamandré silks on the window with layer upon layer of passementerie.

      Howard looks around the room. “Appearances,” he says, “can be deceiving.”

      CHAPTER 4

      Design Tip of the Day

      “Family photos can personalize your space, but they have their place. Limit your office to two or three, and save your rogues’ gallery for a hallway or small wall where they can be studied in relation to one another and serve to reveal how you came to be who you are.”

      —TipsFromTeddi.com

      I hit “post” and the tip appears on my Web site. Unfortunately, the two photos that are supposed to accompany it disappear. If only it were that easy to dispose of a couple of the people in my life. And their baby-to-be.

      Family, even ex-family, sure can make your life interesting. For example, there’s my mother, who certainly makes life…interesting.

      And I wish Bobbie would stop laughing about what that mother of mine did, because she’s spitting soda on my kitchen counter and my laptop, and because what happened at my parents’ house is not really funny. But you be the judge. I stopped by my parents’ house to check on my mother—you know, see how she was doing after finding Joe Greco and all. She answered the door and told me that my father was “washing his hands.”

      While I hit computer keys in an attempt to find what happened to the pictures of my bathroom wall and Bobbie’s husband, Mike’s, credenza, which are supposed to illustrate my point about family photos, Bobbie tells me she thinks that so far my story is “the first normal thing you’ve ever told me happened in your mom’s house.”

      Of course, since it’s my mother’s house, it doesn’t stay normal for long. My father took forever, and it turned out he wasn’t in the bathroom, but in the kitchen, really washing his hands.

      Bobbie whines that I already told her this part. She’s holding up earrings to her ears and checking out her reflection in the glass of my kitchen cabinets, seeking my opinion, which she will ultimately ignore. “Tell me again how your mother told him she bought him the ring.”

      “And that he shouldn’t let me see it because I’m so poor and I’ll think she’s being extravagant?” I ask, copying and pasting the pictures back where they belong and indicating the dangly earrings over the studs while I tell the story. “It’s so totally my mother. So I tell my dad that she didn’t buy it, she stole it from a dead man. Which doesn’t help get the ring off his finger and now he’s desperate to get it off like it’s cursed or something. Only the harder he tries, the tighter it gets.”

      “Windex,” Bobbie says in that matter-of-fact, doesn’t-everyone-know-this way she has. “They use it in jewelry shops when you can’t get the diamonds off your hand.” I tell her we could have used her at my mom’s house.

      “Instead, we had to go to the emergency room because his finger was swelling up,” I tell her. “Four hours later, after my mother has made up half a dozen cock-and-bull stories for every nurse and physician in the hospital about how the ring was smuggled into the country by her Russian ancestors, he’s handing me the ring.”

      “And he wasn’t furious with her?” Bobbie asks. I tell her we’ve all learned that there isn’t any point in being mad at my mother. It doesn’t bother her in the slightest and it just drives us insane.

      “Anyway, now I’m the one who’s got to get rid of the thing,” I say, pushing Joe Greco’s diamond pinky ring across the kitchen counter toward Bobbie with one finger while I peruse the questions posted on my site—in the hopes that I can answer one of them. I’m amazed that people out there are actually seeking my advice. Especially when Bobbie opts for the diamond studs instead of the longer earrings.

      “Sell it,” Bobbie says, flicking the ring back toward me as I settle on the question of how to remove blood stains from draperies. “You could use the money.”

      I remind her it isn’t mine to sell and type in a question of my own. I hate to ask, but how does one get blood on the draperies in the first place? I know the right thing to do is to just turn it over to the police, but my mother’s had enough trouble with them, and then again, Drew is already calling it my murder. I push the ring back toward her and it dances off the counter onto the floor and caroms off the baseboard.

      “But it would give you a good excuse to see him again,” Bobbie says while I stoop to pick it up off the floor.

      I tell her that I’m afraid that is precisely how it will look. Like I took the ring so that I could “produce evidence” and get involved with him on a case again.

      Frankly, if that didn’t seem so embarrassingly obvious, I’d consider it.

      “And maybe it’s some family heirloom or something,” I say, though it looks like a pretty generic Zales sort of thing.

      “Okay then, Miss Goody Two-Shoes, give it back to the dead guy, why don’t you?” Bobbie says as if she doesn’t care much one way or the other, while I type The best way to deal with blood stains on draperies is to take them to the dry cleaners and let a professional do it. However, if you are sure they are washable, you could try an enzyme presoak and then wash as usual. Good luck!

      “Give it back? How?” I ask her, closing down Windows and shutting off the computer. “Put it in an envelope and mail it to heaven?”

      “I don’t know,” Bobbie says. “Why don’t you just take it to his funeral and ask him

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