Dating Dead Men by Harley Jane Kozak Page A

page at a time, looking for a match.
    â€œMorning.” Joey, in blue jeans, emerged from the back room. The teenage customer followed her long, thin legs with his eyes. She was morning pale and her red hair shot out in all directions, follicles energized from a night in bed. “There it is,” she said, unearthing her cell phone from my mound of newspapers. “I'm hanging here today, if you don't mind; Elliot's out of town and his evil sister's visiting. She was going on last night about my chaise longue, how it violates the aesthetic integrity of the house, until I finally just hauled it out of there.”
    Joey had married into an architecturally important house, which is why her former furniture kept migrating to my back room. I flipped through a Friday Calendar section. “Are you allowed to abandon a houseguest like that?” I asked. “Doesn't it violate some in-law hospitality rule?”
    â€œNo, because my sister-in-law likes the housekeeper more than she likes me. What are you doing?”
    I showed her the page I was trying to match and she started to look through the papers with me. I should borrow her housekeeper for Margaret, I thought. At 7 A . M ., I'd taken the ferret for a courtyard stroll, replaced her glutinous Wheat Chex with tuna fish, a rice cake, lettuce, and grapes, apologized for leaving her alone, and told her I'd return as soon as I could. Margaret had been unmoved.
    I felt Joey's look as I furiously turned pages. It was a big mistake, this vow of silence I'd taken. Bad enough that I couldn't talk about Doc or the corpse, but he'd been really adamant about Margaret, as if she were in some witness protection program. The fact was, I was bursting to discuss it all; I wasn't programmed for discretion. Maybe it would be okay to just ask questions, the kind that come up in general conversation. That wasn't “talking,” exactly. “Joey,” I said, “how do you find out about the progress of a murder investigation, beyond what's reported in the paper?”
    Joey perked right up at this. She came from a family of law enforcement professionals and had worked herself, briefly, in a morgue. “The best way is to be a close relative of the victim, or know someone on the force. We don't have you dating any homicide cops, do we?”
    A woman with a walker struggled through the front door, causing the Welcome! bell to ring incessantly until I rescued her. She cut off my hello with a toss of her steel gray spit curls and said, “Just looking,” in the tone of voice that means “Don't bug me.” I went to the register to ring up my teenage customer, then turned to find Joey exiting to the back room, phone to her ear. Prominently placed on the table for me was the Friday California section, folded open to page B9.
    â€œPlea Bargain of Mob Figure Reversed on Appeal” said the headline. The word “Mob” seemed to pulsate. Mob. Mob. Mob.
    â€œShit!” cried the woman in the walker.
    You're telling me, I thought, and hurried over to Birthdays, Humorous. The woman stood with an open purse, cursing. On my grass green carpet was a compact of pressed powder, broken and crushed. When I knelt to pick it up, the customer snapped shut the purse and exited, her walker thumping across the floor.
    I was desperate to get back to my clue, but the woman could be a spy, lying in wait outside. This was the sort of thing Mr. Bundt would test me on, the Immediate Cleanup Response that was drilled into us on a cellular level. But there are times a person has to live dangerously. I returned to my paper.
    Next to the mob article was an ad for Ernest Bovee, M.D., who specialized in cosmetic body surgery, and provided a smiling photo of himself with before and after shots of a woman's thighs. It was possible Doc saved liposuction ads. It was also possible he'd felt compelled, last night at the Donut Stop, to collect coupons. But it wasn't likely. With a sigh, I