A Body to die for

grandfather at thirty-five. I even hit the ball a few times with my new girlfriend. She was an aerobics instructor at the club before she got in an accident there. Leeza Robbins? Ever meet her?”
    Leeza’s wounds had healed in a few days. She’d been back at the club for a month and a half already. I wondered if Alex knew about her friendship with Jack. “You should take Leeza on the road with you,” I suggested. Just because she wasn’t a threat anymore didn’t mean I wanted her around.
    “You did it again,” Jack remarked, slapping the bed. “My God, but you are brilliant. As a matter of fact, Leeza and I are flying out tonight. We’re going to London. To Wimbledon. Not that I can get in the tournament, but it’ll be good for me to go check it out. I should get back in the scene. Make myself known. Get a new coach. And with all the money, I might as well live a little.”
    The money. Here’s how that happened: Ameleth had to declare bankruptcy to pay for her legal fees. She was forced to sell the club. Jack arranged the sale of the club to Brother Samuel of the Jehovah’s within weeks. All was settled by the time my skin healed. Brother planned to keep the club as a fitness center for post-apocalypse survival training. Because Jack was still married to Ameleth, he was legally entitled to half of the sale money. Jack walked away with about a quarter of a million. Dollars, that is.
    “Which reminds me,” I said. “Don’t you owe me a few grand?”
    “I thought we were all straight, weren’t we?” Jack asked. “The three thousand I gave you should cover it.”
    “Plus expenses,” I said. “About five thousand worth.”
    Jack wrote a check. He handed it to me and got up to leave. “I hope you’ll be happy, Wanda.”
    “Who says I wasn’t happy before?”
    “Marriage is hard,” he said. “It was for me, anyway.”
    I told this story to Max and Alex on my last day at Brooklyn General. Max said, “You’re going to take marital advice from that guy?”
    “He just wants me to be careful.”
    Alex said, “You don’t know how to be careful, though you should. With birth control at least.”
    “And now that all this is over,” Max said, “you’ll be hanging up your gumshoes for good. Right, honey?”
    “Hanging up my gumshoes?” I mocked. “Please, dear. Leave the witty patter to me.” Max left the room to find out what was holding up my discharge—from the hospital, that is.
    After Max had left the room, Alex sat on my bed and asked, “What’s this about gumshoes?” His jaw muscles were jumping under the skin. Goddamn that husband of mine and his big flapping mouth, I thought. Husband? Did I say husband? How comic.
    “I haven’t decided anything yet,” I lied. “But Max and I were talking about the possibility that I might cool out on detecting for a little while.” We’d been talking about it a lot, actually. Every day. For the first time in my personal detecting history, I was beginning to agree with Max about quitting. I got burned in this case—physically and metaphorically. I didn’t think I could get it up again anytime soon. It’s one thing to claim blithely that I, supersleuth Mallory, laugh brazenly in the face of fear. But this time around, I went snout-to-snout with it. Fear turned out not to be so fucking funny after all.
    Alex said, “And you were planning on sharing this information with me, your partner, at some point, I assume?” He was getting angry. I could tell by his nervous hair raking.
    “I figured I’d let you know.”
    “Big of you.” He stood up and walked across the hospital room. He stared into the mirror by the sink. “You suck, Mallory.”
    “Eggs?Meat? Out loud?” I asked, attempting levity.
    Alex didn’t laugh. “I could have been a famous photographer by now. If I hadn’t devoted the last five fucking years of my life to you. To your fucking agency. To this detecting crap.”
    “Yeah, you could have been a contender.” I watched his back tense. “And you know it’s not crap. We caught murderers. We protected New York from itself.”
    “We did some good? Is that what you’re saying? Well, in that case, it’s fine for you to make decisions about our agency without talking to me first,” he said, heavy on the irony. He turned around to face me. “What am I supposed to do now?”
    I was beginning to get pissed off myself at this point. “Well, considering that you need me to hold your dick when you take a piss, I have