A Body to die for

and deadbeats to the ticket buyer lines. Jack complained that he had to go to the bathroom. He went. I waited on line. Even for midday, the station was packed with people. A family of European tourists with rucksacks stood in a circle to my left. They were checking a subway map and jabbering in German. I estimated forty minutes before at least two of them were swindled—tourists were easy targets for scams. I turned to see how much progress my line made. Not much.
    I turned back to the Germans. A couple of teenagers walked by. One skillfully squirted ketchup from a bottle on the back of the father’s pants. The other one tapped the man on his shoulder and pointed to the stain. The father dropped his pack to examine himself, and the squirter snagged the bundle and ran. Needless to say, the other family members couldn’t catch him with fifty pounds of miniature Empire State Buildings strapped to their backs. The old ketchup scam. I almost felt sorry for them.
    A six-foot tall black hooker walked by just as the family was regrouping. The German jabber was loud and excited. Sensing something was up, she asked if she could help. The mother took one look at her nose ring and pretty pink dress, and spit on her candy-colored pumps. The hooker politely slipped off her shoe and wiped what she could on the mother’s David Letterman T-shirt.
    I smiled. I liked New York in June. Jack joined me on line just as the Germans slinked off, beaten, to the Roy Rogers on the corner of Forty-second and Eighth Avenue. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
    “You’ve got toilet paper stuck to your flip-flops.” He actually checked.
    Jack said, “I was propositioned in the bathroom. And I probably caught some disease from the urinal.”
    I sighed. Even I knew not to use the urinals at Port Authority. I thought of the long bus ride. Finally, our turn came at the ticket window.
    They were only a few bucks each. I got receipts. I checked the time: too close for comfort. We had to dash to the gate. Jack beat me, even in his flip-flops. It was the middle of the morning on a weekday; the bus was nearly empty. The driver grunted good morning to us, and then gave Jack the fish-eye. I said, “What, you’ve never seen a former tennis pro before?” The driver ignored me. We took a seat in the back.
    The ride took forty minutes. I asked Jack about Freddie Smith. He didn’t know him. During our whole conversation, Jack sporadically tugged at the leggings. Two Upper West Side yuppie housewife types sat across from us. The one with the frost-job poked the one with the nose-job in the arm. Frosty then pointed at Jack as he wrestled with his package.
    I asked him, “Remember when we found Barney, you got us drinks from that little bar fridge. You didn’t happen to notice anything that didn’t belong?”
    “Like what?” he asked. “These tights are constricting.”
    “I don’t really know. I guess I’m picturing a test tube or some pills.”
    “Nope, just the usual—beet juice and tomato juice.”
    “The leggings aren’t the problem,” I said. “But that dick of yours. We’ll just have to do something about that. In fact,” I continued, “just think. Once the operation’s done, you can wear leggings every day.” Frosty, who’d been eavesdropping, gasped.
    “What operation?” Jack asked.
    “Forget it,” I said. The view out the window on the New Jersey Turnpike wasn’t what most people would call God’s country, unless smoke-spewing factories, polluted marshes (Jimmy Hoffa’s final resting place), and the miles of shimmering tar highways were divine. The traffic was spotty, and the air-conditioning in the bus didn’t quite filter out the sulfur smell coming from the Tuscan dairy factory outside. We passed the exit for my parents’ old house in Short Hills. I hadn’t been back since they moved to Florida five years ago. I didn’t miss it. Elizabeth, our destination, was only a few exits away. I scanned the passengers on the bus again, looking for tails. Everyone seemed clean—or uninterested. Except, of course, for Frosty and Nosy, now fixated on Jack’s incessant fiddling.
    We pulled into the massive Ikea parking lot at high noon. The tar moved under my feet as we walked toward the squat, turtle-shaped, blue-and-yellow warehouse. I had the Bjornskinki knife in my purse. I hoped that there weren’t hundreds of weirdos like Alex who’d special order bread knives from Sweden. Jack caught some stares from the strictly