Third Degree (A Murder 101 Mystery)

conversation obviously over. There’s nothing worse than a hungry Crawford.
    He drove us to the Stop & Shop at the corner of Route 9, but thankfully, he didn’t ask me about my visit to Lydia Wilmott’s house. That didn’t mean we wouldn’t be discussing it later. I grabbed a cart and wheeled it inside, happy to be doing something normal and ordinary, like looking at fruit and deciding between potato salad and cole slaw. He followed behind me, admiring the big selection of fruits and vegetables; Crawford lives on the Upper West Side and gets most of his groceries from the Korean grocer two doors down from his apartment. Suburban grocery stores never ceased to amaze him with their size and selection. I turned to hand him a bag of limes but instead found myself staring at Lydia Wilmott, an Hermès kerchief on her head, giant black sunglasses hiding her presumably red, tear-filled eyes. I stuttered out her name, careful not to alert the other shoppers that the newly widowed woman walked among us in the grocery store.
    Crawford dropped the kiwi he was holding and waited for an introduction. “Lydia Wilmott, Bobby Crawford,” I said, and she took his hand tentatively. I didn’t go into the whole, “he’s my boyfriend even though we’re too old for that terminology but I haven’t decided whether or not to mess up a good thing by marrying him” spiel.
    “I’m very sorry for your loss,” Crawford said, good former altar boy that he was.
    Lydia stood, straight-backed, her hands gripping the handle of her shopping cart. Her lips were set in a grim horizontal line and she stared at Crawford from behind her very expensive designer sunglasses, ignoring his condolences. “I appreciated your visit this morning, Alison.” She plucked a kiwi from the stack next to Crawford and threw it into her cart. “I had to get out of the house. There are too many people there and I just need to be doing something normal.”
    “I understand,” I said. I handed her a bunch of bananas that she was too far away to reach and she thanked me.
    She turned to Crawford and addressed him. “What did you say your name was?”
    “Crawford,” he said. “Bobby Crawford.”
    She nodded slowly. She continued to appraise him from behind her dark glasses, and while I was used to Crawford getting admiring glances from the opposite sex, I sensed that this wasn’t one of those occasions. She was studying him for some other reason, its nature indeterminate to me. “And what is it that you do for a living, Mr. Crawford?”
    I didn’t know what that had to do with anything, besides her curiosity, but Crawford answered that he was a police detective. Lydia nodded slowly. “Here?” she asked.
    “No. New York City,” he said.
    She nodded again, and by the grim set of her mouth, I could tell that she wasn’t impressed. In fact, she seemed disgusted. Maybe she had had a run-in with a cop? Unpaid parking tickets? A jaywalking fine? All I knew was that she was not pleased to meet Crawford, even though she said so as she started off down the apple aisle, careful to avoid the glances of any other shoppers who were rubbernecking with gusto. The Hermès scarf and sunglasses notwithstanding, everyone knew exactly who she was.
    Crawford looked at me and mouthed, “What was that?”
    I shrugged and went with a full-blown lie. “You’re handsome. You’re going to get looks.” I pushed the cart down the aisle and toward the deli counter, Crawford following behind me.
    “That wasn’t what that was,” he said, looking over his shoulder to see where Lydia had gone, but she had disappeared into one of the vast aisles in another part of the store. When he determined that she wasn’t in earshot, he turned back toward the deli counter. “Is it our turn?”
    I showed him our number. Nine hundred and seven. The number on the neon counter read “three.” There were four other people ahead of us, waiting for cold cuts. “We’re going to be here a while,” I said.
    The deli man approached and moved the number ahead. “Four!”
    When no one answered, the woman at the head of the line interrupted. “I have forty-eight,” she said, proffering her ticket.
    “Five!”
    The man behind her offered his input. “I have ninety.”
    “Six!”
    Crawford let out a loud exhale.
    “Seven!”
    I looked at my ticket again. “I have nine hundred and seven,” I offered weakly.
    “Eight!” The counter guy was more exasperated than the customers were but