Third Degree (A Murder 101 Mystery)

thin cuts of meat onto paper. When he was done, we had about six packages, along with several bags of chips, a couple of loaves of Italian bread, and a six-pack of beer, which Crawford had set about amassing as we waited for our order.
    Tony looked at me forlornly. “You never come here anymore.”
    I shrugged. “I’m sorry, Tony. I’ll come by soon,” I said, even though I had no intention of doing so. I heard some pots and pans rattling around in the back of the store and knew I had only a minute or two to find out what I had come in for: just how much Tony and Lucia hated Carter. “Tony, did you know Carter Wilmott?”
    He blessed himself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, kissed the Jesus head around his neck, and then spat on the floor in fury. “Son of a bitch,” he said, quickly adding, “God rest his soul.”
    Crawford had his hand on the door handle and was anxious to leave. “You didn’t like him?” I asked, feigning ignorance. I didn’t like him, either, and that was just from reading his blog; I had no personal experience with the guy. Oh, right, except for the dying-in-front-of-me part. That’s about as personal as it gets.
    Tony leaned across the counter and was close enough to grab my hand and bring me close. My midsection hit the ice-cream case fronting the counter with a thud, and with an indelicate “oof,” the breath left my lungs. “He was a very bad man.”
    I struggled to catch my breath and listen to Tony at the same time, which wasn’t easy.
    “He said very bad things about my store,” he whispered conspiratorially, looking over his shoulder to see if Lucia was in sight. I had never seen her, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t somewhere else in the store. “I thought Lucia was going to kill him.”
    I was feeling faint. Between the heat of the kitchen, the lack of oxygen, my growing hunger, and the pungent odor of roast beef combined with mayonnaise wafting off Tony, I knew I wasn’t going to last long. I decided to ask the question I had come in to ask. “Does Lucia know anything about explosives?” I could almost read Crawford’s mind: way to cut to the chase, Alison. Whether or not Carter had died from a blow to the head was irrelevant in my mind. Someone wanted to kill him, and for some unknown reason, I wanted to find out. That, coupled with a misguided allegiance to Greg and bad coffee, was enough for me to poke around.
    Tony smiled proudly. “No, but I was a cook in Korea,” he said. “Learned a lot about blowing things up from the guys we fed. Once we blew up a whole pig!”
    I was aware of Crawford’s hand gripping my elbow as I slid down in front of the ice-cream case. “That’s interesting,” I said before I passed out, thinking about how good a roast beef on Italian bread would taste when I finally woke up.

Seven
     
    I’m a fainter. Always have been. Even worse, I’m a puker. Fortunately, when I awoke, propped against the counter with a dirty dish towel pressed to my head, I was free of puke. I had slid down the counter into a sitting position before I had really conked out completely. The bag of cold cuts was on the floor where Crawford had dropped it; he knew I was going to faint even before I did.
    Crawford asked me if I could get to my feet and I tried to put them under me. After a few tries, I managed to get into a standing position. Tony handed me a cold bottle of water, and the genuine concern on his face made me forget that he was more attracted to me than my first husband had been, a thought that gave me pause. Crawford thanked Tony for his help and helped me out of the store and into the car. He turned it on and put the air conditioner on full blast.
    “Are you okay?” he asked, directing the vents toward my face.
    “I don’t know what happened,” I said, truly at a loss. “I think it was when he pulled me into the counter. I lost my breath.”
    “You looked queasy long before that,” Crawford said, taking a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiping my brow. “You haven’t looked well since I picked you up yesterday.”
    “Do you blame me?” I asked. “I saw a dead body.”
    “Not your first.”
    “No. Not my first. But hopefully my last.” I leaned my head on the air-conditioning vent closest to me and sighed. “Take me home.”
    Crawford kept an eye on me most of the way home, but he also kept looking in his rearview mirror quite a bit, raising my hackles. “What are you doing?” I asked.
    “Who do you know who drives