Life with Dickie – Chapter 46

Firstly, thank you all the reviewers – especially the critical ones! It helped keep me on track for this chapter and get back to where we needed to be. And it made me feel like a real author! To anyone who is worried, Ranger will come through in the end. He just needs to get over his sulk first.

I stood in the middle of the footpath watching Ranger walk away, mouth agape.

He flirted with me. He was the one who pushed himself into my life. He was the one who wanted us to be friends. I saved his daughter! And then what? "Goodbye, Stephanie."

"What a jackass," I muttered to myself. I heard a sound nearby and looked up to see Tank, trying to hold back laughter. I hadn't even noticed him there in my excitement of finally seeing Ranger and seeing for myself that he really was okay. I glared at Tank and stomped off.

I was late for dinner. The pot roast was dried out. My family valiantly washed it down with the red wine that I bought. Morelli's phone beeped with a message halfway through dinner. He checked it, excused himself, and disappeared.

Poor Joe. I'd have to eat his slice of cake for him. And Dickie's too. I was there for my family members in need.

After dessert I walked Val and the girls home. Mary Alice neighed and trotted the whole way. I pushed Bella's pram, and Angie chatted to me the whole way home.

"Where was Dickie tonight?" Val asked.

"Working, like always," I told her.

"He works late a lot," she said.

"Part of the job, I guess. Just like Morelli."

"Sometimes I worry about Joe. Steve worked a lot and I trusted him. Then he ran off with the babysitter."

"Joe won't run off with the babysitter, Val. He's grown into a decent man."

"Yeah, I guess so. It can be hard to tell though," she said. We reached her house, so I hugged her and my nieces goodbye, then walked back to my parents.

I went into the house to say goodbye and pick up the giant bag of leftovers that my mother had packed up. It seemed that she'd decided that I couldn't fend for myself, but there was half a cake in there, so I didn't complain. If Dickie was lucky, I'd even leave him a piece to eat.

The door to my office opened, and I looked up. Mary Lou had the day off and Hal-o-saurus had stopped shadowing me a few weeks earlier, so I was alone in the office. As alone as someone with security monitoring and a panic button could be. We sometimes got customers coming in to pick up orders, but I saw that it was Eddie Garazza, who was married to my cousin Shirley. Then again they had about a billion children, but maybe Eddie was coming in to pick up something nice for Shirley.

He had a box of doughnuts in his hands and he looked nervous.

I wasn't going to babysit, no matter what. Dickie refused to help me again after last time, and I wasn't facing Eddie's kids on my own.

"I'm not babysitting," I told him. Might as well get it out of the way.

"It's not that," Eddie opened with. "Shirly overheard something the other day at the beauty parlour. I know she likes to gossip, Steph, but it's got me worried."

Crap. Burg gossip. This wasn't good. What had I done this time? Well besides getting kidnapped, having multiple men shot in my business premises, being brushed off by Ranger in the street – oh crap, was the rumour that I was having an affair with Ranger?

"It's not true, Eddie. I swear it," I told him. He opened the box of doughnuts and slid them over the counter towards me. I picked up a doughnut and took a bite.

"It's Joyce Barnhardt. She was bragging that her boyfriend is on the verge of a big deal."

"Well, good for her," I told him.

"She said he's a lawyer in a small firm, and he and the other partners have this huge deal going that's about to pay off. That all she needs to do is get him to leave his wife and she'll be set," Eddie said.

"Joyce is a shark. No, not a shark. A bottom feeding pond scum sucker. And if this guy is cheating on his wife, then he deserves Joyce. What a scum bag."

"Stephanie, Shirley thinks she was talking about Dickie," Eddie told me. I stopped eating.

"What? No. Dickie's not a cheater. When would he have the time?" I said. When would he have the time? Because he's always at work.

Always… at….

I stared at Eddie. It was starting to sink in.

"Shirley said that Joyce described him and he sounded like Dickie. And Joyce knew that Shirley was in the room and that she's your cousin. It's the sort of awful thing that Joyce would get a kick out of, not thinking that Shirley would work it out," Eddie said.

That was true enough. Joyce did like to think that she was clever, and Shirley didn't have a reputation for being that bright. However Shirley's sense for gossip was top notch. Although I wanted to deny immediately that Dickie would ever cheat on me, I trusted Shirley and if she thought it was important enough to send Eddie around with doughnuts, well… she must have been certain.

"Shit," I said.

"Yeah," Eddie said.

"I need to find out," I said.

"Don't do anything until you know for sure," Eddie cautioned me.

"How do I find out for sure?" I asked him. He looked back at me. "Shit," I said. I'd need to catch him in the act, or see if he was stupid enough to have any evidence on his phone. He always kept his phone secure and I didn't know the passcode. He said that it was security for his work, and I'd believed it.

So that left catching him in the act.

I needed back-up. Ranger would have been my number one choice in looking intimidating, but he wasn't talking to me at the moment. Hal-o-saurus had disappeared from sight. Morelli and Eddie were cops and probably couldn't rough people up for the hell of it. Who did that leave? A pregnant Mary Lou? Val with baby Bella strapped to her front? My dad? I sighed.

I was on my own.

First things first, Stephanie. Get smart. You know Dickie can track you from your phone. Set up a plan. See what happens.

First. Find out what Joyce is doing. If I saw her out somewhere and she was with someone not Dickie, that would clear him.

That made me remember when I'd last seen Joyce, when she'd been at the same restaurant that Dickie and I were meeting at for dinner. She'd been meeting Ranger. She and Dickie had arrived minutes apart, and he'd known her.

I'd also caught a glimpse of someone leaving Dickie's building once that looked slightly like Joyce but she'd disappeared before I could get a proper look.

Nothing conclusive but I was starting to feel like I'd been an idiot. A trusting idiot.

So how did I find out what Joyce was up to? She'd surely spot me if I tried to track her. Not many people in the Burg had a Mercedes. And Mary Lou had giant vanity plates that would make it obvious if I borrowed her car. I couldn't borrow Big Blue.

This was when I really could have used Ranger as a friend. I bet he had some nifty spy gadgets that I could use.

You know what. The hell with it. Dickie had been acting suspiciously enough lately that I should have been worried earlier. Instead I'd been in denial. I was never one to hold back, so I'd just throw myself in the deep end. Time to visit my husband at work.

"Want to give me a lift?" I asked Eddie.