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When Marsella walked into Toneu Motors on Rutherford Street, she didn’t know what she expected to find. Her fianc? in the arms of another woman? Lipstick on his collar? A girl’s nylon stocking in the pocket of his blazer? Whatever it was, she decided not to let this Mary-Lynn control her every thought from now on. She was simply going to tell Dewey what Mary-Lynn had told her and see how he’d react. She reckoned herself to be a pretty good judge of character and his response would probably tell her everything she needed to know.

But when she walked in, she found Dewey ill at ease and looking tense. He was pacing the showroom, where gorgeous Italian cars stood blinking appealingly to anyone who passed by. Only there weren’t that many people in the place. A few who were browsing and one who was being shown the interior of a Lamborghini by one of Dewey’s salespeople.

“Are you all right, darling?” she asked.

“Will you look at that,” he grunted, gesturing irritatedly to a couple who were in the parking lot examining a Ferrari Portofino. They were taking pictures of the car, with the wife posing on the hood while the husband snapped a couple of shots. “I should tell them to buzz off,” he said. “I need buyers, not lookers.”

“Lookers can become buyers, unless you tell them to buzz off,” she reminded him gently.

“I’m sorry, darling,” he said, pressing a quick peck to her cheek. “It’s just been awfully quiet lately. If this keeps up I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“It’ll be all right,” she said, having heard this particular lament many times before.

“It’s that moron Izban,” he said, repeating another one of his favorite gripes.

She placed a hand on his chest.“Listen, we need to talk caterers,” she said, hoping to distract him from his worries. “We need to make a decision soon, or else we won’t be able to feed our guests.”

“Just pick one,” he said, clearly not in the mood to talk wedding minutiae.

“I don’t want to just pick one,” she said. “I want us to pick one together.”

“Look, the ones we discussed are all excellent. So just pick one. It’s fine.”

She studied him for a moment. He seemed more tense than usual.“Are you sure it’s just the business that’s got you worried?”

He turned to her.“Of course it’s the business. What else would it be?”

“I don’t know. I just…” She thought about the best way to broach the topic, but then realized that this was neither the time or the place to hold such a delicate discussion. “Why don’t we go out tonight? We can visit the caterer at the top of our shortlist and then if we like what he’s got to offer we can decide on the spot and lock him down.”

“Sounds like a great idea,” he said, forcing a smile.

He was an attractive man with a full crop of dark hair, now slightly graying at the temples, and still sporting an athletic build in spite of the fact that he was a good fifteen years older than she was. It wasn’t hard to imagine his enduring popularity with the ladies, even as he was nearing the end of his fifth decade. And even though she’d decided against the PI idea, she was still determined to have it out with him once and for all.

You couldn’t build a marriage based on lies.

And if he did lie, she’d catch him at it.

When she walked out, she saw Odelia Kingsley walk up, along with her husband Chase, the cop. They were accompanied by two cats, a small sort of grayish-beigeish fluffball and one big and orange.

She offered them a smile in passing and wondered if they were in the market for a new car. It never occurred to her they could be there on official police business.

Chapter 10

The owner and proprietor of Toneu Motors didn’t look like any car salesman I’d ever seen. For one thing he wasn’t overly garrulous and avuncular and didn’t try to grab our attention the moment we walked in and extoll the virtues of his exclusive and expensive wares. On the contrary, the man seemed very hard to find. Finally his salesman, who was busy convincing an elderly gentleman that a two-hundred-thousand-dollar car was exactly what he needed, steered us in the right direction: the office at the back of the showroom.

Chase knocked on the door and we all filed in without awaiting the man’s response. One of the perks of being a cop is that you don’t need people’s express permission to start bombarding them with all kinds of awkward and sometimes very personal questions. Like whether they enjoy paying for sex on a regular basis.

“Chase Kingsley,” Chase curtly announced, flashing his badge. “Dewey Toneu?”

The car dealership owner sat behind his desk, looking sort of moody and out of sorts. And the sudden arrival on the scene of a cop didn’t improve matters much, I could tell.

“Yes?” he said in a sort of surly way, just bordering on incivility. He wasn’t going to sell a lot of cars with that attitude, especially at the price points he was advocating.