Pink Balloons and Other Deadly Things (Mystery Series - Book One) by Nancy Tesler

jagged painful gasps as I leaned against the wall in the corridor.
    The door to the elevator opened. I knew there were people in it, but I was hardly aware of them. We rode down in silence. Memories flashed through my mind. Images of Rich in his office talking to young hopefuls. Images of him with Dot the hundreds of times I saw them together, her eyes worshipping him, his, remote and businesslike. God, he was good at it. Did it make his infidelity worse knowing for certain there were many instead of just one? I wasn't sure. But by the time we got to the car, a kind of calm had settled over me. I was certain of what I was going to do. Meg knew it too.
    “Oh, Carrie,” she said. “Don’t go off the deep end because of what Herb said. He’s so sick, who knows if he even knows what---”
    “With or without you,” I interrupted. “She had a motive. If there’s anything in that apartment of hers, I’m going to find it.” I turned away from her and stared out the window.
    Cars flew by, white cars, green ones, blue,
    Black...blue. I turned to Meg. “Who makes the Prius?” I asked her.
    She took her eyes off the road for a second and looked at me. “Toyota. Why?”
    I wanted to smile, but my lips wouldn't stretch that far. “Because I just remembered. A couple of months ago, Dot bought a new car. A blue one. A blue Toyota Prius.”
    I CALLED DOT’S apartment. The phone rang a half-dozen times and then I got a robotic voice telling me that the person I’d called was not available and I should please leave a message. I didn’t. By now, I’d convinced myself she and Rich had gone off somewhere together. Some secret place-—a love nest where they’d been rendezvousing monthly, or weekly, or maybe daily for the past ten years. Dot Shea! Neurotic, unsexy Dot! Erica-—you could attribute her to a middle-age crisis. You could hate her, convince yourself she'd stolen him away by casting some magical, youthful spell. But Dot...
    Stop! I told myself. This was old ground, covered months before in my therapist’s office. What difference, at this point, if Rich got it on with one woman or twenty? Some men are born womanizers. Like Clinton and Spitzer and that Dominick Strauss Whats-his-name. It’s a known personality disorder.
    But this was my husband who had been leading a double life right under my anesthetized nose. I had not only been blind, I must have been brain-dead.
    Meg glanced at me inquiringly as I flipped my phone closed. “Well?”
    “Not home.”
    “You still determined to go?”
    “You don’t have to come.”
    “Oh, shut up.” She hit the accelerator and we turned on to River Road.
    DOT’S APARTMENT COMPLEX was located south of us in Edgewater, a town where high-rise buildings have sprung up like giant trees amid the weeds of commercial flotsam adjacent to the river. The town’s proximity to New York City and its panoramic view of the Hudson had enticed developers out to make a quick buck to erect buildings wherever they could purchase land. Little if any thought was given to architectural harmony or to the original character of the town. The result was, the town had no character at all.
    Dot’s building, lacking a swimming pool and a health club, fell just short of being labeled luxurious. It did, however, have a doorman plus a security guard, who roamed the parking lot checking bumpers and windshields for tenants’ and visitors’ stickers.
    Meg pulled over half a block from the entrance.
    “How’re we going to get past the M.P.?”
    A dilemma.
    “If we park here,” I said, “and walk along the river to the entrance, I think we can bypass him. We’ll only have to deal with the doorman.”
    Meg flipped open her purse, applied some lipstick, and fluffed up her hair. “No problem,” she replied, opening her door.
    I didn't question her. I’d seen men preen like peacocks doing a courtship dance over Meg.
    We jogged along a dirt road toward the river, residents out for our daily