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naked .
    “Sure thing, Mark, anytime.” Nail him down. “A week from tonight?” Would the crime scene tape be gone by then?
    He leaned in closer. “Nothing sooner?”
    “Friday?” I blurted. Never stand in the way of a good-looking man whose only fault is that he wants to see you sooner.
    “You’re on.” He grinned and gave me a peck on the cheek before I knew it was coming and could intercept it with my lips. The man was fast—and elusive. Catching my breath, I got tangled in a swirl of his cologne, something by Serge Lutens that I recognized because I’d snagged a sample card at Saks.
    My eyes followed him as he strode up the street. At this rate, the snow would be falling before he and I experienced anything half as cheap and pointless as my onetime adventure with the FedEx man.
    *
    My contribution to the Happy Food Potluck at Landon’s was a salmon ball.
    “Anything, but anything, with horseradish is not happy food, Eve,” Landon lectured me. “Don’t you have sinuses?” I followed him into his granite and Italian tile kitchen, where everything seemed suspended from the high ceiling: a Casablanca fan, a wineglass rack, hooks for his gleaming copper Calphalon cookware.
    Landon is a trust fund baby whose six-room condo is in the upscale Innerlight Estates complex overlooking Pensey Park on the south side of town. Maria Pia’s younger son, Dom Angelotta, made a fortune in plumbing supplies, which pretty much offset her pique when he announced he was not going to work in the family business. Landon is his only child.
    And Landon is the greatest art hag I have ever met. If there’s a gallery opening anywhere in the borough of Manhattan, Landon is there with a bottle of Giacomo Conterno Barolo Riserva Monfortino for the owner. He also likes small dance companies and dignified poetry readings.
    Four of Miracolo’s “human resources” were collected on the leather sofas in the living room, eating happy appetizers, which turned out to be edamame dumplings and caramelized onion Brie en croute . Apparently the dumplings and Brie didn’t cut it with Landon’s handsome tabby cat, Vaughn, who was stretched out on his back pretending to be asleep.
    Gathered were Choo Choo, Paulette, Jonathan, and the treacherous Dana, all stakeholders. Paulette Coniglio was one of my father’s former lady friends, who had waitressed all her life and still needed a paycheck. I liked her. Jonathan Bolger was still in a closet that appeared to be painted shut, but he was an excellent sommelier, and Landon had hopes.
    “Vera will get here when she can,” Choo Choo explained, balancing a strangely empty plate on his lap. “She’s taking her brother to an AA meeting.” We all knew she had finally talked him into going. Redheaded Vera Tyndall was a little younger than my thirty-two, putting herself through Temple University part-time, taking care of her brother, and an all-around good egg. The kind of person you can totally trust with your goldfish and house plants. And she actually liked Maria Pia, who was as difficult as she could be charming.
    Landon brought me a plate and a big glass of red wine, probably not from a bottle of the Giacomo Conterno. “And poor, dear Alma will be late, too. She’s got her grief support group until eight.” Alma Toscano was a hard-luck friend of my grandmother’s. When her husband killed himself two years ago, Alma underwent what Maria Pia called a “circumstance revision”—read: she fell on hard times and came to work at Miracolo. She kept going to the support group because they had all bonded, so now it was something social, only without having to learn Mah Jongg.
    Working at Miracolo was an answer to grief, tuition, habit, empty nests, man trouble, underemployment, and performance dreams, since both the food and the company were wonderful.
    I was chewing an edamame dumpling, waiting for the bliss to happen, when Dana spread a wide smile all around, then folded her hands and turned to