Seven Minutes to Noon (19 page)

With his wiry build in a T-shirt and jeans, pale gaze and close-cropped blond hair dusted with silver glitter, Jason reminded Alice of Peter Pan: young and sweet and ridiculously hopeful.

“Morning, boss.” He smiled his most cocky, man-at-twenty smile and checked his watch. “Made it on time today!”

If ten minutes late is on time,
she thought. But what she said was, “Boy, am I glad you’re here.”

He came around the counter and kissed Alice on both cheeks, taking her by surprise. He smelled sweet, cologny — thoroughly un-American. He must have been spending time with the local French transplants who had lately claimed the neighborhood.
Little France,
Maggie called it. She enjoyed the affectation of his perfumed kisses for a moment before her stomach reeled. Then she ran into the bathroom, slammed shut the door and threw up.

She spent the rest of the morning hiding out in the peaceful, shabby back room, feeding herself toast and ice water and lying on the couch. She listened as Jason politely served a customer. Three times he came back for different shoes in the woman’s size. Then, without the sound of the cash register — no sale for all that fuss, though that wasn’t unusual — the customer left.

It was quiet for a while before Maggie arrived. The welcome bell dinged immediately after, announcing another arrival, and the hum of business out front tightened to a buzz. Women’s voices spun furiously around quick punctuations of Jason’s quasi-sardonic laughter. The bubbling tone of Maggie’s enthusiasms was like boiled sugar to Jason’s quick stirs. Alice was sure she heard Pam Short’s voice. She had to find out what was happening out there.

Pam was seated on the center bench, queenlike in a
flowing magenta caftan with uneven green stripes. Her hair was tied up in a magenta and green polka-dotted ribbon.

“Alice!” Pam opened her arms but didn’t rise. “Come here. Let me have a hug.”

Alice leaned over and put her arms around Pam. She smelled like baby powder.

“Did I miss an appointment?” Alice asked, wondering how badly her inner clock had been thrown off by her escalating nausea.

“Nope,” Pam said. “We’ve just got the two o’clock. Can’t I visit my favorite shoe store? I’m taking an early lunch hour.”

“Slow morning in real estate?” Maggie said.

“You got it, honey.”

Maggie was just then putting away the last customer’s try-ons, nestling a burnt orange autumn pump against its mate in a bed of pearl tissue paper. She placed the lid carefully on the box and handed it to Jason.

“Hold it a minute,” Pam said. “I’ll take a look at those lovelies.”

Maggie opened the box and presented it to Pam as if offering a selection of the most delectable chocolates.

“Shall we find your size?”

“Please,” Pam whispered. She lifted one of the shoes out of the box and ran her fingers along the suede toe.

A minute later, Jason came out of the back room and announced, “We don’t have a nine.”

“Can you order it?” Pam asked.

“Of course we can,” Maggie answered.

“Tell you what,” Alice said. “Find me the perfect house by the end of the week and the shoes are on me.”

“You have got yourself a deal!” Pam stood up, flouncing the wrinkles out of her caftan. “How about throwing lunch into the bargain? Doesn’t look like they need you here.” She winked at Maggie, who gamely nodded.

“You go on, darling,” Maggie said. “Jason and I can handle the hordes.”

Alice collected her purse, said her good-byes and left her shift early to treat Pam to lunch. She
was
hungry, though skeptical of her ability just now to hold anything down.

Walking arm in arm with Pam along Smith Street, Alice asked, “What do you feel like eating?”

“Julius Pollack.” Pam stopped walking and pivoted to face Alice.

“Excuse me?”

“He just paid me a little visit at my office. I had to get out of there. I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know how much to say in front of the others, so I bit my tongue.”

“Just now?”

“Yup. He walked into the office and kindly asked me to stop snooping around. The look in his eyes.” Pam approximated a forced-pleasant squint. “He’s gotta be the most passive-aggressive person I have ever met. I see your special fondness for him. He’s a major piece of work.”

“But why did he go see
you
?”

“Beats me. I only made a couple of calls. Someone must have gotten back to him. They all know each other.” Pam shrugged her hefty shoulders, creating a wave of fabric across her massive breasts. “He’s something, isn’t he? Those glasses.”

“I think he cross-dresses,” Alice said. “I think I saw him wearing silver high heels. I think I heard a baby crying in his apartment last night, but he lives alone, and—”

The look on Pam’s face stopped Alice. She wasn’t sure exactly what Pam was feeling — incredulity, pity — but there was enough concern on the woman’s face to float a charity.

“Never mind,” Alice said. “I slept for about ten minutes last night. I’m probably imagining things.”

“No,” Pam said, weaving her arm back through Alice’s. “If you heard it, it’s real.”

They walked in silence for a few minutes before deciding
to eat at the French bistro on the corner of Dean Street. When they had settled at an outdoor table, Pam said, “Guy in our office used to cross-dress but he didn’t keep it a secret. Told anyone he felt like, so it seemed like nothing.”

“I think Julius hides it,” Alice said, steadying her tone, “except for the glasses. And at night.”

“He’s a freak, in or out of ladies’ clothes.” Pam reached into her purse, withdrew a small tube of hand cream and squirted a dab onto the back of one hand. “I haven’t found out who his silent partner is, but I will. Someone from the Buildings Department who owes me a favor is getting back to me.” She rubbed her hands together and smiled, satisfied. “Learn to work the ropes, my mother used to say, and you’ll go far.”

“You must have had quite a mother.”

“Still do. She’s conquered Florida, says she’ll only leave the state in an urn, which will never happen, because my mother intends to live forever.”

After lunch they walked up to Hicks Street for their two o’clock house.

“Well, here we are,” Pam said.

It was another 1.5 million-dollar house, this one overlooking the twin lanes of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, and across the street from the emergency-room entrance of Long Island College Hospital.

“What a noisy corner,” Alice said.

“It’s always something, isn’t it?” Pam rolled her eyes conspiratorially. Alice wondered if Pam managed this same camaraderie with all her clients, or if she was special. She remembered how much energy it used to take to please and appease her commercial editing clients.

“Well, let’s take a look.”

Alice marched up the front stoop ahead of Pam, who followed with the keys. The stoop, Alice noticed, was crumbling, but she didn’t mention it. She was depleted, without patience even for her own complaints.

“One-bedroom rental on the ground floor,” Pam said, pushing the front door open into a dim corridor with
stuccoed walls. Only one weak bulb illuminated the entrance but Alice could see the cracked brown linoleum lobbing up the stairway, its edges curling off the ancient steps. “Cosmetics,” Pam said. “A little lipstick makes all the difference, my mother used to say.”

As had Alice’s mother; it must have been a generational thing. Alice could still see the image of Lizzie’s partial face reflected back to her in the rearview mirror, stretching her lips taut for the dark shade of red she always wore.

“We enter here.” Pam singled out another key and put it into a door on the first-floor landing. They entered another narrow hall off which five separate rooms clustered like starved peas in a withered pod. Each room was small and dark, except the last room that faced the street, which was larger than the rest and was the only one that got any light.

“Picture how nice this could be,” Pam said, “with all the walls knocked out. If you took all three top floors, you could open the whole parlor floor to the staircase. It would look like a different place.”

“Is there an upstairs to this apartment?”

Pam shook her head, clearly embarrassed. But Alice knew the woman was doing her best in a ridiculous market, showing Alice what was available both above and below her target price. Driving home her point to strive upward, take a risk, and come out happy at the other end.

“This is a two-bedroom unit, and the two floors above are also two-bedroom units. That’s a lot of rental income for someone who wants to ease into their mortgage payments.”

“Or a big gut renovation for someone who doesn’t,” Alice said. She looked around and tried to see the
potential
here. The building was wide and deep, and while the ceilings weren’t high and had no detail, they weren’t exactly low either. But after a few minutes of thinking it over, she knew she fit neither of the profiles they had
mentioned, neither the income hoarder nor the gut renovator. She and Mike were willing to pay their share of the mortgage for a nice house, but weren’t up for much more than a paint job and maybe sanding wood floors. Plus they had to move quickly; there would not be time for major work.

“Let’s keep looking,” Alice said.

“You’re the boss.” Pam followed Alice out and locked the apartment door behind them.

“I’m sorry—” Alice started.

“What did I tell you?” Pam held up her hand. Today’s rings were shades of green to match the stripes in her caftan.

“I know, but still.” Alice wove her arm through Pam’s and felt a warm tug closer. “I appreciate your patience, Pam.”

“Good. I’m the most patient person I know. That’s why I always succeed.”

Up close, Pam’s skin looked slightly translucent in the midday sun. Alice noticed a dusting of powder on the folds of Pam’s neck, the baby-powder scent. They stood on Hicks Street in front of the house, next to the buzzing highway. Pam opened her green patent-leather purse, pulled out her overstuffed date book, removed the rubber band that held it together and flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for.

“Tomorrow, we’ve got a ten o’clock.”

“We do?” Alice came around to look over Pam’s shoulder at the page scrawled with pencil and various colors of pen. She couldn’t discern her appointment in the scribble.

“Didn’t I tell you?”

“Not that I know of,” Alice said, “unless Mike forgot to give me the message.”

Pam rummaged for a pen, scrawled the time and address on a blank page at the back of her address book, ripped it out and gave it to Alice.

“Anything else to see?” Alice was just asking when
across the street, on the highway side of Hicks Street, she spotted the limo driver walking slowly along the curb.

“That man!” Alice kept her voice low but couldn’t contain the pitch of hysteria. “He’s been following me all week!”

“Him?” Pam pointed at the man, who had become aware of the attention and was now walking quickly away. “That sucker? Are you
sure
?”

“Positive.”

“Hey!” Pam shouted at the top of her voice. “You! Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

Alice watched, dumbfounded, as Pam rushed across the street after the large gray-haired man, shouting all the way. “Get over here, bozo! Mama wants to talk to you! Stalker!”

The man broke into a trot, then a run, and to Alice’s surprise actually jumped over the waist-high fence separating Hicks Street from the highway. Pam leaned over the fence, her caftan catching the gentle breeze like a sail, inflating her beyond all natural proportion.

“Come back here, asshole!” she called to the buzzing thread of highway below. Then she turned to face Alice, across the street, and shrugged. “Gave it my best shot.”

Pam’s grip on each moment terrified and thrilled Alice. Suddenly there was no doubt in her mind. Yes, if she heard it, it was real. And the limo driver
was
following her.

“Are you sure, Alice?” Frannie’s voice sounded tinny. Their cell phone connection was breaking up.

“Frannie? Are you there?”

“Who’s Frannie, Mommy?” Nell had walked into the kitchen and was searching the refrigerator.

Alice shushed her, whispering, “I’m on the phone. What do you need?”

“Apple juice, please.”

She poured Nell a cup of juice and left her alone in the kitchen to hide out in the bathroom, where she could talk in private; she didn’t want the kids to hear her talking about being followed.

Alice put down the toilet seat and sat, listening to the swoosh of traffic on Frannie’s end of the phone. Where was she? Finally her voice materialized.

“Hello?”

“I’m still here, Frannie. Where are you? Are you driving?”

“Paul’s driving. We’re entering a tunnel. If I lose you, I’ll call you back.”

If they were in a tunnel, chances are they were heading into New Jersey. Why were they going there?

“Alice,” Frannie said, “tell me exactly what you saw.”

“I first noticed the man a week ago, over by the Carroll Street Bridge. Then I saw him again on Clinton Street. And I’m starting to think he was the man who turned around and walked away on Degraw Street on
the block where we park our car. The way he ran away today, I’m sure he was following me. He’s creepy, Frannie. He smells like dirty laundry.”

“He came that close?”

“This morning, the first time,” Alice said. “I thought I’d have a heart attack when I turned around and there he was.”

“Describe him.”

Alice told her everything she could remember about the limo driver. Thick, steel-gray hair. Mismatched blue and green eyes. Tall and beefy, the reek of tobacco, badly dressed.

“Well,” Frannie said, “we can see if we get a hit on him in the DMV database. Not too many people have two-color eyes. We’ll start by finding out who he is.”

“Thanks.”

“Try not to go out alone if you can help it. Walk on busy streets if you have to. Okay? If you’ve got a real stalker, we’ll get him.”

“Frannie?” Alice had to ask this. “What if he’s the other half of Metro Properties? What if he’s the one who killed Lauren? What if he’s after me now?”