Twelve Rooms with a View (11 page)

“It’s something to do with Dad’s will,” he told her. “He left everything to Olivia.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Look, it’s fine, it’s going to be fine.” You could hear that he was already kicking himself for telling her that much. And it did seem to be a terrific mistake.

“He left everything to
Olivia
? He barely knew her!”

“They were married two years,” he corrected her.

“Did you know he was doing that? Did you agree to it?”

“He didn’t actually ask us to agree,” Pete said. His voice sounded really uptight. “He told us. Doug tried to talk him out of it. He wanted to do something for her.”

“But why?”

“He was worried that she wouldn’t have anything if he died. That’s what he said.”

“She didn’t deserve anything!”

“Well, that’s what he felt, anyway. He, you know, he knew he was dying, and he wanted her to have some security after he was gone.”

“Surely you could have put a stop to this.”

“We had a big fight about it. Doug, you know, he pretty much felt the way you do, and Dad got real mad. It wasn’t … we didn’t really talk much after that.”

This was so much more information than I’d ever had about Bill and his marriage to my mom that I was momentarily thrilled. I had forgotten how useful snooping at doors could be. I was also happy to have a shred of good feeling for the guy, since he had tried to do the
right thing by Mom in the face of opposition. He was instantly transformed in my imagination from a selfish drunk into an eccentric recluse who had lousy kids.

“But Olivia is dead now. And these other people, what rights do they have?”

“I don’t know. Honestly, I just don’t know.” Pete trailed off, clearly wanting to get out of this conversation. But she was a sharp one. And she was as fascinated by what he had told her as I was.

“He didn’t even know them, he refused to meet them!” she told him. “He was afraid of just this scenario, that complete strangers would come after his property—that’s why he told her they were never to set foot in the building!”

“She told you that?”

“She did! I asked her one night. She had just come back from having dinner with them apparently. It was so rare that you ever saw either of them leave the apartment, so when I saw her in the lobby, I said, this is a treat! You and Bill don’t go out much, do you, and she said, I was having dinner with my daughters, and we rode up in the elevator together, and I said, are we going to meet your daughters? She said, oh no, Bill prefers to keep me all to himself! And I said, well, that hardly seems fair, you must miss them a lot. And she said she did, very much, and that she had tried to speak to him about it but he was very worried—those were her words—he was worried that other people were after his property, and he had to protect it. Those were her exact words. And then I saw him one day not long after that—I actually saw him putting trash in the bin, which he never did—and I said, why Bill, there you are! He looked terrible, I don’t need to tell you that, he was sick for a long long time and I know he refused to see a doctor—”

“Yeah, but you said you talked to him?”

“I did. I took the opportunity. I said, Bill—Olivia tells me you’ve never even met her daughters, aren’t you curious to meet them? She’s your wife! I was reluctant to say anything to him at all, I couldn’t believe he brought another woman into your mother’s apartment. It’s the Livingston Mansion Apartment, it is a historic property! He should have let it go, is my opinion, when your mother died. He should have
sold it to someone who would take care of it, someone in the building who would appreciate it. He never appreciated it. She was the one.”

“But he said something? About these daughters?”

“Yes, he said they were trash. He said, those daughters are trash and I’m not meeting them. That’s what he called them.
Tra
s
h
. And he said all they wanted was his money.” At which point old Bill went back to being an alcoholic asshole in my mind.

Pete Drinan thought about this. It was not an uninteresting bit of information to him. “Was he drunk?” he finally asked.

“Well, I only saw him for a moment, so I couldn’t really say,” Mrs. Westmoreland admitted. “I know he did like to drink.”

“Yes, he did,” Pete sighed, his hand still curled around the beer bottle behind his back. “Listen, Mrs. Westmoreland—would you be willing to talk about this? To our lawyer?”

“Oh, a lawyer …” she sighed, all worried but excited too, like she was secretly happy to be asked. “You mean, officially?”

“Well, yeah,” said Pete. “It might make a difference—that you spoke to him directly and he told you he didn’t want the property going out of the family. That that was his intent?”

“That was my understanding. But if this is an official situation—I don’t know. I want you and your brother to have your inheritance. But obviously I don’t want to get into some complicated legal mess. I did love your mother. Maybe you’d like to come in and have a cup of tea?”

“Oh,” said Pete, his fingers twirling around the neck of that beer bottle. I thought about how the beer was getting all warm and flat, and I guessed he was thinking that too. And sure enough, he leaned back on his left leg, ready to edge away again. But she was not letting go. She actually had her fingers twisted in his jacket sleeve now. Her door had swung completely open, and what little I could see of her place was gorgeous.

“Your mother was my neighbor for thirty years, this whole story breaks my heart,” she explained, leaning up against the doorway.

“Mine too, Mrs. Westmoreland.” He nodded, leaning back.

“Good heavens, Peter,” she sighed. “After all this time I think you could consider calling me Delia.”

“Yeah, well …”

“Come in, let me get you that tea. Or a drink! Maybe a whiskey—that sounds like a policeman’s drink!” she said with a smile.

He turned, finally, planning to get a hit off that beer bottle, and saw me looking out through the crack in the door. He looked tired. And then he remembered what was going on and took a fast step in my direction. I remembered too, and I slammed the door and slid the bolt back in place. I thought he was going to start pounding again, but he just waited. I could hear the woman in 8B start to gripe about how awful it all was; I couldn’t really hear the words, but the tone of her voice was not complimentary. He didn’t say anything back to her. I stood at the door and listened, but he didn’t say anything at all. I wasn’t sure what was going on. Finally Mrs. Westmoreland stopped talking, and it got really quiet. I thought maybe he was gone. And then a little white card was slid under the door. At the last second, it kind of wafted, like he had pushed it. I picked it up. It was a really plain business card, with the NYPD shield, and his name, Detective Peter Drinan, right in the middle, and a cell number. On the back, in little block letters in ink, it said, CALL ME WHEN YOU’RE READY. I thought about that for a second, as I kept listening at the door. He was still out there; in fact, from the shadows it looked like he was sort of hovering down near the floor to see if I had picked the card up. So I took the paper bag from the hardware store, and I looked through my backpack, which was still right where I had dumped it, for a pen, and I ripped a piece off the paper bag and wrote: OKAY. I shoved that through the door, And then I watched through the bottom of the door while he picked it up. And then I heard him laugh. The lady in the other apartment asked some more questions, and he said something to her, but then I heard the elevator ding, and the door close.

And when I went in the hallway in the morning, he was gone.

L
EN’S GREENHOUSE WAS SO BIG IT HAD ROOMS: THE DECIDUOUS
room, the desert room, the rain forest room, the heirloom plants from other centuries room, the plants that only grow on other plants room. Some of these were subsets or extensions of rooms, and some of the rooms overlapped before growing into new rooms—the plants growing on other plants room turned into the orchid room, which evolved into the spectacularly gorgeous and weird plants room, which turned a corner and became the poisonous plants room. So the whole greenhouse seemed to be growing. In some places it covered the roof and threatened to crawl down the side of the building. It was the only greenhouse I had ever seen that was big enough to get lost in.

I told Len that I was surprised he could get enough water up there for a greenhouse that big, especially one with a rain forest, and yet he couldn’t get enough water for a little bit of moss.

He said, “I know, it is surprising, isn’t it?” By which I knew he really was full of shit, and there was no reason he had to stash the moss in my apartment, except that he had run out of room in his. That, and there really was quite a lot of sunlight up there. He got light on six sides. It was like living on Mount Olympus with a whole bunch of plants.

As much fun as it had been to talk to Len about his moss, it was nothing compared to hearing him go on about plants. He started by delivering information like a university lecturer, which he had been at some point. Everything was all about the genus and the species and the Latin name and the common name and the historical sources of the names. But he couldn’t hold on to the formality. In no time he was talking to the plants, checking out the texture of the leaves, telling the pretty ones how lovely they were, telling the ones that were all spiky and weird-looking that looks don’t matter, the pink coleus is just a slut for showing
off like that, beauty comes and goes so quickly, and she’s only an annual anyway. He thought the cactuses were sly and devious, the “tricksters of the desert,” which I didn’t quite follow, because all those spikes didn’t look sly to me; they seemed pretty direct. When I pointed that out, Len just laughed, like there was so much about cactuses that I didn’t know. And how could you argue with that? I
don’t
know anything about cactuses; I was just making an observation. Then he took me into the orchid room, and I got an earful about the orchids. He had more than a hundred different kinds, each one stranger than the last. Some had spots all over them, which I had never seen on any flower. They were pink and purple and yellow and white and dark red with black centers, and one was black all over, which was strangely frightening. Some looked like stars and some looked like butterflies, some looked like tarantulas, and some like hornets or some other kind of stinging animal, and then of course there were dozens that looked like sex organs. Seriously, all of those flowers looked like they wanted to have sex with humans. It was a bit creepy, honestly. I was somewhat afraid to touch them.

This turned out to be a good impulse on my part, as Len casually informed me once we were done with the orchid room.

“Some of them are poisonous,” he admitted. “The pollen, the ovules, the nectar, this little darling here—don’t touch—not that it would hurt you permanently, but you very well might lose all feeling in your arm, at least for a day.”

“Come on, Len,” I said.

“Do you want to try it?” he asked, raising those eyebrows at me.

I didn’t. “But if orchids are poisonous, how come everybody has them in their houses?”

“Only certain species, Tina. Use your head,” he said, pulling out a very small pair of clippers and snipping some extraneous vines away from a line of bright yellow star-shaped flowers that wound down the side of a tree. “Please don’t touch that.”

“You can’t touch any of them?” I asked.

“Until you know which ones are poisonous and which aren’t, no, in fact, you can’t touch any of them.”

“How did you find out which ones are poisonous?”

“The hard way,” he said. “I studied.”

The place smelled like growing things and sounded like water. He had little fountains in corners, and strange pools behind tree trunks or alongside a hillside of ferns. That greenhouse was so big it had hills—small hills, but definite undulations. And everything was green, a thousand different greens, each one more subtle than the last. In spite of the pink coleus and the startling sexuality of the many-colored and poisonous orchids, green was what you saw everywhere.

And then all of a sudden you turned a corner and were back in his apartment. The apartment was quite small in comparison to the greenhouse; it was one little room right at the center of the roof. There was a kitchenette with a linoleum counter, completely cluttered with pots and pans and a blender, and lots of mismatched dishes on open shelves. And across from the counter was a wall with a lot of books about plants, and a chair and a little table. To one side was a big, overstuffed blue couch with magazines and books piled all over it, and behind that, in a corner, an unmade bed. Next to the bed was what seemed to be a closet, and then a very small bathroom with a skylight and lots of plants in the tub. On the other side of the bathtub was one of those clear acrylic doors they sell in fancy bath stores, and just beyond was the room with all the ferns. Seriously, you could step out of that bathtub and into the greenhouse. I mean, the apartment did have some walls, just not as many as most people have. The greenhouse seemed to have grown out of that tiny apartment and then just kept on growing.

“Would you like a cappuccino?” Len asked me. He gestured toward a large silver contraption that took up all of the counter space between the very small stovetop and the equally small refrigerator. The only thing that wasn’t utterly minuscule in the kitchen was the enormous cappuccino machine. Len considered it with an air of bemused resignation, like it was an old but hapless and worrisome friend. “I have this wonderful machine someone gave me, but I can never get it to work,” he admitted.

“If you can’t get it to work, why are you offering me cappuccino?”

“Well, I was thinking that if you wanted a cappuccino, you could try to make it yourself, and then, if you were successful, you could show me how to do it,” he said, offering up that dazzling smile.

“Fair enough,” I said. “Where’s the coffee?”

“Oh, coffee … oh,” he mused, looking around the tiny kitchen.

“Never mind, I’ll find it,” I said, and started poking around. There weren’t that many places to look. I landed on the stuff my first try: in the freezer.