Twelve Rooms with a View (42 page)

“No, it’s fine,” he said. “People need money. I assumed you needed money.” He continued watching me with those impartial eyes. I wished he would laugh again, but I figured that would be an uncommon event.

“Look,” I said finally. “You should go look through that stuff. Even if you don’t want it because of whatever your reasons are, even if it all seems like—nothing to you—you should go through it. It’s yours.”

“Our lawyers have been telling us for months that it’s
not
ours. According to them, any way you look at it, it’s all yours.” He held up the pearls to hand them back to me; they hovered there between us for a moment. He wasn’t kidding. I took the pearls, and then I took a breath.

“My mother. Called my sister,” I told him. “Before she died.”

“So?”

I sat down next to him on the bed. The pearls were lovely to hold, cool and round and heavy. They seemed somehow confident in my sweaty hands, like they knew I could get through this.

“She knew that she was, that maybe she was dying,” I said. “Anyway, that’s what I think. I don’t know for sure, because I didn’t talk to her. She didn’t call me; I was out there in hell at the Delaware Water Gap, no one knew how to get hold of me.”

“But she called your sister,” he asked, like a detective reminding a witness to keep the story moving forward.

“She called Alison. She said something like the will wasn’t right.”

“No. It was right. He told us we weren’t getting anything. The will was right.”

“Yeah, but wait. Mom told Alison that she wanted to make a new will for herself, so that you and your brother would get it. If anything happened to her. She was going to make a will.”

“Did she call a lawyer?”

“I don’t know. I talked to that Mr. Long just last week. He didn’t say anything.”

“He didn’t say anything in his deposition either. I saw it.”

“Yeah, but she told Alison—”

“It’s hearsay, Tina,” he explained. “It won’t hold up in court.”

“You don’t know that. You’re not a lawyer.”

“I’m a police detective; I think I know a few things about how the law works. Hearsay is inadmissible. Even if Alison would admit it.”

“She admitted it to me.”

“She won’t admit it in court, and they wouldn’t enter it as evidence even if she did. And then it would only complicate a legal situation that already has way too many complications. I wouldn’t bring it up, if I were you. When did Alison tell you this?”

“Yesterday.”

“So she knows how to keep a secret. Good for her. Tell her to keep her mouth shut in the future about your dying mother’s phone call.”

“Look,” I said. “We have to start getting a clue. The co-op board wants both of our families out of here. They’re trying to steal it out from under all of us. If we got together on this we could at least—”

“Keep it in the family?” he asked, with a sardonic roll of the eyes.

“I know you have every reason to be mad at me, but I’m honestly trying to do the right thing,” I informed him. “Don’t you want this? Don’t you want the apartment?”

He looked over at the painting, and his eyes creased with the worry and sadness of the past. You could see that he didn’t want to think about any of it, but that he wasn’t a coward when called upon to do so.

“A lot of shit went down here,” he said. “So no, I’m not sure that I do want it. And you know, I lived here for a long time, and then I didn’t live here for a long time. So I’m not so sure I need it.”

“Whether you need it or not, it’s worth a lot of money!” I insisted. I was tired of his version of the facts. He kept skipping the one fact that had been twisting through everything that had happened since the day my mother died: the money. “Even if you don’t want the stuff, this place is worth a total fortune. It’s worth
millions
. You could sell it. If you didn’t want it.”

“Would you sell it?”

“Me?” I said. “It’s not mine to sell.”

“So, if you could, you’d just live here forever?”

I thought about this. I had never even let myself think it, because I knew from the start it couldn’t happen. But if it could? “I like this place,” I admitted. “It’s beautiful. Things happen here. It’s kind of weird, with all the hallways and rooms and hardly any furniture. I really like living here.”

“People don’t live here, they die here,” he reminded me.

“People die everywhere. And this apartment is considerably better than the other places I’ve found.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen your record,” he said. “It’s pretty interesting.”

“I like living here,” I said again, looking around the room, which was quite cozy now with the collection of little pieces I had pulled together to make a home for myself. “I’ll be sorry to go.”

“You don’t need to be in such a hurry,” he said. “It’s going to take years to get this through the legal system.”

“No, I’m being kicked out. The co-op board is kicking me out. It’s part of their big plan to get the apartment.”

“How is kicking you out going to accomplish that?”

“I don’t know, I’m getting all my information thirdhand. Presumably they have more shenanigans up their sleeves.”

“Who’s behind this?”

“I don’t know. They keep saying ‘the building,’ like it has a mind of its own.”

“Yeah, they used to do that to us too,” he remembered. “They’d
get all bent out of shape about something or other, send notes to my dad signed ‘The Building.’ It really pissed him off. My mother screaming all the time, seriously bloodcurdling shit, horrible, and
loud
, and then we’d get these messages from The Building about appropriate noise levels. I think they threatened to kick
us
out a couple times—and her family built the place. Assholes. It was always presented in such a creepy way, too. Like, that woman who married beneath her is a little
loud
when she has her psychotic breaks, but the real problem is those Irish guys who are being rude. They’re a bunch of ‘feckin’ bigots’—that was Dad’s phrase.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You mean he was
really
Irish? Like, Irish Irish?”

“He grew up in Galway. But he was legal, at least after he married her. That was another one they kept tossing around: he married her for the green card. Somebody, or maybe it was ‘The Building,’ tried to argue that he wasn’t allowed to inherit when she died. Our lawyers dug into it, because if he couldn’t inherit it, then he couldn’t leave it to your mother, and that meant it would come to us straight from her. But there’s no legal standing for that one. They may go there anyway, who knows.” He looked around the little room, thinking about all this, then he grinned as a thought occurred to him.

“That why you’re trying to give it away?” he asked. “To stick it to all of them? If you can’t have it, why not me?” This idea pleased him.

“I wasn’t trying to stick it to anyone. I’m trying to do the right thing.”

“The right thing.” He laughed. “You’re a criminal.”

“Oh, please,” I said. “I’m such a dumb criminal. I am the lamest of criminals.”

“You have your points,” he said. Then he leaned back, considered the stars above, and stretched his arms over his head, happy. He really was one of those guys, the truth made him happy. I had never seen him so relaxed. “I like criminals,” he admitted. “I mean, some of them are jackasses, and some are truly bad people who should not be on the street. The rest of them—they’re people who want things. I respect that. I mean, they go too far, they don’t understand rules, but they want
life
. I get it.”

There wasn’t any point in waiting for more of an invitation. Sitting next to him on that little bed, I felt the same as I had the moment I first saw him, like I could just leap on that guy at any second. So that is what I did. Or at least, I reached over, took his face in my hands, and kissed him.

“Well, hello, Tina,” he said when I let him come up for air.

“I was getting tired of waiting for you to kiss me,” I said. And then I kissed him some more. For about fifteen minutes we made out like teenagers on his bed that was also my bed, which is when he stopped for a moment, pushed my hair out of my face, and considered me.

“I’m not sure I want to do this here,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?” I said. “When will you know? Because like I said, they’re kicking me out any minute now.”

And because neither one of us was all that interested in living in the past, we went ahead and did it, and didn’t let the death all around us take the day.

W
E SPENT THE WEEKEND IN THE APARTMENT, GOING OUT ONLY
once to buy more scallops, which I cooked, and we got drunk on red wine and picked through Sophie’s treasures. We lay together in the dark and told stories about our dead mothers, what we knew of them, what we didn’t know, how they failed us, how we failed them.

Reality eventually reasserted itself; on Monday morning Pete took a shower in the bathroom with the good water pressure and then put his clothes back on so he could go off to his precinct. As he disentangled himself from me at the front door, he stuck his hand in his pocket, looking for his car keys, and his fingers curled around something he found there. “Oh, yeah, I thought you might want this,” he said, and he handed me a little black perfume bottle.

“So,” I said, “you knew all along that it was mine.”

“I did know that,” he admitted. “That’s why I wanted it.”

I looked at it. It was cool in my hand, like a big pebble, but black, unknowable. The word that had once scrolled across the opaque glass was long gone. I opened the bottle, smelled it for a moment, shook out a drop of the precious oil, and touched the back of his neck with it.

“Oh, great,” he said. “Now I’ll hear about that all day.”

“I want you to,” I told him.

After he was gone, I went back to bed. I woke up to the sound of that throwaway cell ringing away.

“It’s been four days. Have you heard from Vince?” Lucy started.

“Not since we had dinner, no.”

“Have you called him?”

“No”

“Tina, you have to follow up! And push a little! Have you met his father yet?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, that needs to happen. You can make sure he understands our position and supports it, and then, if he does, maybe we can enlist him to speak to other board members on our behalf. Call Vince right now and let me know what he says.” Then she hung up. Twenty minutes later Alison called.

“Hi, how are you!” she chirped.

“You know, I’m pretty good, Alison,” I started. “I had a terrific weekend and I learned quite a bit about this place.”

“About the co-op board?” she asked. “Lucy said you were calling Vince, have you talked to him?”

“No, I haven’t really called him yet.”

“Well, then, what good was it?” she started, almost crying with frustration. “It is so important to just work with the building! It’s what Mom would have wanted, I know it.”

“Mom told you specifically that it wasn’t what she wanted,” I reminded her.

“She wouldn’t want them to have it!”

“No,” I agreed. “That’s not who she wanted to have it.”

“So you’re going to call him, right?”

“Who?” I asked, getting confused again.

“Vince,”
she said, almost crying again. “For heaven’s sake, Tina! This is no joke!”

They called four more times that day and then twice on Tuesday. I stopped answering the phone. I realized that any minute they would be coming over to harass me in person, so I needed to pack Sophie’s stuff back into those boxes and haul it all back to the storage room. That took most of the day, and by the time I was finished, I was exhausted. I took a moment to sit in that lost room and think about what to do next. The boxes were in place. The light was evaporating. And then the ghost started up, mournful and frightened and inevitable. She murmured inside the wall, gently complaining about her traps and her losses and the impossibility of her life. She wept and worried in her unknown language, right there with me and unbearably far away. I let her go on, thinking that maybe she
would be able to explain something to me, even though I didn’t understand a word she said. She couldn’t explain anything at all.

“What are you doing in there?” I asked. “Why are you so stuck?”

“I’m not
stuck,”
said a friendly voice. “It just takes a minute to get out of here. It’s pretty tight.” And with that, the ghost voice disappeared and Jennifer clambered into the room, dusting herself off with teenage disgust. “Ugh, it’s so gross in there. There are
live things
in there. We have to figure out a better way to talk to each other.”

“You could call me on the phone,” I reminded her.

“It’s too dangerous,” she said, quite serious. “Someone might hear me. There’s no privacy in our apartment. You wouldn’t believe the stuff I heard
today
. They’re going to try to kick you
out.”

“I know that part.”

“You do? Because it’s supposed to be top secret.”

“Vince Masterson told me they were going to try it last week, but his dad couldn’t be at the meeting.”

“Well, he’s going to be there tonight,” Jennifer informed me grimly.

“Tonight?” I said, startled. “It’s
tonight
?”

“They’re meeting at six. Oh. That’s ten minutes ago.”

“Thanks for the notice,” I told her, not sounding particularly grateful. “And thank you, Vince,” I muttered to myself.

“So where are they meeting?” I asked her.

“The Gideons’ apartment on eleven,” she told me.

I looked up at that horrible bricked-up staircase, inhabited by rats and spiders and god knows what else. My hands started to sweat.

“This thing goes all the way up through the building, right?” I asked.

“How am I supposed to know?”

“Look,” I said, “if I don’t come back in six hours, tell somebody I might be stuck in the wall. Tell Frank.”

“You’re going
up
there?”

She sounded aghast. And why not? It was an idiotic idea. No one in their right mind would even consider it.

“I think I am,” I said. And with that I climbed up onto the edge of the tiny doorway, put my fingers on one of the steps, crouched forward,
and started to climb. “You need a flashlight!” Jennifer called after me. “It’s dark in there! What if the Gideons blocked off the entrance? What are you going to do when you get there? What if someone …” Her voice trailed off as it became obvious that I was going through with it.