Twelve Rooms with a View (43 page)

There are advantages to being someone who thinks rules are made to be broken. Finding yourself stuck in an airless, dank, Victorian crawl space that might very well lead nowhere is not one of them. Even though Jennifer had opened the wall plug in Katherine’s room, only a faint amount of light came in, and once I climbed beyond its friendly solace—the last moment that I might have bailed out of this insane endeavor—it was pitch black. I had to lead with my hands, which more than once landed on something crunchy and alive, and then my face went through some weblike, sticky stuff filled with little nublike things that were probably dead bugs. At some point I realized that I didn’t know how far I’d have to climb to get to the Gideons’ apartment and that I might have passed it already. I didn’t know if I should go back down or continue up. Then, when I reached over to steady myself against the wall, I grabbed at something that moved and actually hissed; terrified, I jumped back and hit the wall, which had somehow transformed itself from brick to wood. It made a big thump.

“What was that?” someone asked. I froze.

“Did you hear something?” the voice asked again.

“Margarita thinks there are rats in that old crawl space,” another voice announced. It was Mrs. Gideon, and you could tell even without seeing her that she thought Margarita was a moron. “I’ll mention it to Frank.”

“Frank’s the doorman, Mother,” the other voice, the beautiful Julianna, replied.

“You really are sentimental about him,” her mother replied with a little sneer.

“I’m not
sentimental
, I’m
respectful.”

“You encourage him, and it’s ridiculous.”

“We are not talking about Frank, Mother, please! I think I heard something, I know I did. It sounded like a rat or something in that crawl space. I think Margarita is right, there’s something in there. You
need to mention it to the super—or why don’t you tell the board, since they’re all here anyway.”

“We are not gathered to talk about rats. Or perhaps we are,” Mrs. Gideon observed. Then Julianna said something I couldn’t quite pick up, as she clearly had moved away from the wall and the giant rats inside it. There was some further murmuring and then silence, as the two women apparently went into the next room or someplace beyond.

Here is where the true stupidity of my plan revealed itself. I had succeeded in landing right in the middle of the Gideons’ apartment without anybody knowing I was there, but I had no way to get out of that wall. I hung in there, my heart pounding, my head leaning against some sort of old cabinet, and let my fingers probe the wood. I found a giant bolt, but there was no way to open it. My fingers continued to probe it, and I told myself that if I were anything like a functional thief I would have brought picks for the lock. But then I thought, it’s a
deadbolt
, you can’t open it from this side, you’d have to saw through the wall to get that thing off—or an axe, a short-handled
axe
, or a gun, maybe a gun would do it. I ran through all the possible solutions for opening a deadbolt, none of which were feasible in any kind of reality other than the movies. I was stuck in the wall; there was no way to get out.

Then a voice whispered, right next to my head, “Tina? Are you in there?”

It took me a second, honestly. I couldn’t quite catch up.

“Tina. Tina. If you’re in there, knock or something. I don’t have a ton of time.”

“Jennifer?” I said.

“Knock where you are, knock where you are, I can’t tell, and we have to do this fast,” she told me. I rapped gently on the wall several times.

“Okay, that’s good, that’s good,” she said, rapping on the panel right in front of me. “Is this it? This is the doorway?”

“There’s a bolt,” I told her. “Right in front of you, they’ve got a deadbolt holding it shut.”

“Yeah, I see,” she said, working on it. “It’s painted shut. Shoot. It’s—oh. Hang on. I have to find something—oh wait. Not so bad, the paint’s pretty old. Oh!” And with that, the door swung open three inches
and she smiled in at me. “Come on, come on,” she said, excited, pulling the door open against the resistance of the paint, which was half of what was holding it in place. She reached in and grabbed me by the arm, forcing me to climb out. “It’s a good thing you’re little,” she observed.

“What are you doing here?” I whispered. I was shaking, half with relief and half with the sheer terror of what I had just been through. “God, it’s horrible in there. Don’t go in there anymore.”

“Yeah, it’s not nice. I knew you weren’t going to be able to get out of there. You didn’t think of that. Get down, you don’t want them to see you,” she advised me. She shut the cabinet door carefully, holding it in place with her shoulder while she flipped the ancient deadbolt back into place. The kid was a marvel. She was grinning with delight at her own cleverness. “Anyway,” she said, dropping down to the floor so she could talk to me, “as soon as you left, I knew you were going to need me, so I took the elevator and interrupted the meeting and said I needed to talk to my mom. So she came to the door, and I told her I had a fight with Louise, and she told me they were busy and to go home, so then I told her I needed to use the bathroom, which is supposedly what I’m doing now. I’ve got to go. They’re all in the living room, it’s down that hallway, you pass the dining room and some sort of den, and then it’s right there. There’s a whole lot of them in there. The whole board, and then a couple others, they look like lawyers. We’ll make for the den, you can hide behind the door and hear everything, I checked it out on the way. Come on, we have to go. I’ll make a lot of noise when I go back out through the meeting, so I can distract them while you’re finding some place to listen. Ready? Let’s go.”

I was still so freaked out from being stuck in the wall that my brain was not functioning fully, so I was glad to have an excited teenager telling me what to do. She breezed ahead of me silently, glancing back to make sure I stayed down and hidden by furniture in case anyone suddenly appeared looking for a glass of water or something; then she took me into a dark room with plush couches and low lighting, all done in red with the slightest touches of gold sprinkled through. I got nothing more than a sense of its opulence as Jennifer quickly waved her hand behind her, pointing to a corner behind the open door. She stood
in the doorway for a moment, waving her hand impatiently, and then she marched deliberately into the next room.

“Thanks for the use of your bathroom, Mrs. Gideon,” she announced to the whole room. “Mom, can you at least
call
Louise and tell her that I don’t
have
to put Gail and Mary Ellen to bed, they’re big enough to get themselves to bed
anyway
, and it’s not my job and plus I have a lot of homework.”

“That’s fine, Jennifer,” Mrs. White noted tersely.

“Well, she’s being horrible. Can you call her at least?”

“Jennifer, I said go home,” Mrs. White told her with finality.

The door from the den to the living room was wide open, and a couch stood against the wall, just inside. Behind the door and beside the couch was a clever little area of carpet invisible to either room: that was my spot. Fully half of the room was out of my line of sight, but the other half was completely visible. I could see Jennifer scoot into the hallway by the front door, passing that ridiculous table with the spindly legs where Mrs. Gideon had given me the evil eye, then she quickly disappeared from view. The sound of the door opening and closing behind her was obscured by the rustle and settling of fifteen people in the room next to me.

“Thanks to everyone for making this a priority,” announced a tall, absurdly handsome man who was standing to address the others, most of whom I couldn’t see. He was clearly Vince’s father; he looked just like him and he carried himself with even more self-involved confidence. Next to him, his son looked like a cheerful puppy. I immediately understood why Vince hated him so much.

“The petition to have the illegal tenant in apartment 8A removed is being passed among you for signatures,” he explained. “We have asked everyone to sign, because if a lawsuit should result from this action, we want to make it clear that the entire board is in agreement and no one can be singled out for culpability.”

“Can they sue?” asked someone unseen on the other side of the room.

“Why don’t we let our lawyer answer that one, that’s what he’s here for,” Vince’s creepy dad responded. “Gary?”

Another good-looking guy in a suit stood up. I swear to god, he
looked like every other lawyer I had met during this fiasco except Stuart Long, the Egg Man. These guys all looked like the suits they were wearing. “From what Roger has told me, and what I’ve gleaned from phone calls with many of you, these people are aggressive and determined,” announced Gary the lawyer. “Under these circumstances, lawsuits are always a possibility. Lawsuits are, however, expensive. It is clear that they have few resources other than the speculative value of the Livingston Mansion Apartment. We’ve spoken to the legal department at Sotheby’s, and they have reassured us that they will not support any action on behalf of the so-called heirs of Olivia Finn until the co-op has had the opportunity to state its legal position concerning the property.”

“Do we have a position?” asked Mrs. Gideon, sounding like she was standing in front of the door right next to me. “Other than we wish they would go away?”

“That’s what we’re here to discuss,” Vince’s hyperconfident ice cube of a father asserted.

“My husband told me not to sign anything until we have our lawyer look at it,” came another voice from beyond my sight line. But I recognized this one: it was Mrs. White, who sounded nervous and kind of unhappy.

“We can have copies sent to your lawyer, certainly, and wait a few days for your signature,” said Mr. Ice Cube. “The reason we asked Gary to be here was to set your mind at ease about the legality of these documents.”

“But he’s not our personal lawyer. He doesn’t represent me or my husband. And the interests of the co-op are not necessarily
our
interests, are they?” continued Mrs. White, insistent. She really sounded bothered, like she might secretly be on my side. That is what I told myself anyway. I wished I could see her face for a moment. I wondered what color suit she was wearing.

“No one should sign anything they’re not comfortable signing,” said the lawyer, trying to be soothing and looking more like a shark than ever. “I am happy to interface with anyone’s attorney around all of this.”

“He’s already spoken to my guy,” someone offered up.

“Mine as well,” Mrs. Gideon purred. “I’m completely satisfied this is the appropriate move to make.”

“Look, we can get her out of here with a simple majority of votes, and legally we don’t
need
more than six signatures,” Gary explained. “But if the co-op wants to send a message to these people and to the real estate community and to the city in general, my recommendation is that it be loud and unanimous. That’s why I hope to have everyone’s signature on the documents of removal.”

“I want to support the building, I do,” protested Mrs. White. “Maybe I could call my husband at the end of the meeting and just make sure it’s okay.”

“You do whatever you need to, Alice,” said Ice Pop. “We all have a lot at stake here.”

“Once they’re gone, though, does it really change anything?” a woman asked. “I saw all the things on television and the papers, and it sounds like these two sets of heirs are going to fight it out whether we like it or not, and we’re going to be dragged into the press for who knows how long. Is there anything we can do—beyond asserting our right to have the apartment remain empty?”

“That’s an interesting question, Jenny,” Ice Pop agreed. “And it’s why I made sure that all of us could be here tonight. As it turns out, there is something we can do. Len, maybe you could explain the situation.” He made one of those graceful little gestures that mean “the floor is yours,” and Len stepped out of the invisible side of the room and into the front and center. He was wearing the dark green suit coat I’d seen him in at the press conference, and he carried a cream-colored folder with some papers in it. He had a big bandage on his left hand. Their nocturnal confrontation had taken place almost two weeks ago. For all her claims that she wasn’t trying to hurt him, Charlie must have scored a real hit.

But Len wasn’t acting wounded. With his calm, treelike posture and wry smile, he radiated strength and gentle wisdom to the entire gathering. “I do have some rather interesting—some exceptionally interesting—news about the legal status of the Livingston Mansion Apartment,” he claimed. “As some of you know, I was quite friendly with Bill and his wife
Sophie for many years before her death. I was in fact a confidant of them and their sons.”

“And the second wife, the one who made all the trouble?” someone called.

“I knew her, yes, and yes she was—problematic. Some of the things I saw her doing to her husband made me very unhappy, because of the degree to which she was maneuvering him around these questions of inheritance and the apartment.”

“Could you be more specific? You actually saw—”

“I saw a lot, and I’m willing to testify to that,” Len claimed, with seemingly sincere regret. I wanted to rip his face off or at least give Charlie another go. But before he could continue to tell spectacular stories about how evil my poor lost mother was, Vince’s dad leaned forward and whispered something to him. Len tilted his head and listened, then nodded with bemused respect. “I quite agree. I quite agree,” he murmured. Then he looked out at his audience and held up the little packet of papers.

“Our esteemed board president, Roger Masterson, has made the excellent point that a discussion centering on Bill’s more recent wife, who actually never held any rights in regard to the Livingston apartment, is not the most useful way to spend our time together this evening. What’s more important to all of us is the status of the apartment as designated by the last will and testament of the first Mrs. Drinan.”

Something was up. Len was curling his sentences on top of each other so deliriously that the whole thing sounded fishy before he even started telling the story. But everyone in the room was eating it up. There was a pause and a hush. He sighed and looked down, sad. “Those of you who lived here then know that there was some difficulty surrounding Sophie Livingston. Those who knew her remember a woman filled with passion and delight. At times she was unhappy, and at times her spirit was greatly troubled. Today some might choose to label these fluctuations in temperament as mental illness. And indeed, her unhappiness led her family to make choices for her that were questionable, and they were questioned.”