Twelve Rooms with a View (45 page)

So she gave up everything and got a walk on the other charges, because Gcina was from Somalia and no one knew who she was or where her family was, and in the end she didn’t matter as much as the Livingston Mansion Apartment did. The police issued warrants for the arrest of every member of the board, including Roger Masterson and Len, who was in especially hot water because Westmoreland had admitted that the whole will scenario was a fake, and she claimed it was his idea. Then Gary the lawyer showed up and explained that Roger Masterson did not have to come down to a police precinct in the middle of the night and they could speak to him in his office the next day. Then some uniformed officers brought Len in and walked him right past me, as I sat in the waiting room with Pete. Then some lady from INS arrived and took Gcina off, and when I asked Pete where they were taking her, he admitted that she would be put in jail, and they would hold her probably for months and then send her back to Somalia unless she could prove that she needed asylum.

“They can’t,” I said. “Come on. You can’t put her in jail. She’s been in jail for months. We don’t even know how long. But at least months.”

“I still can’t see how you put that together,” Pete said, checking his nails. “You really didn’t have any evidence, just somebody crying in the next room. You know, if you had brought that to me, I couldn’t even have gotten a warrant on it. It’s a good thing you got Frank to open the door for you. No cop in the city would have done it.”

“Because she’s nobody?”

“Because you didn’t have any evidence.”

“I’m on the same landing with them. I could see, when Westmoreland opened the door going out or coming in, that the place was getting cleaned every day. And no one ever came. I never saw anybody.”

“Still not enough.”

“I cleaned houses myself,” I said. “I know what it’s like to be locked in a trailer out at the Delaware Water Gap.” And then I went on a crying jag, and Pete said he’d take me home.

Which is where we were the following morning when Doug showed up. Unfortunately I had not, for once, locked the door from the inside, both because I was so tired and because I had my own cop, and I wasn’t worried about someone bursting into my world. I had not counted on Doug Drinan getting a tip-off from Len Colbert, who had used his one phone call to tell Doug that his brother might be here, fraternizing with the enemy, and he might want to come see for himself.

“I don’t believe it,” he said. He was standing in the doorway of the bedroom, watching us wake up. At least we weren’t having sex, I thought, but Doug didn’t see the upside of that. He was already in a state. “What the fuck,” he seethed. “What the
fuck
are you doing with
her
?”

“Oh, shit,” Pete muttered, groggy.

“Get up,”
Doug hissed. “Get up so I can hit you.”

“Dial it down, Doug. I’m still waking up,” Pete said.

“In our apartment,” Doug exploded. “In our
room
! With her! You know what she is! You know what her mother did to our family!”

“My mom didn’t do anything, she was a really nice person and she took really good care of your father,” I started.

“Tina, stay out of this,” Pete warned me.

“We know what she did. She stole our home,” Doug informed me. “We have evidence—what she was doing, we know what she did, and we know what you’re doing, at least those of us who aren’t thinking with our dicks have something of a clue—”

“Hey hey hey, I said dial it back,” Pete repeated. I opened my mouth to say something that would not have been helpful, but Pete put his hand up in a fast silencing gesture as he stood.

“We’re not going to talk about it this way, Doug,” he stated. “I want you to step out into the hallway.”

“Don’t you fucking ‘cop’ me,” Doug sneered. “I’m not the crook in this fiasco. I can’t believe you’re this stupid. Or yes I can, actually, I can believe it. After what you did—what you did, to Mom—”

“Come on, don’t start this again.”

“It was your idea! What happened? You were the one who, you and Dad, she didn’t want to go, I told you don’t do it—”

“That’s not the way it went down and you know it—”

“And then she died in there alone. She was
alone—”

“She was there because she needed help! She couldn’t stay here! Christ, she tried to kill him, more than once, Doug—”

“So he said—”

“I saw it! You saw what she would do, you saw the bruises, come on, man, let’s not relive this.”

“He made that happen. She was defending herself. He would get drunk and start those fights—”

“I’m serious, Doug, don’t do this.”

“You’re doing it! You did it!
You’re just like him. She used to say, your brother is just like your father, a a a lowlife and a drunk—she would tell me—”

“I know what she said, come on, Doug, let’s just take this down the hall—”

“No! She needs to hear this! She needs to know what you are, what you did, what you—she—” His rage took over as he glanced at me, utter madness in his face. I crept back against the wall a little. This was not a good situation. And it just goes to show, I thought: pictures don’t tell the whole story. I thought of all those photos of the happy boys and their cool, interesting, rich, hippie mother. They didn’t tell this story at all.

“I could kill you for this,” Doug continued, pacing in a tight circle in that tiny room. “This was Mom’s, everything. This place. And you’re just throwing it away! On those—that
woman
, who Dad let come in here, like it wasn’t Mom’s. When it was
only
hers. This place is
hers
. It was the only thing she really loved.” The words hung out there like a curse as soon as he said it. I was embarrassed to have heard it.

Pete shook his head. “You know that’s not true. She loved us. I remember how much she loved us. That’s what I choose to remember. I make that choice every day.”

“That’s convenient. Considering what you did to her, what you and Dad—what you
did.”

Pete didn’t answer at first. The whisper of loss was rising around them. Doug looked completely spent. He glanced up at the ceiling for a moment, that old trick of raking your eyes frantically to keep them from betraying you. He looked at that awful painted sunset on the wall and started to shake with a terrible and relentless grief. Pete waited, still, while his brother wept openly for what seemed a long time before he shook himself back into some semblance of control.

“Sorry,” Doug finally said, abrupt and ungracious.

Pete nodded, pretending the apology was better than it was. “There was something wrong with her brain,” he continued quietly. Doug accepted the facts as Pete recounted them. “We talked to a lot of people. You remember that. The chemicals went bad. It wasn’t her fault, but it wasn’t his fault either.”

“She wasn’t well.”

“No, she wasn’t. We got a lot of opinions, Doug, you know we did what we had to do.” The two of them stood there looking at each other, mournfully resting in the end of an argument they had had far too many times. For a long moment they just looked at each other. Pete reached up to touch his brother’s shoulder. And Doug slugged him, hard, right across the face.

“T
HEY’RE KICKING YOU OUT
, T
INA,”
F
RANK INFORMED ME UNDER
his breath when I snuck out past the doorman’s station several days later. “They’re real mad at you.”

I wasn’t surprised to hear it.

The pearls I left at Sotheby’s. Leonard Rubenstein, the man who looked like a lion, gave me an official estimate of their worth, somewhere in the range of $350,000. The clasp, apparently, was much more valuable than the pearls themselves. He knew of a jeweler who would take the necklace quickly and essentially break it up for parts. He promised to call me by the end of the day with an offer. Then I called one of my friends from the hot tub, Lyle, who had had the foresight to slip his phone number into that little alligator handbag. He suggested he could come by the apartment and price out the rest of the stuff, so I said sure.

“Really?” he said, almost cooing on the other end of the line. “Can I bring Roger? Or Andrew? Or Steve? They’ll kill me, they really will, if they find out that I got to see the apartment and they didn’t.”

“Whoever wants to come see the apartment,” I said, “is welcome.”

It was a good little party. Andrew brought champagne and foie gras, and Roger and Steve and Edward and Dave came too, and they loved every square inch of the place; they appreciated every strange corner and disastrous choice. They even loved the mustard-colored shag rug.

“It’s so hideous,” Andrew said in an admiring tone. “And who would have thought to use so much? It’s a sea of mustard. I think it works, I really do.”

“You’re insane,” said Edward, but he kissed him, so I knew he wasn’t in love with Vince anymore, which I thought was definitely a good thing.

“Tina, can I talk to you for a second?” Lyle called from the hallway.

He took me back to the storage room so we could talk business. “All right. A lot of this—everything over here—it’s sentimental value, I’m sure, but that’s how you need to see it,” he explained, waving at a pile of boxes full of old shoes and knitting paraphernalia and wrinkled cotton skirts. “The Salvation Army maybe would take it off your hands if they didn’t have to come pick it up. It’s not worth anything. Over here, on the other hand, we have some things that probably are worth quite a bit.” He stepped back out into the laundry area and led me around the corner toward the TV room. There he pointed toward the doorway of Bill and Mom’s bedroom, where he had used the arched pocket doors as a frame for a little fashion show.

“What a lovely presentation,” I told him.

“Thank you,” he said, smiling. “I think it’s important, with beautiful things, to display them properly, so we can decide in an aesthetic way what is the best course of action.”

“The only course of action I’m really interested in is money,” I said.

“Yes, sweetheart, I’m well aware.” He nodded. “You can be a philistine all you want. The rest is for me. Okay. The Balenciaga cocktail dress will bring in, conservatively, two thousand dollars.”

“Two
thousand
?” I said, hoping I was hearing this right.

“The alligator bag, I already know who I can take that to, and there’s no question he’ll pay four. The evening gowns are a little more specific and not quite as classic or timeless as the gowns that bring in the big bucks, but they’re in good shape, the sea green one is really a beautiful color, we’ll stay conservative and estimate another two for both of them.”

“So what is that, eight? That’s pretty good. How long will it take to sell them?”

“Wait wait wait. First, my darling, first we have to talk about this.” He walked over to the display area, reached up against the wall, and presented me with a piece of the ugliest luggage I had ever seen.

“What about it?” I said.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked.

“You can have it, nobody wants this stuff,” I assured him.

“You know nothing! Nothing!” he said, incensed with delight at
how much I didn’t know. “Six pieces—a matched set of Hermès airline luggage from the sixties. I’ve never seen even one piece before today—you have a whole set! And it’s pristine! It’s in perfect condition! I don’t know what you might get for it. I just don’t even know.” He was dialing away on his cell phone, he was so excited.

“But do you know anybody who would buy it?” I asked him. “I need the money fast. They’re going to kick me out any second. I have to get this stuff out of here.”

“We’ll buy it, Tina, don’t worry,” said Andrew, handing me a glass of champagne.

“You’ll
buy it,” I said. “No no, come on you don’t have to, to to—”

“To take care of you?” he asked. “But we want to take care of you. And if Lyle says it’s worth something, trust me, it is. I’m sure it’s a terrific investment.”

“Do not take less than twenty-five, Tina,” Lyle warned me while he consulted with someone on the phone.

“Twenty-five,” I said.
“Thousand?”

Andrew gave me a check right then and there, then went with me to cash it. On the sidewalk outside the bank I called Jennifer on her cell; she was just getting out of school and walking home. “You have to sneak out tonight. Tonight’s the night,” I told her. “Be at my place at eleven.”

“Eleven, like eleven
P.M
.
?” she said, stunned.

“Actually, make it half past ten,” I said. “We have a lot to do.”

Six hours later there were five gay men waiting for her in the lost room. They helped her climb out of the crawl space and slip through the darkness into one of the many empty bedrooms, where there was a makeup station, a hair station, party dresses in three different sizes, four evening jackets, and eight pairs of shoes for her to choose from.

“What is this?” she said, laughing.

“It’s party time,” I told her. “We’re going to a club.”

She protested, but not too hard. “It’s a school night.”

“Yeah, you’re going to have problems staying awake in history tomorrow,” I admitted, picking up a pair of strappy heels, hoping we got the right size.

“What is this you’re wearing?” Andrew asked her, a little worried about that plaid skirt.

“It’s a uniform, I go to a Catholic school up on Ninety-eighth,” she explained, eyeing the party dresses with undisguised hunger.

“Come on,” Roger said, his voice drenched in disbelief. “They have Catholic schools in Manhattan?”

We dressed her up and took her out. Edward rented a limo, and we went to three separate clubs. Jennifer danced with everyone in our entourage, and then she danced with a bunch of more appropriate college guys, whom we met up with later at an all-night diner in the Meatpacking District. She flirted outrageously with one of them, and they ended up making out on a street corner until five
A.M
., at which point I thought I’d better get her home so we could perhaps end the evening without parental discovery and Catholic recriminations and have it just be a wonderful night for her to remember forever.