“I wish I knew.”
“Most clients’ parents chip in.”
“My folks don’t have that kind of money.”
“Can’t they take a home equity on their house?”
I explained that a bank appraiser would not bother getting out of his car for their tiny ranch with a shallowly pitched roof on a quarter-acre lot. “If every neighbor on their block chipped in with a home equity loan, they might raise enough to send a crippled kid to Disneyland. No, Tommy, not everybody is rich. It just seems that way.”
“I gotta tell you, Richard is not lowering it. There are no minuses in that apartment. Once you accept the stairs and the kitchen-which you already did-there’s nothing wrong to make him lower his price.”
“Yeah, I guess not.”
“Think about Brooklyn.”
“No!” I felt my face burn red again.
“Man, you’re looking obsessed.”
I repeated what I had said yesterday: “I won’t settle for second best.” Then I changed the subject to get him off my back. “I heard you on the phone. Sounds like you got un-obsessed with your ex.”
“What do you mean?”
“Helping her look for her boyfriend’s apartment.”
“Is that what it sounded like?”
“Sounded like you got over her.”
His face hardened up. “After what she did to me?”
“What did she do to you?”
His eyes widened. “Are you kidding? What did she do to me?”
“You keep saying it, but I don’t know what it was.”
“I told you. She got the apartment.”
“My ex got our apartment. But I’m not going to kill her for it. Much less cut her heart out.”
Tommy got really mad and started hacking away at me.
“She got your apartment? What kind of apartment? Tell me about it. View? Big? Classy building? High ceilings? Skylights?
Granite and nickle bathrooms?”
“No. No. No. And no. It was just a nice apartment. Nice layout.”
“Nice layout means small.”
“It was small. It was a New York apartment.”
“Yeah, well I wouldn’t cut my ex’s heart out for a piece of shit like that, either. But my apartment was fantastic. First of all, it was the best deal in New York. I bought it right out from under my firm-previous firm. Went to check it out.
Found this old guy, just got widowed, starts weeping while he’s showing me. It was gorgeous. He had no idea what it was worth. He just wanted out. I made an offer on the spot.
Condo, so I didn’t have to go through board shit. Gave my banker oral sex to get a bridge loan to close the deal-Hey! Lose the I-just-got-here-from-Topeka expression. She wasn’t that bad.”
Maybe she wasn’t, but Tommy had no smile for the memory.
“I thought I was made,” he raged. “Fucking brass ring at last. It had it all. Views, high ceilings, kitchen to die for, class building. She turned around and flipped it for ten times what I paid five years ago. She is fucking rich and I’m sleeping in a sleeping bag. Which is why-”
“I know, I know. You’re going to cut her heart out.”
That afternoon he called me at work. Richard had canceled our 7 o’clock meeting. I felt a cold lump in the pit of my stomach. It sounded like he had gotten the higher offer he’d been waiting for. “Any idea why?” I asked.
“No idea,” said Tommy.
“Can you reschedule?”
“I’ll talk to him next week.”
I had an awful feeling Tommy was trying to blow me off. In fact, I had an awful feeling that he himself had found the client who had made the higher offer. Hating myself, I did a terrible thing, telephoned my folks in Missouri and asked to borrow the fifty thousand dollars they’d been saving, buck by buck, so they could move south when my father finally retired from teaching.
The damnedest thing was how they didn’t even hesitate. I promised I would pay it back as soon as possible, thinking maybe I could in five years, and right after work hurried down to Chelsea prepared to meet Richard’s insane price with an extra ten thousand to beat the offer I just knew he must have gotten.
Richard was sitting on his front step, leaning against a pillar that was topped with a welcoming wrought-iron pineapple he’d had recreated by Spanish craftsmen to match one stolen. The front door closed behind him and I could hear somebody creaking up the steps.
I said, “I got the money. I can meet your price.”
“Too late. A woman’s buying it right now.”
“I can top it by ten thousand.”
“Top what by ten thousand?”
“The extra forty you wanted.”
Richard laughed. “She’s already topped that. I’ve got seven hundred thousand on the table.”
“Seven hundred thousand? Sight unseen?”
“She saw it this afternoon. Woman looking for a pied-àterre for her boyfriend.”
“Seven hundred thousand?”
“This woman is so in love she’d have paid a million.”
Richard shook his head. Even he seemed awed and it made him seem more human as he asked, “You know how when somebody is really happy after being unhappy for a long time?
How they glow? This woman is glowing like Venus on a dark night.”
“How’d she find out about it?”
“Your friend Tommy showed it to her broker. Tommy was so excited he was red in the face. He really is a greedy prick.”
“Is Tommy up there?”
“No, he and the broker were here earlier.”
“Did you actually see Tommy King leave?”
“No.”
I thought to myself, Tommy wouldn’t kill her up there.
Richard knew he had set it up with her broker. He’d get caught. Except he didn’t care about getting caught. He thought he was right.
I hesitated for longer than I should have. I knew exactly what would happen, and when it did, the price of that apartment was going to plummet. A bloody murder would knock the price lower than a ghost. All I had to do was walk away from a crime about to happen. Or better yet, just stand innocently chatting with Richard who, as usual, was talking up a storm. All I had to do was listen and wait.
“Hey, Richard,” a woman called down from the front window of the apartment. “Where is that air shaft for the kitchen exhaust?”
She was not the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in New York, but she came close-a perfectly lovely blonde, slim, not boney, sky-blue eyes set wide in a heart-shaped face, and a mouth that wanted to smile. Quite a few years older than Tommy, I thought. I wasn’t surprised they had gotten divorced; what I couldn’t figure out was how they had hooked up in the first place. She just seemed better than Tommy, who while handsome enough to squire a beauty like her around town, had an empty mind and soul even when he wasn’t threatening bloody murder.
She looked down at me gaping up at her, and her smile erased every line that hinted at age. As Richard had said, she glowed. “Hi. I’m Samantha King. Do you live in the building too?”
Before I could answer, she disappeared-like a reverse jack-in-the-box-and the window slammed shut. I ran up the front stoop. The door had swung closed and locked. “Open it,” I yelled. “Unlock the door!”
Richard located the key on the crowded ring on his belt, inserted it, and unlocked the door. I pounded up the stairs.
Halfway up the flight I heard her scream. When I reached the landing something heavy slammed against a wall. The old house had thin paneled wood doors and I ran full tilt into the nearest, splintering it open with my shoulder.
Tommy had chased her into a corner, bent her backwards over a radiator, and was hacking at her chest with his scalpel. He looked up at me crashing into the room. His face was covered in her blood.
“Stop!” I shouted, too late to do any good.