“Well that’s good to hear. You wouldn’t want to be bumping into her around town. You do like your own space, don’t you?” Penny cleared her throat. “Now, don’t forget. We have Alexis’s twenty-first birthday party here at the house a week from Saturday.”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
“That’s good. I had Rod up here today with his crew. They spruced up the pool house. It needed painting and a few repairs. He really is marvelous.”
“Rod’s a contractor. I didn’t think he did sprucing.”
“For the right price he does. It’s only a couple days’ work. You’ll get the bill.”
Conrad squirmed. Soon he’d be paying the expenses of two ex-wives. It was galling.
“It was good to see him. It had been a while. You didn’t tell me he was doing the renovation on the loft for your old neighbors.”
“They told me they were looking for a good contractor. I recommended Rod because he’d done such beautiful work on our house years ago. I probably should have kept my mouth shut. I don’t need him discussing my business with you.”
“He didn’t, dear. He’s such a sweet man.”
“A sweet man when he shows up. Is he finished?”
“No. He promised me today and tomorrow. They worked until it got dark and then left. They must have been on the road when the blackout struck.” Penny yawned. “Okay, darling. Would you like me to record the news in case Lorraine comes on again?”
“That won’t be necessary. Good night, Penny.” Conrad hung up the phone. He was tempted to pour himself another drink but decided against it. His reflection in the mirror behind the bar was of an attractive, graying man who was in reasonably good shape but whose face showed serious signs of stress. He needed to focus and get to work. With fire in his belly, he sat down at his antique desk. The sight of the red leather desktop, delicate china lamp, and engraved Mont Blanc pen set soothed him. He was ready to tackle what needed to be tackled. As Grandpa Spreckles used to say, “Whenever the world was getting me down, I headed into the kitchen and got to work on a new batch of chocolates. That was when I invented some of our finest recipes.”
Conrad looked up at the portrait of Grandma and Grandpa Spreckles that had been painted in honor of their fiftieth wedding anniversary. They’d be mortified to know how much money generated from the sale of Spreckles chocolates had been paid out to Conrad and his brother, Winston’s, ex-wives. At least Winston now seemed happy with wife number two.
“I’m not going to let Lorraine take me to the cleaners!” Conrad promised his grandparents. He quickly unlocked the file drawer where he kept his financial statements from the last few years. He knew he didn’t pay enough attention to personal money matters. He left it to his accountant, whom he trusted completely. After all, it was the accountant who had urged him to have a prenuptial agreement. Thank God I made her sign it, he thought. Of course she hadn’t been too happy about it. She almost talked him out of it. At least I’d kept my wits about me in that situation. She’ll only get five million dollars.
It only took a few moments of perusing the statements for Conrad’s face to turn beet red. He knew that Lorraine charged every purchase she possibly could. She’d charge a stick of gum if it were allowed. She claimed that it built up their mileage on the airlines. Mileage they were never able to use when they traveled. Their trips always seemed to take place either during the airlines’ blackout dates or when first-class award seats were already long gone.
The credit card bills were approved by Conrad and then sent off to the accountant who paid them. Conrad had also given Lorraine plenty of cash for walking-around money. God knows what she needed it for since everything she bought went on the charge card. But now as he looked through his records he realized that in the past two years she’d withdrawn thousands and thousands of dollars in cash from the three checking accounts. Five hundred here from an ATM machine in New York City. Six hundred there from an ATM machine in Greenwich. Why hadn’t the accountant pointed it out to him? Conrad opened his drawer and pulled out his calculator. He furiously began tapping away at the keys. It totalled nearly seventy thousand dollars!
“Where is all that money?” he squealed. “She must have it stashed away somewhere. Or she has a separate bank account I don’t know about.” He shook his head and continued mumbling. “It’s more likely she stashed it. She never planned for this marriage to last.”
He got up from his desk and stormed out of the room without a glance at his grandparents’ faces. He was too ashamed to look at them. How could he have been so careless?
If she hid that money in this house, I’m going to find it, he thought. I’ll go from room to room and tear everything apart. He stopped in his tracks as he approached the grand staircase. Could she have hidden money somewhere in the loft? He had taken pains to make sure it was completely cleared out on moving day. Everything she’d left there was now in the guest room. Her purses, clothes, yoga mat.
No use thinking about the loft now, he decided as he grabbed the polished wood banister and charged up the steps. First things first.
He knew that money had to be somewhere.
And as Grandpa Spreckles used to say, “It’s not always about the money, it’s about the principle involved.”
You’ve got that right Grandpa, Conrad thought wildly. He strode into the guest room, opened the closet door, and reached for the first in the preposterously long lineup of Lorraine’s designer handbags.
12
Before the blackout hit, Rod had been chatting amiably with his two employees as they rode home together from Connecticut in the company van. Frank and Wally had worked for Rod for years. They were both single and in their early thirties. Rod had just turned forty and was the father of two young children. The three of them lived not far from each other in northern New Jersey, where they’d all grown up.
“This job is a piece of cake, isn’t it?” Rod asked rhetorically as they tooled down the highway. “And Mrs. Spreckles certainly put out a nice spread at lunchtime. When you think the way some clients don’t even offer us a morsel, not even a drop of water…”
“She likes to talk,” Frank commented, himself a man of few words.
“That she does.” Rod laughed. He was always cheerful which was amazing, considering how often he had to listen to people yell at him, sometimes quite heatedly, for not showing up when promised or still not having their homes finished months after the estimated completion date. Rod let it all roll off his back. His eyes never seemed to stop twinkling and his cherubic face was often lit up with a smile. The work he did, when it was finally completed, was always superb. Satisfied clients soon forgot their fury and recommended Rod to their friends.
“I mean really talk,” Frank said. “I was afraid she was going to fill us in on everything that has happened in her life since we were there ten years ago. She also asked a lot of questions about her ex-husband’s loft.”
In the backseat, Wally’s stomach did a somersault. Nicknamed for his walrus moustache, he had a hangdog look but was always pleasant company. Now his whole body was tensing up. His friend Arthur was sneaking into the loft tonight to check out the hidden safe Wally had discovered last week. A discovery he never mentioned to his boss.
It was the contractor’s ultimate fantasy—to stumble upon a hidden treasure in a home that was under renovation. There were countless stories of cash found in walls, jewels hidden under floorboards, sterling silver covered by loose insulation in the corner of the attic. Treasures that the owner of the home didn’t even know about, left behind by previous owners who had died or just plain forgotten about their valuables.
A few years back, Wally had ripped a medicine cabinet out of the wall and was stunned to find a diamond necklace in the hollowed-out space. He’d put it right in his pocket, and it was never missed by anyone. He reasoned that he wasn’t stealing because whoever owned the necklace was long gone, one way or another. Those diamonds whetted his appetite for more exciting discoveries.
He’d been disappointed over and over again when they started new jobs. It seemed nothing like that would ever happen again.
Until last Friday.
Wally had started moving the heavy boxes of Italian tile into the Reillys’ front closet so they’d be out of the way. He opened a cabinet in the closet that was close to the floor, a cabinet which he thought he’d thoroughly inspected when they started the job, and slid one of the boxes to the back with greater force than he intended. A funny sound made him nervous. He was afraid he might have cracked the tile. When he pulled the box back out, a false back fell forward. A safe was staring him in the face, its key sticking out of the lock.
Adrenaline shot through his body. Frank and Rod had gone up to check something on the roof, so he was alone. This discovery was his! Knowing it was probably futile, Wally leaned forward and tried to turn the key. It wouldn’t budge. He needed the passcode or the owner of the safe’s fingerprint for the key to work. The latter was impossible and figuring out the former was about the same. But he knew someone who might be able to figure out how to open it.
Wally’s mind was racing. He reasoned that the Reillys couldn’t have known about the safe. If they had, they wouldn’t have left the key there. They’d also wanted to build new cabinets in this closet and never once mentioned the hidden safe. Conrad Spreckles couldn’t have known about it, either. He’d stripped the apartment clean of anything worth a nickel. If this safe had been his, he would have taken it with him.
Wally was sure that there were treasures lying within it, treasures with his name written all over them. He quickly replaced the cabinet’s false back and finished storing the boxes of tile. They were due to leave in a few minutes. Finally, he thought! Finally it’s paid off that I duplicated keys behind Rod’s back. Ever since he’d found the necklace he’d had keys made for every house or apartment they worked on. He thought he might discover something he couldn’t carry out in his pocket. Hopefully he had!
Wally couldn’t wait to get home. As soon as Rod dropped him off, he raced inside, called his poker buddy, Arthur, and offered to buy him a drink at the corner bar. Arthur, a computer geek who was a whiz at mathematics and loved every kind of numerical gadget almost as much as he loved a free drink, jumped at the invitation. But when he was served his beverage of choice and heard about Wally’s plan for him to go into a loft and try to break the code of a safe, he refused.
“I don’t need to take that kind of risk,” he stated firmly, his thin face looking pained, his pale eyes astonished. He shook his head back and forth and jutted out his lower lip. “No no no. Ah-ah.”
“Arthur, we could pick up some extra money. You could buy another computer or two.”
Arthur’s eyes blinked several times. Thoughtfully, he took a sip of the frosty beer Wally had paid for. “Why don’t you have me up there when you’re working alone? Don’t you work by yourself sometimes?”
“Yes, but that’s unlikely to happen on this job. And the woman who owns the loft is home a lot. She and her husband are living there while the work is being done.”
“Then aren’t they there now?”
“No! They’re away for several days. Rod said we don’t have to go back to work there until next Wednesday when they’ll finally be back.”
Unbeknownst to Wally, Regan Reilly had been expecting them on Tuesday.
Arthur adamantly refused, drank his beer, and went home to his computer. On Saturday and Sunday, Wally tried again. Arthur remained stubborn, a mulish expression plastered on his face as he swilled all the beers charged to Wally’s growing tab.
Then today, Wally had heard from the first Mrs. Spreckles that the second Mrs. Spreckles was on her way back from England, that she didn’t know the loft had been sold, and that she certainly wouldn’t be happy about it because she was there all the time. Without her husband.
Wally immediately realized that the safe had to be hers, and that he had to act right away. If she had valuables in there, she’d certainly try to get them back. He had to beat her to it. In the back of his mind, Wally realized that this was more like stealing than just finding something left behind, but he didn’t care. He was on a wild ride, and the proverbial train had left the station. Saying he wanted to stretch his legs, Wally casually strolled out to Mrs. Spreckles’s expansive back yard and called Arthur yet again. Luckily, Arthur had just lost a load of money at the track. All his fancy calculations figuring out which horses should win, place, and show, taking into account all the variables of the race, failed him miserably. Reluctantly, he agreed to go into the loft after dark and attempt to crack the code of the safe. He told Wally to try to find out the date of Lorraine’s birthday. People often used some combination of their day, month, and year of birth as their passcodes on everything from ATM machines to alarm systems. It was a stupid thing to do because it made it easier for thieves to break the codes.
“If I can’t crack the code,” Arthur said nervously, “I’ll break open the safe with a sledgehammer. My grandmother hid her jewelry in her attic for years but the insurance company made her get a safe. Thieves broke in and bashed it open. It looked like a crumpled soda can!”
Wally hung up, went back into the house, and without much prodding, learned from Penny Spreckles that Lorraine Lily was thirty years old, only nine years older than their daughter, which of course was disgraceful. She’d turned thirty on the first of January and still hadn’t really made it as an actress, which meant, well, you know.
Wally returned to the yard and called Arthur back with the information, minus the editorial. Now as he rode in the back of the Rod’s Renovations van, he was a nervous wreck. If anything happened and they got caught…
He was lost in thought when the lights went out on the highway. Rod flipped on the radio, and they heard the news of the blackout. Rod immediately called his wife, who said their power was off but she and the kids were fine. Frank didn’t call anybody. Neither did Wally.
A short while later, Wally’s cell phone rang. He could see it was Arthur calling, but he was too afraid to answer. He couldn’t risk having Rod or Frank overhear the conversation. Was he imagining it, or did the ring itself sound angry?
“Aren’t you going to answer your phone?” Rod asked. “Someone might be checking up on you to see if you’re okay. Or someone might need you.”
“Nobody needs me,” Wally joked as he pressed the silence button. “Nobody cares.”
Frank rolled his eyes.
“Oh, come on,” Rod said with a laugh. “I bet whoever is calling is just dying to get a hold of you.”
Truer words have never been spoken. At the other end of the line, Arthur was an enraged, quivering mess. Calling from the safety of his car, parked down by the Hudson River, he wanted to blast Wally for giving him the wrong information about when the owners of the loft were expected back from their vacation. And he was terrified because he’d lost the stun gun he’d just bought on the Internet when he was visiting his grandmother in Nebraska. He’d only bought it for his own protection. He bought one for his grandmother, too. If they find it and trace it back to him…
“Answer the phone!” he screamed at Wally’s recording. “Answer your stupid phone!!”
13
When Kent, the bartender, sat down with Regan, Becky, Kit, and Billy in the back room of Larry’s Laughs, he was drying his hands with a small towel, then used it to wipe the sweat from his forehead. Women customers found the red-headed, freckled, thirty-three-year-old cute and friendly. “It’s not easy cleaning up this place in the dark,” he began. “What a job trying to settle everyone’s check with all the lights out. Businesses all over the city are losing money tonight.” He paused. “I shouldn’t be complaining. The situation you’re dealing with is much more serious.”
“It looks that way,” Regan said. “As you know, this woman Georgina left Kit stranded here tonight. Becky saw her get in a cab with a tall, young guy with blond hair. She also noticed he was left handed. If you could tell us what you saw…
”
Kent tapped the table with his fingers. “It was crowded when Kit and Georgina first came in but I noticed them because Kit was on crutches. Then about twenty minutes later, I saw Georgina hurry past the bar and go outside. She had an unlit cigarette in her hand, so I knew the drill. She’d run out for a few puffs and be right back. The bar was pretty empty by then because the show was about to start, but I was busy filling the orders for the drinks. I glanced out once and she was holding her cigarette and just staring into space. I thought, oh boy, she’ll be a tough customer for the comedians tonight. Sometimes you can just tell who’s going to be a laugher, and who isn’t. She didn’t look like one to me.”
“Did you see the guy she left with?” Regan prodded.
“Yes. When I looked again, there he was. He was tall, I’d say about six five or six six, and blond, like Becky said. He seemed pretty clean cut, like a preppy. The two of them were definitely flirting.”
“Have you ever seen him before?” Regan asked.
“I don’t think so. A tall guy like that I would have remembered.”
Regan rubbed her forehead. “He could have been on his way inside, saw Georgina, found her attractive, and asked for a cigarette.”
“Of course,” Kit said, “Georgina might very well have initiated a conversation. Her victims have all been blond.”
Regan turned to Becky. “Did anyone not show up for their reservation tonight?”
“Just one party of three and they didn’t call to cancel. How rude.”
“So he probably wasn’t part of that group. I assume you take walk-ins.”
“If we have the room. But lately the shows are usually sold out or close to it. Larry’s Laughs is getting great buzz. Larry—the owner—is starting a stand-up comedy class. The first session is filled.”
“Kent,” Regan said. “You said they were flirting. Could you be specific?”
Kent raised his eyebrows. “I see the mating dance going on at the bar all the time, and it always interests me. When I glanced out the window, he was picking something like a leaf off the top of her head. I thought to myself, here we go. Oh—I did notice that he had on a big school ring—the kind with a colored stone in the middle. I’ve seen a lot of them, but for some reason this one looked huge.”
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