by Jane Heller
“I have a better idea. You have your people turn themselves in to the police and I’ll skip the trip to the microphone.”
He shook his head. His breathing was raspy, congested. “You don’t get it.”
“Get what, Mr. Levin?” I said sweetly, punctuating the question by kicking my foot off to the side, with the flair of a ballroom dancing champion, if I do say so.
“I’ve got to have that brooch back. I’m not the guy in charge.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Jesus. What do you think it means?” He coughed once, then twice, then loosened his tuxedo tie. He was sweating, having a hot flash. Da da dah. Da da da dah.
“You feeling poorly, Mr. Levin? Is the shock of seeing me out in public with the brooch you stole making you sick?” I taunted. “Or are you just a little winded from all the dancing?”
“I’m not the guy in charge,” he repeated. “If I don’t get the brooch back, he’ll—”
“He’ll what?”
“He’ll—”
“Who’ll?”
“I don’t feel—”
“Finish what you were about to tell me, Mr. Levin,” I demanded. “Are you saying that you’re not the one who’s running your organization? That the man who is will do something to you if you don’t—”
Before I could complete the thought, he made a choking sound, a gasping-for-air sound, and then his hands slackened from around my waist and he went down, face first, onto the gym floor.
“Oh my God!” I heard myself yelling. “Stop the music! This man needs a doctor!”
Bob Levin’s collapse and my yelling caused a great commotion, as you might imagine, and put a definite damper on the festivities. Several of the fathers at the party were doctors and rushed to Levin’s side to perform CPR on him. (They took turns, although there were two who hung back, claiming concerns about medical malpractice.) Gretchen Levin was so consumed with worry, waving her arms around like a hysteric, that she got herself caught up in the mosquito netting and one of her committee members had to disentangle her. And then, of course, there was Penelope, who was apoplectic that her biggest donor was out of commission.
“This is your fault, Nancy,” she said, wagging a finger at me. “If you hadn’t wiggled and jiggled him across the floor like some cheap dance hall girl, he wouldn’t have taken ill. You’d better hope he doesn’t die.”
Oh, I hope he doesn’t die all right, I thought. If he goes, there’ll be no way to catch his accomplices, never mind this boss he was mumbling about.
“I’ve done it again, haven’t I?” I said morosely as Bill and I watched the EMS people cart Levin off to the hospital. “I’ve screwed up the plan.”
“You were magnificent,” he said, putting his arm around me. “You got him to give up that tidbit about the real head of the organization. Now we know there’s another layer, another level.”
“But if he doesn’t pull through, we’ll never find out about any of it.”
“He’ll pull through.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because we’re not done with him yet.”
Da da dah. Da da da dah.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Levin did pull through, just as Bill had predicted, but his doctor kept him in the hospital for a couple of weeks, after which he recuperated at home for a few more weeks.
“So young to have a heart attack,” Victoria Bittner remarked as we were leaving school together one afternoon. “He’s only in his forties, isn’t he?”
I nodded. “And in decent shape, being both a polo player and a squash player.”
“You’d think. Maybe he had one of those congenital abnormalities you hear about,” she offered. “One minute, those people are fine; the next minute, they’re an obituary.”
“Could be,” I said.
“Although it’s possible that it was his Type A personality that brought on the heart attack,” she reconsidered. “That and the fact that he’s in a very stressful line of work.”
“Very stressful,” I agreed. I wondered whether being a crook was more stressful than being a stock broker or whether being a stock broker was more stressful than being a crook. And then I wondered whether I was comparing apples with apples.
Fischer was extremely disruptive in the classroom following his father’s sudden illness. I assumed that he was acting out because there was chaos at home, that nobody was bothering to tell him what was going on, and that he was left to fend for himself, as usual. As I felt partially responsible for this—it was my flashing the brooch in Levin’s face that triggered the heart attack, after all—I didn’t put him in Time-out whenever he made trouble. Instead, I nurtured him, tried to draw him out, tried to get him to express his feelings.
“Are you scared about your daddy being in the hospital?” I asked him shortly after Levin’s collapse.
“Kind of,” he said. “But he’s in a big room—the biggest room in the whole hospital.”
“Oh, so you’ve been to visit him, honey?”
“Yeah. My mommy took me.”
“That’s great. How’s he doing?”
“He goes beep beep beep. From the machines.”
“The machines will make him better,” I said. “And then he’ll come home and everything will be back to normal.” I practically gagged on my words. Bill and I were doing what we could to send Levin away for good, which caused a real crisis of conscience for me as Fischer’s teacher. In the long run, I knew I was doing what was best for him, his father being a killer and a thief, but in the short run, I felt like a rat.
In any case, Bill and I figured that since Levin was under the weather, he wouldn’t be holding any meetings with his bad-ass buddies and that our plan to nab the entire bunch of them would be in a sort of holding pattern for a while.
Wrong. Bill and I came home one night to find that his place had been ransacked.
“Welcome to the club,” I said, surveying the mess. “I guess Levin isn’t that under the weather. He managed to get in touch with his mopes, as you call them.”
“Which means our plan was partially effective,” said Bill. “Levin saw you with the brooch at the fund-raiser and he also saw you with me. He must have told his people that the brooch might be here.”
“I’ll say one thing for his ‘people.’ They’re pretty incompetent, the way they try and fail and try and fail. Not that I’m not glad they fail. Plus, if they’d shown up when we were home, we could have gone the route of the other Nancy Stern.”
“But they didn’t show up when we were home, because murder isn’t their game. They didn’t set out to kill your neighbor, I’m sure of it.”
“Well, the main thing is, they’re not giving up on getting the brooch back. Levin seemed desperate to get it back, as if this boss of his, this kingpin, was putting the squeeze on him to get it back.”
“If I could just find out who the guy is,” Bill mused. “Then I could knock them all out of operation.”
“You will, but in the meantime I really think you should involve the police, before one of us does end up like Nancy.”
Instead of answering, he started picking up the articles of clothing that had been strewn around the apartment.
“Bill.” He wasn’t paying any attention to me. “Bill?”
He looked up.
“Why are you doing all this housekeeping when you should be on the phone to the police?” I asked.
“I explained that to you before,” he said, returning to his straightening up. “Reynolds told me to butt out of his investigation. Cops don’t like us private guys interfering.”
“But you have new evidence. He’ll listen to you now, won’t he?”
“Doubt it.”
I regarded him, watched him tune me out, and as I did his ex-wife’s crack echoed in my mind. If I were you, honey, I’d wear a bullet-proof vest to sleep. Had she been warning me about Bill, not merely sniping at him? Was he more interested in playing the hero than in reac
ting sensibly to a dangerous situation?
“I think I understand what’s going on here,” I said. “You’ll be off the case if you turn all your information over to the police, isn’t that true?”
“What’s your point?” he said.
“My point is that if you tell the police everything you’ve got on Levin, they’ll take over and you’ll be out of it. You can’t stand the idea of that.”
“Look, Nancy. I thought I made this clear in past conversations. I was hired by Denham and Villier to do a job. That job was to bust the organization that’s been costing the company millions in stolen gems. Fingering Bob Levin alone won’t cut it.”
“No, but there’s another side to this. If Bob Levin’s got a boss who’s pressuring him to get the brooch back, he’ll become bolder, take more chances, and the assaults on us, on our property, will only escalate. He’s not going to stop at a couple of break-ins and a purse snatching. Are you willing to risk my safety in order to do your job?”
He sighed. He seemed exasperated with me. “You know, you’re really giving me mixed signals here. On one hand, you act all turned on by my job, by my cop background, by my gun. You even tell me you want to be my partner in solving the crimes. ‘I’m not your ex-wife,’ I believe you said, as if to mean that you, unlike her, have no problem with the way I earn my money. On the other hand, you want me to stop right in the middle of my case and turn it over to the police who, at this point in time, have absolutely no interest in it. Sorry, but I can’t figure out where you stand.”
I came toward him, put my arms around his waist. “I stand with you,” I said. “I love you. But Levin’s going to up the ante here. I feel it.”
“Then let me do my job,” said Bill, kissing the top of my head. “Trust me to handle this my way.”
“All right,” I said. “I will.” For now.
With the brooch back in its vault, Levin still at home recuperating, and both Small Blessings and Denham and Villier closed for Easter vacation, Bill and I decided to drive out to Pennsylvania to spend the weekend with my parents, get a change of scenery.
As I didn’t want to worry them, I continued to let them think Bill was the manager of Denham’s New York store and told them nothing about the cops-and-robbers shenanigans we’d been up to.
“So this is the man who stole my daughter’s heart!” my mother exclaimed when we arrived at about noon on Saturday. “She’s my special baby, Bill.”
“He’s heard,” I said as Bill shook hands with both of my parents and expressed how delighted he was to meet them at long last. He was in full charmer mode, every bit the debonair executive of an internationally famous jewelry store. It occurred to me as I watched him that we were meant for each other—two people who were uncommonly good at pretending.
My mother had made lunch, which we ate in the kitchen with the television on in the background, as usual. On this occasion, the set was tuned to CNN Headline News, which delivered the news on the half hour. By the end of our two-hour lunch, I had practically memorized the day’s top stories.
“So, Bill. Tell us all about yourself,” my mother urged as she deposited ice-cream scoopers full of egg salad, tuna salad, and shrimp salad onto his plate, then suggested that the rest of us serve ourselves. Bill was God, apparently, being the first legitimate suitor to come along since my divorce.
“Oh, there’s not much to tell,” he said self-effacingly, then proceeded to trot out the same bullshit story he’d handed me on our blind date.
“I’ve always been interested in the jewelry business,” said my father, who had never been interested in the jewelry business, at least not that he’d ever let on. He asked Bill all sorts of questions like: “What’s your markup?” And: “Who’s Denham and Villier’s biggest competitor?” And: “Is there much theft and, if so, how do you handle it?”
The last question provoked me to kick Bill under the table, but he remained unflappable, answering my father with a matter-of-factness that really impressed me.
After my mother and I cleared the table and did the dishes, the four of us adjourned into the living room so my parents could continue the grilling of Bill. Well, they weren’t grilling him exactly; they were just trying in a very enthusiastic way to elicit information from him, to get to know the man with whom their daughter was shacking up.
By the middle of the afternoon, I was tired of sitting around the house, so I asked Bill if he wanted a tour of the town, the idea being that he and I could steal some time alone.
“What a wonderful idea,” said my mother, clapping her hands. “We’ll all go. Uncle Dave is coming over in a little while—I invited him for dinner so he could meet Bill too—but he’s got a key and can let himself in if we’re not back.”
Uncle Dave, my father’s widower-brother who drank too much and acted crabby. Oh, well.
“We’ll start out by taking Bill to see my shop,” my mother said proprietarily.
“He’s not interested in greeting cards,” my father disagreed. “I’ve got to run over to Home Depot to pick up a few things. I say we start out by taking him there. He can help me find what I need.”
They were fighting over my boyfriend. I found this sweet.
“Actually, sir, I’m not much of a do-it-yourselfer,” said Bill.
“Nonsense,” said my father, who was not much of a do-it-yourselfer either. I had never known him to run over to Home Depot to pick up anything. I chuckled to myself as I realized that he was showing off for Bill, being a manly man for Bill, hoping to bond with Bill over nails and screws and paint spackel. He was, it seemed to me, courting Bill because he liked him and regarded him as a good candidate for the position of son-in-law. I may have been my parents’ special baby, but Bill was the key to their having special grandchildren.
After our itinerary was set, we all got into the car and headed off.
My father drove. My mother narrated. Here’s the elementary school Nancy went to. Here’s her junior high. Here’s her high school, where she got straight A’s except for the C in Latin and the D in home economics.
“I don’t think Bill’s interested in every single aspect of my childhood,” I told my mother. “Maybe you could just hit the high points.”
She hit the high points. Eventually, we came to her greeting card shop. She had taken the day off, but the store was open, so she dragged Bill inside and introduced him around. After that, we buzzed by my father’s office. It was not open, but my father insisted that Bill see it, so he unlocked the doors and let us in. Throughout, Bill was patient and polite and respectful of my parents. The perfect husband for Nancy, they were probably thinking. I wondered how perfect a husband they’d think he was if they knew who he was.
Our last stop was Home Depot. My father and Bill went off to the nails and screws and paint spackel sections of the giant warehouse, while my mother and I wandered off to the nursery to check out the plants. After what seemed like an eternity, she glanced at her watch, declared that it was nearly five o’clock, and said we should “find the boys” so she could get home and start dinner.
We went to find the boys. We couldn’t find the boys. We looked in nails. We looked in screws. We looked in paint spackel. No go.
We tried lumber. We tried electrical. We tried plumbing. There was no sign of them.
“Let’s split up,” I suggested to my mother, knowing how easily you could lose someone in a store the size of Home Depot. You could walk down one aisle while the other person was walking down the aisle right next to it and keep missing each other for hours. “I’ll take this side of the building. You take that side.”
It was a terrible plan. After a half hour of what felt like a game of hide-and-seek, I had not only lost my father and Bill, I had lost my mother too.
I was standing by myself in the aisle where they sell drawer and cabinet knobs, thinking I should probably ask one of the employees to make an announcement over the loudspeaker, when a man darted over to me, appearing out of nowhere.
“You’re Nancy Stern, right?” he said breathlessly.
“Yes,” I said with a certain wariness. The man was extremely grubby-looking—his face unshaven, his hair lank and greasy, his clothes torn and stained—and he smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in days.
“I just wanted to make sure,” he said with an odd little laugh, sort of a hee-hee-hee.
It was as he was reaching for me, lunging at me, that I recognized him. He was the same man who had snatched my purse in New York! The goon Bob Levin had sent to find the brooch! He must have followed me to Pennsylvania, waited until I was alone, and was now going to kidnap me or something equally unacceptable!
I screamed, naturally, which brought dozens of Home Depot employees dressed in bright orange aprons running to my aid. (I don’t advocate screaming as a method for getting a salesperson to wait on you, but it’s food for thought.)
“Get this man away from me!” I said, which prompted a rather burly employee to grab the man by the arms and wrestle him to the ground.
It also prompted my father, my mother, and Bill to follow the commotion and find me and each other in the knobs aisle.
“Nancy! What on earth is going on?” my mother asked.
I looked at Bill and directed my reply to him. “This man was about to attack me,” I said, pointing at the culprit. “I think he wanted to steal my jewelry!” Not that I was wearing any, but I knew Bill would catch on. “He’s a hardened criminal, at any rate.”
“A criminal?” My mother turned pale.
I put my arms around her, gave her a little hug. “I’m okay,” I reassured her. “Nothing happened. It’s over now. They’ll take him away and put him in jail.”
“Put him in jail?” She wriggled out of my arms and kneeled down on the floor, next to the bad guy. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. She turned toward the Home Depot employee who still had the man in a hammerlock. “Release him this minute!” she instructed the employee.
“Mom. Please stay out of this,” I said. “Without going into details, this man is part of a group of cunning and dangerous individuals.”