Hot Property

by Michele Kleier

  “I agree. But he’s gone now, so let’s take a look at the other bedrooms,” Isabel says, changing the subject. “They’re all huge, perfect for the twins, and, when they’re a little older, for sleepovers with their friends.”

  “I wanna see my room!” says Skylar, who, with her twin, has just emerged from under the bed, dust clinging to the hem of her dress like a spider’s web.

  Isabel says, “Wouldn’t you love a great big room so you could spread out all your toys when you play?”

  Skylar nods enthusiastically. “My Flower Fairies, my Twinkly Tiara, my stringing beads, my Barbies . . .”

  “My Magnetic Mosaics, my Calico Critters, my Princess Puppets, my See and Spell!” Carlin chimes in. “My Barbies . . .”

  Isabel remembers her own bedroom growing up, with the huge, hand-painted dollhouse her parents had commissioned for her.

  “Let’s see them,” Kimby says, and taking each girl by the hand, leads the way.

  They seem to love the first bedroom. Lawrence loves the view, the enormous closet where the girls can put their Barbie collections. There’s no furniture in the room save a big overstuffed armchair covered in a blue-and-white gingham check. Carlin runs over to it and sits herself down.

  “I said I wanted to go to the park,” she reminds her parents. “You have to take us,” she says, kicking the heels of her pink Mary Janes rhythmically against the side of the chair.

  “Maybe,” Kimby says; now both hands are resting on her rounded front. “We’ll see.”

  “It is a good-sized room,” Lawrence says, concession apparent in his voice. “Let’s see the rest fast, I have to get to a meeting.”

  The next room is noticeably smaller than the others; Lawrence asks, somewhat testily, “Was this a maid’s room? Because no child of mine is going to sleep in a maid’s room,” he adds, as if this were a fate too hideous to contemplate.

  The room’s appearance is not at all enhanced by the unmade bed and heap of clothing on the floor, including Drew’s coffee-stained bathrobe.

  “Look,” Skylar says, pointing to an open laptop resting on the desk. “A computer.” She turns to her mother. “Can me and Carlin play Strawberry Shortcake Amazing Cookie Party while you and Daddy look at the rest of the rooms? Okay?” She trots over to the computer and touches the keyboard.

  “Sweetie, that’s not our computer, we can’t touch—” Kimby begins, and then suddenly stops. Her voice sounds clotted and strange, so Isabel quickly shifts to follow her gaze. Skylar’s touch has brought the screen to life, and there, plain as can be, is a naked woman with the largest breasts Isabel has ever seen. Her hair is an unnatural shade of purplish red and her eyes are closed; one hand is touching her pancake-sized pink nipple, while the other directs a huge penis toward her parted thighs.

  “Who’s that?” asks Skylar. She puts a fingertip to the screen and touches the woman’s nipple, stroking it nonchalantly.

  “Get your hand off there!” Lawrence shouts, and hustles his family down the hall toward the front door, Kimby waddling behind as best she can.

  “Oh, well,” she begins, with her hand on the doorknob. It looks as if she might be contemplating offering something further, Isabel thinks. But Lawrence is already at the elevator.

  “Kimby!” he calls urgently. “The elevator’s here. This place is too filthy, let’s go right now.”

  And with that, the pregnant Bennetts disappear from the fourteenth floor, and possibly from her life forever.

  As she searches madly through her purse for her cell phone, so she can e-mail Jonathan—who has just the right sense of wickedly dark humor for this—she sees Tara slinking toward her, shaking her head, and the two have no choice but to laugh.

  Walking out of the Carlyle House into the beautiful April day, Isabel thinks for just one moment where she would be were it not in the family real estate business. Elizabeth’s first hopes were actually for either Kate or Isabel to be not just a famous actress but a true movie star. Isabel, age three, was desperate to be a star, layering necklace upon necklace long before Vogue declared that “the look,” while Kate daydreamed of being an architect and married by, at the latest, twenty-four, to a tall, dark, and gorgeous man named Gregory with whom, by twenty-six, she would have one daughter (Kim, as in Kim McAfee from Bye, Bye, Birdie) and a second (Scarlett, from Gone with the Wind) on the way. Elizabeth’s biggest regret was that Isabel was born too late to play the starring role of Cee Cee as a child in the movie Beaches, based on the novel written by her best friend from childhood, Iris Rainer Dart. Although according to Iris, Isabel was far too pretty for the part.

  So Elizabeth hired a photographer and took modeling shots of her girls wrapped around trees in Central Park. They went on go-sees for cereal commercials and to acting class, where they had to sing “Happy Birthday” with every different emotion possible. They took gymnastics and ballroom dancing (they loved these lessons because the white gloves they wore were very Kim Novak in Vertigo), and they watched Gypsy again and again and again. Kate of course was Louise and Isabel was Baby June, though as Elizabeth pointed out when the girls were older, “Louise grew up to be Gypsy Rose Lee, the most famous stripper in the universe, and Baby June grew up to be a housewife.”

  Isabel wound up getting the much-sought-after role of a Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz at the very prestigious Westbury Music Fair (the grade school equivalent of playing one of the girls on murder row in Chicago). But the moment her mother told her she would have to go on location on Long Island and miss most of the sixth grade at Horace Mann (a very important year, the last before children went from the elementary school to the “big” campus across the street), Isabel cried for a moment and then declined the role.

  Her phone rings, snapping Isabel back into the present, and she scurries into a taxi to get to her office on Madison Avenue.

  Chapter Three

  Elizabeth

  Central Park West, 70s

  Legendary Majestic 7-room co-op; sprawling terraces with sweeping Central Park views, 3 bedrooms, 3 baths. $6.3 million.

  “Well, I’ll try to get hold of Teddy right now.” Violeta, the receptionist at Chase Residential, hangs up the phone. In her third year at NYU part time, she is a Penelope Cruz look-alike who has inspired all the men in the office to linger at her desk before going to their own.

  There’s the click-clack of high heels and the sound of dozens of charm bracelets and Ippolita bangles clanging together—Elizabeth has arrived.

  Violeta twirls her thick black hair into a low bun, poised to tell Elizabeth about Teddy.

  Elizabeth flips one of her hands as if to say, “What?” her bracelets tinkling like coins. She’s a beautiful woman whose features have deepened over time. Her smooth forehead, perfectly straight nose, deep-set dark eyes, and lovely smile have remained virtually unchanged since her twenties. A cross between Sophia Loren and Mary Tyler Moore, she hasn’t had a stitch of work done, save for the occasional shot of Botox, and only started coloring her rich brown hair a year ago. Kate, everyone says, is her clone, although in truth, both of her daughters look exactly like her, though Isabel’s blond hair and green-blue eyes set her apart.

  “Who was that?” Elizabeth asks.

  “It was the lawyer for Teddy’s buyers.”

  “1148 Fifth Avenue?”

  Violeta nods. “Teddy’s forty-five minutes late for the walk-through, and no one’s heard a word from him.”

  “What?” For a moment Elizabeth just stares at Violeta, then arranges both elbows on the tall mahogany sideboard that fronts Violeta’s desk and cups her face in her palms. Teddy Wingo is the only broker at Chase Residential whose yearly business even approaches hers. And he knows as well as she does that a walk-through—the final opportunity a buyer is entitled to before the closing to go through the apartment and make sure that the property is exactly as it’s supposed to be—is absolutely imper
ative. Without one, closings generally do not happen.

  “We need to try and get hold of Teddy right now,” Elizabeth tells Violeta.

  Violeta presses one of her speed dial buttons. She pulls the receiver away from her ear. “Voice mail.”

  “I assume you tried his cell and e-mail?” This is most unlike Teddy, she thinks, and for a moment wonders if something is terribly wrong. “If we don’t find him, I guess I’ll have to go to the walk-through. So who’s the attorney who called?” Elizabeth asks Violeta.

  “Steve Matz.”

  At least the seller’s lawyer is a cooperative one, Elizabeth reflects, anxiously watching Violeta’s unsuccessful attempt to reach Teddy on his cell phone and then her French-manicured fingers tapping out a text. Once it’s sent, Violeta looks up at her. “Is it a Gumley Haft building?” she asks, mentioning the real estate management company that Chase Residential is affiliated with. “In which case either Dan Wollman or Jim Stasio might know something, don’t you think?”

  Elizabeth considers this for a moment. “No, not ours. So why didn’t I know Teddy had a walk-through today?”

  “It’s on your desk,” Violeta tells her. “But remember, you were hardly in yesterday.” The day before, Elizabeth had mostly been out of the office, supervising an open house on a new exclusive listing, a town house at 61 East 93rd between Park and Madison, an affair that involved catering and blitz marketing and required every bit of Elizabeth’s attention on-site. To complicate matters, Elizabeth was never able to return to the office because the open house was followed by back-to-back showings and then a bidding war. Priced smartly at $9.9 million, the property had attracted three offers by five o’clock yesterday evening, two of them coming from best friends who were pitted bitterly against each other.

  This wasn’t the first time, of course, that Elizabeth had observed that the desire to acquire real estate trumped the bonds of friendship or that real estate in the city could be a vicious game. Real estate is, without a doubt, a family’s biggest investment, and also the ultimate status symbol. Everyone in Manhattan wants to know what people are spending for their homes and where. In a crisis, people will sooner sell family diamonds, art, or furniture than give up their “address.” (And of course what sort of home a person acquires reflects so much about him; income, taste, lifestyle.) She’s observed, too, that someone battling a midlife crisis might move to a new location rather than look for a new love; instead of trading in his wife he’ll trade real estate and move across town to a property that just might be more interesting than what he owned before. (Elizabeth had two clients, in fact, who within a year of each other moved from the same Park Avenue co-op to the same brand-new Tribeca condo, by sheer coincidence. One stayed married, the other did not.) And, too, until recently, co-op prices and the names of the people who bought them weren’t public knowledge, which helped to make people even more obsessed with finding out who had bought and sold and for exactly how much. It became as much a dinner party or school benefit conversation as the subject of whether Brad and Angelina were adopting again.

  “Well, then, you could’ve called my cell,” Elizabeth hears herself reminding Violeta now. “Anyway, call Steve Matz back and tell him I’ll be at the apartment in twenty minutes.”

  Her cell phone rings. “I’m so annoyed!” she tells Kate.

  “Oh no, what’s the matter?”

  “Teddy didn’t show up at his walk-through at 1148 Fifth,” Elizabeth says, and repeats the story to her.

  “Well, that’s kind of alarming,” Kate says.

  “And now I’ve got to go to the walk-through. I just got into the office and have a million things I have to do here, and I have to run right back out.” Teddy’s known all over town to be a womanizer (in Kate’s words, someone who thinks he’s a twenty-five-year-old womanizer), but one whose charm, gorgeous looks, midwestern calm, and appearance of unflappability have more than compensated for any lack of consistency. Elizabeth hired Teddy because he’s well connected, a Yale grad with dozens of wealthy friends living in the city, so many of them buying and selling their homes every few years, it seems. But she finds him rather devious, always scheming for other people’s listings—always with a dazzling smile on his face.

  “Okay, I have to go, I’ll call you later,” Elizabeth tells her daughter. She stops in her office for a moment to pick up a piece of a board package she is working on and grab a few salty extra-dark special pretzels from the tub she keeps behind her desk (the family’s secret stash) and then clutching her orange Birkin, walks back out to the reception area. Violeta is standing in front of her desk, holding out a manila folder.

  “Is that going with me?”

  Violeta nods.

  Elizabeth lets out an elaborate sigh. “So when, exactly, was the last time you spoke to Teddy?”

  “Yesterday around five o’clock. He’d just finished with his Venezuelan clients.”

  “The ones you think might be money launderers?”

  “Well, I’m not going that far,” Violeta says. “Teddy asked me what I thought of them, and I told him what I’d told you, which is that I didn’t get a good vibe about them.”

  “I’ve got to go, but just tell me quickly what it was about these people that gave you a bad vibe, okay?”

  Violeta’s face reddens. “When they dropped by the office and I heard their dialect of Spanish and saw the name Carmona-Morillo, I thought to myself: Not good.”

  “But you’re Argentinian—how do you know so much about Venezuelans?”

  “Well, I’m from South America. And being South American . . .” Violeta hesitates. “Let’s just say you learn to recognize the way certain women dress. The straightened hair, the designer clothing . . . it gives them away.”

  “Gives them away as what?” Elizabeth presses.

  “You can just tell that the Carmona-Morillos recently came into a lot of money. Very recently,” Violeta says with a whiff of imperiousness. Violeta is descended, in fact, from old Argentinian aristocracy that can trace its roots back to Spain.

  Elizabeth’s cell phone rings again, and she hears an unrecognizable male voice say, “I’m driving . . . I think I’m in a dead zone . . . I’m going to lose you—”

  “Hello?” Elizabeth says, and then realizes the call has been dropped. In any case, she needs to get over to the walk-through right away, and with traffic it could take her twenty minutes to get to 96th and Fifth. She looks at her watch; it’s a little before eleven now. “If we don’t hear from Teddy by, say, twelve thirty or so, I’m going to have to go over to his apartment,” she says.

  Violeta looks startled. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “What choice do I have? He didn’t show for a walk-through on a three-and-a-half-million-dollar property. More than a little odd, don’t you think?”

  Violeta shifts uncomfortably and pushes a few strands of hair behind one ear. “You don’t think something’s happened to him, do you?”

  There’s a small knot of worry in her stomach, and yet Elizabeth shakes her head and makes herself say, “Probably a late night with one of his”—she makes a face—“numerous women, but I don’t think anyone or anything would cause him to miss a walk-through. I’ll call you after I’m done, okay?”

  She’s in the elevator, halfway down to street level, when she hears the opening notes from Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind” playing on her phone—Isabel’s new ringtone.

  “I’m in the elevator, I may lose you,” she tells her younger daughter.

  “So, did you wear your new black-and-white Chanel beads?” Isabel asks.

  “Why, was I supposed to?”

  “For the brokers’ lunch today at Gramercy Tavern.”

  “Oh, no. I wore them, but . . . you might have to go without me.” Elizabeth explains Teddy’s failure to show up at the walk-through, and there’s shocked silence at the other en
d of the phone. The fact that Teddy does slightly more business than either Kate or Isabel has always bothered the girls a little bit, something they purposely play down because they know Elizabeth would only tell them, “He has far more experience than you do, girls, that’s all.”

  “Anyway, the walk-through shouldn’t take too long—come by after,” Isabel says.

  “Yes, but I have to reserve time just in case I need to go by Teddy’s apartment.”

  “Why would you go there?”

  “Because as of now, he’s completely missing. Anyway, I’ll call you later,” Elizabeth says as she exits the elevator, and then the building. Phone still in hand, she hails a taxi. “96th and Fifth,” she says to the driver, and then to Isabel, “I have to run—I need to make some calls before I get there.”

  “Bye, Mom.”

  As Elizabeth goes through her purse to find a pen, she comes across a photograph of her family: the three Chase women on the floor in their twenty-seven-foot living room on Park Avenue hysterically laughing, the girls opening their Christmas presents, Tom in the background cleaning up wrapping paper, Jonathan on a chair at his laptop not paying attention, their three Maltese—Lola, Roxy, and Dolly—blurry little balls of white fur. Cecilia, their housekeeper, who has been with the family since Jonathan was four, took the picture, Elizabeth remembers, and she had yelled, “Cecilia, don’t get me in that, I look hideous!” But when they got the picture back from the store, Elizabeth loved something about it, something about how casual and happy her family looked, unposed, innocent. So she kept the photograph in her purse, of all she loved most.

  Her phone rings—it’s Laurel Rosenbluth, the seller of the town house at 61 East 93rd Street, wanting to know about the bidding. Laurel is always perfectly dressed in beautiful pantsuits, silk Hermès scarves, matching necklaces and bracelets she’s collected over the years, and practical yet pretty pumps. Elizabeth has never seen her look anything less than perfect, her exquisite blue eyes beautifully shadowed and her cheeks filled with just the right amount of blush. Laurel Rosenbluth is a true lady. “They haven’t budged yet,” Elizabeth reports. “They both know they have to come up. I’m still waiting to hear from their brokers, Laurel. Hopefully by the time your tennis game is over, we’ll have one far ahead of the other.” As it is, the competing buyers have driven up the price of the town house over ask, something that happens less frequently now that the country has been besieged by a recession. Even the very rich feel that the ebbing financial tide in the country compels them to be a bit thrifty—and for those who are philanthropic, there’s that need to give even more generously as a way to feel less guilty about continuing with their luxury lifestyle, like weekend trips to the Ocean Club in the Bahamas at over a thousand dollars a night.