I taught my morning classes and prepared for my meeting with Madeleine Cranston at Riviera Pointe. I wanted to see how far I could go before having to commit to anything or—gasp—show my financial records. I had played it a little fast and loose with the credit card lately, buying some clothes that were a bit out of my league financially. But what the hell? You only live once. And I wasn’t about to live that life in Payless shoes and a faux shearling coat from Kmart. Especially now that I was divorced and only had myself to think about.
I pulled my emergency lipstick out of the top of my desk drawer. If any day called for lipstick, today was it. I applied, smacked my lips together, and moved the mirror around to see how much of my hair I could see. As usual, it was a mess. I did my usual time-saving trick of patting it down with my hands because I didn’t keep an emergency brush or comb in my desk.
I took one last look at my reflection. Good enough. Madeleine Cranston, with her awe-inspiring décolletage and blond beehive of hair, had nothing on me.
Well, actually, that wasn’t really true, but I needed a little boost of self-confidence if I was going to lie my way into Riviera Pointe. I don’t know what I was expecting to accomplish but I figured it was worth a try.
I arrived at Madeleine Cranston’s office, housed in a glass-enclosed sales building a few blocks from the actual construction site. I sat in a very well-appointed lobby, casually flipping through a sales brochure that was given to me by a reed-thin, long-legged young woman in a fashionable print wrap dress. I looked at her, immediately felt bad about my own cardigan/skirt combo (a sure bet every morning for me), and began to study the sales brochure as if there would be a test on it in a few minutes. I realized then that I had no idea what I was going to talk to Madeleine about. Did I really think I could wing it? Regardless of what I thought, the time was now: she was click-clacking across the marble floor toward me, a huge smile on her elaborately painted face. Between the face and the giant hair, it seemed as if the Dynasty look had returned and I hadn’t been alerted: the twin set and the herringbone skirt that I was wearing harkened back to Murder, She Wrote.
I stood. “Hello, Madeleine!” I said with extra cheer.
“Ms. Bergeron? Hi?” she asked in that annoying, questioning way of hers. She extended a well-manicured hand. We shook.
“Thank you for calling me the other night,” I said. “And please, call me Alison.”
“And what is it that I can help you with?” Her smile held in place as if glued there.
I had no flipping idea. “Uh, I was thinking that it may be time to downsize since my . . .” I hesitated, wondering how I had concocted this lie so quickly and why I was giving her personal details about myself, “. . . divorce . . . well, actually he’s dead . . . but that was after . . .” I took a deep breath and focused. “I was thinking that Riviera Pointe would be the perfect place for me since I teach at St. Thomas.” There. That was easy.
She gave me a knowing glance that said, Yes, who would want to live in a house where a dead body had been found? Because unless she had been living under a rock, everybody knew that my ex, Ray, had been found in my kitchen missing his hands and feet. But she didn’t let the gruesomeness of that detail cloud her thoughts. She clapped her hands together, the sound reverberating in the giant, marble-filled room. “Excellent!” It was the first time I had heard her punctuate a sentence with something other than a question mark. She leaned in and whispered conspiratorially. “And it will bring you that much closer to that delicious new man of yours?”
Crawford? I looked at her. Judging from the way she was practically drooling over the memory of said delicious man, and the fact that I didn’t think she had met Crawford, I concluded that it was Jack to whom she was referring; that and the fact that she was tapping a pencil against her teeth. I remembered that he was moving into Riviera Pointe as soon as Phase I, as the brochure called the first condos to be built, was done. It took me a few seconds to make the connection. “Right! Delicious man,” I said, sounding like an idiot. I wasn’t supposed to talk about Jack in that way, but I had to keep the charade going.
She shuddered a little bit and I got concerned. When she closed her eyes and sighed, I knew she was thinking about Jack. Obviously, she was as turned on by good oral hygiene and symmetrical Chiclet teeth as I was. She came to again and was back to business. “Well, shall we go into my office?” As I followed her across the marble, she instructed the receptionist to hold her calls. Wow, she really meant business. She was going to be really pissed if she ever found out that this was one big hoax.
I took note of the fact that Richie’s office was right next to hers. As is often the case with temporary structures like sales offices, and, I supposed, everything built by Richie Kraecker and company, the walls were paper thin, and I could hear him bellowing inside his office.
I took a seat across from her reproduction Louis XIV desk and crossed my legs. Behind her head was a spectacular view of the Hudson, a view that I see every day of my life as I walk around campus thanks to St. Thomas’s location, but it never gets old. She riffled through some paperwork on her desk, finally looking up at me. “So, what are we interested in? A two-bedroom? Three?”
“Um . . .”
“Let’s talk figures? Maybe that will help? Our standard two-bedrooms start at nine fifty and our river views start at a million two.” There was no question in her voice as she dropped that little gem of information. I nearly gagged. She leaned onto her desk and folded her hands as if she had just told me that I had gotten an A in algebra. I buy generic cereal because the real stuff costs too much. Spend a million two on a property? Highly unlikely.
I resisted the urge to show her how shocked I was at those prices. When you considered the fact that Richie was paying most of his workers about a dollar an hour, it really was akin to highway robbery. I looked at her, my eyes dropping to the mountainous cleavage that had presented itself when she bent forward. “Two bedroom,” I managed to get out.
“Excellent!” She pulled out a brochure that had a floor plan. My brain doesn’t work in the way that allows floor plans to make any kind of sense to me; I have never been able to look at a floor plan and decipher what exactly the finished product might look like. I stared at it as if that weren’t the case, oohing and aahing at all of the fabulous appointments a two-bedroom Colonnade model might contain. By the time she had finished her pitch, I was almost ready to pull out my checkbook and give her a deposit. The apartment sounded fantastic. One problem: I had a dollar thirty in my checking account. Max hadn’t been over to balance my checkbook in months and I had written myself into a giant financial hole. I did have forty-seven bucks in my wallet, though; I wondered if that would be enough. “So, what do you think?” she asked, looking at me expectantly.
“It sounds great!” I said.
“So, how should we proceed? Would you like to write a check for the deposit? Of course, we’ll need to do a credit check but that won’t take too long?” She looked at me some more and I stared back. I wasn’t expecting this part. I wasn’t expecting the hard close so early in the process. And believe me, I knew about the hard close. I had once agreed to use an inferior textbook just because the publisher’s rep had bullied me into buying it for my class, moving from the hard sell to the hard close in about thirty seconds flat. My head was still spinning and I still couldn’t figure out how to use the damned book with a class of freshmen.
I started to backpedal. “Well, I’m not sure. Maybe a different arrangement might be better for me. I’m not sure,” I repeated, chewing on my thumbnail in faux contemplation.
“Then maybe our Majestic might be right for you?” she asked, describing the other apartment in vivid detail. Yes, I did like this one better, if only for the extra walk-in closet that would hold all the clothes that I had held on to since 1978; my poncho from spring break in Cancun would fit fabulously on one of the built-in hooks. She pulled open a filing cabinet drawer next to her desk and looked for a brochure. “I’m
sorry? I don’t have a Majestic brochure here? Let me go out to Daphne’s desk and see if she has one?” She got up, and leaving a cloud of Opium in her wake, sashayed out of the office and down the hallway.
I jumped out of my chair and put my ear to the shared wall between her office and Richie’s but I couldn’t hear a thing. That’s because he was standing right behind me. “Well, look who it is,” he said, clucking his tongue. “Boy, you’re everywhere, aren’t you?”
I spun around so fast that my hip caught the edge of Madeleine’s credenza, over which I had been leaning to listen into Richie’s office. I sucked in my breath, surprised at how much it hurt. “Like a bad penny, I guess,” I said, chuckling nervously. I put my hand to my hip, trying to make it look like I was affecting a nonchalant stance. I squinted to hold back the stinging tears that had sprung to my eyes.
“You could say that again,” he said, making his way into the office. “Whatcha doin’?” He put his hands into the pockets of his khakis. I guess he had adopted a “business casual” policy for himself but no one else in the sales offices, judging from the amount of makeup, perfume, and designer clothing that was on display there.
“Oh. That,” I said, pointing at the wall. “Checking out your paint colors. Is that from the Benjamin Moore Serenity collection?” I asked, getting up close to the wall again. “Tumbled Marble, maybe? Or Naked Dawn?”
“Morning Dew,” he said.
“Hmm,” I said, surveying my surroundings like I really cared.
“So, you never answered my question,” he said, pulling up to his full five feet five inches. “Whatcha doin’?” he asked casually. He hitched his pants up a little, his hands still in his pockets. Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine this man being “attentive” in bed. Nor did I want to.
“Buying an apartment,” I said, far too quickly and with much too much confidence and assurance. I really hoped that I wouldn’t have to buy an apartment because there was no way I could afford a studio, much less the two bedroom with the great closet that Madeleine thought I was interested in. I’m a buy-high, sell-low kind of person and hadn’t accrued that much equity in my two-bedroom Cape.
He regarded me warily. “Really?” He shifted slightly from one foot to the other. “Which one?”
“Oh, I’m not sure. Maybe the Colonnade, but the Majestic sounds lovely, too,” I said. Shit, shit, shit. I thought about the amount of money in my checking account and tried to imagine it multiplied by a hundred thousand or so. The jig was going to be up sooner rather than later.
“Really?”
I nodded enthusiastically. “Really!”
He continued to look at me. “Tell Madeleine to give you a good deal.”
If a good deal constituted ninety percent less than market value or the equivalent of a dollar thirty, we had a sale. “I will. Thank you, Richie.”
Daphne, the wrap dress–wearing receptionist, came to the office door. “Mr. Kraecker?”
Richie turned and I swear, gave her the once-over. You dog. Wasn’t the drop-dead-gorgeous biathlete enough? “Yes, Daphne?”
“A Detective Crawford here to see you?”
The jig was definitely up.
Sixteen
I managed to escape the sales office of Riviera Pointe without writing a check and without seeing Crawford. I had remained in Madeleine’s office, ostensibly considering the merits of both the Colonnade and the Majestic and making a great show of my indecision. I could hear Richie talking to Crawford in the office next door and when it sounded like they had settled into their conversation, I thanked Madeleine for her time and beat a hasty exit, promising to call her as soon as I made a decision.
She gave me a cheery, “See you soon?” as I made my way through the sales office to the front door, passing the lovely Daphne’s desk on the way out.
As I trudged back to my car, I felt kind of bad for wasting her time. I hadn’t really learned anything, other than that Richie was going to make a tremendous amount of money from this complex, he overcharged for his condos, he was still short, and he liked to surround himself with beautiful women. I didn’t know—as Max had reported—whether or not he still hated onions and drank Veuve Clicquot champagne. I got back to my car and noticed a piece of paper fluttering under the driver’s side windshield wiper.
I pulled it out and read it, recognizing Crawford’s cop scrawl:
I could charge you with obstruction of justice. C.
I sighed in annoyance. No, you couldn’t. You could charge me with wearing a hideously matched twinset and herringbone skirt, or with having the worst hair on the planet, or for lying to a seemingly nice salesperson, or for any other number of reasons. But I hadn’t obstructed anything. I had merely gotten up the hopes of a saleswoman who thought she was looking at a big, fat commission when all she was really looking at was a big, fat liar. With bad taste.
I had just gotten into the car, which was facing the front door of the sales office, when Crawford emerged. He looked up at the sky and turned his face to the sun. After that, he spent a few seconds looking at the Hudson River, a sight he didn’t get to see too much being as most of the crime he investigated took place farther inland in the Bronx. I crouched down in the front seat of the car, hoping that he wouldn’t see me. He knew I was there, but hopefully, he would think I was still inside.
No such luck.
He’s nothing if not pathologically observant. He sauntered over to the car and knocked lightly on the window. His muffled voice came through the tempered glass. “I can see you.”
“I can see you, too,” I said.
He sighed and shoved his hands into his overcoat pockets. “How are we going to play this?”
I opened the car door and got out. “Where’s Fred?”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“We’re not going to play this any way,” I said, leaning against the car and folding my arms across my chest.
“I thought you were going to stay out of this,” he said.
“I lied.”
He was obviously abashed at my honesty. “Yeah, you did,” he snorted.
“I also might be looking for an apartment,” I said defensively.
He nodded, pursing his lips. “Oh, really?”
“Yep. I think the Majestic has just what I’m looking for in condo luxury,” I said, reciting what I had read in the brochure.
“Does it have enough room for all of the clothes that you’ve held on to since high school?”
“Sure does,” I said. I didn’t think he’d noticed. I must have forgotten about the pathologically observant part.
He turned his head and looked back out at the river. He spoke slowly. “Stay away from here. Stay away from Richie. Please. I’m begging you.” He put his hands together in a prayerful way and bowed at the waist slightly.
I remained silent. I wasn’t going to lie anymore. I was going to keep nosing around until I found out something useful to help my friends.
“Well, as long as we’ve got that clear.” He knew that it was a hopeless case. “If you get killed, I’m not going to be able to help you.”
The old scare tactic. I wasn’t going to get killed. I was going to take a bath on a new two-bedroom condo I didn’t want or need, but I was not going to lose my life over it. “Good to know.”
He was quiet for a few more minutes, enjoying the view, if not the company. “You want to have dinner tomorrow night?” he asked, taking a new angle on an old argument.
I was surprised. “Sure.” I opened the car door. “That is, if I’m still alive.” I gave him a smile and closed the door, leaving him staring after me as I drove away.
I drove back to school and parked in my usual spot in front of the men’s dorm. I took the back stairs into the building, checking out my office through the huge windows that faced the stairs. Everything looked to be just as I left it, which was to say, a mess.
Dottie was doing a Sudoku puzzle when I entered the office area. I had managed to avoid her earlier i
n the day so this was the first time she saw me. She looked up and whistled. “Where are you coming from all dolled up?”
That sealed it. This outfit was going into the trash.
“I was at a meeting off campus,” I said.
She looked at me, expecting more information. There was none forthcoming.
“You know what, Dottie? I could use a little help getting some information about the Vietnamese holiday of Tet. Do you think you could help?”
She snapped to attention. “Of course! I’ll let you know what I find out.”
“Great,” I said, and continued to my office. She called after me and I turned around.
“I forgot to tell you. Sister Mary was looking for you.”
That couldn’t be good. She only looked for me if she needed to take me to the woodshed. “Thanks.” I turned and headed back out to the stairs, going up one flight to Sister Mary’s office. She was sitting behind her immaculately clean and empty desk, writing longhand in a notebook. Her whole look was steely, down to her short, gray coif. She looked up at me and, as usual, didn’t smile or greet me, instead just telling me to come in and sit down.
I did as I was told. “How are you, Sister?”
“I’m fine. I wish the same could be said for Sister Louise.”
I looked at her, waiting for elaboration.
“Sister Louise has had a terrible thing happen to her. She is devastated.”
Sister Louise was a professor in the nursing department and I didn’t know her except to say hello. I couldn’t imagine what horrible event had befallen her, so I waited for Mary to fill in the details.
“Her car was stolen. It was a 1990 Chevrolet,” Mary said, rather reverentially, but who could blame her? Nuns had to take a vow of poverty and a 1990 Chevrolet was worth its weight in gold.
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