Quick Study

by Maggie Barbieri

  He closed his eyes. “I know.” I saw tears seep out from under his closed lids. “Now she’ll leave me for sure.” He swiped a giant hand across his eyes. “I’m not that guy, Alison.”

  I couldn’t dispute his suspicion that she would hit the road over this but I told him to keep the faith. I looked over at the hulking form that was the foundation and framework of Riviera Pointe, the glass-enclosed sales office just a few hundred feet to the north. The parking lot and the front door were on the other side of the building; we had pulled up to a side street that was perpendicular to the back of the sales office. Richie had smartly built the front of the sales office facing the river, with the parking lot in front of it; I couldn’t see if Morag’s car was there or not.

  “I’ll go in and get her,” I said. “Wait here.”

  I got out of the car and jogged down the hill toward the sales office, the midday sun glinting off the river. I shielded my eyes while I ran down a path that flanked the side of the sales office. I tried to look into the building, but the bright sun just made me see my own reflection.

  I got down to the front door, my hand on the door handle. I looked into the parking lot, which was behind me and fronted the river. I saw Morag’s car so I knew they were there.

  And then I saw my car.

  I knew that whatever plan I had needed to change dramatically.

  Thirty-Five

  My hand was still on the door when it was pulled inward, me with it. I stumbled onto the polished marble floor of the sales office, skidding along its slippery surface. I came to a stop at Daphne’s desk, now unoccupied, bumping my head against the front of her rounded, mahogany work area. I looked up and saw Max standing by the entrance to Richie’s office. Morag was standing behind her with a thick sheaf of papers in one hand and her other hand behind her back.

  I looked back toward the door and greeted Joey. “If there is one scratch on my car, Joey, I’m going to add that to my list of complaints to your parole officer,” I said.

  Max looked at me. “Where did he come from?” she said, pointing at Joey.

  I gave him an angry look. “You tried to hit me and run me over, didn’t you, Joey?” I thought back to the night I had been walking Trixie, back when all of this madness had begun. I had ruined a perfectly good pair of boots that night.

  He just stared back at me blankly without answering.

  “Spell ‘business,’ ” I said, thinking back to the note that was on my car when the tires got slashed.

  “B-i-z-n-e-s,” he said.

  “Aha!” Max yelled. “There are two s’s!” She turned and looked at me, lowering her voice. “Why are we asking him to spell?”

  “And you slashed my tires, too?” I asked, disappointed. “Gosh, Joey, what did I ever do to you?”

  “It’s what you did to me.” Morag brushed past Max and came into the hallway. Man, she was tall. I’m tall but she was a giant. She was six two if she was an inch. She had on black leggings tucked into high-heeled boots and a very cute tunic with jewels on the neckline and sleeves. If I didn’t want to get away from her so badly at that point, I would have complimented her on her style. It was a vast improvement on the 1940s gun moll look she had been sporting at Jose Tomasso’s funeral. And instead of her usual blond do, today she had a jet black bob with bangs. Which did not suit her at all, but I opted not to tell her that, either. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “God, you are so nosy.”

  I stood up. “I’ve come to talk some sense into my friend here.” I rested my hand on Daphne’s desk, which was about chest high on me. “Max, let’s go.” I decided not to show my hand and reveal that Fred was in the car. I had a feeling that might escalate things faster than I was ready for, both with Morag and with Max. I was trying to remain calm, but I knew that Joey’s presence at the sales office signaled that we were in a situation that was rapidly getting out of control.

  Max looked at me and I nodded at her. She walked toward me slowly, her eyes not leaving mine the whole time. I drifted away from Daphne’s desk and toward the door. I wondered how many blows to the head it was going to take before Max and Crawford put me in an assisted-living facility and fed me applesauce from a baby spoon. I could feel the bruise taking shape as I stood there.

  We just might get out of this, I thought as I got closer to the front door. Max was at my side, and I grabbed her hand. “Let’s go,” I whispered.

  I heard a click behind me, and while my original thought was that it was Morag’s stiletto heel making contact with the marble, deep in my brain I recognized the sound as that of a safety being released on a revolver. “Stop.” She said it once, and she said it politely. “Please.”

  Joey looked back at Morag and went pale. And this was a guy who had stuffed me into the trunk of my car. I didn’t want to turn around and see what had made him blanch, but I had to. And when I saw that we were on the business end of a big gun with a silencer, I did as I was told.

  “Max’s husband is outside, Morag, and he’s waiting for us.”

  Max looked at me, her eyes filling with tears. I couldn’t take much more of the emotional Max; it was throwing me off. “He is?” she said so plaintively that I thought I’d start crying, too.

  Yes, I thought, he’s out there, but boy, do you have some talking to do. I squeezed her hand. “Yes.”

  “You’ll be dead before he gets here,” she said calmly, and an image of her on skis, shooting at targets in the wintry woods of Switzerland floated into my head. That ruled out making a break for it. She could ski and shoot; certainly, she could mow down a tall college professor and her petite friend, even if we were moving targets. She leveled the gun at us and asked us to move back toward Daphne’s desk.

  “Morag, I don’t want any part of this,” Joey said, his hand still on the door handle. “I’m already in too deep on this.”

  “Did you kill Jose, Joey?” I asked as I stood against Daphne’s desk.

  He threw his hands up. “No!” He pointed at her. “She did!”

  And with that, she shot him in the chest.

  Max screamed as we watched him clutch his chest, his eyes filled with surprise. He fell to the floor with a sickening thud. She broke away from me and ran over to him, covering his inert body with hers. “Why did you do that?!” she yelled at Morag.

  “Get back against the desk, Max,” Morag said.

  Max disregarded her and I repeated what Morag had asked her to do. “Come on, Max. Do it,” I said. From the way his body lay lifeless on the floor, I knew that it was too late to help Joey.

  Morag watched her walk back and then turned toward the two of us. “You two couldn’t be more annoying,” she said in her barely accented English. “This whole thing would have been so much easier if you,” she said, pointing the gun at me, “would have stayed out of it. I asked Joey to try to scare you, but you don’t scare easily, do you?” she asked, a small, cruel smile playing on her lips. “A possible hit-and-run and a couple of slashed tires weren’t enough to get you to back off.”

  “Is that why we went to dinner, Morag? So you could see how much Alison knew?” Max asked, her face flushed.

  Morag didn’t answer. I kept my eyes on her to see if I could get any indication of what she would do next. I wondered how long it would take Fred to realize that it had taken far too long for me to bring Max back to the car.

  “Why did you kill Jose, Morag?” I asked.

  She thought for a moment, not sure how much she wanted to tell us. But considering that she was going to kill us, I guess she decided that she could tell us everything. “Kid was blackmailing me. Wanted more of a cut on each forge than I was prepared to give,” she said, shaking her head at the thought. “I wonder who he thought he was dealing with?” she asked, almost to herself.

  The front door burst open and Richie came barreling in with Class of ’59 in tow. “I have had enough of your crap, O’Laughlin!” Richie shouted, Class of ’59 behind him with a briefcase overflowing with papers. “You’re no
t getting an injunction, we’re not stopping construction, and, no, your daughter cannot get a fifty-percent discount on an apartment just because you’re losing your view! She’s also going to lose her job because she may be the dumbest receptionist I have ever met!” Richie, not paying attention to where he was going, tripped over Joey’s lifeless body and did as I had done earlier: he skidded headfirst into Daphne’s desk. He grabbed at his head, stunned.

  Class of ’59—O’Laughlin, I presumed, and, weirdly enough, Daphne’s father—had stopped inside the door and was fixated on Joey’s body, the blood running out of it thick and black and leaving a muddy Rorschach pattern on the floor. He dropped the briefcase next to the body and ran back out the door.

  Morag took a shot that shattered the front floor-to-ceiling pane of glass but missed him by a hair. He ran off around the building, screaming. I’ll say this for Class of ’59: he was a spry little bastard. He could have lettered in track, too.

  Morag waved the gun at us and motioned for us to go into Madeleine Cranston’s former office. Once inside, she put her fingers to her lips and smiled. “Shh . . .” she said, collecting our cell phones. “I have to think.” She stepped out and closed the door.

  Richie, ever the businessman, took a seat behind Madeleine’s desk, leaving me to sit on the credenza and Max to take the one remaining guest chair in front of the desk. “What the hell is going on?” Richie asked.

  “Your girlfriend is a freaking psycho, that’s what!” Max screamed, lunging at him across the desk. “If I end up dead because you’re dating a serial killer, I will kill you,” she said, grabbing at his shirt.

  Richie wheeled back in the desk chair and flattened himself against the back wall, leaving Max spread across the empty desktop. Once away from Max’s clutches, he looked at me. “Got any ideas, Stretch?” he asked.

  “Are you talking to me?” I asked, pointing at my chest.

  “Yeah. You’re the only one over five five in the room, right?” He bared his discolored little teeth at me.

  “What did you ever see in this troll, Max?” I asked, my mind off the murderous Morag for the moment.

  She peeled herself off the desk and sat back in her chair. “I’ve been asking myself that for the last five years,” she said, glaring at him.

  “All I know is this, Richie: ever since you started this operation, only bad things have happened.” I stood up and pressed myself against Madeleine’s window, hoping to catch a glimpse of Fred. “First, the nonunion laborers, the illegals, the shoddy construction . . . do you need money that badly that you had to break every possible building code in New York City?”

  Richie looked at me. “What are you talking about?”

  “This is all news to you?” I asked.

  He smiled. “Well, some of it,” he said. He held his hands up in protest. “But I don’t know anything about illegal aliens. Every guy on this job site has a green card.”

  I snorted derisively. “Yes, Richie, they all had green cards because the dead guy out there and the first dead guy—Jose Tomasso—were forging them and bringing them to the job site.”

  He stared at me. Finally, it dawned on him. “The dead guy was involved?”

  “Yes. His name is Joey and he’s an ex-con who did a lengthy stint at Sing Sing for forgery.”

  “He was framed,” Max whispered under her breath.

  “Morag told me that was her cousin,” he said.

  “You’re a moron,” Max said. She turned to me and lowered her voice. “That’s not her cousin, right?”

  I shook my head. “No.” I walked around the office, getting antsy from being locked inside. I prayed that Fred was somewhere outside with the Fighting Sixty-Ninth, but it was eerily quiet. I wasn’t even sure that Morag was still out there, but my instincts told me that she was. I felt pretty confident that she was going to kill us as soon as she cleared her head and got her thoughts straight. “All right. How are we going to get out of here? Richie? Any ideas?” I leaned on the desk and got in his face. “Is this place built in as shitty a way as the rest of your buildings? In other words, can we bust out through a cardboard wall or something?”

  “What is wrong with you?” he asked. “We scrimp on the foundations. The framing and Sheetrock are top-notch.”

  “Oh, that’s a relief,” I said sarcastically. I looked around, settling on an air-conditioning grate in the ceiling. “Where does that go?” I asked.

  Richie shrugged. “No idea. I just cash the checks.”

  At least he was honest. “Help me barricade the door with the credenza,” I said. I figured that would buy us some time.

  He looked at me, shamefaced. “All the furniture is bolted to the floor.”

  “What?”

  “Why do you think she locked us in here? She knew that there was nowhere for us to go and that we couldn’t barricade ourselves in,” he said. “I didn’t want the cleaning crew walking off with the furniture in the middle of the night.”

  “Yes, Richie, a fake plastic credenza is just what every New York City apartment needs.” I looked at him and shook my head. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Max ignored the two of us and stood on the desk, reaching toward the ceiling. “Give me a boost,” she said.

  My luck that I got locked in an office with two of the shortest people I had ever met. I got on the desk and jockeyed around with Max until she was sitting on my shoulders while Richie regarded the two of us with a newfound respect. Or it might have been some kind of weird sexual interest; I couldn’t tell. We didn’t even have to talk to each other to figure out what the plan was. She pushed at the ceiling grate and I stood up straight, shoving her through the grate and into the ventilation system, her ballet-flatted feet hanging down in my face.

  Relief flooded through my body as I saw her disappear into the ceiling of the Riviera Pointe sales office.

  At that moment, Morag chose to come back in to get us.

  Thirty-Six

  Standing on the desk, I was now taller than Morag. I looked down at her.

  “Where are you, Max?” she said, firing a shot into the ceiling. I heard Max yelp but it wasn’t the yelp of the wounded. Then she scurried overhead and into the airspace over Richie’s office. I prayed Morag wouldn’t move through each office trying to shoot Max down, but that’s precisely what she did. Although the silencer saved our ears, nothing could dampen the odor of gunpowder that flooded the office after Morag left.

  Richie had turned into a statue in the corner of the office. “Where is she?” he asked.

  I heard the muted sounds of shots being fired into the ceiling and the sound of Morag’s pointy boot heels making their way across the marble floor of the lobby.

  Richie picked up a desk chair and moved back several feet. When he was across from the desk, he hurled it at the window in back of Madeleine Cranston’s desk. A spiderweb pattern grew in the tempered glass, but it didn’t shatter.

  “If you break the window, Richie, you can go, but I’m not leaving Max here,” I said as he attempted to shatter the glass again. The chair bounced off the window and onto the floor, a few of its screws coming out in the process. Obviously, Richie scrimped on his office furniture, too.

  I heard a man’s voice yelling Morag’s name, but the thick door muffled her response. I pressed an ear to the door but all I could hear was a scuffle followed by a thud and then, a shot.

  The sound of that shot, louder than the ones that Morag had fired with her silenced revolver, reverberated through the office, and Richie hit the ground, his hands over his head like he was in the midst of an air raid. I stood and listened to the quiet that followed the first report.

  After a few minutes, Richie stood again and picked up the chair, holding it aloft. I could hear footsteps; they weren’t the sound made by stiletto-heeled boots but by shoes with rubber soles. There was a knock at the door and when it swung open and I saw Fred’s face on the other side of it, I burst into tears.

  “It’s OK,” he said and clo
sed the door. “She’s not going anywhere.”

  I presumed, by that comment, that Morag was dead.

  “Where’s Max?” he asked, his calm delivery belying the terror in his eyes.

  I pointed at the ceiling. “Somewhere up there,” I said.

  He looked crestfallen and it occurred to me that perhaps he had misconstrued what “up there” might mean. “No!” I said. “She’s in the ceiling.”

  Fred lumbered up onto the desk and stuck his head into the air vent. “Max!” he hollered. I’m sure his baritone, coupled with the surround sound of air-conditioning ductwork, played havoc with Max’s hearing.

  “What?” she called back.

  “You can come out!” he responded.

  I could hear her scrambling back through the ductwork; finding her way back was not as easy as she expected. “Keep talking so I can find my way back!”

  Instead of talking, Fred started singing the words from their wedding song, which was the Bee Gees version of “More Than a Woman.” I saw his arms go up into the ceiling and his heels leave the desk as he stood on his toes to get a better look into the shaft.

  Richie looked at me and finally put the chair down, convinced that we weren’t going to be killed. “Well, I think I’ll be going,” he said, moving toward the door.

  I stood in front of it. “Not so fast, Kraecker.”

  “It’s Kray-ker.”

  “Whatever.” I kept my hand on the doorknob. “You’re going to have to tell us what happened here. And why Morag was so intent on killing all of us. And Jose.”

  “I have no idea,” he protested and came closer to me.

  I threw my arms across the door. “You had a relationship with this woman and you have no idea what she was thinking?”

  He thought for a moment. “Well, she is a bit of a hothead.”

  That was vastly understated. “That’s it? She’s a ‘bit of a hothead’?” I asked.

  Fred bent his knees and crouched on the desk, looking at his watch. Within seconds, I heard the wail of sirens and he shook his head and smiled. “That didn’t take long.”