Utah: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 7)

by J. J. Henderson

  UTAH

  ALSO BY J.J. HENDERSON

  The Lucy Ripken Series

  Murder on Naked Beach

  Mexican Booty

  The X-Dames

  Lucy’s Money

  Lost in New York

  Sex and Death: The Movie

  UTAH

  J.J. Henderson

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 J.J. Henderson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Sarah Caley LLC, Seattle

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  LEAVING TIME

  June 1. On Lucy Ripken's last day in New York, her wake-up call caromed skywards from an ambulance careening down Broadway, siren ulullating like the cry of an Arab woman in mourning. Five flights above Broome Street the sound drove into her belly, stunning her to consciousness. She gasped, torn from a breezy Jamaican dream back to her 124 gravity-bound pounds, her 35 hard years, her body, painfully creaking from yesterday's treadmill speed-trudge and three mile pool-swim. And then she worried. At 35, single women in Manhattan begin to grow faintly visible mustaches, talk to themselves in the street, buy little pink guns that shoot real bullets, advertise for love in the weekly papers. Well, everybody did that now. But still…time running out.

  She exhaled, pushing the fear away. Today all was changed, changed utterly. She was out of here! Goodbye, New York City! She threw the sheet off her naked body and jumped up. A truck shook the building with an air horn blast. Claud barked once. The phone began to ring. She strolled across the room and tugged on a shade, sent it rattling up to expose dawn over the six story hulk across Broome Street. From ground floor to top floor, gleaming galleries and high end shops glowed behind sweeps of expensive new thermally-treated glass. In the old days, the days she missed, in half-light seeping through soot-stained windows she had often watched Chinese immigrant women, spectral silhouettes shuffling through the rooms opposite her loft, huddled over sewing machines doing piece work to pay off the pirates who had hustled them across the seven seas to end up here, corner of Broome and Broadway, stitching threads for Calvin or Oscar. Made in the USA. Those days were long gone now, along with the old Soho, the Soho of weird performance art, intelligent graffiti, and empty nighttime streets. The Chinese women had moved on, to Queens and Brooklyn and Jersey City. Now, what she gazed upon were self-satisfied hipster matrons, shopping. Soho had become a retail spectacle.

  How she yearned for the old city, or was it the open sky? At times she didn’t know any more. Thank God she was leaving town, leaving it all behind. Claud barked again. She picked up the phone. "Hush, puppy, " she said. "Hello."

  "I am not a puppy, toots," said Rosa. "It's showtime, doll."

  "The truck's downstairs, the boxes are packed, the road is waiting."

  “You’re a lucky girl, Lucy.” Rosa sighed. She had left New York for good, lived two years in Santa Fe, then came back, tail tucked, to New York, first to the Upper West Side, where she thought she’d like it better but didn’t, and then to her loft on the third floor above a Chinese food wholesaler two blocks east on Broome Street. Even now in the tidy new Soho the rats ran all night in her walls, snacking on bean sprouts. "Jesus, I'm beat. Derek came in late last night, and he, uh...programmed my software till dawn."

  "So you haven't slept."

  "Not so little since I gave up coke."

  "A 27-year old boyfriend is bad for your health, is that what you're saying?"

  "You said it, I didn't. Hey, not to worry, we'll be over in a couple minutes. Can I get you a coffee?"

  "Yeah...no, never mind, the dog needs a walk. I'll get one myself. Give me twenty minutes. Tell you what, I'll get you coffees, how's that?"

  "Fine. Black no sugar, regular one sugar. When's Harlan supposed to show?"

  "Around noon. I have to be out of here by then."

  "No problem. Derek's a big boy, and..."

  "Cute, too. So see you back here in twenty minutes, OK?"

  "Wait for us downstairs, we'll ride up with you."

  Lucy threw on black sweatpants and a black t-shirt, and her black high top tennies with red laces. Looking at them she realized she had owned the shoes for more than ten years. They’d gone from cool to lame to hot to cool and now…were they lame again? She didn’t know and didn’t care. She brushed hair and teeth, dabbed on a little lipstick, then went out to the elevator landing. She punched the button, breathing easier as the thing lurched into motion, wires creaking taut. The erratic clunker was working!

  Down on the street, day was imminent, traffic light but steady—the Broome and Broadway flow never actually stopped anymore, not even Saturday at dawn. The big yellow rental truck she'd parked on Broome Street six hours earlier was still there, four wheels in place, no smashed windows and no spray-work on the sides. All the graffiti gangsters had retired, it seemed. She took Claud up Crosby Street as far as Prince, then headed east into Little Italy, or Nolita as it had been re-branded a few years back. Another node of downtown Manhattan hipsterdom, which these days meant a cluster of expensive restaurants, a couple of expensive clothing boutiques, and possibly an expensive specialty shop or two. It had all become too damned predictable.

  Some things, however, never changed. The mingled Manhattan perfumes of truck exhaust and garbage baking in the dumpsters lent a noxious tinge to the air. Nearly eighty degrees at six a.m. A hot, damp day dawning. A bad day for moving furniture, but at least she had a couple of helpers and would be out of there by noon. That was the plan at least. Pack it all up and beat it through the Holland Tunnel and across New Jersey. In Western P-A by nightfall, with her white dog in a yellow truck on the great American highway. She found an open deli, got a Times and three coffees, and headed back.

  Rosa and Derek waited by the double glass doors of the grungy little elevator lobby. Rosa was three years younger and a continent removed from Lucy, genetically-speaking: Lucy the skinny blue-eyed blonde, northern European wasp to the core; her best pal Rosa the mysterious and voluptuous black-eyed Mediterranean gypsy. Actually Lucy came from Portland, Oregon, and Rosa Luxemburg was a nice Jewish girl from Scarsdale, with a name chosen to honor a turn-of-the-century anarchist, a dad with deep pockets, and a body that just didn't quit. Lucy's, on the other hand, did quit, or rather, had never quite started: she was boyish, a five foot eight inch beanpole in spite of the miles she walked and swam. But no matter, over the years she'd learned that some boys like their girls boyish; and plus, like her Mom once told her, there'll come a time you'll be glad you don't have big boobs, honey. When everything not nailed to a frame starts heading south. Mom was right about that. And then there was Derek, a 27-year old, six foot four inch, African-American computer programmer, Rosa's highly surprising beau of the moment. She had a
lways had a thing for older, whiter men. Now this cyber-wired, bootstrap-pulling homeboy, built like a point guard, was her one true love. Her taste had changed when her first one true love ended up in jail for grand larceny, insurance fraud, and accessory to murder. Derek was the latest in the line that followed, and definitely the most interesting. "Yo," said Lucy, approaching them. Claud rose up on his hind legs to dance with Derek.

  "Yo Luce," said Rosa. "How goes it?"

  "Hey Rosita, Derek," Lucy said. "Down, poodle, down. Sorry 'bout that."

  "No problem," Derek said. "Dog's cool." He rubbed Claud's head, and looked into his brown eyes. "Some dogs know things, and he's one of them."

  "Yeah, he's a genius," Lucy agreed. "So you guys ready for some fun?"

  "Give us caffeine and we'll let you know," Rosa said. They boarded the elevator and headed up. On the fifth floor they stopped and Lucy pushed the door open onto the landing. Beyond the piled boxes and furniture, the door to her loft was wide open. "Wow, its so big!" said Rosa. "I never realized how..."

  "Nice space, Lucy," said Derek. "What've you been paying?"

  "You're gonna hate me. Six fifty a month. Thirteen hundred square feet." The bare white room glowed in the early light.

  "So why're you leaving?" he asked. "Place like this in Manhattan's hard to..."

  "This town has fried my brain," she said. "I just...gotta get out of here, know what I mean?" It hadn't been easy, deciding to make this move, get outta Dodge, Dodge being Manhattan, Manhattan being the center of the known universe. But she had to do it: unless you grew up in the neighborhood, the New York City she knew had been re-designed to accommodate only the young, the rich, or the terminally ambitious, and Lucy no longer fit in or aspired to any of those categories. She wanted a normal life and though no longer sure what that meant, she knew that she would never live it in Manhattan.

  "Let's take some pics while its empty like this. The light's great. Where's your camera?" Rosa said.

  "The digital’s in that bag there." Lucy pointed. "But not too much dicking around. We gotta get all this stuff out of here by twelve."

  Lucy posed in a window, and posed in a dance with Claud, and posed alone against the white plaster wall that had been her headboard for twelve years; snap, snap, snap, they had a look at what they captured, and that was that. They loaded the elevator and went down to pile the truck with the detritus of her life in Manhattan: clothes she hated, paperbacks she loved, cast-off street furniture, boxes of dead manuscripts and fading photographs—the dregs of the professional and personal life of an aging bacheloretta stuck in the slowing-down-fast lane of New York City.

  By eleven a.m. Lucy was cramming the last of the weird old useless stuff from the top shelf in the closet into the last of the boxes. Harlan had just called to say he would be there with his truckload of stuff around twelve. Chip Harlan, art director of SPACES Magazine, where Lucy used to get work. A nice guy, if a trifle wormy—nothing wormier than aging white boys who aspire to hip hop style—behind his recessed chin and wispy longish hair and low-slung jeans and backwards baseball caps. He'd paid her ten thousand dollars down to take over rights to the loft, and owed her another ten, to be wired west at the end of June. They trusted each other because they spoke the same language: that of New York's downwardly mobile, over-educated, white media working class.

  On the advice of a pair of two hundred dollar an hour attorneys, one for each of them, Lucy and Chip had done the deal without the knowledge of the building owners, a couple of textile wholesalers who lived in Queens and spent their working days holed up in dimly-lit offices on the lower floors of the building next door, selling bulk fabric to Africans between ratlike forays out onto the sidewalk to stick their snouts in everybody's business. But they didn't work weekends, and so, on this particular landlord-free Saturday, Lucy was to move out and Chip was to move in. By the time Lascovich and Meyers showed up on Monday morning, Chip Harlan would be physically and thus legally in possession of his new loft, and there would be nothing the landlords could do about it. Lucy would be in Iowa or Nebraska, crooning cross-country lullabies to Claud the Poodle as they rolled west across the prairie towards a new life in Seattle, financed in part by Chip Harlan's twenty grand, payback for the years of legal strife and assorted home improvements Lucy had made in the space.

  The elevator lurched to a halt and off came Derek, looking a shade whiter than his African American self should. "Luce, you got a problem," he announced.

  "What?" she said. "You gotta run? You have to..."

  "No, it's not me, it's...Rosa's down there talking with the dude owns the building. She says Meyers' his name. Your..."

  "Meyers is down there? The landlord?" She dropped a bag of rubber penguins—props from a 1997 photo shoot—into the box. "Damn," she said. "He's not supposed to...what'd you...what'd Rosa tell him?"

  "I don't know. She sent me up here to warn you. All I heard was he saw me, said, what's the schvartze doink at my buildink?"

  "Yeah, he talks that way when it suits him...Jesus...I'd better call Harlan. No I better go down there and see what the...damn, what should I do, Derek?"

  He shrugged. "I don't know about Harlan but you better talk to the man. If he didn't know you're leaving he probably wonders what's going on."

  "You're right, but..." She punched in a number and let it ring. "Harlan's got his machine on." When it beeped she said, "Yo Chip, Lucy here. Got a problem. Landlord showed up downstairs. Don't freak, but maybe you better slow your movers a little till I can get rid of him." She looked at her watch. 11:20. "I'll call you back at noon." She stood. "Let's go down there, Derek. I better check this out."

  "Maybe I should hang here in case Harlan calls. Tell him what's up."

  "Good point." She went alone. Riding down to face the landlord, Lucy recalled her first time riding up, when she'd moved her stuff in eleven years past. How could she ever forget that day, her in-your-face welcome to loft life in New York City? It was not Meyers but Lascovich, the partner, the Lithuanian hyena she had battled that day and all the years since over the trash service, the ancient and erratic elevator, the unpredictable heaters, the cracked windows, and the broken locks. A gnome-like little man with long, thick silver hair sweeping back from a huge forehead, appearing out of nowhere he had leapt like an agile, enormous rodent onto the elevator as the doors were closing and then, after rudely mistaking everything she owned, which just half-filled the elevator, for a pile of trash someone was taking out, he had snarled, cursed, and threatened her—in four or five of the seven European languages he spoke fluently—with arrest, eviction and a fate worse than death if she dared move herself into his buildink. He had terrorized her beyond tears that day long ago. But in the end, she'd said "fuck you" in the only language she knew, and moved in anyways. She'd had no choice but to fight it out, for she had already given six thousand dollars, half of all the money she had in the world, to the jazz pianist who'd sold her "the fixtures" and then left for New Zealand. She had retained a lawyer two days after moving in. Eleven years later she was still paying the same lawyer.

  On the other hand the mild-mannered Meyers had always played the good cop in the good cop/bad cop scenario the landlords employed in their dealings with tenants. As she walked out on to Broome Street she was hoping against the hollow feeling in her stomach, the feeling of disaster, of doom impending, that the good cop would be reasonable.

  Not likely. The air fairly simmered, and the noisy, steamy-hot streets crawled with slow traffic and gaudy pedestrians, the multi-ethnic din of a Saturday on lower Broadway roaring along at full force. Barry and Rosa stood by the cab of the yellow truck, locked in a face-off amidst the stop and go flow of cars and bodies. Rosa glanced over at Lucy helplessly, with a little shrug and a nod at Meyers. Like a large primate ready for battle, the barrel-chested Meyers presented himself: to Rosa, to Lucy, to any and all who would dare challenge his dominance of this streetcorner, his hard-won piece of Manhattan turf. Over six feet tall, he stood with f
eet apart. His chest and belly were thrust forward, inflated with threatened male importance, and a damp spot showed on his tight, v-neck t-shirt. The t-shirt was tucked into a pair of faded blue jean shorts. The unhemmed shorts had frayed, creating a delicate, lacy white fringe high up around each of his thighs. The shorts were pulled tight in the crotch—so tight his balls were separated neatly by the seam, and bulged out on either side. Lucy thought she'd never seen such an ugly sight, and for a fleeting moment she couldn't tear her eyes away from the shorts and what they covered and yet so gloriously highlighted. Down at the end of his long, thick, hairy legs, he wore a pair of bright new white tennies, with dainty little ankle socks. She approached.

  "What's going on here, Lucy?" he asked. As always, he affected an easy-going manner and wore a wide grin on his large head. His tanned, closely-shaven jowls shone with greasy sweat. Thin hair combed over his bald spot had flopped, baring the spot. Between hair and jowls he wore wraparound designer sunglasses with pale yellow lenses. A landlord demon incarnate, a dybbuk unloosed from the hot, smoky bowels of Queens.

  "What do you mean?"

  "What do I mean? The truck. You going somewhere? Someone moves out of my building I shouldn't be made aware?"

  "I don't know. So what are you up to, working on the sabbath anyways? Shouldn't you..."

  "Lucy...the truck, please." He smirked, like he knew he had her.

  "Summer's coming, Barry. I'm moving some stuff up to a country place I rented for a couple months."

  "I looked in there," he said, rapping on the side of the truck. "You're moving a sofa for the summer?" he said. "And your kitchen table? You need an eighteen foot truck to move for a couple months?"

  "It's an unfurnished house."

  "I'd say so. What about the loft?"

  Was this the critical moment, the twenty thousand dollar question? She didn't have a clue. So she told a half-truth. "A friend of mine's taking it over for the summer. No big deal."