Twelve Rooms with a View (12 page)

“You know you’re not really supposed to freeze your beans, it dries them out,” I informed Len, looking for an expiration date. “How long has this been in here?”

“Oh, not long. A week? My daughter brought it by, she brought me one of those baskets of food they give to invalids in hospitals. I think there are chocolate biscuits somewhere.” He started poking around the bookshelves, as if he might have hidden the biscuits in with the books.

“You have a daughter?” This was real news. I mean, it was hard to imagine this strange person having any human relations. I thought he was half plant himself by this point.

“Oh yes, she’s, well, you know, she’s my daughter, you know what that’s like,” he replied, as if all girls with parents somehow must share the same frontal lobe. “I can’t find the biscuits.”

“Here they are,” I said, pulling them out from behind the cappuccino machine. Len looked at them with a sort of stern surprise, like the biscuits had done something offensive, locating themselves in such an unusual spot.

“What are they doing there?” he asked.

“Maybe your daughter put them there,” I suggested. “Maybe she was trying to clean up your kitchen and she thought it was a good spot to stash the cookies. You know, by the cappuccino machine. What’s her name?”

“Oh, who remembers,” he sighed, suddenly bored to the point of apathy. “Her mother always called her Charlie. I dislike it when girls have boys’ names, it’s confusing enough as it is without things like that.”

“Is that the name on her birth certificate?”

“What? No. Do you think I’m crazy?”

“Well, yes, a bit,” I said, looking around.

“Her given name is Charlotte. We named her
Charlotte,”
he stated, with some heat.

“Well, why don’t you just call her that?” I asked, pouring a bunch of coffee beans into what seemed to be the grinding part of the machine; at least, the clever little chute that opened up off one side implied that beans might go there.

“I rarely see her, so I don’t call her anything.” Len sounded increasingly annoyed with my questioning.

“Why don’t you see her?” I said, looking for the switch.

“Well, let’s see, Tina, why would a parent and child become estranged? Let’s speculate on that, shall we?” He ducked his head into the refrigerator. “You’ll need milk, I think.”

“This is a very nice machine, Len,” I told him, flipping the switch. Nothing happened. He set a red-and-white carton of whole milk on the cluttered counter between us and watched as I flipped the switch again.

“Stop it—it makes no sense to keep flipping that switch. One try is plenty. It doesn’t work, I told you; I’ve had that machine for years, and it doesn’t ever work.”

“So why don’t you get another one?”

“Oh, I don’t really like cappuccino anyway,” he sighed, opening the tin of cookies.

“Then why am I making it?”

“Well, you’re not, as far as I can see, you haven’t gotten that thing to work any more than I did. And now you have to figure out how to get the beans out of there; you’re going to have to turn the whole thing upside down, and doubtless the beans will simply go everywhere. It’s a complete waste of time.”

“Wait,” I said, plugging the machine in. “Hang on.” I flipped the switch. The machine started to hum and rumble as the beans swirled in the chute.

“Oh,” said Len, arrested for a second. Then ground coffee began to spit all over the counter. “Well, that is—interesting.”

It took twenty minutes to figure out how to get the ground coffee into the other part of the machine, make the espresso, and then steam the milk, but the whole project was pretty entertaining and relaxing, compared to the other stuff that had been happening to me for the past few
days. Len had a lot to say about everything except his own personal history. As long as we stayed off the subject of his daughter Charlie and her mother, he was a complete motormouth. He left out a lot of things, but if I didn’t push too hard and just let him keep yakking he produced plenty of information, which I was happy to have.

“So what’s the story on the lady who lives on the same floor as me?” I said, serving up a perfect cappuccino—which, as it turned out, Len liked a lot.

“You’ve met Delia Westmoreland!” he noted, admiring the foam on his coffee cup. “How was that for you?”

“How was it?”

“Yes, did you find her charming? She can be, if she likes.”

“But not if she doesn’t like?”

“I didn’t say that. Where are those cookies?”

“We finished them, but there are some cheese-twist things here,” I said, finding another little foil bag from a fancy food store. “Is this all you eat, gourmet snack food?”

“I have a hard time in grocery stores, they confuse me,” he admitted. “Delia Westmoreland. She’s a strong personality, I would say. And she had strong ties to the previous tenants of your apartment.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

“You noticed? How so?”

“One of them came by a couple days ago, the Drinan who’s a police detective or something?”

“Yes, I know who he is,” Len responded drily.

“Anyway, when he couldn’t get in, he stood out in the hall and yelled, and she came out and talked to him. She’s pretty ooh la la for a lady her age,” I observed.

“She’s fifty, darling, it’s the new seventeen,” Len informed me. “Although ‘ooh la la’ does cover it. Why did young Mr. Drinan find himself stuck out in the hall yelling in the first place? It was my understanding that neither you nor the Drinans were allowed to change the locks.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Everyone in the building is talking about it, Tina. You’ll have to
get used to it, the walls have ears in a co-op. One of you is going to need a court order at this point to change those locks. You didn’t do something foolish, did you?”

“I didn’t change the locks, if that’s what you mean, I just put in a couple of chains and a spring bolt, so people can’t barge in whenever they want.”

“Oh,” said Len, startled at this idea. “Oh! That’s clever. Good for you.”

“He didn’t think I was so clever—he was pretty pissed off.”

“Well, he’s an open wound. You know that legally you’re not allowed to forbid them access to the apartment until claim to the title is established.”

“I didn’t say he couldn’t come in, I just don’t want him barging in while I’m sleeping there.”

“Well, you put yourself in that situation, darling.”

“My sister put me in it.”

“Oh yes, I see,” he said, raising his eyebrows.

“What?”

“A girl who knows how to put in a spring bolt and two chain guards is hardly a victim, Tina.”

“I didn’t say I was a victim.”

“Didn’t you? I thought you did.”

“Could we get back to this horny Westmoreland character who lives on my floor?”

“Horny? Why do you say that?”

“She was coming on to Drinan big-time. She kept trying to get him to come into her apartment and have tea.”

“You’re up in my apartment having cappuccino, do you think I have designs on you?”

“No, you have designs on making sure nobody bothers your moss.”

“Well, along those same lines, allow me to inform you that Delia Westmoreland does not lust after young Mr. Drinan. She lusts, but not after human flesh.”

“She said she was mad that Bill didn’t offer her all the stuff in the apartment when he started selling everything off,” I remembered. “But
now it’s all gone. You’ve been in the place, there’s nothing left for her to want, is there?”

“That’s not what she’s after,” he told me, eating one of the cheese twists. “No, darling, she wants the same thing everyone else in New York is pining for: square footage. If she could get her hands on the Livingston Mansion Apartment, she would own the entire eighth floor. Minor renovation, and she’s sitting on one of the most spectacular apartments in the city. She’s been trying to buy that place for years—she literally hounded Bill about it.”

“She wants to own the whole eighth floor?”

“Of course she does.”

“I thought, I mean, she kind of—doesn’t she live alone over there?”

“There’s the occasional visit from estranged children, but yes, for the most part she lives alone.”

“Well, how much room does she need?”

“It’s never about need when it comes to real estate.” To a girl who last lived in a mobile home in a trailer park, this did not completely make sense, but he was dead serious.

“So if she bought it, she’d have like—how big an apartment would that be?”

“Twelve thousand square feet.”

“That’s a lot.”

“With park views and walk-in closets? All those freaks over in 10021 would commit collective suicide out of sheer envy if Delia managed to pull off that coup. A place like that would be worth forty million in any market.”

“So she’s like mega-loaded.”

“Not particularly, no.”

“Come on, she’s got to have some money, she lives here.”

“She inherited. Her husband’s parents bought the apartment she lives in back in the twenties for something ridiculous like thirty-five thousand. They died—that was in the late eighties, just before the market tanked and I managed to grab the roof here, which is a whole different story—anyway, that’s how she got in. He was in finance, but he was never a major player, so in some ways they were just scraping by. I think
she’s got twelve or fifteen million on a good day in the market, apart from the apartment.”

“So she’s worth, like, twenty-five million. And that’s not loaded?”

“Well, it’s certainly not enough to make a grab on 8A unless she leverages her place, which may be her thinking. If she puts up two, let’s say, she should be able to find a bank to lend her the rest. Another million goes into the renovation and voilà, for the up-front price of three million dollars, she owns an apartment worth forty. But my suspicion is, she hopes to lay her hands on that place for nothing at all.”

“How’s that supposed to work?”

“Well, I’m not saying it will work. But if she can convince a developer to put down the money up front in exchange for right of first refusal to buy the place from her estate when she dies, that might be of interest to any number of speculators.”

“People do that?”

“That’s actually a fairly tame and sensible scenario. For instance, it doesn’t involve homicide, although if Delia made it into her nineties I am sure there would be some discussion of poison. Even in the most catastrophic of markets, a twelve-thousand-square-foot apartment with park views on the Upper West Side will never depreciate. It’s win win win win win for everyone. Oh yes, I’m sure all of these options have been considered by now. And not merely by her.”

“Who else?”

“It’s an old and elegant building, Tina. People have lived here a long time.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means it’s an old and elegant building and people have lived here a long time,” he repeated mysteriously.

“Well, if any of these ‘people’ want to buy our apartment they should call Sotheby’s. Why is this woman sucking up to Pete Drinan in the middle of the night if what she really wants is to buy the stupid apartment?” I was getting a little peevish. I turned back to the cappuccino machine, thinking I’d make another round, even though I was so caffeinated I thought my head was going to explode.

“Is something wrong?” asked Len.

“All these rich people make me nervous. She has a zillion rooms herself, and she wants our place too? But she doesn’t want to pay for it? That’s just incredible. Plus you should have heard her going on about how horrible it all was, we’re horrible, Mom was horrible, like we’re just crazy skanks from Jersey or something—and meanwhile she wants to take over our apartment just because she’s lived on the same floor for a bunch of years. That’s classic, it really is.”

“It wasn’t your place at all, I might remind you, until three days ago.”

“It was my mom’s. When she died, the deed was in her name, was it not? Was it not?”

“So I’m told,” said Len.

“So I’m told too. By
lawyers
. My mom lived there, oh and by the way, she died there too. That doesn’t give us rights?”

“I don’t imagine that Delia Westmoreland thinks so, no. I don’t believe the Drinan brothers think so either. And I have a suspicion that the co-op board will not feel that it gives you rights.”

“Well, they don’t get to say, do they? The
law
says. The
LAW
says we own, it’s ours by
law.”

“That’s not going to do you any good if you can’t sell it, Tina. And if you can’t sell, how will you pay the inheritance tax? Have you asked yourselves any of these questions?”

“We are going to sell it.”

“Not if the co-op board can stop you.”

I truly didn’t know what he was talking about, but it had that peculiar sound of a true thing. “Okay,” I said, trying not to get too worked up. “Okay, so tell me what the problem is with the co-op board. I don’t even know what a co-op board is.”

“They are the twelve residents of this building who will inform you and your sisters—repeatedly, I am afraid—that even if the courts decide that you do own the apartment and that you very much have the right to sell it, in fact they will not permit you to sell it.”

“They can’t do that.”

“Alarmingly, yes they can.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Because they don’t know you. You’re an outsider. Your mother was an outsider. It’s an offense to everyone here that you and your sisters think you can just come in and take over that beautiful old apartment. You and your sisters can talk to Sotheby’s all you want; every offer they put on the table will be rejected out of hand until someone, or more than one person, in the building has been permitted to make an offer.”

“They can’t do that. They said, that lawyer said, there isn’t a cloud on the title. It means, that legally means—”

“I know what it means, Tina, and I’m afraid there is very much a cloud on the title, whether it is a legal cloud or not.”

“I have to call Lucy,” I said, digging into my pocket for my cell phone.

“She knows all about this, Tina, I’m sure.”

“No, she doesn’t, she didn’t yesterday—”

“Does she tell you everything?” he asked me pointedly. I looked at him. He was considering me like I was some kind of interesting plant that was growing in odd directions, or my leaves were drooping and gray, and he couldn’t quite understand why.