Twelve Rooms with a View (8 page)

Lucy didn’t care. Honestly, she has ice water in her veins, so this guy and all his unhappiness were just no match. “I completely agree,” she said. “That’s why we felt it was best to have Tina camp out here for the time being, to have someone on site making sure nothing untoward happened to the property while we sorted this all out. For instance, I think you and your brother stopped by in the middle of the night last night and removed some items?”

Doug Drinan stared at her, aghast at her nerve. She looked right back at him. “My mother’s wedding ring,” he said finally, as if the righteousness of the situation would mean something to her.

Lucy shrugged. “We have no way of ascertaining that.”

“Except that she saw it.” Drinan turned his cold stare on me, like I was the one who was fucking with him.

“I never said it wasn’t, I didn’t—ah—” I started.

Lucy raised her hand, fearless, and cut me off. “Tina, your actions are completely blameless in this matter.”

“How do you figure that?” asked Drinan. “We got there, she’d already completely cased the joint.”

“I was looking for my mom’s perfume,” I explained again.

“You went through my father’s underwear drawer,” he sneered. “You managed to find his wallet, which was conveniently empty by the time we got there.”

“I didn’t—”

“It doesn’t matter what you were doing, Tina,” Lucy said. “The point is, you did not remove anything from the premises, nor are you—or I or Alison—doing anything except insisting that we hold to the status quo until our lawyers and their lawyers have a chance to work through the documents and finalize the legal status of the estate. That’s all we’re trying to do. Protect everyone’s rights.”

“Look, I don’t know what any of this is about?” said the locksmith. “But somebody’s got to make a decision about these locks. There’s a kill fee, you call to have your locks changed and then you change your mind, that’s a fifteen-dollar charge.”

“Not a problem,” Lucy said, reaching into her purse.

“I don’t agree to that,” Drinan snapped. He put his hand out, stopping the locksmith from pushing for the elevator button. “I want the locks changed, and I have every right to change them.”

“You legally have no right to change the locks,” Lucy said. She was so coolheaded there was no way the locksmith would not do what she told him. But he did feel bad about it.

“Listen, man, I’ll wait downstairs and let my boss know what’s going on. If the situation changes, I can come back up and do the job. But I can’t get involved in something that might, you know, be illegal.”

“This is my apartment. I grew up here, this is my apartment.” Drinan’s temper was fraying again.

“Unfortunately, we have a stack of legal documents indicating that there is a very real chance that in fact it is not your apartment,” Lucy said, not quite so nicely anymore. “And if you insist on pursuing this course of action I will be forced to call the police—”

“Go ahead. My brother is a detective with the NYPD, and you want to know something? They take care of their own.”

“Listen, buddy,” the locksmith said, desperate to get out of here. So was I. Bringing up the cops just made everything ickier.

“Wonderful. Your brother works in law enforcement, and I work in publicity. He can bring in his friends, and I can bring in mine. I know several writers for several prominent newspapers who would be only too happy to write about the NYPD superseding the law and forcing people from their homes.”

“This
isn’t
your home!” he shouted, starting to lose it.

“It is
Tina’s home,”
she told him in no uncertain terms. “Our mother died here, and every legal document I have studied so far tells me that this apartment is now
our
apartment, and she has no place to live, so for now she’s living here, and it is her
legal right to do so.”

“I don’t even know you people,” Doug observed, as if that mattered.

“I suspect we will have plenty of time to get acquainted,” Lucy said. She looked at the locksmith like she couldn’t believe he was still standing there. “If you want to call your boss, now would be the time. I think we both know what he’s going to tell you.”

“Yeah, I don’t have to call him; I’m not getting involved in this,” he said. “But I do need that kill fee.”

She reached into her purse, lifted out a neatly folded bill, and handed it over to him. The whole move took three seconds. “Keep the change,” she announced. “For your trouble.”

“Thanks.” He nodded, then ambled over to the exit sign, pushed through that crummy brown door, and went on down the stairs. I didn’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to hang around waiting for an elevator under those circumstances either.

Drinan likewise didn’t want to wait. He picked up his pile of legal documents and followed the locksmith.

“Perhaps you’d like my card,” Lucy cooed, holding one out to his back.

“When I need to talk to you, I won’t have any trouble finding you,” he said as the door to the stairwell slammed shut behind him.

“What a lovely character,” Lucy said, putting the card away. “I thought you said he was good-looking.”

“The other one, the cop,” I said.

“What does this one do?” she asked. “Run a charm school? Let me have the keys.”

I handed them to her. “I don’t know what this one does. Last night he didn’t say much. They were both drunk.”

“You should write down everything that happened last night. Have you done that yet?” she asked me.

“No, of course not—why would I write it down?”

“Well, we’re going to need a paper trail on everything, Tina, this isn’t a joke. I want it established that we are keeping records. Things are going to happen really quickly, and obviously the Drinan brothers have no compunction about playing hardball. We need to be prepared, as much as we can, for whatever they throw at us. What the hell is this?”

We had stepped into the front room, now filled with light from top to bottom. In spite of the hideous wall-to-wall shag, and all the crazy trouble with Doug Drinan, that room was really gorgeous, so I got distracted for a minute just staring at it and didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Tina, hellloooo,” Lucy said, waving her hand in front of my face and snapping her fingers.

“What?” I said.

“What,” she asked, impatient, “is this?” With her toe, she nudged a small wooden toolbox, placed neatly against the wall beside the doorway to the mossery.

“Oh, that’s Len’s,” I said.

“Len,” she repeated, looking at me as if she knew that once again I had slept with someone I shouldn’t have.

“He was a friend of Bill’s and Mom’s, that’s his moss in the kitchen. They let him grow it there, he’s some kind of botanist person, he lives in the building,” I explained. “He was here when the phone got cut off, and he, you know, he said I should go get a cell phone.” Lucy flipped the light switch. Nothing happened.

“Yes, I see,” she sighed. “And what did you do once you bought the cell phone? Did you call me at work, as I asked you to, and say, Lucy, the phone has been cut off and they’re probably going to try to cut the electricity as well and maybe change the locks, could you come over and help me handle this? Did you do that?”

“No, I didn’t do that,” I started.

“No, you didn’t,” she said, continuing to flip the useless light switch for effect. “You went shopping.”

“Why would I assume this guy was going to do all that stuff you said? We don’t even know these people.”

“Tina, honestly, would you try to
think
for once? Hello, Monica, hi.” She was on her cell now, firing on all jets. “I’m going to need you to call Keyspan
and
Con Ed, the gas and electric got turned off in my mom’s apartment and we need to get it turned back on right away, and I mean now. My sister is living here, and she obviously can’t stay if there’s no gas or electricity, so if you need to run down to their offices, then do it. I left three copies of the will on my desk, take them with you so if they give you any trouble you can prove we have the right to put the accounts in my name. You can also give them the number of the building, tell them the doorman can verify that we’ve taken possession. What’s his name?” she asked me.

“Frank,” I said.

“Frank,” she said to the phone, and then she rattled off the Edgewood phone number, which of course she knew even though I did not. She finished up the call by snapping her cell shut and then continued to explain things to me as if there had been no interruption at all. “I checked in with Stuart Long, the lawyer, from yesterday?”

“I remember, Lucy, could you not talk to me like I’m an idiot?”

“Don’t get snippy, Tina, you almost completely blew it today—”

“I told you, I didn’t know.”

“No, you didn’t
think;
you just took off for three solid hours on a
shopping
spree, and I’m not going to ask where you got the money because I don’t care. But while I don’t think Doug Drinan has any sort of legal claim on this apartment, I don’t necessarily think he is a
liar
. Did you find money here?” She waved her hands idly at all the shopping bags I had dumped on the floor.

“I didn’t have anything to wear,” I said, trying to get to the beginnings of a defense. She was not interested.

“You listen to me,” she snapped. “If I hadn’t gotten worried about not hearing from you, and showed up, what would have happened?”

“I don’t actually care what would have—”

“You’d be locked out. We all would be locked out. We would not have access to the apartment or the building, for that matter, for months. We’d have to go to a judge to get an injunction for permission to even look at the place, and by that point the Drinan brothers would have filed to legally contest their father’s will, which, depending on how long that took to get through the courts? Would cut us off for years.
Years
. I checked this out with Daniel’s friend the real estate lawyer, who assured me that contrary to what that idiot told us yesterday, a scenario like that leaves us with virtually no standing whatsoever. If they can prove that Bill was of unsound mind and Mom was of unsound character, and none of us had ever met Bill and had never set foot in this apartment, it is not that far a leap to claiming that Mom
tricked
him into changing his stupid will and that we have no right to this place. And that is what they are going to try to do. So do me a favor and don’t make their case for them, would you? We put you here for a reason. Stay put.”

“You expect me to never leave.”

“Not unless you pick up your handy new throwaway cell phone and call me first and let me know that you have to go out for two hours and that Alison or I need to come by and be on site while you traipse about.”

“Well, so how long—”

“As long as I say! If you don’t like this deal, let me know. Let me know, and you can go back to Darren and the trailer park and the Delaware Water Gap now instead of later. Because if you don’t help me make this work? That is where you’re going to end up anyway.”

I really thought Lucy was overreacting and being a total nightmare, but her argument made an impression on me. Even though I couldn’t follow all the dastardly legal turns she had worked out about where this situation could go, it was pretty clear that if we didn’t pull this off, it was in the cards for me to get booted out of there and back to cleaning houses in New Jersey.

“Okay okay okay,” I said.

“Not okay okay okay!” she snapped. “I don’t want to hear some sort of snotty okay! I want to hear, Yes, Lucy, I Will Do Whatever You Say.”

“Well, I’m not going to say that,” I snapped back. “I’ll do it, but I’m not going to say it.”

“Fine,” she said, clearly sick of me. “Now, what’s the story with all this moss? This is actually here for a reason?” Look, I find it impressive when she does that. In the middle of all that arguing, she remembered the one thing I had told her about the moss.

“Len, it’s Len’s moss, he lives on the top floor.”

“Well, Len is going to have to get his moss out of here,” she said, shoving his little toolbox with one of her slick black heels.

“I don’t have his number,” I said. “But I could go downstairs and get that doorman to buzz up and see if he’s there.”

“That’s a good idea,” she said, only half paying attention.

“Maybe I should get the keys copied while I’m down there.”

“Now that, actually, would be useful,” Lucy noted. She dialed her cell, then popped it to the side of her head while she held out the keys, which I took. “Listen, don’t panic, there’s nothing to get upset about,” she said, so I knew she was talking to Alison. “But I’m over at the apartment. There’s a lot going on.”

Now, you do have to wonder why someone like Lucy believes people like me when we suddenly cave and agree to all sorts of nonsense in the middle of an argument. Because really, I had no intention of calling Len and telling him he had to move his moss. Instead I went downstairs, waved to Frank, walked over to Columbus and found the one bodega that inexplicably hovers there, and I bought myself a box of Dots. Then I walked around the block, ate the Dots, and thought about what I was going to do next. I wandered around the Upper West Side until I found a crummy little hardware store, where they made some new keys for me. While I was there I bought a few more choice items. Then I went back home, feeling more and more that I had every right to think of it that way.

“T
HE MOSS GUY ISN’T IN
. F
RANK BUZZED HIM ABOUT EIGHT TIMES,
but he didn’t answer,” I told Lucy. “So I asked for his phone number, but it’s unlisted and the doorman isn’t allowed to give it out. Anyway, I left a message with the doorman for Len to call as soon as he gets in, and I’ll tell him we need him to move all that stuff. Here, I got a set of keys for you and also an extra one, in addition to the ones I have.” Soaring right through the lie about Len, I started fumbling with the keys. She didn’t even look up as she took them from me.

“You didn’t leave my number as well?” she asked, pecking away at her laptop, which she had set up on the coffee table back by the TV. There was a whole mess of documents and file folders falling out of her briefcase on the couch, so I knew she had decided to spend the rest of the day there. I felt like I had been invaded.