Twelve Rooms With A View Part 4

"I know what that's like." Frank nodded. "I lost my mom fifteen years ago, I still miss her." He looked at me, and I swear to G.o.d, in that split second you could see the sadness rise up in his face, just enough to make his cheeks flush a little and his eyes well up. He got embarra.s.sed right away and looked down, like he was still searching for that pen even though it was in his hand, and because that uniform looked so hideous on him, it made me feel kind of bad to be lying to him. I mean, he was significantly nicer than Len, who probably was just taking care of me so I wouldn't mess with his moss. But this guy Frank was just a nice person who missed his mom. He had a kind of bad haircut, which was so sweet and stupid I thought my head was going to split.

"Well ... thanks, Frank," I finally said. "I'll go call Doug right now and make sure he knows about me staying here and all that and, you know, make sure that he knows not to turn anything else off." I turned away so Frank could have a moment of privacy to collect himself. And then old Len was at my elbow, showing me to the door, like a friendly undercover agent. "There's a Verizon store two blocks up and one over, on Columbus," he informed me cheerfully under his breath. "They sell those throwaway phones. You don't need a credit card, you can just pay cash, isn't that convenient?"

"Very," I agreed. "Thanks for the tip, Len."

A throwaway phone was exactly the thing, of course, because I had no cell phone and no credit card and now no landline. So Len was right to suggest it, and while I was out putting his sensible suggestion into action, I also poked around a couple of clothing stores so I'd have more than one skirt, one pair of jeans, and one sweater in my wardrobe. I could have called that bonehead Darren and asked him to put all my clothes in a box and send them, but I had no reason to believe he would actually do that, even if he said he would. So I ducked into a couple of really cute shops, where I learned that my seven hundred dollars, minus one throwaway phone, might buy me one pair of excruciatingly expensive blue jeans and half a tank top, which seriously annoyed me until I found a Gap, which had a whole lot of stuff on sale that fit fine and looked cool enough and cost quite a bit less. Then I was hungry, so I had a burger in a seedy deli, and then I needed underwear, and honestly I couldn't find anyplace to buy it except one of those really cute little shops, and that cost a complete fortune but I had no choice. So the seven hundred dollars was more or less whittled down to two hundred by the time I decided to go back home.

That was the first time my head said "Let's go home," and I know it sounds kind of ridiculous that I thought of it that way? But no kidding, I was already in love with that place. All that stuff about my mother drinking herself to death there, and my sisters being so uptight and bossy, and the crazy drunk guys showing up in the middle of the night-none of it seemed that serious when I picked up my eighteen packages and thought about going home. I half wondered, what are you going to do when you get home? And then I thought, well, maybe I'll just make myself a cup of tea and read a book or something, there are at least a thousand used mysteries still shoved under the bed in Bill and Mom's bedroom. So on the way home I stopped at a little shop and bought some fancy tea, and I was well on my way to becoming a totally different person, the kind who lives on the Upper West Side, and drinks tea in the afternoon while reading mystery novels. Then I got back to the lobby of my fabulous new apartment where I found out I was still the same old Tina I had been just a couple hours before.

The lobby was packed. People were milling about, a bunch of kids in school uniforms were cl.u.s.tered around the elevator, arguing with one another and hitting the b.u.t.tons on the elevator bank, and a woman in a bright red jacket with a fur collar kept trying to get Frank's attention at his little bra.s.s podium. Frank was talking to two men, and they were all yelling at once, and it sounded loud because the ceilings in that small s.p.a.ce were so high and curved that the sounds bounced around in it. The lady in the red jacket was clearly related to the kids, because occasionally she would yell, "Stop it, Gail! All of you, would you just wait until I see if your father's package has arrived? Frank ..." But Frank was dealing with whatever the two guys were saying, which I couldn't hear because of all the other noise. Two ladies standing behind the one in the red jacket were waiting a little more patiently, but not much. Both of them were spectacularly thin and wearing the kind of clothes you only see in ads in the New York Times, everything tight and fitted and slightly strange. I couldn't see their faces right away because their backs were to me. All I could see were those strange fas.h.i.+onable outfits, and one of the women had the most astonis.h.i.+ng black curls tumbling down her back while the other one had short white hair flipped around her head. Then the one with black hair turned for a second, like she had heard something just behind her, and she was one of those people who are so idiotically beautiful you think you're on drugs when you see them up close. Her eyes flicked in my direction, but then the woman she was with yanked at her arm.

"This is ludicrous," the older woman said. "I'll hail my own cab."

"That's what I said ten minutes ago," said the spectacular-looking woman. She turned around and headed right for the door. But the older lady didn't follow.

"We will get our OWN CAB, FRANK!" the old lady announced in quite a loud voice. "And I'm going to call the management company, do you understand? This chaos is NOT ACCEPTABLE."

"I want to talk to management as well, you get them on the phone," said one of the guys who was arguing with Frank.

"Maybe you could just take a second to look through the deliveries, then we'll just get out of your hair, Frank," said the lady in the red jacket, poking through the stuff piled on the console, trying to be nice but trying to get her own way too. The kids continued to scream as the furious white-haired lady turned away, muttering to herself about how nuts it all was.

Poor Frank was apologizing to everyone at the same time. "I can do that, sure let me-sorry, Mrs. Gideon, I am so sorry, so sorry, Julianna," Frank called after the ladies heading for the door. "If you give me just a second here-oh, she's here!" he said suddenly, looking both harried and relieved. And then the lady in the red jacket knocked all the packages off the top of the podium.

The whole scene was so complicated that it took me a second to realize that Frank was looking at me. He said to one of the guys he'd been talking to, "She says she's living there now, and that you met last night and you spoke about it-I'm not sure, but that's the young lady, she said that you know each other." Then he turned to me. "Tina, there's some kind of confusion here with Doug about the locks, he says he needs to change the locks, but you didn't say anything about that, so can you come talk to him while I deal with this? Hang on there, Mrs. Gideon, let me get you a cab. You can go ahead and look through all this, Mrs. White, but I didn't see anything." Frank rushed by me, opening the door for the infuriated Mrs. Gideon and her fabulous daughter Julianna. Mrs. White continued to yell at her children while she poked through the packages on the floor. Doug Drinan turned and gave me a dirty look.

Obviously this moment was a bit of a drag. The fabulous Upper West Side fas.h.i.+on plates were pus.h.i.+ng by me while I tried to grab up my Gap bags, apologizing like a loser, "So sorry, sorry, sorry ..." Frank practically shoved me aside while he raced after the women, trying to do his job. The loud, insane kids finally managed to get the elevator to arrive, but their mother was not yet ready to pile in with them; she was too busy giving me the once-over, like I was someone who was trying to break into their building. Which in fact I was.

"The doorman seems to be under the impression that you're living in my father's apartment," Doug announced. "And he thinks that I somehow agreed to this."

"Well, we did have a conversation about this last night, Doug, and I don't think you could have been really surprised that Frank told you that," I announced back. We were both pretending to be polite, but our voices were too forceful to count as polite.

"Last night we were decent enough not to kick you out onto the street," he told me. "The understanding was you'd be gone in the morning. You have no right to be here-your mother actually had no right to be here either, after my father died-"

"That's not what my lawyer tells me."

For some reason this caused old Doug to really lose it. He was suddenly furious, his face going all red, and he actually grabbed me, right up at the front of my s.h.i.+rt, and yanked me toward him, to do what I wasn't sure. I was not expecting it; even last night when he showed up with his brother totally wasted, and they were both really mad and reactive, they didn't put their hands on me. For one terrible minute I thought, oh no, this is one of those guys who's worse when he's not drunk; all that disappointment and sadness and thinning hair are just too much for him.

"Let go of me, let go let go," I said, real nice, real fast. I truly didn't want to find out if he had it in him to hit me.

"Look, I got a bunch of other jobs. Is this going to happen?" the guy with Doug asked. He had on a bad leather jacket and jeans and was carrying a tool kit, and he looked really bored. Somehow you knew right away that he saw this stuff all the time, people arguing about who had the right to change the locks to some house or apartment, and it wasn't all that earth-shattering. I realized I was probably not going to get hit. Anyway, the lock guy didn't seem to think so. He looked away like he didn't give a s.h.i.+t who won this battle, but also like he was pretty sure it was not going to be me, so there was no use even acknowledging that I existed.

The little interruption gave Doug a chance to recover. He let go of my s.h.i.+rt, giving me a little push, like he couldn't believe he had actually touched me. Then he turned and yelled back at Frank, who was outside trying to hail a cab for the fed-up Mrs. Gideon and her babelicious daughter. "We're going up!" Doug announced. Frank didn't even notice. Doug and the locksmith headed for the elevator, but they couldn't get in, because it was full of all those kids in school uniforms and the lady in the red jacket. But Doug was on top of his game now.

"We'll take the stairs," he announced, walking over to the other end of the lobby. The lock guy followed him. I did not. I finally got a clue, pulled out my brand-new throwaway cell phone, and called in the marines.

4.

"OH FOR G.o.d'S SAKE," SAID LUCY, ALL ANNOYED, AS SOON AS I reached her. "Where have you been?"

"They cut off the phone," I told her.

"No kidding. I tried calling you three hours ago and got the message that the phone was no longer in service," she said. "Where have you been?"

"I went out to get a cell phone-"

"You've been out buying a cell phone for three hours?"

"Well, I needed some other stuff too and-"

"I thought you were broke, what are you using for money?"

"Would you listen to me, Lucy? They're here! At least one of them is here, and he's trying to change the locks, he has a locksmith with him, and he says I have no rights and-"

"Relax, I'm two blocks away, I'm taking care of it," she told me.

"What do you mean you're two blocks away? I called you at work," I said, all confused again.

"And my a.s.sistant patched you through to my cell."

"So you're on your way here? How did you know to come?"

"Tina, when the phone got cut off, what did you think was going on?"

"I don't know, I thought I needed to get a cell phone."

"Well, I thought a little harder than that. Just stay right there in the lobby; I'll be there in two minutes."

She hung up on me just as Frank trotted back in. He looked a little sh.e.l.l-shocked in a delirious kind of way. I thought he was going to be mad at me because I had just caused a huge scene, bringing utter chaos to his little lobby, with people threatening to have him fired and all sorts of unpleasant bulls.h.i.+t. Frank, however, seemed to have barely noticed. He was actually humming a little tune as he went back to his podium and started picking up the packages that were all over the floor. I thought for a moment that he was one of those strange sad people who need a little action to feel alive, but then I took another look, and it was like he was glowing around the edges, you could almost see beams of light coming out of his cuffs and collar. I thought, oh, he's in love, Frank is in love with the unspeakably beautiful Julianna Gideon. And he got to be near her, he got to hold the cab door open for her for half a second.

"She's pretty, huh," I said, testing out my theory.

"Oh my G.o.d," he agreed. "I can't even, when I look at her ..." He glanced out the door, taking pleasure in seeing the place he had last been allowed to look at her.

"Does she know you like her?" I asked.

"What?" That was a bad question; it shook him out of his fantasy, and he remembered he had a real right to be mad at me.

"Did you get things straightened out with Doug?" he asked, suddenly stern. "He was quite certain that you are not supposed to be living up there in 8A. I didn't know what to say. This has put me in a very awkward position. I put a call in to building management, and I don't know what they're going to say. There's already been so much controversy around that apartment, I'm sure they're going to want to talk to both of you about it." He was trying his best to sound really mean, but the guy didn't have it in him. He was reading me the riot act, but he sounded like he was apologizing.

"I'll try to keep this out of your hair from now on," I said.

"I would appreciate that." He didn't sound angry, he sounded like he really would appreciate it. Just then Lucy walked in, wearing a sharp gray suit and heels, carrying a big briefcase, and looking like the queen of the universe.

"Lucy! Hey, this is my sister Lucy," I told Frank. "She'll have this solved in five minutes, I guarantee. You don't have to talk to building management."

"I'm sure they know all about this already," Lucy announced, a little clippy. "Tina tells me there's some confusion about the locks?"

"Confusion, I should say so," Frank said. "Doug Drinan, he's Bill's son?"

"I know who he is," Lucy said, nodding, trying not to make that little can we hurry this up please sign with her hand.

"Well, he's up there, having the locks changed," Frank told her. "He says he doesn't know anything about you having a claim on the place. I didn't know what to tell him. Your sister tells me she's staying there, I got no reason to doubt her, but Doug was Bill's son-"

"And we are his wife's daughters." Lucy smiled, completely professional. "No worries. We'll clear this up in no time." She took a couple of smooth steps over to the elevators and pressed the call b.u.t.ton; as far as Lucy was concerned, this was as good as done. Frank smiled at me, relieved. When she isn't being annoying as h.e.l.l, Lucy does have that effect on people. You know who's in charge.

Doug Drinan and his pal the locksmith were, sadly, not quite as easy to snow. We more or less fell over them on that eighth-floor landing-that is, I stumbled out of the elevator with all my packages, while Lucy popped out like a genie and presented Doug with a huge stack of doc.u.ments.

"Mr. Drinan? Hi, how are you? I'm Lucy Finn, Olivia's daughter, it's a pleasure to meet you after all this time," she announced, talking quickly. "As you are aware, our mother pa.s.sed only a few days ago, so obviously we are reeling, completely caught off guard, so I'm sure this is our fault. But I think there's been some confusion about the status of the estate. We spoke with Stuart Long just yesterday. He was in possession of your father's will-have you seen it? I brought an extra copy in case you hadn't." She handed it to him and kept talking. "Anyway, there is some real question about who the beneficiaries of the estate are at this time. Your father seems to have expressed in no uncertain terms that our mother was to inherit everything, largely meaning the apartment, it's unclear what else is included, but in any event I'm going to have to ask you to hold off on changing the locks for now. Until we get this sorted out." She smiled at him, very pleasant, but there was a definite don't-f.u.c.k-with-me edge behind it all. She works in PR and she can be very daunting.

Doug Drinan, unfortunately, didn't get on board with what she was saying. He barely glanced at the papers she handed him, then tossed them on top of the old radiator that was hissing in the hallway. "I'm aware we're going to be in a holding pattern for a little while with regard to the dispensation of the will," he told her. "Which is why I thought it important to secure the apartment. Obviously we can't have just anyone wandering in and out, disturbing the effects before we've even begun to probate this situation. I hate to say it, such a sad time-I mean really, condolences on your loss-but it sounds to me like this is going to get pretty complicated. This is just precautionary. Don't want things to get ugly down the line or anything."

Okay, the speech was good, but he was not as good as Lucy. He pressed those thin lips together, trying to smile and explain things like a nice guy, but he couldn't be bothered to pretend all that hard, so it came off like what it was, condescending and mean and like he was kind of enjoying messing with us. Which maybe he was. The more I saw of this guy the less I liked him. His hair really was dirty, and he had too much disappointment in him. Sometimes those are the worst people to deal with because they aren't even thinking anymore, they're just hoping they can make you as miserable as they are.

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 f.u.c.king 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 doc.u.ments 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 pus.h.i.+ng for the elevator b.u.t.ton. "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 doc.u.ments 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 doc.u.ment 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 circ.u.mstances either.

Drinan likewise didn't want to wait. He picked up his pile of legal doc.u.ments 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 h.e.l.l 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 s.h.a.g, 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, h.e.l.lloooo," Lucy said, waving her hand in front of my face and snapping her fingers.