A Fare To Remember_ Just Whistle_Driven - Vicki Lewis Thompson [81]
“You payin’ a visit to Ruta’s?”
Alec glanced up and the cabbie grinned, watching him in the rearview mirror.
“Do you know her?” Alec asked.
“Oh, yeah. Ruta is the best in the city. I met her back when I was working with NYPD. Now I see her whenever my luck goes south at the track.” He chuckled. “If she devoted herself to the ponies and lottery numbers, she’d probably be a millionaire. That woman has some scary psychic powers.”
“Interesting,” Alec said. His eyes came to rest on the cabby’s photo. Mario Capelli. He wondered if Mario knew that Ruta Lupescu was sitting on a multimillion-dollar lottery ticket. She owned a piece of property that every developer in Manhattan would trade his mother to own.
In the past twenty years, real estate values in the Village had skyrocketed. Most of the undeveloped property had been scooped up long ago in a mad race to provide housing and retail space to a growing population of very affluent New Yorkers. But Ruta Lupescu had acquired her building fifty years ago, before Greenwich Village became one of the city’s most attractive neighborhoods.
Now her building sat smack in the middle of a row of six properties owned by Harnett Property Development. With all seven in hand, they could build something special—a new hotel, luxury condominiums, or maybe a shopping complex with a movie theatre. But without Ruta’s property, plans for anything big were put on hold—unless Alec could convince her to sell.
His father had always considered the property to be his to begin with and had never made a reasonable offer, preferring instead to badger the old Gypsy into selling. But Alec took a more pragmatic approach to the problem. Everyone had their price, even Ruta Lupescu. It was his job to find it.
“What can you tell me about her?” he asked.
“Ah, she’s a sweetheart. Always willing to help a person in need. Why, most of those folks who live in her building are on fixed incomes. She barely asks for rent.”
“Seems a bit silly in this day and age,” Alec commented.
Mario shrugged, glancing over his shoulder. “I suppose it does. But Ruta came from nothing. She and her mother were refugees back in the late thirties. They came with only the clothes on their back. Just a few years after they arrived, her mother died. Ruta was a teenager. She told fortunes on the street and lived in the basement of an old building until she saved up enough to rent her shop. The story goes that one night, her landlord stopped in and she told him his fortune. And when it came true, he gave her the building, free and clear. A whole building for one fortune. Like winning the lottery, don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” Alec murmured. He’d heard the story a million times, but told with much less awe and reverence. His grandfather, George Harnett, had been the man. And Ruta’s fortune had predicted good health and a long life for Alec’s grandmother Judith, who had been seriously ill for nearly a year. The very next day, Alec’s grandmother had miraculously gotten out of bed, and within a week, she was her normal cheery self.
“Back then, the Village wasn’t the best place to live,” Mario commented. “But things have changed.” He laughed, shaking his head. “That Ruta could live like a queen, but she’s still telling fortunes for ten dollars a pop.”
“What about her family? You’d think they’d want her to be comfortable.”
“Her daughter moved to Missouri with her husband a few years ago. She wanted Ruta to come with them, but the old lady was determined to stay. I don’t blame her. She loves that place. And everyone in the neighborhood loves her.”
Alec sat back, glancing around the cab. The interior was decorated with photos. At first, he assumed they were of Mario’s children, but upon closer examination, Alec found smiling couples, many of them dressed in wedding wear. “What are all these pictures?” he asked.
“Ah, most of them are fares. At least, that’s how they started. Once in a while, I make a few introductions and one thing leads to another and