Manhattan Noir - Lawrence Block [76]
I called Tommy.
“Don’t worry about it, I’ll get you another one soon as I can. Bunk with me till then.”
I thanked him for his generosity and he repeated what he had said when he first offered me the apartment-sitting deal.
“Why watch your down payment get smaller? Bad enough watching prices go higher.”
At a quarter to 8 the next morning, Marcy unlocked the door with the agency key and looked surprised that I was still stuffing clothes into bags. “What are you doing here?”
“I’ll be right out of your way.” I picked up a garment bag, a laptop backpack, and a suitcase—everything else was in storage. The suitcase, which had been damaged by an airline, broke open. My laundry fell on the floor.
Marcy and the new owner, a Chinese guy in a blue suit, along with a huge guy who appeared to be his bodyguard, watched me crawl around picking up my underwear, and shut the door firmly behind me as I shuffled down the long, dreary hall to the elevator.
Tommy was on the phone when I got uptown to his latest temporary place—a glass and mirrored palace in the sky with views of the park and both rivers. He pointed me toward one of the halls and mouthed, “Third bedroom on the left.” Then he continued loudly on the phone. “Hey, by the way, my ex is looking in Chelsea. She’s got a new boyfriend wants a pied-àterre. No, leave me out of it. If she hears I’m involved she’ll run the other way. I might have something you can show her. I’ll give you a heads-up.”
As soon as I bundled my stuff into the bedroom, which had hardwood floors, a marble bathroom, and no bed, Tommy wandered in saying, “You gotta raise some more cash for a bigger down payment so the bank’ll cut you a mortgage to meet Richard’s price. So the question is, where do you get the cash?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Most clients’ parents chip in.”
“My folks don’t have that kind of money.”
“Can’t they take a home equity on their house?”
I explained that a bank appraiser would not bother getting out of his car for their tiny ranch with a shallowly pitched roof on a quarter-acre lot. “If every neighbor on their block chipped in with a home equity loan, they might raise enough to send a crippled kid to Disneyland. No, Tommy, not everybody is rich. It just seems that way.”
“I gotta tell you, Richard is not lowering it. There are no minuses in that apartment. Once you accept the stairs and the kitchen—which you already did—there’s nothing wrong to make him lower his price.”
“Yeah, I guess not.”
“Think about Brooklyn.”
“No!” I felt my face burn red again.
“Man, you’re looking obsessed.”
I repeated what I had said yesterday: “I won’t settle for second best.” Then I changed the subject to get him off my back. “I heard you on the phone. Sounds like you got un-obsessed with your ex.”
“What do you mean?”
“Helping her look for her boyfriend’s apartment.”
“Is that what it sounded like?”
“Sounded like you got over her.”
His face hardened up. “After what she did to me?”
“What did she do to you?”
His eyes widened. “Are you kidding? What did she do to me?”
“You keep saying it, but I don’t know what it was.”
“I told you. She got the apartment.”
“My ex got our apartment. But I’m not going to kill her for it. Much less cut her heart out.”
Tommy got really mad and started hacking away at me.
“She got your apartment? What kind of apartment? Tell me about it. View? Big? Classy building? High ceilings? Skylights?
Granite and nickle bathrooms?”
“No. No. No. And no. It was just a nice apartment. Nice layout.”
“Nice layout means small.”
“It was small. It was a New York apartment.”
“Yeah, well I wouldn’t cut my ex’s heart out for a piece of shit like that, either. But my apartment was fantastic. First of all, it was the best deal in New York. I bought it right out from under my firm—previous firm. Went to check it out.
Found this old guy, just got widowed, starts weeping while he’s showing me. It was gorgeous. He had no idea what