Manhattan Noir - Lawrence Block [77]
Condo, so I didn’t have to go through board shit. Gave my banker oral sex to get a bridge loan to close the deal—Hey! Lose the I-just-got-here-from-Topeka expression. She wasn’t that bad.”
Maybe she wasn’t, but Tommy had no smile for the memory.
“I thought I was made,” he raged. “Fucking brass ring at last. It had it all. Views, high ceilings, kitchen to die for, class building. She turned around and flipped it for ten times what I paid five years ago. She is fucking rich and I’m sleeping in a sleeping bag. Which is why—”
“I know, I know. You’re going to cut her heart out.”
That afternoon he called me at work. Richard had canceled our 7 o’clock meeting. I felt a cold lump in the pit of my stomach. It sounded like he had gotten the higher offer he’d been waiting for. “Any idea why?” I asked.
“No idea,” said Tommy.
“Can you reschedule?”
“I’ll talk to him next week.”
I had an awful feeling Tommy was trying to blow me off. In fact, I had an awful feeling that he himself had found the client who had made the higher offer. Hating myself, I did a terrible thing, telephoned my folks in Missouri and asked to borrow the fifty thousand dollars they’d been saving, buck by buck, so they could move south when my father finally retired from teaching.
The damnedest thing was how they didn’t even hesitate. I promised I would pay it back as soon as possible, thinking maybe I could in five years, and right after work hurried down to Chelsea prepared to meet Richard’s insane price with an extra ten thousand to beat the offer I just knew he must have gotten.
Richard was sitting on his front step, leaning against a pillar that was topped with a welcoming wrought-iron pineapple he’d had recreated by Spanish craftsmen to match one stolen. The front door closed behind him and I could hear somebody creaking up the steps.
I said, “I got the money. I can meet your price.”
“Too late. A woman’s buying it right now.”
“I can top it by ten thousand.”
“Top what by ten thousand?”
“The extra forty you wanted.”
Richard laughed. “She’s already topped that. I’ve got seven hundred thousand on the table.”
“Seven hundred thousand? Sight unseen?”
“She saw it this afternoon. Woman looking for a pied-àterre for her boyfriend.”
“Seven hundred thousand?”
“This woman is so in love she’d have paid a million.”
Richard shook his head. Even he seemed awed and it made him seem more human as he asked, “You know how when somebody is really happy after being unhappy for a long time?
How they glow? This woman is glowing like Venus on a dark night.”
“How’d she find out about it?”
“Your friend Tommy showed it to her broker. Tommy was so excited he was red in the face. He really is a greedy prick.”
“Is Tommy up there?”
“No, he and the broker were here earlier.”
“Did you actually see Tommy King leave?”
“No.”
I thought to myself, Tommy wouldn’t kill her up there.
Richard knew he had set it up with her broker. He’d get caught. Except he didn’t care about getting caught. He thought he was right.
I hesitated for longer than I should have. I knew exactly what would happen, and when it did, the price of that apartment was going to plummet. A bloody murder would knock the price lower than a ghost. All I had to do was walk away from a crime about to happen. Or better yet, just stand innocently chatting with Richard who, as usual, was talking up a storm. All I had to do was listen and wait.
“Hey, Richard,” a woman called down from the front window of the apartment. “Where is that air shaft for the kitchen exhaust?”
She was not the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in New York, but she came close—a perfectly lovely blonde, slim, not boney, sky-blue eyes set wide in a heart-shaped face, and a mouth that wanted to smile. Quite a few years older than Tommy, I thought. I wasn’t surprised they had gotten divorced; what I couldn’t figure out was how they had hooked up in the first place. She just seemed better than Tommy, who while handsome enough to squire a beauty like her around town, had an empty