Three-Day Town

by Margaret Maron

  I’m cynical enough to know that won’t happen. Jenny’s probably counting on the fact that we serve on a charitable board together and often have lunch with some of the other members after the meetings. Max, on the other hand, has been my insurance agent ever since I had anything worth insuring. When my car was totaled last year, he got me the maximum from the underwriter and expedited the process.

  Both work full-time, but Jenny’s a control freak and a micromanager, who would drive me crazy if she had any say in my life. She’s devoted to Jamie, the sixteen-year-old in dispute. Very conscientious about his well-being. Too conscientious, say some. She never gives him a chance to fail, and he would probably be a neurotic mess without the leavening influence of his dad.

  Max is more laid-back. An ad hoc guy, he takes life as it comes and each day is filled with mostly happy surprises for him, thanks to an efficient secretary who keeps his workday on track. He loves the outdoors and takes the boy fishing and camping whenever they can sneak away—activities too unstructured for Jenny to join them.

  On the face of it, Max would be the better custodial parent of a teenage boy, but Max is also a high-functioning alcoholic who has no desire to exchange malt liquor for Adam’s ale. I’m told that he usually limits himself to a single shot of scotch every evening, but once or twice a year he goes on monumental benders that can last a week.

  Overprotective mother or unpredictable father?

  I’m sure their lawyers will present both arguments and everyone will expect the wisdom of Solomon. I just hope I don’t have to get out my sword.

  Our train pulled into New York right on schedule, a little after seven. Here at the tail end of rush hour, Penn Station was a confusion of shops and exits, and the space swarmed with people who all seemed to know exactly where they were going. I hadn’t been there in several years and would have stopped to savor the scene if Dwight hadn’t already been heading toward the Eighth Avenue escalator for a cab going uptown.

  A short and skinny teenage boy might have fit into the backseat of the first taxi, but there was no way Dwight’s long legs would. The second one was only marginally better, so Dwight slid into the front seat, which left me in possession of all the windows in the rear. Rather dirty windows actually, but I didn’t care. By the time we got up to Kate’s apartment in the West Seventies, I almost had whiplash from trying not to miss a single neon sign.

  The cab let us out in front of the building’s nondescript brick exterior, a block off Broadway, and we stepped into a frigid wind straight off the Hudson River. It stung our cheeks and almost blew Dwight’s hat off. The inner door was locked, but before we could ring, an elderly gentleman was leaving and he courteously held the door open for us. Inside the lobby, the elevator man watched as we approached, trailing our roller bags behind us across a floor tiled in earth-tone ceramic squares. A hair or two taller than me and trim in a dark brown uniform, he had skin the color of weak tea, his dark hair was going gray, and he wore a pencil-thin gray mustache above narrow lips that pursed in disapproval. A brass name tag identified him as Sidney.

  “Does Mr. Gorman know you?”

  “The man who just left?” asked Dwight. “No.”

  “He should not have let you in.” He spoke sternly in an accent that sounded slightly Asian to me. “No one is supposed to enter this building without proper identification.”

  I tried not to smile. This Sidney had a wiry, muscular build as if he worked out regularly, but unless he had a black belt in martial arts, no way could he have physically stopped someone Dwight’s size once he was inside the lobby.

  Instead of arguing, Dwight simply flipped open his wallet and held out his driver’s license. “I believe Kate Bryant, the owner of 6-A, notified the super that we were coming?”

  “Mrs. Bryant? Oh. You mean Mrs. Honeycutt that was.” He squinted at Dwight’s ID, then reluctantly stepped aside so we could enter the elevator.

  Almost immediately, five more people pushed through the outer lobby door, two women and three men. Like us they were muffled and hatted against the icy wind. Laughing and chattering, they greeted Sidney by name as they converged on the elevator. The alpha female pushed back the fur-lined hood of her black parka and let a cascade of blonde hair swing free. Her face was too long and thin and her chin a bit too pointed for conventional beauty, but from the indulgent smile she was getting from ol’ Sidney, she could have been a glamorous A-list movie star. There was a familiar lilt to her voice, and for a moment I wondered if I had indeed seen her before. If not on the big screen, maybe television?

  Dwight and I stepped back and pushed our bags closer together. Even so, there was no room for all of them.

  “Sorry, boys. You’ll have to wait,” the blonde said as she pulled the other woman, a small brunette, into the car with her. One of them wore a delicate spicy scent that contrasted pleasantly with the smell of cold wool.

  The blonde gave us a friendly smile and then read the tag on my suitcase with blatant curiosity. “Cotton Grove, North Carolina? Where’s that? Anywhere near Charlotte?”

  “A few miles south of Raleigh,” I said.

  “Cam’s from North Carolina,” she said. “Do you know him?”

  “Who?”

  “Cameron Broughton. One of the left-behinds in the lobby.”

  I hadn’t looked closely at any of the men although Cameron and Broughton are both prominent names in the state. I glanced up at Dwight, who gave a negative shrug.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “It’s a big state, Luna,” said the other woman with an amused shake of her head. “You’ll have to excuse her. Cam’s got her thinking that everybody in the South knows everyone else. Or is related if you go back far enough.”

  “Well, just look at yesterday,” the blonde said as if scoring a definite point. She turned back to us. “Two couples came out of the hotel down the block, and just as we were passing, they realized that they were all from North Carolina and that one of them was the sister-in-law to the other woman’s cousin. Cam says it happens anytime four Southerners get together. There’s never the full six degrees of separation.”

  In keeping with the Arts and Crafts ambiance of the lobby, the small elevator was probably original to the building. Sidney had manually closed the brass accordion-type gate before turning a thick brass lever that let us rise. Once we left the lobby’s fixed door, there was nothing between the gate and the ugly concrete shaft. We passed the numbered floors and stopped in front of the door marked with a large black 6.

  The two women exited and Sidney unbent enough to tell us that 6-A was on the right, which made the blonde called Luna turn back with renewed interest.

  “You’re staying in Jordy Lacour’s place? Cool! We’re neighbors. How long will you be here?”

  “Just a week,” I told her.

  “Then we’ll be seeing you again,” she said.

  They went on down the hall to the apartment at the other end and Sidney did not linger to watch us open the door, which was just as well, given how long it would have taken us to figure out which key turned which of the two locks. I had forgotten how most city dwellers have more than one on their doors and I had a sudden flashback to the law student I’d lived with after Mother died when I dropped out of school and ran away from home. The door of Lev Schuster’s West Village efficiency had three locks and a deadbolt and his jaw used to tighten if I left any of them unlocked.

  In the end it didn’t matter, because Dwight had barely inserted the first key before the knob turned and a stocky man filled the open doorway. His dark brown coveralls were the same shade as Sidney’s uniform and his own brass name tag read PHIL. Unlike Sidney, who was so sleek and trim he could have stepped off a wedding cake, this middle-aged man filled his coveralls to the bursting point with lumpy bulges. His hair was a tangle of salt-and-ginger curls that probably sneered at combs. His square face was clean-shaven, but his bushy eyebrows more than made up for it. Like the hair on his head, his brows were so thick and wiry
they reminded me of woolly bear caterpillars foretelling a hard winter. His nose looked as if it’d been broken at least once, but his smile was welcoming.

  “You the people Miz Bryant said was coming?” He had a smoker’s gravelly voice but no smoky odor emanated from his coveralls.

  “That’s right,” said Dwight. “And you are?”

  “Phil Lundigren. I’m the super here. There was a leak in 7-A and I was checking to make sure it didn’t come through the ceiling.” He reached for the handle of my suitcase. “Here, let me give you a hand with that.”

  He led us through the vestibule and down a short hall into the master bedroom, switching on more lights as we went. He wasn’t particularly tall, but there was strength in his bulky frame, for he carried my heavy bag as if it were a feather and gently deposited it inside the door.

  “My wife cleans for some of the owners and she came in yesterday after Mr. Lacour left and changed the sheets and towels. I didn’t find any water damage, but you folks might want to keep an eye out and call me if you see any damp spots on the ceilings, okay? My number’s there by the house phone and my apartment’s on the ground floor around from the elevator.”

  He explained how to adjust the radiators and opened a service door off the kitchen to show us where to leave our garbage after we had separated out the paper, glass, and tins. He told us how the keys worked and how to buzz someone in, and warned us not to let anyone in that we didn’t know. After saying there was a grocery around the corner on Broadway, he finally took himself off so that we could explore the apartment for ourselves.

  There were two bedrooms, two baths, full kitchen, separate dining room, and, unexpectedly, French doors that opened off the living room onto a tiny balcony. Two chairs might fit out there in nice weather, but they’d have to be awfully small ones. Leaning over the iron railing, we could make out the upper end of Broadway, half a block over. Knots of people passed on the sidewalks while yellow cabs weaved in and out of the lanes, missing each other by inches. The horns, the lights, the wail of a fire truck—all added to the exhilaration of being in one of the world’s great cities.

  “It’s freezing out here,” Dwight said and we stepped back into the warmth of the apartment.

  “First things first,” I said as I slung my coat and scarf on the back of the black leather couch. “I’ll call Mrs. Lattimore’s daughter and—”

  “No,” said Dwight, taking me into his arms. “First thing is to remember that this is our honeymoon.”

  It was after 9:30 before we were ready to think about food. The refrigerator was empty except for a stick of butter, a bottle of salad dressing, and six different kinds of mustard. Rather than go out for supper, we bundled up and headed around to Broadway to find the grocery store the super had described.

  Here on a freezing Friday night, Fairway’s aisles were as crowded as our local grocery would have been on a warm Saturday morning. Of course, these aisles and carts were only half as wide as ours, but the shelves and cases were piled high with exotic delicacies of every description. One corner was filled by a dozen different varieties of olives in open barrels, hundreds of cheeses were stacked in another section. Hot foods, cold cuts, salads, baked goods, custards—we hardly knew where to begin. Every turning brought unfamiliar smells and entrancing temptations.

  In the end, our eyes were limited by how much we thought we could carry, and we went back to the apartment with eggplant parmigiana, ravioli, artichoke salad, a small packet of bruschetta, and a Washington State merlot.

  “We can come back tomorrow for milk and juice,” Dwight said, happily taking it all in. I tried not to roll my eyes. This was his honeymoon, too, and if he finds grocery stores more entertaining than I do, who am I to complain? Especially since Kate had given me the addresses of a few specialty shops more to my own liking.

  By the time we finished eating and stashed the remains in the refrigerator, I decided it was too late to call Anne Harald.

  “I’ll do it first thing in the morning,” I said through a barely suppressed yawn, and we were soon back in bed.

  This time to sleep.

  And the evening and the morning were the first day.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Among the detached sculpture in the parks and streets, bad as much of it always was… there are still some notable examples which people do not care to forget.

  —The New New York, 1909

  We slept till after eight the next morning, and while Dwight went out for coffee and breakfast rolls, I checked my email.

  Cal wrote that he and Mary Pat had made 100s on their end-of-the-week spelling test and that he was now one level higher than she on one of their long-running computer games. Both of them were going to a classmate’s birthday party the next day.

  My friend Portland had finally uploaded some of the pictures she’d taken of her year-old daughter at Christmas. She and Avery named her Carolyn Deborah, and one of the pictures showed her wearing the red plaid dress I’d given her.

  Minnie, the sister-in-law who is my campaign advisor, wrote that barring a last-minute surprise, I wasn’t going to have to run an all-out campaign for reelection.

  “She says that Paul Archdale’s decided not to run for my seat after all,” I told Dwight when he returned.

  “Probably knows he’d be wasting his time and money,” said my loyal spouse, busily unloading plastic bags from Fairway Market onto the kitchen counter.

  The smell of freshly ground coffee and warm bagels made my mouth water. Dwight set out milk, orange juice, a block of cream cheese, several slices of smoked salmon, and a small jar of wild strawberry jam. I opened another bag to see an applesauce muffin, a turnover oozing with blackberries, and a little wedge of Brie. A third bag held more packets of deli items.

  I shook my head. “All this for breakfast? I’m not letting you go back to that store.”

  He laughed. “Try and stop me. You call Mrs. Lattimore’s daughter yet?”

  “I’ll do it right now,” I said and scrolled through the list of names on my cell phone’s contact list till I came to Anne Harald.

  There were the usual chirps and blips and then four long rings before I heard a woman’s voice say, “You’ve reached Anne and Mac’s answering machine. If you need to reach Anne or Mac before February, find a pencil. Got it? Okay, listen up, ’cause here comes the number to call.”

  By then I had grabbed a pen from Dwight’s shirt pocket and scribbled the number on my hand, a 212 area code, which meant it was right here in Manhattan.

  A few minutes later, I was listening to a second answering machine message. A different woman’s voice crisply instructed me to leave a short message and a callback number. There was no promise that she would actually call back, but I dutifully gave my number and explained that I was trying to deliver a package to Anne Harald from her mother in North Carolina, but—

  At that point the answering machine cut off and left me with nothing but a dial tone.

  Exasperated, I ended the connection and helped Dwight finish putting our breakfast together.

  The coffee was even better than the aroma promised, and I’d forgotten how delicious toasted onion bagels are with a thick schmeer of cream cheese. I couldn’t decide whether to top mine off with smoked salmon or the wild strawberry jam, so what the hell? I cut it in half and had some of each. Yum!

  I told myself I didn’t need to worry about waddling onto the train home, because the city encourages walking. All the New Yorkers I’ve ever known walk miles more than country people, who tend to jump into a car or truck if it’s more than a few hundred feet. Once again, memory stretched back across the years to the winter I spent here with Lev Schuster. A penniless law student, I knew he couldn’t afford cabs, but “Can’t we at least take a bus?” I would whine, only to have him look at me in surprise that I would waste money on a bus when the restaurant or museum or library was only fifteen or twenty blocks away. I grew to hate crosstown blocks, which are two to four times longer
than the north–south blocks, and I planned to reacquaint myself with the bus and subway systems as soon as possible.

  “What do you want to do first?” Dwight asked me when I emerged from the bedroom warmly dressed in wool slacks, sweater, and sturdy shoes made for walking.

  We both had lists of things to do, restaurants to try, and exhibits to see. He wanted to reconnect with an old Army buddy who taught at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and had promised to give Dwight a tour of the place next time he was up.

  I had already decided that would be a good time to check out some of the stores along Fifth Avenue. But for today?

  “Let’s take a bus down to Columbus Circle. I want to see that exhibit of Madeleine Albright’s pins.”

  “Pens?”

  “Pins,” I said firmly. “Brooches. They’re not just girly stuff. I’ve read that when she was secretary of state, she used her pins to set the mood for some of her negotiations. We don’t have to stay long if you get bored, I promise.”

  Bundled up against the cold, we were waiting for the elevator when the door at the end of the hallway opened and the blonde from the night before appeared. She wore a fuzzy pink sweater over flannel pajama bottoms and her bedroom slippers were stitched with pink rhinestones.

  “Oh, good!” she said in her maddeningly familiar gurgling voice. “I was going to slip this under your door but now I can just hand it to you. I’m having a party tonight and I’d adore for you to come.” As the elevator door opened, she gave that impish, slightly conspiratorial smile we were coming to know. “If you’re part of the party, you won’t complain about the noise.”