“I can’t thank you enough,” I said. “Nothing worse than being lost and not having access to . . . facilities,” I said, choosing my words carefully in front of this lovely, well-mannered man.
He chuckled. “Not a problem, dear.” He held out his hand and I took it in my well-moisturized one. “My name is Eben Brookwell.”
I stopped for a moment, not realizing that I would need an alias. I quickly decided to go with the old “your first pet/your first street” rule of thumb. I forgot that that’s what you were supposed to use for your stripper name—at least that’s what Max had told me when we had played this ridiculous renaming game—but it worked in a pinch. The only problem was that I had grown up on a street named “New Broadway.” Obviously, that wouldn’t work. And my current street name was “Palisades,” after a line of cliffs that ran along the Hudson River. I thought quickly, staring into Mr. Brookwell’s handsome, older-gentleman face. “Coco. Coco,” I repeated, flashing on my first dog, a teacup Yorkshire terrier. I searched my brain for an appropriate surname. “Coco Varick,” I finally said, using Max’s former street address in lower Manhattan.
“Well, Coco Varick, happy house hunting,” he said. “And tell Mr. Varick that we’ll get together for a drink when you do move to town. Look us up, will you?” He gave Crawford a little wave, which Crawford returned sheepishly.
“I definitely will, Mr. Brookwell.”
“Eben.”
“Eben,” I said, my discomfort at the number of lies I had told growing by the second.
“What do you do, dear?”
“Do?” I asked.
“Yes. What’s your profession?” He blushed a bit when he realized I might not have a job that required me to leave the house, like raising a small brood. “Or are you home with the little ones?”
“No. No little ones,” I said, deciding to go for broke. What was one more lie to Coco Varick? “I’m a flight attendant.”
“Ahhh,” he said, some kind of look passing across his face. Lust for flight attendants of yore? Who knew. But he seemed impressed so I went with it.
“I fly for Air France.”
“Très bien!” he said enthusiastically, the flush in his cheeks getting deeper. Yep, he likes the flight attendants. Especially the French ones.
“Do you have children, Mr. Brookwell?”
“Four,” he said proudly, regaining his composure after his momentary flight of fancy, pun intended. “Twin boys, then a girl, and then a boy.”
“How lovely.”
“I’m a very proud dad,” he said. “One of the twins is a lawyer in Boston, the other a doctor at NYU. My daughter is also a doctor in Miami. And my youngest is a resident director at St. Thomas University. Have you heard of it? It’s local. Right over the border in the Bronx.”
“Oh, yes,” I said, exuding enthusiasm. “I have heard that it is quite an institution.”
“It is,” he said, and his face fell a little bit. “Our youngest—his name is Wayne—is at a bit of a crossroads. We’re hoping that he doesn’t spend his life living in a dorm.”
“Not exactly the path you had mapped out for him?” I asked.
He shook his head but before he had a chance to elaborate, a woman emerged from the kitchen and came up behind him. She was tall and thin, her crisp white blouse open just enough so that I could see her Miraculous Medal of the Blessed Virgin glinting in the light coming from the overhead fixture in the foyer. Eben turned around.
“Dear,” he said, gesturing toward his wife and putting an arm around her waist when she got close enough. “This is my new friend, Coco Varick. Coco, my wife, Geraldine.”
I held out my hand and hoped that she would hold me up when I crumbled to the floor on my shaking legs.
Because I was looking into the face of Sister Mary.
Well, obviously it wasn’t Sister Mary, but someone who looked exactly like her. The reason I knew it wasn’t Mary is because she was nice.
She held out her hand. “Nice to meet you, Ms. Varick.”
“Oh, please call me Coco.” I couldn’t stop staring at her. She was Mary down to the sensible shoes and short haircut but definitely had more élan and flair than my stodgy boss. I pulled my eyes away from her when Eben started talking, my eyes coming to rest on a St. Thomas sweatshirt thrown casually over the banister of the staircase. It was hard to miss: St. Thomas’s school colors are a bizarre combination of purple and yellow, which I’m sure had some deep religious meaning lost on me, the pagan. The sweatshirt material was the purple, and I could see some yellow lettering peeking out from under the wrinkled fabric. I was itching to ask them if their son was a drug dealer and if he had just quit his day job, but being as we had just met, I thought it might be a tad impolite.
“Coco and her husband . . . ,” Eben started, looking at me questioningly.
“Chad,” I said.
“Chad are looking for a house in the area. They got a little turned around and stopped to ask for directions.”
“I’m glad you did!” she exclaimed. “Who’s your agent?”
“My agent?”
“Yes, dear,” she said, fingering her necklace. “Your real estate agent?”
Crawford tapped gently on the horn and we all looked over at him. “Chad seems to be in a hurry,” I said apologetically, and started down the walk.
Eben followed me. “Please do look us up when you move in, Coco. We’d love to have you and Chad over for cocktails sometime.”
I hurried down the walk and called over my shoulder, “We’d love to, too!” I put my thumb and pinkie to my ear. “We’ll call you!”
“We’re in the book!” he said. “And don’t forget! A left at the Catholic church!”
“Got it!” I called back and gave him a thumbs-up. Of course it was a left at the Catholic church; I wondered if we could stop in for a little on-the-go confession. I jumped in the car and returned Eben’s wave as we drove off.
Crawford looked at me when we got to a stop sign. “What the hell is wrong with you? I thought we were going to spend the night there, you were with him for so long.”
“Before I forget, your name is Chad and mine is Coco and I’m a flight attendant for Air France.”
“Of course it is. Of course you are.” He let out a little exasperated sigh. “What do I do?”
I put on my seat belt and adjusted my pocketbook between my feet. “I didn’t get that far. Do you want to be a firefighter?”
“Do you want me to be a firefighter?”
New York City cops and firefighters have a not-always-amicable relationship with each other and are somewhat competitive when it comes to whose job is more important and who is braver. It’s stupid civil servant man stuff, but I knew I had to choose my words carefully regardless of how ridiculous I thought the whole thing was. Crawford was already irked that I had gone into the Brookwells’ so telling him I wished he was a firefighter would not help. “No. Of course not. Do you want to be a graphic designer?”
He started thinking and then realized that we were off topic. “Whatever. What did you find out?” he said, pulling into a parking spot in the middle of town.
I looked out the window and took in the row of quaint shops and restaurants. “Maybe we should look for a house here,” I mused. Crawford cleared his throat and I realized I had to tell him about the Brookwells. “Very Junior League, country club, blue-bloody types.” I held my hands out to Crawford. “Smell my hands.”
He did it instinctively before realizing he didn’t actually have to.
“Smells good, right?” I asked, putting my hands back in my lap. “The hand lotion in the bathroom goes for around sixty bucks a pop.”
“That’s fascinating,” he said. “What did you talk about?”
“Chad and Coco’s house hunt, mainly,” I said. “Wayne’s a loser compared to the rest of the brood, but we could have guessed that.”
“He’s not a loser,” Crawford protested. “He is gainfully employed.”
I sn
orted. “Did you get a look at Mrs. Brookwell? Geraldine?”
Crawford shrugged. “Not really.”
“She’s the spitting image of Sister Mary.”
Crawford shuddered involuntarily. Mary scares him, too.
“I think Wayne Brookwell is Mary’s nephew.” I thought about that for a second while acknowledging the rumbling in my stomach. If it wasn’t one bodily complaint, it was another. The Chinese food from two hours before was a distant memory and nature was calling again.
Crawford motioned that I should continue. “And . . .”
“And I don’t know what that means. Could indicate why he got the job on campus. Could give me a clue as to why Mary didn’t say a word during my interrogation and subsequent imprisonment by Etheridge and Merrimack. Could mean a lot of things.” I looked out the window and spied a Thai restaurant; I knew where we’d be having dinner. I thought back to my encounter with Sister Mary outside the bathroom at Hop Sing. “Could be why she asked me about Wayne at the restaurant.”
“Or it could mean nothing.”
“Right,” I agreed. “But you got to admit it’s weird, right?”
“It’s weird,” he agreed, adjusting himself in his seat so that he could restart the car. “I called Fred while you were inside and he said they need another hour before you can come back. What do you want to do?”
I pointed to the Thai restaurant.
“But we just ate,” he complained.
“That was two hours ago. And I didn’t get to finish my . . .” I looked at him. “What was that anyway? It really wasn’t lunch and it really wasn’t dinner.” I put my hands together, pleading. “Please, Crawford. Please?”
Five minutes later, we were seated in the Thai restaurant in the main village of Scarsdale, picking at some spring rolls.
“Did you see anything in the house to indicate that Wayne might be living there?” he asked, looking around the restaurant. I don’t know what he hoped to see, but he was taking it all in, from the paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling, to the waitresses dressed in traditional Thai garb, to the guy cutting up sushi behind a long bar. Although it called itself “Thai,” it seemed that the restaurant was going more with pan-Asian.
“I saw a St. Thomas sweatshirt hanging on the banister,” I said with gravity.
“So what?” he asked. “If their kid worked there, I’m sure they have a ton of St. Thomas clothing.”
“They don’t strike me as St. Thomas clothing kind of people. He was wearing the old khaki-oxford-shirt-loafer combo and she was dressed to the nines, too. And it’s a Saturday afternoon and they were hanging out at the house. I don’t imagine Geraldine would be caught dead in a St. Thomas sweatshirt at the local Stop & Shop if she’s not wearing it at home on a weekend.”
Crawford stared at me for longer than I thought necessary. I snapped my fingers in front of his face. Finally, he spoke. “Wow. That was amazing.” He put the rest of his spring roll in his mouth. “You’ve got this all figured out. I don’t know whether to be amazed or frightened.”
“Amazed. Go with amazed.” I took the last spring roll from the plate and dunked it in a ramekin filled with sauce. “So, chances are, Wayne has been somewhere in the vicinity recently.”
“You really think so.” It was more of a statement than a question.
“I do.” I handed the empty plate to our server, a gorgeous Asian woman with an elaborate bun and eye makeup. “So, Chad, I think we need to start looking for a house. The Brookwells have invited us for cocktails, too.”
Crawford held up his hands in protest. “I’m out.”
“You are not ‘out,’ ” I said. “If you want me out of that dorm, you’re very much ‘in.’ ”
Crawford crossed his arms on the table and rested his head on them. “There’s so much wrong with this plan that I can’t even begin. And if Geraldine Brookwell is Sister Mary’s sister, this is going to unravel so quickly your head will spin.”
He had a point. But him having a point had never stopped me before. And it sure wasn’t going to stop me now.
“That kid’s obviously in a heap of trouble so I hope, for everyone’s sake, he’s safely ensconced in Scarsdale. His parents seem like very nice people. I would hate to have to tell them their kid’s a drug mule or a dealer or something of that ilk.” I thought about them for a moment. “I really hope that he doesn’t put them in any danger.”
Crawford looked sad all of a sudden. I was sure it was the parental connection, being as he was the father of twin teenage girls. “Me, too.” He leaned back in his chair, his long legs grazing mine under the table. “We need to find out if there’s a missing persons on him in Scarsdale. Let me poke around.” He closed his eyes, thinking, trying to work out that part of it. He opened them a few minutes later. “When’s your next flight?” he asked, a twinkle in his eye.
“I’m on the New York to Paris flight at midnight,” I said. “And I won’t be back for two weeks.”
“And I have a graphic design convention in Cleveland next week,” he said. He waved to our server. “Check, please.”
Seven
I was able to get back into my room around nine o’clock, where I fell into the bed that Crawford had made up again with fresh sheets after we had returned from the restaurant. I lay there, my arms behind my head, and thought about how the day, and even the whole week, hadn’t turned out as planned. If it had been normal, I would be home, alone, petting my dog and watching a reality show on Bravo. I would have been less surprised if I had ended up on a space shuttle mission than where I was now. Never in my wildest dreams did sleeping on a thirty-year-old mattress on campus come into play.
But here I was. Crawford had bid me a chaste adieu in the dorm hallway, heading back to his apartment in Manhattan, because even though visitation was still in effect, I didn’t want to look like a hussy my first week on the job. He was working the next day, and I wouldn’t see him for a couple of days, which, in itself, was depressing enough. Now this. Living in a dorm room—there was no place on earth where this would be considered a “suite”—every surface covered with fingerprint dust, with hissing pipes overhead. I decided to make the best of it, and fell into a deep sleep, thinking that I would clean up the fingerprint powder in the morning.
I hadn’t set my alarm; there was no reason. The only thing I had to do the next day was unpack and go back to Dobbs Ferry to get Trixie. It was going to be a tight squeeze with the two of us living here but we would manage. I got up around nine and used the communal bathroom on the second floor again, making a mental note to call maintenance before I left so that they could give me a new toilet. Because you know what? The cops had taken my toilet “as evidence.” Yes. Just when I thought my life couldn’t get any weirder or more embarrassing, the appliance upon which I had sat my ample behind was now in some evidence room at the Fiftieth Precinct.
I dressed and headed off to Dobbs Ferry, hoping that at the very least, Max was in a semigood mood and not in her usual fugue state.
I entered the house and was greeted by an overly enthusiastic Trixie, who pushed past me to go out into the backyard where she ran free for a few minutes before rooting for field mice in the giant pile of leaves that I had never bagged the autumn before. When she tired of that, she came back in and paid me the respect I deserved by jumping on me and slathering me with wet, dog-scented kisses. I pushed her down and called for Max, who didn’t respond. A quick survey of the area told me that she wasn’t home.
She really hadn’t left the house for any significant length of time in the past two weeks, so I was surprised that she was gone. I scribbled a note with the phone number in my room on campus and put it next to a can of paint sitting on the counter.
I looked at Trixie. “Where did this come from?” I asked her. It is not unusual for me to ask her questions and even more common for my questions to be met with adoring silence. I looked at the top of the can and saw a little dab of paint on the label: Million Dollar Red. I had no idea where th
is had come from or what it was for, but I left it there, thinking that Max might have purchased it to redo a room in her own apartment once she revoked Fred’s squatter’s rights and she returned there. She had been talking about making a fresh start and I couldn’t think of a fresher start than painting a room red.
I pulled together everything I needed: Trixie’s food, bowls, leash, and chew toys. We got into the car and headed back to St. Thomas, never seeing Max.
The director of security, Jay Pinto, was waiting for me when I returned from my trip. He held the door to the dorm for me as I carted in a box with Trixie’s supplies, her leash dangling off my wrist. We made our way down to my room, where I set the box on the ground and commanded Trixie to “sit.” She responded by taking off down the hallway, skidding up and down on the marble floors, investigating her new environment.
I folded my arms over my chest, expecting the worst. “I guess you heard what happened.”
Jay, shorter than me with a thick shock of black hair and a neatly trimmed mustache, looked up at me and nodded. A faithful practitioner of kickboxing—a fact I had learned during one of Etheridge’s goofy awards ceremonies—he was in excellent shape for a man in his early fifties. “You know I’m retired from the Job?” he asked, using the term cops normally used to refer to their time on the NYPD. Obviously, it was important for him to establish that I knew that before we got down to the business at hand, namely my exploding toilet. “I really wished your boyfriend would have called me first. We could have kept the whole thing a lot quieter.”
I hadn’t known he had been a cop but it didn’t surprise me. It also didn’t surprise me that he knew about Crawford. “So you talked to Detective Lattanzi?”
“The other one. Marcus,” he said. A couple of students, tanned from their spring break adventures, came through the side door near my room and scampered down the hallway, encountering Trixie on the way. She was thrilled to make new friends. Jay leaned in so that we wouldn’t be overheard. “We’re going to try to keep this quiet anyway. If we can.”
I wasn’t surprised to learn that, either. “I won’t tell anyone.”
Final Exam Page 5
