The Good Stranger (A Kate Bradley Mystery)

by Dete Meserve

  Every couple of minutes, my phone chimed with yet another text from someone telling me about something good they’d experienced around the city. The next morning, the chiming became so insistent that a teen in front of me in the Starbucks line turned around, looking annoyed.

  “Your phone got a bug or something?” he asked, adjusting his earbuds.

  I turned the volume down. “I just get a lot of texts.”

  He studied my face. “What are you, some kind of celebrity?”

  “Nope. Just a reporter.”

  That profession was apparently boring enough that he immediately turned away and started scrolling through his phone.

  A few minutes later and armed with a soy latte, I glanced at my phone to see what I’d missed. I stepped toward the door and smack into Scott Jameson.

  Literally.

  My cup fell, and when it hit the ground, its lid popped off, spilling liquid everywhere.

  I laughed. “I must look like the most accident-prone person in Manhattan—”

  “You just haven’t mastered the New York jostle yet,” he said as a Starbucks employee jumped in to mop up the mess.

  “There’s a New York jostle?”

  “Okay, I made that up. But the key to survival here is to never look down. Always maneuver around tourists. And never, ever look at your phone when you’re leaving Starbucks.”

  “You made that last one up too.”

  He smiled. “I did. Where are you headed?”

  “I was just reading a text from a man who says someone prepaid his rent for the next month. And not just his. All his neighbors’ in his apartment building too.”

  “Everyone?”

  I glanced at my phone. “He says: ‘We all got letters taped to our door asking us to meet the anonymous donor by the fountain in Bryant Park at noon.’ Which is where I’m heading.”

  “Can I tag along?”

  I tilted my head. A guy with Scott Jameson’s star power didn’t need to join a freshman reporter on a story. If he wanted it, he could just take it. Besides, his series was all about natural wonders. In one episode, he’d spent the night lashed to the side of Yosemite’s El Capitan. In another, he’d hiked the Alaskan tundra. He’d even scaled a volcano in the South Pacific and spent the night there before reaching the summit and filming his show at sunrise.

  “Action. Adventure. Adrenaline. That’s what you usually cover, right? Why would you want to come along on this story, which has none of that?”

  We stepped aside to let a woman leaving Starbucks pass. She stopped to stare at him, then elbowed her friend to do the same. Scott had the kind of striking good looks that made people notice him. Even world-weary Manhattanites weren’t immune.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it. I keep wondering—is it a marketing gimmick? Or maybe performance art of some kind? Banksy did something with balloons here once. But then something new happens, and none of those theories make sense. What do you think is going on?”

  “I don’t know yet. The sheer number of things that are happening is . . . mind boggling. But things are never as they first appear.”

  By noon, seventeen people from a small apartment building on 134th in Harlem had gathered around the fountain in Bryant Park. Despite the hundreds of people sitting in the grass or in patio chairs in the park during the lunch hour, it wasn’t hard to spot the group because they stood in a cluster, talking rapidly like people do when they’re at a birthday party or other celebration.

  I was nervous about allowing Scott to join me on the story. It wasn’t unusual for a couple of reporters to team up, but it mostly came about on much bigger stories like natural disasters, riots, or mass shootings. Would it look like I couldn’t handle this story on my own if he was tagging along?

  Even though he seemed to be genuinely curious, I wasn’t so naive to believe that his motives were entirely pure. This story was already getting a surprising amount of attention. Was he planning to gain some insight from our trip to Bryant Park and use it to take over the story?

  The one plus to him joining was that he convinced cameraman Chris Yamashita to work with us on his day off. Without him, I’d have been stuck shooting everything with my cell phone camera because the dispatch team couldn’t assign any cameramen to this story. Chris jumped right in, recording shots of the rapidly growing group and getting close-ups of their excited expressions.

  Scott and I struck up a conversation with fifty-three-year-old resident Grant Hamilton, who had sent me the text. “It’s like winning the lottery,” Grant told us. “Plus, I didn’t know most of these people in my building before all this. And now I do.”

  “The spirit behind the gift was even more important to me than the money,” Ann-Marie Louison said. “It carried a lot of love with it.” She had dressed in a brightly colored red-and-orange floral caftan and had brought a jar of homemade pickles for the anonymous donor. She told us she hoped for a photo with them so she could show her seven-year-old grandson “what a hero looks like.”

  But when no one had shown up by 12:25, our excitement wilted. Chris set his camera in the grass and popped a stick of gum in his mouth. “Have you considered that this is some company’s campaign to get viral attention?” he asked me.

  “Yeah, maybe the chamber of commerce is trying to lure more tourists to Manhattan,” I replied.

  “As if we need more of that,” he grumbled.

  “The problem with both of those theories is that if this is some kind of campaign, they’d be promoting a hashtag or account to follow. But we haven’t seen that.”

  Ann-Marie stepped toward me. “What if this whole thing was supposed to get us out of our apartments so they could steal what we have?”

  That idea struck a chord of fear, and within minutes, everyone in the group was on their phones calling nearby friends and relatives to check on their apartments. Everyone except a retired guy named Walter, who sat quietly on a café chair, slowly and deliberately peeling an orange.

  “I got nothin’ to steal. I’m just happy I got a month where I don’t have to scrape together the rent.”

  “What will you do with the savings?” Scott asked him.

  “Everything.” He cracked a smile. “Half the fun is thinking about that.”

  Then three men in their twenties lumbered through the grass carrying heavy picnic baskets. “Are you people from the 134th Street apartments?” the tallest one asked.

  “Yeah,” Grant said.

  Was this them? These guys in their baggy jeans and sweat-stained T-shirts. I scanned their faces, wondering. Did it show? Did generosity like this reveal itself on someone’s face? Could you spot their compassion by the way they spoke or the way they carried themselves?

  “Are you the people who paid our rent?” Ann-Marie asked.

  “Nope,” the taller one said, wiping sweat from his face with a red bandana. “We’re from Broadway Finest Deli. Someone hired us to bring you this lunch. Sorry we’re late.”

  The three men unpacked red-checkered picnic blankets and spread them out on the lawn.

  “Who hired you?” I asked them as they laid out platters of sandwiches, salads, and cold drinks.

  The one with a buzz cut and trendy clear-frame glasses shrugged. “We don’t know. Someone left cash and instructions for our boss.”

  “That same person was supposed to meet us here. What can you tell us about who that is?” I pressed.

  He felt around in his back pocket and handed me a folded paper. “No idea. But I’m supposed to give you this.”

  As I unfolded the paper, the group gathered around me, a few peering over my shoulder.

  It read:

  Dear 134th Street Apartment Residents: Sorry I can’t join you as planned. You are all connected.

  —A Stranger.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “There’s a catch,” a woman named Michelle told me on the phone. She’d called minutes after Scott and I finished recording a stand-up in Bryant Park.

  “What kind o
f catch?” I asked.

  “I went into a Le Pain Quotidien near Washington Square at lunch. The waitress said my meal had already been paid for. Which was great, right? Like my lucky day or something, because I heard this has been happening other places around Manhattan too.”

  “What was the catch?”

  “I had to eat my lunch with a stranger. Someone else who was at a table for one.”

  I scribbled in my notebook. “What’d you do?”

  “Look, I didn’t really need the free lunch. I mean, I order the same salad every time I go there. I can afford it. And I’m really not one to eat lunch with other people. That’s kind of my time to read, you know. But I was curious. So I ate lunch with a random guy.”

  “What was that like?”

  She sighed. “At first it was strange. Then I found out he also grew up near Hawthorne, in New Jersey. Like me.”

  “It turned out better than you expected?”

  I heard her smile through the phone. “We had a long lunch together. Then he asked me out . . . and I said yes.”

  I tried to wrap my head around her story. Someone was putting strings on the giving, making people jump through hoops to get the free meal. Was this all some kind of social experiment to see how far people would go for free stuff? A few years back, I’d covered a story about someone who had hidden twenty-dollar bills in parks in San Francisco and Los Angeles. People had torn up the parks, destroying flowers, dropping trash everywhere, and even smashing up manholes trying to find the money. I wondered: Was this a ploy to bring out the worst in all of us?

  After I hung up with Michelle, I found Scott lounging on one of the blankets, immersed in a conversation with several of the residents and petting a chubby black Lab that had wandered into the picnic, looking for food. Scott looked surprisingly comfortable there, as if he didn’t notice that a few tourists were snapping photos of him. On his series, he came off as the kind of adrenaline junkie who would kitesurf, raft, skydive, kayak, or ski anywhere to find the most stunning places on Earth. But in this setting, he seemed relaxed, gently teasing answers out of the people around him.

  “You have to hear what Ann-Marie’s grandson told her just happened at his school,” he said. He motioned to a spot on the blanket and moved to make room for me.

  “He’s in second grade,” Ann-Marie said, beaming. “And today all the lunches in his school were paid for. Just like our rent.”

  “Where?”

  “East Harlem. It’s a blessing because he—Dannel—just moved here from the Dominican Republic. That’s where my son has been since before Dannel was born. He ate lunch alone every day since school began. But when the kids got to lunch today, they found out that everyone would get a free meal—some of their favorites—but only if no one sits alone.”

  “But wait till you hear what happened next. Tell her,” Scott said.

  “Some boys in his class invited Dannel to sit with them. This was the first time for him. He just called me to say, ‘Abuela, I made a new friend. He plays Minecraft too.’”

  While Ann-Marie told her story to the others, I turned to Scott. “This isn’t just about giving. They’re connecting strangers.”

  Tucked between a nail salon and a barber shop and with a faded yellow sign that had a seventies flair to it, the pizza joint didn’t look like the kind of spot that a celebrity journalist like Scott would seek out.

  But after we finished shooting the last of our stand-up reports, Scott had suggested we get a bite to eat. I thought we’d grab a quick sandwich and head back to ANC, but he said that if I was willing to walk an extra couple of blocks, I’d experience the “titan of all pizza.” Given my disappointing experience with food in Manhattan so far, it seemed unlikely that any food here would deserve the “titan” moniker, but I’d agreed to try it out.

  The line was out the door. Easily an hour wait. No combination of cheese and dough seemed worth that.

  “He imports his fresh mozzarella from Italy,” Scott assured me. “And a coal-fired oven makes the crust perfect every time. I met the owner’s son, Vince, while mountain biking in Highbridge after I moved back from Chicago years ago. My first time here, Vince had me try the artichoke pizza, and after living in Chicago, I turned him down. Because artichokes don’t belong on pizzas.”

  “Where I come from, we put artichokes, avocados, banana, even kimchi on our pizzas.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  I laughed. “Did you just make a face about bananas and kimchi?”

  “I did.” He smiled playfully. “Stuff like that will get you banned from a Chicago pizzeria.”

  Minutes later, one of the guys behind the counter spotted Scott and motioned for us to come over.

  “Hey, good to see you,” the man said. He was a burly guy, wearing a too-tight black henley dusted with pizza flour.

  “Vince, this is Kate. It’s her first time experiencing New York pizza.”

  Vince’s eyes lit up. “Where you been hiding?”

  “LA.”

  He grinned. “Then you don’t know pizza. Not yet anyway. I’ll have something special for you in a couple of minutes, okay?”

  True to his promise, ten minutes later he handed us a warm, boxed pizza, handcrafted by his seventy-two-year-old dad, the owner. The pizza was normally priced at thirty dollars, but Vince insisted it was on the house.

  We tried to find a seat in the dining room, but it was so packed that people were standing in the aisles digging into their pizzas.

  “I know a better place to go. Not far from here,” Scott said as we snaked through the line and out the door. We walked a few more blocks, then stopped at a six-story redbrick apartment building. “Welcome to the best place to eat the titan of all pizzas.”

  “Here?” I stared, unconvinced, at the nondescript building.

  “You’ll see.”

  As we embarked on the hike upstairs, I wondered if I should be going with him. Where was the line between a collegial dinner and a date? I didn’t want to give him the wrong impression of why I was there. Or have to explain later why I went to a stranger’s apartment with Scott Jameson. But everything about it felt friendly, just colleagues on a mini-adventure after a long day.

  “It’s my cousin’s apartment. But he’s always traveling,” he said, unlocking the door to a beautifully decorated apartment whose walls were lined with photographs and eclectic art.

  He stepped over to a colorful fish tank filled with graceful fish shaped like small disks and dropped some food pellets into the water.

  “You can probably guess that he runs an art gallery.”

  I had never seen anything like it before. The living room seemed to vibrate with energy, with pieces that ran the gamut from an Italian tapestry to a little boy’s painting of a boat.

  I followed him into the kitchen, where he opened the floor-to-ceiling window. “Our dining room awaits,” he said, motioning outside.

  A fire escape.

  Stepping onto the steel platform hovering eighty feet above the sidewalk in the warm summer air immediately reminded me of the balcony scene in West Side Story or the fire escapes across the courtyard in Rear Window.

  From this oasis in the city, we could hear everything: the leaves rustling in the wind, glasses clinking and laughter floating up from a nearby restaurant, and people murmuring as they walked on the street below. The rumbling city I thought I knew suddenly had a hushed, magical quality. Even the honking cars in the distance sounded like they might be the strains of some kind of otherworldly music.

  “Wow” was the only word I could manage.

  Scott pulled out a narrow runner rug tucked under the window and rolled it out on the steel-grate floor.

  “These are the best seats in the house,” he said, gesturing to the carpeted floor.

  We sat on the carpet, opened up the pizza box, and dug into heaven. He was right about it being one of the titans of pizza. Every bite was a punch of flavor. While we inhaled it, Scott told me about the next season of his sh
ow, which would have him heading out across the globe again next month. On camera, he was smart, funny even, and he was surprisingly the same in real life.

  “What’s left to cover?” I said, digging into a second slice. “You’ve already dodged Taliban bullets in Afghanistan, scuba dived in the Red Sea, and wasn’t that you who did a live shot from the top of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco?”

  “With permission,” he said with a laugh. “I’m not like one of those daredevils who snuck up there last month with GoPros and got in trouble.”

  “That didn’t make your stomach churn having to report from so high up there?”

  “Probably the best view anywhere. If you remember, we got those impossible shots of all those whales breaching. That’s why I love what we get to do every day. Showing people what the world looks like.”

  “What’s next then?”

  “One of the things on the list is to rappel down Mystery Falls in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It’s pitch dark, and we’re going to need close to two thousand feet of rope rigged at just the right angles. Plus, handheld flashes and flash guns. But I want viewers to feel the scale of it. From inside these caves, every sound—every sight—seems larger than life.”

  “That seems like a huge adrenaline rush. Today’s story was on the opposite end of the scale.”

  “It is. But a lot of what we reporters do is report on the flaws, the unfairness, the bad decisions. Anyone watching TV news might think all we humans do is make mistakes. But this story is a chance to show that’s not all there is.”

  “What’s curious to me is that they’re giving to everyone. They’re not deciding who’s worthy or not. They’re just giving to complete and total strangers.”