When Harry showed up three days later, tanned, tired, dirty, and bug-bitten, Lucy couldn’t help but feel a low glimmer of satisfaction when she told him she was moving to LA for a while. “And of course you’re welcome to the loft, as always,” she added, handing him an ice-crusted shot glass of his favorite vodka. Harry had a mouse-sized fourth floor East Village walk-up, a tres chic locale but lacking air conditioning, with a tub in the kitchen and toilet down the hall, so staying at Lucy’s loft, with or without her there, was like vacation for him. “And you don’t even have to deal with the dogster. He’s going with me, eh what, Claud? He’ll be thrilled to see you when you come visit.”
“Not so fast, kiddo,” Harry said, and knocked back the shot. “Whooo, that’s good.” She poured him another. “Aside from the fact that I think you’re crazy to go out there—LA is an inferno, Luce, and the TV industry inhabits the ninth circle—I’ve got my own out-of-town gig going. As it turns out I’m on assignment in Florida for a while.”
“What? What kind of assignment? You said you were done with Florida for now.”
“Well, actually I volunteered for surveillance duty on a couple of illicit landing strips in the jungle not far from Snake Creek. My cover is I’m doing a piece on the Everglades National Park for an airline magazine. But there is a ton of dope coming into the area by plane all the time, so I’ll have my hands full. Who knows, I might even stop a few hundred pounds of coke or junk from finding its nasty way up here. But aside from that and the writing gig, the real reason I set it up is I’ve come up with a plan. I’ve been contemplating that Walmart situation I told you about, with the million bucks, and I think I know a way to get at the money without—“
“You can’t be serious, Harry. I’ve never been in a Walmart but I imagine there’s probably fifty tons of concrete sitting on top of your mythical bags of money, plus security up the wazoo.”
“Exactly. Security. As in seriously underpaid dudes in blue shirts with tin badges who would probably be very happy to get ten per cent of my gross in exchange for getting me floor and fixture plans, and maybe running some cover, so that when I dig my tunnel from the swamp behind the back of the building I won’t hit any cables, pipes, or people. I checked it out. There’s a thick stand of jungle back there and the tunnel will only have to be about sixty or seventy feet long.”
“A seventy foot tunnel under a Walmart superstore? Harry, you’re nuts. This sounds like a really dumb-ass plan.”
“You know what, Luce? Believe it or not I’m sick of being broke all the time. Sick of living in that overpriced rathole on East Seventh. I need a leg up and those guys weren’t bullshitting me. The money’s there for the taking, it’s not stealing, and I’m the only person on the planet who knows about it. Excepting you, of course.”
“It’s a hare-brained scheme, Harry, and you know it. Besides, what am I going to do about the loft? Who can I get to stay here? I depend on you for this. You know I can’t just advertise for a subletter. Not with the landlord situation.”
“Hey, you’re going to be working in TV. Making major money, right? If I were you I’d just leave it empty. You can afford six hundred a month for the peace of mind.”
She hadn’t thought of that. Maybe it was true. She just wasn’t used to that kind of spare cash. “Well, I’m going to make a few calls, see if I can round up someone trustworthy. If not I guess I could just lock the door and walk away.”
“Ask Jane downstairs to keep an eye on the place. She’s kind of a friend, right? But I would take all your valuables and personal stuff. You never know what that fucking landlord might try.”
Soon they cut the chatter and commenced with peeling each other’s clothing off, a ritual that had only improved with time. By now, two years into it, they knew each other’s hot spots, when and how to hit them. They spent that night together, and had great sex. Twice, with a vodka break between. Not at all bad for a fortysomething man and a thirtysomething girl. Even if she did kinda watch the clock, wondering. If her time was running out. Time for what? Love and marriage and a baby carriage? Who knew any more these days?
Whatever Harry had in the way of failings, he was a wonderful lover and had been since their very first nights together in Jamaica. Lucy suspected his unpredictable availability had something to do with it—that hoary old cliché, absence makes the heart grow fonder, having some bearing on the situation. He was definitely absent.
Come morning Harry went off to his East Village dump to prep for his own incipient departure back to the Florida swamps, and Lucy got on the phone to chase after subletters while breaking out her three suitcases and two duffelbags, having decided to do a major reassessment of her worldly goods, so that what she took to California would be all that she held dear, and what she left behind would be the basics.
Everything else she bagged for throwaway, including the collected back issues of SCRUB Magazine. By the time she was ready to go a week later she had sixteen bags of trash, five overstuffed suitcases, and a loft that had never looked better, empty of everything but furniture, a couple of prints, her five-year-old dinosaur desktop pc—drained of all her files—and the essentials in the kitchen and bathroom.
She never did find anyone she trusted enough to sublet or loft-sit. In the first week of May, with a signed hard copy of her $2500 per week X Dames contract in her carry-on and a back-up in her laptop, on the day before her departure to LA she ambled downstairs and after walking Claud around the block, she went into the building next door. She tied Claud up and ascended to the second floor, where the bad cop landlord, Itzak Lascovich, ran his business, SeaBee Fabric Merchants, out of a grubby little office in the corner of a dingy, fluorescent-lit, six-thousand square-foot loft crammed with chaotically-heaped twelve-foot rolls of cheap fabric. He dealt primarily with wholesalers in Africa, he claimed, but it was strange—in all her years in the loft she had never actually seen any fabric go into, or out of, his place of business. Only him, scurrying about in his rodent-like fashion.
She picked her way through the stacks of rolled fabric until she could see him through the dirty glass door of his office. He was greenish under the twittering lights, barking at someone on the phone, pushing his greasy white hair back with a clawlike hand. She tapped on the glass. He looked up, waved her in, continued barking. She opened the door. His wife, twice his size, thin brown hair pulled back tight, gaudy lipstick in place, tree trunk legs nicely stockinged and crossed, never said a word, sat there vigilant as she did all day every day. She glared at Lucy briefly, then returned her gaze to the middle distance. Lascovich waved at the one chair not covered by papers, fabric samples, his skinny ass or his wife’s fat one. Lucy sat, feeling rather sassy in spite of the grim vibe in the grim little room. How they could spend fifty or sixty hours a week in this hole she had never figured out. “Goodbye,” he said to the phone, then hung up. “So Miss Lucy Ripken it is the third of May you haf my rent?”
“I do, yes.” She put the check on his desk. He picked it up, looked at it, frowned, and shook his head. “Sometime you will pay market value, Miss Lucy Ripken.”
“Not this year.” She smiled at him. “Don’t forget it was you that initiated the lawsuit, Izzy.”
“You are illegal. The whole lot of you. And I will get my buildink back sometime.”
“Well, maybe so, but not today. Oh by the way,” she went on, hoping her casual tone would carry the moment. She had decided that though it would be risky to reveal her plans, it would be better than having Jane spring it on him after she was gone. This way, at least, she would have some idea of his response—and she could then deal accordingly. “I wanted to let you know that I’m going to be traveling for a while, and the place won’t be occupied. But I will be paying rent, through Jane Aronstein, so you don’t need to—”
“You can’t go away and keep my floor for you to come back and—”
“Of course I can, Itzak. I will be paying the rent and—”
“If the place is not occupied th
en I am having it.”
“I don’t think so, Mr.—”
“I don’t care what you are thinking, I am—”
“This conversation is over, Iz. I’ll have my lawyer call you.”
“No. I will be taking the place when you—”
“Good day, Mrs. Lascovich,” she said, and breezed out. Then stormed down the stairs. “Damn,” she said to Claud as she unhooked his leash from the banister, slammed out the door, and stood on the Broadway sidewalk, trying to collect herself. “God damn, pup,” she said. “That guy is so infuriating.”
She went into her own building, hiked up to her loft, and got on the phone with Jack Harshman, who’d been her legal pit bull on matters residential since the day she moved into the loft and Lascovich tried to evict her.
Later, after hours, she put all of her trash out on the street in black plastic bags, and then she did what Harshman had advised. She spent two hundred and fifty dollars to have a locksmith come over and hike up the stairs and change one of the three locks on her door and on the door inside the elevator at the other end of the loft. She gave a set of new keys to her downstairs neighbor Jane, with strict instructions not to let Lascovich or anyone else have them under any circumstances. Jane had been in the building even longer than Lucy so she got it. Lucy pocketed the other set.
After a less-than-rousing overnighter with Harry, whose excessive, mournful vodka drinking rendered him entirely incapable, they left for La Guardia at seven a.m., she with five suitcases and a carry-on containing her camera and laptop. Harry had a single carry-on. His Miami flight left at 9:30, half an hour before Lucy’s L.A. flight. They got their cell numbers and tentative plans to meet organized and said goodbye, Harry’s hangdog, hungover face the unfortunate last image Lucy and the drugged and caged Claud had of him as he forlornly headed off to find his boarding gate. As he disappeared into the crowd charging through the terminal, Lucy found it hard to believe he was actually going to Florida to burrow a tunnel under the back end of a Walmart in search of a plastic bag with a million dollars inside. She, on the other hand, had a contract and a check for $11,000 in her pocket, a one month advance from the producers of the X Dames. They had thrown in the extra thousand in moving expenses, and so after checking her bags, and dishing out a fifty dollar tip to make sure Claud got treated right en route, and doing security, and hitting the latte stand, and grabbing a TIMES from the concourse newsstand, and waiting for half an hour at the gate, Lucy pre-boarded with the gilded gang, and traveled first class for the first time in her life. She was going Hollywood.
CHAPTER TWO
LA A GO GO
By the time the plane touched down at a little past one, LA’s west side morning marine layer had burned off, so Lucy got an eyeful of ocean as they glided into LAX. She badly needed that look at the Pacific, Southern California’s great saving grace, to remind herself that she could actually stand the place for a few months. Especially after suffering through an extended overview, during approach, of the city’s endless, smog-shrouded flats and valleys, where fifteen million or so people went about their daily business, almost all of them in cars. Every time she landed in LA Lucy was appalled by the city’s relentless suburbanization of every inch of land around the myriad mountain ranges that once hemmed it in. Even that sun-baked, forbidding desert terrain east of the San Fernando Valley appeared to be filling up with houses and cars and roads to carry them. But her sweet little soon-to-be home was down there, too, somewhere in the low-rise urban zone hugging the hazy shore between the two dinky piers of Venice and Santa Monica, just a few miles north of the airport.
By two o’clock she had collected her bags and her still-dopey dog. She emerged from baggage claim with a cart piled high, half-dragging Claud behind. Slipping on shades she headed for curbside. The air felt perfect, around seventy degrees. New York was supposedly getting its first heat wave in the coming week. After waiting three anxious minutes she pulled out her cell and was just about to dial Terry’s number when she spotted a bright orange VW bug convertible headed her way. Saved! She should have known. Terry was never late. And Hollywood jackpot or no, Terry was not about to give up on her sweet, funky old car. She’d bought it used in the late 1980s and it had not broken down once since. She pulled up with a wave and a honk, jerked on the parking brake, and jumped out. “Lucy Ripken, you are looking fabulous as usual!”
“Likewise,” Lucy said. They met for a big hug, then stepped back for a better look. “Look at you, Teresa. Wow!” Lucy did a little double take. Teresa had long, shiny red hair, wore low-slung jeans and a short, navel-exposing t-shirt with a picture of Exene Cervenka on the front. She looked better than she had in years.
Teresa smiled. “Well, I never said I wasn’t going to, you know—”
“You had some work done.”
“A little. My eyelids were going south. And a chemical peel, for sun damage.”
“You evil girl. You look twenty-five.”
“What can I say? It’s LA. Over thirty is over the hill around here.”
Lucy held her by the shoulders and took a closer look. “Really, you look wonderful. Whoever it was did a great job.” She paused. “Where do I sign up?”
“Lucy, many a time I heard you swear you would never do the dirty deed.”
“That was then, this is now. No, seriously, I’m not in any rush. Hey, have you met Claud? Teresa MacDonald, meet Claud, the world’s finest poodle.” Terry reached down and patted him as Lucy went on. “He’s still a little loaded from his dog dope. There’s no way he would have gotten in that box without it. Claud, this is my pal Teresa.”
The dog looked up, acknowledged her, then dropped his head. “Luce, you’ve got enough luggage for the grand tour. What’s with all this?” Terry waved at the heap of suitcases.
“Harold convinced me to spring clean before I left. So I did, for the first time in, I think, seven years. I ended up getting rid of half my clothes. This is the other half.”
“What, you’re planning on staying here?” Teresa said. “You’re no LA girl, Lucy. I wouldn’t—“
“No, no, I just emptied out my place is all. I didn’t even sublet it so I must be planning on heading back sooner or later. Or turning bi-coastal.” She grinned. “Hey, I’m going Hollywood, right? I just might need to dress to impress.”
“The only thing that impresses people around here are twenty-year old girls with artificial breasts.”
“It can’t be that bad, Ter.”
“Trust me. It is. The cosmetic surgery industry is taking over the world. Women are even getting their, you know, private parts done.”
“Are you serious?” Lucy made a face. “God, that’s bizarre.”
“To say the least. But hey, it’s LA, where insolent liquor store clerks card women as a come-on. And you know what? It works. Even on a dyed-in-the-acrylic cynic like me. Flattery will get you everywhere.”
Lucy had another look at her, and grinned. “I don’t know if I’d card you, but you could pass for twenty-fivish. Which ain’t bad considering.”
“That I’m four yards short of 40? Don’t remind me.”
“Hey, not to change the subject but I don’t know how we’re ever going to fit all this stuff plus me and the dog in there,” Lucy said, looking at the little car doubtfully.
“Cram, cram, cram, as my Scottish granny used to say about her garden,” Teresa said blithely. “I’ve gotten really good at overloading this baby.”
Ten minutes later, with suitcases piled high in the back seat, and 65-pound Claud flopped in Lucy’s lap, they drove out of the airport and north on Lincoln Boulevard.
“So where is Harold, anyway?” Terry asked a moment later, as they headed down from Westchester towards Marina Del Rey.
Lucy surveyed the scene, one of rampant construction. “God, the last time I drove through here this was all open land.”
“Was is the operative word. This close to the beach and marina, it was way too valuable to leave empty any longer. On
ce Hughes bailed out it was just a matter of time.”
“Right. Anyways, Harold’s in Florida. I think he’s gone completely crazy.” Lucy gave her a shorthand version of Harold’s tunnel scheme.
“Jesus, that does sound a little flaky. I thought he was a serious guy.”
“He is, but—he’s just tired of being broke, he says, and so—” Lucy shrugged.
“Well, I’m with him in that regard,” Terry said. “I mean, if Bobby Schamberg had approached me even last year, I would have laughed in his face. But I, too, got sick of living in crummy apartments and only going out to dinner on somebody else’s dime.”
“I hear you. I just wish Harold had a better plan. Tunneling under a Walmart just seems utterly insane to me. And I told him so. Hey, maybe you can hire him, too,” Lucy said, only half-jokingly.
“I wish, but Bobby wants an all-woman—I should say all-girl—team.” Terry honked. “Hey, move, moron,” she yelled at a slow-moving silver Benz. “He’s a total sleaze, Luce. Bobby, I mean. I did tell you that, right?”
“Yes, I guess you did. But his checks don’t bounce, right?”
“No, they don’t.” Terry said. “You can take that eleven grand to the bank. In fact this is where I have my account.” She pointed at a bank on the left, on one of the streets leading into the Marina. “You want to open an account now?”
“Later, later. I’d like to get to the new place, get the dog settled in, and unpack a little. Okay by you?”
“Of course. I’m only two blocks away, Lucy. We’ll be neighbors.”
“Cool.”
X Dames: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 3) Page 2
