“Luis, my package. It’s still inside.” He handed me the key and headed for the garbage disposal. I slipped back in, grabbed my package, and ever so gently swiped the spare keys off the hall credenza. I tossed the master key back to Luis, and returned to my apartment, feeling just a little guilty.
I set the package down on my coffee table, grabbed a Diet Coke, and headed straight back to Mr. Rudkus’s apartment.
Mr. Rudkus’s desk was positioned directly under a large casement window framing a sliver of the East River. The light was extraordinary for a city apartment, thanks to its position perched atop a granite cliff. If you could snare a Tudor City apartment just south of the United Nations, the view was golden. The current residents, I’m sure, had no memory of the turn-of-the-century tenements, slums, and slaughterhouses that originally lined First Avenue. I imagined Mr. Rudkus spending numerous hours filling out his ledgers in this very spot, back when Tudor City was truly the urban utopia it set out to be. The tree-lined sanctuary hovering over Second Avenue was home to well-groomed gardens, lively playgrounds, and a host of cozy restaurants. I opened his day planner, the object of my curiosity, and perused his scheduled activities for December, 2010. True to form, he had honored his part of the agreement. The calendar was packed with plans. Drinks with friends, the movies, senior functions at the YWCA. The upcoming month of January told the same story.
As I had hoped, and as I had been promised, nothing in his planner indicated imminent death. The details of his life could trip up the casual observer, and that’s exactly how he wanted it. “Remember, tell them I’m coming home. That’s your first job.”
I was jolted out of my reverie by the buzz of the intercom. My Coke upended and fizzled its way down the side of the desk. Like a trained seal, I made a beeline for the door and pressed the buzzer. Not a smart move. Why not just announce myself to the caller? I was just about to release the button, when I overheard Luis’s voice on the other end of the intercom.
“Silly me. I pressed the buzzer out of habit. Please take the keys and go on up. The fridge, it’s clean.” I heard feet clicking across stone and the thud of the elevator landing in the lobby. This time Luis’s voice came through sounding an awful lot like an angry Ricky Ricardo. “Are you crazy, Miss M? Mr. Rudkus’s cousin, she’s here with a real estate agent. You get out of there.”
I released the button faster than a handle on a hot skillet. I had about three seconds to disappear. I grabbed my Diet Coke and fled for the door. I turned the lock just as the elevator was opening. Taking two giant steps sideways, I slid silently into my own apartment.
I had heard volumes about the Rudkus clan. Most stories included a revolving door of prep schools, followed by long summers abroad, financed by a family real estate business. “Flip, flip, flip. Never made sense to me.” Mr. Rudkus’s paltry ledgers supported his Depression-era mentality, and, despite his apparent lack of funds, he was convinced his family was ready to pounce. In all fairness, I had been warned by Mr. Rudkus to expect an onslaught. “Oh, they’ll come at the slightest hint of trouble.”
I dashed for my kitchen, grabbed a juice glass, and propped it up against the wall. Nothing. I poured out the remnants of my mug and repeated the same routine. I caught some muffled sounds before trying a location further down the room. Balancing on the back of my couch, about midway up the wall, allowed for a few snippets of conversation.
“Cash deal in two weeks.” That’s all I could make out. A cash deal before the end of the year? A pipe dream, given the economy, but who was I to argue? As Mr. Rudkus had predicted, the wheels were in motion, and his failing health was the starting gun. That was my cue.
I collapsed into the sofa and dialed Luis’s cell.
“I can’t talk, Miss M. You’ll get me in trouble.”
“Luis, something is wrong. Mr. Rudkus is not even dead, and his apartment is up for sale. I didn’t even know Mr. Rudkus owned! In fact, now that I think about it, his ledgers had no expense for rent or maintenance. Don’t you think that’s strange?”
“Miss M., I told you. I’m not good with numbers.”
“Fine Luis. Where’s Martin these days?”
“Some fancy place on Wall Street, with lots of names.”
LUIS was more than happy to unload me onto his nephew, Martin. I punched in the number and worked through the automated phone tree at Kravits, Klein, and Couchman, until I got to Ramos. Martin, the eager new recruit, picked up on the first ring.
“Commercial investments. Martin Ramos speaking. How may I help you?”
“Martin, this is Susan Miles— Mr. Rudkus’s neighbor.”
“Is this about an investment? I’d be happy to introduce you to our portfolio of financial products.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m broke. But Mr. Rudkus needs a favor, and he said you’re good with numbers.”
“Sure thing, how about if I come by this weekend? I owe Mr. Rudkus a visit.”
“No, it has to be now.”
“Miss Miles.” Martin whispered into the receiver, and I imagined him crouched low in his cubicle. “I’ve only been here two months. I can’t just up and leave.”
“You get a lunch break, right?”
“Yeah, but I eat at my desk.”
“Tell your boss you’re coming uptown to meet a client for lunch. He’ll be very impressed.”
I filled Martin in on the events of the morning, putting considerable emphasis on the two-hundred fifty dollar graduation check he’d received from Mr. Rudkus, no more than seven months ago. My pleading eventually wore him down, and we made plans to meet at my place at noon. That gave me about two hours to massage my conscience. I swore to Mr. Rudkus I wouldn’t make my next move, but it was inevitable. I needed to see him one last time.
I BUNDLED up like an Iditarod racer and headed west. Droplets of snow hung in the air as I weaved my way through a dozen Salvation Army Santas. I caught the 6 train up to Mount Sinai and headed straight for the nurses’ station.
As luck would have it, I spotted a physician right off.
“Excuse me, Doctor. May I have word?”
“Pfizer rep? Sorry, but I’ve got a house full today.” He jammed a chart in the door sleeve and reached for the antiseptic dispenser. His body language seemed impenetrable, but I had something up my sleeve. Tears. Real ones, too. They were surprisingly easy to conjure up, given Mr. Rudkus’s impending death. I threw in a snort for good measure and was hustled immediately into the doctors’ lounge.
“You are?”
“Susan Miles. I need to see Mr. Rudkus.” I accepted the tissue and dabbed at my eyes.
“Mr. Rudkus. Quite an interesting fellow. He drove the kitchen crew crazy with his requests for higher quality meat.” He smiled softly. “On the upside, his lungs cleaned up beautifully.”
“That’s the problem. It seems he’s gone to hospice. Only family can visit, so I’ll need a doctor’s permission.”
“Hospice. I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.” The doctor appeared genuinely baffled as he flipped through a stack of papers. “I don’t see anything unusual in the chart. Unfortunately, at his age, recovery can be fleeting. I’m sure his family felt it was the right decision.”
“Please, Doctor, eighty is the new sixty.”
“That may be, but Mr. Rudkus is a hundred and two.”
Words, my reliable friends, evaporated faster than the tears on my cheeks. Thousands upon thousands of words to choose from, dictionaries filled with innumerable variations, yet they ran off my tongue and dribbled down my chin, leaving me without a proper response.
“Oh,” was all I could muster.
The doctor mumbled on about the gruesome effects of aging, allowing me a second to regain some semblance of composure. Mr. Rudkus had lied. Or had he? It’s not as though the movie theatre carded seniors. And frankly, I had no idea what a hundred and two looked like. A number that high was usually reserved for fevers or heat waves. The question, the hard question, was whether he had lied about something
else. In the end, I went with my gut. Life was the issue, not age, and regardless of what happened next, I felt as though I had delivered on at least part of my promise. I had announced his intended return with conviction. Tie a yellow ribbon, fellow Tudor City inhabitants, Mr. Rudkus will be coming home.
And home was where I needed to be, since it was too late to cancel Martin. I sprang for a cab and arrived just in time to meet Martin in the lobby. I rehashed the morning, leaving out my momentary lapse at the hospital.
“Let me get this straight. Mr. Rudkus is broke, but fears his relatives are after his nest egg.” Decked out in his interview suit, Martin embodied the naivety of youth. Trusting and green.
“That’s right.”
“And as of two weeks ago, he thought he was coming home from the hospital.”
“Right again.”
“So when did he send you this package?”
“Package?”
Martin pushed the package across my coffee table. “I recognize the handwriting from my graduation check.”
“Oh my gosh, the package.” As it was getting increasingly difficult to remember my role in Mr. Rudkus’s final affairs, I had forgotten the package. I tore at the brown wrapping, tossed the box aside and handed Martin the contents of the package. Another green-and-white speckled ledger. It took about twenty minutes for Mr. Rudkus’s worthy investment to pay off.
“Holy shit. This ledger itemizes his income.” Martin loosened his tie, whipped out a Blackberry, and worked his thumbs at break neck pace.
“Susan, the guy is worth millions. I don’t know what the hell he was telling people, but Mr. Rudkus is rolling in it.” He laughed with sheer delight as he ran through the numbers.
“Remember his obsession with meat? It’s all here.” Martin pulled out some yellowed papers and a tintype photo from the box. “He owned a slaughter house between First and Second Avenues, right below this building. He didn’t sell when Tudor City was constructed. He traded his property for part ownership in the entire complex. That’s him in the photo under the Rudkus Meat sign.”
“Well, I’ll be darned. That’s why the ledgers didn’t include a line for rent. Martin, you’re a genius!” I reached out to give Martin a pat on the back, but he was shaking his head violently like a dog out of water. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“His family. Mr. Rudkus thought they were after his money.”
“Well yeah, but the point seems moot. At his age, their inheritance is inevitable.”
“Half the inheritance was inevitable. But all of the inheritance is a sure thing before January first, 2014.”
“You’ve lost me, Martin.” I squinted, as if I was listening with my eyes. I had practiced this look for Mr. Rudkus, hoping it would come in handy. Feigning confusion, when you know the answer, is harder than you think.
“During the Bush administration, Congress raised the estate-tax exemptions on inheritances. That law’s due to expire. The new law doesn’t come into effect until January first, 2014. If Mr. Rudkus dies within the next few days, his estate will not be taxed. Not a penny of it.” Martin handed me the ledger. “Susan, don’t you see? He sent you the ledger as proof of his family’s guilt. By forcing him into hospice, his relatives are withdrawing medical attention in an attempt to hasten his death. The motive is in their timing.”
“Martin, he’s been in hospice care for a few days already. What if it’s too late?”
“I’m dialing the police now.”
And he did. Of course, Martin’s frantic call to the police came too late. That’s exactly how Mr. Rudkus wanted it.
Martin left me curled up on my couch with a pile of soggy tissues.
“Can I get you anything else before I leave, Susan?”
I pointed to the stack of 78’s Mr. Rudkus had given me before going to the hospital.
“Put on ‘The Entertainer’ by Scott Joplin.” The twenties ragtime theme from The Sting seemed fitting, as I recalled the morning Mr. Rudkus presented his elaborate scheme to choreograph his own death.
“MR. Rudkus, explain it to me one more time.” I held my coffee cup for a refill.
“It’s simple. My money, all of it, is going to charity. My family will contest the will and insist I was not of sound mind. By framing them for my murder, any attempts to dissolve the document will only increase their guilt.”
“Where do I come in?”
“You must alert the players in my life that my intent was to live. The police will investigate, and their conclusion must be airtight. The authorities must believe in my desire to live.”
“But you don’t want to live.”
“My time has come. If my medications are halted, my days will be numbered.”
“If I help, isn’t it assisted suicide?”
“Technically. But it’s my choice, and your participation in an otherwise illegal activity will be masked by layers of diversion. I’ve edited the ledgers to tell a story. I’ve maintained the social calendar of a debutante. The graduation check was planned to garner Martin’s participation. The package is important. Remember to reveal the package at the right moment.”
“Do you have to do it now? Can’t it wait?”
“No Susan, it can’t wait.”
I rose from the table to wash our mugs. Really, just an excuse to hide my tears. I was thinking how lonely I’d be each morning, when I heard my own thoughts echoed. “Susan, I’m going to miss this, too.”
A POET’S JUSTICE
Eileen Dunbaugh
SENIDA leaned over the old lady’s knobby shoulders, surrounding the fragile limbs as carefully as if they were bone china. Together, they sifted through the pictures in the box, Senida helping Maddie to hold each one, as she tried to recall who it was and where it had been taken.
“Peter,” she prompted. “Astoria Park.”
They had a guest today, but with her first expressions of delight in seeing her great-niece over, Maddie’s eyes and hands had wandered back to her picture box.
“You must do this for hours,” the niece said.
Senida nodded without resentment, knowing that life, tentative as the fluttering of a butterfly, could not keep hold of her employer for much longer.
The relative, who’d given her name as Ellen, picked up Maddie’s tea service and headed for the kitchen. Senida started to get up too, but Ellen urged her to sit.
“I used to be requisitioned to wash up here all the time when I was a kid,” she said. “Aunt Maddie would tie these giant aprons around me and my sister and leave us to it. The cracks in the sink are deeper now, but everything else is still pretty much the same.”
The tension in Senida’s chest eased a little, but then the phone rang, and she picked up to a familiar sharp voice.
“For me?” Ellen said, coming back into the room and taking the handset from her. “Jean?”
She lowered her voice.
“You can’t imagine how strange it is to be here. Remember how all these places in Maddie’s neighborhood seemed so full of mystery when we were kids coming in from the suburbs? When I drove up today, all I could see from La Guardia— all the way to Ditmars and down into Maddie’s neighborhood by the Hell Gate— was one row of brick two-stories after another, each with its same tiny patch of garden and plaster Virgin. As similar as Monopoly houses and lined up just like them.”
Senida had kept very still, trying to catch what was said, but an amplification device had been installed on the phone for Maddie’s benefit, and it projected the voice on the other end so startlingly that Ellen jerked back from the receiver.
“Will you come down to earth, Ellen! They could be robbing Maddie blind. How is Maddie anyway?”
The back of their visitor’s neck reddened, like mercury rising.
“Maddie’s fine,” she said. “Look, I can’t talk now. I’ll call you back later.”
When the phone was back in its cradle, a guilty glance from Ellen found its way to where Senida perched behind Maddie.
“The su
nflowers are still here— well, not the same ones, of course,” came Ellen’s raised voice a moment later. “My sister and I used to play tag around their giant stalks. We’d be feeling all confined in these silly starched dresses girls used to wear. “Sorry, I’m blabbering away,” she said, when Senida appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Is there a towel?” She held up a dripping plate.
Senida opened the door to the basement and pulled a cloth from the rod on the back of it. She was about to close it again, when Ellen latched onto her arm, and leaned forward to peer down the stairs.
“Oh my god, I just remembered. Aunt Maddie had a tenant down there once, who owned a player piano. We thought it was the most amazing thing, like ghost hands were flying over the keys.”
“Yes, well, it’s there still,” Senida said, “along with so many other things, almost you cannot move.”
Her dish suddenly deposited on the counter, Ellen started for the steep stairs.
“Na, na,” Senida said, pointing to her heels.
Not that a wobbly heel would have stopped the old lady. Senida had been told that, before she arrived, Maddie had climbed that flight of stairs alone, hauling laundry. It was only after she slipped on a patch of ice that her lawyer, Antonelli, had taken over.
“And not one single family member came!” Antonelli’s wife had whispered to Senida on the way back from the hospital with Maddie.
Senida had expected Antonelli to feel contempt for Ellen, coming so many months later. But he hadn’t. She’d stood with him while Ellen parked her rental car and, introductions and greetings exchanged, he launched right in to a cheerful account of how he’d used Maddie’s power of attorney, pointing to a step that had been repaired, and to Senida herself, whom he’d hired to be on hand for Maddie’s return.
Senida, meanwhile, had gone for the car’s trunk to get Ellen’s bag. Antonelli had booked a hotel room near the airport for Ellen, but it suddenly occurred to Senida, as they stood there in the kitchen cleaning up, to offer the woman the tiny bedroom next to Maddie’s where she’d been sleeping.
“Then where would you sleep?” Ellen said. “From what I understand, that little apartment upstairs is shut up and in pretty bad shape.”
Fresh Slices Page 19
