Fresh Slices

by New York Tri-State Chapter of Sisters in Crime

  Isaiah’s looking at the map and clucking his tongue at street names like ‘Francis Lewis Boulevard’ and ‘William Floyd Parkway.’

  He says, “Mon, those two guys signed the Declaration of Independence, and all they get is a couple of streets named after them.”

  “I guess those citizenship classes are good for something,” says Richie.

  “Yeah, he can read a map now,” I say.

  But Isaiah just shakes his head and says, “I wonder what they’d think if they could see what you’ve done to their land, burying the Indian trails under layers of Babylon’s garbage.”

  “And don’t forget that Whitman guy from South Huntington,” I say.

  “Walt Whitman didn’t sign no Declaration. He was a rhymin’ man.”

  “You’re kidding. You mean the Walt Whitman Mall is named after a rapper?”

  Tony chokes back a laugh so hard he almost inhales his sandwich.

  “Wasn’t he some kind of fruitcake or something?” says Richie.

  “He was a transcendental poet,” Tony explains through a mouthful of grilled cheese.

  “Same thing.”

  Clinton Road finally changes to Glen Cove Road, and after a while we’re passing the real deal, mansions with long curved driveways and separate drive-up service entrances in the back.

  We pass the security hut, and the guard buzzes us through the aluminum gates leading to one of those modern castles, where the property taxes alone can run you upwards of three-hundred grand.

  The lawn hasn’t just been mowed, it’s been manicured, hot-combed, and shampooed till it gleams like the Blue Diamond grass at Yankee Stadium. There’s a satellite dish on the roof that looks like it could pull in TV shows from the moons of Saturn, and a Dumpster full of torn-up carpet and freshly-split molding that still smells of raw lumber. I wonder if today’s installation is gonna be one of those change-of-life things, where the owners gut the traditional wood-stained interior and remodel everything in twenty-first century steel and glass, or if they’re the kind of people who do renovations every season, because nothing ever satisfies them, which can really spell trouble for us.

  The lady who answers the door is a skinny blonde with a tight mouth and a pair of designer breasts, size 38C, if I’m any judge.

  “Why didn’t you call?” she says sharply.

  “We did,” says Richie. “We left a message with Mr. Edgehill.”

  “Well, my husband didn’t give me the message,” she says, glaring at us like it’s our fault. Then, Julio walks in and her eyes widen. You’d think he was sporting MS-13 colors and a couple of prison tats, from the way she looks at him.

  “You can’t just show up at a person’s home whenever you feel like it,” she says. “But as long as you’re here, you might as well get to work.”

  Oh, brother. Something tells me this is gonna be a long day, because she’s clearly the type who keeps hovering around all day, until Happy Hour comes around, and she can finally knock back a couple of stiff belts and get the fuck off our case.

  We unload the van and troop into the foyer with our gear. The place is so huge, I take in the high ceiling, arched windows, and tapestries for a full minute, before I notice the grand piano in the living room, right in front of my eyes between a couple of potted palms.

  Of course, Tony’s got to go and piss on it.

  “Man, there’s something creepy about a million-dollar home with no books in it,” he mutters as we go down the hall to the bedroom wing.

  “Maybe they’re all stored on that gizmo,” I say, nodding toward the ginormous flat screen TV in the middle of the entertainment center. “Looks like it’s got enough disk space to back up every TV show ever made.”

  We’re installing a walk-in closet, complete with standing units, outfitted with pull-out compartments, drawers, retractable hooks, and all kinds of space-saving devices that they don’t really need, because the master bedroom is roughly the size of a two-family house. Even the bathroom has a hot tub on a raised platform that’s big enough for six people.

  But we’re here to do a job, and our priorities are as follows: Don’t damage the pieces and keep the walls and rugs clean. But we can’t help noticing certain things, like the private office with the framed M.B.A. on the wall, the half-finished cup of cold coffee on the credenza next to a pile of unpaid bills, and the cigarette butts overflowing from the ashtray that tells anyone with half a brain that the guy who’s paying for all this is burning up the fast lane at some big Wall Street investment firm, where the only honorable way to leave the place is feet first, after having a heart attack at your desk from overwork. Plus, there are so many papers scattered all over the place, it looks like someone’s being murdered in slow motion here.

  Or else drowning in red ink. We move some of the woman’s clothes aside, and a piece of paper falls to the floor. It’s a bill for one of her jackets, a black-and-white checkered number that costs— Jesus. Eight-and-a-half grand.

  Richie tries to warn me, exactly one millisecond before a smooth white hand swoops in and snatches the paper out of my hand.

  “Do you always go through other people’s pockets when you’re on a job?” she asks.

  “I wasn’t—”

  “And you’d better get back to work— that is, if you ever want to work in this town again.”

  I can feel my face heating up, even though I haven’t done anything wrong.

  Richie comes to my rescue. “Ma’am, the contract states that this closet should have been cleared out before we got here.”

  She flicks her head at him.

  “All right, then. Clear it out. You can lay the clothes on the bed in the guest bedroom. And be careful not to wrinkle anything. I just had everything dry-cleaned.”

  And she marches out of the room, like a four-star general who’s got more important things to do than dress down a couple of buck privates.

  Great. Now she’s got us clearing the crap out of her closet, too.

  We’re trying to sink the screws for the fifteen-foot brass closet pole, but the closet space is a modern addition, and the wall’s got no studs in that location, just a half-inch of Sheetrock that couldn’t support a straw hat on a six-penny nail, so we’ve got to build a floor-to-ceiling column to anchor everything.

  I go out to the van and set up the sawhorses, so I can cut the lumber down to size, when the woman calls out from the patio, “Oh, boy.”

  Boy? Is she serious with that shit? Then, I see she’s talking to Julio.

  “I need you, uh, por favor . . . un momento.”

  Julio nods, and she leads him through the bushes to the other side of the house. I catch Richie’s eye, and he gives me the Bay Ridge salute, fisting his own arm, while the both of us are chuckling at the old-school porn scenario of the hired help sticking it to the lady of the house.

  At least we can plug in a radio out here, so we can catch the game.

  I switch on the air pump and wait for the pressure to build, so I can spray a thin web of gummy, red contact-cement on the lumber and the underside of the mica. I do the sides first and file down the edges, till they’re flush with the one-by-three, so I can lay the finished sheet on top. The spidery threads of red cement bond immediately.

  I can see Julio’s busy hauling trash bags to the Dumpster and tossing out boxes of shredded paper.

  A newsbreak cuts in on the radio: a third-grade teacher found a loaded .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol in a student’s desk at North Elementary School in Brentwood. Richie says the whole town should just be fenced off, and everybody inside should be rounded up, tagged, and sent back to El Salvador, or wherever the hell they came from, when all of a sudden the woman appears in the sliding doorway.

  “Aren’t you done with that yet?” she says in a voice that would crack glass. She stands there a moment, staring at us as if she’s surprised that we’re still here, then turns and disappears inside the house.

  I go back to what I’m doing, filing away the flash so there’s no
lip, then put on some pink rubber kitchen gloves and start scrubbing off the excess contact cement with a rag and some lacquer thinner. I asked the boss for some heavy black industrial gloves and a breathing mask, but the cheap dickwad wouldn’t spring for them. At least I’m doing this out in the open where the fumes can’t concentrate, because whenever I work with the chemicals for more than a couple hours, I wake up the next morning with the taste of that crap coming up the back of my throat.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spot Julio dragging a heavy sack through the bushes and tossing it on the trash heap, just as the Dumpster boys show up to cart it all away. It must have been pretty heavy, ’cause he looks bushed.

  “You look like a fairy, wearing those things,” says Richie, needling me about the pink gloves.

  I tell him, “Yeah, well maybe the women you go out with like guys with rough hands, but the women I go out with like guys with smooth hands, you know?”

  “Oh, you need them to get laid. Why didn’t you say so?” He’s always busting my balls about the pink gloves, but what can I say? I don’t want my fingers to end up looking like someone gave me a manicure with a rusty cheese grater.

  We keep hitting snags, because, like I said, the closet space is made of cardboard, so it’s pretty hard to hang any weight-bearing hardware, and everything’s got to be just so. Meanwhile, Julio keeps disappearing with the Soft Scrub and rags. What the hell is he up to?

  I go down the hall, and find him wiping the floor around the tub and toilet bowl with a damp rag.

  “And when you’re done with that, you can empty the trash,” says the woman, drying her feet with an embroidered towel.

  She stops short when she sees me.

  “You’re supposed to use the other bathroom,” she says. Her eyes flit to the trashcan. There’s a pile of bloody chick rags ripening in the garbage, ranging from pale red on top to dark smoky red beneath.

  Well, that explains a lot.

  I head back to the master bedroom.

  It’s past five-thirty when the boss calls to check on us, and asks if we want to put in the overtime and stay on site until we get the job done, or pack everything up and have to drive all the way back out here tomorrow and set up all over again. It’s unanimous: we’ll stay and get it done tonight.

  The lady actually surprises us with a couple of pizzas and soda. But it’s Domino’s, for god’s sake. We’ve got more Italians per square mile on Long Island than anyplace else in the country, and she sends out for freaking Domino’s. But hey, we appreciate the gesture. We finish our dinner break just as the sun is going down, and the Yankees finish off the Orioles with a broken-bat dribbler up the middle. Jeter snags it and throws to first, to end the game.

  By nine, Julio’s washing up in the sink, turning the water a rusty brown, and that hot tub is starting to look mighty good to us, but we keep working.

  It takes us another hour to finish the job, pack up the tools, and vacuum up the sawdust from the holes we drilled in the particle board, and the lady’s husband still isn’t home yet. Hasn’t even tried to call, as far as I can tell.

  She inspects her new closet and thanks us for all our hard work.

  “Thanks again for dinner,” says Isaiah.

  She smiles, and her face relaxes for the first time since we got here.

  There’s something in that smile— maybe it’s something about the presence of all these strange men in her bedroom, that thing that’s unavoidable whenever men in work boots are around high class women like her. I think that’s a bit of it. And maybe some of it’s— what, embarrassment? That we can read the signs that her marriage is on the rocks? Or that we’re such lousy stand-ins for the guy who’s supposed to be here? Or maybe she’s just glad to finally get rid of us.

  Because any idiot can see that the poor schmuck is working himself to death to pay for the place, and he isn’t even here to enjoy it.

  Christ, you couldn’t pay me to live like they do. A dollar isn’t worth that kind of aggravation. You know?

  We go out for beers after, and Julio starts off with a double shot of Andean rum, like he needed something to steady his nerves, then he buys the first two rounds.

  “Thought you were saving up,” I say.

  “Oh, the lady, she give me a tip for doing some extra work for her,” he says, flashing a pair of twenties.

  “Really?” says Richie. “’Cause it looked like you did a lot more than forty bucks worth of work, bro.”

  “Yeah, she sure stiffed you,” I say.

  But that’s the rich for you. They think they can get away with anything.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Manhattan author CYNTHIA BENJAMIN is a television and feature film writer. She created a daytime soap opera for CBS and wrote twelve children’s books. Her mystery stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and the Murder New York Style anthology, and will appear shortly in Family Matters, the newest mystery anthology from the New York / Tri-State Chapter of Sisters in Crime.

  SUSAN CHALFIN has published articles on mystery gaming for The Daily News and essays on the darker side of parenting for Big Apple Parent. Her short story, “Trinity,” appeared in MystericalE. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and two daughters.

  FRAN BANNIGAN COX is a visual artist and writer. She holds an M.A. from Hunter College in New York. Her artwork has been exhibited in one-person and group shows in New York, Boston, and other major cities. She is the co-author of A Conscious Life, published by Conari Press in Berkeley, California. Her short stories have appeared in the anthology Murder New York Style as well as in the webzine Mysterical-e, and will appear shortly in Family Matters, the newest mystery anthology from the New York / Tri-State Chapter of Sisters in Crime. Fran holds a 500-hour teaching certification from The Yoga Alliance. Yoga, she says, keeps it all together.

  LAURA K. CURTIS lives in Westchester, NY, with her husband and two madcap Irish Terriers, who’ve taught her how easily love can co-exist with the desire to kill. She’s the author of romantic suspense novels Twisted and Lost. She can be found at her website Laura K. Curtis, at Women of Mystery, and on Twitter.

  EILEEN DUNBAUGH’s fiction has previously appeared in the Mystery Writer’s of America anthology The Prosecution Rests, edited by Linda Fairstein; in the historical mystery anthology Somewhere in Crime, from the Central Coast Mystery Writers; and will appear shortly in Family Matters, the newest mystery anthology from the New York / Tri-State Chapter of Sisters in Crime.

  LOIS KARLIN writes fiction and memoir. In addition to her professional career, writing and publishing online user assistance and web copy, she enjoys juggling a small publishing house that allows her the pleasure of introducing readers to unique and vivid voices. “The Understudy” was her first published short story, inspired by reminiscences told around a neighbor’s campfire by seasoned veterans of the FDNY. She lives in New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley. You can find Lois at Women of Mystery and Twitter @loiskarlin.

  LYNNE LEDERMAN, PH.D., has a doctorate degree in molecular biology and virology from the Cornell University Graduate School of Medical Sciences. She is a widely-published medical, science, and health writer, and an award-winning printmaker. She is using her experience in the cutthroat world of scientific research and the biotechnology industry to write her mystery series, which features scientist and amateur detective Nanette Newman.

  CATHERINE MAIORISI lives in New York City and often writes under the watchful eye of Edgar Allan Poe, in Edgar’s Café near her apartment. While seeking an agent for her series starring NYPD Detective Chiara Corelli and her sidekick, Detective P.J. Parker, Catherine is plotting a new series and writing short stories. She published “The Fan Club” in The Best Lesbian Romances of 2014, and another story will appear shortly in Family Matters: Murder New York Style, the upcoming anthology from the New York / Tri-State Chapter of Sisters in Crime.

  TERRIE FARLEY MORAN is the author of Well Read, Then Dead, the first cozy mystery in the Read ’Em and Eat ser
ies published by Berkley Prime Crime. Her short mystery fiction has been published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and various anthologies, including the Mystery Writers of America anthology, Crimes by Moonlight. Her work has been shortlisted twice for Best American Mystery Stories. Terrie’s website is www.terriefarleymoran.com, and you can find her blogging amid the grand banter of an eclectic group of writers known as the Women of Mystery.

  Before turning to fiction, LEIGH NEELY enjoyed a career in newspapers and magazines as a writer and an editor. She currently works with writing partner, Jan Powell, on books with romance, suspense, and paranormal elements using the pseudonym Neely Powell. Witch’s Awakening, from The Connelly Witches miniseries, is out now with two more books coming soon. True Nature, from The Wild Rose Press, was published in 2013. Her short story, “My Brother’s Keeper,” will appear in the upcoming Murder New York Style anthology, Family Matters, from the New York / Tri-State chapter of Sisters in Crime.

  ANITA PAGE’s short stories have appeared in webzines and anthologies including Mysterical-e, Beat to a Pulp, Back Alley, Word Riot; the Murder New York Style anthologies Deadly Debut and the upcoming Family Matters, which she edited; as well as the Mystery Writers of America anthology, The Prosecution Rests (Little, Brown). She received a Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society in 2010 for “’Twas the Night,” which appeared in The Gift of Murder. Her Catskill Mountain mystery, Damned If You Don’t, featuring community activist Hannah Fox, is available as an eBook from Glenmere Press. Anita can be found online at Women of Mystery and www.anitapagewriter.blogspot.com.