Hell to Pay

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  The doorman and the guard are chatting beside the security desk in the lobby. Neither gives her a second glance.

  They wouldn’t recognize you even if they had.

  Anonymous, in New York. Who would have ever imagined that could be possible?

  Obviously, people forget.

  But I don’t. I never forget.

  When she began the hunt for an apartment to rent in Manhattan, the Ansonia was one of the buildings that had come up with a vacancy. She recognized it right away, of course.

  Elsa Cavalon’s mother lived in a sprawling apartment there; it was where Elsa tried to hide when she realized someone was stalking her daughter, Renny. Rumor had it that the building’s illustrious tenants fought to keep its role out of the press after the story broke—to no avail. Photos of the Ansonia were splashed all over the papers, along with shots of the Cavalons’ small ranch house in Connecticut, the Montgomerys’ brick colonial outside Boston, and the Quinns’ Manhattan apartment building.

  Naturally, there weren’t just pictures of the places where the crimes had occurred. The faces were captured as well, faces of the so-called heroes and the so-called victims and the so-called criminal.

  She’s never liked labels. It’s all in how you look at things.

  For instance, Elsa and Renny had slipped from La La Montgomery’s grasp on that long-ago day at the Ansonia.

  Or did they?

  Maybe she let them go. Because she knew that she was in control. Because she didn’t want it to be over so quickly.

  Maybe because she had killed before, and she realized that once the moment is over, you’re left with little more than blood on your hands and a hollow, anticlimactic feeling.

  And you want nothing more than to experience that high again. And again . . .

  You want it so badly that the need consumes you and nothing else seems to matter.

  But it does matter. This mission is about so much more than personal satisfaction; about so much more than her own vendetta against the Cavalons.

  “This is where you belong,” Chaplain Gideon told her on that cold day when she emerged from the subway to see the Ansonia looming over Broadway. “It’s close to Jeremy and Lucy—but not too close.”

  There were plenty of open rental apartments in the building—including this one, which happens to face the same air shaft as Sylvie Durand’s place, just a few floors above.

  Walking through the small one-bedroom with the Realtor, she thought about what lay ahead, and the plan became as much about the backdrop as it was about the players.

  The Ansonia was close to Jeremy and Lucy—but not close enough.

  Yes. This was where she wanted them. Here, with her, under one roof at last—a towering mansard roof that would seem more natural perched atop a haunted house than one of Manhattan’s foremost historic apartment buildings. Here, where she can keep an eye on them as the time draws near.

  “If you want them here with you, then you have to make it happen,” Chaplain Gideon said. And then he told her how to do that.

  There was no guarantee that Lucy and Jeremy would move into Sylvie’s vacant apartment after being kicked out of their own. But Chaplain Gideon told her to pray on it, and sure enough, everything fell into place as neatly as those cameras fit into the nooks and crannies in every room.

  Now, it’s just a matter of time.

  In a few days, it will all be over for Lucy and Jeremy Cavalon . . .

  And just beginning for True Believers like me.

  Out on the street, she walks two short blocks down Broadway, glancing repeatedly over her shoulder—a habit she picked up in prison, where you have to be on guard all the time, because you never know when violence is going to sneak up on you.

  Crossing over to the newsstand on the island near the subway station, she finds that the morning tabloids that once splashed her own name and face across their pages are stacked high alongside the gum and candy.

  The Post and Daily News headlines don’t disappoint.

  Death on the 27th Floor

  Did “I Told You So” Author See It Coming?

  Remembering how she felt when the taut skin of Richard Jollston’s neck split open beneath her blade, she smiles to herself as she fishes a couple of dollars from her wallet.

  Seeing the brown smears on them, she hesitates. These are bills she took from Myra’s pocket last night. She grabbed Richard Jollston’s wallet, too, before she left the room. After removing the cash, she threw it into a garbage can around the corner from the hotel, ID and credit cards intact.

  “You want both papers?”

  “Yes,” she tells the impatient-looking vendor, “and I want the Times, too.” She takes a copy from the pile.

  The story might not be trumpeted on the front page, but she’d be willing to bet an account of Richard Jollston’s demise is printed somewhere in the newspaper that was set to debut his new book on its upcoming best-seller list.

  She hands over the singles, and, as she had hoped, the vendor doesn’t notice the bloodstains. Good. They’ll be back in circulation momentarily.

  After tucking the papers under her arm, she crosses back to the west side of Broadway and hesitates, wondering where to go next. Her body is demanding to be fed, but where should she go? She keeps her back to the wall of the building on the corner—another wary tendency she learned in prison.

  It’s miserable out here this morning, with a damp, icy wind blowing in from the Hudson River, cutting through her.

  Maybe she’ll find a coffee shop. Order a big, hot breakfast. Sit and read the papers. Try to forget what she heard back at the apartment . . .

  Suddenly, she remembers something.

  Are you going to Parkview? Lucy had asked Jeremy.

  Where—or what—is Parkview? And why does he apparently go there every Friday morning?

  She has no idea. But she sure as hell is going to find out.

  She crosses Seventy-second Street and hurries back up to the Ansonia.

  In twenty-five years as a homicide detective with the NYPD, Omar Meade has seen some horrific crime scenes.

  This definitely ranks right up there among the bloodiest.

  A hotel guest and maid, slaughtered in a fancy suite that has a hell of a view of the Chrysler building to the south and a hell of a carpet-cleaning bill in its very near future.

  The bodies were discovered late last night by the housekeeping supervisor and a security guard, who went looking for the maid when she failed to return from her turndown shift.

  “I’da thought she’d just walked off the job—it happens—but not with a whole cart full of stuff,” the badly shaken supervisor told Meade and his partner, Lisha Brandewyne.

  Both the cart and the maid are right here inside the suite, along with the corpse of the room’s occupant.

  “One thing’s for sure—this is no robbery gone wrong.” Brandewyne shakes her close-cropped brunette head, surveying the slaughtered male victim lying just inside the door on a blood-soaked patch of carpet. The maid is a few yards away, between the bathroom and the foot of the bed.

  “Hell, no,” Meade agrees, “it’s not a robbery.”

  “It was supposed to look like one, though. What are we, stupid?” Brandewyne flashes her coffee-and-nicotine-stained teeth.

  Meade looks away, down at his notes.

  Yes, it was definitely staged to look like a robbery. Jollston’s wallet is missing, as is the maid’s tip money—she’d have collected about fifteen bucks, according to the guests occupying the neighboring suites that had received turndown service before she and her cart disappeared into 2715.

  But the killer wasn’t very thorough. In Jollston’s pocket was a Tiffany’s gift box containing three-thousand-dollar diamond and platinum earrings.

  Based on the estimated times of death—a couple of hours apart�
��Meade is betting the victims were total strangers whose paths crossed only postmortem.

  He’s certain this was no random crime, and that Jollston was the intended victim, considering he was hacked up pretty good—stab wounds all over his body. The Tiffany’s box in his pocket was soaked through with blood.

  In stark contrast, the woman was sliced open from ear to ear, execution-style, indicating to Meade that she merely got in the way—classic wrong-place, wrong-time scenario.

  With any luck, the hotel’s surveillance videos—now being scrutinized down in the security office—will reveal the killer’s identity. With a little more luck, Meade will track down the perp, make an arrest, and be home in time for his son Dante’s holiday choir concert at school tonight.

  Luck. Yeah. Wouldn’t that be nice.

  Meade—who doesn’t go to Atlantic City, doesn’t play the lottery, and hasn’t made it to one of Dante’s school concerts in years—has a feeling it’s going to be another long day, and an even longer night.

  I’d be on the train right now if we still lived in White Plains, Lucy thinks, noting the time—8:03—on the microwave in the kitchen.

  She dumps half a pot of coffee into the sink and quickly turns on the tap to wash it down, her gag reflex triggered by the smell.

  She puts the empty carafe into the dishwasher, along with two empty cereal bowls, spoons, and the plate she used for her toast and jam. She told Jeremy the day they moved in that she’s been craving strawberry preserves, and he promptly went across the street to Fairway to buy several jars. She’s already halfway through the second one.

  “Should you be eating that right out of the jar with the spoon?” Jeremy asked her earlier, when they were eating breakfast. “I mean . . . that’s an awful lot of jam, isn’t it?”

  “Cravings are good,” she assured him. “Anyway . . . I just want it. I have to have it. A lot of it.”

  “So it shall be.”

  All that sugar seems to have given the baby some extra energy, that’s for sure. He or she has been kicking and dancing more than usual this morning.

  Lucy closes the dishwasher, wipes down the counters, and checks the clock again. 8:04.

  Now what?

  She’s already dressed and ready for the workday, and she doesn’t have to leave for at least twenty minutes.

  She pours herself another cup of tea and wanders through the apartment while waiting for it to steep.

  She finds herself torn between opening all the shades to let in the morning light, and keeping them drawn to shut out prying eyes. Strange, because she’s never had that feeling before, and of all the places she’s ever lived, this apartment in the sky is the least conducive to Peeping Toms.

  Forcing herself to open the living room draperies, she peers out to make sure no one is looking back in at her. The bleak cityscape is reassuringly void of visible voyeurs, but she supposes someone could be spying on her through a telescope or binoculars.

  Unsettled by the thought, she closes the drapes again. But the strange feeling that she’s being watched doesn’t go away.

  Frustrated, she reopens the drapes, muttering, “You’re losing it.”

  Just last night, she was scoffing at Ryan’s suggestion that she’s afraid to be here alone, and now look at her, in the broad light of day.

  Not afraid, exactly, but . . .

  Vulnerable. Or something.

  Whatever it is, she doesn’t like it.

  If Jeremy were here with her right now she’d undoubtedly feel less vulnerable—or whatever it is that she’s feeling. But he’s on his way to Parkview.

  As he got ready to go, he was even quieter than he usually is on Friday mornings with the looming visit weighing on him.

  “Are you okay?” Lucy asked, watching him silently tuck his keys and MetroCard into the front pocket of the canvas bag he carries around with him.

  “Yep.”

  That was it. Just yep, followed by a quick kiss good-bye, and out the door he went.

  He was probably sulking because she refused to, as he put it, “christen the new bedroom.”

  Worried about the cramping she’d experienced, she was afraid to take any chances. She didn’t want to tell Jeremy she was worried, though, about this new symptom, so instead she told him she was just nauseous. To his credit, he didn’t say, “So what else is new?” but she could tell he wanted to.

  Obviously frustrated, he got out of bed and went off to take a shower—most likely, a cold one.

  She wishes she hadn’t made plans to go out tonight with Robyn. Maybe she should cancel.

  No—I can’t do that to her.

  She’s been looking forward to seeing her friend tonight. They’ve been trying to get together for over a month now, but something always seems to come up at the last minute to force a cancellation—mostly on Lucy’s end.

  So yeah, she’d better keep the happy hour date. She and Jeremy will have the whole weekend together, and anyway, she’s a firm believer in maintaining an independent social life in a marriage.

  Her own mother didn’t, and look what happened to her when Daddy moved out. She was pretty much abandoned by all their mutual friends.

  Not that Lucy can imagine that Jeremy would ever leave her . . .

  But I’m sure Mom was thinking the same thing about Daddy back in the early days, before I was born.

  Yeah, now there’s an unsettling truth that’s proven impossible to ignore: her parents had been happily married for a long time before Daddy’s midlife crisis.

  She remembers what life was like back when Lauren and Nick Walsh used to laugh together, and hold hands, and kiss. She remembers actually scolding them for acting all mushy.

  Yeah, and that was nothing compared to watching Daddy fawn all over Beth the home wrecker a few years later.

  Pushing that uncomfortable memory aside, Lucy unplugs her cell phone from the wall charger near the sofa. She has two calls to make today: one to her mother, and one to Carl Soto, their former landlord, to see when they can expect the return of their security deposit.

  It’s a little too early to call him, but Mom and Sam will have been up for a while.

  She dials the number for their Vero Beach condo. It rings several times, then goes into voice mail. Maybe they went out to breakfast, or for a walk on the beach. Lucky them.

  As she leaves a message, she glances at the gray December day beyond the tall rain-spattered windowpane and wrought-iron scrollwork of the Juliet balcony. Maybe the weather is responsible for Jeremy’s glum mood this morning, and her own unsettled frame of mind.

  Too bad we can’t afford to jump on a plane and fly south for Christmas to find the sun, she thinks wistfully. It’s been almost two years since they took a real vacation.

  And at the rate they’re going, it’ll probably be a few more years until they can afford one again.

  She decides it’s not too early to call Carl Soto after all. And if it is . . . too bad. She dials, lets it ring.

  He doesn’t pick up, either. Maybe he recognizes her number on his caller ID and is avoiding her.

  She sighs, waiting for it to go into voice mail, hoping they don’t have to chase him down for their money. They could really use it.

  He heard the phone ringing as he was stepping out of the shower and ran for it, but he was too late. He waits a few moments, dripping onto the rug, and then dials into voice mail to see if there’s a message.

  “Hello, Mr. Soto. This is Lucy Cavalon. Jeremy and I were wondering when we can expect to hear from you about our security deposit. Please give me a call back as soon as possible . . .”

  Carl replays the message, this time grabbing a pen and paper to write down the phone number she leaves him, before remembering that it’s probably in his phone’s caller ID. Modern technology is a wonderful thing . . . most of the time.

  He put
s the number aside and returns to the bathroom to towel off, thinking about the Cavalons and about Mary, the woman who forced him to force them out of the apartment.

  Well, it’s not like she held a gun to his head. But she waved a wad of cash at him, and that was almost as powerful a motivator.

  He’d been thinking the call might be from her. He’s been hoping that every time the phone has rung for the past few days, but it never is.

  Face it, Soto. You’ve been duped.

  His friend Lee denied that he’d been behind the scheme, and although Carl had really pushed him on it, he’s pretty sure Lee is telling the truth. What possible motive would Lee have to set him up that way? Besides, Lee might be a practical joker, but he’s also a real cheapskate. He wouldn’t find anything funny about a prank that set him back several thousand bucks.

  Maybe Mary got hit by a bus and that’s why he hasn’t heard from her.

  Or maybe something else is going on here.

  Maybe the Cavalons themselves put him up to this because . . .

  Because why? They wanted to force him to evict them so they could get out of their lease?

  But it would have eventually been up anyway, and if they wanted to move out so badly, they’d have been better off financially just paying the rent on an empty apartment for a few more months.

  Nothing about this shady deal makes sense.

  But Carl can hardly go to the police to complain about a stranger coming up to him on the street and handing over a whole lot of money . . . can he?

  No. You can’t.

  He vigorously rubs what’s left of his hair with a towel and wonders what he’s going to tell Lucy Cavalon when he calls her back.

  Holding her umbrella and bundled in her parka with the hood up, she trails Jeremy at a safe distance as he strides along the winding path through Central Park, past Strawberry Fields and Bethesda Terrace.

  The park is busy despite the raw day. Good. Less chance that Jeremy will spot her among the joggers and bikers, the businesspeople walking to work, the mothers and nannies pushing strollers wrapped in clear plastic tarp.