The Lottery Winner

by Mary Higgins Clark

  She went back inside and settled on the couch. Willy handed her a cocktail, a Manhattan in honor of being back in the city, and carried his own to his big easy chair. He lifted his glass to her. “To us, honey.”

  Alvirah smiled fondly at him. “I have to say all that sightseeing does wear me out. I’m going to rest my hands and feet for at least two weeks,” she said.

  “Agreed,” Willy nodded and then added sheepishly, “Honey, I still think riding those mules in Greece was a little much. I felt like a broken-down Hopalong Cassidy.”

  “Well, you looked like the Lone Ranger,” Alvirah assured him. She paused, looking lovingly at her husband. “Willy, we’ve had so much fun, haven’t we? If it weren’t for the lottery I’d still be cleaning houses and you’d be fixing busted pipes.”

  And once again they sat in silent wonder, marveling over the wonderful event that had made a clean sweep of their former life. The dates of their birthdays and wedding anniversary were the numbers they’d always played, a dollar a week for ten years until the unbelievable moment when the lottery ticket with those numbers was pulled and they found themselves the sole winners of the forty-million-dollar prize.

  As Alvirah said, “Willy, for us, life began at sixty, well, not quite sixty.” So far among their travels, they’d been to Europe three times, to South America once, had taken the Trans-Siberian Railway from China to Russia and now had just returned from a cruise around the Greek islands.

  The phone rang. Alvirah glanced at it. “Don’t be tempted,” Willy begged. “We need to get our breath. It’s probably Cordelia, and she’ll have a job for me, fixing the plumbing at the convent or something. It can wait a day.”

  They listened to the answering machine. It was Rhonda Alvirez, secretary of the Manhattan chapter of the Lottery Winners’ Support Group. Rhonda, a founding member of the group, had won six million dollars in the lottery and been persuaded by a cousin to invest her first big check in his invention, a fast-acting drain cleaner. As it turned out, the only thing the cousin’s cleaner whooshed down the drain was Rhonda’s money.

  That was when Rhonda started the support group, and when she read about how well Alvirah and Willy had handled their windfall, she begged them to be honorary members and regular guest lecturers.

  Rhonda had already left one message. Now she got right to the point. “Alvirah, I know you’re home. The limo dropped you off an hour ago. I checked with your doorman. Please pick up. This is important.”

  “And you think Cordelia’s bad,” Alvirah murmured as she obediently reached for the phone.

  Willy watched her expression change to disbelief and concern and then heard her say, “Of course we’ll talk to her. Tomorrow morning at ten. Here. Fine.”

  When she hung up she explained, “Willy, we’re going to meet Nelly Monahan. From what Rhonda tells me she’s a very nice woman, but much more important, she’s a lottery winner who’s been shafted by her ex-husband. We can’t let that happen.”

  * * *

  The next morning at nine o’clock, Nelly Monahan prepared to leave her three-room apartment in Stuyvesant Town, the East Side housing development that she’d moved into over forty years ago as a twenty-two-year-old bride. Even though the rent was now ten times more than the fifty-nine dollars a month that had been the starting figure, the flat was still a terrific bargain, provided, of course, that you could spend nearly six hundred dollars a month for shelter.

  But now that she was retired and living on a tiny pension and her monthly social security check, it had become painfully obvious to Nelly that she might have to give up the apartment and move in with her cousin Margaret in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

  To Nelly, a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, the prospect of spending her final years away from the Big Apple was appalling. It had been bad enough that her husband, Tim, had walked out on her, but to give up the apartment broke her heart. And then to learn that Tim’s new wife had produced that winning lottery ticket! It was just too much. That was when her neighbor suggested that Nelly call the support group, and now she had a meeting with Alvirah Meehan, who, Rhonda assured her, was a problem solver who got things done.

  Nelly was a small, round, nondescript woman with vaguely pretty features and lingering traces of brown in her gray hair, whose natural wave framed her face and softened the lines that time and hard work had etched around her eyes and mouth.

  With her hesitant voice and shy smile, Nelly gave the outward appearance of being a pushover, but nothing could have been further from the truth. People who tried to take advantage of her soon learned that Nelly had a spunky streak and an implacable sense of justice.

  Until her retirement at age sixty, she had worked as a bookkeeper for a small company that manufactured venetian blinds and, some years earlier, was the one who realized that the owner’s nephew was bleeding the place dry. She’d persuaded her boss to make the nephew sell his house and pay back every dime he’d stolen or risk becoming a guest of the Department of Correction of New York.

  And once, when a teenager tried to grab her pocketbook as he rode past her, she’d poked her umbrella into the spokes of his bicycle, causing him to go sprawling on the road with a sprained ankle. She alternately shouted for help and lectured the would-be mugger until the police came.

  But these episodes paled compared to being cheated out of her nearly two-million-dollar share of the lottery money by her husband of forty years and her successor, Roxie, the new Mrs. Tim Monahan.

  Nelly knew that Alvirah Meehan and her husband Willy lived in one of the fancy Central Park South buildings, so she dressed carefully for her meeting with them, selecting a brown tweed suit she’d bought on sale at A&S. She’d even gone to the extravagance of having her hair washed and set.

  Promptly at 10:00 A.M. she was announced by the doorman.

  At ten-thirty, Alvirah poured a second cup of coffee for their guest. For half an hour she’d deliberately kept the conversation general, talking about their shared backgrounds and changing life in the city. From her experience as an investigative columnist for the New York Globe, she’d learned that relaxed people tended to be better witnesses.

  “Now let’s get down to business,” she said, touching the sunburst pin on the lapel of her jacket and turning on the recorder in it. “I’m going to be honest,” she explained. “I’ll be recording our conversation because sometimes when I play it back I pick up something that I missed.”

  Nelly’s eyes sparkled. “Rhonda Alvirez told me you used that recorder to solve crimes. Well, let me tell you, I’ve got a crime for you, and the criminal’s name is Tim Monahan.”

  She went on to explain, “In the forty years I was married to him, he could never hold a job because he always found a reason to file suit against his current employer. Tim spent more time in small claims court than Judge Wapner.”

  Nelly then enumerated the long list of defendants who had tangled with Tim, including the dry cleaner accused of putting a hole in an ancient pair of trousers, the bus company whose vehicle’s sudden stop Tim said caused whiplash, the secondhand car dealer who refused to fix his car after the warranty expired, and Macy’s, which was sued for a broken spring he discovered on a La-Z-Boy recliner Nelly had given him years before.

  In her gentle voice she continued to tell them that Tim always considered himself a bit of a ladies’ man and would gallantly rush to open doors for attractive girls while she, Nelly, walked behind him like the invisible woman. It had been especially annoying when he sang the praises of Roxie Marsh, who owned the catering outfit he worked for occasionally. Nelly had met the woman once and recognized that Roxie was the type who buttered up her help and then paid them slave wages.

  She went on to explain also that while Tim drank a little too much, was a pain in the neck and looked particularly silly when he tried to act like Beau Brummell, he was nevertheless company of a sort, and after forty years she was used to him. Besides that she loved to cook and always enjoyed Tim’s hearty appetite. It hadn’t bee
n perfect, but they had stuck it out.

  Until they did or didn’t win the lottery.

  “Tell me about it,” Alvirah ordered.

  “We played the lottery every week, and one day I woke up feeling particularly lucky,” Nelly explained earnestly. “It was the last chance to get in on the lottery for an eighteen-million-dollar pot. Tim was between jobs, and I gave him a dollar and told him to be sure to pick up a ticket when he bought his newspaper.”

  “And did he?” Alvirah asked quickly.

  “Absolutely! When he got back, I asked him about it and he said yes, he’d bought it.”

  “Did you see the ticket?” Willy asked quickly.

  Alvirah smiled at her husband. Willy was frowning. He seldom lost his temper, but when he did he looked and sounded remarkably like his sister Cordelia. Willy would have no use for a man who cheated his wife.

  “I didn’t ask to see it,” Nelly explained as she swallowed the last of her coffee. “He always held the ticket in his wallet. Besides, there was no need. We always played the same numbers.”

  “So do we,” Alvirah told her. “Our birthdays and wedding anniversary.”

  “Tim and I took ours from the street addresses of the houses we grew up in—1802 and 1913 Tenbroeck Avenue in the Bronx, and 405 East Fourteenth Street, the number of our building all these years. That came out to be 18-2-19-13-4-5.

  “Tim didn’t say one word about picking different numbers. That was on Saturday. The next Wednesday I was watching the TV when our number was pulled, and you can’t imagine my shock.”

  “Yes I can,” Alvirah told her. “I had cleaned for Mrs. O’Keefe the day we won, and let me tell you, she’d had all her grandchildren in the day before and the place was a mess. I was bone tired and soaking my feet when our numbers were pulled.”

  “She kicked over the pail,” Willy explained. “We spent our first ten minutes as multimillionaires mopping up the living room.”

  “Then you do understand,” Nelly sighed. She went on to explain that Tim had been out that night, working his occasional job as a bartender for Roxie the caterer. Nelly had sat up waiting for him and to celebrate had made his favorite dessert, a crème brûlée.

  But when he got home, a tearful Tim handed her the ticket he was holding. It wasn’t the numbers they always played. Every single one was different. “I decided to change our luck,” Tim told her.

  “I thought I’d have a heart attack,” Nelly said. “But he felt so terrible that I ended up telling him it didn’t matter, that it just wasn’t to be.”

  “And I bet he ate the crème brûlée,” Alvirah snapped.

  “Every speck. He said every man should be so lucky as to have a wife like me. Then a few weeks after, he walked out on me and moved in with Roxie. He told me he’d fallen in love with her. That was a year ago. The divorce came through last month and he married Roxie three weeks ago.

  “They’d announced that there were four winners of the eighteen-million-dollar pot, and I didn’t realize that one of them hadn’t shown up to collect. Then last week, on the very last day before the ticket expired, Roxie, now the second Mrs. Tim Monahan, showed up at the redemption window and claimed she’d just happened to realize she had the fourth ticket, the ticket with the numbers Tim and I always played.”

  “Tim was working for Roxie the night your number won, and he had the ticket in his wallet?” Alvirah asked, to confirm her suspicion.

  “Yes, that’s the point. He had big eyes for her all along and probably showed the ticket to her.”

  “And she’s a flirt who saw her big chance,” Willy said. “That’s disgusting.”

  “If you want to know what disgusting is, I’ll show you the picture of the two of them in the Post saying how lucky they were that Roxie happened to find her ticket,” Nelly’s voice quivered into a near sob. Then she got a flinty look in her eye, and her jaw moved out an inch. “It’s not justice,” she said. “There’s a retired lawyer, Dennis O’Shea, living down the hall from me, and I spoke to him about it. He did some research and learned that there are a couple of other cases on record where one spouse or the other pulled that scam and the court decided that the one holding the ticket is the owner. He said that it was a disgrace and a horror and a terrible shame, but legally I was out of luck.”

  “How did you happen to go to a meeting of the Lottery Winners’ Support Group?” Alvirah asked.

  “Dennis sent me. He’d read about all the people who lost all the money they made on the lottery in bad investments and thought it might help me to be around kindred souls.”

  Righteous wrath in her voice and a certain mulish expression around her mouth, Nelly summed up her luckless saga. “Tim moved out on me faster than you can say abracadabra, and now the two of them will live the life of Reilly while I move in with my cousin Margaret because I can’t afford to stay where I am. Margaret only asked me to live with her because she likes my cooking. She talks so much I’ll probably be stone deaf in a year.”

  “There’s got to be a way to help,” Alvirah decreed. “Let me put on my thinking cap. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  * * *

  At nine o’clock the next morning, Nelly sat at the dinette table in her Stuyvesant Town apartment, enjoying a warm bagel and a cup of coffee. It may not be Central Park South, she thought, but it’s a wonderful place to live. Since Tim took off, she’d made little changes in the apartment. He’d always insisted on keeping that big, ugly recliner of his right by the window, but since he’d taken it with him when he moved out, she’d rearranged the rest of the furniture the way she’d always secretly wanted and then she’d made bright new slipcovers for the couch and wing chair and bought a lovely hooked rug for next to nothing from neighbors who were moving.

  Looking now at the autumn sun streaming in, and seeing how cheerful and inviting the place was, she reflected on how more and more she’d come to realize that Tim had been a lifelong drag and that she really was better off without him.

  The trouble was that she couldn’t make ends meet without his pitiful income, and try as she did, she couldn’t find a job. Who wants to hire a sixty-two-year-old woman who can’t use a computer? Answer: nobody.

  Margaret had already called this morning. “Why don’t you give the apartment up on the first and save a month’s rent? I’m having the back bedroom painted for you.”

  How about the kitchen? Nelly wondered. I bet that’s where you really expect me to spend my time.

  It was all so hopeless. Nelly took a sip of her excellent, fresh-brewed coffee and sighed.

  Then Alvirah called.

  “We’ve got a plan,” she said. “I want you to go and see Roxie and Tim and get them to admit they shafted you.”

  “Why would they admit it?”

  “Get one of them mad enough to brag that they put one over on you. Do you think you can do that?”

  “Oh, I can get Roxie’s goat,” Nelly said. “When they got married last month, I found a picture of Tim at Jones Beach where he looks like a beached whale and I had it framed and sent it to her. On it, I wrote, ‘Congratulations and good riddance.’ ”

  “I like you, Nelly,” Alvirah chuckled. “You’re a woman after my own heart. Here’s the plan. One way or another you’re going to make a date to see them and you’re going to wear an exact copy of my sunburst pin. My editor had a couple of extras made for me.”

  “Alvirah, your pin looks valuable.”

  “It’s valuable because it has the recorder in it. You’re going to turn it on, get them to admit that they cheated you, and then we’re going to get your lawyer friend, Dennis O’Shea, to sign a complaint to Matrimonial Court that you were cheated out of marital assets.”

  A faint hope stirred in Nelly’s ample bosom. “Alvirah, do you really think there’s a chance?”

  “It’s about the only chance,” Alvirah said quietly.

  For several minutes after getting off the phone, Nelly sat deep in thought. She remembered how a couple of years ago when
Tim’s mother was dying, the old woman had asked him to tell the truth: Hadn’t he been the one who set the garage on fire when he was eight years old? He’d always denied it, but that day, seeing she was breathing her last, he broke down and confessed. I know how to get to him, Nelly thought as she reached for the phone.

  Tim answered. When he heard her voice he sounded irritated. “Listen, Nelly, we’re packing up to go to Florida for good, so what’s up?”

  Nelly crossed her fingers. “Tim, I’ve got bad news. I don’t have more than another month.” And I don’t, she thought. At least not in Stuyvesant Town.

  Tim sounded at least somewhat concerned. “Nelly, that’s too bad. Are you sure?”

  “Very sure.”

  “I’ll pray for you.”

  “That’s why I’m calling. I have to say I’ve had some pretty nasty thoughts about you in these weeks since Roxie turned in the lottery ticket.”

  “It was her ticket.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean I used to tell her how we played those numbers and she tried them for luck that week and I tried some other combination.”

  “Her numbers?”

  “I forget,” Tim said quickly. “Look, Nelly, I’m sorry, but we’re leaving tomorrow, and the movers are coming in the morning. I’ve got a lot to do.”

  “Tim, I have to see you. I’m trying to get my soul in readiness, and I’ve hated you and Roxie so much I have to see you face to face and talk to you. Otherwise I’ll never die in peace.” More straight truth, Nelly thought.

  From the background, she heard a strident voice yell, “Tim, who the hell is that?”

  Tim lowered his voice and said quickly, “We’re leaving on a noon plane tomorrow. Be here at ten o’clock. But Nelly, I have to tell you. I can only spare fifteen minutes.”

  “That’s all I want, Tim,” Nelly said, her voice even softer than usual. She hung up the phone and dialed Alvirah. “He’s giving me fifteen minutes to morrow morning,” she said. “Alvirah, I could kill him.”