Twelve Rooms with a View (28 page)

“Look,” I said, trying to prompt her. “Do you think something’s happened to him? I mean, do you think he’s hurt or—”

“He’s up there. I came by a couple of nights ago and watched from the park with a pair of binoculars. The lights were on and he’s in there.”

This was a pretty interesting piece of information. “You came by and spied on him?”

“Yes,” she responded, completely without apology. “He stole something from me and I need to get it back.”

“That plant you brought him? That little boy’s plant?”

“Do you actually not know?”

“Of
course
I don’t know,” I said, trying not to sound too annoyed. “I mean, I think it’s obvious I’m not a plant person, and since no one has told me anything, I don’t know anything.”

“It’s possibly what’s on the wall in your kitchen,” she told me. I just stared at her. “The plate. From the
Sarum Horae. Madrigaris antiaris toxicaria.”

“The picture of the tree?”

“Yes. We’re not precisely sure—no one knows what that plant really looks like. No one’s seen it for a millennium.”

“And you think that’s what those seeds were—seeds to some medieval tree?”

“It’s older than that,” she corrected me, ignoring my incredulous tone. “There are records of it being cultivated on the island of Malta as early as the fourth century. Some people think it was one of the psychotropic plants used in the Greek rituals at Elysium, which, if that is true, would make it quite a bit older.”

“Psychotropic,” I said. “So it’s like a drug plant?”

“It is historically understood to have promoted altered states, yes,” she replied.

“So what do you do, you smoke it?”

“My impulse would be to study it. No one knows if the rumors about its ritualistic uses are accurate. No one has seen that plant in any shape or form for a long, long time. If it is what we think, it’s worth a
lot of money, which Benny could use. That’s why I brought him over here. I thought he would be able to help us. And protect it. It’s so improbable, but if it’s true, we needed protection. So I took that boy, who trusted me, and I told him my father would help us. And now he, apparently, he has decided … I don’t know what he’s decided,” she admitted, looking off. “I would like to kill him.”

I didn’t know what to say. I thought she was kidding, you know, but she was so tall and fierce and had those strange blue eyes, it certainly sounded like she meant it. In the few times I had been around Len and Charlie and that little boy Benny, they had all struck me as special. But now they were sounding and acting like everyone else, just people who had a hole in their hearts and only one thing could fill it.

Charlie smiled at me, one of those old smiles that admit things to people you barely know. “It’s my fault. I should never have trusted him,” she said.

“He’s your father,” I said.

“Yeah.” She turned around and looked at the stars on the ceiling of the little bedroom. “This is a nice room. How come you don’t have any furniture in this place?”

“It’s kind of a long story,” I said. “If I hear from Len, do you want me to have him call you?”

“I think it might be better if you just called me. My phone number is there.” She tipped her chin toward the sheet of watering and feeding instructions in my hand. “Thanks for the ham sandwich.” And with that she left.

I
RA
G
ROSSMAN AND HIS OFFICES WERE THE LAST WORD IN SWANK.
His waiting room was paneled in actual wood and had several low black leather couches and chairs with stylishly sloped backs, plus sleek glass coffee tables with international newspapers fanned out neatly across the glittering surfaces. You expected to see a murderous widow draped in front of the narrow, knifelike windows, which overlooked a particularly dense canyon of skyscrapers in Midtown. Unfortunately, it was just us, although each and every one of us was dressed better than we had been on the day we buried Mom and ended up in Stuart Long’s crummy offices farther downtown.

Grossman turned out to be just as slick as his waiting room. He wore a flawlessly fitted double-breasted suit with the thinnest of pinstripes. His shoes were fiercely and evenly polished to a rich meaty brown. As he crossed the room with capable purpose, honestly, you couldn’t help but notice the perfection of those shoes. So while everyone in my family was standing and greeting this killer, my eyes kept slipping back to the floor. Those dazzling shoes smiled up at me like crocodiles.

“You must be Tina,” Grossman said, reaching out to shake. I looked up just in time to catch him giving me the once-over; Lucy had clearly filled him in on my questionable past, only the facts had, as usual, backfired on her. He held my hand about two and a half seconds longer than strictly necessary, and there was the slightest suggestion in his smile that he was thinking about licking his chops. No question, like many clever and successful men, Ira Grossman liked bad girls.

“Let’s get to it, shall we?” he asked me.

“That would be wonderful!” Alison trilled, annoyed. It was always hard on her, the way guys flirted with me. She was the oldest, but from
high school on, it was clear that Lucy was destined to be the smartest and that I was the one boys liked. Alison ended up with the cute, stable husband while Lucy lived alone and I careened from one loser to the next, but it didn’t seem to make a difference, finally. Whenever creepy guys in suits started sniffing around me, Alison took it as a personal offense.

“Yeah, let’s get to this, Mr. Grossman.” I smiled, turning up the wattage. I even reached over and touched him lightly on the sleeve of that astonishing suit. “I looked through all those papers Lucy gave me, and I couldn’t make head or tail out of them. I hope you can explain to me what really is going on here, because I
suck
at math.”

“It is a bit complicated,” Grossman told me, infinitely touched and turned on by my putative stupidity and maybe my emphasis on
suck
. “Let’s go to the conference room. Would anyone like some coffee?”

“I’ll take a Coke,” I said, trying to make it sound like I wanted to have sex. I thought Lucy was going to gag and Alison would throttle me, or at least ask Daniel to do it. I didn’t care. Both my sisters were really getting on my nerves. They didn’t have a clue what was going on. I was the one who was living in the apartment, and I was the one who had found the lost room, and I was the one who knew everyone in the building, and they just didn’t have a clue. This was my oh-so-enlightened position at the time. It gave me permission to be snarky and superior to them while they were being snarky and superior to me.

The meeting started simply enough, with piles of papers that we were told to sign for no apparent reason, in triplicate.

“Since Lucille has been acting as administratrix for the past two months, we do need to formalize that situation immediately,” Grossman announced as we took our seats around the solid black conference table. “There’s no need to backdate the documents since we don’t even have a court date yet in the matter of the execution of your mother’s estate, but in the negotiations with Mr. Drinan’s estate it will occasionally be necessary for a representative of your mother’s estate to make a physical appearance. She will need to be authorized to negotiate on your behalf legally as in fact.”

“What?” I said.

“Just sign it, Tina,” Daniel advised me, helpfully turning my copies of the docs to the signature pages. Alison had already bent her head over her set and was writing her name with a schoolgirl’s determination, like she was trying to teach me a lesson by following the rules to a T.

Lucy was a little more subtle, but she was also doing what she was told as quickly and efficiently as possible, leaving me quite openly in the position of Problem Child as I sat there, pen in hand, not signing a thing.

“This makes Lucy
what
? ‘Administratrix?’” I asked. “How come she gets to do that?”

“It’s just a legal designation; she doesn’t actually ‘do’ anything,” Grossman assured me, with just enough of a conspiratorial gleam in his eye to register what an administratrix might actually “do” in private. “The courts require that the estate designate a petitioner to represent all interested parties as a matter of expediency, but if there is a discrepancy in the wishes of the interested parties, you and your sister will have the opportunity to appear and object in court.” Both Alison and Lucy pretended that they understood this nonsense and shoved their carefully signed documents across the table to him. He took them with one hand while passing different documents back to Lucy with the other. They all ignored the fact that not only had I not finished signing my documents, I had not even started. I had not even picked up one of the plain little ballpoint pens Grossman had so helpfully pushed in front of everyone.

“This authorizes me to act as your legal representative in this matter and to schedule payments of monies from the estate,” he explained, quickly moving through the docs. “This authorizes the previous attorney for the estate to forward to me all files pertaining to the estate.”

“What monies, there are no monies,” I said.

“There will be,” Lucy replied, signing away.

“Yeah, but when? How can we hire this guy—excuse me, Mr. Grossman—”

“Ira, please.”

“Ira, I’m having a little trouble catching up with this.”

“Which would be why Lucy is the administratrix,” Alison muttered.

“Sure, okay, sure, Alison, fine,” I started, getting testy. “I’m still allowed to ask a few questions.”

“Absolutely, that’s why we’re here,” Grossman reassured the room. “These situations are always complicated. The fact is, however, that the Drinans are moving ahead with the challenge to their father’s will, and you and your sisters have already been designated as interested parties in that action. They’ve scheduled a deposition of your mother’s attorney, and the likelihood is that they will attempt to depose all three of you. We’re hoping to avoid that, which is why the documents need to be signed so that Lucille can be the point person, otherwise all three of you will have to give depositions. Of course, we don’t think anything unsavory or contradictory would come out of a situation like that, but it’s an issue of controlling the odds.”

“Odds of what?”

“The odds of something coming out,” Daniel inserted bluntly.

“What could come out?” I asked.

“The Drinans are claiming that your mother kept their father in a state of constant inebriation, during which she coerced him into changing his will, which disinherited them and left the entirety of the estate to her,” Grossman stated bluntly.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said, out of loyalty. “Mom
coerced
him? He wouldn’t let Mom out of his sight, she was his prisoner, and if he had a drinking problem that wasn’t her fault.”

“What makes you think he had a drinking problem?” Grossman asked me, suddenly serious.

“The first day we got there, alcohol was everywhere,” I said.

“This was the day of your mother’s funeral?”

“Yes. No furniture, just vodka and red wine.”

“That was a full three weeks after her husband’s death,” Grossman said pointedly.

“Well, I didn’t know exactly when Bill died,” I started.

“She didn’t tell you?” Grossman asked.

“Not right when it happened.”

“When did she tell you?”

Lucy, Daniel, and Alison were all staring at me, silent, as if I were about to betray them. “She …” I started, and then I turned all red as the truth occurred to me. “She never told me that he died. I didn’t know.”

“What did you think when you heard that he had died? Didn’t it strike you as odd that she never informed you of it?”

“I didn’t actually think about it. I was upset about Mom. I thought Bill had died a long time ago.” Lucy, Daniel, and Alison kept staring at me like a jury. It was really creepy. “What is the big deal? They didn’t know either,” I commented, defensive.

“I knew,” said Lucy.

“How could you know?”

“I knew because she told me. She was very sad, and she called and told me that Bill had died, but she didn’t want us to come to the funeral.” Lucy stared at me coolly, like this was common knowledge. Next to her, Alison stiffened her spine fiercely.

“Did you know too, Alison?”

“Yes,” Alison whispered. “I did.”

“So that would be another thing you didn’t tell me.”

“Mom told her not to,” Lucy inserted.

“Mom
told
you not to tell me her
husband
died? The way she
told
you both not to tell me that she was cleaning houses. She told you not to tell me any of that.” I looked at both of them. Lucy looked back, unapologetic; Alison looked at the floor.

“Yes, she did,” Lucy stated.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Lucy, very plain. Alison’s lips were pursed. Daniel just kept staring at me.

“This is good, this is good,” Grossman explained smoothly. “It’s wonderful to see you all work out the complications of this situation in terms of communication and confusion. Death is often like this. Certain people know things, others don’t know those things. My understanding, Tina, is that you were out of touch with the family for a while. But your personal circumstances—where you were, what you
were doing—are completely irrelevant to the court case and have no bearing on the details of the settlement. So you see why it would be important to keep these personal discussions out of the court record.” Grossman continued smiling at me, like he and I shared a secret, even though it was clear that we did not. “And the amount of alcohol that your mother was keeping in the apartment, even though she was the only person living there, is not something that the court is going to be able to ignore, since it is at the heart of the Drinans’ case.”

“Bill was a big drinker,” I said.

“By your own admission you never met Bill,” Grossman reminded me. “And your mother did not share information with you about her marriage. Your testimony is not going to be helpful in this matter. But please don’t worry about this,” Grossman hastened to reassure me, taking the opportunity to reach over and press my hand. “They don’t have much of an argument, given their own family history. The burden of proof is on them. I’m just saying we don’t want to help them out if we can easily avoid it. The first step is making it difficult for them to depose all three of you. We need to name an administrator. Both Alison and Lucy feel that Lucy is the right person for that job. And since you’ve taken on so much responsibility for the daily upkeep of the apartment, no one wants to burden you further.”