Twelve Rooms With A View Part 19

"Not today," he said, still not looking at me.

"Did you see him yesterday?"

"No, Tina, I didn't."

"Well, when was the last time you saw him?"

This conversation was obviously annoying the new, mean Frank. "It's not my job to keep track of people, that is not my job description."

"No, I know, I just-"

"And you don't have any rights here."

"What?" I said, surprised at how direct and horrible that statement sounded, coming from Frank. I was truly hurt. I guess my face must have made that clear, because he flushed a little, like he was privately ashamed for half a second, before the mean version of himself could take over again. It took the sting out of what came next.

"I just mean you're staying here, okay, obviously no one can stop you from doing that, but it's unclear what's going to happen next. People want to make sure you are aware of that."

"Of course I'm aware of that."

"All right, then."

"So like ... what? Has the building been talking about us?"

Frank glanced up, then took a small step back, like he wanted to make sure he wasn't too close to me. "Yeah, the building has been talking," he said.

More than anything else, that little step smacked me in the heart, but there was nothing I could do about it. Frank worked for the building. I tried to remember why I had come down to speak to him.

"What about Len?" I said finally. "I really need to get hold of him, there's something he needs to know, and I haven't seen him for at least two weeks and now I can't get him on the phone."

Frank looked up at the ceiling as if he had to find the nerve to keep up the nasty edge, and it was hiding somewhere up there, in the corner maybe. "Like I said, it's not my job-" he started, still bristling.

"Okay, I got it, Frank! If you see him, tell him I need to talk to him, and it's important," I hissed. Frank turned all red, like I had really hurt his feelings. Like most nice people, he was terrible at being mean; he didn't know how to pull it off and he also didn't know how not to be hurt when someone was mean back. So of course I felt ashamed of myself immediately. It is no fun picking on nice people; I don't know why anyone ever does it, honestly.

Back up in my apartment, with no idea what I was doing, I did my best to fertilize and feed the dying moss. In the corner of the kitchen, Len had stashed dozens of plant nutrients-pota.s.sium, nitrogen, magnesium, something with an oxidized-silicate formula, a.r.s.enic, and bromides-all of which had different functions. His main supply of plant foods came in little gla.s.s bottles with droppers, and you had to mix them up into various solutions before you poured them into a thing that looked like an IV lead, which fed into the water supply. It took me three hours of following the pictures on the backs of the boxes and putting that information together with what I had seen Len do the few times I had watched him work in there before I felt like I might be making progress. I couldn't tell if I was giving any of the plants the right amount of these different versions of fertilizer, but since I still couldn't find Len-his phone just rang and rang whenever I tried him-I was left with my own haphazard guesswork.

After two days of working on the moss with mixed results, I decided I'd better get help.

I took the express train from Seventy-second Street to Park Slope, where the Eastern Parkway stop lets you off right at the front gate of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. When I told the man in the ticket booth that I was looking for Charlotte Colbert, he didn't even make me buy a ticket, he just directed me to the conservatory, where another cheerfully helpful employee pointed me toward a side room that held a subdivision of bonsai trees.

The bonsai room was bright and hot and full of light. Long wooden tables along the walls held a series of bonsai trees, each more surreal than the last. There was a tiny maple with a whorled trunk and perfect five-point leaves, a miniature stand of beech trees with whittled bark, a tiny juniper with elegantly twirling branches. An impossibly miniature dogwood gracefully presented fresh miniature pink blossoms. An ancient bald cypress, I learned from the metal plaque on its base, was over three hundred years old. Even though there were no other visitors, it took me a moment to locate Len's daughter, Charlie; she had drifted into a tiny alcove just off the main display area, her entire attention focused on a miniature pine tree, which she was pruning with extraordinary care. As Charlie looked up, in the same plant-induced daze I had seen on Len's face, I realized that all of the trees in the room were growing in trays covered in moss.

"Can I help you?" she said, not recognizing me.

"Hi, I'm Tina, Tina Finn? I met you at your dad's apartment."

"My father?" She didn't actually perk up at this; what she did was more the opposite. She set her pruning shears on the table and looked down as if trying to decide whether or not to say something she might regret. "What about him?"

"Have you talked to him?"

"Who are you again?" Charlie folded her arms over her chest. When I first met her in the foyer of Len's apartment, she had struck me as a sort of friendly soldier. The friendly part of the equation had, unfortunately, evaporated.

"I live in his building, and he keeps his moss in my apartment, and I haven't been able to get hold of him for, well, a while. Have you heard from him?"

Charlie continued to consider me like a piece of stinkgra.s.s. "No," she finally said, turning back to her miniature pine tree, as if that was all I could possibly expect out of her.

"Well, if you do hear from him, could you ask him to call me? Here, I can write my number down for you," I offered, trying not to sound too desperate.

"Look, I don't know what you think you're doing with my father," Charlie said, cutting me off. "But you've made a colossal mistake if you think I'm going to help you."

"I'm not doing anything with your father. I'm just helping him with his moss."

"That's the first time I've heard it called that," she said with a sneer.

"Look," I retorted. "There are plenty of people who have good reason to be mad at me, but trust me, you are not one of them. I'm telling you the truth. Why would I make something like this up? The kitchen of my apartment is just covered with moss beds, and the moss is dying because he hasn't shown up to take care of it for ages. I didn't even notice at first, because I was not paying attention, but now, I'm telling you, the moss is dying. It's dying and I don't know how to take care of it and I can't find Len. Did he go somewhere? Did he take a trip? Do you know where he is? And if you don't know where he is, can you at least tell me what to do? There's moss around all these little bonsai trees, and you clearly know what you're doing. I don't know what I am doing and the moss is going to die. My mother helped Len take care of the moss before she died. She was ... she was a good person." This statement came out of my mouth so unexpectedly that I suddenly felt overwhelmed. "She took care of his moss. I don't want it to die."

While Charlie did not seem impressed, she was at least listening. "So you're not some sort of hooker?" she asked.

"Why does everyone think that?" I asked, pinching my eyes quickly so she couldn't see that I was crying.

"I don't know why other people think that, but the last time I saw you, you were hanging around my dad's apartment and he handed you hundreds of dollars and then told you to get lost. That would be why I think that."

"That was for the moss," I said, trying not to get too defensive. "Are you going to help me save the stupid moss, or are we just going to let it die?"

Unlike Len, Charlie was not much of a talker. She didn't say anything on the subway ride back to my apartment, and she didn't say anything in the elevator, and she didn't say anything even when I took her into the kitchen, flipped on the lights, and showed her the catastrophic mess that had once been a mossery. She took in the situation from the doorway for a moment, then took a step forward to consider each bed separately. She looked up and over, immediately spotting the open shelf with the itty-bitty gardening implements, as if she knew they would be there because that was the only logical place for them. She picked up a miniature trowel and turned back to the moss, gently pressing it and her fingers into the edges of the soil, searching for some mysterious force under the surface that I would never understand. She did that for a full minute before I finally asked, "So can you fix this, or are they all going to die?"

"You fed them," she observed, without answering the question.

"I tried."

"Do you remember what you did?"

"I did whatever the plant food told me to do," I said. I started pulling out all the different kinds of plant food and fertilizer from under the table and handing them to her. "He's got the directions written on the top of the containers, so I tried to do what they said, but who knows? I didn't know if I should be mixing everything up or putting it on top of the moss or underneath it, and he has these little spiky things, so I thought maybe I should dig holes in the beds and then put the food in the hole or something. I was kind of making it up as I went along."

"Yes, I see," Charlie said, opening one of the little plastic containers and rubbing the black stuff between her fingers. She held her finger up to her nose, breathing it in quietly, and then she tasted it with the tip of her tongue. She looked at another container in her hand, then glanced back at the moss. "Okay," she said. "Can you get me a ham sandwich?"

"A ham sandwich?"

"Yeah, I'm kind of hungry. There's got to be some sort of deli around here. I'd like a ham sandwich."

"Oh. Sure. I'm just, I guess I a.s.sumed that people like you were vegetarians."

"No," she said, and went back to work.

Three hours later, I was lying on the little bed in my bedroom, reading a pa.s.sably interesting mystery novel about some detective who was as screwed-up as the killers he was chasing. He drank too much and had trouble opening up to people, and he had a cynical weariness that came from seeing too much suffering, and he distrusted women, who all found him irresistibly s.e.xy. In short, he was such a dead ringer for Pete Drinan that I could not help but wonder if they taught those specific qualities in detective school. I picked up one of the photo alb.u.ms from the lost room and looked at the pictures of the young Pete and Doug when they were in high school and grinning at the camera with all the money and good looks that New York privilege could buy. How could someone who grew up in the sw.a.n.kest apartment in New York and whose brother was some sort of big-deal egghead at the Dalton School end up in the NYPD?

"You're all right for now," Charlie announced, standing in the doorway.

I shoved the photo alb.u.m back into its hiding place between the bed and the wall. Her eyes flickered as she watched me, but she didn't comment. Like Len, she apparently was not interested in anything in that apartment except the moss. She took a half step into the room and held out a sheet of lined notebook paper with tidy rows of information neatly inscribed in tight handwriting. "You need to make sure there's enough water in the pumps every morning and then add the minerals and fertilizers according to this schedule. You did a pretty good job faking your way through this."

"Then you think we can save most of it?"

She shrugged; it was a stupid question, but she seemed used to dealing with people who didn't understand plants. "Moss is pretty st.u.r.dy," she explained. "It goes dormant when humidity or ground conditions become hostile to growth. How long was it, that the water was turned off?"

"I don't know exactly. Maybe two weeks? Len always just came down and worked there every few days and then he ... stopped."

That was the information she was after. She folded her arms and leaned against the doorjamb, acting like she didn't give a s.h.i.t, but her crazy eyes were thinking.

"And you tried to get hold of him."

"I called him and I went up there and knocked on the door a bunch of times. I think he's in there, but he didn't answer. And he's not answering the phone, obviously. I mean, I wouldn't have come looking for you if he had. Is something going on with him?"

Charlie lifted her arms into the air, clasped them backward over her head, then let them float to her sides. It made her look really tall, like a tree spirit, standing in the doorway of my strange little room with the sunset on the wall and the stars and planets glued to the ceiling. Then she twisted swiftly back and forth at the waist and bent forward until her hands touched the ground in front of her, doing a few yoga stretches while she considered how much to tell me.

"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.

18.

IRA GROSSMAN AND HIS OFFICES WERE THE LAST WORD IN Sw.a.n.k. His waiting room was paneled in actual wood and had several low black leather couches and chairs with stylishly sloped backs, plus sleek gla.s.s 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 skysc.r.a.pers 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 c.o.ke," I said, trying to make it sound like I wanted to have s.e.x. 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 doc.u.ments 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 a.s.sured 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 pet.i.tioner 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 doc.u.ments across the table to him. He took them with one hand while pa.s.sing different doc.u.ments back to Lucy with the other. They all ignored the fact that not only had I not finished signing my doc.u.ments, 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.