There was a pause, and then a kind of bump, right at my shoulder. “Shit,” I heard him mumble. He must have been right up against the door. For a second I thought, Wow, this door is thin, I can hear everything and if I can hear everything he can probably pry it open with one of those little battering ram things cops carry with them, whether or not I have the spring bolt in place. And then I thought, Is he the kind of cop who carries those things? What kind of a cop is this guy anyway? Does he have a gun on him? He didn’t have a gun, or a uniform, the last time I saw him, but obviously since I wouldn’t let him into the apartment there was no knowing if he any of those things—gun, uniform, battering ram—right now. I took a step back, because it did occur to me that if he started whacking at the door all of a sudden I didn’t want to be leaning up against it. But whacking at the door did not seem to be on his mind. For the moment, at least, he was quiet.
And then someone else started talking, someone who wasn’t him.
I couldn’t hear at all what the other person was saying. The other voice was much softer, more from a distance; it was a murmur, and a question. He answered it, only now I couldn’t hear him, either; he was practically whispering all of a sudden, to whoever else was out there. This should have been good news to me—let’s face it, having an angry cop screaming at me to let him into my apartment in the middle of the night was not anything like an ideal situation—but the whispering voices actually made me more anxious. I stepped back to the door, and put my ear up against it, to see if I could hear what the other person was saying, or what my angry friend Pete Drinan was saying. But while a second ago I felt like Pete was practically in the room with me, now I could barely hear him. He wasn’t up against the door anymore; he was down by the elevators. The other person asked him another question, that I couldn’t hear, and he answered again, and I couldn’t hear the answer. I thought he might be talking to his brother, that would make the most sense, but it didn’t really sound like him; whoever this person was actually talked more carefully, and Drinan was talking carefully back. I truly couldn’t tell what was going on.
Given my options I decided I’d better go for it, and slid back the spring bolt quietly and carefully. Which was exceptionally difficult; those spring bolts hold together pretty tight, what use would they be if they didn’t? Luckily Drinan was far enough away now, and the conversation was apparently riveting enough that he wasn’t supernaturally attuned to the sound of a spring bolt being slowly scraped back into the unbolted version of its identity. He had already thrown the tumblers in the three door locks, so all I had to do then was make sure the chain guards were in place and open that door as silently as possible, and find out who the hell was out there with him. I cracked the door.
He was past the elevators, his back to me, and he was talking to whoever it was who lived in the other apartment, 8B. Of course he was! It made so much sense when I saw it that I almost laughed out loud about how paranoid I was being. The lady—I could see it was a lady, with kind of messy brown hair—was standing in her doorway, like all the yelling had just woken her up, and she needed to come out and complain about whatever nonsense we were involved in, just across the hall from her doorway. But she didn’t seem to be angry. She had her hand on Drinan’s arm and every now and then she would pat it, like she was comforting him, and he would nod, and look at the floor. He had a bottle of beer in his left hand that he was kind of holding behind him, like a teenager who doesn’t want his mom’s friend to know that he’s got a beer back there. His thumb was hooked into the top to make sure the fizz didn’t go.
They didn’t know I was there listening, so they just kept talking. “God rest her soul, I miss her every day,” said the lady.
“I do too,” he told her, quiet.
“It would have just killed her to see this, just killed her! Oh my God when they were selling the furniture, all I could think was this would have just killed Sophie, the way Bill is just letting everything go.”
“Actually she hated most of that stuff,” Drinan noted.
“So many beautiful pieces. Worth a fortune! And then the paintings, I thought I would just cry when the paintings—”
“She didn’t like them either.” He sounded like on every line he wanted to take a hit off that beer bottle, but she wasn’t giving him an opening.
“Your inheritance, it was all your inheritance, gone, that’s what she wouldn’t have liked. Your father should be ashamed of himself.”
“Yeah, well, he never was.”
“God rest his soul you got that right. And he never asked me. If I wanted them? I thought at least ask, I would have been happy to step in, and keep them in the building. I would have done that for your mother, God rest her soul. I told him! But you couldn’t talk to him. Well, you know that.”
“Yes.” He shifted on his feet and for about fifteen seconds I got a better look at the woman, who had a very good face, underneath that big head of messy hair. I was sort of not liking her much until I saw her face, then I wasn’t so sure, because she seemed sort of sensible, even though she was saying slightly dotty things and clearly was just cranky that she couldn’t get her hands on those paintings and all that furniture. She also had on some kind of silk robe, sage green with a burnt orange stripe; the bit I could see hanging off her shoulder suggested it might be spectacularly beautiful if I could get a better look at it. Drinan shifted again, and I lost the sightline.
“Well, thank you for your thoughts, Mrs Westmoreland,” he started. His hand, holding the beer, was getting a little slippery, plus I could see from the way his shoulders were scrunching together that he was getting pretty desperate for that drink. Before he could take a step backwards and turn to take a fast hit off it she touched him on the sleeve again, and held him there. Ai yi yi, I thought, this is getting interesting.
“But these people, who are these people?” she asked, all concerned. “Coming and going, acting like they own the place. Frank says that one of them has moved in. I’m horrified.” I went back to not liking her. What on earth was she complaining about, she was “horrified” about me living in an apartment I had every legal right to live in? She was just some Upper West Side snob who had the hots for a dude half her age, that’s what I decided, on the basis of admittedly hardly any information at all.
“It’s something to do with Dad’s will.” He shrugged. “He left everything to Olivia.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Look, it’s fine, it’s going to be fine.” You could hear that he was already kicking himself for letting go that much. And it did seem, in fact, to be a terrific and instant mistake.
“He left everything to Olivia? He barely knew her!”
“They were married two years,” he corrected her.
“Did you know he was doing that? Did you agree to it?”
“He didn’t actually ask us to agree,” Pete said. His voice was starting to get real uptight. “He told us. Doug tried to talk him out of it. But Dad wanted to do something for Olivia.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Yeah, well, he was worried she wouldn’t have anything if he died. That’s what he said.”
“She didn’t deserve anything!”
“Well, that’s what he felt, anyway. He, you know, he knew he was dying and he wanted her to have some security after he was gone.”
“Surely you could have put a stop to this.”
“We had a big fight about it. Doug was, you know he pretty much felt what you were saying. Dad got real mad about it. It wasn’t…we didn’t really talk much after that.”
This was so much more information than I’d ever had about Bill I was momentarily thrilled. I was once again delighted to find how successful snooping at doors could be. I was also happy to have a shred