Close to You, page 6
The Palumbos had a seriously nice spread.
Now, if only Mrs. Palumbo would leave her entire key ring in the car.
It was surprising how many people did that.
Chapter 24
Paige recognized the caller’s last name immediately.
“This is Samuel Morton. My daughter Sarah has been corresponding with Ms. Blake.”
“Yes, Mr. Morton, of course. This is Paige Tintle, Ms. Blake’s assistant. How can I help you?” Paige asked, picking up her pencil to jot down the message.
“Well, Sarah and I were supposed to come into the news studio tomorrow and meet Ms. Blake.” Paige thought the man’s voice sounded stressed and it crossed her mind that he might just be nervous about calling the prestigious news organization’s anchorwoman. She knew she would have been, had she been making the call as an outsider.
“Yes. We’re all set up for eleven-thirty tomorrow,” she answered brightly, trying to put him at ease. “And Ms. Blake has made lunch reservations for after your tour if you and Sarah are available.”
A loud sob burst through the receiver Paige held to her ear. As the man wept, Paige took down his message.
Sarah had died at Sloan-Kettering the night before.
Chapter 25
Larson Richards pulled his big black late-model Mercedes sedan into the driveway of the home where he had grown up. As he opened the car door, a blast of hot, sticky air met him. He pulled off his soft beige, elegantly cut suit jacket and hung it on the hook in the back seat.
Rolling back the sleeves of his crisp white shirt, he loosened his Hermes tie and wished he had realized that he would be coming to do this today when he dressed this morning. But after the meeting with his investors in his office this afternoon, it was clear that, if he wanted to go through the house one more time before the closing on Friday, today was going to be his last opportunity.
Richards took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped away the film of perspiration that covered his brow. Things were not going well with this deal. He had organized a syndicate of investors contributing millions of dollars to back him as he attempted to buy and consolidate the individual, small, mom-and-pop owned pizzerias that operated in just about every town in the northern half of New Jersey. Richards had seen an opportunity. If he could buy up all the little pizza parlors and consolidate them under one umbrella, he could turn around and sell the whole package to a national company, trading as “Jersey Pizza,” making a huge profit for his investors and himself in the process.
Approximately three billion pizzas were sold in the United States each year, but the tomato and cheese pies sold in New Jersey were in a class of their own. Residents who moved away from the Garden State claimed that pizza made in other parts of the country was not nearly as good. Since The Sopranos, with its northern New Jersey locale, had become such a cultural phenomenon, Larson was even more convinced his “Jersey Pizza” idea would work. But he had to find a buyer with deep pockets and he needed money to keep his business afloat until he could get to that finish line.
The investors, confident because of their fantastically good luck in the booming stock market, piled on board happily at first. The double-digit profits on Wall Street had made them very wealthy in a relatively short period of time. What Larson Richards outlined for them promised to double or even triple their investments. Who could say no to a business opportunity like that?
But as Wall Street corrected and the pizza deal suffered one setback after another, the investors had become less cocky and more worried. Richards was struggling from week to week to make his payroll. The expensive cars he had leased so that his offices could impress the prospective business sellers sat unused in his company parking lot, as he had had to let some of his people go. But the Mercedes and BMW dealerships didn’t give a rat’s ass about Richards’s economic hard times. The costly leases still had to be paid each month. So did the mortgage on his office building.
He had so much invested now, there was no turning back. He had long ago divested himself of his stock portfolio, taken a second mortgage on his house, and emptied his sizable IRA account, plowing all the money back into the pizza deal. He was convinced that if he could just keep things afloat a few more months, ultimately it would be all right. And he had just spent most of his afternoon trying to convince his skeptical and angry investors the same thing.
Thank God this house is closing on Friday, he thought as he let himself in through the front door. There will be another two million dollars in the bank next week.
He walked slowly from room to deserted room, wondering why he didn’t feel sadder or more nostalgic. He had spent his boyhood and teenage years in this house and his parents had tried hard to provide a life for him that was full of happy memories.
But he was angry with them nonetheless. They hadn’t been there for him when he really needed them.
He climbed the large, center hall staircase, feeling tired, his feet shuffling heavily on the polished wooden steps. In the upstairs hallway, he walked right past his old bedroom without stopping, heading directly to his parents’ room.
It was empty now, the furniture all carted away by the bargain-hunting antiques dealer who had purchased the contents of the gracious home for a fraction of its true worth. But what else could he have done? He didn’t have the time to do the calling around and researching necessary to find out how he could get the best prices for his mother’s carefully acquired antique furniture collection. His time was better spent trying to hold his business deal together, and the quicker the house was empty and sold, the sooner he would have the big cash infusion he so desperately needed.
The walls of the master bedroom were marked with smudged outlines where the triple dresser and massive four-poster bed once stood. Images of jumping up and down on that big bed as a kid flashed through Richards’s mind, but he pushed the memories aside. He didn’t want to remember the good times. Those were history. The recent past had not been so kind.
He opened the heavy paneled door and stepped into his mother’s walk-in closet. It, too, was empty now. All her dresses and suits were gone, but the smell of her perfume still lingered. He exhaled deeply to clear his mind as he reached for the dial on the wall at the back of the closet.
He knew the combination by heart and methodically he turned the safe’s dial back and forth, listening for the sound of the tumblers clicking softly into place. The square panel opened quietly, revealing, just as he expected, nothing inside.
Larson had known the safe would be empty because he had checked it right after his parents’ death, removing everything in it at the time. His mother’s jewelry, the promissory notes his parents had asked him to sign. This last trip today was a final attempt to make sure that he hadn’t missed anything.
Chapter 26
Eliza’s eyes were red-rimmed and her cheeks were blotchy when she showed up in the makeup room a half hour before airtime.
“Honey!” cried Doris, rushing over and putting her arms around Eliza. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
“Oh, Doris,” Eliza whimpered. “Remember that girl I told you was writing me? The one with cancer? Well, she died.” The tears began to flow again.
As she held on to Eliza, Doris, ever professional, glanced up at the wall clock. There was a lot of work to do in a relatively short time if Eliza was going to look decent on television tonight.
“Here, sweetie, sit down.” Doris calmly guided the anchorwoman to the chair. As she listened to Eliza’s story about Sarah Morton’s father’s call canceling the meeting, Doris went to the mini-refrigerator under the counter and pulled out an ice pack. It was imperative they get that eye swelling down.
Eliza leaned her skull back against the headrest and Doris squeezed drops of Visine into the anchorwoman’s troubled eyes. Closing her heavy lids, Eliza felt the soothing cold of the frozen blue ice mask. She sat quietly for a few moments while Doris clucked over her and massaged her neck and shoulders, wondering why she was taking this so hard. Eliza hadn’t even met Sarah Morton.
“You’ve got a lot on your plate right now, Eliza,” said Doris gently. “Everything will work out. You’ll see.”
Eliza reached back to pat Doris’s arm, knowing full well that Sarah’s death wasn’t the only thing that had put her into such a state. Hearing about the tragedy had just pushed her over the top. It brought up all the old memories of John’s death and struck the most terror-filled chord of all. The fear of losing her own Janie. With everything going on in Eliza’s life right now, she was vulnerable and she knew it.
Tonight they wouldn’t be able to get away with merely airbrushing Eliza’s beautiful skin. More corrective measures would be necessary. Doris expertly dabbed at each dark pink blotch that scattered across Eliza’s face and then smoothed a creamy foundation to even things out. Blush and powder followed. With the eyes she took even more special care. The ice pack and Visine had only been able to do so much.
Doris brushed taupey eyeshadow over Eliza’s lids and outlined them with a fine aubergine eyeliner. The plum color made the blue of Eliza’s eyes pop out, taking attention away from the bloodshot white parts. She applied a darker brown powder along the orbs, to give the eyes depth and drama. On the middle of the eyelids, Doris defied the general rule among makeup artists not to use sparkle on television, ever so lightly brushing on a bit of shiny light peach glitter and thereby adding warmth and life to Eliza’s tired eyes.
“God, Doris, you deserve an Emmy for the job you did tonight,” Eliza said in wonderment as she looked at the final result of Doris’s labors in the brightly lit mirror that covered the wall in front of them.
Eliza rose tiredly from the chair and air-kissed Doris on the cheek, careful not to smudge the lipstick Doris had so painstakingly painted. Eliza squared back her shoulders and stood erect
In a half hour, she could go home and gather Janie in her arms.
As she walked across the studio, Eliza wore a marine-blue dress that covered her knees. Good. Finally she was listening to him.
But the dress was sleeveless. He didn’t like that.
“Hey, Meat! How ‘bout another beer here?”
He grudgingly turned away from the television set and grabbed the empty mug from the gleaming bar top. He pulled the lever to fill the glass from the Budweiser tap and he tried to block out the loud conversation that filled the crowded bar. Yeah, he cared about how the Giants were doing in preseason, but from six-thirty to seven, all he wanted to hear was Eliza’s voice.
Now an annoying newcomer to the bar was asking him how he had come to be called Meat.
“It’s a nickname I got in junior high,” he grumbled.
“Because of your size, I guess,” the unknowing customer supposed, eyeing the beefy arms protruding from the striped polo shirt.
“Yeah, that, and because my last name’s Bacon.” Meat turned back to the television set. He wasn’t going to be telling the clown that he had been relieved when he was christened “Meat” by the guys on the JV football team. He hated his real first name, couldn’t stand it all through grammar school when the nuns insisted on calling him Cornelius even though he had repeatedly asked them to call him Neil. In a classroom filled with Johns, Josephs, Kevins and Tommys, the kids teased him mercilessly about his weird, old-fashioned name, but his mother and father, always the cowards, weren’t about to go into school and chastise the sisters.
Meat chuckled to himself. Cornelius Bacon Sr. was dead now and his son hadn’t shed a tear. He had despised his father for his timidity with the outside world. Always playing by those pathetic rules of his that never got him anywhere. Back and forth, back and forth every day to that job at the post office, always insisting that while a government job may not make a man a millionaire, he would have a good retirement and medical insurance for the rest of his life. But the joke was on the poor slob: he dropped dead of a heart attack two months before he was set to retire.
The good thing about it was that his mother didn’t have to worry about money now, and that meant she wasn’t looking to him to kick in to support her. She got enough from the government each month to cover her needs and go to bingo at the church twice a week. She was satisfied with that.
She wasn’t satisfied, though, with the way her son made his living. Tending bar was not respectable as far as she was concerned. She nagged him about it whenever she called him. He should get a solid, dependable job with benefits.
“Not for me, Ma,” he droned time after time. “I don’t want any suits bossing me around.”
A man should be a man, and set down his own set of rules.
Eliza looked beautiful as always, but Abigail Snow detected something different about her eyes tonight. There was a sadness to them and Abigail ached to reach out to her.
Leaning back in her chair in the promotion office, she told herself again that she had to get over this obsession with Eliza. It wasn’t healthy. Abigail had stopped talking to her therapist about it, sensing that Dr. Flock was beginning to think she was really going over the deep end in her wishful relationship with Eliza. But with no other woman in her life, Abigail’s fascination with Eliza grew and grew.
It wasn’t that Abigail wasn’t trying to meet someone else. But it was difficult. She had posted her picture and biography on PlanetOut.com, one of the Web sites featuring gay “personals,” and she had received many responses. But when she actually took the step of meeting the women for dinner or drinks, she was always disappointed.
A soul mate was hard to find.
Abigail thought about her last girlfriend, Cosima. The year they had been together had started out wonderfully. They shared the same love of the outdoors, spending weekend afternoons hiking out in New Jersey or cycling and Rollerblading in Central Park. In the winter, they had driven out to the Poconos to ski or stayed in the city, catching a movie or just staying in together, Abigail reading while Cosima cooked delicious Greek meals. Abigail had reveled in those long, leisurely, companionable Sunday afternoons.
Abigail had cared about Cosima, but Cosima had found someone new.
The lesbian community was a small world. Everyone seemed to know who was with whom. Abigail had heard from her friend Shannon, who spent July and August in Sag Harbor, that Cosima was totally in love with the woman for whom she had left Abigail. Shannon had seen them, hand in hand and inseparable, at several parties during the summer. It was clear they were mad for each other.
Abigail’s sadness only deepened when Shannon well-meaningly suggested they go together to the Chubby Hole some Friday night. It would be a kick, Shannon said, to go to a lesbian strip joint. Fun to have a few drinks and watch the G-string-clad women dance. According to Shannon, Abigail needed to get out and have some laughs.
Abigail doubted that erotic dancers would make her feel better. She wanted someone to love, someone with whom she could have an emotional connection.
Someone like Eliza.
Each time their work put them together, Eliza never disappointed Abigail.
Eliza was her dream woman. Intelligent, witty, beautiful and so feminine. Abigail, who had long ago come to grips with the fact that she was butch and preferred taking the more aggressive role, fantasized nightly about making love to Eliza.
She had to get over it! Accept the fact that Eliza Blake was not gay. She had been married and had a daughter. Everyone around KEY News was aware that she and Mack McBride were romantically involved.
But Abigail still held out hope. After all, she had been married once herself. Many lesbians she knew had been in heterosexual relationships before they realized and accepted that they were gay. Maybe that could be the case with Eliza.
Chapter 27
Paige found an excellent agency that sent in a half dozen potential housekeepers for Eliza to interview. Three of them seemed like they would be the type of people Eliza might be able to trust her child with and feel comfortable having in her home. But one of them stood out and Eliza, after checking her references, hired her.
The one hitch was that Carmen Garcia couldn’t start until the middle of September. She insisted that she had to give notice at her current job. The family she had been employed by for eight years was relocating to the West Coast and Carmen had promised she would help them get ready for their move.
“How do you think you’ll be able to deal with helping me get settled in my new home, coming right off of packing up another?” Eliza asked with some concern as she interviewed the Guatemalan woman in her office.
“It is fine, senora. I like to get things in order,” Carmen answered, clasping her hands across her ample lap. “The Howards are very good to me. They help me get my green card. But their children are big now. They have no toys to pick up, only laundry now. The family goes out to dinner all the time. I like to cook and I miss having una niña to take care of.”
This was too good to be true.
“Do you have your driver’s license, Mrs. Garcia? There will be lots of chauffeuring my daughter to do.”
“Yes. I know how to drive, but I do not have my own car.” Carmen looked worried.
“No, you don’t have to have your own car. I will have a car for you to use. But you must have your own way to get to work in the morning and someone to pick you up at the end of the day. I can drive you in a pinch but, as a general rule, I don’t want to have to build time into my schedule to do that.”
“Of course not, senora. I know you are very busy. I will have my daughter or a friend drive me.”
“You have to know that sometimes I get home late, Mrs. Garcia. If there is a breaking news story or if I have a professional obligation at night, I have to know that it will be no problem for you to stay.”
