“OK, Luce, if it’s all right with you.” She popped out the dvd and put in another. They ran through Lucy’s intro and the first phone call, to Harold’s cell. Then, on screen, Lucy looked at the camera and said, “OK, OK, keep it rolling, Les. Invade my universe, I don’t care. Here’s the story: right now I’m calling my neighbor in New York, Jane Aronstein, to check on my loft. This has nothing to do with our investigation but Leslie insisted on shooting it anyways.” She punched in a bunch of numbers, and waited. Offscreen, Leslie said to Lucy, “I can turn this into a speaker phone. Do you mind?”
Lucy remembered her first impulse was to say, hell yes I mind but then, instead, she shrugged. “No. Go ahead.”
They all watched the computer screen, where Lucy now talked on the phone. “Hey Jane, how are you? It’s Lucy.”
Jane came through muffled but understandable on the speaker phone. “I’m good, Lucy. Hey, how’s the weather in LA?”
“LA? I don’t–oh, of course. I’m in Mexico, Janey. I came down like two days after I got to LA. We’re working on the show down here.”
“Mexico? Cool. How’s the weather?”
“It’s great. So’s everything OK with the loft? Has Lascovich been around?”
“No. But your friend came by yesterday and got the keys.”
“My friend? What friend? What are you talking about?” Lucy, on screen, looked shocked and dismayed.
“Mickey. Your writer friend, the one you said you went to Jamaica with a couple of years ago. I remembered her name since they’re aren’t many girls named Mickey. She said she’d talked to you and you told her it was OK if she stayed there while she was getting a new kitchen put into her apartment on Roosevelt Island. She said you’d called from LA, that the X Dames show was going great, and that you thought you’d be out there staying with your friend Terry for a while. She obviously knew you so I gave her the keys.”
“Jesus.” Lucy held the phone, her uncertainty emanating from the screen. “Jane, I thought we agreed you weren’t going to give the keys to anyone but me.”
“I know, I know, you’re worried about Lascovich. But he’s not even around. He and his wife went to Florida. They left the day after you did.”
“So Mickey’s up there now?”
“I guess. You want me to go knock on the door?”
“No. Forget about it. I’ll call her. But I wish you’d checked with me.”
“Lucy, I tried your cell. It wasn’t working. She was really nice, and said all the right things, so–”
“OK, OK. I’m not blaming you. I just–oh, never mind. Hey, what did this woman look like?”
“I don’t know. I mean I was in the middle of something so I wasn’t really paying attention. Let me think. She had long, wavy blonde hair, she was probably in her late thirties or early forties, she wore spectacles, and she was dressed in sort of nouveau hippie clothes but expensively, it seems to me. She seemed fashion-conscious. I remember thinking she was really skinny.”
“Hmm.” Lucy couldn’t picture anyone she knew. She especially couldn’t picture mouse-haired, wide-bottomed Mickey. “Well, I guess I’ll see you when I see you, Jane.” She hung up. “Damn.” She looked into the camera. “Lascovich is messing with me here, I think.”
Leslie, offscreen, said, “You want to fill us in?”
“Not right now. I’ve got to make another call this minute.” She picked up the phone and punched in a bunch of numbers.
“Hello?” The speaker phone was still on.
“Hey, Mick, is that you?”
“Yes, who’s this?”
“It’s me. Lucy Ripken.”
“Hey, Luce, sorry I didn’t recognize your voice. This cell phone sucks. I was just thinking about you this very morning. I heard something about–”
“So you’re not in my loft?”
“What? Why would I be in your loft?”
“You didn’t call my downstairs neighbor Jane, get my new keys, and move into my loft while your kitchen’s being remodeled?”
“What are you talking about, Lucy? I’m sitting in my apartment on Roosevelt Island, gazing longingly at TV commercials for bad food while eating carrot sticks by the hundreds. I’m down to one hundred thirty eight point six pounds and still on it.”
“That’s great,” Lucy said into the phone, then looked directly at the camera. “What the hell’s going on?”
“Lucy, what are you talking about?”
“Mick, here’s the deal: I’m in Mexico working on this TV show and somebody posing as you got the keys to my place and got in. She knew enough about me to convince my neighbor that she was you. That’s all I know. I don’t know who or why or what but I suspect the landlord is up to something.”
“God damn, that’s pretty weird. Do you want me to go and see what’s up?”
“No, no, I don’t think you should stick your nose into this.”
“But if someone gets legal possession you’ll never get back in there.”
“I know,” Lucy said. “I’m in a total bind. But I heard my landlord’s out of town for a week, so maybe I’ll beat him back and then–we’ll see. Meanwhile, I’m like five thousand miles away. Damn! Ain’t life a bitch. Well, listen I have one other thing I wanted to ask you.”
“Anything for you, Luce. You want me to go shoot this broad, get the keys back?”
“Yeah, I’ll pay you five hundred bucks for the hit. No, seriously, once upon a time you told me you knew this guy in the East Village who was like the best computer hacker in the known universe.”
“Slope Tweed.”
“Slope Tweed?”
“That’s his name. He’s still there, on East Ninth. Completely wacko, but yes, he’s the best hacker I’ve ever met, known, or heard of, and he loves me madly so he will do your bidding if I tell him to do so.”
“I might need him.”
“You might?”
“Yeah. I have some things I’m looking in to and I might have to hack into some email and some other stuff on a website down here.”
“Down where?”
“I’m in this little town near Puerto Vallarta, and somebody got killed.”
“Jesus, Lucy, are you in the middle of another one of your escapades? I still tell people about our adventures solving the death of Awful Angus down in Ochi.”
“Yep, I’m at it again. And once again it came out of nowhere.”
“You’re lucky that way. New material just falls in your lap. Ha! Well, anyway, his email’s slope@tweed.com and here’s his number.” Lucy wrote it down. “I’ll call him after we get off the phone and tell him Lucy Ripken calls, do what she asks.”
“Muchas Gracias, Senorita Mickita.”
“My pleasure. And Lucy?”
“Yeah Mick.”
“Do me a favor and watch your ass.”
“Will do, Mick.”
“Let me know when you want to do the hit on the loft imposter. We only need one Mickey Wolfe in the world and that’s me.”
“Right on, Mick. See ya.” They both hung up.
“So someone hijacked your loft?” Terry said. “What a bummer.”
“You have no idea what a bummer, if that is what happened. My landlord is a hound from hell and it smells like he’s behind this,” Lucy said. “In any case, that’s all I got done today,” she said. “It was–upsetting.”
“I can imagine,” Leslie said. “Listen, tomorrow we’ll check out the real estate office. I’ll shoot with the mini-cam and see what shakes. After that, we’ll use your friend’s pal if we need to. Slope Tweed, huh? Sounds like an interesting specimen.” Leslie was seriously into it now, Lucy could tell. Smelling blood.
“All I can tell you guys is we have to get this done fast because I have got to get back to New York ASAP,” Lucy said. “I don’t know what’s up with the X Dames but I am not going to lose that place for any stinking TV show. A Soho loft is worth its weight in gold, in New York.”
“So let’s get on it,” said Terry. “Marcia, you go with Leslie to see that Townsend dolt in Dario’s office tomorrow. Tell him you want to invest your X Dames winnings in a Sayulita surf hut or something. Leslie’s your financial advisor or whatever.”
They left Lucy alone. After a room service dinner she began to get into a major fret about her loft again, trying to figure out how to take it back from afar. Nothing seemed feasible. Then the phone rang. She pounced on it.
“Lucy here.”
“Hey Luce, it’s me.” Harold.
“Damn am I glad to hear your voice,” she said. “Things have gotten really weird, Harry. Are you still in Fla? How’s it going down there? You strike it rich yet?”
“Whoa, Lucy, slow down. Things are OK. Moving. Remember my friend Prudence in Jamaica? Well, I called her and she hooked me up with these two cousins of hers who’ve been working as cane-cutters on some rich-ass exile Cuban’s plantation about two hours from here. So I tracked them down and when I told them I was a friend of cousin Prudence they got really friendly. They bailed on their cane-cutting gigs—God, that’s ugly, hard, shit-paying work—but anyways, they were very happy to help me start digging for twenty-five bucks an hour against ten per cent of my haul. I don’t believe they think we’re going to find bags of money, and the ground is pretty damp, but–”
“Harry, cut to the chase. Are you there?”
“We’re about 50 feet into it. I found a maintenance guy to get me plans to help me steer around some plumbing so that took a little extra time and payola. We can only work midnight to five am and I also had to invest some time in shoring things up because the ground’s so damp. All in all it’s taking a little longer than I thought. But another three days or so we’ll be there. Say a little prayer for me, Lucy. Now that I’m actually doing this it seems pretty preposterous I must admit.”
“But you don’t want to cut your losses and get back to New York, huh?”
“No way, Luce. I got a serious tunnel going here, and I’m way too close to my target at this point. Why? What’s up?”
“Someone’s in my loft since yesterday and I don’t know who.”
“What?”
Lucy told him the story. “So here I am in Sayulita and the mysterious stranger has moved into my place. I figure Lascovich is behind this but on the other hand I don’t know how he could find out about the X Dames gig, which this woman used to trick Jane and get in, so I’m also thinking it’s might be someone connected to somebody on the show because she knew all about it.”
“But you told Lascovich you were leaving, right? So he found out where you were going and–hey, how is that going? The show I mean.”
“Murder and mayhem on the high waves, what else?”
“What?”
She told him another story.
“Jesus, Luce, you are so good at stepping into it. So what are you going to do?”
“Oh, we have a plan, don’t worry. Things go right Teresa and I are going to turn this lurid scenario into the TV event of the next fall season. But it will probably take a few days to pull it off so I was hoping you might make it back to Manhattan before Lascovich gets back and see if you could get rid of this person in my loft.”
“And how was I supposed to accomplish that?”
“Harold, you are one wily character when you need to be.”
“I guess that’s a compliment but I still need a couple of days to unearth my million.” Harold was trying to track down a million bucks in hundred dollar bills that some now deceased dope dealers had buried in a Florida swamp. A Walmart had been built atop the swamp in the interim. Things were complicated.
“Still think it’s there, huh?”
“I sure as hell can’t walk away without knowing one way or the other. I’ll be back in New York, let me see, today’s Tuesday–Saturday afternoon I would guess.”
“I think Lascovich will be back in his office on Monday.”
“I’ll check it out Saturday night or Sunday, see what’s up. But damn. Lucy, it’s Manhattan real estate. People kill for that much space. You know the deal.” She didn’t respond. “I’ll do what I can.”
“Thanks, Harry.” She paused, and softened her voice. “And Harry?”
He knew that tone. “Yes, Lucy?” he said slowly, drawing it out, and she could picture him smiling his patented, come hither and strip, immediately if not sooner, smile.
“You know what I want to do to you next time I see you, Harry?”
“I have a pretty good idea, Luce,” he said. “And I’m sure you know that I eagerly await your ministrations. Or as the man once said, I could use a lemon-squeezer.”
“I only hope that it is in my own bed, in my loft, that we can make lemonade.”
