City of Lies

The Jennings could afford more than they knew. They just had to put away their existing notions of a dollar and to start thinking, We can do it.

Katie knew that this generously sized one-bedroom would be a good candidate for convincing the Jennings to ‘stretch’, as she liked to say, but the apartment was even more impressive than she had imagined. The seller had followed all of the rules: clean surfaces, no unnecessary clutter, even the welcoming fragrance of a warm pan of brownies, still cooling on the stovetop. And absolutely no photographs; the apartment should feel like it already belongs to the potential buyers.

‘Now this one’s one-point-one-two-five,’ Katie said, as if the extra four hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars was chump change, ‘but my guess is that there’s some softness there.’

Don winced at the number, but his wife did not. ‘Wow, Don, look at this kitchen. We could actually cook if we had this kind of kitchen. Think of the money we’d save in the long run.’

And then Katie knew she had an ally. Crossing the million-dollar threshold would be a leap for Don, but now Katie could see that Laura had been there all along. She felt a twinge of animosity toward the woman for so willingly spending her husband’s hard-earned money, but then reminded herself that she needed the commission. Given Katie’s standing in the hierarchy of her agency, it wasn’t often she had a shot at selling above the million-dollar mark.

‘Feel free to open the cabinets,’ Katie urged. ‘They’re Italian. High-gloss lacquer, top of the line.’

Katie checked her BlackBerry while the Jennings made their way through the apartment. She preferred to give buyers privacy so they could imagine life in their new apartment, without the watchful eye of a broker, but last year a couple posing as buyers made off with a hundred thousand dollars of jewelry and collectibles at various open houses across Manhattan. Now Katie kept one eye on her clients, even while she read her e-mail.

She could have used some good news. Instead, the incoming messages brought her more headaches with no corresponding revenue. The purchaser of a Tribeca studio under contract was bickering over a hundred-dollar difference in the negotiations over a built-in wall unit. Katie used her thumbs to type her most comforting words, even as she rolled her eyes in frustration.

Another e-mail delivered far worse news on the business front: a client who had been on the fence about making an offer for a West Village one-bedroom had climbed down on the wrong side. That he delivered the news to her electronically was not a good sign. On the phone, she had a chance of persuading him otherwise, or at least lining up the next showings. A terse e-mail like this one told her that the guy had written off not only this particular apartment, but his commitment to purchasing anything at all.

The message she received from Marj Mason, a caretaker at Glen Forrest Communities, was even more upsetting. Katie had seen the assisted living center’s telephone number pop up on her vibrating BlackBerry as she had stepped into the elevator with the Jennings. As Katie had requested a few months earlier, Marj had followed up with an e-mail. It was easier for her to check written messages than voice mails when she was with clients.

Katie’s mother had fallen again. According to Marj, there were no breaks this time – only bruises, and of course even more fear now of walking on her own. There was no way around it: Katie was going to have to increase the intensity of her mother’s care.

And then there was the final message: a text message that Katie had noticed first on her BlackBerry, but read last. She felt a knot form in her stomach as she took in the abrupt instructions.

As she replaced her BlackBerry in her red Coach purse, she prayed her mother would never find out about that final message, or what Katie would be doing the following night because of it.

Chapter Eleven (#ulink_d3e9f67c-5abc-54c1-b6b4-75e632378da9)

3:45 p.m.

Rogan was waiting for Ellie at his desk when she emerged from the locker room, freshly showered, hair still damp.

‘We cool with the Lou?’

‘Icy. Did you get hold of our guy in Narcotics?’

‘Yep. He wasn’t real happy about sticking around for a five o’clock arrival. I told him we’d do our best.’

Ellie looked at her watch. It was nearing four. ‘Our best will be five o’clock.’

‘Are you going to bother telling me why?’

‘We’ll have to work our way through traffic going uptown.’

‘Uptown? The Fifth Precinct’s in Chinatown.’

‘We’re making a pit stop. You’ll see.’

Twenty minutes later, Rogan peered through a glass storefront window on Eighty-ninth and Madison and flinched.

‘Is that woman doing what I think she’s doing?’

‘Um, that would depend on what exactly your imagination might be doing with the input being processed by your visual cortex.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I think if my brain’s doing anything, it’s trying to forget what I just saw. That shit should be illegal.’

‘It’s called threading,’ Ellie said.

They watched as an Indian woman with smooth dark skin and burgundy-stained lips moved her head back and forth, using the grip of her teeth and the movement of her head to maneuver a thread across the face of a young blond woman seated on the other side of the glass window.

‘She’s using a thread to pull that woman’s eyebrows out?’

‘It’s called threading,’ Ellie repeated.

‘Should be called torture. What the fuck are we doing here?’

‘You could use a little tidying up around there,’ Ellie said, reaching for his brow line.

Rogan swatted her hand away.

‘This is Perfect Arches,’ she said. ‘It’s Thursday, ten after four. You don’t remember?’

‘If you’ve some personal woman business to take care of, Hatcher, you really didn’t need to drag me along.’

‘Perfect Arches? Thursday at four p.m.? Kristen Woods?’

‘Kristen Woods is Sparks’s assistant.’

‘The timeline, Rogan. When we first tried to track down Woods about the timeline, she was out of the office. She said she’s got a standing appointment every Thursday at four p.m. to have her eyebrows threaded. I asked her –’

Rogan snapped his fingers. ‘You asked her where. Then you went on and on about how perfect her eyebrows were. I was tempted to reach down and check my anatomy to make sure I was still a man, the two of you blathering like that in front of me.’

‘I was bonding. Like the way you talk up sports to every doorman we ever need information out of ? Pretending you’re a Mets fan? So I pretended to care about eyebrow plucking. Kristen loves me.’

‘So if Kristen loves you so much, why are we bombarding her at this dungeon of torture?’

‘If we want to see Kristen without popping into the Sparks building, this is the place to do it. Look, there she is.’

Rogan followed the line of Ellie’s fingertip and spotted a woman with straight strawberry blond hair down to her shoulders, leaning back in a salon chair, another Indian woman working her magic with a string of thread above her.

‘She dyed her hair,’ he observed.

‘Did she?’

‘Yeah. It didn’t have any red in it before. It was more your color.’

Ellie dropped her gaze. ‘You might want to check that anatomy after all, girlfriend.’

Rogan flexed his bicep and gave it a little kiss. ‘One hundred percent Afro-American Manly Man, sweetheart. Don’t you forget it.’