Manhattan Noir

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL APARTMENT IN NEW YORKBY JUSTIN SCOTT

Chelsea

I will cut her heart out,” Tommy King announced in a loud, clear voice, placing near equal emphasis on each word.

_I said, “You shouldn’t be saying that.”

“Who you going to tell?”

“See the blondes at the bar? How do you know one of them’s not a cop? Or a cop’s sister looking to get him promoted?”

Tommy King lowered the decibels to a vodka mutter. “Whoa. Almost blew it. Thanks, Joe.”

We were seated at a four top in the back of Morans, an expensive Irish joint on Tenth in Chelsea around the corner from what I was already thinking of as “my apartment.” Which was premature, considering how negotiations had gotten jammed up. Tommy King was the real estate agent who had steered me to it after a six-month search. The table was roomy because he always reserved for three and gave his name as “Dr.” King.

“I don’t want to give the cops any ideas. Shouldn’t even tell you.” He was finishing off his second martini, not drunk enough to ignore. I was used to his harping on his ex-wife, but suddenly he was vicious, gripping my arm and pulling me close to whisper, “I’m going to buy a surgeon’s scalpel.

What she did to me. I just have to figure out how not to get caught-What’s the matter? You’ve never been mad enough to kill anybody?”

Hoping to shift the subject from ex-wife killing back to business, I said, “Right this minute I could kill the owner of that apartment.”

“No, no, no. Jesus H., don’t even say such a thing.” He ducked lower. “You don’t want to do that. Kill him and you’ll end up negotiating with his heirs. I’m telling you, heirs are the worst. Soon as they inherit free money, it’s not enough.”

“It’s the most beautiful apartment in New York.”

“I used to say that about my wife. The most beautiful woman in New York. She still is, I’ll give her that. Opens up that big smile of hers, she lights the whole street.”

“I didn’t realize you were still seeing her.”

“From a distance. You have to get right in her face to see the evil.”

Tommy waved his glass for a third drink.

I stood up. I’d heard enough evil-ex for one night. From a distance almost sounded like he was stalking her. “I’m out of here. We’ll go up again tomorrow, right?”

“Seven p.m.”

“Why so late?”

“He wants you to see the sun changing colors on the Empire State Building.”

“He’s enjoying jerking me around.”

Tommy put down his glass and said, seriously, “Two things you want to keep in mind, Joe. He can only jerk you around if you show him he’s getting to you. And, he knows what he’s got.”

“What’s that?”

“What you just said, man. The most beautiful apartment in New York.”

It was a walk-up. And the kitchen was a bad joke.

It ran the full length and breadth of the parlor floor of a Greek Revival town house built in 1840. It had two fireplaces and nine-foot ceilings. Listed as a one-bedroom, it had the extra nooks and crannies you find in an old house. One would hold a desk. Another, the upright piano I’d had in storage since I came to New York. It had a view in the back of narrow gardens and a view out front, across the street, of a gigantic plane tree in a green field beside a gothic stone seminary whose church, gardens, and dormitories occupied the entire block from Ninth to Tenth Avenues.

The plane tree spread its branches in a hundred-foot circle that screened the only ugly thing in view, the seminary’s 1960s-modern three-story office complex that had all the charm of a suburban elementary school. When I asked how the church had skated it past the Landmark Commission-which maintained strict architectural control of historic blocks like this one-Tommy had answered, “This city was built on loopholes.” The tree blocked most of it. Above the tree the Empire State Building sailed into the sky like a vertical ocean liner.

“Hard to believe you’re in the city,” said Richard, the owner. Richard had renovated the building forty years ago when-he told me every time I went back for another look-brave pioneers could buy crumbling property on a dangerous street for what today would buy a time-share in a parking garage. He had knocked down rooming house partitions and opened it up into floor-throughs, occupying the ground floor himself and renting the rest. Now, old and Florida-bound in a booming market, he had emptied the rentals by the simple expedient of jacking the rent to Park Avenue penthouse rates and had sold the third, fourth, and attic floors. “Mine” was the last and most expensive, since, Richard assured me, it was the best.

His negotiating strategy was effective, and downright intimidating. I had instructed Tommy to offer forty thousand less than his exorbitant asking price, then Richard raised his asking price by forty, making it insanely exorbitant. I should have walked away. Instead, I walked in at 7 o’clock, agreed that it was hard to believe we were in the city, and admired the light on the Empire State Building shift color from a metallic tan to red to blue-gray as the sun crept past the city.

It took a while, but Richard was in no rush. He was a non-stop talker who loved a captive audience. He told me that the reason the staircase sagged was some idiot had cut a main beam in the basement while running a new sewer line when they converted the original town house into a rooming house for the dockworkers back in World War II. He told me he put a new roof on the building. He told me that a disused air shaft could be converted to a kitchen exhaust fan in “your apartment.”

He told me a bunch of gossip about people on the block who fell into two categories: amusing eccentrics who owned buildings and apartments, and gypsy peasants who rented.

He cackled that the house of a neighbor he was feuding with was haunted. “Really is. You could buy an apartment in his building for half what it’s worth.”

I had checked that out already. It was going cheap all right. I didn’t see any ghosts. But it was completely ordinary and the only view was of a housing project on 18th.

“Having the seminary across the street is like having a country house outside your window. Except you don’t have to drive there and mow the grass. You want to get outdoors, you walk two minutes to the river.”

Then he made my blood run cold by telling me that a couple had looked at the apartment this afternoon and seemed to like it a lot. Money was no problem. The guy’s parents were rich. And if they wouldn’t help, the Swiss bank that employed the woman would front the down payment. He watched me react and seemed to like what he saw.

“You really should live here,” Richard said. “You’ll never find another place like this. Chelsea Piers, best gym in New York, is right down the street. I’m selling paradise.”

I turned my face to the window. The Empire State Building had almost disappeared in the dark. Just then, they switched on a thousand floodlights, painting it white as an iceberg.

“Look at that,” Richard crowed. “I just have a feeling in my gut you belong here. I don’t know if I ever told you, but this apartment has a track record when it comes to romance. Everyone who ever rented it met somebody and had a love affair. Right here in these rooms.”

I should not have told Tommy King that I wanted the kind of home that a woman would like to share.

“You’re asking a killer price,” I said.

“It will only get more valuable,” he countered. “Nothing will bring it down. It didn’t go when the Towers went down. I was watching on CNN thinking, Oh, God, the Empire State Building’s next, I’ll never get my price without the view. Then I realized the terrorists don’t know from shit about the Empire State Building. You gotta be a New Yorker to love the Empire State Building-sure enough, they went for the Pentagon.”

He was right. It would not be the most beautiful apartment in New York without that spire changing colors by the hour.

Richard said, “Nothing but a haunting will ever bring it down, Joe. And don’t get any ideas, because this building is not haunted and never has been. No scary ghosts, no evil spirits. It’s a great investment. Turn around and sell it in a flash. For profit.”

“I’m looking for a home, not a stepping stone.”

“Everyone wants to move up.”

“Not me. This is up.” Another mistake I realized as soon as I said it. I had told him exactly how much I wanted it and he didn’t bother to conceal a smile.

Tommy King stepped in, too late to repair the damage, saying, “Listen, Richard, thanks. We gotta split. We’ll come back tomorrow. Seven o’clock?”

Richard touched my arm, exuding fatherly concern.

“You might want to think about if you really belong in New York.”

“Beg pardon?”

“A lot of people your age who can’t afford New York are buying in Brooklyn. Manhattan may not be your town.”

On the street Tommy said, “I thought you were going to slug him.”

I turned on him. “Next time you see a class of high school tourists from the boonies? Look for the straggler staring at the skyscrapers. That’s the kid who’s coming back. Manhattan’s been my ‘town’ since I came here on my senior trip. I don’t care who’s moving to fucking Brooklyn, I’m not.”

“Whoa. I believe you, man. You turned red as brake lights. First time I’ve seen fire in your eyes.”

“I’ve settled for second best too many times.” I couldn’t believe I had just admitted that out loud, but I was so upset I dropped every defense and proceeded to spill my guts to Tommy King. “I didn’t hold out for an Ivy League college. I didn’t fight to get into a first-rank law school. I didn’t hold out for the job that really would have gone someplace.”

“You’re general counsel of the biggest printing company in the city.”

“I sign off on contracts. If a problem gets interesting, I’m told to hire outside counsel. I married a woman mainly because I didn’t know how to say no when she asked. And I didn’t fight for a fair divorce. I’m through settling. I’m through letting things happen to me. I want that apartment.”

“I believe you, man. You look like I feel about my ex.”

“I really blew it with Richard, didn’t I?”

Tommy said, “I bought it today.”

“What? Bought what?”

“Scalpel.”

“What?” I said again, though I knew what he meant.

“It’s just a skinny little handle with a bunch of blades. Like razors. Cops’ll figure some kid got her with a box cutter.”

I figured it was time to get a new real estate guy. Tommy King was nuts-creepy nuts-telling me all this because in his twisted heart he really believed that he was right and she was evil. It didn’t matter that he was the listing broker. Richard would sell to whatever fool paid his ridiculous price.

On the way home I got a call from another broker at Tommy’s agency, a partner named Marcy Stern, a woman with a shrill, demanding manner that matched her pointy face and darting eyes. “Listen, Joe, you’re out of there tomorrow morning.”

I was living rent free, baby-sitting an apartment for sale.

Tommy had gotten me the gig and I figured I was safe until I found a place of my own because the plain white box in an ugly white box building was listed for an insane price. Wrong about that. “How can you close in one day?”

“All cash deal. The client wants to dump his stuff before he hops his flight to Singapore. Get your junk out by 8.”

“Didn’t I sign something that said I’d get a couple of days notice?”

“Not if you want help getting another free place. Call Tommy King.” Tommy had a similar live-in security guard arrangement, sleeping in a succession of apartments on the market since he lost his home to the ex-wife he hated so much he wanted to cut her heart out.

I called Tommy.

“Don’t worry about it, I’ll get you another one soon as I can. Bunk with me till then.”

I thanked him for his generosity and he repeated what he had said when he first offered me the apartment-sitting deal.

“Why watch your down payment get smaller? Bad enough watching prices go higher.”

At a quarter to 8 the next morning, Marcy unlocked the door with the agency key and looked surprised that I was still stuffing clothes into bags. “What are you doing here?”

“I’ll be right out of your way.” I picked up a garment bag, a laptop backpack, and a suitcase-everything else was in storage. The suitcase, which had been damaged by an airline, broke open. My laundry fell on the floor.

Marcy and the new owner, a Chinese guy in a blue suit, along with a huge guy who appeared to be his bodyguard, watched me crawl around picking up my underwear, and shut the door firmly behind me as I shuffled down the long, dreary hall to the elevator.

Tommy was on the phone when I got uptown to his latest temporary place-a glass and mirrored palace in the sky with views of the park and both rivers. He pointed me toward one of the halls and mouthed, “Third bedroom on the left.” Then he continued loudly on the phone. “Hey, by the way, my ex is looking in Chelsea. She’s got a new boyfriend wants a pied-àterre. No, leave me out of it. If she hears I’m involved she’ll run the other way. I might have something you can show her. I’ll give you a heads-up.”

As soon as I bundled my stuff into the bedroom, which had hardwood floors, a marble bathroom, and no bed, Tommy wandered in saying, “You gotta raise some more cash for a bigger down payment so the bank’ll cut you a mortgage to meet Richard’s price. So the question is, where do you get the cash?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Most clients’ parents chip in.”

“My folks don’t have that kind of money.”

“Can’t they take a home equity on their house?”

I explained that a bank appraiser would not bother getting out of his car for their tiny ranch with a shallowly pitched roof on a quarter-acre lot. “If every neighbor on their block chipped in with a home equity loan, they might raise enough to send a crippled kid to Disneyland. No, Tommy, not everybody is rich. It just seems that way.”

“I gotta tell you, Richard is not lowering it. There are no minuses in that apartment. Once you accept the stairs and the kitchen-which you already did-there’s nothing wrong to make him lower his price.”

“Yeah, I guess not.”

“Think about Brooklyn.”

“No!” I felt my face burn red again.

“Man, you’re looking obsessed.”

I repeated what I had said yesterday: “I won’t settle for second best.” Then I changed the subject to get him off my back. “I heard you on the phone. Sounds like you got un-obsessed with your ex.”

“What do you mean?”

“Helping her look for her boyfriend’s apartment.”

“Is that what it sounded like?”

“Sounded like you got over her.”

His face hardened up. “After what she did to me?”

“What did she do to you?”

His eyes widened. “Are you kidding? What did she do to me?”

“You keep saying it, but I don’t know what it was.”

“I told you. She got the apartment.”

“My ex got our apartment. But I’m not going to kill her for it. Much less cut her heart out.”

Tommy got really mad and started hacking away at me.

“She got your apartment? What kind of apartment? Tell me about it. View? Big? Classy building? High ceilings? Skylights?

Granite and nickle bathrooms?”

“No. No. No. And no. It was just a nice apartment. Nice layout.”

“Nice layout means small.”

“It was small. It was a New York apartment.”

“Yeah, well I wouldn’t cut my ex’s heart out for a piece of shit like that, either. But my apartment was fantastic. First of all, it was the best deal in New York. I bought it right out from under my firm-previous firm. Went to check it out.

Found this old guy, just got widowed, starts weeping while he’s showing me. It was gorgeous. He had no idea what it was worth. He just wanted out. I made an offer on the spot.

Condo, so I didn’t have to go through board shit. Gave my banker oral sex to get a bridge loan to close the deal-Hey! Lose the I-just-got-here-from-Topeka expression. She wasn’t that bad.”

Maybe she wasn’t, but Tommy had no smile for the memory.

“I thought I was made,” he raged. “Fucking brass ring at last. It had it all. Views, high ceilings, kitchen to die for, class building. She turned around and flipped it for ten times what I paid five years ago. She is fucking rich and I’m sleeping in a sleeping bag. Which is why-”

“I know, I know. You’re going to cut her heart out.”

That afternoon he called me at work. Richard had canceled our 7 o’clock meeting. I felt a cold lump in the pit of my stomach. It sounded like he had gotten the higher offer he’d been waiting for. “Any idea why?” I asked.

“No idea,” said Tommy.

“Can you reschedule?”

“I’ll talk to him next week.”

I had an awful feeling Tommy was trying to blow me off. In fact, I had an awful feeling that he himself had found the client who had made the higher offer. Hating myself, I did a terrible thing, telephoned my folks in Missouri and asked to borrow the fifty thousand dollars they’d been saving, buck by buck, so they could move south when my father finally retired from teaching.

The damnedest thing was how they didn’t even hesitate. I promised I would pay it back as soon as possible, thinking maybe I could in five years, and right after work hurried down to Chelsea prepared to meet Richard’s insane price with an extra ten thousand to beat the offer I just knew he must have gotten.

Richard was sitting on his front step, leaning against a pillar that was topped with a welcoming wrought-iron pineapple he’d had recreated by Spanish craftsmen to match one stolen. The front door closed behind him and I could hear somebody creaking up the steps.

I said, “I got the money. I can meet your price.”

“Too late. A woman’s buying it right now.”

“I can top it by ten thousand.”

“Top what by ten thousand?”

“The extra forty you wanted.”

Richard laughed. “She’s already topped that. I’ve got seven hundred thousand on the table.”

“Seven hundred thousand? Sight unseen?”

“She saw it this afternoon. Woman looking for a pied-àterre for her boyfriend.”

“Seven hundred thousand?”

“This woman is so in love she’d have paid a million.”

Richard shook his head. Even he seemed awed and it made him seem more human as he asked, “You know how when somebody is really happy after being unhappy for a long time?

How they glow? This woman is glowing like Venus on a dark night.”

“How’d she find out about it?”

“Your friend Tommy showed it to her broker. Tommy was so excited he was red in the face. He really is a greedy prick.”

“Is Tommy up there?”

“No, he and the broker were here earlier.”

“Did you actually see Tommy King leave?”

“No.”

I thought to myself, Tommy wouldn’t kill her up there.

Richard knew he had set it up with her broker. He’d get caught. Except he didn’t care about getting caught. He thought he was right.

I hesitated for longer than I should have. I knew exactly what would happen, and when it did, the price of that apartment was going to plummet. A bloody murder would knock the price lower than a ghost. All I had to do was walk away from a crime about to happen. Or better yet, just stand innocently chatting with Richard who, as usual, was talking up a storm. All I had to do was listen and wait.

“Hey, Richard,” a woman called down from the front window of the apartment. “Where is that air shaft for the kitchen exhaust?”

She was not the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in New York, but she came close-a perfectly lovely blonde, slim, not boney, sky-blue eyes set wide in a heart-shaped face, and a mouth that wanted to smile. Quite a few years older than Tommy, I thought. I wasn’t surprised they had gotten divorced; what I couldn’t figure out was how they had hooked up in the first place. She just seemed better than Tommy, who while handsome enough to squire a beauty like her around town, had an empty mind and soul even when he wasn’t threatening bloody murder.

She looked down at me gaping up at her, and her smile erased every line that hinted at age. As Richard had said, she glowed. “Hi. I’m Samantha King. Do you live in the building too?”

Before I could answer, she disappeared-like a reverse jack-in-the-box-and the window slammed shut. I ran up the front stoop. The door had swung closed and locked. “Open it,” I yelled. “Unlock the door!”

Richard located the key on the crowded ring on his belt, inserted it, and unlocked the door. I pounded up the stairs.

Halfway up the flight I heard her scream. When I reached the landing something heavy slammed against a wall. The old house had thin paneled wood doors and I ran full tilt into the nearest, splintering it open with my shoulder.

Tommy had chased her into a corner, bent her backwards over a radiator, and was hacking at her chest with his scalpel. He looked up at me crashing into the room. His face was covered in her blood.

“Stop!” I shouted, too late to do any good.

Tommy let the poor woman go and her body slipped off the radiator onto the floor. “I can’t get it out,” he said.

“Should’ve brought a fucking saw.” He reached down and tried to close her staring eyes, but the lids popped open again and all he did was leave bloody prints on her cheeks. He gave up trying, pressed the scalpel to the left side of his neck, and gouged deep.

I got what I deserved.

The Post and the Daily News exaggerated the blood, of course. Times and Sun readers learned that Tommy did not cut his ex-wife’s heart completely out, but had given up halfway and ripped the scalpel across his own throat in what the Sun writer had termed “a spasmodic mea culpa.” Still, there was blood enough.

Marcy Stern, speaking for the real estate brokerage, swore that Tommy King had been “terminated for cause” before the attack. Asked what effect the crime would have on property values in Chelsea, West 20th Street, and Richard’s 1840 town house in particular, she fired back, “Don’t even think of lowballing us.”

Unfortunately for her and Richard-and fortunately for me-no one thought of making any offers at all, lowball or otherwise. I got the apartment for the original asking price and didn’t have to tap my parents’ little nest egg. Richard, shaken, agreed to all my terms, especially a floor-to-ceiling cleaning by professionals before I moved in and a repainting of the room where most of the attack had occurred. I moved in the afternoon of the closing to a home smelling of fresh paint and floor wax.

Samantha was waiting in the window, her heart-shaped face super-imposed on the Empire State Building. Her ghost? Or just my guilty imagination reflected in the glass? Didn’t matter which, I saw her clear as I saw the sunlit spire by day and the white iceberg at night. I tried moving around the room, shifting perspective. At angles, the nineteenth-century glass distorted the light, but she kept moving with me. Wispy hair, blue eyes, paler than in life, and a small, sad smile that grew sadder every day as the lines around her mouth deepened. “Why didn’t you stop him?” she asked one morning. And that night, “You knew he wanted to hurt me.”

After a couple of weeks of her, I called in a broker for a hint of what I could get for the place. He liked it, at first. I didn’t have much furniture yet, but my piano made it look lived in and there were the fireplaces and the killer view from the front windows. All of a sudden he shivered.

“Weird feeling in this place. Like something’s here? You ever notice? Hey, is this where that woman got killed?”

He didn’t wait for my answer.

Samantha was waiting in the window. She said, “The thing that makes me saddest is that I had finally found a great guy. My friends were asking me, does he have a brother?”

I said, “I can’t sell this apartment. I can’t move. I can’t change what I did to you. So I guess I’ll have to get used to you. With a view like this I’ll get used to anything. If I have to live with you, I will. If you can stand it, I can too.”

I awoke the next morning to a mind-shattering screaming roar echoing in the street, looked out the window, and saw a bunch of guys with chainsaws and a crane lopping branches off the plane tree.

I raced downstairs in pants and socks. Across the street sawdust was flying from the main trunk. Marcy Stern was on the sidewalk, taking people’s business cards and handing out pictures of model apartments slated for a new twenty-story residential tower. Each had a wonderful view of the Empire State Building.

“You can’t build here!” I and several panicked neighbors screamed. “The seminary is landmarked.”

“Not this part.”

“The whole block.”

“Not the new part.”

“But-”

“We found the same loophole they did when they built the new part.”

Steel rises quickly in New York. The last Samantha and I saw of my view was a hard-hatted iron worker silhouetted against the Empire State Building like King Kong.