Super in the City (24 page)

There, on top, in no- smudge Sharpie, was “3 Lives Books, Sun, noon.”

“Oh my God,” I said quietly, but in a room that was library silent, it made heads turn.

The techie looked up at me with real alarm and put his arm over the bills.

“No,” I said, reaching out my hand, which scared him more. He gathered up the money and shoved it in his wallet.

“Wait,” I whispered, while he looked around for a court officer. “That ten- dollar bill, the one that was on top, look at it.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. I drew my shoulders down and tilted my head at him: do I
look
like a criminal?

“Take it out and look at it,” I insisted.

Reluctantly, he opened his wallet again, keeping one eye on me. He pulled out the ten, glanced at Lucy’s handwriting, then looked at me blankly.

I hesitated, wanting to strike a balance between honoring Lucy’s trust in fate and giving fate a little leg up.

“Do you know what that means? What’s written on there?”

He squinted at the bill again.

“The bookstore in the Village?” His voice was a touch nasal for my taste, but this wasn’t about me.

“It is, it is! You know it?” I said excitedly.

He shrugged.

“See the rest? Day and time?” I prodded. “Say you had noticed it yourself. What do you think you might have done?”

Other prospective jurors were looking at us now, trying to
figure out whether we knew each other or whether I was hitting on him. I grabbed a chair and sat down.

“What would you have done?” I repeated with more irritation than I’d intended. Cupid’s assistants should probably use a more tender tone.

“Done?” he whispered. “Nothing. I don’t take orders from graffiti scrawled on currency.”

Smart man.

“Okay look.” I pointed at the bill. “That was written by a really good friend of mine. She’s a romantic. She believes that the right man out there will see this and meet her at the bookstore and they’ll love each other forever.” I spread my hands as if to say I’m just the messenger.

“And it wound up in my wallet?” The techie looked properly awed. I opened my mouth to explain that there were dozens of Hamiltons out there, not just this one, but then changed my mind and just nodded.

“Huh.” He squinted at it. “So, what, does she go there every Sunday at noon just waiting for some guy to show up?”

I wondered if Lucy had ever gotten this far in her scenario, to the point where she had to admit that she did, in fact, do just that.

“She’s a romantic,” I repeated helplessly. “And a bibliophile. She loves to be around books anyway, so she figured…” I couldn’t tell if this was a good route. “She’s pretty and smart and has a fabulous sense of humor and she’s loyal.” I was getting angry, as if he’d already rejected her.

“Okay, okay, don’t get worked up,” he said, starting to smile. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and did a funny little flick of his earlobe. “Why not? Even if she’s a serial killer, she can’t hurt me in a bookstore, right?”

It wasn’t the most stouthearted comment I’d ever heard from a man, but it was reasonable.

“How will I know who she is?”

I thought for a moment, then pulled out my cell phone and surreptitiously turned it on.

“You’re not supposed to have that on in here,” he whispered urgently. Ah, he and Lucy would have a beautiful life together, living by the letter of the law.

I scrolled through my pictures until I found one of the four of us at the party at Soho House. I held it up to him. “The blonde in the blue dress.”

His jaw fell open. “Seriously? What’s her name?”

I shook my head. “Pretend you saw the note yourself. But you’ll go this Sunday, yes?”

He nodded vigorously, twisting his neck to follow the image as I put my phone away. I stood up and put my chair back, satisfied that even if the clerk never called my name, I had performed a great service this morning.

Half an hour later, we were mercifully released for

an early lunch. The first thing I did when I stepped out of the building was call Lucy.

“You still go to the bookstore on Sundays, right?” I said when she answered.

“Zephyr?”

“Because I want to make absolutely sure that you’ll go this Sunday.”

“Why?” she said suspiciously. I heard a man screaming in the background.

“Are you okay?” I said, thinking that Lucy and I should have a safety code. If she was ever being held at knifepoint by one of her clients and I happened to call, she could say, “Wow, wasn’t Sterling a great school?” and then I’d know something was wrong and could call the police. I’d make a fascinating
career out of lecturing all over the country, advising social service agencies on effective and innovative security measures.

“I think the janitor stubbed his toe,” she said, her voice momentarily distant as she leaned away from the phone to confirm. “Sometimes I still stop by the bookstore,” she admitted. “Why should I go this Sunday?”

I chose my words carefully. “I’m downtown on jury duty—”

“Oh, yeah, how’s that
going?”
she interrupted in a concerned voice, reassuring herself that she was tuned in to even the most mundane details of her friends’ lives.

“Fine,” I said impatiently. “I mean, totally boring and I haven’t been called in, but fine. Listen, I saw a guy there with one of your ten- dollar bills.”

I heard her suck in her breath and my heart ached for her hopefulness.

“He’s cute, Luce, and I think he’ll be there.”

“What did you say to him?” she said accusingly.

“Nothing!”

“Liar.”

“All I did was notice it and joke that he should stop by,” I lied.

“And?”

“And he kind of laughed and said, ‘Hey, yeah, you never know!’ ”

“Cute?”

“Totally,” I said without hesitation, on the grounds that people had wildly different definitions of “cute.” “So you’ll go?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t sound excited.”

“I am, it’s just, you know,” she said forlornly.

“I know,” I said sympathetically, “but this time might be different.” I was bolstering my own broken heart as much as I was hers.

“How’s Gregory?”

“Over,” I said curtly.

“Oh, Zeph, what happened?” There was genuine dismay in her voice.

I shook my head, suddenly afraid I’d start crying right there among the defendants’ wives and landlord- tenant lawyers, all smoking in one indiscriminate mass in front of the building.

“Long story. I’ll tell you guys when I see you. Are we all on for TV night tomorrow at Mercy’s?”

“Yeah, unless she ditches us for Dover, in which case it’s just the two of us.” Crap. In my self- pity slump on Sunday, I’d forgotten to call Tag to say good- bye. She had left for a week-long conference in Senegal. Or Saudi Arabia? No, Senegal.

“Mercedes would never do that,” I said with little conviction. Mercedes had never been in love with any man but Mozart. Who the hell knew how she’d behave? I immediately chastised myself for my bitterness. I could not let Gregory win. If I hadn’t let Hayden get the best of me, I certainly wasn’t going to let some gangly, barbecuing Shakespeare- shirker trample my optimism.

“Have you talked to her since Saturday night?” Lucy asked suggestively.

“Did she sleep with him?” I yelped a little too loudly, eliciting some guffaws from a coterie of passing detectives wearing identical trench coats—perhaps to protect them from the bright sunlight.

“You’ll have to ask her yourself,” she said lightly. The prospect of meeting the love of her life the following Sunday had already put Lucy in a playful mood, which irrationally irritated me.

After lunch, I returned to purgatory. The boring CFO had been dumped back in among us mere mortals, but his brief foray had made him an instant critic.

“I’m a big believer in getting things done,” I heard him proclaim. I turned to see who his new victim was, and found an artificially tanned, face- lifted ambassador of Park Avenue listening raptly. I glanced at her left hand: ring finger naked. I stood up and changed seats. Where was the popping, sparkling melting pot that was supposed to be my city?

“Okay, listen up, people!” the clerk boomed, his voice a de-fibrillator on our collective asystolic body. “If you hear your name, line up, and Officer Pendleton’ll take you upstairs.” He gave the ancient, rusty cylinder on his desk a spin, and began calling out names.

“Sean O’Malley. Jennifer Smith. Astrid Heffenfigger. Concita Buenavista,” he said, mangling all the names except for Smith. Though in this town it was always possible that their names actually
were
Seen, Astride, and Consitta.

Ohpleaseohpleaseohplease. I knew it was pathetic to depend on jury duty for excitement, but I needed something to take my mind off Gregory. Off the fact that I was twenty- seven and lived downstairs from my parents. Off the fact that my friend was dating a movie star. Off the fact that my little brother was about to be outed as the next Scorsese. I needed a little boost of something, just a tiny swirl of chocolate through my pound cake.

“Ebony Leonard. Tamara Weinstein. Marguerite DuBois,” he droned, pronouncing the silent “s.” “Zephyr Zuckerman.”

Adrenaline surged through me, but I tried to look nonchalant as I gathered up my things and made my way over to join the chosen ones. I felt like I was in grade school again, remaining silent as we were escorted through a gray- tiled corridor that reeked of ammonia. We piled into an elevator, rode up to the eleventh floor, and lined up outside a set of double doors. I glanced at my fellow jurors, but couldn’t spot anyone who might be feeling as thrilled as I was. Officer Pendleton, who
brought to mind Nurse Ratched with a gun holster, held up her hand and opened one door, leaning in to confer with someone. She turned back to us.

“You will sit in the back two rows of the courtroom,” she instructed. “No talkin’, no gum chewin’, no eatin’, no cell phones, no readin’, no hats. This judge, she don’t put up with
nuthin’.
” She glared at us to convey her approval of the judge’s standards.

I figured I knew what to expect better than most. I’d been visiting the courthouse since I was seven, proudly watching my father in action. I already knew it was nothing like on TV. The paint peeled, the windows stuck, court officers sat around reading the paper, there was usually no one in the audience, it was dead quiet, and the action was very, very slow. That someone’s life might be hanging in the balance was rarely reflected at any given moment. Even my father’s line of questioning was often a dull litany, designed to clarify over the course of an hour exactly how many steps it was from an elevator to a drug dealer’s front door.

So I was surprised to find a packed courtroom thrumming with an energy I’d never felt during any of my father’s cases. Except for the rows reserved for us, every seat was filled. A line of court officers, holding their arms akimbo to accommodate their sagging weapon belts, stood behind the defense table, which was also packed. I couldn’t distinguish the accused from their lawyers—they were all wearing equally spiffy suits. As we entered, everyone turned to look at us.

I took my seat beside a mouth- breathing meathead with ropy tendons in his neck who’d been in front of me on the way up from the jury- pool room. A personal trainer. On my right sat an elderly black woman with thick glasses. She smelled of coconut, wore a pillbox hat with a hatpin through it, and kept her hands tightly folded over her stiff purse. I felt an urge to
put a protective arm around her, and mentally heard Mercedes accusing me of reverse racism.

The judge smiled at us coolly, casting a professional eye over the motley crew before her.

“Welcome to Part Seventy- two, and thank you for fulfilling your civic duty.”

I sat up a little taller in my seat.

“I’m going to give all of you a brief background of this case, after which we’ll seat you in the jury box and question you individually as part of the formal voir dire.”

The tedious CFO from the jury pool, who’d been three names ahead of me, raised his hand. The judge narrowed her eyes and continued speaking to all of us, while looking directly at him.

“After you are seated and addressed, you may tell the court any reasons you may have for not being able to serve. While I understand that for many of you a long case, which this promises to be, is difficult to commit to for a variety of reasons, I will
not
excuse anyone because she or he has a business deal pending or a trip planned to the Bahamas.” The suit put his hand down and pressed his lips together so hard they turned white.

“While we generally prefer that jurors have no familiarity with the details of a case,” she continued, “there is little chance that you have not heard of this one, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year.” I liked this judge and, in the same pathetic way that I wanted to be Jill Amos’s new best friend, I wanted her to like me. I tried to look smart.

“The four defendants are accused of conspiring to steal a piece of artwork from a museum here in Manhattan, replace it with a forgery, and sell the original. In addition, two of them are charged with the murder of the guard who attempted to stop them. They are all charged with felonies.”

Oh my God. This was the “Adios Pelarose” case. I inhaled
sharply and started jiggling my foot, trying to reroute my excitement. The mob case had been all over every paper for the last twelve months. The “piece of artwork” was nothing less than a Picasso, the museum was the Met, and the media had been acting like it was Christmas morning. The story was that Luis Pelarose, one of the dirtiest mob capos of all time, had lost his head and heart to a size DDD girlfriend named Maria Anna Mariza. She had wanted him to prove his love with something bigger and better than a Harry Winston bauble, and soon it was rumored that she had a Van Gogh gracing the gas- fueled fireplace in her Sheepshead Bay apartment. When Pelarose’s wife found out, she was so humiliated that she threatened to go to the cops and inform on his lifetime of murders and thefts if he didn’t top that gift with a better one for her. Hence the attempted Picasso heist, and now here we were, all together, in one room.