The old guy, Mr. Madnick, burst out laughing, choked on his laugh and coughed, spitting out words, "She doesn't have a million dollars She is dirt-poor. She is judgment-proof!"
"Well," Kathy bared her long, white crocodile teeth. "Maybe you guys want her to rot in prison? You're not gonna get her."
"No, we just" Mr. Davidoff started, but Madnick interrupted him, "I don't mind. She is the kind of girl my mama cautioned me about. Never believe a redhead. Never."
My friend clenched her heavy fists. "You're an evil man to say that."
"Yep, you got that right, ma'am. I'm an old, evil, crazy, white man with zero tolerance for criminals and shouting bitches."
He hadn't even finished his little speech when my best friend, red-faced and sweating, opened her purse, pulled out a bunch of dollar bills and stuck them at the old guy's face, shouting, "Did you see that? You will never get that. This is not for you. You are a money grubbing lawyer!"
"Kathy, no!" I shouted, and moved, trying to get between them. The officer behind me grabbed my cuffed hands and jerked me back. My weight was about one hundred fifteen pounds and the cop weighed twice that much. I lost my balance and stepped on his foot, sending both of us falling back. He hit the ground with a terrible thud, and I landed on his stomach.
Meanwhile, uninterrupted, Kathy threw the money at the old guy's fat face. He turned around and opened his palm to slap her, when Mr. Davidoff jumped and pushed him away. The old guy's legs gave up, and he went down like a doomed tree in a hurricane. Falling, he swung his leg and tripped Kathy, who, trying to keep her balance, grabbed Mr. Davidoff. I saw everything while the police officer jerked me up. An enormous pang of jealousy came over me the second I saw my injured cognac prince hugging my best friend.
"Oh, I'm so sorry," Kathy sang at his face with her sweet Northeast Philadelphia accent. For ten years, she had been happily married to her college professor, but at that moment, I started to worry about the stability of her marriage.
"It's perfectly fine," Mr. Expensive Vodka answered, trying to untangle his arms from her long gorgeous hair.
A terrible moan sobered us all. The officer pushed me ahead, and we all gathered around lifeless Joe, who was lying on his back with his eyes closed.
Mr. Davidoff kneeled in front of his older friend.
"Joe, are you okay? Do you need a doctor?"
The old guy responded with another gut-wrenching moan.
"He probably injured his spine. He can't talk," I said. Mr. Davidoff looked at me thoughtfully, obviously reevaluating his optimistic view of my mental health.
"He's your lawyer. He had better start talking, because that's what he does for a living."
As if hearing him, Joe opened his black eyes with eyelashes so long and thick they looked covered with layers of mascara and threw a dirty look at his friend. "How come you guys got to schmooze with these beautiful chicks and I didn't?"
Instead of locking us up for disturbance of the peace, the officer on duty gave us papers to sign and let us go. During the following two months, I saw Alexander Davidoff twice at the police station during the cross-examinations, once at the city court, and every weekend at my studio apartment, newly decorated with the bundles of freshly cut roses. By then, I discovered he was working for an international law firm, that his wife had left him and that his teenage daughter's name was Evana.
Two months later, on Christmas morning, I opened my eyes at eleven, because I had been working the night before. Looking out the window of my basement studio apartment, I saw two things that made me hysterical. First, my cab was nowhere in sight. Second, somebody's car was parked in my spot.
I jumped into jeans and ran outside. We had gotten little snow for Christmas this year, thank God. Here it was! A red shimmering Jaguar sat on its shiny tires. I looked around. My beat-up Ford was gone.
In quiet desperation, I ran up and down the street, screaming and yelling. My cab carried a parking permit, so it shouldn't have been towed. If it had been stolen, the police wouldn't waste their time looking for an old battered Crown Victoria. If I lost the cab, I wouldn't be able to make money to pay the cab company. I barely had enough for next month's rent.
Icy Christmas rain was pouring down my face by the time I returned to the Jaguar. What was this thing doing in front of my window, anyway? Had some drug dealer burned his money for this toy? That was it! They towed away my cab to let him park! Blood rushed to my head and, seeing red, I ran toward the grossly overpriced pile of metal and started kicking its shiny grille. "Who parked this pile of shit here? This is my space! This is my parking space! Where is my car?"
I shouted because I couldn't be silent anymore about every injustice and abuse that had happened to me ever since my first husband sent me an e-mail saying that he wanted a divorce because he felt closer to his parents than to his wife.
Nobody came out to claim the Jaguar, so I kept kicking it until I smashed the grille.
"Hey," an eerily familiar voice said. "I can see that you like my gift!"
I turned around, wet sweatshirt and Mudd's jeans clinging to my bones; my mouth opened, and my eyes popped out. Alexander Davidoff stood behind me in his long gray London Fog raincoat. His brown-gloved hand was holding an umbrella.
"Huh?" I said and swallowed a handful of raindrops.
"I'm glad you like my Christmas present," Alexander repeated after a brief inspection of the car. "I'm glad you customized it right away. It looked kind of too new. Not your style."
CHAPTER 3
At thirty-five, I retired as a cab driver and acquired the most exquisite taste in clothes, furniture, architecture, design, landscaping and jewelry, all by virtue of my marriage to his highness, prince, landowner, and international lawyer, Alexander Davidoff. My new husband owned a family castle in Mooresville, NJ. Built a hundred years ago by his relatives as a hunting shed, the castle was an exact copy of a French mansion from the Champagne province. When I first saw this castle, two things became clear to me. First, I'd retired as a cab driver, and second, I have a lot of time on my hands to read mystery novels.
We moved in and spread out evenly through its fifty rooms. Under `we' I mean Alexander, his daughter Evana, me, my daughter Iris, Alexander's butler Mark, the girls' tutor Larissa, Alexander's German shepherd Elvis, and my black cat Pepper.
Pepper was the first one to step inside our new house, according to the superstition rules of Alexander's old country. I agreed that the three-story gray stone mansion needed some good guardian spirits. We took the cat to the door in his basket and let him inside. He stepped on the shiny hardwood floor with his legs straight and inflexible like a little parading Pakistani soldier. The cat crossed the spacious entrance hall and then turned towards the kitchen. The shepherd, Elvis, surprised he wasn't the first one this time, trotted behind Pepper, sniffing the air.
"Hey," Alexander said, smiling. "They know their place in a house."
Our animals disappeared into the kitchen. Surprised, we rushed there too. I stopped at the door. The countertops and a round dining table were loaded with tons of pizzas, chicken pies, salads, cakes, grilled meat, and fruits. Amid this abundance stood a British-looking man, holding a baking sheet filled with hot rolls.
"Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen," he said. "Where have you been the whole morning? I was about to eat it all myself!"
That's how I met Mark, my husband's butler.
Tired of eating and moving, we took a trip around the house. There was a huge kitchen with a sunroom, dining room, living room, library, sauna, and a fitness room on the first floor. On the second floor were a master bedroom, my office, my husband's office, and the girls' bedrooms. Four spare bedrooms comprised the third floor. To clean all those square feet, we hired a cleaning aide, a middle-aged single mom named Claudia, against Joe's advice about how dangerous it was to have other people in the house. According to him, there was a scam running through the cleaning community. They work for you two months, and then they sue you for bodily injuries and mental abuse. They see that you have money, and why not try to nibble on your bank account a bit? My husband usually listened to Joe like the old guy was his godmother, but this time Alexander ignored his advice. The first time in my life I wasn't doing housework and working for money. The first week I felt like a queen; the next week I caught myself watching soap operas at midday and having a second lunch. When, in the third week, Mark woke me up for dinner after my lunch nap, I took it as a real wake-up call and decided to start my own charity.
It was a late spring Friday. In anticipation of a nice long family dinner and a romantic evening with my husband. I made a mountain of sandwiches and went to drop some food at Joe's office. I wheeled into the parking lot with Joe's Ford and somebody's Honda parked there. I didn't want to interfere, just to come in, place a package with lunch on a kitchenette table and leave.
"Rachel? Come here this instant."
Joe, who spent part of his life in the Navy, had a booming husky voice that could reach you and stop you in your tracks from a block away. I entered his office and greeted him and his client, a short bulky woman with brown hair.
"Listen, you nincom Rachel, this is Deborah. Mrs. Cooper, this is Rachel, my assistant and my right hand. Can you please repeat your story to her? I found it very important that she would hear it from you."
Deborah looked at me. Her slightly bulging eyes welled with tears.
"I had just started a new job and my co-worker accused me of stealing money and jewelry from her. She was leaving for a new location, and I was taking over her position. I waited for this position for four months," she interrupted herself, sobbing. I brought her a cup of coffee, and she told us her story.
Debbie Cooper was from a family of college professors and scientists. In her parents' house, people discussed numbers and laws of physics as if it was breaking news and weather updates. She had known the multiplication table since she was five, thanks to her uncle Bruce, who made it a routine when coming for dinner to play a numbers game with her he called Number of the Day. "You can't go wrong with math," he liked to say. Being a genius mathematician himself, he worked for years on Wall Street as a market analyst, and after retirement at thirty-five, he took a tenured position at Princeton. His sister-in-law Elizabeth, Debbie's mother, herself was a professor of physics at the community college. Debbie's father used to be a financial analyst for Vanguard Group, but died a year ago of pneumonia complications.
Debbie's love of numbers made it very easy for her to get an honorary scholarship at NYU. She graduated with a Bachelor of Finances and became the youngest woman to work as an accountant for Goldman Sachs. That is where she had met her husband, Pitt Cooper, working for the IT department. Ten years older, he was a big, forceful man who always knew what to do, and to her, a calm, scholarly girl, he looked like a safe haven. They had their share of city dating, which means fast, quick and in a hurry, before their roommate or parents showed up. They got married after sixteen months of dating, got a Tribeca apartment and had two children one after another. Debbie worked part-time, trying to concentrate on her sons, especially the oldest son, Matthew, who developed ADD at the age of four.
She had wanted to move to the suburbs, she said, and after seven years, God heard her prayers: Pitt became the Head of the IT department at Gordon's Electronics in Philadelphia. They bought a spacious house in Cherry Hill and moved. Relaxed and happy in her new life, Debbie gets pregnant again, this time with a girl. Pitt, forty at the time, was completely crazy over this `little angel,' as he called her.
Away from the New York intensity, Matthew seemed to outgrow his emotional problems. Life was perfect until Debbie realized Pitt had a drinking problem. She suspected him of having affairs: he was coming home late or not at all. The final straw was his moving in with his lover. Debbie filed for divorce.
"It was five years ago," she said, drying her eyes with a tissue. "We finalized our divorce only two months ago. It was all custody issues. He didn't want to give me the kids. He just tormented me."
Their family house was sold, and she and the kids rented a house. They couldn't stay in their family house because Pitt took it as a habit to come over every night, shouting and cursing her, and blaming her for their paradise lost. Deciding to buy a house, she took a full-time accounting and case-working job in the city with NOSE: The National Office of Services to Emigrants. She started on the 4th of May, and five days later, she was accused of stealing by her co-worker, a job developer, Mrs. Gamma Woods.
"I worked in the corporate world and I know the rules, so I filed an Irregular Incident Report the next day."
She opened a manila folder and read slowly, first, then faster.
"At the beginning of our conversation, Mrs. Gamma Woods notified me that she and her husband were coming at 8 pm to pick up the boxes with teaching materials from the office we shared for four days. When I told her that she was welcome to store her books and materials as long as it was convenient for her, she said that she wanted to pick up all her stuff on Monday night because she was concerned about the safety of her materials."
"She said, `My money and jewelry were stolen from my handbag on Friday May 8. I left my bag on the desk and was in and out of the office. Around lunchtime, I put the bag in the desk drawer. I took my bag from there around 8 at night and found that my money and jewelry were stolen. I thought that you would take care of my bag and look after it. I thought,' she said, `that you would constantly be present in the office, making your phone calls, and would watch my handbag. Now, $110 and my jewelry has been stolen from my handbag. I have been working here for twenty years and it has never happened before.'"
Joe listened, looking at Deborah with a funny expression on his face. His eyes were laughing.
"Did you see this damn handbag?" he asked, when Deborah stopped reading and reached for water.
"I did not see Mrs. Woods' handbag among her other belongings and teaching materials," she said firmly, as if he were a judge.
"Did she ask you to take care of her possessions?"
"She did not ask me to watch her bag. Why did she assume that her new co-worker was supposed to watch her bag?"
"I don't know," Joe replied. "I don't know what this woman is doing, but she definitely knows what she's doing. She's trying to destroy you. Anything else, ma'am, that you want to tell me?"
Deborah wiped her nose with a tissue. "Yes. I think it's very important that she had a financial transaction in the nearest drugstore from 3 to 3:30 pm, buying an inhaler for her husband, Mr. Woods, who was having an asthma attack. She had her handbag with her. If something was missing from her bag, why didn't she tell you about it at the time?"
"I don't know," Joe said. "And I would ask her a couple of questions. What items of jewelry were missing? Can she present photographs of her jewelry? You said that people from the Carolinas Institute had been moving the furniture. How many of them? Who was moving the furniture? Why didn't Mrs. Woods notify the police?"
"I found out," Deborah replied, "that Gamma Woods contacted everybody in our local office and in the head office and told people that her money and expensive jewelry had disappeared from her handbag while I was in the office. Last week everybody was talking about it. It's like a slap in my face. I never took even a match from anybody. It's simply not me. I can't work, I can't concentrate. I feel I should quit, but I have waited for this job for so long. I have bills to pay. I have to put food on the table." Deborah blew her nose. "Please, help me. I have to sue this woman. She wants me to be fired because I took over her position."
"It's a terrible way to keep your job," Joe muttered and lit up a cigarette. He was lounging in his chair, looking up at the ceiling. "How long has she been working there? Gamma Woods Right?"
"Right." Debbie nodded solemnly. "She has been working there for twenty years. She is a Philippine woman who came to this country about twenty years ago. I don't think she has as good an education as I do, but she has got tons of experience. She knows exactly what this job needs."