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  “I’m calling about the apartment you have for rent,” he continued.

  Aside from having to replace my semi-luxurious sedan with an aging clunker, the second casualty of getting booted off Mount Upper Middle-class was the realization that I’d need to supplement my income. Sharing a house with Lucille was bad enough. Sharing a cardboard box with her and two teenage boys was far worse. That meant giving up my home crafts studio over our detached garage.

  The end of last week I reluctantly placed an ad in the Star-Ledger. Having missed the deadline for the weekend edition, the ad appeared for the first time in this morning’s issue.

  “Would you like to see the apartment this evening?” I asked.

  “Actually, I’d like to see it now. I’m scheduled to leave on a seven-thirty flight tonight and won’t be back for a few days. The apartment sounds perfect. I’d hate to lose out to someone else.”

  I glanced at my watch and did some quick mental gymnastics, factoring travel time back and forth and the hours of work I still needed to put in on the wedding spread scheduled for tomorrow’s photo shoot. Three dozen peach, pink, and white satin birdseed roses sat in a vase on the corner of my counter, but I still had to create several pairs of bridal and bridesmaid tennies for the second part of the article.

  It was going to be tight, and I’d have to work late, but I couldn’t risk losing out on a possible tenant. Besides, if I timed things right, he’d be gone before Lucille returned from her afternoon Kommie Koffee Klatch. Thank God for the Daughters of the October Revolution, their weekly Lower East Side meetings, and Lucille’s improved health, which enabled her to take the train into Manhattan.

  “I’m at work, but I can meet you at the apartment in an hour,” I told him.

  “Great.”

  I gave him directions.

  “Thanks. By the way, I’m Zachary Barnes.”

  “Anastasia Pollack.”

  “See you in an hour, Anastasia Pollack.”

  After I hung up from Zachary Barnes, I noticed the flashing message light on my office phone. I tapped in my code to retrieve the message.

  “Given your recent widowhood, I’m cutting you a break. You have until tomorrow. Don’t make me regret my generosity. Don’t call the cops, and don’t ever hang up on me again if you know what’s good for you, bitch. Capisce?”

  Maybe I’d watched too many episodes of The Sopranos, but something told me this guy meant business. Might have been his uber-mafia-like accent. Or the repeated click-click-click of what sounded like a gun cocking. Not that I’d ever heard a gun cock except on TV or in the movies but what else would make that scare-the-living-wits-out-of-me sound?

  I capisced all right. This was no crank caller as I’d hoped. The likelihood of a crank caller having both Karl’s cell phone number and the direct line to my office was about as likely as Miss Piggy sprouting those wings and sailing toward the clouds.

  I was now convinced that on top of everything else, Karl had gotten himself mixed up with a loan shark. And I’d be the one wearing the cement Manolos if I didn’t pay up.

  But how could I? Thanks to Karl, I didn’t have an extra fifty cents, let alone fifty thousand dollars. I sank into my desk chair and stared at my blank computer screen, willing it to offer up some answers. It didn’t comply.

  “Marlys! Where are you, you goddamn fucking bitch-whore? You can’t hide from me. I’ll rip your fucking heart out and shove it down your fucking throat!” The shrieking outrage of Vittorio Versailles, the Franco-Neapolitan fashion designer whose creations were a favorite of the celebrities on Mr. Blackwell’s Worst Dressed List, boomed from the direction of the elevator bank. A moment later, I heard him pounding down the corridor in search of the woman who had minced and mangled him in our latest issue.

  In our business, egos often clash. Harsh words and not-so-mild expletives were frequently hurled. Jealousies abounded. Wild histrionics regularly pierced the normal frenzy of our workplace. Only the players changed from day to day and confrontation to confrontation.

  I poked my head out in time to see Vittorio, his face a deep purple that clashed against his skin-tight burgundy jumpsuit, charge down the hall toward Marlys’s office. He waved a copy of our latest issue over his head. An entourage of eight anorexic men, all dressed head-to-toe in die-cut aqua suede, followed at his heels.

  “Looks like Vittorio saw the slice-and-dice Marlys did on him,” said Cloris, stepping out from her office directly across the hall from mine. She gave me an odd look. “You okay?”

  “Sure, why?”

  “You look like you’re about to cry.”

  I pasted a smile on my face. “I’m fine.”

  “Sure you are, sweetie.” She broke the ears off a chocolate bunny and handed them to me. As food editor, Cloris received samples for review on a daily basis. She ate them all and still maintained a size two figure. I hated her.

  I hadn’t told anyone at work about my financial situation and wasn’t about to now. And I certainly wasn’t going to say anything about the message I’d just received. I changed the subject back to Vittorio. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but for once I agree with Marlys. Vittorio’s designs belong in a circus.”

  “On the clowns,” said Serena Brower, our travel editor. She and Daphne Jervis, our shared editorial assistant, joined us. We watched as Vittorio and his group stormed into Marlys’s corner office.

  “What do you have against clowns?” asked Daphne.

  The three of them laughed. I joined in with a forced and half-hearted chuckle.

  They were still laughing a minute later when Erica, tears streaming down her cheeks, ran out of Marlys’s office and headed for the ladies’ room.

  “Uh-oh,” said Cloris.

  “Whose turn is it?” asked Serena.

  I sighed. “Mine.”

  “If only she’d listen to us and file a complaint against that bitch,” said Daphne.

  Erica and Daphne had been hired the same day, and Daphne could just as easily have been assigned to Marlys. At first Daphne resented Erica winning out on the choicer assignment, but her resentment soon disappeared when she saw how Marlys treated Erica. Now she thanked her lucky stars for her position as assistant to us Bottom Feeders.

  “This is harassment,” said Daphne. “It’s illegal. Erica should exercise her rights.”

  But Erica didn’t have the backbone to say boo to Marlys, much less take legal action against her. She suffered Marlys’s wrath, then dissolved into tears at least once a week. I headed for the ladies’ room, hoping I could calm her down quickly. I had bigger problems than a sniveling, spineless assistant who wouldn’t stand up for herself to worry about—like a threatening loan shark and a prospective tenant I couldn’t afford to stand up.

  Entering the restroom, I found Erica locked in a stall, her gulping sobs sounding from behind the pink metal door. “Want to talk about it?” I asked.

  “She blamed me!” she wailed between snuffles. “Do you believe that? She told him I typed up her notes wrong, and she didn’t see the mistakes until after the issue was printed because I proofed the blue lines while she was out of town. She didn’t even have the guts to tell him to his face that she deliberately trashed him!”

  “Did he believe her?”

  Everyone knew Marlys was out to get Vittorio after he snubbed her in Milan last summer. She had waltzed into the House of Versailles, demanding the kind of freebies reserved for the editors of Vogue and WWD. We were a second-rate general women’s magazine sold at supermarket checkout lines. Vittorio knew it. He had laughed in her face and bounced her out on her liposuctioned butt.

  Erica sniffed back a mucousy sob. “I don’t know. I ran out before he said anything, but he looked like he was about to strangle both of us.”

  As if on cue, we heard Vittorio’s booming voice passing outside the ladies’ room. “You won’t get away with this, Marlys. Your days are numbered, bitch.”

  It took me ten minutes to talk Erica into unlocking
the stall and another ten minutes before she had calmed down sufficiently to wash her tear-stained, puffy face. “I hate her,” she said.

  I placed my hand on her trembling shoulder. “So I guess this means we can rule you out as president of the Marlys Vandenburg Admiration Society, huh?”

  She jerked away. “Don’t make fun of me!”

  “I’m sorry. I was just trying to cheer you up.”

  “Well, you didn’t.” She headed back to the stall, slammed the door and relocked it. “Go away, Anastasia. Just leave me alone.”

  ~*~

  I arrived home forty-five minutes later to find Zachary Barnes standing in my driveway, staring up at the apartment above the garage. He looked exactly like a guy with a voice like his should look: like someone had dumped the genetic components of Pierce Brosnan, George Clooney, Patrick Dempsey, and Antonio Banderas into a pan and baked up the epitome of male perfection.

  I wasn’t sure whether this was a good thing or a bad thing, given my current situation. Luckily, my recent tumble into pandemonium, thanks to my own deceitful, dearly departed, drop-dead-gorgeous-although-balding-and-slightly-overweight-yet-still-a-hunk husband, had inured me to all males in general and drop-dead-gorgeous hunks in particular. I doubted any woman had ever had to fake an orgasm with the stud standing before me. If I hadn’t already sworn off men for the rest of my life, recently widowed or not, I’m certain I would have been reduced to drooling and babbling like some hormone-riddled sixteen year old.

  Instead, I assumed my most professional, forty-something demeanor, introduced myself, then led him up the flight of stairs on the side of the garage and into the second-floor apartment.

  “Perfect,” he said after taking a quick peek into each of the three rooms, bathroom, and closets. “I’ll take it. I’m assuming you want first and last month’s rent plus references?” He reached inside his well-worn brown leather bomber (the hunk jacket of choice) and produced a folded sheet of paper and a checkbook.

  I stared dumbly at him, my mouth refusing to work.

  “Is something wrong, Mrs. Pollack?”

  I shook my head, forcing my jaw to loosen and allow words to exit. “No, I...I’m...this is happening much quicker and easier than I anticipated. That’s all.”

  What I had really been doing was mentally calculating how many rent checks it would take to get the Capisce thug to go away. What proof did I have that Karl even owed Ricardo money? However, did a loan shark really need proof? Was there a Society of Loan Sharks with a set of rules and code of ethics that had to be followed to maintain their certification? Highly unlikely. These guys made up their own rules. And broke legs—or worse—when the schmucks who did business with them didn’t pay up.

  I may never have come up against a loan shark before, but I do live in New Jersey, and I do read the newspapers. I was in deep shit. Thank you very much, Karl.

  Zachary Barnes was staring at me. “The apartment is for rent, right?”

  “Yes. Of course. Absolutely.” I snatched the sheet of references from his hand and gave them a cursory glance. “Freelance photojournalist?” His contacts included an editor at National Geographic and the president of the World Wildlife Federation.

  He tapped the paper with his index finger. “They’ll vouch for my integrity.”

  The connection suddenly clicked in my brain. Zachary Barnes. Photojournalist. The Zachary Barnes. “I’m sure they will,” I said, “but why would you of all people want an apartment over a garage in a New Jersey suburb?”

  This guy was on the A-list of every club in Manhattan. He dated models and celebrities. Correction. He was a celebrity, albeit a minor one, who’d been mentioned numerous times on Page Six and in other gossip columns. This guy enjoyed the nightlife of Manhattan. The only nightlife he’d find in Westfield, New Jersey was high school basketball, PTA meetings, and Tuesday night Bingo at the Catholic church.

  He combed a hand through his hair, the kind of hair heroes in romance novels always have—thick and wavy and the color of bittersweet chocolate with just a hint of gray at the temples.

  “Look,” he said, “all I want is a quiet place to crash and work. I’m fed up with pushy publicists forcing me to be seen every night, not to mention interfering neighbors who think I’m running a meth lab.”

  “A meth lab? Hey, I’ve got two teenage sons.” I shoved his references back at him. “I can’t have a junkie living on my property, no matter who vouches for your character.” A loan shark breathing down my neck was enough of a crime connection for this working mom.

  “Chill, lady. I’m not running a meth lab. I don’t do drugs of any kind. Never have.”

  Right. I raised an eyebrow. “Never?”

  He grew sheepish. “Okay, so I smoked a little pot in college. Didn’t everyone?”

  “But never inhaled?”

  That caused him to chuckle, which brought out a nice set of laugh lines around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. Why is it that guys with wrinkles look sexy, but when women get wrinkles, they just look old?

  And why on earth was I thinking of such things when my life was turning to week-old crap? Maybe my brain decided I needed a shot of serotonin to give me a brief respite from the more pressing problems of newly acquired poverty and how to avoid being fitted for cement Manolos.

  I gave myself a mental slap upside my head. I couldn’t afford to lose this guy. “Then why do your neighbors think you’re running a meth lab?”

  “Because Mr. and Mrs. Can’t-Mind-Their-Own-Business are a pair of geriatric nut cases who don’t know the difference between a meth lab and a darkroom.

  Darkroom? And here I thought those were assigned to the antiquities section of the Smithsonian, along with typewriters and adding machines. Didn’t photographers use digital cameras nowadays? All the photographers who worked for Trimedia did. But I decided this was not the time for such a discussion. Maybe Mr. Zachary Barnes was an old-fashioned purist. What did I care as long as he paid his rent on time?

  “Last night,” he continued, “the cops raided my apartment and ruined three days’ worth of work when they barged in and turned on the lights while I was developing film. And that wasn’t the first time. It’s been an ongoing problem.”

  He glanced at his watch. “Now I have to fly back to New Mexico to reshoot those three days in less than twenty-four hours in order to meet my deadline.”

  He indicated the apartment with a sweep of his arm. “A place like this is ideal. No neighbors and easy access into the city.”

  He looked at me.

  I looked at him.

  “Hey, I’m desperate here. You’ve got to believe me,” he said.

  I did. After all, I had my own geriatric nut case living under my roof, didn’t I? Besides, going head-to-head in a Who’s More Desperate contest, I’d win hands down. I needed Zachary Barnes and his rent check a hell of a lot more than he needed my apartment. What I couldn’t believe was my good fortune in finding a renter so quickly. But then again, maybe I deserved a slight nod from the Karma gods and goddesses, given the lollapalooza of a quadruple whammy they’d recently dropped on my head.

  I reached into my purse and handed him the standard lease agreement form I’d purchased at Office Depot. His check for two months’ rent would make a nice dent in the enormous stack of past-due bills sitting on my desk—bills that I, as Trusting Wife, had assumed Karl had paid. Silly me to take my husband at his word.

  Or maybe I should wait with the bills and offer the money to Ricardo as a down payment. How long would the gas and electric company carry me before shutting off the power? Weren’t there some laws against doing that in winter? And what were the odds of a loan shark accepting a payment plan?

  “Sign on the bottom line, and the apartment is yours, Mr. Barnes. When would you like to move in?”

  “Zack,” he said, extending his hand. “And how does Saturday sound?”

  “Saturday works for me.” I shook his hand. “And it’s Anastasia.”

 
“You’ve saved my life, Anastasia.”

  Actually, he’d saved mine, but I wasn’t going to let him know that. I also wasn’t going to mention the geriatric nut case living mere feet from his new apartment.

  I wondered how he felt about communists.

  ~*~

  An hour later I pulled into a space under one of the parking lot lampposts at Trimedia. The dashboard clock read six-thirty, thanks to an overturned eighteen-wheeler on Route 287 that had me stuck in traffic for two additional hours. The parking lot was empty except for Marlys’s silver Jaguar, which surprised me, considering her big date of this evening. Maybe it was a midnight supper.

  I stepped from the car and stretched. My lower back ached from sitting so long. The Hyundai’s seats were sub-standard, hard and non-ergonomic. As I entered the steel and glass structure, using my magnetic ID to release the lock, I made a mental note to investigate seat pads. Or maybe those beaded things that are supposed to give added support.

  Scratch that. I had to reprogram my attitudes. Find creative ways to make do instead of solving problems with dollars. After all, I was a crafts designer and editor. Maybe I could make a seat cover with some old macramé beads I had stored in the basement.

  As I walked down the vacant hallways, passing one unoccupied office after another, the staccato rhythm of my heels against the Terrazzo floor echoed in the eerie silence. I don’t often stay late; however, when I do put in overtime, I enjoy the calm silence that blankets the otherwise tumultuous environment that is American Woman.

  Tonight, though, disquiet permeated the emptiness surrounding me. Disquiet and the distinct odor of hot glue. A prickly shiver crept its way up my spine, raising the tiny hairs at the back of my neck. I shivered, hugged my arms to my chest, and hurried around the corner to my own office.

  The last thing I expected was to find Marlys sitting at my computer. She stared at the blank screen, her fingers poised on the keys. “Marlys? Can I help you with something?”