An Ex to Grind (18 page)

I was dying to wipe my cheek where the spit had landed, but you can't really do that, can you? "You were thinking about me?" I said.

She bent down to pet Buster, and even he flinched when she said to him, "Such a pretty, pretty puppy dog." She stood back up and said to me, "I ran into Dan last night."

"Did you?" I said. "Was he ordering beluga caviar at some overpriced restaurant?"

"I didn't notice his meal, but I did notice his date."

I felt my pulse jump. "I'd heard he was seeing someone," I said, trying to sound casual. "I'm not sure if it's serious though."

"It sure looked serious," said Wendy. "They were all over each other."

"Interesting," I said, understating it. Part of me wanted to leap in the air and cheer. The other part was cursing the fact that they
had
to be shacking up over the weekend and yet I had no way to prove it. Talk about a waste.

"He introduced me," said Wendy. "Her name is Linda or Lana or something like that."

"Well, whoever she is, I hope she makes Dan happy."

"Wow. You're a nicer person than I am," she said, wetting me again. On the other cheek this time. "I wish Ken nothing but pain."

"You don't mean that," I said. I didn't wish Dan pain, not really. I just wished he'd stop confusing me with an ATM machine.

"As you must know, Ken left me for our children's pediatrician," she said, her eyes moistening. "Do you have any idea how much it hurts that they feel more comfortable in her hands than in mine?"

"I'd be devastated if Buster felt more comfortable with Dan's girlfriend than with me," I commiserated.

"Then you'd better hope this Lana isn't a veterinarian," she said.

I nodded at the coincidental nature of her remark, feeling just the hint of something—a prick of concern, maybe—and then dismissed it.

Wendy and I vowed to get together, which, of course, we both understood we'd never do. We had only been in each other's worlds because of our husbands, and now that they were gone we had nothing in common. She was getting money from her ex. I was giving money to my ex. Old school. New school.

When I got home I was more motivated than ever to find someone to handle the spying duties on weekends, should Dan and Leah's romance continue at its torrid pace. I decided a good candidate would be Isa Johnson, Dan's cleaning lady, who used to be my cleaning lady too until I no longer had an apartment worth cleaning. She worked for him six days a week—not Sundays, but Saturdays, which was better than nothing. She came in at noon and spent a couple of hours tidying up his mess, doing his laundry and ironing, making sure he didn't trash the place. Yes, I thought. She'd be a good snitch, although she was not without her quirks.

In her forties, Haitian-born Isa claimed she was a witch. Dan and I used to refer to her behind her back as our voodoo housekeeper, because she put spells on tough-to-clean surfaces in addition to giving them a shot of Fantastik. "You want magic? You have to use magic," was her explanation when I once asked her why she was chanting with her head inside our oven. Yeah, she was a little bizarre, but nobody got rid of soap scum better than she did.

She'd been married once when she was very young—he'd left her, whoever he was—and the product of their union was her terrifying son Reggie. I say "terrifying" because he was only sixteen but was nearly seven feet tall. They'd had hopes of him being a professional basketball player and had asked Dan to intervene on the kid's behalf, but Reggie was as uncoordinated as I am and was told by NBA scouts that he needed to "grow into his legs." In the meantime, he was a giant boy who sat around their Bronx apartment smoking crack and eating copious amounts of food. In other words, everything Isa earned either went up his nose or down his throat.

Wait, correction: it also went to the voodoo church she belonged to near Yankee Stadium. She was devoted to the House of the Heavenly Spirits, where there was singing and praying and chanting and sacrificing of animal parts, and she was always asking Dan and me to make donations. How happy she would be, I figured, when I surprised her with a very large donation during my Sunday night visit with her.

I wasn't crazy about driving around in her neighborhood after dark, given that it was a known haven for car thieves. I had a Mercedes then (hang on, it was three years old and leased; I'd been forced to sell the spanking new one I used to own in order to pay Dan), and I feared for its stereo system, not to mention its hubcaps, but, as I said, I was motivated.

Reggie answered the door of their ground-floor unit in what was a run-down, four-story brownstone building. I tried not to look scared when I saw him, but, call me old-fashioned, there's something about dope-addled people—especially when they're manic and can't stay still, then suddenly their eyes roll back in their heads and they look like they might be dead—that unnerves me.

"Hi, Reggie.
Reggie
." I snapped my fingers at him. Twice. Finally, his eyes opened. "It's Melanie Banks," I said. "Your mom used to work for me, remember? I called earlier and she invited me to stop by."

He peered down at me from his great height and said, "I don't like you now and I never did like you."

I laughed, guessing he was just being, you know, crackheadish. "It's nice to see you again too. May I come in?"

"Whatever." He let the door hang open while he lumbered off in search of his mother.

I stepped inside and waited. I couldn't help noticing the smell of something cooking. Something with pungent herbs and seasonings. A cauldron of boiling chicken heads, perhaps. Isa had once told me that their steam vaporized negative spirits. I hoped she would help me vaporize the negative spirit known as my ex-husband.

After a minute or two, she came bustling into the small sitting room, her face in a wide grin. She was very dark skinned and very pretty, and it was too bad she'd wasted her youth on some dead-beat husband, but I wasn't one to talk.

"Well, look at you," she said in her island-flavored accent, giving me a hug. "It's been a long time. You learn how to work a microwave yet,
chérie
?"

"I can heat up my instant coffee. That's about it."

"Pitiful. And how's my little Buster? I only get to see him every other week at Dan's these days. Last week, he told me to air out the rug in the master bathroom. He said there were ghosts in it."

"Dan said that?"

"No, Buster did. You didn't know he spoke to me?"

"No." Well, he spoke to me too. Just not about ghosts.

Isa motioned for me to sit, then she joined me. "So, what brings you all the way up here? Must be important."

"It's about Dan."

"Ah." She nodded. "You jealous?"

"Of what?"

"The new gal who's been staying over the last few nights." She winked. "Cleaning ladies know everything."

"I'm counting on that. You see, Isa—"

"You don't have to tell me. You split up with him because he lounged around on his sorry ass all day long, but now you don't want somebody else to have him."

"God, no. I do want somebody else to have him. Anybody else, in fact. At the moment, it looks like he's interested in Leah, so I want her to have him."

"Why do you care?"

"Because—" I was about to roll out the kind of extravagant lie I'd told Ricardo, then realized it made sense to be honest with
Isa. She was sort of psychic, so she would have mind-read me anyway. "When Dan and I got divorced, he decided it wasn't enough that he ended up with the apartment. He wanted alimony too, just to spite me."

"He doesn't seem like the spiteful type. He gives me nice big tips."

Nice big tips. Not only was my ex-husband squeezing me financially; he was sullying my reputation. By handing out my hard-earned cash to everybody on the planet, he was making me look like a cheapskate. Which I wasn't. Look at how much I was paying people to spy on him. I'm not saying I was an angel here, but I was practicing my own brand of trickle-down economics, wasn't I?

"He can be a very likable guy, no doubt about it," I conceded. "But for me to have to support a man who's more than capable of supporting himself—just because I happened to succeed at my job longer than he succeeded at his—isn't fair. He's taking, taking, taking, and I can't stand it."

"You want me to put a spell on him so he'll give the money back?"

"Thanks, but no." I pulled my chair closer to hers. "What I want is for him to live with his new girlfriend for ninety days. If he does, I won't have to support him anymore."

"So you want me to put a spell on her?"

"No, Isa. No spells." God. "This is a legal matter having to do with my divorce settlement. Dan just has to live with another woman for ninety days or so, and I'm off the hook for the alimony. The only catch is that I need someone to help me prove that they're cohabitating—and, if so, how often."

She shook her head vehemently. "I'm against all that pornography."

I smothered a laugh with my hand over my mouth. "Cohabitating isn't sexual. It has to do with their living arrangement. All I'm asking is that you help me prove she's staying there with him. You don't have to inspect their bed linens."

"If you want me to snoop for you, I'll have to say no."

No? I wasn't listening to
no
. "Let me understand this, Isa. Putting a spell on Dan is okay, but snooping on him isn't?"

"Spells are who I am,
chérie
. All members of the House of Heavenly Spirits are skilled in the art of spells. We do it to restore the balance between good and evil."

"I'm glad you brought that up," I said. "Your church, I mean. If you help me keep tabs on him and his girlfriend, I'm prepared to donate five hundred dollars to it."

"Five hundred dollars?" She jumped up, raised her arms in the air, and whirled around and around and around until she nearly fainted. I didn't know whether to revive her or give her a big round of applause. "This is wonderful," she said when she had composed herself. "You should have told me about the money in the beginning. I'll snoop or whatever else you want me to do."

"I was hoping you'd see it that way. Now, Ricardo, the doorman, says he'll tally up the days the girlfriend is there during the week, but that leaves Saturdays and Sundays."

"I don't work Sundays,
chérie"

"I know, but when you get there on Monday afternoons, you'll be able to tell if she slept over. Just check to see if she left any clothes or makeup or other personal property. And maybe Dan will be there sometimes and you can ask him about her. In a casual way, of course."

"And then I'm supposed to call you with information?"

I reached into my purse, pulled out a tiny digital camera, and handed it to her. I'd decided against another spiral-bound notebook, since Isa wasn't great about jotting things down—appropriate things, that is. I'd once asked her to make up a shopping list of cleaning supplies, and she'd included crab eyes and turtle essence along with the Pledge. "Not necessary. I'd like you to take pictures of the evidence. Those clothes we talked about. Her makeup. Anything she leaves there."

Isa held the camera tentatively, as if it might break.

"It's really easy," I said. "You just point and shoot. And you keep pointing and shooting as long as Leah sticks around."

"But I've never used one of these."

"You'll be fine. If you can work a microwave, you can definitely work that camera."

She pointed it at me, peered into the viewfinder, and clicked. "Like that?"

"Just like that."

I got up, gave her the five hundred bucks, and said I'd better head back to the city.

"Remember, the goal is to document that this woman is sleeping there for three months," I said. "It's possible that she and Dan won't last that long and we'll have to start all this up again with the next one."

"That's where spells come in," said Isa as she walked me to the door. "You don't really mind if I put one on them, do you?"

I smiled. "Of course not. As long as you take the photos, the rest is up to you."

As I left her apartment, I was feeling pretty good about things. Plans were shaping up. Systems were in place. People were in motion.

Unfortunately, when I reached my Mercedes, I discovered that people had been in motion and stolen the car's hood ornament, along with all four of its wheels.

Don't read too much into this, I cautioned myself as I dialed 911. It's only a slight setback.