Pent Up (3 page)

“Oso.” He waited for the joke. In Spanish, the name meant a couple things, all silly.

Not even a smile. “Oso. Right.” Just the square-square jaw and the flannel eyes looking back out of a handsome face that said
Punch me
.

Ruben stayed in the chair, feeling like he’d had his pocket picked.

Mr. Bauer gave a sharp nod from the doorway. “Perfect.”

Not even close.

Five minutes later, Ruben was still considering that door when Charles came back, eating a greasy bacon sandwich, and shuffled through the paperwork. “You all set with the Apex guy?”

“I guess.”

“Cakewalk. That Bauer is hiring a wingman to impress someone.” Another swallow. A drip spattered on his hibiscus shirt. “Ten bucks he’s some Wall Street gonk who’s seen too many thrillers. Scariest thing he deals with is silicone titties and erectile dysfunction.”

“Carlos….” Charles had been christened Carlos, but their parents refused to speak Spanish on principle. No immigrant bullshit for them. Their grandparents had moved to Florida from Soledad after the Second World War. The Osos were American through and through. Roots, nothing. Charles had learned Spanish during his pretend-to-be-mob phase.

“Tsssh. Yeah. You watch.” Charles took a drippy bite. “He just likes your scary mug.”

My bull’s-eye.

“Whatsamatter? You said you were doing good.”

“Yeah.” Ruben lifted a shoulder noncommittally. “Yeah, sure. I’m doing great.” Even if he couldn’t put his finger on the feeling that nagged him.

Charles narrowed his eyes.

“No. No way. It’s not that. I’m great. I just woke up late.” Ruben hoped that was the truth.

“I don’t wanna come home to you punching holes in my wall.”

“I promise.” None of that here. Ruben had patched plenty of walls on plenty of mornings.

“Something funny there.”

“Ha ha.” Charles balled up the sandwich shrapnel and tossed it. “What’s funny?”

Ruben squinted. “He is.”

“He is”—Charles overlapped his words—“a spruce goose laying golden eggs, baby. You better sit on that motherfucker till all of ’em hatch.”

Ruben tapped the desk, then slid the check across the clutter toward his brother. Something Bauer had said, but what? It stuck in his teeth like gristle he couldn’t stop worrying with his tongue. “He’s all balls and fulla shit.”

“So much the better. It’s all in his head, then, and he wants to put on a big fancy show. Paranoid on Park Avenue.” Charles rubbed his hibiscus gut and sat. “I think the problem is you’re looking for a problem where there ain’t none.” He plucked the retainer check off the desk. “Good gig. Easy money and no headaches. Fancy clientele. This is a milkbone. You chew on it all summer. Scare up business from his, uh, associates.”

Ruben nodded.

Charles held the check over his face and closed his smiling eyes like the zeros were sunshine. “Give him his show. Ya needta get laid. You need some new threads. Place of your own. Bauer’s your ticket. He does anything funny, you laugh.” A look.

“Sure. I promise.”

“And Rube.” He pointed, fake stern. “Up that penthouse, you better be passing out my cards like crabs.” Charles tried to sell it. “I’m taking care of you, man. You needed work and this deal’s a cinch.”

As in, boring as hell. Ruben tried not to feel insulted.

“You just got divorced. Off the bottle. And it’ll get you outta the apartment.”

“So it’s bullshit.”

“The check’ll clear.”

“Fuck off. I mean that he’s in no danger.”

“Psssh. Danger! I’m in danger, you’re in danger. Life is danger, bro.” Charles wiped his jowly chops. “Might as well get paid.”

CHAPTER TWO

THERE’S ONLY
one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him. If he says yes, he’s a crook.

Ruben fidgeted in his brother’s little offices through a lunch he didn’t take and calls he didn’t answer. Something about Bauer’s flannel stare kept right on bugging him. “I’m gonna go to church.”

Charles looked up at him and nodded. Church was Ruben’s code for an AA meeting, and Charles probably didn’t want to ask questions. “Sure.” He thumped Ruben’s back, man-to-manly.

In the hall, Ruben pulled up the AA app and found a
Big Book
meeting at the Jan Hus Church on East Seventy-Fourth. He headed down the hot stairs.

He skirted Central Park, nervous about navigating his way through the trees. Even at its margins, the air felt cooler than he’d expected, but then he was wearing an outsize cotton suit without a tie. He’d seen pictures of ponds and castles hidden in there, and hot girls running in their goddamn underwears practically.

Nature was about the only thing he missed living in the city. He’d definitely be coming back to these trees when he felt braver.

A half hour later, he reached a red brick church wrapped in gingerbread arches. He grabbed a folding chair with five to spare. Maybe fifteen people, mostly white and mostly older. Not surprising given what Charles had told him about the Upper East Side. Still, no one blinked at him. Mostly Ruben kept his head ducked, surprised to feel a sunburn on his neck.

The meeting didn’t help: a roomful of wealthy retirees who treated it like a gabby social club. Their problems were not his. He sat in the back, and though he stood up to introduce himself at the open, he didn’t share and he only half listened. Peach would have smacked him and snapped him out of it; she was always after him to
share
. In her absence, he’d have to man up.

The group talked through Step Four, the Step he was still hung up on: “We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”

Good times.

They broke after an hour. He thanked the old man who’d run the meeting and dialed his sponsor before he’d gotten outside. His feet headed back toward the park. On the third ring, Peach picked up.

“Hey.” She sounded raspy and out of breath. “There you are.” She always answered like she expected his call, which he found weirdly comforting. As a guy, Ruben knew he should have had a male sponsor, but no one cut to the bone like her.

He smiled. “You working in the garden?”

“Kid, I’m too old to work. I’m having sex with the pool boy.” Peach lived alone in a retirement community in Aventura, fifteen miles outside downtown Miami. “Of course, he’s fifty, so it takes a while.”

“So you’re on a break.”

She cackled and coughed. “What’s up? You sound like shit.”

“Meeting. Fourth Step, still.”

“Inventory is rough.” The sound changed, like she’d moved outside onto her little balcony. “Ruben, here’s a thing. You don’t have to love the process, but you gotta live with it. Shame puts the glass in your hand.”

He nodded and then realized she couldn’t see him. “Yeah. It’s good. New York is good.”

The
tcchk-tcchk
rasp of a lighter. She was all of five feet tall and chain-smoked menthols. He could imagine the smell exactly, and the smoke curling around her knobby knuckles.

She sighed. “Lonely, I bet.”

He pressed his lips tight before he spoke. “Oh, man. Like you wouldn’t fucking believe.”

“Tell me. I’m a seventy-eight-year-old floozy from Boca.” Peach breathed loudly for a few seconds. “See any great shows?” As a former hoofer, Peach loved musicals.

“C’mon. I don’t even watch TV these days. I work and I sleep.”

“Kiddo, lonely sucks, but other things suck more. Work your Steps. Pay attention to what matters, huh?”

“Mmmh.”

“And call your damn parents.” She was right, of course. “They’re old and they worry.” In other words, Peach was older and worried more about him. She gave the best guilt.

“I will.”

“Ruben, lonely isn’t always such a bad gig. Stay focused. Howzat job?”

Little by little his shoulders relaxed. As he walked west he told her about Charles, about his sofa bed, about the office, even the mugger that morning and the money tornado, but not Bauer. For whatever dumb reason, Andy Bauer and his paranoia didn’t come up.

Before he realized it, he’d reached Park Avenue and Seventy-Fourth.

Peach asked, “And have you met anybody?”

“Not like that.” He looked uptown. Bauer’s building had to be right there.

“Good. Take your time. Remember: The elevator is always broken. Use the Steps.”

Again he bobbed his head at the slogan like she could see him. She probably could.

Peach coughed. “Go home, rub one out and relax, Ruben.”

“Fuck off. G’bye. You know I don’t do that.” He hung up laughing with her.

He didn’t. Not jerking off had been a point of honor for him all his life, almost a competition.

At eleven his dad had explained the man/woman/baby deal and what his two-by was for. The Osos weren’t Catholic enough for Ruben to get horny-guilt, but he’d taken his dad’s lecture as a kind of challenge. A real man kept shit under control. His coaches said the same: game first, pussy after.

Easy enough. Ruben didn’t need to masturbate as long as he had a girlfriend to tap the sap. He always did.

He looked down at the map on his phone.
You are here.

Why did Andy Bauer bother him so much?

According to the blue dot on his GPS, Bauer’s building was on the corner of Seventy-Eighth and Park, so he headed north for a looksee.

Much quieter, this neighborhood. Boutiques and townhouses. Expensive cars even on the street. The buildings all had doormen, and the pedestrians dressed for show, not comfort. He spotted his destination from over a block away, a digital icicle rising ten stories higher than anything nearby.

880 Park Avenue turned out to be a white stone sliver with exaggerated windows above the twenty-fourth floor. The lower half definitely blended in with the surrounding Park Avenue buildings, but the upper floors resembled a space-age dildo. The glass cap kept it from sore-thumbing the block by angling the windows to reflect the sky. Out front, a zigzag row of chestnut trees bloomed in creamy pyramids. The gray awning said “The Iris,” so maybe the whole thing was supposed to look like a flower bud.

As a test, Ruben decided to bluff his way past the door staff.
Just to see.
Look like you know where you’re going, most staff steers clear.

He crossed Seventy-Eighth and approached a plate glass door held by a young doorman in a suit the building had probably hired for his smile, not his smarts. He was listening to a leggy blonde in a sundress holding a leash with a ball of peach fluff at one end.

Bauer had to be many times a millionaire to live here.

Ruben passed the door boy and the blonde, not even grunting a greeting as he strode across the white marble.
Bright.
Somehow brighter inside here than the June afternoon outside. Almost blinding.

He tucked his chin, squinted, and ambled inside as if mulling his millions. His pupils started to adjust. Maybe
that
was why it was called the Iris.

Another thirty feet.

On his left, a green wall of living vegetation and three tall silver birches in a line growing out of containers set into the floor. Sort of a deconstructed indoor garden. The leafy wall muffled half of the sound. Polished limestone slabs covered the other walls.

Twenty feet.

A lacquered desk to the right. Two doormen? One seated, one bent over a ledger talking on a phone. Both kids and too groomed to take seriously. He sauntered past and gave an absent nod to the youngsters. No response; geniuses obviously. A short hallway hooked to the right behind the doormen. Mailboxes, looked like.

Ten feet.
Secure building, my ass.

Past the spindly trees, a rigid semicircle of brown leather armchairs on a spotless ecru rug. Hell to keep clean, but maybe the residents wore new shoes every day. The chairs faced a blown-glass coffee table that cost upward of nine grand. Ruben pretended to dig for his keys as he neared the elevator bank at the back.

Five feet.

He pressed the button. According to the posted fire escape floorplan, the dogleg hallway ahead hooked back toward the stairwell and a service elevator opening into the garage.

These kids seriously weren’t going to stop him. Feeling brave, he swiveled to check the lush, hushed space behind him. Not a peep.

The vaulted elevator slid open without a sound. He stepped in and pressed PH. No key, no code required.

Digital numbers flicked by up top, even though the car didn’t seem to be moving. The interior was paneled in cherry burl with a narrow bench running the length of the back. Maybe rich idiots got tired if they stood too long.

See?
He knew what he was doing. Charles owed him a raise. Bauer owed him a debt of thanks. Ruben had just stuck his fingers into a fancy fortress built of Swiss cheese.

The digital display above the buttons slowed, although he still couldn’t feel any shift in momentum. For a moment, he thought he was about to walk back out into the lobby, but he had indeed reached the PH without a single hiccup.

The cherry doors slid open directly into the penthouse to reveal Bauer two feet away, big dumb grin on that square face. Dress shirt, slacks, but he’d ditched the jacket. “Oso! You’re about fourteen hours early, my man.” He held out a glass of white wine.

Ruben opened and closed his mouth. His face and neck prickled with a blush. “Uh.”

Bauer’s lips flickered with a suppressed smile, dimples framing it like apostrophes.

Lunkhead.
Ruben hadn’t snuck past anything. His new boss had poured him a goddamn drink.

“Didn’t we say eight?” The elevator started to close until Bauer waved his hand in the beam. “A.M.?”

Ruben had to step off right into the man’s personal space.

Instead of backing away, Bauer put the glass in Ruben’s hand. “This is yours. I left mine out on the terrace.” Without waiting or explaining, he headed right toward brightness. He was barefoot.

Ruben followed him toward a blinding double-height living room. Floor to ceiling glass faced south over a hot sky and high-rises. The windows were kept so clean they were invisible. It was uncomfortable, actually, as if they were standing on an open platform; wander off and you might fall five hundred feet and end up Park Avenue pudding. He had to turn away and his eyes took a second to adjust. Total showplace.