spoken in tongues or cracked the human genome. Okay, he wasn't into plants . . . or big words. But the longer I looked at him, the less I cared. Brains weren't everything, and anyway, we were just talking.
If I stuck to club soda and we stayed in safe territory conversationwise, he could stay. Besides, I'd enjoy the look on Lucy's face when she rushed in breathlessly with stories and apologies and saw me sitting with a sexy beast like Nick Vigoriti. She and the rest of my friends had been after me to start dating again ever since I left New York City, and this little encounter might shut them up for a while. He might even contribute something interesting about the hotel that I could use for the article. Who knew?
'Who are the Mishkins?' I asked, surreptitiously keying that info into the laptop.
'Bernie Mishkin and his sister,' he said, watching me use the computer. 'Are you writing this down now?'
'Yeah. Is that a problem?'
Vigoriti shrugged. 'Same difference. The Mishkins own the place,' he said, waving the sad-eyed bartender over. 'They and their numerous partners.'
The bartender had a heart-shaped face and lank hair that hung in a skinny braid halfway down her back.
'What're you having, Nicky?' she asked, in an accent I couldn't initially place, then decided was Russian. She wiped nonexistent spills from the bar and slipped a coaster in front of him, grazing his fingers.
'Dirty martini,' he said, pulling back his hand. 'You?' he asked me.
Every stupid thing I'd done in my adult life had come after a few drinks, and I could imagine getting very stupid with Nick Vigoriti, so I stuck with club soda.
'Can you introduce me to them?' I asked. 'The Mishkins?'
'You think that's a good idea?'
'Why not?' I said. 'I may have a lucrative proposition for them.'
'They're always interested in money.' He laughed. 'I haven't talked to Bernie for a while, but that may change. His wife died a few months back. I haven't seen much of him since then. . . . I was really friendlier with her.'
Why was I not surprised? What woman wouldn't want to be friends with a handsome stud who hung on your every word and made you feel as if you were the only woman in the room worth talking to?
The bartender brought our drinks. Nick's had six green olives on two plastic toothpicks. The bartender moved off to another customer but not before giving me a look that suggested she wouldn't mind seeing my head on a sharpened stick.
'What did
'Oksana's a good kid,' he said, swallowing hard and nodding in her direction.
'Adorable.'
'I used to work here,' Vigoriti continued. 'Before Mishkin brought in the Malaysians, the Ukranians, let's see . . .' He rattled off a laundry list of ethnic groups, then took a long pull on his drink. 'Who is it now, Oksana?' he called out to the bartender.
'Chinese, I think,' she said, over her shoulder, already fixing him a second drink.
'Their board meetings must look like a Benetton ad,' I muttered.
'Most of them cut bait.'
'It doesn't look like business is too bad; there are people here,' I said.
'We could go somewhere private to discuss this,' he said, signaling Oksana that he was ready for round two. He polished off his drink and slid all the olives into his mouth in a surprisingly suggestive move that made me rethink how friendly I wanted to appear.
'You know, I was just trying to be polite. Always dangerous at a bar. I'm sorry if I misled you, but I really am waiting for someone, and it isn't you.' As if on cue, my phone beeped with a text message. Lucy was running late. Typical. She'd gotten a late start to begin with and one of the cheap Chinese New York-to-Boston shuttle buses had collided with a construction-materials truck. Gravel was spread all over I-95. The result was the same as if a load of ball bearings had spilled out on the highway; cars were drifting side to side as if they were in a Japanese video game. Lucy was stuck on the road, near Stamford, and wrote that she'd call when she got closer.
Locals were trickling into the bar for after-dinner drinks, working guys with puffy baseball caps. And businessmen who might have heard about the mess on 95 and preferred to sit here instead of in traffic. I debated the pros and cons of staying at the bar with Nick and possibly moving on to the harder stuff but decided against it. Life was complicated enough.
I chugged my drink and shut down the computer. 'I'm gonna cut bait, to use your expression. I have to go. I was serious about meeting the Mishkins, though. I may have a buyer.' I whipped out my business card and handed it to Nick as I got up to leave. He looked puzzled and studied the card for longer than it took to read the six or eight words on it. Was it possible the guy couldn't read? 'For the greenhouse,' I said, 'the glass enclosure?'
A smile crept over Nick's handsome face.
'What's so funny?'
'My mistake,' he said, flicking the card with his index finger. 'Not the kind of dirt I thought you dug up.'
That's how my business card came to be in the breast pocket of his shirt, and that's why the cops called on me hours later to identify his body.
I'm a gardener. Paula Holliday, sole proprietor of Dirty Business, garden design, container maintenance, and the occasional exhumation. Not really, although that was the way my last major landscaping job turned out, in Springfield, Connecticut, where I live, about seventy miles south of the Titans Hotel.
Titans had been built in the twenties, a place where businessmen parked their families for the summer and raced up to on Friday afternoons. Third-tier comics and wedding and bar mitzvah bands played there on the weekends. The men would bake themselves with sun reflectors, drink heavily, and have their conjugal visits. Then they'd wake up at the crack of dawn on Mondays, speeding back to Boston or New York and clocking themselves so they could compare travel times over drinks the following Friday.
By the sixties and seventies, kids didn't want to vacation with their parents anymore, Mom was just as likely to be working as Dad, and lots of hotels like Titans fell to the wrecking ball. Somehow Titans had survived. That was as far as my online research had gotten me before Nick joined me at the bar.
I got to the elevator just as April, the white Maltese, and her redheaded owner were exiting, the larger of the two in a skintight tangerine outfit with hot-pink trim that accentuated her big frame. The woman looked away quickly, and I watched her make her way to the taxi line in front of the hotel, the scrawny dog hurrying to keep up.
Maybe some of Nick's magnetism had rubbed off because, upstairs, this time my key card worked perfectly. The suite Lucy had reserved for us was large and benignly ugly. Nothing atrocious, just endless swathes of beige and dusty pink, from the synthetic bedspread and carpet, harboring god-knew-what kind of microorganisms, to the particleboard furniture. The only good news was that the furniture was from the sixties or seventies, so old there was an excellent chance that all of the formaldehyde had already been thrown off.
I hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorknob and automatically turned on the television, something I always do in hotel rooms, but rarely do at home. A hotel channel reminiscent of the cheap ads at movie theaters showed slides of the lobby and a kidney-shaped pool that must have been another vestige from Titans's good old days. The local news featured repeated helicopter shots of the collision on 95 from the same two angles. I kept the news on to get an update as to when Lucy might arrive and unpacked the rest of my things.
After years of traveling for work, I was an expert at packing light. Now that I rarely needed to look like a grown-up, I was even better at it. The white shirt went everywhere with me, and black jeans and a black jacket could pass for business attire if I needed to look reasonably professional. That was my uniform. I'd thrown a pair of low-rise yoga pants and a thin hoodie into the bag and that was what I climbed into.
The Titans room-service menu was almost as limited as my wardrobe and my viewing options, but I settled on a turkey club, hoping that the tryptophan would counteract the caffeine in the diet sodas I'd guzzled on the drive to Titans. Then I curled up on the scratchy synthetic love seat and waited for food and Lucy.
I should have been at home fine-tuning this year's plan for Caroline Sturgis's garden. Dirty Business had a few customers in the high-rent district, and a handful of retailers whose seasonal planters I serviced, but Caroline was my biggest and favorite individual client. Four and a half rolling acres bordering the arboretum, money to burn, and always happy to see me. And she had so much lawn that her property was like a blank slate, like that chunky brick of loose-leaf paper the first week of school. Filled with possibilities.
