THE MOST BEAUTIFUL APARTMENT IN NEW YORKBY JUSTIN SCOTT
I will cut her heart out,” Tommy King announced in a loud, clear voice, placing near equal emphasis on each word.
I said, “You shouldn’t be saying that.”
“Who you going to tell?”
“See the blondes at the bar? How do you know one of them’s not a cop? Or a cop’s sister looking to get him promoted?”
Tommy King lowered the decibels to a vodka mutter. “Whoa. Almost blew it. Thanks, Joe.”
We were seated at a four top in the back of Morans, an expensive Irish joint on Tenth in Chelsea around the corner from what I was already thinking of as “my apartment.” Which was premature, considering how negotiations had gotten jammed up. Tommy King was the real estate agent who had steered me to it after a six- month search. The table was roomy because he always reserved for three and gave his name as “Dr.” King.
“I don’t want to give the cops any ideas. Shouldn’t even tell you.” He was finishing off his second martini, not drunk enough to ignore. I was used to his harping on his ex-wife, but suddenly he was vicious, gripping my arm and pulling me close to whisper, “I’m going to buy a surgeon’s scalpel.
What she did to me. I just have to figure out how not to get caught-What’s the matter? You’ve never been mad enough to kill anybody?”
Hoping to shift the subject from ex-wife killing back to business, I said, “Right this minute I could kill the owner of that apartment.”
“No, no, no. Jesus H., don’t even say such a thing.” He ducked lower. “You don’t want to do that. Kill him and you’ll end up negotiating with his heirs. I’m telling you, heirs are the worst. Soon as they inherit free money, it’s not enough.”
“It’s the most beautiful apartment in New York.”
“I used to say that about my wife.
“I didn’t realize you were still seeing her.”
“From a distance. You have to get right in her face to see the evil.”
Tommy waved his glass for a third drink.
I stood up. I’d heard enough evil-ex for one night.
“Seven p.m.”
“Why so late?”
“He wants you to see the sun changing colors on the Empire State Building.”
“He’s enjoying jerking me around.”
Tommy put down his glass and said, seriously, “Two things you want to keep in mind, Joe. He can only jerk you around if you show him he’s getting to you. And, he knows what he’s got.”
“What’s that?”
“What you just said, man. The most beautiful apartment in New York.”
It was a walk-up. And the kitchen was a bad joke.
It ran the full length and breadth of the parlor floor of a Greek Revival town house built in 1840. It had two fireplaces and nine-foot ceilings. Listed as a one-bedroom, it had the extra nooks and crannies you find in an old house. One would hold a desk. Another, the upright piano I’d had in storage since I came to New York. It had a view in the back of narrow gardens and a view out front, across the street, of a gigantic plane tree in a green field beside a gothic stone seminary whose church, gardens, and dormitories occupied the entire block from Ninth to Tenth Avenues.
The plane tree spread its branches in a hundred-foot circle that screened the only ugly thing in view, the seminary’s 1960s-modern three-story office complex that had all the charm of a suburban elementary school. When I asked how the church had skated it past the Landmark Commission-which maintained strict architectural control of historic blocks like this one-Tommy had answered, “This city was built on loopholes.” The tree blocked most of it. Above the tree the Empire State Building sailed into the sky like a vertical ocean liner.
“Hard to believe you’re in the city,” said Richard, the owner. Richard had renovated the building forty years ago when-he told me every time I went back for another look-brave pioneers could buy crumbling property on a dangerous street for what today would buy a time-share in a parking garage. He had knocked down rooming house partitions and opened it up into floor-throughs, occupying the ground floor himself and renting the rest. Now, old and Florida-bound in a booming market, he had emptied the rentals by the simple expedient of jacking the rent to Park Avenue penthouse rates and had sold the third, fourth, and attic floors. “Mine” was the last and most expensive, since, Richard assured me, it was the best.
His negotiating strategy was effective, and downright intimidating. I had instructed Tommy to offer forty thousand less than his exorbitant asking price, then Richard raised his asking price by forty, making it insanely exorbitant. I should have walked away. Instead, I walked in at 7 o’clock, agreed that it was hard to believe we were in the city, and admired the light on the Empire State Building shift color from a metallic tan to red to blue- gray as the sun crept past the city.
It took a while, but Richard was in no rush. He was a non-stop talker who loved a captive audience. He told me that the reason the staircase sagged was some idiot had cut a main beam in the basement while running a new sewer line when they converted the original town house into a rooming house for the dockworkers back in World War II. He told me he put a new roof on the building. He told me that a disused air shaft could be converted to a kitchen exhaust fan in “your apartment.”
He told me a bunch of gossip about people on the block who fell into two categories: amusing eccentrics who owned buildings and apartments, and gypsy peasants who rented.
He cackled that the house of a neighbor he was feuding with was haunted. “Really is. You could buy an apartment in his building for half what it’s worth.”
I had checked that out already. It was going cheap all right. I didn’t see any ghosts. But it was completely ordinary and the only view was of a housing project on 18th.
“Having the seminary across the street is like having a country house outside your window. Except you don’t have to drive there and mow the grass. You want to get outdoors, you walk two minutes to the river.”
Then he made my blood run cold by telling me that a couple had looked at the apartment this afternoon and seemed to like it a lot. Money was no problem. The guy’s parents were rich. And if they wouldn’t help, the Swiss bank that employed the woman would front the down payment. He watched me react and seemed to like what he saw.
“You really should live here,” Richard said. “You’ll never find another place like this. Chelsea Piers, best gym in New York, is right down the street. I’m selling paradise.”
I turned my face to the window. The Empire State Building had almost disappeared in the dark. Just then, they switched on a thousand floodlights, painting it white as an iceberg.
“Look at that,” Richard crowed. “I just have a feeling in my gut you belong here. I don’t know if I ever told you, but this apartment has a track record when it comes to romance. Everyone who ever rented it met somebody and had a love affair. Right here in these rooms.”
I should not have told Tommy King that I wanted the kind of home that a woman would like to share.
“You’re asking a killer price,” I said.
“It will only get more valuable,” he countered. “Nothing will bring it down. It didn’t go when the Towers went down. I was watching on CNN thinking,
He was right. It would not be the most beautiful apartment in New York without that spire changing colors by the hour.
Richard said, “Nothing but a haunting will ever bring it down, Joe. And don’t get any ideas, because this
