Tattoo Thief (BOOK 1) (9 page)

Jasper baroos a greeting when I open the door and I quickly change and take him out for a walk. We run into dogs of every size and color, but not another basenji.

On our walk, my mind can’t escape the riddle of Gavin. He’s searching for something, but he doesn’t know what. He wants me to “just deal with” personal stuff in his apartment, yet he’s cagey about the details.

I want to know why.

When we get back to the apartment after high-fiving Charles and collecting Jasper’s piece of cheese, I go in the other bedroom and take a look at the clothes piled on the bed. They really are exquisite, so I try on a sweater. It fits.

The tops fit. The dresses, T-shirts, and bras. And with a little wiggling, even the jeans fit. I don’t try on the panties, but I know they’ll fit too.

I can’t throw all this stuff out. It’s a goldmine!

It will be my brand-new New York wardrobe and the perfect replacement for my Bumpkin Fashion. I decide to tell Gavin I got rid of it—no need to explain that it went to Beryl K. Sutton instead of St. Vincent de Paul.

With everything he’s wasting, he’ll never know the difference.

I show up for work in a sleeveless purple blouse with tuxedo ruffles down the front and a silk skirt that floats around my knees, both chosen from my new wardrobe. I stop by a Duane Reade on the way to work and buy vampy purple lipstick to complete the look.

I’ve got my second house-sitting gig thanks to Dan’s connections, and after I catch up on email at the office, I take a cab to the Upper East Side where Greta Carr lives.

I’m prepared this time. I Google her first and find out she’s the daughter of a seafood processing magnate. While Daddy is selling frozen shrimp, she’s on the party circuit attached to various Hollywood B-list actors.

Goody, goody. I can hardly wait to snoop through the tabloid princess’s drawers.

Greta’s supposed to be gone for a couple of weeks and my duties are light—clean up and restock her place, get her cleaning and deliveries, and feed her fish.

From Google, I know she has a purse-dog, but apparently that poor creature travels with her everywhere.

I fill out a sign-in sheet and fork over my ID and Dan’s business card—my cards are still being printed, and Dan’s changed my title from “Assistant” to “Short-Term Property Manager.” I like it better than just plain “manager” of the coffee bar.

The doorman takes a photo of both cards with his phone, makes a few notes in a logbook and then hands me a key.

Greta’s apartment makes Gavin’s look tiny. It feels like the inside of a seashell, decorated in blush and pink and coral with stark white carpet and blond wood furniture. An enormous fish tank divides the main living space and now I see why its care instructions were so precise.

I gawk at the tropical beauties on display and then imagine Greta’s father’s machines stamping multicolored fish sticks out of them.

Yuck.

I open Greta’s refrigerator and see diet soda, slim-down drinks, a few dessert-flavored yogurt cups and some sad-looking baby carrots. Even her condiments look hungry, nothing but a few low-fat salad dressings.

I guess this is what skinny rich girls eat. I snoop and her pantry is equally barren, with portion-controlled snacks, fat-free this and low-carb that. The only guilty pleasures I can find are a bag of pretzels—good God, carbs!—and a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

I have no idea how she’d prepare it. There’s no butter, margarine, or milk in her fridge.

I go to Greta’s bedroom and it’s a riot of pink, made even more extreme by the mirrors hanging on the walls. Her wide dressing table has a fat, tufted stool upholstered in deep pink velvet. Dozens of perfumes, creams, and lotions are spread across the table.

I pick up the clothes strewn around her bedroom floor and toss them in a bag for the cleaners. A coppery sequined slip-dress slithers like a snake in my hands.

Greta’s closet is arresting, with row upon row of shoe racks lining both sides of the walk-in. It’s large enough for a full-length mirror and a zebra-striped chaise lounge, and I debate whether to re-hang the clothes draped over the chaise or stuff them in the laundry basket.

No way am I giving them the sniff-test. I play it safe and toss them in the laundry.

Greta’s regular housekeeper is due for a visit in a few days, so I ignore the towels on the bathroom floor and just grab the clothes left there. I wonder how she managed to strew several weeks’ worth of clothes everywhere, or if she simply doesn’t pick up after herself—ever.

Maybe that’s how this rich girl was raised.

I can’t resist peeking in Greta’s bathroom drawers but what I find there horrifies me. It’s a tableau to self-loathing, with every kind of cosmetic treatment on record, many of which I’ve never seen. One whole drawer is devoted to lipstick, and in another I find more wrinkle creams than Central Park has pedicabs.

I don’t think this woman is much over thirty, but from the staggering amount of cosmetics she owns, she hates her face.

I retrace my steps to the front door, piling two bags of laundry for my trip down to the cleaners. But before I leave, I have to know what
really
makes her tick.

Is she really just a spoiled rich girl?

My answer is not in her living room, where everything is ready for company or a magazine photographer to drop by. There’s a bookshelf full of classics that look like they’ve never been cracked. The books are arranged among objets d’art that might have all come from the same designer catalog.

This space is too perfectly impersonal to betray her secrets.

I snoop around the rest of the apartment and find a little reading nook tucked in a guest room—a ratty old afghan blanket is thrown over a super-sized chair that looks totally out of place among the rest of Greta’s designer duds.

This space feels real. It’s the place I can tell she goes when she’s not trying to show off. I find a bookshelf full of what she really reads—supermarket romances, chick lit, and some steamier titles.

I find binders full of torn magazine pages featuring celebrity galas. She’s cataloged them carefully, with sections for weddings, charity fund-raisers, society events, and big-ticket Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. I see color swatches and notes on which flowers are in season during certain months.

This girl is obsessed with parties.

In a large basket next to the chair, there’s a massive pile of fashion bibles and celebrity gossip rags. I wonder if she’s looking for pictures of herself in them? From what Google revealed, she’s photographed often enough.

The magazines are dog-eared and torn, with sticky notes popping out of some of them. I flip open the top magazine and see Jessica Alba staring at me in an advertisement for skin-smoothing makeup.

A fat black marker has circled her nose. A note to the side says,
thinner.
I flip to another page and another nose is circled. A few pages later, Scarlett Johansson’s boobs warrant a black marker note:
C cup or D?

I can’t help myself. I drop into Greta’s chair and rifle through her magazine collection, each page revealing what Greta would look like if a plastic surgeon could just pinch, squeeze, plump, or slice her body into submission.

I saw her on Google—she’s gorgeous. And yet, she hates her body and her face. It makes me sad.

Suddenly I’m not so keen to want to know what really makes her tick.

I finally wrest myself away from this little shop of horrors and head down the elevator bearing two bags of clothes that probably cost several years’ worth of my salary. I walk a couple of blocks to the cleaners and make the exchange—dirty clothes for clean ones—and struggle under the weight of the fresh clothes on my way back to Greta’s apartment.

I am thankful again for my flats.

I tear off the protective plastic coverings and figure out where to hang each garment in her massive closet, a process that seems to take forever. I see that each one of the pink-and-chrome hangers bears a monogram: G.A.C.

Greta Amelia Carr.

Amelia? I wonder if her dad has a thing for flying.

My
drycleaner gives out cheap wire hangers with flimsy cardboard tubes.
Her
drycleaner hangs laundry on Greta’s custom hangers. Chalk up one more thing about rich people that I didn’t even know was possible.

And chalk up one more thing for me to do. I set aside a fat pile of monogrammed hangers to drop off at the cleaners for when her next load of clothes is ready.

Finally, I wrap up my list of chores with a precise feeding of the tropical fish. I don’t want to commit ichthyomicide in my first week as a house sitter.

I close the door to Greta’s home, knowing my job’s done for a few days. But I wish I could do something better for her than just feeding her fish and shuttling her laundry to the cleaners.

She needs perspective. Cocooned in her rich-girl life, I imagine she’s had far too long to wallow in this weird self-judgment. Her idea of “problems” most of us would count as blessings.

I wish I could get her to stop looking in the mirror and start looking out the window.

Now that I’ve chatted with Gavin on Gmail’s chat, I become
kind of
a stalker. Back at Keystone Property Management, I keep a Gmail window constantly open, watching to see if the little bubble next to his name turns from gray to green, signaling that he’s online.

But his bubble’s never green.

After our first connection, I want to know more. I
have
to know. Why did he trash his house?

I’m still afraid he’s angry about my accusation but I pretend it never happened. Instead, I send him an email about his crooked couch. It’s clearly expensive—should I find a place to repair it? Does he want me to replace it? Or get something different? I send the message and wait.

And wait.

After work, I take Jasper out for another walk in the park, our rhythm becoming familiar. I’m figuring out when he can go off-leash safely and when I need its added insurance so he doesn’t go tearing after squirrels or other dogs. That dog is
fast
—when he’s going top speed, his tail uncurls almost straight like a streamer behind him.

We’re back and I dive for my phone to check my email again. What’s gotten into me? I’m supposed to be licking my wounds over Jeff, not fixated on Gavin. I force my mind to recall the state of his apartment when I first got here and revulsion overpowers lust.

That’s better.

But I see an email in my in-box, and my chest does a little fluttery thing when I see it’s from Gavin. Damn.

Gavin doesn’t answer my question about the couch. He does one better. His email says:

Beryl. Chat me. I’ll be here at the café for half an hour or so.

I squeak with excitement and then check the time, dismayed. He sent the email almost an hour ago, and I’ve been gallivanting all over Central Park with his dog. I kick myself for leaving my phone behind, and then kick myself for kicking myself.

How lame is it to be waiting online for a guy? Is this the new version of waiting by the phone?

I ditch my phone because it’s almost out of juice and as my laptop wakes up and Gmail launches, I find myself cheering it on.

“Come on, come on,” I urge.

Me:
Gavin. I’m here.

Gavin:
Beryl.

Me:
How are you?

Gavin:
Lost, but in a good way. I went to Njoro.

Me:
You did? That’s pretty far from Nairobi.

Gavin:
Yeah, it was a few hours, but I wanted to see where the Beryl prototype grew up.

Me:
The prototype?

Gavin:
Well, I couldn’t call her the “Original Beryl,” since I met you first.

Me:
No, you couldn’t. So … are you having fun?

Gavin:
Fun’s not the word for it. I’m on a mission.

Me:
For?

Gavin:
I’ll tell you when I find it. I think I’m getting closer.

Me:
Is it something you lost?

Gavin:
Yeah.

Me:
Someone?

Gavin:
Yeah.

Me:
Tell me.

Gavin:
No. Stop pushing. I just wanted to say you can replace the couch, except don’t get the same kind.

Me:
Why not?

Gavin:
I need a change. I want things different.

Me:
Is that why you were trying to wreck everything you owned?

Gavin:
I don’t know. I think I was trying to wreck myself.

I want to ask why but I hold silent.

Gavin:
So anyway, just make some changes, OK?

Me:
Anything I want?

Gavin:
No pink. Or girly frilly crap.

Me:
Rats. That’s just what I had in mind.

Gavin:
You wouldn’t dare. I take it back. Don’t change anything.

Me:
Really?

Gavin:
Shit. I’m no good at this. I usually have my assistant to figure this out.

Me:
What happened to her?

Gavin:
I fired him. So you’re it, Beryl.

Me:
OK, then, how can I assist you?

Gavin:
Tell me about yourself.

Me:
Um, that’s kind of a weird request.

Gavin:
No, it’s not. Not for what I have in mind.

A bolt shoots through me, hearing a sensual connotation I’m sure he didn’t intend. But I want it to be there.

Gavin Slater wants to know about
me
? What could I possibly tell him that would be enough?

Me:
OK, then, what do you want to know?

Gavin:
Tell me something real. Not something you make up to impress me.

Me:
Hello, ego? What makes you think I’ll try to impress you?

Gavin:
Because everyone does. It’s kind of gross. People who have no business making moves on me—teenagers and much older women and taken women, and even some men—act like I’m a piece of meat. Or like I’m a lion; if they just dangle a piece of meat out in front of me, I’ll pounce.