Sammy Keyes and the Cold Hard Cash (2 page)

TWO

Light from the hallway shines on the man as he starts across the landing toward the steps going down. He’s wearing a dark blue jacket, dark pants, a hat pulled down low, and
white
Velcro-close shoes.

Old-guy shoes.

Then the door swings closed, and I relax a little because he is definitely not the building manager. Mr. Garnucci is skinny, and this guy’s stocky. And whoever he is, he doesn’t notice me. He’s just some old guy who’s sure to have bad eyes, bad ears, and a focus on the ground instead of what’s ahead of him.

Or what’s behind him.

But then, before he takes his first step down, he glances over his shoulder. Maybe to check the door, I don’t know. All I know is that his glance turns into a double take, and the double take turns into a look of terror.

He’s spotted me, all right, and from the look on his face, he thinks I might
mug
him or something. And then all of a sudden his face wrenches up and he makes a horrible
choking
sound and slowly collapses onto the fire escape.

“Are you all right?” I ask, going toward him.

His face is still all contorted, but he blinks at me, then chokes out, “You’re…just a…
girl.
”

“I’m sorry I scared you. Are you…all right?”

He shakes his head, licks his lips, pants, pulls another awful face, and clutches his chest. And that’s when it finally hits me—this guy is having a heart attack!

“I’ll call an ambulance!” I tell him, but he gasps, “Wait!” and it looks like he’s trying to take something out of an inside coat pocket.

“Do you have heart medicine?” I ask, because somewhere in the back of my brain I remember seeing something like that on TV.

His face pinches up hard and he closes his eyes.

So I dive down and start digging through his coat, asking, “Which pocket?” only I stop short because what I run into instead is a big fat bundle of money.

“Get…rid of it,” he gasps.

I hesitate. “The money?”

He nods and pants, “All…of…it.”

“The
money
?” I ask again, then dive back into his pockets, looking for pills. “Don’t talk crazy. Where’s your medicine?”

He doesn’t answer. And when I find a second bundle of money, and then a
third,
he says, “It’s not—” but he can’t seem to get the rest out. He just folds up in pain.

“Where’s your medicine?” I cry, and when he doesn’t answer, I stand up and say, “I’m getting an ambulance!”

“Throw it!” he gasps. “Get…rid of it!”

“The
money
?”

“Please!” he wheezes. “Throw it!”

So I pick up the bundles of money, but really, tossing them away is not something that comes naturally to me. I mean, with Grams’ limited income and my
zero
income, money is always an issue.

But what am I supposed to do? It’s not
my
money, and something about it being there sure seems to be making his condition worse.

Then he pulls a terrible face and wheezes,
“Please,”
so I take a deep breath and heave the bundles over the railing and into the bushes below.

He seems to relax a little, so I say, “Look, do you have medicine or not?”

He shakes his head.

“I’m getting an ambulance!” So I power up the stairs to the fifth floor and shoot down the hall to get Grams’ help, only before I get there, I hear her voice coming through the open doorway of our neighbor’s apartment. “Rose, honestly,” she’s snapping. “I can’t do this alone. I’m going to have to call for help!”

I stop short, thinking, Uh-oh, because I know what this means.

It means what it always means.

Our supersized neighbor has fallen off the toilet and can’t get up.

My plan, as I was charging down the hall, was to have Grams call 911.
I
sure didn’t want to do it! Those 911 people ask you stuff like who you are and where you live, and what you’re doing on a seniors building fire escape giving people heart attacks.

But now I knew that Grams was dealing with Mrs. Wedgewood, so my choice was to either go into the Wedge’s apartment and get Grams to call 911 or go into our apartment and call 911 myself, pretending to be Grams.

I’ve learned the hard way that a split-second decision can affect you a lot longer than the split second it took to make. In this case, my split-second decision was to go inside Mrs. Wedgewood’s apartment and head straight for the bathroom.

The place was dripping with steam. The mirrors were completely fogged up, and there was an actual
cloud
hanging in the air. “Oh, thank heavens!” Grams said when she saw me, her hair in sweaty curls, her glasses milky with steam.

Mrs. Wedgewood hadn’t fallen off the toilet. It was actually worse. She was on the floor of the shower, looking like a big blob of blubber.

I tried to wave Grams out of the bathroom, whispering, “Quick! You’ve got to call an ambulance!”

“She’s not hurt,” Grams says, pushing her glasses back up her nose. “She’s just slippery!”

“Grams!” I whisper. “It’s an emergency!” But for some reason she can’t seem to see that I’m dealing with a crisis bigger than a soaped-up whale. So in another split-second decision, I run into the kitchen, pick up Mrs. Wedgewood’s phone, and dial 911.

“It’s a real emergency,” I say in my best old-lady voice when they answer. “A man collapsed on the fire escape of the Senior Highrise!” And since there are two fire escapes for the building, I add, “The Broadway side! He’s on the fourth-floor landing! I think he’s having a heart attack! Send an ambulance quick!”

Then before they can ask me any questions, I slam down the phone, turn around, and nearly slam into Grams.

“What was that?” she asks me.

So real fast I tell her about the guy on the landing having a heart attack.

She shoves hair off her forehead with the back of her hand and gasps, “Oh dear! Let’s go!”

She calls, “I’ll be right back, Rose!” and after she grabs a flashlight from home, we both hurry over to the fire escape.

Grams was amazingly quick on the stairs, and when we reached the fourth floor, she knelt down by the man and took his pulse.

It was too late, though. I could just tell—he looked way too peaceful to be alive.

“Oh dear!” Grams says over her shoulder. “I think he’s gone!”

Sirens are screeching down Main Street, so Grams shoos me off, whispering, “Go! I’ll take care of this. See if you can help Rose.”

So up the stairs I fly, feeling shaky and sick to my stomach.

No matter how much I didn’t want to believe it, it was still true.

I’d scared a man to death.

THREE

Rose Wedgewood knows I live with Grams. I’ve never actually
admitted
it to her, but she knows. And she’s turned out to be the biggest sweet-talking blackmailer the world has ever seen. Early on she said, “Don’t worry, sugar. I’ll keep your little secret,” then immediately started asking me to do all sorts of errands and chores.

The thing about Mrs. Wedgewood is, I don’t think she
wants
to be a sweet-talking blackmailer. Underneath it all I think she’s probably a nice person. But she says that moving to assisted living—which, believe me, she needs—would be like “opening the coffin and steppin’ in,” so instead, she blackmails us into helping her stay at the Highrise. She calls us on the phone to send us on errands and have us do her laundry and stuff like that, but for emergencies she doesn’t bother with the phone. No, for emergencies she bangs on her bathroom wall.

Now, that’s probably because most of her emergencies happen in the bathroom.

And her definition of “emergency” can be pretty broad. Sometimes she’s dropped her wig on the floor and can’t pick it up. Sometimes her walker’s out of reach and the bathroom floor’s wet and she’s afraid of slipping and crashing through to the apartment below. Sometimes the toilet paper roll’s run out and she needs us to get her a refill from under her sink.

Usually, though, she bangs on the wall because she’s fallen off the toilet.

I don’t want to get into the gross details of how or why this happens, but man, is she good at it. And it takes both Grams and me to hoist her back onto the throne.

In all the times I’d been inside her bathroom, though, I’d never seen her in all her bald, naked glory on the shower stall floor. I didn’t even think she took showers. From her usual, uh,
aroma,
I figured she sponged off maybe once a week and called it good.

“Sammy!” she gasped when she saw me. “Where’s Rita? I thought she’d left me here to die!”

I whipped the double-sized beach towel she’d made me sew together off the rack and covered her body. “Are you kidding? She wouldn’t do that.” I studied the situation a minute. She was sort of on her side, with her back end toward the door.

“I should never have tried a shower,” she moaned. “What got into me?”

“Let’s just get you out of there.” I knelt in front of the shower and put out my hand. “Here. I’ll help you sit up, and then maybe you can get on your knees. Then I’ll get the walker and…we’ll go from there.”

So she takes my hand, making it practically disappear inside of hers, and after I wedge my knees up tight against the curb of the shower, I go, “Ready? One, two, three!” and pull back as hard as I can. Trouble is, instead of her moving anywhere, my knees slip out from under me and I go
flying
into the shower.

I land with a sloppy
thump
right on top of her, and even though the towel’s between
some
of us, it’s not between
all
of us. And I’m sorry, but being sprawled out over all that flubbery blubberyness freaked me out.

“Aaaah!” I cried, and quicker than a cat tossed in ice water, I backed
out
of there.

“You almost had me! Try again,” she says.

I did
not
want to try again, but I knew there was no escaping it. So finally I take a deep breath and lean in, and this time I brace myself by putting one foot against the curb of the shower.

I pull, and she swings up, up, up, until she’s sorta sitting, using one arm to prop herself up.

“Okay, both hands right here,” I tell her, tapping on the curb of the shower. “Then get up on your knees. Can you do that?”

“I’ll sure try, sugar,” she says, panting hard. “But first can you hand me my wig? I am so embarrassed to have you see me like this.”

I want to say, You’re kidding, right? because her bald head’s
nothing
compared to her bald body. But I can tell she’s serious, so I get her curly black head-mop off the counter and wrestle it onto her head.

When I’m done, she looks like one of those enormous beached seals with a wig on. It seems to give her confidence, though. “All right, sugar,” she says, “let’s do it.”

So with big groans and moans she finally gets up on all fours.

I drape the towel over her back, and as she’s peering at me through the shower door opening, she now reminds me of one of those maharaja elephants.

“Okay!” I tell her. “Good job.” I grab the walker and put it up to the curb. “You’re almost there!”

“Give me a minute,” she pants. “And I’m going to need your help getting up.”

I just stare at her, because helping her up means I’ve got to get in the shower.

It means I’ve got to grab her under her armpit and heave-ho.

It means…

I try to block the grossness of it all from my mind and squeeze past her into the shower.

“I really need to get me one of those shower seats,” she says. “And one of those spray nozzles on a hose. And maybe you could come by and help me bathe, rather than my trying to do this all myself.”

The thought of that makes me shudder. I mean, come on! How far is this blackmail stuff going to go?

I don’t say a word, though. I just get her to grab the walker, then I take a deep breath and scoop an arm into the flubbery abyss between her arm and her body. And as I’m straining to help her up, I’m wishing Grams would hurry back. I mean, what was taking so long? Were the police quizzing her? Was she telling them that she found the guy passed out? Dead?

What else could she say?

And there were a gazillion other questions running through my head. Who was the guy and what was he doing using the fire escape? Did he live in the building? And why did he have fat bundles of cash? You don’t live in the Senior Highrise if you have fat bundles of cash! You live here because you
don’t
have fat bundles of cash.

And why had he been so worried about getting
rid
of the money? He obviously didn’t want anyone to find it on him. Had he robbed a bank? Had he stolen it from an apartment?

But who in this place had fat wads of cash?

“We did it, sugar, we did it!” Mrs. Wedgewood panted as she stood outside the shower in all her naked glory. “Oh, bless you, child. Bless you!”

I was panting, too. “Okay. Well, there you go.” I wrapped the towel over her shoulders.

“That’s okay, sugar, I’m not cold,” she said, shrugging it off. And as she clomped out of the bathroom and into the living room, Grams came hurrying into the apartment, closing the door tight behind her.

“Oh, good!” she said when she saw that Mrs. Wedgewood was out of the shower. And even though she blinked pretty good at her as she clomped along, from the flush of her cheeks and her darting eyes I could see that Grams had bigger things on her mind than Mrs. Wedgewood.

“So, Rose, are you going to be all right?” she asked, giving me the let’s-get-out-of-here nod.

“I am famished,” she said, clomping toward her bedroom. “Would you mind fixing me some eggs? And toast. Buttered.”

“Uh…sure,” Grams said, eyeing me.

“I think I’m out of eggs,” Mrs. Wedgewood called over her shoulder. “Do you have any? If not, maybe you could run to the store?”

Grams pinched her lips together and counted to ten through flared nostrils. “I’ll see what I have.”

Grams gave me the nod again, so I followed her to our apartment and whispered, “What happened?”

“He’s dead,” she whispered back. “But it’s all very strange. His name’s Buck Ritter and his driver’s license shows he was from Omaha, Nebraska. And there was a receipt from the Heavenly Hotel. I don’t think he lived in our building at all!”

“Wait. Did you go through his wallet?”

She gave a little frown. “I wanted to know who he was! If he was a Highrise resident, his neighbors would certainly not have wanted to learn about his death on the morning news!”

“So it was your civic duty to go nosing through his wallet?”

She gave me a prim look. “I didn’t nose.”

“So what happened after the paramedics showed up? What did you tell them?”

“The paramedics were fine,” she said. “They tried to revive him, but it was no use.” She was quiet a minute, then said, “He had wings tattooed on his neck.”

“On his neck?” I asked, because she was sounding…strange.

“On the back of it. There was a star in the middle and something written over the top. I couldn’t make out what it spelled, but it was strange to see.”

“Because?”

She hesitated, then said, “Because they looked like angel wings.” Then very softly she added, “Like he’d been ready to be carried off…for a long time.” She shook her head. “Never mind. It was just a strange thing to see on…on a dead man. After that the police showed up and I panicked.”

“What do you mean, you panicked?”

“What was I going to tell them?” she said, all wide-eyed. “Why was I on the fire escape so late at night?” She held her forehead. “So I left! The fourth-floor door was un-locked, so I just slipped inside and came home.”

“So…nobody knows it was you?”

Her head quivered back and forth. “And I want it to stay that way!” She opened the refrigerator and pulled out a carton of eggs. “The whole thing was very distressing.” Her head quivered some more. “Nobody wants to die on a fire escape!”

I cringed. “I didn’t mean to kill him.”

She stopped cold. “Don’t ever say that again. Don’t even
think
that. It was not your fault. He must’ve had a weak heart.” She frowned. “And what got into him? He didn’t look like he was in any condition to take the fire escape down!”

I took a deep breath because I knew something she didn’t.

I knew about the money.

And I was actually about to spill this extra piece of confusing information, when suddenly Grams
screeches
and drops the carton of eggs.

“What?” I say, whipping around, and that’s when I see that my cat, Dorito, is stalking a mouse.

Now, I don’t mind mice. I think they’re cute, actually. But Grams has this thing about them being disease-carrying, fang-faced, pooping varmints, and most of the people in the Highrise seem to share her view.

“They promised us the problem was solved!” Grams said, watching the little gray fuzzball cower in a corner.

I turned away, not wanting to see Dorito do what he’s so good at doing. Instead, I picked up the oozy egg carton and headed for the stove. And by the time Grams said, “There, that’s done,” I had the eggs cooking in a frying pan.

“What are you doing?” Grams asked, because I had just poured the broken eggs out of the carton and was scrambling them up, plucking out little chips of shell as the eggs cooked.

“You want to finish?” I asked, handing over the spatula. “I’ll take the mouse down to the trash chute.”

“No.” She got cleaning gloves from under the sink. “I don’t want you out in the hallway. Not with everything that’s going on tonight!”

So she got rid of the mouse while I finished scrambling up crunchy eggs and making toast, and when she returned, I let her deliver the “snack” to Mrs. Wedgewood.

It was after midnight by the time we went to bed. No police had come pounding on the door, nobody had called, Mrs. Wedgewood was tucked safely in bed, and there were no more mouse sightings. Everything seemed to be settling down, but there was no way I could sleep.

Not with three big bundles of cash in the bushes!

At least I hoped they were still in the bushes.

What if one of the paramedics found them?

What if the police did?

What if some homeless guy camping out in the bushes did?

Now, I’m not going to lie and say I’d be happy for some homeless guy if he found the money.
I
wanted it! I hadn’t
meant
to scare the guy to death, but really, what could I do about it?

Nothing.

What I
could
do something about was the money.

I could go get it before someone else did!

So when enough time had passed, I tiptoed up to Grams’ bedroom door and listened.

And there it was—the lovely sound of Grams sawing logs.

I tiptoed away from her door and into the kitchen.

I got the flashlight from the tool drawer.

I put on my sweatshirt and ball cap.

Then I eased out of the apartment and hurried down the hall.