way to return to school now, and no desire. Myra had studied for her sales license and gone to work at a real estate agency in New Rochelle. Here was something she could do well, concentrating on the woman, if she were selling to a couple; letting the property seemingly sell itself; sometimes deftly steering the conversation so she could sense what the potential buyers really wanted, what they needed, rather than what they said were their wants and needs. Seeing into them. It was the gift everyone working in sales thought they possessed, or they belonged in other occupations. Myra didn’t only think she had the gift—she had it, and converted it into fat commissions.
But the commissions were even fatter in Manhattan, in the high-end residential property in the Upper East Side, Sutton Place, and areas of the Upper West Side, as well as potentially trendy neighborhoods. Myra had a nose for money, and it led her to a position with an agency in Tribeca just when the neighborhood was getting hot.
The track was faster in Manhattan real estate, and she became faster. Myra was cunning, which is better than smart, and she was ruthless, which is better than cunning. Whatever the cost to take a step forward, she paid it. Whatever sacrifice it took to get out ahead of the pack, she made it. Whatever was required to close a sale, she somehow came up with it.
Within two years she’d opened her own agency, and within three more the Myra Raven Group (which sounded so much better than “Ravinski”) was the most successful apartment sales and rental agency in New York City.
Five years, three severe diets, three rounds of cosmetic surgery, and three men later, she was the present and complete Myra Raven, molded by survival of the fittest to persevere and to thrive. Lean and attractive in a way striking if brittle, she was single and independent, knew personally the city’s wealthy and influential, and was successful and rich. And contented as a shark in a stocked pond.
Meeting the Markses had stirred old memories in Myra. Ed the shiny new cop. Amy the naive and love-struck wife, and with an obvious devotion and loyalty Myra recognized. And pregnant with twins. How might that last have been if it had happened long ago to Myra Ravinski? Young Myra would have shown the same determined happiness and burgeoning love that glowed in young Amy.
What a different life Myra Ravinski would have led if things had been only slightly different. How careful she’d been not to become pregnant! How she’d wished, at least for a while after her young husband’s death, that she were pregnant.
Only later did she realize what a pregnancy at that time would have meant. What a millstone and a hardship.
Well, Amy Marks’s husband was alive, and she was pregnant. Not only that, the young couple had a windfall and could afford a nice place to live and bring up twin daughters. Myra would see to it that the co-op contract would go through; she was a genius at putting together deals, at settling differences and arranging financing, at fitting customer to co-op or condo. An absolute genius, or so had said the Times last year in a feature article they did on her.
Smiling, she watched the horse-drawn carriage with its white canopy disappear in the darkening park below. She had it in her power to help the Markses buy some happiness, and she would help them. There was no need to closely examine her motives. It did occur to her that maybe she was trying to prove to herself she wasn’t quite the hard, venal bitch she knew some people said she was. She had overheard that assessment of her more than once, in a restaurant where she used to dine, even in the elevator in her building. It didn’t concern her. Usually.
The hell with that kind of thinking! She was simply doing a good deed and that was the end and all of it. There was no need to question herself. She wasn’t some rich bitch trying to squeeze through the eye of a needle and enter heaven.
Then why would it have occurred to her that she was?
“Fuck it!” she said softly to the lowering night. If there really was a heaven, it was right here on earth, and you made it for yourself and by yourself.
The streetlights had winked on in the park, graceful patterns of curved illumination, like stars in a galaxy with pattern and purpose. She turned away from the window and lit a cigarette with a silver lighter. Then she sipped from the glass of single malt scotch she’d set aside on a marble-topped table, glanced at her Patek Philippe watch, and picked up her cell phone to place a call before it got too late.
Worked on a deal.
NINE
January 2002
Raymond Masters was easy enough to find. He lived in his mother’s house in a run-down neighborhood in Astoria.
Rica stood to the side on the wooden porch while Stack knocked on the door. She thought this was better than the neighborhood where she’d grown up, and wondered what it would have been like to have a room of her own in a house like this, have girlfriends who lived on the block, maybe walked to school without worrying about—
“Rica?”
She started at the sound of Stack softly calling her name. This wasn’t the time to be daydreaming. What seemed routine could any second turn deadly. Cops who forgot that part of their training could die suddenly or cause it to happen to others.
Without thinking about it, she moved her hand closer to the 9mm in its shoulder holster beneath her coat.
“Yes?” a woman was saying warily.
Judging from what they could see of her deeply etched features, and her one visible faded eye as she peered from behind a door open only a few inches, she was hardly the lover of a desperado. Probably Masters’s mother.
“We’d like to talk to Raymond,” Stack said amiably. They might have been old friends of her son.
“Who should I say is calling?” Formal and wary.
“We’re with the police,” Stack said, “but please don’t be alarmed. I assure you we’re not here because Raymond’s in any trouble.”
Yet, Rica thought.
“We only want to talk to him for a few minutes, to reaffirm some things he told us earlier.”
Mom—if she was Mom—wasn’t that dumb. She put on a smile. “When he gets home, I’ll sure tell him you were here.”
Stack tuned to her wavelength; now they were older and worldly types, the sort of people who might say thou. “Between us…Mrs. Masters, is it?”
She nodded. Nothing in the faded eye changed.
“We both know we’re going to talk to your son one way or the other. I do pledge to you that there are no active warrants on him, nothing left over from his last problem. When we leave here, he’ll stay. Talk is all we want to do. And since we both know that conversation is going to take place sooner or later, why not now, in your own comfortable home, instead of the more unfriendly atmosphere of a Manhattan precinct house?”
“If he was here, I’d tell—”
“You don’t believe or trust me,” Stack said. He sounded crushed. “Well, I guess I can understand that. But ask yourself, dear, did what I just tell you make sense?”
Still no change in the bleary eye. But the door closed, the rattle of a chain lock being taken off sounded from inside; then the door opened and Mrs. Masters stepped back to admit them.
She
