Esme and the Money Grab: (A Very Dark Romantic Comedy) (4 page)

  No need to have anyone searching for him.

  I had called my roommates and let them know I wasn’t coming back. I was vague on the details of where I was staying for their safety and mine. Jack hadn’t been by the apartment but I told them to keep an eye out for him and to call the police immediately if they saw him.

  Jack, I didn’t like to think about him… The calls were tapering off but the vitriol remained the same. I had listened to a few of his messages the day before, hoping against hope that he had settled down, come to his senses. Nope, if anything he sounded even more angry.

  I tried to imagine the day that I would look back on this and it would all seem funny. Jack patting me on the shoulder, laughing, his eyes the bright sparkle of blue he had as boy, and saying to me, “Remember that time I robbed the liquor store? When I called you three hundred times in a row and threatened your life?”

  There really wasn’t a way back as far as I could see. My heart broke at the thought. The Jack I had known and loved for almost my whole life was gone and wouldn’t be coming back to me.

  I had run out of clothes and hadn’t done the wash. I decided to wear Mr. Galloway’s. Yes, it was macabre, but I looked cute. He wore a lot of pastels and plaids. I put on a pair of his green checkered shorts and cinched them with a crocodile belt than I’m sure cost more than my previous monthly wages, and an off-white polo shirt.

  I felt a chill as I walked to the garage with Mr. Galloway’s Porsche keys in hand. I felt safe in the house, but at UCLA? Jack did know where I went to school. He didn’t know my schedule, and the campus was sprawling, taking up 419 acres and was generally safe.

  But still, school would be where I was most vulnerable. I went back to Mr. Galloway’s closet and selected a navy trilby-style hat and tucked my hair in. I forced myself to feel a confidence that he would never think to look for me in such an outfit. I headed back to the garage.

  Mr. Galloway had a 1938 Bentley, which was more a work of art than a car for driving, and a Porsche 911. The Porsche had only ever been driven by me, back and forth to the market and to pick up his dry-cleaning. As you can imagine, I loved driving the car.

  Who wouldn’t?

  I opened the garage door and turned the key in the engine. The bright light of the day shined on Mr. Galloway’s personal mausoleum, the gardening shed. I tuned off the engine.

  What on Earth was I doing? I had wrapped a dead man up in kitty litter and plastic and essentially buried him. I needed a definitive plan. This could not go on indefinitely. My sainted parents would be ashamed of the child they had lovingly raised.

  I leaned back in the seat and considered my options. Go inside, call the police, and throw myself on the mercy of the court? No.

  Live my life as a mad woman with a corpse? No, I had already ruled out that option.

  I decided to give myself until the end of my academic quarter to save up enough money to get a new apartment, one where Jack would never find me. I was certain the police would have arrested him by then and I would be safe again. I would unwrap Mr. Galloway, respectfully place him in his beloved recliner and leave the house.

  A month after moving out, I would stop by for a surprise visit to my previous beloved employer, find him dead and tearfully call the police. His body would have decomposed sufficiently. It would be ruled as sad case of an elder who died alone.

  I would spend the rest of my life atoning for what I had done, church every Sunday, charitable good works with the community.  

“Okay, good plan,” I wiped away the tears I hadn’t noticed were falling and turned the engine on again.

…

  At the bottom of the driveway, I fell in love. A deep, madly forever kind of love.

  A moving truck blocked my exit. I rolled down my window to politely ask the driver to pull the truck forward. I did not fall in love with the driver. I fell in love with the man he was speaking to, the man who would be moving into the house.

  They turned to me at the same time, but I only saw him, and he only saw me. It was as if the world had exploded, leaving only the two of us. He approached my car as if drawn to me. I was the magnet, he was the steel.

  “Landon Aldridge,” He held out his hand. I took it. We held them together for the entirety of our short conversation. It was a short conversation, because me falling madly, truly, deeply in love while living with a dead body in a home that I was fraudulently residing in was not going to work out.

  “I just moved in… right now.” He sighed deeply and his eyes glowed and sparkled with a blinding brightness.

  I swooned in return.

  “Esme— I stopped myself.

  “What a beautiful name,” He sighed again, “I could say it everyday for the rest of my life.”

  “Thank you,” I knew I should loosen his grip on my hand, but he already felt like a part of me, a part I never wanted to get go of, ever.

  The noise of the driver moving the truck forward broke our trance. I pulled my hand away, placed it back on the steering wheel, and looked at the road in front of me.

  “Very nice to meet you Landon,” I punched the gas, and sped off to the sound of him calling my name.

  By the time I turned onto Sunset Blvd, I was sure that this was Mr. Galloway’s revenge. I couldn’t even be mad at the devilish old dead man. I deserved it.

  Weeks went by and I avoided Landon. It broke my heart to do so, but I had bigger problems. I was broke and couldn’t find a part-time job that worked with my school schedule.

  Mr. Galloway had set me up on an online payroll service for my checks after my first year working for him, when the temporary job had turned to permanent. Before that Mr. Galloway had paid the temp agency directly, and they sent me the checks with their commission taken out. I was tempted to keep myself on his payroll, but knew it would best for my alibi if my employment end date was before he died.

  I was too scared to even pay myself for my last real week of work. Yes, I had been watching a lot of crime shows on his premium cable. They were instructional videos for me by this point in the story.

  I was down to my last thirty-three dollars and feeling very desperate. I even called the trendy pizzeria I had worked at after my parents died. They had gone out of business.

  On a positive note, Jack’s calls were slowing down. He was down to eight times a day and the messages weren’t endless tirades. He had settled into, die bitch die.

  It was as if he were possessed by the devil. What had happened to the sweet natured boy whose only fault had been a salty and sarcastic mouth. Had there been mental illness in is family? Is that why his mother had left him at the firehouse?

  There was nothing I could do about it without endangering my life. My once best friend/one love wanted me dead. I couldn’t quite believe he would actually hurt me, but I couldn’t afford to take a chance.

  I would have been destroyed by his change in character if I hadn’t had so much else going on in my life. I didn’t have time to think about him. My survival instinct had grown cat-like, spry. I was the human embodiment of my Mila, my only friend.

  I sat at Mr. Galloway’s desk in his office off the living room, clicking through webpage after webpage trying to find a job. No such luck. I opened his brokerage account. So much money, and no way for me to touch it.

  He had me take over the responsibility of his home expenses and had given me all of his passwords a few months after coming to work for him. He declared me trustworthy for, “my kind”. I cringe at the memory of me thanking him for the compliment.

  I took care of his home accounts by setting up automatic debts for all of his utilities. Very smart of me in retrospect. I would have been sitting in the darkness if I hadn’t fortuitously organized his affairs this way. I couldn’t even imagine what his electricity bill was every month for running the air-conditioning the way he did even in the dead of winter. The man was always too hot.

  I had thought it was the opposite with older people before I met him. That’s the way it had been with my other elder patients. Mr. Galloway was a contrary man in every way.

  I heard a crash from the living room and my heart nearly stopped. The sound of Mila skittering away calmed me down. She had knocked something over. This happened occasionally.

  I retrieved the broom and dustpan from the kitchen and went into the living room to clean up the mess. “Mila… This was one of my favorites, I loved swirling colors of the glass…” Mr. Galloway had told me it was Lalique and that it was an important piece because of… I can’t remember what he said. He could get a little longwinded when discussing his precious objects that he placed more importance on than actual humans.

  It was beautiful, and I was sad it was broken. I’m sure it was worth more than a month of my previous salary. I wished I could have taken all the objects down and kept them on the floor. I had put earthquake putty beneath most of them but it doesn’t always work, especially with Mila running up against the walls and shelves.

  I held the largest sliver up to the light, “Mila look how the colors light up the walls—

  I hate to say it, but another idea sprung up into my head that was growing more twisted everyday. I dropped the piece of crystal and ran to Mr. Galloway’s bedroom. “No, no, no… This will create a trail.” I admonished myself.

  I did it anyway. I opened Mr. Galloway’s bedside drawer and took out the hand-tooled leather case that held his collection of vintage watches. He had been a collector in the 1960s, and then had lost interest. I was sure that somebody would eventually do a full inventory of his possessions once his body was found, but he had so many objects. Would they really notice one little watch missing?

  I knew some of his pre-Colombian pieces were worth hundreds of thousand of dollars, because he talked about it a lot. Generally when I was dusting. He would tell me life’s wages wouldn’t amount to cost of one of them. Sweet.

  But how much could one of his watches really be worth? Maybe a thousand dollars if I were lucky? It would keep me going until I found a job. I grabbed the most simple looking one with a plan to go to one the small jewelers shop on Wilshire Blvd. They seemed a little shady by Beverly Hills standards. I was sure they wouldn’t ask too many questions.

…

  I didn’t think about what I wearing until I was buzzed into the small and rather musty jeweler’s shop. My reflection in the glass door was quite a shock. I looked like a loon in Mr. Galloway’s rolled up black tuxedo pants, and white dress shirt tied tightly at my waist.

  A cute loon, but very out of place for my circumstances. My circumstances being selling a dead man’s watch. Was there any chance I wasn’t going to hell for my actions?

  “Hello,” I confidentially strode across the room to the elderly man sitting in a chair towards the back of the store. He held a magnifying glass with one hand, and a tiny diamond-like object in the other. He did not look up at me.

  “How can I help you?”

  “I have a Philippe Patek watch, I need to… sell.” I stated questioningly.

   “Do you mean Patek Philippe?” He looked up at me suspiciously. I almost turned and ran out the store. I didn’t because I was desperate woman.

  “Yes,” My fingers trembled as I thrust the watch towards him.

  He placed the jewel on a velvet tray, took the watch from me, and looked at it through the magnifying glass, “May I ask how you came into possession of Patek Philippe watch from 1908? There are only ten known surviving pieces from this collection and they’re all accounted for.”

  My heart pounded hard in my chest, I was sure the man could see it, “My grandfather left it to me—

  “I see,” He laid the watch and magnifying glass on the velvet tray and looked up at me with a very serious but unreadable expression. “I’ll pay you 80,000, not a penny more.”

  I’m surprised I didn’t pass out on the spot. I nodded my head instead. He nodded his and reached under the desk for his checkbook.

  I hadn’t considered how I would be paid for the watch. But a check was not going to work. I had watched a college-education level of crime shows in the previous week. Checks were a paper trail. I would not be having one of those.

  “Is there a way…” I didn’t know how to phrase my question.

  “You need cash?”

  “Yes,” I said with the added force of a heavy sigh.

  “40,000, that’s the most I can do with cash. IRS keeps an eye on me… and others in the area.”

  “Fine, thank you,” I tried not to sound too relieved. I don’t think it worked.

  “Promise me something, if you have anything else to sell from your “grandfather’s” estate, come see me. The other jewelers in this area can be… unscrupulous. I wouldn’t want you to be taken of advantage of.”

  It was very clear in that moment that he had taken advantage of me. Not much I could do about it, being a criminal and all. I let go of it.

  “I will… Thank you again.”

  He nodded, went into the backroom of the shop, and came back with 40,000 cash in a very attractive vintage gold knit purse. It was beautiful. I still own it.

  “The handbag is a gift to you.” he smiled brightly as he handed it to me. He was missing a tooth like Mr. Galloway. Why did all the rich octogenarians have such bad teeth? Very strange.

  “Thank you,” I checked the bag, not quite believing it was stuffed with money. It was. My hands were definitely in a full tremble but I did not pass out on the floor. Small miracles everywhere.

  I walked as gracefully as I could out the door. Once I was outside, I was free to be me, and me? I was rich. I leapt down Wilshire Blvd, pirouetting around the beautifully manicured trees. My face felt like it was on fire from the pure joy pumping though my veins.

  A group of older women as well maintained as the city’s foliage whispered, very loudly, that they wished people wouldn’t let their “help” prance around the town on their day’s off. Did I let her words ruin my day? NO.

  I did come to a sudden stop in the middle of my happy dance. Elitism never ceased to amaze to me. Did these people really think they would have attained the same position in life if they had been born in a hut in Nicaragua?

  The odds against it were astronomical. They would be better off playing the lottery.

  The stop I came to on the sidewalk wasn’t so bad. I found myself in front of Barney’s. I went inside…

  Three hours later and 8,000 dollars poorer, I left. Did you know there was a world of elegant and comfortable stilettos outside of Christian Louboutin?

  I didn’t buy them, but they exist. Lanvin slippers is what I bought to cover my feet. Glove soft leather in every color and hue of the rainbow. I bought five pairs.

  I bought a lot of other things too, dresses, so many dresses. I didn’t think anyone would be confusing me with a housekeeper anymore. I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about that.