Kevin Wilson’s present home was a furnished sublet in TriBeCa, the area below Greenwich Village that at one time had been the location of grimy factories and printing presses. It was a roomy loft with an open area that included a kitchen with a well-equipped bar, a living room, and a library. The furniture was starkly modern, but the den beyond it was equipped with a roomy leather sofa and matching chairs with hassocks. His bedroom was comparatively small, but that was because the owner had moved the wall to accommodate a fully equipped gym. An oversized corner room served as his office. The large windows in every room guaranteed sunshine from dawn till dark.
Kevin was happy to sublease the loft and recently had put in a bid to buy it. He already was making plans for the architectural changes he would make, like leaving the exercise room only big enough to hold a few pieces of equipment, enlarging the master bedroom and bath, and turning the corner room into two other bedrooms with a shared larger bath.
As for the furnishings, he already was marking which ones he would keep and which would end up at Goodwill. His mother told him he was getting the nesting instinct. “You’re the last one of your good friends to be single,” she regularly reminded him. “It’s about time you got over the casual dates and found a nice girl and settled down.” Lately she had begun to expand on that. “By now all my friends are bragging about their grandchildren,” she complained.
After having dinner with his mother, Kevin had gone straight home to bed. He slept soundly and in the morning awoke at his usual six A.M. Cereal, juice, and coffee with a quick glance at the front page of the Wall Street Journal and the Post was followed by an hour on the gym equipment. He watched the morning news, catching a segment of the Today show with some legal expert giving his opinion that the arrest of Alexandra Moreland was imminent.
My God, Kevin thought, is that really possible? He felt again the electrical reaction that he had experienced when their shoulders brushed. If those pictures in Central Park aren’t doctored, then there is something wrong with her, he regretfully acknowledged.
As he showered and dressed, he could not get Zan’s face out of his mind. Her eyes, so beautiful and expressive, had been so sad. It didn’t take a Rhodes scholar to see the pain in them. Louise had made the initial call to Moreland Interiors inviting Zan to bid on the job for decorating the apartments. Oddly enough, in all the times she had come and gone, he had not run into her until the other day when she delivered her sketches and samples. She had brought them in herself. Bartley Longe, on the other hand, had been accompanied by his assistant walking behind him carrying his designs.
That’s another reason I don’t like that guy, Kevin thought. Longe’s attitude was galling. “I look forward to working with you, Kevin,” as though it were a done deal.
It was ten minutes of eight, and he was ready to go. Because he was planning to be at 701 Carlton Place all day, he had dressed casually in a sport shirt, sweater, and khakis. He took a quick glance in the mirror. It was about time to get a haircut, and he wanted to be sure that his hair was brushed down sufficiently.
When I was a kid, I had such curly hair that Mom used to say that I should have been a girl. Zan Moreland has long, straight hair, the dark auburn of a Japanese maple. I didn’t know I was a poet, he thought, as he reached for a jacket and left the apartment.
If Louise Kirk did not come in at the stroke of nine, Kevin had to endure her usual indignant outburst about her belief that one day, all the traffic in New York will just stop dead. Today, though, she arrived fifteen minutes early.
Kevin had told her he surfed the channels during his workout.
“Kevin, did you by any chance catch the Today show when they were talking about Zan Moreland?” she asked eagerly.
I guess we’re friends again, he thought. I’m back to being on a first-name basis with her.
“Yes, I did,” he said.
Louise did not seem to notice his abrupt answer. “Everybody can see that unless those pictures were doctored, which I’d give ten years of my life to say that they’re not, the poor girl is deranged.”
“Louise, the ‘poor girl,’ as you describe Alexandra Moreland, is an extremely gifted interior designer and a very attractive human being. Could we withhold judgment and drop the subject?”
Kevin almost never played employer/employee with anyone in his office or on a job, but this time he did not try to hide his genuine anger.
When he was a child, at his mother’s insistence, he had taken piano lessons. It had become painfully obvious to all three—his mother, his teacher, and himself—that he had absolutely no talent as a musician, but that had not diminished his pleasure in playing. There was one song that he had learned to play very well, “The Minstrel Boy.”
Now a fragment of the words echoed through his head. “Tho’ all the world betrays thee . . . One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard . . . One faithful harp shall praise thee!” Who did Zan Moreland have to praise or defend her? Kevin wondered.
Louise Kirk got the message. “Of course, Mr. Wilson,” she answered, her voice subdued.
“Louise, will you knock off the ‘Mr. Wilson’ stuff? We’re going to take a tour through this whole building. Bring your notebook. I’ve been seeing some sloppy work, and I have a number of people who are going to hear about it today.”
At ten o’clock, as Kevin, trailed by Louise, was pointing out uneven grouting in three of the shower stalls in apartments on the thirtieth floor, his business cell phone rang. Not wanting to be interrupted, he gave the phone to Louise to answer.
She listened, then said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Wilson is not available but I’ll give him your message.” She disconnected and handed him back the phone. “That was Bartley Longe,” she said. “He wants to invite you to have lunch with him today, or if that doesn’t work, to have dinner this evening or tomorrow night. What shall I tell him?”
“Tell him to forget it for now.” Longe’s probably gloating that he has the job, he thought, and then reluctantly concluded that maybe he did. The model apartments needed to be finished. The consortium that owned the building was already grumbling about the cost overruns and the inevitable delays in construction. They wanted the apartments decorated so that the sales department could take over. Certainly if Zan Moreland was arrested, she wouldn’t have any time to oversee the day-to-day progress. A decorator had to be on top of the job when any interior work was done.
At quarter of eleven, when he and Louise were finally back in his office, one of the workmen came in to see him. “Which apartment do you want us to stack the fabrics and all that other stuff in, sir?”
“What do you mean, where do I want to put what stuff?” Kevin asked.
The workman, a leathery-faced man in his sixties, seemed bewildered by the question.
“I mean all the stuff that decorator ordered for the model apartments. It’s starting to arrive.”
Louise answered for Kevin. “Tell whoever is delivering anything for those model apartments to take it right back to where it came from. Not one single order has been authorized by Mr. Wilson.”
Kevin did not believe what he heard himself saying. “Put any deliveries in the largest apartment.” He looked squarely at Louise. “We’ll sort this out,” he said, “but if we don’t accept whatever is coming, we’ll be part of the sensational stories about Zan Moreland. Those suppliers will go screaming to the media. I don’t want potential buyers to see this building in that kind of light.”
Not daring to show what she was thinking, Louise Kirk nodded. You’re attracted to that young lady, Kevin Wilson, she thought.
Fools rush in . . .