Мэри Эндрюс - The Newcomer

Zoey grabbed a menu and the coffeepot.

“Morning,” she said, sliding the menu onto the tabletop. “Can I get you started with coffee?”

“No thanks. Just some ice water.” The woman glanced at the menu. “I’ll have a bagel egg sandwich, and you can bring me two packets of mustard.”

When the waitress was gone, Evan thumbed through photos on his phone, found the one he wanted, and handed it across the table to his guest.

She studied the photo, enlarged it with her fingertips. “She’s a lot prettier than that photo they ran in the Daily News. Is this the most recent one you’ve got?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, text that to me. And any other photos you’ve got of her. And the kid, of course.”

“Maya.”

“Right.”

Zoey was back with the coffeepot, but Evan waved her away.

Vikki Hill sipped her ice water. “I talked to the detective running the investigation. I worked on a housing-inspection thing with him a couple years ago that ended up also being a child-endangerment case. He’s pretty straight.”

“Did he tell you anything useful?”

“Just that they recovered the Mercedes in Philly yesterday. Stripped and abandoned.”

“Figures.”

“She used your wife’s…”

“Girlfriend,” Evan corrected. “Ex-girlfriend.”

Vikki plowed ahead. “A woman who fits the description of Scarlett Carnahan used your ex-girlfriend’s credit card to rent a car at the Hertz counter at Newark Airport, then turned it in at RDU.”

“That’s the airport in Raleigh?”

“Yeah. Do you know if the girl has any connections down that way?”

“Not that I know of. She and Tanya moved around with their mother a lot when they were growing up. They lived in West Virginia for a while, and then I think there was a relative who lived in Indiana. To tell you the truth, I didn’t pay much attention to any of that. But neither one of them ever mentioned Raleigh.”

“Have you talked to the mother?”

“No,” he said succinctly. “They weren’t close. I know her name was Terri, but Tanya and Letty didn’t talk much about her.”

“Okay. You say the sister worked here, when she first moved to the city?”

“Yes.”

“All right, I’ll check with the manager. Maybe she used her mother’s contact info as next of kin on her job application.”

“Doubtful,” Evan said. “But I guess you could ask.”

“Tell me more about Letty,” Vikki Hill prompted. “What was she like? Who were her friends? Places she hung out, like that.”

He gave it some thought. “She was sharp, you know. No college that I knew of, but she read a lot and she was street smart. You couldn’t hustle Letty, that’s for sure. She’d been doing acting, but not getting very far with that. She was pretty enough, but nothing like her sister. Tanya had presence, you know? Like, drop-dead gorgeous.”

His lips twisted. “Of course, as it turns out, Tanya, unlike Letty, was a major head case.”

“Friends?”

He jerked his head in the direction of the counter, where Zoey was busily trying to look like she hadn’t been staring at them.

“That waitress? She was a friend of Letty’s. There’s another girl, who quit around the same time as Letty. Corinne Tapley. She’s working at a boutique in the East Village. I went to see her, but she claimed she hasn’t heard from Letty and doesn’t know where she might have gone.”

“Did you believe her?”

“Not really.”

“Text me the girl’s name and the name of that shop. I’ll talk to her. Let me ask you something. What motive would Letty have for killing her sister?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Who knows? Jealousy? Letty was living the good life up here. And then little sister shows up and poof! Everything changes.”

Every morning when she woke up in what she still thought of as Monica’s apartment in Friends, Letty felt like she was living in a dream. She arose early, sipped coffee on the balcony, and planned her day.

Managing the Airbnb guests was more involved than her new employer had led her to expect. One of the tenants on the second floor had begun to complain about all the people coming and going from Evan’s unit there, so she’d taken to meeting guests in the lobby, wheeling their suitcases as though they were hers, and ferrying them into the unit.

“The doorman keeps giving me these weird looks,” she reported to her boss. “Do you think he thinks I’m a hooker or something?”

“Sidney gets paid very well not to ask questions or give you weird looks,” Evan said, sounding annoyed. “I’ll speak to him.”

Every guest who checked into one of Evan’s Tribeca units—which were located within a six-block radius—was given Letty’s cell phone number. They called or texted at all hours, day and night, to complain about the air-conditioning or the furnace. Or the Wi-Fi speed. Or the lack of a corkscrew, toilet plunger, or ice cream scoop.

Guests lost their keys. They wanted early check-ins and late checkouts. And, as Evan had warned, none of them could figure out how to work the television remotes.

Her new responsibilities quickly escalated. She gave notice at the diner. Working alone from the apartment, she was surprised how much she missed the camaraderie and friendship of the Lazy Daizy crew.

“You need a better agent,” Evan told her bluntly one evening, when they met at a nearby bistro to discuss the upcoming week’s bookings.

“No.” She shook her head. “Leslie’s been great to me.”

“How long since she got you an actual job?”

“I got two callbacks for that paper-towel commercial.”

“I’m not talking about callbacks. I’m talking about paid gigs.”

Letty shrugged.

“Dammit, Letty, if you want to be an actress, you need to be acting. I’ve seen what you’ve done, you’re terrific. You really stood out as the juror in that Denzel Washington flick, and I realize you only had a couple lines, but the Law & Order episode you did was great.”

“You’ve seen my work? How?”

He smiled. “IMDb.” He slid a card across the table to her. “Give this guy a call. Ronnie’s the best. Knows everybody, reps all the up-and-coming actresses. More importantly, he owes me a favor.”

In retrospect, it was shocking how easily she agreed to do whatever Evan suggested. She cried the morning she let Leslie know she was seeking new representation, but within a week, Ronnie Silver managed to get her a walk-on in a CBS pilot and an actual speaking part in a low-budget indie horror flick. She got cast as the jealous ex-girlfriend in a Hallmark Christmas movie. The pay was crap, but she got to spend a week in Canada, in August.

The boost in her income allowed her to sign up for classes with a prestigious acting coach.

When Evan tactfully mentioned that her slight underbite could be keeping her from getting bigger roles—and when he referred her to an orthodontist he knew—she dutifully got invisible braces, which cut her lower lip and made her jaws ache. And when he pointed out that she might get bigger roles if she let her hair grow longer and went lighter, that’s exactly what she did.

Evan Wingfield was a patient man. He waited a month before he casually asked Letty to dinner. She was frankly shocked when he didn’t make any overt moves, just giving her a chaste kiss on the cheek when he dropped her back at the apartment.

There were more dates: to a charity fundraiser, the soft opening of a new French restaurant owned by one of Evan’s friends. The kisses became less chaste and more urgent. She enjoyed the attention and began to have second thoughts about her pledge that she would not sleep with him.