Sugar Tower

By Jessica Rohm

The great real estate crash has pulled the rug out from beneath the feet of one of New York's best known developers. While he struggles to keep his family dynasty afloat, his wife is found dead in the swimming pool of his newest trophy condominium Sugar Tower. The newspaper reporter covering the real estate beat at the City's second largest daily becomes obsessed with investigating the death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jessica Rohm
• Release date: Sep 11, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452335612

Jessica Rohm

Jessica Dee RohmAuthorSugar Tower, The Secret Life of Sandrina M., Make Me an OfferA lifelong writer and a serial entrepreneur, Jessica Dee Rohm started her career at the New York Times. Her first solo enterprise, Jessica Dee Communications, a marketing and communications company, grew to be the sixteenth largest in the country when she sold it to the then largest advertising agency in the U.S., Chiat/Day. She served as CEO for an additional two years, leaving in 1989 to found her second venture, Foreign Management Company, a real estate consultancy and brokerage firm catering to investors. Her clients have included the German government, Société Generale, Commerzbank, real estate developers in New York City, Russia, and Italy, as well as many corporations, trusts, and colorful “fiction-fodder” individuals.The New York native graduated from high school as valedictorian of her class, at age 16. Winning a National Merit Scholarship, a Regents Scholarship, and a National Newspaper Scholarship, she attended Barnard College, graduating at age 19 with a B.A. in English literature. She then earned her M.B.A. in management and marketing from Columbia Business School. This year she will be awarded her second master’s degree, an M.F.A. in creative writing, from Manhattanville College.Jessica Dee Rohm has published numerous feature articles in magazines ranging including regular columns for both Restaurant Hospitality and The Cornell Quarterly. In addition, she has published many newspaper articles in the New York Times, Hartford Courant, Real Estate Weekly, the Hersham Acorn newspaper chain, and others. She has been the subject of several feature stories and profiles in publications ranging from the Fairfield County Business Journal to the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, Entrepreneur, the Palm Beach Post, and Glamour. She has been featured in two books—The Confidence Factor by Judith Briles and Whiz Kids by Marilyn Machlowitz.Some of her personal and professional affiliations include: Member of the Board of Directors, Stamford Symphony; Winner of 2000 IBM MLDP Award for Demonstration of Best Leadership Competencies; Member, International Association of Business Communicators (IABC); Member, PR Task Force, American Association of Publishers (2003-2004); Columbia Business School, Executive MBA Program Faculty/Lecturer (2002); The Conference Board, Corporate Image Conference 2002; Speaker, The Global Brand Leadership Council 2001; Speaker, "Young Leader” – Selected by the American Council on Germany to represent the United States at an international conference on leadership issues; selected by American Express for its Small Business Partnership Program; Central Park Conservancy—Women’s Committee Board Member.Sugar Tower is Ms. Rohm’s first novel for publication. She is represented by Erica Silverman of Trident Media Group, 41 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. Tel. [phone]; Fax [phone]; Email [e-mail].

Book preview

SUGAR TOWER

A Novel

by

Jessica Dee Rohm

Set in today’s Manhattan, Sugar Tower is a sharp and funny tale of a woman forced to reinvent herself as the platforms she built her life upon are dissolving beneath her feet. With uncanny perceptiveness, this novel delves into societal shifts that affect us all – the real estate bubble, the decline of feminism, the obsolescence of print journalism – in the context of a murder mystery that titillates and dazzles from beginning to end. Marchesa, the heroine, is a marvelous creation whose voice carries the reader from scene to scene. She is savvy, quick witted, funny, and likable and the reader will want to be with her and follow her to the conclusion of her journey.

Smashwords Edition

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Published by:

Olivicas Press

New York

Sugar Tower

Copyright © 2010 by Jessica Dee Rohm

ISBN 978-1-4523-3561-2

Available in print at www.amazon.com

www.jessicadeerohm.com

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Sugar Tower is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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This ebook is licensed for your personal use only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

I: The Pool

II: M. Jesus Piazza

III: It’s Not Dead Till It Stops Breathing

IV: M.J.P. Meets the C.M.E.

V: Setting the Table

VI: A Spoonful of Sugar

VII: Cave Canem

VIII: The Big Kahuna

IX: Financial Forensics

X: I’ll Have Mine With an Olive And a Twist

XI: Sock It to Her

XII: In Over Her Head

XIII: Leave No Stone Unturned

XIV: A Custom-Maid Opportunity

XV: On the Pathological to Success

XVI: The Met

XVII: Our Lady of Mercy

XVIII: Amazing Grace

XIX: Re-entry

XX: The Chase Is Back On

XXI: Three Not So Average Jos

XXII: Let’s Hope There’s Water in the Pool

XXIII: Soho

XXIV: The Missing Link

XXV: Change of Heart

XXVI: Top Dog

XXVII: A Snake Always Rattles Before It Bites

XXVIII: Even the Pilgrims Were Immigrants

XXIX: The Lies That Bind

XXX: Great Scott!

XXXI: What Some People Do for Kicks

XXXII: Chin Na!

XXXIII: In Custody

XXXIV: Back at the Lab

XXXV: The Moment of Truth

XXXVI: Probable Cause

XXXVII: Bang-Bang, Who’s Dead?

XXXVIII: The Third Eyelid

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I

The Pool

On the morning she was murdered, Anabel Trainor Sugarman called her mother to describe a most disturbing dream.

In her dream she was swimming, head held high above the crystal surface of the pool, trying to catch her hand. It was the left hand, neatly severed from her slender wrist and drifting just beyond her reach, sparkling in her view as the light caught the new jewel on her finger. The pool sat beneath a soaring atrium on the roof of Sugar Tower, the recently completed Manhattan condominium built by Anabel’s husband Barry. The panels of the atrium’s electric sunroof were retracted, revealing a rainbow and an eagle-size crow. As Anabel grasped to catch her hand, paddling her feet frantically to stay afloat, the big black bird flew off with it in its claws.

Then Anabel grew feathers, in all the colors of the rainbow before her, and followed the crow, free at last.

Eudora Trainor, Anabel’s mother, told me about this dream, her dead daughter’s last, when I spoke at length with her by telephone that July day after the murder. Drawn in, I decided to attend the wake at The Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home on Madison Avenue, which was held a few days later. Eudora, tired after her flight from England, was there with her other daughter, Olive. Anabel’s father, a career British Navy man, had died three years before.

As I was kneeling before the dead body of Anabel Sugarman, thinking how alike the two sisters looked, beautiful really, tall and long-limbed, baby-fine blond hair and pale blue-green eyes the color of clean water, Anabel’s mother tentatively approached me from behind. She bent over to read my press credentials, which I wear around my neck as others might a cross.

I glanced up at her sympathetically. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a familiar looking policeman, a Latino, in a crisp blue uniform. He was watching us.

It was kind of you to listen to me rattle on about Anabel last week, she said to me. She was so thin—she looked as though if I sneezed I would blow her away. She stood up straight, arms around her body in a self-hug, and swayed like a feather in the breeze. She dreamed often of pools, Eudora continued, as if she knew she’d die in one.

I clutched her hand in mine to show support, still on my knees; what a sight we must have been. A tall, dark-haired woman on her knees before a crying wisp of one.

Olive Trainor Jackson from Melbourne, Anabel’s younger sister by two years, had been staying at the St. Regis hotel visiting Anabel when the tragedy happened. She stepped out from her mother’s shadow. Politely, we introduced ourselves.

Anabel had nightmares about water all the time. Whirlpools that sucked her in and pulled her down. Floods that washed her away. Olive raised her perfectly plucked eyebrows. It was ominous in retrospect.

The dreams? I asked.

More than just dreams. She was obsessed with water. It permeated every aspect of her life. All that swimming, bathing….purifying. We all thought it was odd, but none of us saw it as foreboding.

Nor did Anabel Sugarman apparently, despite what her mother would tell me later about her daughter being psychic. But during the days just after Anabel’s death I was only interested in extracting facts from Eudora and Olive, even if they were distorted by their own perceptions, as recounted facts tend to be. Facts, to a journalist like me, are like a vein of ore to a miner.

Best that I could piece together from what the family and my other sources had told me about the morning of her death, Anabel woke up a little after ten, brewed and drank her black tea, snorted two lines of cocaine (this part from Olive when their mother wasn’t listening), talked briefly with Olive to confirm lunch, and called Eudora in North Walsham, in the north of England, where it was three in the afternoon. They spoke for five minutes, enough time to relate the dream, but a shorter talk than usual, because Anabel’s head hurt, she felt a bit wobbly on her feet, and she wanted to finish her sixty-minute swim by eleven fifteen to give herself enough time to get dressed before meeting Olive at one o’clock at La Grenouille.

According to Olive, Anabel had become mostly immune to the feeling she always had now in her head upon waking that she described to her sister as like the wringing of a wet towel, as well as the taste in her mouth like bloody nails. That day was much worse; every particle of Anabel’s being ached, and she felt overwhelmed by a fatigue so thick it was like pond silt.

She drank dirty martinis, Olive explained with a forgiving shrug. Her eyelids were rimmed in red, as if she had been crying for days, and her hands trembled. So when my mum told me what Anabel had said, I didn’t think much of it. Glancing up at an easel that displayed an enlarged photo of her sister, wearing a bronze Speedo and Frette robe with the gold letters ST, for Sugar Tower, embroidered over her left breast, Olive commented that Anabel wore that emblem over her heart. Then: reminds me of the brands on cattle back in Australia, a mark to keep the rancher’s property from straying.

Following her phone calls to her sister and mother the morning of her death, Anabel pursued the rest of her rigorous routine according to many of Sugar Tower’s other occupants. I interviewed them during the following hours and days and they reported having actually seen the deceased the morning she died.

When I asked who had spoken with her that fateful day, I was struck by the way several on the staff and even some of the residents commented that they always let her speak first because they never knew what mood she would be in until she addressed them. I found that in my notes from the time of the murder, which, as of this writing, was one year, two months, and fourteen days ago. There were at least six people whose paths crossed Anabel’s on the way to the pool the day she died: two residents—an elderly man from 4E and a mother from PH36B—the concierge, the spa director, a porter, and a dog walker for several owners, although technically the dog walker was neither a resident nor a member of Sugar Tower’s staff.

Now in my line of work—real estate reporter for a large New York City daily newspaper— it is my duty to make the acquaintance of superintendents and doormen, concierges and valets, because they are the gatekeepers, my point of entry, so to speak, to the information I seek. As luck would have it, the concierge at Sugar Tower was a huge fan of my paper and, particularly, my real estate column. I suspect it was he who called The Tip Line shortly after the murder. I’d like to report the end of a life—the body being our developer’s wife. And it was certainly he who slipped me into the building via the loading dock, when I showed up with the Tip in hand. Usually, I find, people are eager to talk to the press, which I have always attributed to their desire for Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame.

Still, I wasn’t surprised that on the day of Anabel Sugarman’s murder the building staff, with the curious exception of the porter and, off the record, the concierge, had been circumspect; delivering monosyllabic but polite answers to my reporter’s probes. I couldn’t blame them; after all, the victim’s husband was their employer. I was able to extract that they remembered seeing her switching elevators in the lobby to catch her ride to the pool, passing the gym and the spa, and, finally, entering the smoothly tiled Aquatic Amenity Area through the locker room, where the porter was mopping the floor.

Mehobab Khan, the porter, smelled her before he saw her, as her distinctive perfume temporarily overtook the more familiar scent of Pine-Sol.

Leafing through my two red notebooks from the time, it seemed that I had relied on my usual ploy to disarm sources by asking first about what the weather had been like, the most innocuous topic possible, to get them talking. Apparently Anabel wasn’t in a very good mood that day, because three of the six people she met along the path to her demise repeated, in partially bleeped or implied language, that Anabel’s final words to them were: FUCKING AWFUL DAY ISN’T IT?

Since Mehobab Khan was the last to see her, he seemed a logical place to start my interviews. Plus, he was sitting on a bench just outside the pool area looking appropriately shell-shocked, making him what I call a geographically desirable source.

My shorthand transcript reads something like this:

So, Mr. Khan, how was the weather this morning when you came to work?

I remembered Khan as short and squat, with shrewdly intelligent eyes, 35-38 years old, olive complexion, balding pate with a spray of black hairs carefully combed over his shiny scalp. He sat in a hunched squat, like a goalie preparing to block a score.

Please, call me by my first name, Miss—Mike. Mike is my American name, he said proudly.

Okay, Mike. The weather?

He crossed his arms in front of his chest and rested them on his belly. I start my shift at four in the morning, so the sun isn’t up yet, he said guardedly. I was cleaning in the areas without windows—the locker rooms, the hallways, the basement—so I just assumed the sky was still deadly like last night, based on what Miss Anabel told me when she passed by.

And, what did Mrs. Sugarman tell you, Mike?

Can’t repeat it directly, Miss. After a pause, he said: Effing awful day, she called it. His hooded eyes were focused on the ground.

Where you from, Mike?

My accent or my name give me away? He had a man-of-the-world smile and a throaty, nervous chuckle. His chubbiness strained against the starched cotton of his white-with-gold Sugar Tower uniform.

Both. I smiled.

I was born in Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border. Came to the U.S. via the Philippines and worked for Interconti before they sold the hotel I was at—that place changed hands and nationalities so many times it might as well have been the U.N. Anyway, that’s when I started working for Mr. S.

How long ago was that?

Just before he married Miss Anabel—nearly five years.

What about Mrs. Sugarman, Mike?

He looked as if it were an unexpected question, despite the fact that she lay dead thirty feet away. Miss Anabel? We call…called…her the White Tornado round here. You know, as in ‘take cover,’ there’s the White Tornado. I think he was waiting for me to laugh. She’s…she was…very, very talented in decorating and fashion and making Mr. S happy. She did this pool area herself. Anything she doesn’t…didn’t…like, she buys new. The other day, she scooped up a lounge cushion and tossed it in the trash just because it had a thread loose. She is…was…a…perfectionist.

Then I asked: Mike, did she swim every day?

Yes, Miss, ten a.m. like clockwork, although, come to think of it, a little late this morning. Sometimes she came down early to watch me test the chemicals in the pool. I was always surprised how much she liked the water, seeing as how she was always having those dreams…

What dreams would those be?

He was silent. I followed his eyes the way I read a book, looking for hidden meaning.

Then he tucked his feet under the bench and squirmed a bit. I didn’t know anything about Anabel at that time, but from what I knew about people like her my antennae went up at the thought of a porter knowing something as intimate as her dreams. I repeated my question.

Nothing, Miss. I overhear things sometimes. We all do.

After a moment, I accepted his explanation as truth. Invariably my best sources are those who service the rich residents of the buildings I cover. I wondered if the privileged thought that minimum wage earners were deaf, dumb, and blind. Or if they believed the meager salaries they paid bought discretion. If so, they were wrong on both counts. I suspected that Mike Khan knew more, but I never got the chance to follow up because that was all Mike had to say that day.

I made a note to myself to speak to Mike Khan again and moved on to rereading my other interviews.

The family Stone, living in PH36B with views across the East River to Roosevelt Island, all agreed that the sun rose early, as is typical in July, but then their stories diverged. The father, 48, remembered that the heat even early in the day was so intense that the asphalt on the jogging path that ran between the FDR Drive and the East River had steam rising from it. The mother, 45, saw the sky as wobbly, like microwaves. She had been warming her coffee while I interviewed her at her kitchen table, which may have influenced her view. The daughter, 16, who I would have bet was newly in love, remembered that morning as glorious, radiant, as if the atmosphere had rid itself of something putrid that day, and the son, 20, home for the summer from Brown, proclaimed that it was a beautiful, sunny July morning and that he had gone to Jones Beach with a friend.

The elderly man in 4E, Mr. Speyer, was paralyzed on the left side of his face from a stroke earlier in the year. He thought it must have been snowing that day because his daughter hadn’t come to visit.

Like Mike Khan, the rest of the staff couldn’t recall the weather that morning, as they all started work before sunrise, but they did remember the gloomy, gray skies, like a steel trap, said one, which had preceded the storm of the night before. The concierge had rolled out the rubber runners to prevent tenants from tracking up the marble lobby with their wet shoes; the spa director had gotten home late, because of an accident on the Henry Hudson Parkway, to find her babysitter furious and young son in tears; and, the dog walker, whom I spoke with by phone only, remembered the smell of the swollen East River as like wet fur and the color as "weimaraner-gray." Only the dog walker mentioned possibly seeing a rainbow the morning of the murder and, when prompted by me, crows, but on second thought said they could’ve been seagulls or pigeons instead. Then added: Whatever they were, the dogs were howling at them like wolves at the moon.

As I reviewed my notes, I tried to recall myself what the weather had been like that morning. All I could remember was stepping in a puddle of filthy rain water on my way to the subway and the body odor of the man hanging on to the strap next to mine.

In addition to my interviews, I had meticulously regarded the sequence of events that occurred that day. Emilio Urquia, the young police officer assigned to the case, arrived at the scene just after me. The first responders had fished the corpse from the pool and laid her out on the tile. Officer Urquia whistled when he saw the cold body of Anabel Sugarman, a long drink of water, he called her. Without my even asking, he had volunteered that the day was hot and wet.

Standing a distance away, so as not to contaminate the crime scene while we waited for the coroner, we stared at Anabel’s feet, which were covered with ugly purple and blue blotches. Lividity, explained Officer Urquia. Rigor mortis had set in; Check out the facial muscles, he said, pointing his gloved finger at her face, which was frozen in a tragic mask, so he speculated she’d been dead for at most four hours. Then he added that what with the rapid onset of rigor mortis on cadaveric spasm in drowning cases, she might have died just moments before she was found.

The coroner arrived, followed closely by a team of crime scene lab technicians, who quickly swarmed the area, preparing to photograph the corpse and collect possible evidence from the scene. Officer Urquia clammed up when I identified myself as from the press, not a photographer from the Crime Lab, as he had thought from my white jacket and the digital Nikon around my neck. He banished me to the area outside the yellow and black police tape, but I could still see the lab techs bagging and tagging hairs and fibers from the stack of towels and Anabel’s robe, measuring water samples from the pool and sealing them into plastic containers, and dusting every surface for foot and finger prints. I peeked at my watch. It was one p.m.

A female officer was guarding the crime scene barrier. The crowd was growing as word spread through the building. I asked her who had discovered and reported the body.

Babysitter for two kids on the tenth floor came in around 11:20 this mornin’; seven-year-old saw the floater first. Lord, sure glad she wasn’t my kid. Babysitter calmed down the kids and told the concierge right away. He called it in to 911.

Discreetly, I peeked at the printout from our dispatcher in my hand. The paper got the anonymous call on the Tip Line (1-800-Tip-Line) at 11:45 a.m.

Cause of death? I asked. I figured she knew because I saw the coroner whisper something in her ear as he passed to leave.

Officer Urquia, who had been sketching the scene, looked up and made a zipper motion across his lips to his colleague. She hushed up concentrated on keeping rubber-neckers out, letting the professionals in, and making sure everyone signed the Crime Scene Log. She waved a little black flashlight over the ID tags of two men in scrubs carrying a stretcher and a body bag.

Check with the M.E.’s office tomorrow, she told me.

Tomorrow would be too late, so I called from my desk phone later that day. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner deferred confirmation of the cause of death, explaining that it would most likely be days or weeks until the autopsy was done and all the test results in, that the M.E. hadn’t even seen the evidence or the body yet. I persisted. Finally, the M.E.’s assistant said, Based on the police verbal, drowning was most likely, but don’t quote me on that.

That first day, although I could sense something larger, I had to go to press with accidental drowning as the likely cause of death, according to an anonymous source. My story was one column plus a stock photo of Barry Sugarman and his wife, Anabel Trainor Sugarman, taken at some topping-off ceremony or something. It was on page 4 of the Metro Section just beneath the news of a bake sale at P.S. 6.

When I called the M.E. assigned to the case the morning after the murder, he took my call immediately. He told me that DNA would take a while, as would the autopsy reports, but the toxicity screening was in, and he matter-of-factly stated that a toxin was found in the victim’s blood, enough that the death is officially suspicious, declining to say more on the phone but, to my surprise, inviting me in for a face-to-face meeting with his Chief. I guzzled a diet Coke and grabbed a cab to the M.E.’s office.

Murder is a Page One story and, while not my beat, I had the inside scoop.

* * * * *

II

M. Jesus Piazza

When I chose my byline 20 years ago, as a reporter trainee at my hometown newspaper in White Plains, New York, I went with M. Jesus Piazza, because it was tough to get a job in journalism and even tougher to be taken seriously as a female investigative reporter. My Catholic parents named me Marchesa, the Italian equivalent of Princess. The Marchesa was for aspiration and the Jesus for inspiration, they would explain to anyone who asked about my unconventional name.

My name suited me just fine because, at least in print, I could pass for a guy.

Sometimes, usually when I was tired and hoarse and left a message for a source, some deranged baseball fan, to call back M. Piazza, they would assume it was Mike Piazza, greatest catcher of all time. Then they would yell at me for false pretenses. My editor called me Mach, because he said I could "sound like a sonic