Geraldo Segura smiled as he watched Carlotta step out of the front door of Princeton Wells’s mansion on Central Park West. He didn’t have to look at his watch to know exactly what time it was: 4:30 p.m. On the dot. Not a minute earlier, not a minute later. Carlotta was a creature of habit.
Her key ring was already in her hand, and she double-locked the front door with a practiced twist, tossed the keys in her purse, and zipped it up.
He raised the binoculars to his eyes. She had aged well over the years. She was in her sixties now. Her face was rounder, fuller, but her dark eyes were just as alert and intense as ever as she lifted the flap on the keypad at the front door and carefully punched in the security code.
He trained his gaze on her fingers. Eight. One. One. Seven. Five. Gracias, Carlotta.
He knew where she was going. She’d follow the same path she took every day, five days a week, for thirty-six years: a block and a half to the subway station at 72nd Street, catch the uptown C train, take it ten stops to West 155th Street, and walk another block and a half to her apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue.
He and Carlotta had bonded from the very first day he set foot in Princeton Wells’s house. She was Salvadoran; he was Guatemalan. They had an almost identical coppery skin tone, a shared culture, and a mutual distrust of rich white people.
He remembered asking her once why she didn’t ask Princeton’s mother to have the family chauffeur drive her home, or at least pay for a cab.
“Mrs. Wells, she offered,” Carlotta said. “But I say ‘No thank you very much.’”
“Why would you turn down a ride in a limo?” he asked.
“A ride in a limo is wonderful,” she said. “But getting out of a limo in my neighborhood is not so smart. When you take the subway, nobody notices you.”
And Carlotta definitely did not want to be noticed. Thanks to the Wells family, she was a permanent legal resident of the United States, but her husband, Milton, his two brothers, and three of her cousins were not.
He watched her walk purposefully toward the station. When she was halfway down the stairs, he stepped out of the shadows and followed her. God, how he wished they could reconnect. If she saw him, she’d scoop him up in her arms and insist on taking him home and cooking up a big platter of pupusas.
If only, he thought as he came up behind her and wrapped his left arm around her neck and pushed her head forward with his right hand, putting enough pressure on her carotid artery to cut off the blood flow to her brain.
She went limp immediately, and he lowered her to the ground. He unzipped her purse, removed her keys, and went back up the stairs. She’d regain consciousness in a few minutes, check her purse, and breathe a sigh of relief when she saw that her wallet and her money were still there.
She’d be home before she realized her keys were missing. But she wouldn’t call the cops to report the attack. Even though she could produce a green card, Carlotta would never invite la policía into her apartment when there were that many undocumented skeletons in her family closet.
Segura walked back toward Wells’s home, tapped the digits 81175 into the keypad, and unlocked the door. As soon as he stepped inside, he heard the beep-beep-beep of the alarm system asking for yet another security code that would prove he was not an intruder.
That was easy. He’d learned it years ago, and he was sure it would never change. The password was 36459, which spelled e-m-i-l-y on the keypad.
Emily Gerson Wells was Princeton’s great-grandmother. Her singular sense of design and elegance permeated every corner of the mansion. Her portrait, painted by the renowned John Singer Sargent, hung over the mantel in the great room. And lest anyone forget their heritage, her name had to be spelled out every time one of her heirs wanted passage into the grand home that was her legacy.
Segura tapped in Emily’s name, and the beeping stopped.
Back in the day, Princeton’s father had an imposing office on the second floor. The old man had died a few years ago, so the office would be Princeton’s now. Segura trod silently up the stairs, put his ear to the mahogany door, and heard the soulful voice of Mary J. Blige coming from inside.
He opened the door and stepped over the threshold. Princeton was stretched out on a leather sofa, a book in one hand, a drink on the table at his side. He looked up at the bronze hard-bodied ghost from his past, and he froze.
“Hello, Princeton,” Segura said. “I see you’re still a reader. Is it a good book?”
“Hello, Geraldo,” Wells said. “Yes, I’m enjoying it.”
Segura nodded. “Too bad you’re not going to live long enough to finish it.”