Five O’Clock Twist

Chapter 4

4

Richie had finally reached the point in his life where he rarely did things he didn’t want to do. But that freedom didn’t include dealing with his mother. Around noon the next day she phoned him.

“Nothing’s wrong, Richie,” Carmela Amalfi said. “But I need you to come to my house right away. I mean, fast. Now, in fact. It’s about my friend, Benedetta. I want you to talk to her. She needs advice, and I can’t help her.”

“What kind of advice?” he asked. A reasonable request in his opinion.

He heard her suck in her breath. He knew what was coming even before she said, “It’s complicated.”

And that was the kiss of death for any argument he might have. “Complicated” to his mother had a mystical significance. Anything complicated couldn’t be discussed by phone, email, text, or god-forbid, by mail. Anything complicated must be handled face-to-face, and depending on the severity of the issue, either over a cup of coffee (mildly severe) or a glass of wine (big trouble).

He knew if he didn’t do what she said, drop everything and go to her house immediately, he’d be hounded until he complied. The best way, no, the only way to get her and Benedetta—whoever she was—off his back was to do whatever Mamma Amalfi asked. And so he found himself driving in circles near the top of Russian Hill searching for a place to park. Normally, he pulled into the space in front of his mother’s garage, but another car was already parked there. The troublesome Benedetta’s, he guessed. It didn’t make him any more eager to help her.

Still, he guessed doing this was better than sitting home thinking about Rebecca. He was sick of worrying about her. Last night, hearing she had been driven off in an ambulance, nearly killed him. It brought back the horror he felt when he got a call about his fiancée having been in a car accident. He had rushed to the hospital back then, and sat in some depressing, ugly waiting room for nearly two days. They couldn’t save her.

One part of him wanted to run from Rebecca, to stop seeing her or caring about her, so he could stop worrying about her and the dangers of her job. But another part wanted to run to her, to make the most of whatever time they might have together. Having lost his father at a very young age, and then his fiancée whose job was in a bank, he had learned that life threw curve balls that were completely unexpected. It was crazy that someone like bank loan officer could be taken at an early age while some daredevil Flying Wallenda type could live to a hundred. But such was life.

And life was also too short to spend looking for a parking space in the city. He pulled into an opening in front of a garage just a few doors down from his mother’s flat. He hoped he’d hear the tow truck before it drove off with his Porsche.

Carmela lived on the top floor of a three-story building that Richie had bought for her when he couldn’t convince her to move to a nicer, larger home. She refused to leave “the old neighborhood” and the friends she’d made there. A tenant, a middle-aged single man, lived in the flat below, and a garage took up the ground floor. Richie had only seen the tenant once in all the times he’d gone there to visit his mother. Either the guy worked all the time or purposefully avoided him. Richie suspected it was the latter. But if Carmela liked him, he didn’t care.

Richie let himself into the main door and hurried up the interior staircase to Carmela’s flat. He knocked, then opened her door. “Ma, it’s me,” he called.

“Vieni qui, Richie,” she answered. “In the kitchen.”

He walked in and his gaze immediately went to the table. The wine was out. Uh oh.

Carmela introduced him to Benedetta Rossi. She was in her sixties and “skinny as a rail” to use one of Carmela’s expressions, with dark brown hair and eyes. To him, she resembled most of Carmela’s friends, except that her nose was long, thin, and shaped like a beak. He took off his jacket and sat at the table with them.

“Vino?” Carmela asked. The wine bottle was nearly empty, and looking at the flushed cheeks and shiny eyes of both women, he knew why.

He asked for coffee. Since Carmela always had a pot going, she immediately poured him a cup, and then added some slices of coffee cake to the cheese and sourdough bread already on the table.

“So what’s going on?” he asked, hoping to get this over with as soon as possible. Earlier that morning he had heard from Rebecca that Kiki didn’t need surgery “at this time,” and was resting, but he wanted to be available to her in case Kiki took a turn for the worse. As much as Rebecca liked to act as if nothing bothered her, inside she could be falling apart.

“Benedetta lives down on Francisco just off of Hyde,” Carmela said. “She wants to sell her house and move to San Jose to be closer to her kids, so she had to put in a new heater and air conditioner. To her surprise, the company called in a building inspector to check that they did it right.”

Richie nodded. “They do that,” he said, spreading some cambozola cheese on a sliver of sourdough and taking a bite. He knew the street where Benedetta lived. It was a couple blocks from the “crookedest street” and often seen in pictures of the city with the cable car and the bay and Alcatraz in the background.

“Well, some big bully of a building inspector went to her house,” Carmela continued, “and the hot-shot came up with so much stuff wrong with it, she doesn’t know what to do.”

“Wait,” Richie said. “He didn’t just check the HVAC, but checked the whole house?”

“That’s right,” Benedetta said. “He told me the remodeling had to be torn down. I don’t have money for that!”

Carmela put her hand on Benedetta’s arm. “Poverina!”

“Tear it all down?” This story didn’t make sense to Richie. Years back, he had dealt with a lot of building inspectors as he bought and sold houses, which explained why his mother thought he might be able to help Benedetta. Real estate was one of the main ways he made money while he slowly built up his main business by developing his reputation as a helper of mankind, so to speak. Richie Amalfi, nice guy. “What about the contractor who did the work? If he’s licensed, he can work with the inspector.”

“It was her son and his friends,” Carmela said.

Richie didn’t speak for a moment. “How much work did they do?”

Again, Carmela answered. “They extended the kitchen—made it bigger. And put in a laundry room for her.”

“Did they add new plumbing or have a plumber do it?”

“They did it,” Benedetta said. “Just a few pipes.—Ma che schifozz’! How this sucks!—How hard is that? And a bigger water heater, of course.”

“Of course,” Richie said, wondering how he was going to get out of this. It sounded like a first class screw-up. “And the electricity? Did they deal with two-twenty wiring for the dryer?”

“Two-twenty?” Benedetta looked at Carmela. “How am I supposed to know all that stuff? They put in a plug. Several plugs. What’s the big deal?”

“That’s not good,” Richie muttered.

Benedetta stared so hard at him, if her black eyes could have leaped across the room and smacked him in the head, they would have. But then, her lower lip started to tremble, and her eyes grew watery. If she began to cry, Richie knew Carmela would feel obligated to join in.

San Francisco did have a stringent and expensive building permit process because of earthquake and other potential dangers, real or perceived, and frankly, as a way to put more money in the city’s coffers. As a result, building inspections and permits were a hassle that no sane person wanted to get involved with. “Usually, you can work things out with buyers,” he said. “They might be willing to ignore the issues if you give them a credit in the sale price. Then they can fix them themselves.”

“Not this problem.” Benedetta’s voice was low and the tone bitter. Her mouth wrinkled. “The building inspector said he might have to turn it over to the building compliance department, and that they might condemn my house!”

Richie could scarcely believe her. He’d never heard of a building inspector going that far—especially in an area where homes sell for well over a million dollars. “How long ago was all this work done?” he asked.

“Let’s see, it was when my Georgie was still living at home. He was twenty-five when he got married, and now he’s forty-three, so about eighteen, twenty years.”

“And in all this time it hasn’t given you any problems?” Richie asked.

“None.”

That was another surprise, albeit a pleasant one.

“Did you tell him that?”

Benedetta nodded. “I was in tears so he gave me the name of a realtor who deals with distressed property. Distressed! Who knew my house would be called such a thing?”

Carmela patted her friend’s hand and pushed some coffee cake towards her.

“Did you talk to the realtor?” Richie asked.

Benedetta snorted, then took a bite of the cake with perfectly sized, obviously false, teeth. Richie waited until she swallowed. “Yeah.” She took a sip of wine. “She said she might be able to sell it to some foreign investor with a lot of money who won’t care if he has to tear it down and build something else. I was ready to go for it until I talked to Carmela.”

“That’s right.” Carmela faced Richie and tapped the side of her nose. “I can smell a scam a mile off, and this one stinks to high heaven. I’ve been to Benedetta’s house many times. It’s a beautiful place, worth a fortune. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

Richie pondered his mother’s words. She might drive him crazy most of the time, but she was crazy like a fox when it came to anything involving money. If she smelled a rat here, she might be right. And, if Benedetta’s house went at a “distressed” sale price, considering its location, he might be interested in it himself.

“I’ll check it out,” he said. “And I’ll look into the realtor you’re dealing with. I want to see how legitimate she seems. What’s her name?”

Benetta dug through her gigantic handbag and then gave him the woman’s business card: Audrey Poole, Bay-to-Breakers Realty.

Oh, s**t.

He not only knew her, but when he bought and sold real estate, he used to date her. If Audrey was involved, this might not be a good situation for a number of reasons.