Filthy Rich Read Online Free Page B

walk her schnauzer, Bruno, who was even crabbier and shorter, and had recently developed the bad habit of peeing on the lobby’s oriental carpet.
    “Hi there, Marcy,” she said with unaccustomed warmth. “You were wonderful. May I have your autograph? I want it to show my mah-jongg group tomorrow.”
    The request caught me totally off guard. Sure, Mrs. Schwartz and I would exchange pleasantries if we happened to be taking the same elevator. And at a tenant meeting a couple of years ago, I recalled her accusing me and a few other miscreant neighbors of inviting bugs and vermin into the building by failing to adequately seal ourplastic garbage bags before dumping them in the basement trash room—a charge to which I pleaded innocent, standing on my honor as an exterminator’s daughter. But neither she, nor anyone else, had asked for my autograph since the day they handed out the yearbooks my senior year in high school.
    I adjusted the dry cleaning to free my right hand, and dutifully signed “Best Wishes, Marcy Lee Mallowitz” on the back of a small, light-blue appointment card from Mrs. Schwartz’s rheumatologist, which she’d excitedly unearthed from her oversize floral purse and handed to me, along with a cheap ballpoint imprinted with the name of a local luncheonette.
    “That Kingman Fenimore, don’t you just love him?” she said. “What’s he really like?”
    “Frankly, Mrs. Schwartz, I don’t know. I was just a Lifeline. We didn’t get much chance to chat.”
    “That’s too bad, dear,” she said, pulling on her schnauzer’s leash. “I better go now.”
    Unfortunately, it was too late. While she’d stopped to get my autograph and inquire about Kingman Fenimore, Bruno had left another puddle on the rug. She pretended not to notice and, anxious to take the elevator up to my third-floor one bedroom, so did I.
     
    As soon as I realized my apartment door was unlocked, I could sense that Neil had gotten there ahead of me to clearout his stuff. The nervous churning in my stomach intensified as I put the key back in my purse and stepped inside.
    Turning on the lights, I immediately noticed something different about the living room. Neil, the thief, had filched the old dental chair he told me to consider “ours,” leaving as his final gift to me the faint skid marks he engraved dragging the bizarre item across the apartment’s heavily polyurethaned wood floor. His chair gone, the room seemed suddenly larger and brighter, but also very empty. I stood there for a couple of minutes just staring at the deep indentation left in the corner of the room’s plush cream-colored area rug, less upset, I think, than in a state of shock.
    It wasn’t until a trip to the bathroom that the reality of the breakup actually struck home.
    Gone was the cruddy pale-green Water Pik Neil displayed on a specially constructed bathroom shelf, religiously dusting it and explaining that it was a valuable collector’s item—a duplicate of one in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection.
    The old Water Pik was gone, and so was the glass shelf. He’d ripped it out in such a hurry, there were big holes in the plaster. I’d have to fix them myself now without the benefit of the special dental-mold plaster Neil used to bring home from work for such household repairs.
    Left behind, though, was at least one tangible souvenir of my three-year fling with a man whose love for the dental arts turned out to be a lot more enduring than whatever he felt for me. There, at their regular berth by the bathroom sink, gleaming in the artificial light of the overhead fluorescent, were the “His” and “Hers” water squirters Neil had ordered from his dental-supply place. He had them installed as a surprise for me on our first anniversary together.
    What a romantic evening that was. After a candlelit dinner at a small French bistro in the Village, we walked the few blocks back to my cozy third-floor apartment at Tenth Street and Fifth Avenue holding