Seven Minutes to Noon

there. I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know how much to say in front of the others, so I bit my tongue.”
    “Just now?”
    “Yup. He walked into the office and kindly asked me to stop snooping around. The look in his eyes.” Pam approximated a forced-pleasant squint. “He’s gotta be the most passive-aggressive person I have ever met. I see your special fondness for him. He’s a major piece of work.”
    “But why did he go see you ?”
    “Beats me. I only made a couple of calls. Someone must have gotten back to him. They all know each other.” Pam shrugged her hefty shoulders, creating a wave of fabric across her massive breasts. “He’s something, isn’t he? Those glasses.”
    “I think he cross-dresses,” Alice said. “I think I saw him wearing silver high heels. I think I heard a baby crying in his apartment last night, but he lives alone, and—”
    The look on Pam’s face stopped Alice. She wasn’t sure exactly what Pam was feeling — incredulity, pity — but there was enough concern on the woman’s face to float a charity.
    “Never mind,” Alice said. “I slept for about ten minutes last night. I’m probably imagining things.”
    “No,” Pam said, weaving her arm back through Alice’s. “If you heard it, it’s real.”
    They walked in silence for a few minutes before decidingto eat at the French bistro on the corner of Dean Street. When they had settled at an outdoor table, Pam said, “Guy in our office used to cross-dress but he didn’t keep it a secret. Told anyone he felt like, so it seemed like nothing.”
    “I think Julius hides it,” Alice said, steadying her tone, “except for the glasses. And at night.”
    “He’s a freak, in or out of ladies’ clothes.” Pam reached into her purse, withdrew a small tube of hand cream and squirted a dab onto the back of one hand. “I haven’t found out who his silent partner is, but I will. Someone from the Buildings Department who owes me a favor is getting back to me.” She rubbed her hands together and smiled, satisfied. “Learn to work the ropes, my mother used to say, and you’ll go far.”
    “You must have had quite a mother.”
    “Still do. She’s conquered Florida, says she’ll only leave the state in an urn, which will never happen, because my mother intends to live forever.”
    After lunch they walked up to Hicks Street for their two o’clock house.
    “Well, here we are,” Pam said.
    It was another 1.5 million-dollar house, this one overlooking the twin lanes of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, and across the street from the emergency-room entrance of Long Island College Hospital.
    “What a noisy corner,” Alice said.
    “It’s always something, isn’t it?” Pam rolled her eyes conspiratorially. Alice wondered if Pam managed this same camaraderie with all her clients, or if she was special. She remembered how much energy it used to take to please and appease her commercial editing clients.
    “Well, let’s take a look.”
    Alice marched up the front stoop ahead of Pam, who followed with the keys. The stoop, Alice noticed, was crumbling, but she didn’t mention it. She was depleted, without patience even for her own complaints.
    “One-bedroom rental on the ground floor,” Pam said, pushing the front door open into a dim corridor withstuccoed walls. Only one weak bulb illuminated the entrance but Alice could see the cracked brown linoleum lobbing up the stairway, its edges curling off the ancient steps. “Cosmetics,” Pam said. “A little lipstick makes all the difference, my mother used to say.”
    As had Alice’s mother; it must have been a generational thing. Alice could still see the image of Lizzie’s partial face reflected back to her in the rearview mirror, stretching her lips taut for the dark shade of red she always wore.
    “We enter here.” Pam singled out another key and put it into a door on the first-floor landing. They entered another narrow hall off which five separate rooms clustered like starved peas in a withered pod. Each room was small and dark, except the last room that faced the street, which was larger than the rest and was the only one that got any light.
    “Picture how nice this could be,” Pam said, “with all the walls knocked out. If you took all three top floors, you could open the whole parlor floor to the staircase. It would look like a different place.”
    “Is there an upstairs to this apartment?”
    Pam shook her head, clearly embarrassed. But Alice knew