The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,72

lives down off DeKalb Avenue in some pretty nice condos?” Neil asked. “I thought the guy was in public housing or something.”

“Because you know so much about his life?” Rauser asked.

Neil was rummaging around for food. “You guys decided to eat some brownies after all?” He grinned. “Dang, there’s only a couple left.”

We all looked at Dobbs. He had fallen asleep, just drifted off with his hands behind his head, mouth open.

Rauser looked at me as if my head had just done a three-sixty and I’d spit up pea soup. “Tell me you did not give him the stoner brownies! I hope you realize that raises about a trillion ethical issues for me.”

“Oh, please,” I said. “You were on your feet two minutes ago ready to smack him. That didn’t bring up any issues?”

“That was just good clean fun,” Rauser retorted.

I studied Dobbs. “He’s such an angel when he’s snoring and drooling, isn’t he?”

“He wakes up stoned and figures out you gave him spiked brownies, he’s gonna be a real pain in the ass.” Rauser was still indignant.

“Or not,” I said. “He could wake up bright and sunny and eager to help.”

“Uh-huh, and maybe Madonna will come in here and shake her ass for us too.”

I considered that. “The Madonna or just Madonna?”

Rauser shrugged. “Which one would you want?”

“To come in here and shake her ass?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Definitely not the Madonna.”

We gathered keys and things to leave, both of us heading in separate directions. “Hey,” Neil called. “What am I supposed to do with Sleeping Beauty?”

“Give him some strong coffee and call him a cab when he wakes up,” I said. “Oh, and Neil—don’t mention the brownies, okay?”

22

How I came to own two thousand square feet on the tenth floor of Atlanta’s Georgian Terrace Hotel is a testament to, well, blind luck. I had done a job for the property owner that required some diplomacy and discretion during a divorce. He had a mistress, a wife, a child, a boyfriend, and lots of property. Fortunately for him, I discovered the wife also had a mistress and a boyfriend. He paid me to negotiate her down privately without the attorneys squabbling over his massive assets. Miraculously, I pulled it off without a hitch. In the course of doing business with him, I discovered his intent to return the private space he kept for himself in the hotel back into hotel suites. The building had been converted to luxury apartments in the eighties, and when my client bought the property, he turned all but one apartment into hotel space. I had fallen in love on my first visit with the white-bricked walls, the hand-carved crown molding, the marble bathrooms, the twelve-foot ceilings, the glistening wood floors, the rows of Palladian windows with their view of Peachtree Street. I offered to waive my fee, all future fees, and promised to surrender to him my firstborn just to have the chance to make a bid. I had some cash at the time. An insurance company had just paid me a percentage of what I’d recovered on an art fraud case. Still, swinging a down payment on a place like this took every penny I had, every penny I could get out of my parents, and nearly everything I owned that could be converted to cash. I mortgaged myself up to my ears and spent the next three years in chaos, knocking down walls, living with carpenters and sawdust and tools. The experience had permanently marked White Trash, but it also turned the apartment into the rambling loft I now call home. It hasn’t been decorated. That’ll happen when I am flush again, maybe in fifty years or so. In the meantime, a bed, a dresser, an enormous couch, a Moroccan-tiled table that I found irresistibly attractive in Piedmont Park during the Dogwood Festival, a television, a CD player, a computer, three rugs, one scraggly white cat, and me. It’s enough for now.

I am the only permanent resident to inhabit the hotel, and I know most of the people employed here by name. I eat dinner downstairs at Livingston Restaurant quite often and sit on the restaurant’s terrace on Peachtree whenever possible, breakfast and dinner a few times a week. I have none of the privileges of a guest, however. Not during the day anyway. The hotel manager seems to resent my presence here. He makes sure the weight room, the media room, and the pool are off-limits to me. The months of workmen stomping in and