Darcy and Opal: Killing It In Real Estate Part I
By: Valerie Kittell
Tags: Real Estate, Mystery, Fiction, Short Story

Darcy and Opal: Killing It In Real Estate Part I

A Real Estate Cozy Mystery

“Hi, I’m calling about the house on Goodheart Ave.? Can you tell me how much they want for it?”

“Well, sure I can. You been looking for long? Give me a minute while this darn thing loads.” Darcy entered her code into the welcome page of the multiple listing system and waited for the ancient computer to respond. It usually took at least 30 seconds for the little wheelie icon to begin swirling listlessly in fits and starts before it stopped altogether and then would generate a prompt to tell her that the connection was lost and did she want to retry? Which of course she would which would take another code entry and wait and then maybe if she was really really lucky and if all the bandwidth wasn’t being used up by their lazy techie playing computer games with someone in Venezuela, she might just strike gold and be able to answer the phone caller’s question.

“Don’t you just know offhand? Don’t you have a book with your houses for sale in it?” The female caller sounded annoyed.

“Oh no, not anymore. We used to, but now everything is computerized. I know it’s frustrating but while we’re waiting, let me just get some information from you. What price range are you in and is that an area you are interested in and how long have you been looking?” Darcy’s broker had thoughtfully placed a list of questions by the phone to help new agents like her know what to ask when people called in and they were killing time waiting for outdated computers to respond.

“Ask open-ended questions,” he would exhort in the weekly training sessions he held with her and the two other new recruits for the Crumboldt Realty Co. Darcy realized that she should have asked one question at a time and waited for the response, but the way the questions were typed was in a giant paragraph and she was already on number 3 when she realized she should have paused after number 1.

There was a stony silence on the other end of the phone.

Darcy gamely plunged on. “My name’s Darcy Showalter. What’s yours?”.

“Marge Simpson” said the disembodied voice, curtly.

“No, seriously? Is your husband Homer?” Darcy chuckled to herself. This lady didn’t really think she would get away with insulting her intelligence like that did she?

“My name is Margaret Simpson, I live on Goodheart Ave. and I wanted to know what they were asking for that rundown piece of cr . . . You know what? Never mind. I’m sorry I called. Forget it.”

“May I put you on my mailing list?” Darcy skipped to the last question.

“No!” and then, a dial tone.

“The connection has been lost. Would you like to retry?” said the little box on the screen. Darcy hit cancel.

She had only been an agent for two weeks and so far, it did not resemble an episode on the house and home cable channel in any way. She had only become an agent in the first place because there were no jobs in the local paper. Alright, that was not completely correct. Two months ago, there had been ads for a third shift doughnut baker, a dog walker, a fish processor, and a topless cocktail waitress. She had actually gone down to apply for the doughnut job, but there were at least sixty people waiting in line outside the doughnut shop in the dark waiting for it to open before she took her place at the end of the line.

The queue was a motley assortment of the current crop of the American unemployed. The variety of the potential doughnut bakers took Darcy’s breath away. The first person in line was an older gentleman dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase who would not have looked out of place as the President of a credit union. He was followed by a young Goth/Vampire/Zombie couple in their late teens who were snuggling and groping each other in a sleeping bag on the sidewalk. After that there were potential beauty queens, stay-at home Moms, professional wrestlers, accountants, nail techs, you name it. Almost every age, race and nationality seemed to be represented, like they had been gathered together in this place to take a picture for the cover of the local telephone book. Darcy remembered that one year there had been a big flap because the cover picture was an unrealistically homogeneous group of very white Waspy looking people in L.L.Bean type get-ups as though their little burgh had no diversity at all. It actually had quite a bit, being a university town and all.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your wretched refuse”, thought Darcy as she took her place behind a chubby woman with frosted hair who reminded her of someone but she couldn’t think of who. She was definitely feeling tired and poor and like wretched refuse herself. She did not recall ever feeling panicked about the possibility of being unemployed, like she felt this time. Here was the proof, she was standing outside of a doughnut shop in the middle of the night with 60 other people in the hopes that she might land a job as a third shift doughnut maker at $10 an hour which was a princely wage in comparison to the other jobs available in town.

Even if she got this job, she mused, she would probably have to find another one if she wanted to continue to live in her rented condo by herself without a roommate. She had managed to avoid the whole roommate thing ever since she had been on her own and because she was slightly misanthropic (just a little) she preferred to live alone.

Promptly at 4:00 am the lights came on in the diner. Darcy wondered how anyone had managed to enter the shop unseen by the crowd of job seekers. Did the diner have an attached apartment, she wondered. It did seem to have a funny wing at the rear. The owner, a tall skinny man with an amazing black pompadour, unlocked the door, came out and told them the position had been filled and please go away or come inside and buy some donuts and coffee. This made the crowd very unhappy.

“Screw you! You frigging asshole! “Probably ran the ad just to drum up business” “What do you expect from a . . . what is he anyway? Definitely not American ” “I’m reporting you!” were just some of the comments that Darcy heard.

“I heard he only placed the ad to get his brother-in-law to take a pay cut. The brother-in-law is the baker” said the full-figured woman with frosted hair as she stubbed out her cigarette. “They don’t get along. Have you ever been in there? They scream at each other like there’s no one else in the place even if it’s full. They throw baking pans, break coffee pots, you wouldn’t believe it. But my God, the donuts are unreal.”

The shop was called Theo’s Donut Diner. “Which one is Theo?” asked Darcy.

“Neither. Theo was the old Greek guy who used to own the place. The new owner was too cheap to buy a new sign so he kept the name. Oh well, no point in hanging around. My name’s Opal Kandinsky. Here’s my card. Call me if you want to buy or sell a house.”

“Real estate? Is that a good job?” asked Darcy as she twirled the card in her fingers. Whose picture was the vivacious redheaded pixie with the ferocious grin, she wondered. It couldn’t possibly be the 100 lb heavier, twenty years older woman in front of her, could it?

“If it was, would I be considering being a doughnut maker for a certifiably insane maniac who would cheat his own family to make a buck?” The woman, who Darcy finally realized was a dead ringer for Shelly Winters, pulled her quilted puffy jacket closer before continuing.

“Actually, it’s been great in the past, but those days are long gone. Everyone’s getting out. Market’s down. People want more for their house then they can get and what few buyers there are want the deal of the century and nothing less. If their Uncle Al tells them to offer 50 cents on the dollar, they’ll offer 50 cents on the dollar. Then they’re mad when the seller tells them to take a hike and the seller’s mad you even brought them the offer. So, yeah, it’s great if you’re looking for soul crushing and paychecks that disappear the day before closing because the seller filed for bankruptcy without telling you. What’s not to love? And yes, that picture is me. Only six years ago if you can believe it.”

Darcy didn’t know what to say. “I guess the doughnuts are good,” she ventured and immediately regretted. “I mean, I mean . . .”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. If I was sensitive I would stop giving out my card. I almost enjoy seeing the disbelief. It’s classic Ann Landers syndrome. You know, women who can’t stop using an old photograph professionally? I’m a textbook example.”

“Opal Kandinsky? Are you ‘Opal, Your Real Estate Treasure’? I remember those billboards” said Darcy.

She recalled that, yes, almost exactly six years ago, when the real estate boom had been in full frenzy, you couldn’t drive for 300 yards without seeing Opal’s face, or rather, her former face, plastered on a billboard or a bus stop shelter or on a shopping cart seat proclaiming her to be New Dare County’s “crown jewel of real estate” “your real estate treasure” or some other slogan that played vaguely off of her name Opal.

“Yep, I’m the Real Estate Treasure. Now the Buried Treasure. Ha ha! My ex would get a kick out of that. Who says I have no sense of humor?”

Darcy edged away a little. Opal, while amusing, was starting to alarm her a bit. The woman, or the woman she purported to be, really had been the queen of local real estate. Her name and picture were regular features in the local business section of the hometown rag. The idea that this Shelly Winters impersonator could be the same person was straining credulity. Perhaps the woman she was speaking with had just found a business card lying in the street and was playing her own little strange charade.

“It’s been great talking to you. I’ll call you if I ever think of buying a house, but that won’t be for a long time. See ya.” Darcy started to make towards her Chevy Volt which she noticed with annoyance was parked in by one of those idiotic trucks with tires that were six feet high, necessitating a little ladder so a person could clamber up to the running guard. Great. Now she was stuck with Shelly/Opal unless she went into Theo’s and found the truck’s owner.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” asked Opal/Shelly, walking behind her “Here, look at these. Blue Cross Card, Library Card, Driver’s License.” She fanned out and waved her wallet contents then stopped suddenly and shoved them back into her purse. “Shit. It is that bad, isn’t it? I guess I’ll have to lump it and get a new picture. Let’s go inside and have some crullers and find the moron who parked you in.”

Five minutes later they were sitting in a booth with mugs of coffee and a cruller in front of each of them. Darcy was persistent in asking more questions about how one went about getting into real estate. Heck, she might as well make some productive use of the time she had already lost by going to stand in front of a doughnut shop at 4:00 am in the morning.

After all, fate works in strange ways. Isn’t that what people say? Perhaps she was meant to reject the prospect of becoming a fish gutter, a topless waitress or a dog walker in favor of dough frying in order to meet her real destiny, in the form of Opal Kandinsky. Darcy had “Follow Your Bliss” engraved on the inside of a sterling silver bracelet she always wore in an effort to remember to follow the advice of Joseph Campbell. “Find the Bliss, and the rewards will follow.”

Only finding bliss had proved to be an elusive quarry. She was sorry to say that so far in life she had found no person or occupation or endeavor or goal that could be said to envelope her in a state of bliss. The closest contender so far was when she was reading an obscure Victorian novelist while eating leftovers with her Russian Blue cat Eddie sitting on top of her feet and she doubted that anyone anywhere would pay her to do that.

In order to pay the rent, she had gone from one respectable yet mundane job to another, each one lasting approximately three years. Her liberal arts degree from a top university, her good but not intimidatingly good looks combined with an easy manner and a ready smile had served her well in the employment sweepstakes and she had always taken it for granted that whenever she wanted a change she would be able to find one, and almost always with a nice salary increase. Job coach counselor for the developmentally disabled, restaurant manager, and commission sales person for a home dairy service had been her last three gigs. She had never been fired and she had always had a new job to go to when she tired of the current one. Until now.

Longsteads, the historic local dairy and farm stand company that she worked for had suddenly and shockingly been forced to close abruptly when the longtime bookkeeper/accountant had been found to have been embezzling ever increasingly larger sums over the years in order to finance a television shopping network addiction. Only when the trusting Ned Longstead was finally called directly by the local branch of the bank over the matter of bouncing paychecks was the crime uncovered.

In the basement of Gertrude Havermayer’s modest little raised ranch, the police found boxes and boxes and more boxes on top of more boxes. The basement resembled an episode of the “Hoarders” TV show. Gertrude had rotisserie ovens, mineral makeup sets, down comforters in every size and color, non-stick cookware, exercise machines, framed prints, music boxes, rotting taffy apples, curling irons, velour jogging suits, scented candles, and hundreds of designer dolls stacked from floor to ceiling.

Because she admitted her crimes immediately when Ned came to her house to confront her over the paychecks and because her swag had all been paid for with company checks, the merchandise had all been cataloged and then given to the Longsteads as partial reimbursement fairly quickly. Ned himself had invited Darcy to a large storage facility and told her to take as much as she wanted of anything. He was doing this as a small way to make the company closing a little easier on the employees since it was so close to Christmas.

“Do you believe this shit?” he asked as he ushered Darcy into what looked like the clearance room of an odd lot store. He was a lean, good looking, jeans and flannel shirt clad man in his late fifties with prematurely white hair whose crinkly eyes and deep tan attested to a life led primarily outdoors.

“That woman worked for my parents. She is my daughter’s godmother. She took down my business and my family for THIS SHIT!!!” He gave a violent well-placed kick right into the center of a sofa sized Thomas Kinkade painting of a cottage with light radiating from its windows illuminating a meandering brick walkway. He collapsed onto an Amazing Rotisserie Oven box and buried his face in his hands. After a brief moment he seemed to recall that he was not alone.

“We’ll be fine. People have been after us for years for the farmland and we haven’t totally eaten all the equity. We should have enough to pay the taxes and the penalties and the vendors and the employees and have some left over to finance our crappy poverty-stricken retirement. But Goddammit! Why would anyone want any of this garbage in the first place? Look at the boxes — nine out of ten, no ninety nine out of a hundred say “Made in China”. Gertrude whacked a hundred-year-old American company with thirty employees so some sweatshop could make crap for her to put in her basement because it was ‘such a good deal she couldn’t resist’. Do you know that is what she actually told me? “.

Darcy felt horrible. She didn’t want to take anything but finally allowed Ned to force her to take a music box, well, not technically a box, but a piano with little animated mouse who sat on a piano stool and played Christmas songs when you placed a small piece of plastic sheet music in front of it. She thought her mother would probably get a kick out of it.

“Oh well, could be worse,” she said, trying to lighten the situation up. “She could have bought those awful singing fish on a plaque that they had a few years ago that sang Take Me to the River.”

Ned grimaced. “Oh, well then it is worse. There must be fifty of those things way in the back. I think that was her first purchase. The gateway drug as it were. She bought them for the employees as a gag gift one Christmas without asking me and then before she could give them out and tell me about it, everyone had already been given one by their brother-in-law. In fact, my brother-in-law got me one. I brought it into the office and showed it to her and said ‘Who in the world would ever buy an incredible piece of shit like this? For $29.99? They should be put away.’ Well, after that, forget about telling me. And then she saw that I never even noticed that check for the stupid fish even though she spent close to a grand on the stupid things. The check was even made out to TV Shopapalooza right in the goddam register. But after that she made the checks out to TV Shopapalooza but the register and the computer ledger said different. I never looked at the actual bank statements and checks; I only looked at her computer statements. Why would I ever not trust her after she worked here for fifty effing years?”

Darcy shook her head and made sympathetic noises. Nothing she could possibly say would be adequate to say how terrible she felt for Ned and his family and the other employees and herself. Out of all the jobs she had had to this point, the dairy had been the nicest and the most enjoyable. There had been hayrides in the autumn, and a corn maze and a Christmas Tree shop and homemade pies and really great vegetables. The same people had shopped at the farm stand and the ice cream shop and had their dairy delivered for decades. The closing of the Longstead dairy was something right out of a really sad sappy movie from the thirties. Only it was today and it was now and it involved her and this nice man and her town.

“Can’t the bank give you enough to tide you over and keep the place going? “she asked. What about all that “Your Money is Our Money, Your Town Is Our Town” stuff?

“Oh right. The only part of that they really mean is the Your Money is Our Money part. There’s almost no such thing as a commercial loan nowadays or at least right now. Even if I could get one, which I can’t, I would get better terms with my friendly local mob loan boss Mr. Breakayouleg. Except that he’s gone legit. He’s managing a hedge fund now. Son of a bitch.”

And that is how, Darcy Showalter found herself eating crullers and drinking coffee with Opal Kandinsky in Theo’s Donut Diner at 5:00 am on a Thursday morning in late December and being talked into a career as a real estate agent.

To Be Continued.

Copyright 2018 Valerie Kittell All Rights Reserved