Another fifteen seconds, and I would have made it. I would have been in and gone, and they never would have seen Angel, who was right then popping out through the limo’s back door. She was dressed to party and walking straight toward us.
“Oh. My. God.” Tristan lifted his nose in the air. “I wondered what that stench was. Greasy french fries and chicken gizzards. It could only be Miss Dairy Queen come to grace us with her skanky presence. What is she…what are you doing here?”
Angel smiled at him with supreme satisfaction. “Are you ready to go, doll?”
Tristan’s and Irene’s heads swung around so they could gape at me full on. I was humiliated down to my split ends. But then they sprang into action. Tristan swung around to my right side and Irene stood to my left, putting me right in the middle of a concern sandwich.
“This way, dear.” Tristan dropped his arm across my shoulders. “We have a place all set at the table for you.” He tried to guide me away, but my high-heeled boots were planted.
“Tristan, please. Angel and I-”
“No, Alexandra.” His tone was fatherly, but insistent. “I don’t know what’s been going on with you, but it stops now. Consider this your intervention.”
As gently as I could, I took his hand and removed it from my shoulder. It popped right back.
“He’s right about this,” Irene said, with palpable unease. “You should come with us.”
Angel addressed herself to Tristan, as though Irene wasn’t even there. “Why don’t you back off and let her make up her own mind?”
“I hate the sound of my name coming from your mouth, Angela, dear, because there is no way of knowing just what has beenin your mouth.”
“That’s funny, coming from a sky fag like you.”
“Better a sky fag than a sky whore.”
Angel took her excoriation in stride, but I found myself looking around, hoping no one from my building wandered by. Tristan turned me to face him and put a hand on each shoulder. “Alexandra, I’m trying to help you.”
“I know.” I could feel his will pressing in on me. Irene’s, too, both trying to get me to walk away. I didn’t look at Angel, but I could feel her eyes on me and I had no doubt that this was the tipping point. Regardless of whether or not I had passed the test in Chicago, I had one more thing to do. I had to declare my allegiance in front of my friends. My real friends.
I looked at Tristan. “ ‘They may be hookers, but they’re our hookers.’ Isn’t that what you said?”
“Did you say that,Trissy?” I had never heard anyone else use Irene’s nickname for Tristan. Angel wielded it like a scalpel.
I made myself look directly into Tristan’s eyes. I wanted to signal somehow that I didn’t mean it, that this wasn’t me.
“If I get in trouble,” I said, “I hope you will defend me.”
But it was too late. A subtle shift in the currents had tilted the sidewalk from starboard to port, and I had let go of the railing and rolled across the deck.
Angel wasted no time moving in to claim her prize. “Let’s go, doll.” She looped her arm through mine. “We’ve got some serious celebrating to do tonight, and you’re the guest of honor.”
“Let’s go, T.” Irene was in full arbitration mode. “Alex, we’ll go out another time. Just call one of us when you’re feeling better. We’ll be…well, you know where we are.”
They were still on the curb staring when I settled into the limo with Angel and several of her crew. I took one last look at Tristan from behind the smoked glass. I could see him, but he couldn’t see me.
As it ever was.
I woke up the next morning sitting on my couch, fully clothed, blinking into bright sunshine. The blinds were all open. My window was wide open, and Jamie’s disembodied voice floated in from the kitchen, where the machine was recording his message. It must have been the phone that had finally pierced my thick skull and brought me back to life, such as it was. From the angle of the sun, I knew it was late. I knew something else, too. If I didn’t finish this case fast, I would need a stint in rehab.
I dragged myself out to the kitchen for some much-craved liquid refreshment, grabbed a carton of orange juice, and punched up Jamie’s message. The machine announced the time and date stamp for the call. That it was eleven-forty was alarming enough, but Jamie’s message was what made me really feel the pain.
I had promised him another run this morning. I’d completely blown him off, and he was worried. I’d have to call him back when I was coherent and make up an excuse. Maybe I would tell him that I overslept. That wasn’t a lie.
After threatening to fall down all night, the leather pants were ridiculously hard to peel off. They had molded to my body, which is apparently what happens when you leave them on too long. The red sweater was going right to Goodwill the second I had a free moment. It had made me sneeze all through dinner. After having promised me a party of my own, Angel had spent little time with me, leaving me to fend for myself with the exotic Sylvie. At twenty years old, she was the one I wished the most had never showed up on our radar screen. Last night, she had been the only one in the group with any time for me. She had wanted to know who had done my eyes, because I looked so good for my age. I considered that a compliment. I considered it sad and depressing that she was thinking of getting hers done.
I shuffled to the shower, wondering if the whole thing had been a clever ruse on Angel’s part to weaken my defenses for our first real meeting this afternoon. If it had been, it worked. I was a wreck.
The second I got my hair soaped, the phone rang. I stepped out and padded into my bedroom, leaving a trail of soapy water across the hardwood. There were few people for whom I would interrupt a hot shower. Felix was one.
“Hello?”
“Miss Shanahan?”
“Hey, Felix. What’s going on?”
“I got into Arthur Margolies’s computer last night. Ohmygosh. Wait until you see this. I pulled it up, and I was, like, holy cow! You are not going to believe what I found.”
Chapter 26
THE WAY HARVEY FLUSHED WAS LIKE NO ONE I’d ever seen. The crimson started at points below each ear, then worked its way like twin flames up the sides of his face and joined at the bridge of his nose. He was in full bloom thirty seconds into Monica’s video. The fact that his monitor was old and the picture wasn’t as sharp as mine might have prevented a stroke.
What we were looking at was a man’s penis. Actually, it was a man in naked repose on a bed of garish, fringed pillows, but all I saw was his penis, because it was the biggest one I’d ever seen. Granted, my sample universe was not vast, but this thing was a redwood. It towered majestically above his pubic briar patch, just one more of the mighty muscles this man had on casual display.
Harvey reached for his mouse and froze the image. “What are you showing me?”
I reached past him and restarted it. “That’s Arthur Margolies, one of the hookers’ clients, and you need to see this.”
“I cannot imagine why.”
Into the frame crawled Monica, also naked, with breasts so large and heavy I was concerned about rug burn as she moved across the floor on all fours toward her prey. I hadn’t remembered them being that large-each bulbous mass was roughly the size of her head-but I had been concerned with other things at our last meeting.
“Is that Monica?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“And this man is Arthur Margolies?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“Felix confirmed it. He trolled around in the guy’s computer and found photos of him, mostly with his kids.”
“Your friend Felix? You showed this to him?”
“He sent it to me. I asked him to check out Margolies’s computer, so he hacked in. The guy apparently tried to erase everything connected with Monica, e-mails included. Felix only found this because it was buried in some obscure download file. Margolies probably doesn’t even know he has it.”