Well, after tonight, Stevie-boy, you might just change your mind about that.
She smiled and offered the caviar and the beef, reciting the same words over and over like someone kept pulling a string at the back of her neck. She didn’t need to think about it, so she thought about Bobby instead.
Bobby had been the bouncer in a roadhouse near Tallahassee. A huge guy with a lot of old scar tissue across his knuckles and around his eyes. Tale was he’d been a boxer, had a shot until he’d taken one punch too many in the ring. Then everything had gone into slow motion for Bobby and never speeded up again.
He wore a permanent scowl like he’d rip your head off and spit down your neck, as soon as look at you, but Layla quickly realized that was merely puzzlement. Bobby was slightly overmatched by the pace of life and couldn’t quite work out why. Still plenty fast enough to throw out drunks in a cheap joint, though. And once Bobby had laid his fists on you, you didn’t rush to get up again.
One night in the parking lot, Layla was jumped by a couple of guys who’d fallen foul of the “no touching” rule earlier in the evening and caught the rough side of Bobby’s iron-hard hands. They waited, tanking up on cheap whisky, until closing time. Waited for the lights to go out and the girls to straggle, yawning, from the back door. They grabbed Layla before she had a chance to scream, and were touching all they wanted when Bobby waded in out of nowhere. Layla had never been happier to hear the crack of skulls.
She’d been angry more than shocked and frightened – angry enough to stamp them a few times with those lethal heels once they were on the ground. Angry enough to take their overflowing billfolds, too. But it didn’t last. When Bobby got her back to her rented double-wide, she shook and cried as she clung to him and begged him to help her forget. That night she discovered that Bobby was big and slow in other ways, too. And sometimes that was a real good thing.
For a while, at least.
“Ma’am? Would you care for a canapé? Smoked salmon and caviar on that side, and this right here’s Kobe beef. No, thank you, ma’am.”
Layla worked the room in a pattern she’d laid out inside her head, weaving through the crowd with the nearest thing a person could get to invisibility. It was a big fancy do, that was for sure. Some charity she’d never heard of and would never benefit from. The crowd was circulating like hot dense air through a fan, edging their way up towards the host and hostess at the far end.
The Dyers were old money and gracious with it, but firmly distant towards the staff. They knew their place and made sure the little people, like Layla, were aware of theirs. Layla didn’t mind. She was used to being a nobody.
Mr Dyer was indeed a big man, as Steve had said. A mover and shaker. He didn’t need to mingle, he could just stand there, like royalty, with a glass in one hand and the other around the waist of his tall, elegant wife, looking relaxed and casual.
Well, maybe not so relaxed. Every now and again Layla noticed Dyer throw a little sideways look at their guest of honour and frown, as though he still wasn’t quite sure what the guy was doing there.
Guy called Venable. Another big guy. Another mover and shaker. The difference was that Venable had clawed his way up out of the gutter and had never forgotten it. He stood close to the Dyers in his perfectly tailored tux with a kind of secret smile on his face, like he knew they didn’t want him there but also knew they couldn’t afford to get rid of him. But, just in case anyone thought about trying, he’d surrounded himself with four bodyguards.
Layla eyed them surreptitiously, with some concern. They were huge – bigger than Bobby, even when he’d been still standing – each wearing a bulky suit and one of those little curly wires leading up from their collar to their ear, like they was guarding the president himself. But Venable was no statesman, Layla knew for a fact.
She hadn’t expected him to be invited to the Dyers’ annual charity ball, and had worked hard to get herself on the staff list when she’d found out he was. A lot of planning had gone into this, one way or another.
By contrast, the Dyers had no protection. Well, unless you counted that bossy secretary of Mrs Dyer’s. Mrs Dyer was society through and through. The type who wouldn’t remember to get out of bed in the morning without a social secretary to remind her. The type whose only job is looking good and saying the right thing and being seen in the right places. There must be some kind of a college for women like that.
Mrs Dyer had made a big show of inspecting the arrangements, though. She’d walked through the kitchen earlier that day, nodding serenely, just so her husband could toast her publicly tonight for her part in overseeing the organization of the event, and she could look all modest about it and it not quite be a lie.
She’d had the secretary with her then, a slim woman with cool eyes who’d frozen Steve off the first time he’d tried laying a proprietary hand on her shoulder. Layla and the rest of the girls hid their smiles behind bland faces when she’d done that. Even so, Steve took it out on Tammy – had her on her back in the storeroom almost before they were out the door.
The secretary was here tonight, Layla saw. Fussing around her employer, but it was Mr Dyer whose shoulder she stayed close to. Too close, Layla decided, for their relationship to be merely professional. An affair perhaps? She wouldn’t put it past any man to lose his sense and his pants when it came to an attractive woman. Still, she didn’t think the secretary looked the type. Maybe he liked ‘em cool. Maybe she was hoping he’d leave his wife.
At the moment, the secretary’s eyes were on their guest. Venable had been free with his hosts’ champagne all evening and his appetites were not concerned only with the food. Layla watched the way his body language grew predatory when he was introduced to the gauche teenage daughter of one of the guests, and she stepped in with her tray, ignoring the ominous looming of the bodyguards.
“Sir, can I interest you in a canapé? Smoked salmon and caviar or Kobe beef and ginger?”
Venable’s greed got the better of him and he let go of the girl’s hand, which he’d been grasping far too long. She snatched it back, red-faced, and fled. The secretary gave Layla a knowing, grateful smile.
Layla moved away quickly afterwards, a frown on her face, cursing inwardly and knowing he was watching her. She was here for a purpose. One that was too important to allow stupid mistakes like that to risk bringing her unwanted attention. And after she’d tried so hard to blend in.
To calm herself, to negate those shivers of doubt, she thought of Bobby again. They’d moved in together, found a little apartment. Not much, but the first place Layla had lived in years that didn’t need the wheels taken off before you could call it home.
He’d been always gentle with Layla, but then one night he’d hit a guy who was hassling the girls too hard, hurt him real bad, and the management had to let Bobby go. Word got out and he couldn’t get another job. Layla had walked out, too, but she went through a dry spell as far as work was concerned, and now there were two of them to feed and care for.
Eventually, she was forced to go lower than she’d had to go before, taking her clothes off to bad music in a cheap dive that didn’t even bother to have a guy like Bobby to protect the girls. As long as the customers put their money down before they left, the management didn’t care.
Layla soon discovered that some of the girls took to supplementing their income by inviting the occasional guy out into the alley at the back of the club. When the landlord came by twice in the same week threatening to evict her and Bobby, she’d swallowed her pride. By the end of that first night, that wasn’t all she’d had to swallow.