“Yes, of course. I’d love some cake. But, Stella, why don’t you come down off the stage and sit with me, and we can talk first. Why don’t we let-”
“I don’t need to talk.”
I didn’t care what Nina had said. Or how fragile Stella might be. They say you can smell trouble. I didn’t know what scent I was sniffing, but I knew it was dangerous.
As quietly as I could, I nudged the door farther open.
There was a creak. I froze. I was so still I could feel my own heart beating. My teeth started to chatter. I had to bite down on my cheek to stop them. Leaning forward, I looked into the room.
Nina was standing to the right of the block of theater seats staring up at the stage, where Stella stood looking down at her old friend. It was very dark inside. The stage was lit with only one dim, bare bulb that cast everything in a sallow light.
There didn’t seem to be anything wrong after all. Just a distraught woman standing alone in a darkened theater.
And then Stella took a step forward and I could see what her body had been blocking.
Ninety-One
“She’s not home and she’s not at her office. But she’s got an appointment there in an hour which she hasn’t called to cancel,” Butler reported to Jordain a few minutes later, over the speaker phone in his car.
“What about her cell phone?”
“Her assistant won’t give it to me without a subpoena. Want me to work on that from here?”
“Where’s the assistant?”
“In the office-1 Washington Square Park North.”
“We’re still in the neighborhood-we’ll go over there and get it ourselves. What does Dobson teach?” Jordain asked as he swung the car around and headed back south.
“Don’t you know who she is?”
“Yes, she’s a feminist. Noisy one. I just asked what she teaches.”
“Women’s studies. She’s more than just a noisy feminist. She’s a brilliant writer who-”
“You ever read her, Butler?” Perez interrupted.
“Is this a real question, or are you giving me shit?”
“Real question. Quick, we need to know as much as you can tell us. What’s happened to her recently? What makes her angry? What’s she been fighting lately.”
“Her daughter died last June. Overdose.”
“Accidental?” Perez asked.
“So the report says, but that’s based on Dobson’s statement. A few months before that, she lost a large civil court case and was fined six hundred thousand dollars-”
“We’re here. Is there anything else I need to know?” Perez picked up the phone and stayed on it while he got out of the car and followed Jordain down the street toward Dobson’s office.
“I’m reading…wait…yes…shit…the lawsuit’s a little close for comfort,” Butler said. “Dobson hired a computer genius to hack into Global Communication’s database. She got the e-mail addresses of all the women who worked for them and wrote offering to help them find legitimate work.”
“We know that. Stay close by. I’ll let you know if we need any backup.”
“Perez, you know the lawyer who handled the case for the porn company was Alan Leightman’s wife, Kira Rushkoff? That means…”
But he’d already hung up on her.
Ninety-Two
A laptop and a birthday cake sat on a small table in the middle of the stage. The cake was small, frosted with what looked like white buttercream, edged with pink roses, with one pink candle sticking up in the center.
Blythe, wearing a blue butterfly mask, sat two feet from the table. Her wrists were tied together behind her back. Her ankles were tied together beneath the chair. There was a gag in her mouth.
“What is Blythe doing here?” Nina asked.
“She’s here for the party, like you are.”
“Did Blythe know Simone?”
“No. But Simone knew Blythe. She and her poor friend found Blythe online. She taught these two innocents all she knew. While I was doing everything I could to make sure my daughter grew up to be strong and sure of herself, she was sitting in her bedroom surfing the Internet, learning how to be a slut from a slut like this. I loved her. I loved her so much. And this is what she did. That’s what we’ve raised, Nina. You and me…all of us…despite our efforts and our understanding and our rebelling and our screaming and our marching and getting arrested…we wound up raising a generation of daughters who are so desperate for men’s attention that they are willing to debase themselves. Do you know what they did? My daughter and her friend? They turned themselves into New York City Web-cam girls.”
Stella had moved to the very edge of the stage and stood staring down at Nina.
“You have it wrong,” Nina said, her voice soothing. “It’s not the fault of the girls like Blythe. Blythe is a victim, too. She’s someone we need to help. Come down, sit here with me, we can talk about how we can help these women. We’ve spent our whole lives trying to help. We can’t give up yet.” Nina held her hand up to Stella, offering her support. Her faith took my breath away. She actually believed she could talk her down. Oh, God, I hoped she was right. I was scared for her. And for Blythe.
“You think you can help?” Stella gave a short, ugly laugh. “Think back to when we started. What’s changed? It’s only gotten worse, hasn’t it? Women are more subservient. More accommodating. Men are more abusive than they have ever been. Millions of them involved with pornography now. And what do they want? Women who perform. Who demand nothing. Who accept less than nothing.”
I needed to sneeze, but I knew that if I did Stella would realize I was there. And that was dangerous. It hurt to hold it in, but after a few seconds the urge passed.
“Nina, she dressed up like a whore. She and her friend pretended they were lesbians to titillate those boys. They filmed themselves and sent it to the boys, and the boys sent it all over the school. And you know what? Simone didn’t care. She loved it. She was thrilled. She had never been happier. She thought they wanted her. I tried to explain to her that what she was doing was only making them want her breasts. Her vagina. Her as a fantasy. As an image. Not to talk to her or share with her or understand her or help her or have her help them, but to have her to masturbate to.
“And you know what she said in her note? She blamed me. She said I only loved her when she agreed to be one kind of daughter. She said I only wanted women to be powerful if they were going to be my kind of powerful-women who didn’t need men-who could raise a child without a man, who would rather be single than subservient.
“She was my baby. She didn’t think I loved her. Do you know why? Because of these women who are not women, these women who have fangs and claws. She said I was angry with her because she didn’t meet my political objectives.
“I watched that movie and I hated her, hated my daughter. I hated her and hated her-until I realized it was all these other women who were to blame. I loved Simone right. I did. I loved her and wanted her to be a woman who had self-esteem and never went on crazy diets and never needed to wear lipstick or to dress to please a man, and she said that I never loved her right.”
The whole time she was ranting, Stella was holding something and nervously, anxiously, shifting it from one hand to the next.
The smell I’d noticed when I first came into the theater was stronger here, but I just couldn’t tell what it was. It was so rare that I couldn’t identify an odor. But my cold was throwing off my sense of smell. But I couldn’t worry about that. I had to listen to Stella. I had to keep my eye on Nina. I had to watch out for Blythe. I had to figure out what to do.
“What happened to Simone couldn’t go unpunished, don’t you see that? What these bitch witch women do has repercussions. Someone has to show them.”
“Simone didn’t die of an accidental overdose, did she?”
“What does that have to do with it? This is about the women who taught Simone how to be a whore. Who poisoned her.” Her voice finally cracked, but her expression remained defiant. “Do you understand? While I was fighting to save girls like this, my own daughter was becoming one. So I hired someone to hack that porn site’s servers. Everyone thought I cared about getting caught. That I cared about that trial. I didn’t lose. That was a joke. They all thought I lost. No. I won. I needed to get to the girls. I needed to tell them they were throwing their potential away. I didn’t lose. That cunt Rushkoff lost. I found out her husband was watching those girls. He used a pseudonym online, but I had the credit card records. Finding him there, now that was sweet. That was something I could use.”