The Hinky Bearskin Rug

by Jennifer Stevenson

  “I know you don’t. I understand.” He squeezed her hands again, hurting her, and she pulled away. “Let me beg your tolerance yet awhile?”

  She felt sick. “I suppose I have to.” Her throat was raw and painfully tight. “If you get stuck, Velvita can always sneak me in here.”

  “If you grant me your permission to stay,” he said, “I doubt I shall get stuck.”

  My permission! She felt even sicker as she admitted that, yes, she had loved owning him. I’m always saying he has no right to complain about my multiple sex partners. How can I ask him for more than I want to give? Yet the thought of him coming home from “work” every night, back to her bed, nauseated her.

  “You’ll be careful about disease?” she said over her shoulder.

  “These women are tested monthly. They have only dozen or two sex partners, all of them professionals.” He said gently, “They take more precautions than you did before you met me.”

  Well, that was a nice slap in the face. She stiffened.

  To her back, he said, “Do you — would you prefer I did not sleep at your apartment?”

  She kept her back turned. Rage and pain made her say, “Yes, thank you, I would prefer it. If you have somewhere to stay.”

  “Very well.”

  Oh hell, oh ugh, was it that Velvita girl? Or would he turn invisible and hide out in demonspace?

  At the moment she didn’t give a red rat’s ass.

  She looked back. He looked stricken, his black eyes huge with worry, as vulnerable as she had ever seen him.

  And yet he’s holding out on me.

  Backbone. Damn. The one thing he needed to make him irresistable, and he was using it to sleep with “a dozen or two” gorgeous, skinny, sexually Olympic porn stars.

  She licked her lips and swallowed a jagged lump. “Call me if you need anything.” God, was she pathetic or what?

  But he only nodded again. “I will. And you.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  She picked up her purse and shoes and walked out.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Clay was in his suite at The Drake Hotel when Jewel called. “I’m coming over.” She sounded upset.

  “I’ll come to you,” he said, looking out at the wet streets.

  “I’m on my way over in a cab now from the Artistic Building.” She hung up.

  This was promising. She must have seen His Lordlybuns. It must have gone badly.

  Clay’s hopes were realized when she arrived.

  “I’m crushed,” she moaned. “This is awful.” Then she told him all about it.

  Clay was careful not to comment while she obsessed over Randy’s defection. If he agreed that Randy was a poop, she would defend him. If he defended Randy, he’d be in deep poop himself.

  “Let’s walk back to your place,” he suggested.

  That got her out in the night air, surrounded by milling tourists, but even a smoggy moon couldn’t deflect her.

  “I’ve been treating this guy like a — like a dildo.”

  She explained Randy’s trauma over being forced to become a boinkmeister. Then she explained it again, with girl footnotes. Then she started blaming herself.

  Clay clenched his teeth to keep his mouth shut.

  “He knows so much about me from crawling around in my head like he does, and he’s been so patient. Always there for me. And how he talked about those women at the brothel! I felt like a brat. I wasn’t even nice about it. I just sent him off to work with that — that girl, that Velvita. If he’s not staying at her place I’ll eat my new shoes.” She added sadly, “I shouldn’t hate her. She’s actually been really nice to me.”

  “Tell me,” Clay said, hoping to stem the flood of Randychatter. “What is it about her that bothers you?”

  They stopped to wait for a walk signal at the Nordstrom’s pedestrian overpass. Hordes of tourists stopped with them.

  “Besides that she’s screwing my sex demon?” Jewel plunged her hands into her hair and pulled. “Listen to me! I don’t own him. I don’t. Plus she’s skinnier and younger than me, and she can probably do fifty things in bed that I’ve never heard of.”

  “Now that would surprise me,” Clay said, and felt wounded when she shot him a dirty look.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Hey.” He took her hand as they crossed the street. “When I met you, you bragged about being the slut-de-la-sluts. Your words, not mine. Those women you work with — well—” He’d better tread carefully. “You and your gang have this whole wham-bam-grrl ethos. I don’t pretend to understand it.” He shrugged. “I would think you would be glad to meet a real porn star.”

  She looked glum. “If you had read his diary, you would understand. Do you want to see it? It’s on my computer at home.”

  “I don’t think that would be fair to Randy,” Clay said hastily. Besides, he’d been hearing about it for twenty minutes.

  They walked under the pedestrian bridge over Rush Street and slipped between the chain link fence and the keep out road closed barrier blocking off the Trump Tower construction site.

  “Anyway I said something like that to Velvita — about how people treat porn stars. And she said men are mean to male porn stars out of jealousy. God knows,” Jewel said bitterly, “I’ve had to confront my jealousy. What a bitch I am!”

  “I think you’re a decent, honest person,” he said.

  She blinked at him and stopped in mid-rant. “Thanks.”

  “I think your decency is not about who you go to bed with, but who you are inside.”

  Her chest heaved on a shuddery sigh and Clay relaxed a little. He smiled. “It’s possible that this Velvita person is also decent and honest in her own way. She’s still not you.”

  “That matters to you,” she said gloomily. “God knows how Randy will feel after a week or so of — of—”

  “Did you want to keep him?” Clay blurted and winced at his error.

  She looked him straight in the eye. “I thought I wouldn’t ever have to face up to it, because he was the one who stuck to me like glue.” She scooped up a rock and threw it overhand at the scoop of a bucketloader, making a hideous clang in the night. “But, yeah. I thought he was mine for life.”

  Ouch. “Is it the sex?” Clay said. Another error. He handed her another rock.

  She seemed to think about that one, and then raised an eyebrow. “Well, it’s a lot. And now I know about all this horrible shit that happened to him in 1811. And probably worse, if I only knew. He’s such a good guy inside. He totally melted my heart. By leaving me.” Her face crumpled. She dropped the rock on Clay’s foot.

  Oh, for cri-yi, he thought.

  But he bumped hips with her and got his arm around her. “Hey, hey. Come on. He’ll be back.”

  “Oomp,” she said. “Why? Oomp.”

  “Because he knows he’s left you alone here with me.”

  Her head came up at that.

  “Antler-clashing, remember?” Clay said. He pulled up his shirt-tail and blotted her face. “We know what we’ve got.”

  She squinted at him. “You don’t have me. Neither one of you has me.”

  “Oh, please. You’ve been faithful to us for three whole months.”

  “I am not being faithful to you!” she bellowed.

  “Hey, you can’t be on this site,” said a voice out of the darkness. A flashlight played over them. “Oh. That you, Jewel?”

  She waved. “Me, Alfonzo.”

  “You alone?” Alfonzo asked invitingly.

  “Uh, no. Sorry.”

  Another ex-boyfriend of Jewel’s. Feeling conspicuous with his hand around her back, Clay strolled past the guard, out of the restricted area, and up the steps to the Corncob Building.

  “I’m not being faithful to you,” she repeated. “I’m just slowing down a little.” She sniffled.

  “Whatever,” Clay said. “All I mean is, Randy knows who you are, and he’d rather eat his old brass bed with butter and gravy than leav
e you to my attentions for too long.”

  “Why?” she said again. “It’s not like you want me.”

  “You’d be surprised what I want,” Clay said suavely.

  “Yes, I would. Because I never do know what you want.”

  Thank God for small favors. “I don’t have two hundred years of mystery going for me. I have to play up all the mystery I’ve got.”

  That made her laugh.

  But she still wouldn’t let him come upstairs.

  o0o

  Jewel met Clay on the front steps of the Kraft Building late the next afternoon. He was carrying a double armful of big white bags.

  Her eyes bugged out. “Is that what I think it is?” The air filled with the scent of toasted butter and cinnamon, and her mouth watered.

  “I thought we should test our hypothesis about the connection between the porn, and the bakery, and O’Connor’s little friend Wilma,” he said.

  “At the department? Do you think that’s smart?” But she had taken a bite out of a cow plop before the elevator doors opened. “Mmmm!” Crisp, cinnamony, buttery yummyness! Her bruised heart began to scab over.

  The office was buzzing. Ed was out. It seemed like every investigator who wasn’t actually undercover had showed up for work in a rowdy mood. Jewel remembered that the OED assistant commissioner was due to visit, and that the mission was to make the place look crowded. The whole gang seemed to be on board.

  Merntice took the white bags and laid out the pastry at the coffee station. The investigators pounced with animal cries.

  Jewel grabbed Clay and a couple of cow plops and coffees and led him into Ed’s empty office, where they could hear themselves think, and shut the door. She sat behind Ed’s desk and marshalled her thoughts.

  “Okay,” she said, “this is what I didn’t tell you last night because I was too busy being a big baby. That guy Steven Tannyhill, who may have put Viagra in the coffee and started that office orgy? He’s connected up with a bunch of other shit.” She told Clay about Steven’s plan to sell the Artistic Building out from under Onika.

  Clay whistled. “How’d you find this out?”

  “Margaritas with the girls,” she said briefly.

  She took a deep breath. It took guts and patience to tell him, next, how Steven had brought her home and then uploaded naked pictures of her, but she did it. “I’m thinking it was a preemptive strike. It’s about that night. Something he thinks I might have learned then.”

  “I’ll be sure to look ’em up,” was all Clay said. “So what does he think you know?”

  “Beats me. It was only one night.” She avoided Clay’s eye. “He picked me up in the bar at the Doral and two hours later we were in the sack.” Memory began to stir. “Oh. And he took me to dinner with some of his friends.”

  “Who were they?”

  “I don’t think he said. I think he introduced me to them, but he didn’t introduce them to me. It’s all pretty cloudy. I was drinking when we met, and he kept feeding me more drinks.”

  “Did he know who you were?”

  “Yeah, we did the dance, what do you do, blah blah blah. He said he was in real estate. He was sooo impressed with my job. That would have tipped me off, if I’d been sober. Nobody thinks Consumer Services is cool.”

  “What did they talk about at dinner?”

  Jewel shut her eyes against raucous laughter coming from the staff room outside Ed’s office. “Steven was on the defensive, acting macho. But I could tell he was tense. He kept reassuring these guys that their investment was protected. They kept saying the window was closing, and Steven said he was taking steps to speed it up. One big fat guy winked at him. Steven kept giving me a bedroom smile, as if I understood. But I didn’t.” She opened her eyes. “I was so plowed I can’t even remember how we ended up in bed.”

  Clay’s blue eyes crinkled. “So can I see the pictures?”

  Breezing smartly past that topic. “That reminds me, I want to make a list of everything in these cases that starts with the phrase ‘two years ago.’ It’s beginning to haunt my dreams.”

  Clay took a pad and a pen off Ed’s desk. “Shoot.”

  “In no particular order.” She leaned back in Ed’s chair and stared at the ceiling tiles. “Two years ago, John Baysdorter died. Two years ago Lena Sacker took a job as Steven’s assistant, Steven hit on her, Lena complained to her mom, and her mom stonewalled her. Whereupon instead of calling the EEOC on Steven, for fear of endangering her mother’s job, Lena went to work at the Artistic to get dirt on Steven, because that was the company occupying the nine-sixty west Washington building, which Steven has a permanent hard-on about.”

  “Slow down. You ended that sentence with a preposition.”

  “Write faster. Lena and Maida haven’t spoken in two years. Although Lena walked in yesterday just as Maida was saying, ‘I have no daughter,’ and asked her mother to take a stand about something, and Maida said ‘I can’t.’”

  She looked at Clay’s pad. “Oo, shorthand. You could be employable in the pink collar ghetto. Where was I?”

  “Two years ago.”

  “Right. Two years ago, coincidentally, Bill Tannyhill, owner and Adult Uses registrant at Artistic, dies and leaves his daughter Onika in charge. Two years ago, Steven Tannyhill, nephew of Onika and part heir of the company, has a plan to sell her building out from under her, only something goes wrong.” Jewel paused.

  “Got it.”

  “What else?” she mused to herself.

  “How about this one?” Clay said. “A bit less than two years ago, City Council approved final plans for the Circle Line, a new elevated train line running in a big arc from the north side all the way down to the Eleventh Ward.”

  “The Eleventh Ward,” Jewel echoed. “Mrs. Othmar!”

  “And last week her house develops a pocket zone and then mislays it.”

  “So Ed came through with the lists?”

  “I had them yesterday,” Clay said reproachfully.

  “Only I was too busy having a cow about His Lordship to listen,” she said remorsefully. “I’m sorry.”

  A burst of raunchy hooting came from the staff room outside.

  Excitement bubbled in Jewel. “It connects! Steven’s at the Artistic and finds out about the hinky porn. He gets hold of the properties list somehow, and he gives the list and some hinky porn to someone bent in Inspectional Services, who plants hinky porn on the target properties and then goes in and scares the crap out of the homeowners. The homeowners decide to sell. Steven buys the properties up, launders the titles, then resells to the city for a fat mark-up. We’ve got him!” She slapped the conference table.

  “Not quite. We need material facts, officer,” Clay said. “Gotta trace the money from the city back to the conspirators.”

  “He’ll be using a secret blind trust,” Jewel said positively. “Illinois still has them.”

  “We need to identify the bent Inspectional Services inspector and connect him with Steven,” Clay said. “Oh, and find out who leaked the property list.”

  “Your job,” Jewel said. “It’ll give you a chance to get acquainted with IS. Mostly a nice bunch of guys, with the exception of the guy with the biblical name on his windbreaker.”

  “That ought to narrow it down,” Clay said.

  She punched the air. “We’re detecting shit! Is this cool or what? Let’s tell Ed.”

  The door opened on a roar of hilarity and Ed walked in with a double fistful of cow plops, looking red in the face. “Tell Ed what? Whaddaya doin’ in my chair?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Jewel moved out of Ed’s chair and talked. Ed wolfed pastry. Clay read him the list of “two years” items.

  Ed cut to the chase. “You need facts. Taylor won’t ask for an indictment without.”

  Jewel shook her head. “It’s hinky. Right to the bone, Ed. We can’t prosecute in the normal way.”

  “Then why you bringin’ this to me?” The boss seemed unusually impatient.
“You’re the Hinky Division!” He finished his last cow plop and licked all ten hairy fingers, one by one.

  Clay said, “We may need the Chief Attorney to back us up, if we get them cornered.” He coughed. “Somehow I don’t think Steven Tannyhill is impressed with Senior Investigator Heiss.”

  Jewel glared at him.

  “And he’d be even less impressed with me,” Clay added. “I can present it to the Chief myself if you don’t have time.”

  “Fuck that. You, presenting to the Chief, right.” Ed breathed heavily for a moment. “Okay, I’ll brief Taylor. I ain’t promising him nothing until you got evidence.”

  “Even evidence we can’t use in court?” Jewel said.

  Ed rose. “I need another danish before this putz from OED shows up.” He drained his coffee and stumped out. A wave of locker-room chanting came through the open door.

  Jewel slammed it shut. “Maybe we can search Steven’s house or his car for porn.”

  “We need Randy’s hinky radar for that,” Clay reminded her.

  She flushed. “We’ll get it. But he’s not to drive without a license again. And I want you to get him those ID papers!”

  Clay looked his most innocent. “Absolutely. Right now. Say, did Ed just say the OED guy was coming?” He got up and fingered a peephole in the venetian blind, looking at the outer office. “Hm.”

  Jewel went to check the street outside from Ed’s exterior window. “Yeah.” She peered through the smeary windowpane. A huge fat guy was finishing his cigarette on the front steps of the Kraft. From above he was practically spherical, a cartoon of a city-hall fat cat. “In fact, this is probably him.”

  A sound of smashing glass came from the staff room.

  “Uh-oh,” Clay said.

  Jewel’s head whipped around. Clay was hunched, transfixed, peeping through the blinds. She came to peep, too.

  The staff room was a scene of ribald revelry. Britney was standing on a computer chair, stripping, throwing her bra at a mixed gaggle of roaring investigators.

  “Holy shit!”

  Possibly because the chair was a swivel job and wildly unsafe, Digby was kneeling in front of the chair holding Brit’s legs, while Finbow steadied the wobbly chair from behind, and Sayers tried to stuff a folded bill into Brit’s underpants.