He said, “What’s with this guy Steven, anyway? You talk like he’s evil.”
“Oh, he’s hot, but he has no idea what it’s for. And he’s alpha. He’s packed full of energy. Okay, he’s kind of mean, and I could tell that even two years ago, that night in the bar. But you don’t see that kind of — of vitality in every man. It’s like a bright light, leaking through all his cracks.”
“What do you mean, alpha?” Clay’s hands got rough.
“Ouch. Leader of the pack. He’s a dominator. I was sort of into that in those days,” she admitted. “Only I kept getting these utter pricks, and I realized what a bad idea that was in the long run. Sooner or later, one of them would do me harm. Steven proved me right there, I guess.”
“You got what you deserve, then.” His tone made her crane her neck.
“You’re touchy tonight.”
“A good con artist doesn’t praise one guy to another unless she has a motive for gain in mind,” he said primly.
“I’m not praising him. Like you said, he’s evil. Steven schtupps his office girls to prove something to himself.”
“So your motive for gain is?” His blue eyes went crinkly.
Boy, Clay’s ego was getting as sensitive as Randy’s. “I’m telling my partner about a suspect.”
The smile came back into his voice. “That’s kind of weak, but I’ll buy it.”
“Since when do I have to treat you like a sensitive plant?”
He squeezed her arch. “Because you want to keep me happy?”
Suddenly she felt alert. “Do you want to be happy?” She wriggled up on her elbows and looked straight at him.
He looked at her across her feet, and a boylike expression of fear and guilt crossed his face, before the mask of what he liked to call his “Buddha-calm” erased it.
Now what?
“Do you mean to tell me,” she said, “that now you’re gonna be jealous about men I talk to? Because I get enough of that from Randy.”
He didn’t say anything.
“You are. You’re jealous.” If it had been Randy, she would have felt exasperated. She studied Clay’s blank, good-natured face. Well, this is a new development.
She lay back on her back, staring at the ceiling, and he began working his thumbs into the sole of her left foot.
She shouldn’t be surprised. They were always competing. Clay gave a good impression of a passive-aggressive beta male, but around Randy he got territorial. When he’s around Randy — and me.
Boy, how dumb could she get?
“You’re too quiet, Officer. What are you thinking?”
No point discussing this with him. He wouldn’t tell her the truth. And she wasn’t sure how she would feel about the truth, whatever that was. In his slippery, ex-con-artist way, Clay had become a rock in her life, something sane and predictable and normal in a maelstrom of hinky sex and fierce, gut-tearing jealousy.
Now it turned out he’d been hiding something big after all.
And she couldn’t handle it. With Randy making porn, and her insides all stirred up like this, she just didn’t have room for more confusion.
She said abruptly, “I’m gonna go turn over my laundry.” She sat up and pulled her feet out of his grasp. “Tell you what, you can read Randy’s diary. It’s on my computer in his folder. Maybe it’ll explain some things for you.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
When she had disappeared into the rear of the apartment, Clay went to her computer, drawn by horrific fascination. One of his few advantages was that Randy never talked about his past to Jewel. If he’s gotten over that—
He found the folder. He found the file called “My first month.” He read the file.
Widescreen dread with shark music slowly filled Clay. No wonder Jewel can’t let go of him. I can’t compete with this.
Even more nervous, he wandered after her and found her in the bedroom, changing the sheets. “Aw, you didn’t have to do that for me.” He attempted a leer.
She sent him a not-lewd smile. “Back off, Bowser.”
“Oh, now I’m a dog?”
“A horndog.” The smile warmed up.
Was it sisterly? Or more than that? Clay leaped on the bed on hands and knees and started howling and barking, bouncing on his knuckles like an over-excited poodle.
“Hey!” she protested, laughing. The sheet fell out of her hand. “Down, boy!”
He tumbled headfirst off the bed, making it funny and clumsy and, still kneeling, snuggled up to her.
She shrieked with laughter. “And no leg humping, or I’ll have you neutered!”
He stopped and looked reproachfully up at her. “You know, some of us have enough inferiority complex without help from uppity women.”
Her laugh faded to a shy smile. “You like me uppity?”
Would he be giving away too much if he said yes?
If he waited, he might learn how much his answer meant to her.
Her smile faded, too. “Well, you’re stuck with it,” she said in a small voice.
The hurt in her face made him want to reach up and touch it. Suddenly he knew that this was not the night.
He got to his feet. “I think I should go home now.”
She looked hurt even worse. He felt like a rat, but what could he do? That diary had totally unnerved him. He couldn’t compete with Randy’s telepathic lay-dar. He needed time to think out his strategy. Figure out what Randy’s weaknesses were.
It seemed, more and more, that Randy had fewer weaknesses than he’d thought.
“I guess you’re right.” Her face pinched. “Maybe you’d better go home.”
o0o
Immediately, Clay’s worst fears came true.
She picked up him and his BB files on Saturday and they spent the whole day tracking the properties that BB had laundered for the blind trust, marking the map as they went. It was slow work, made slower by glacial traffic on the east-west arteries.
Jewel was on edge all day. By evening, she was thumping the steering wheel. “What is the matter with this traffic?”
“Cubs game tonight.” Firecrackers and whistling bottle rockets went off over the street, and a pigeon, chasing flying sparks, smacked into a streetlight and dropped onto Jewel’s hood.
Behind the friendly confines of Wrigley Field, the fans roared. “Sounds like they’re winning,” she said. “Oh hell, there’s Buzz.” To the indignation of motorists lined up behind them, she stopped the car right in the intersection, put on her flashers, and jumped out before Clay could blink.
She ran across the street toward the ballpark. “Buzz!” he heard her say as she came up to a skinny kid with a backpack, standing beside a bicycle, talking to some ball fans.
A moment later, the kid was skimming away on the bike.
She returned to the car, cussing, and took the wheel again.
“What’s he selling today?”
She started the engine and turned off the flashers. “Saltpetre. What the—? Why saltpetre?”
Clay had to laugh. “It’s for all those office workers who’ve been eating too much Hoby’s pastry.”
Her cell phone rang. “What?” she barked into it.
He sensed her whole body relax beside him. Her closed fists opened on the wheel. Her voice changed.
“Hey, where are you? Oh? Oh.” And just like that she tightened up again. “Really. Where? What do you mean, in the building?”
Pause.
Yup, that was Randy’s voice quacking on the cell phone.
She said, “I guess I could. Okay. I’ll be there.” She snapped the phone shut. “Oh, hell. We’re going to the Artistic Company. Randy’s found the source of the hinky stuff.”
She was already swerving across two lanes of Clark Street, turning east onto Addison in the deepening dusk.
Clay remembered the pastry shop and, down in the bowels of the printing plant, Wilma’s shrine, the feel of Wilma’s lips brushing his ear as she promised to help with his woman trouble in exch
ange for — for what? When they pulled up at the Artistic Building he said, “I think I’ll stay in the car.”
“Fine,” Jewel said. She didn’t even glance at him as she strode inside.
Five minutes later a closed stretch van and a black Caddy pulled up in front of Jewel’s Tercel and a guy in a suit and five uniformed men got out and went into the Artistic.
Clay frowned. He got out of the Tercel and went to stand in the street, irresolute, watching the front door.
o0o
At seven o’clock the front door of the Artistic Building was unlocked, but Harry the security guy was nowhere in sight. The presses boomed under her feet. Jewel took the stairs two at a time to the fifth floor.
Randy was sitting on a folding chair outside the studio. He rose when she entered.
“Okay, what gives?” she said brusquely to hide the leap her heart gave at the sight of him. He was wearing tighter jeans than before, and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He dressed up for me. Her insides went hot and runny.
“Thank you for coming,” he said. She blinked. Randy never said thank you. “Please come this way.”
He led her to a board room with a corner window looking down on Washington Boulevard and the alley. They sat at a conference table opposite one another. She felt odd. In the dress shirt he looked almost corporate. Like he belonged in a board room.
“I think I know what’s haunting this building,” he said.
“Haunt.” She looked over her shoulder. “Is it an it or a person?”
Randy folded his hands on the table. “This is rather complex. I’ve been trying to explain it to Velvita,” he said and Jewel stiffened. “But she hasn’t the education. In my centuries of contact with magic, I’ve come to agree with the earliest scholars. Magic, they say, is the life force of the world expressing itself.”
She was having a hell of a time concentrating on all the sex-demon jargon. He smelled like himself. Her nostrils flared.
He said, “When human beings are involved, magic expresses itself most through sexual desire. This is why love potions are one of the oldest known forms of magic.”
“Would you mind not saying that word?”
Five floors down, the throbbing presses went quiet. Someone far away began shouting.
“I’m sorry,” he said gravely. “I must. The theory is simple, if you concede that human sexual desire can be dammed up, or stimulated to flow in excess. Then it becomes fuel for magic. In this building, sexual desire has been the focus for over a hundred years. Men have photographed naked women in situations calculated to arouse. Salacious stories have been printed. Everywhere one looks—”
He waved a hand, and Jewel noticed more oil paintings of Wilma, naked, willing, and wild, on the board room walls.
“—One sees images calculated to excite human desire. This place is a powder keg, magically speaking.”
This talk made her squirm. “What does this have to do with the pocket zones in people’s houses?”
“Attend. Desire is formless, like a mass of water restrained by a dam. It must have reached critical proportions for it to manifest in the pastries as an aphrodisiac, in the magazines as pocket zones. Perhaps the initiation of the film division poked a hole in the dam. The resultant flood—”
The door fell open with a crash. Harry, the security guy, tumbled in. “It’s La Migra — Immigration — they’re arresting all the printers!” He wrung his hands. “Miss Onika’s gonna be upset.”
Jewel leaped like a scalded cat. “INS!”
“Also, I wondered,” Harry panted, “does the new guy have papers?”
Her blood turned to ice. She said to Randy, “Run!”
In an instant, Jewel and Randy were through the door into the main stairwell, heading down.
A commotion came from below. “Halt! You’re under arrest!” Scuffles and shouts followed.
As one, Jewel and Randy turned and pelted back upstairs. She looked around, frantic. They were on the fifth floor. “Can we go up?”
Randy jerked open a grimy door marked HVAC.
She pushed him. “Go!”
Voices came from the conference room.
They scrambled through the door, Randy first. Jewel shut it behind them. Her foot knocked something on the bottom step, a splinter of wood. She jammed it under the door, wedging it as tight as it would go, and followed Randy upward. All too soon, a heavy body slammed against the other side of the door.
The wind blew fiercely up on top of the building. Jewel pelted behind Randy as he jogged along beside the block-long parapet wall, looking down over the side. There were no fire escapes coming up to the roof. “Dammit!” she screamed.
She caught up with him at the building’s facade, facing down on Washington Boulevard. There was her car at the curb. Clay stood on the sidewalk below, looking up.
Randy looked at her, then down at the street. “Jewel.” In the wind his voice sounded hoarse. He took her by the arms. His dark eyes glittered — were those tears?
Her heart clutched up. “We’ll get you out of this. Don’t panic.”
He yelled over the wind, “I have to set you free. Velvita has made me understand that much.”
That made Jewel clench her teeth. “I understand, too,” she yelled. “About the whorehouse and the girls and you wanting to do the right thing.”
“She is a free spirit,” he said, digging the knife deep into Jewel’s guts. “She doesn’t despise herself. I thought I had time to learn that from her — but the authorities have caught up with me. I can only damage you now.” He kissed her hard, then pushed her away and hopped up on the parapet wall.
She shrieked, “Randy!”
“It’s too late.” He pointed.
Over her shoulder, Jewel saw a man in uniform in the roof-access doorway. She turned back to see Randy teetering on the edge, facing the long drop to the street.
“Goddammit!” she screamed, and scrambled up beside him. He tipped forward before she could get upright. She snatched at him, got hold of the back of his shirt, and pulled.
But he was too heavy.
They went over together, he twisting to face her, she clutching him around the waist.
Down there on the sidewalk, Clay looked up, his mouth and eyes getting bigger very, very fast.
Randy’s lips touched her ear.
He said, “Are you afraid because you’re aroused? Or aroused because you’re afraid?”
She never felt the ground.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Clay was standing directly under them. Two cell phones, two wallets, two sets of keys, four shoes, a pair of jeans, a white dress shirt, a three-piece navy polyester pantsuit, and a white forty-two-double-D brassiere with matching panties hit him in the face, one after the other.
He didn’t dare look away. Horror froze him.
At length he brushed their clothes off his head and noticed a total absence of mangled human remains.
Uh-oh.
He knew what had happened now.
He groaned.
Then he realized what he would have to do to find them and groaned louder.
Up on the edge of the roof, someone stared down. The night watchman? Clay said some bad words, then ran into the building.
Inside the lobby, men in uniform yapped around a crowd of cursing printers like sheepdogs. A guy in a suit accosted Clay. “You. Do you have identification?”
All became clear to Clay. In his most amiable fake Texan accent he explained that he was a citizen, and he showed his ID, and he stood beside Harry the security guy as half a dozen printers were hustled out into the waiting van.
“Miss Onika, she’s gonna shit turkey eggs,” Harry prophesied. “That worthless nephew of hers called ’em on us. Bet you a dime.”
The rest of the printers had come upstairs to watch their coworkers leave. Harry offered to help, and they went back to their lair. The noise of the presses started up again.
Clay was left alone with his problem.
He stood under the big portrait of Wilma on the grand marble landing, thinking. His heart hammered in his ears. He wanted to search the place, but logic was catching up with him.
Jewel could always find Randy when he pulled this stunt, because she was his Number One Hundred. Or, wait, was it because she was female? Clay remembered that, when this happened last month, any woman who slept in the bed where Randy was trapped was guaranteed a good time.
So to be absolutely sure, all he needed was a woman. Somebody to lie down on every single bed in the joint and, well, test it for sex demon possession.
He had an inspiration. Someone who knows where every bed is located would be even better.
He went back outside and collected all the clothes, keys, shoes, wallets, and cell phones. If Randy wasn’t a complete idiot, he would have Velvita’s number on his cell.
Randy hadn’t bothered to label the numbers. Probably doesn’t know how yet. That would teach Clay to withhold information from Jewel’s sex demon.
He started calling at the top of the list, standing in the lobby, fidgeting anxiously, staring vacantly up at Wilma’s portrait, and praying under his breath, Don’t let me down, Wilma. Make this be her.
Wilma must have heard him. The first number answered with a message. Lena’s not here. Leave a message. *boop*
Clay let out a cry of despair. “What do I do now?”
Movement from above caught his eye.
He looked up.
Up on the wall, Wilma stepped out of her picture frame as if descending an invisible staircase. She came straight toward him. She was wearing clothes this time, a corny, country-girlish ruffled blouse and a square-dance-pouffy skirt, but her feet and legs were bare.
She smiled warmly at him. Her voice sounded in his head.
Hey, baby. Let’s make a deal.
o0o
Jewel found herself alone and naked, in the dark, falling. She screamed until she ran out of breath.
Then it occurred to her that she was still falling.
The Hinky Bearskin Rug Page 15