Leana removed her glasses and told him everything. She told him what Eric Parker did to her. And she told him about her father’s reaction and ultimatum. When she was finished, Mario’s anger mirrored her own.
“I’ve thought a lot about this,” she said. “I’ve thought about the threat Eric made me and I’ve thought about the consequences. But I can’t let him get away with what he did to me-contract or no contract. I’m sure my father will fire him, but that isn't enough. Eric will just get a job somewhere else and that will be that.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” he said.
“I want him to hurt as much as he hurt me.”
“And he should.”
“I can’t do it alone,” she said. “Obviously. Just look at me. Will you help?”
“You had my help the moment he did this to you.”
She put her hand on his. “I’ve got Harold and now I have you. There have been times, over the years, that I’ve really missed you and regretted ending what we had.”
“We can always start over, you know?”
She looked at him with sadness. “I know,” she said. “But you’re still married, Mario, and I told you once that I’d never come second in your life again. Right now I need you to be my friend. Can you do that for me?”
He put his thumb over the back of her hand. “I can do that,” he said.
“Will you be needing your car, Mr. Baines?”
Harold descended the mahogany staircase and smiled at the tall, gray-haired man standing in the entryway of his townhouse.
“Not necessary, Ted. I’m going for a walk.”
He stepped into his office, which was at the foot of the stairs and retrieved the leather briefcase he placed there earlier. He locked the door behind him when he left.
“When Helen gets back from her lunch date, would you tell her that I won’t be home for dinner? After my walk, I have a business dinner. I’ll be late.”
“Of course, Mr. Baines.”
When he left his apartment, Harold turned onto 81st Street. A limousine was waiting for him at the street corner. He stepped inside and told the driver to hurry.
Traffic lurched, stopped and lurched all the way to the Lower East Side. The driver shot through two red lights and came close to busting a third. Harold smoothed his hands over the briefcase and closed his eyes. He was only dimly aware of the horns blaring around them. The driver slowed to a stop in front of a building near Houston.
Harold looked out a window and watched a scene that was so far removed from his life on Fifth Avenue, it disquieted him.
People were scoring crack, dealing crack, doing crack-among a host of other drugs. He saw an elderly woman slump against the side of a deserted bus and tie a rubber tube to her upper arm. He looked away before she could inject the heroin and glanced at the building that was to his right. He checked the address to make sure this was the correct place, saw that it was and told the driver to return in three hours.
“Wait for me if I’m not here,” he said to the man, and stepped out of the car just in time to see a van and two Bentleys slowing to a stop in front of him. Harold thought the cars looked ridiculous here. It wasn’t often that this part of town saw automobiles worth $500,000.
But that was part of the fun.
He entered the building. Inside, leaning against a yellowing wall, was a tall, dark-haired man dressed in tight black leather pants and nothing else. He was handsome and built, his face and chest clean-shaven, his nipples pierced.
The man lit a joint, inhaled deeply, held the smoke and exhaled it in Harold’s face. Nothing was going to hurry him.
He cocked his head towards the briefcase in Harold’s hand. “That your membership card?”
Harold nodded.
“Then hand it over.”
Harold did as he was told and parted with ten thousand dollars.
He walked up a flight of stairs. The lights were dim and trippy dance music pounded down at him from the floor above. Faintly, he could hear someone screaming, then laughing, then crying. A woman…?
He climbed the stairs faster, the familiar rush of excitement beginning to flood his senses. The second floor was an empty shell. The windows were closed and blackened with spray paint. The track lights were soft spots of red that strobed in time with the music. Metal cages filled with naked, writhing bodies acted as walls. The air was a heady mixture of alcohol and sweat.
Harold joined a line of men and women removing their clothes and handing them over to the clothes check. He recognized a famous actor, the CEO of a powerful conglomerate, a U.S. Senator, two priests. He began unbuttoning his shirt.
The place was crowded. He moved naked through the room, nodding at men with secrets, with pasts-men like himself.
In one of the steel cages, a man was wrapped in plastic from head to foot. Soon his master would start the bandaging. Beyond the steel cage was a wading pool. In it lay a woman on her back who was staring up at the circle of ten men masturbating above her. In shadowy corners, solitary men high on whatever drug was circulating preened, posed and prowled. And finally, in the last steel cage, was Harold’s reason for being there.
The man standing beside the black leather sling was naked save for the executioner’s hood he wore. He was tall and grossly overweight, his back and chest covered with coarse dark hair. A single latex glove was stretched up his right arm. It glistened with lubricant.
Harold nodded at the man as he approached. As he settled himself into the sling, thoughts of Helen, George and Leana shot through his mind. He thought of his three kids, of his life at Redman International. And then he winced as the man began pressing inside of him.
He began to perspire. His eyes watered. He felt a sudden flash of guilt and was about to stop this when the man held a coke inhaler to his nostril.
Harold met the man’s gaze and breathed in deeply. There was a medicinal rush and he nearly gagged. He hadn’t snorted cocaine since the night of the party-just moments before he danced with Leana. The fact that she had noticed a change in him and suspected something was still too difficult and terrifying for him to believe. If anyone learned of his other life, Harold wasn’t sure what he would do.
He took another hit off the inhaler. And another. He felt no pain now, only a sweet, gray, misty bliss. This wasn’t just coke. It was laced with something else. Harold welcomed it. He started to float.
He focused on the man standing above him and saw only his dark eyes framed by the black hood. Harold thought they were the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen. He tried lifting a hand to remove the hood, but in spite of the floating sensation, his arm was oddly heavy and he could lift it only a few inches from the sling.
And so he just closed his eyes. He was sailing now, his body on a higher plain. He had waited four weeks for this, four long weeks, and he was pleased to be here, happy to have spent the money. It was all worth it.
“How’d you like me to ram my cock up your ass?”
Standing at the rear of the dimly lit room, his back to one of the metal cages, Vincent Spocatti turned away from Harold Baines only long enough to look at the woman standing beside him. She was tall, fit and attractive. In this light, her hair was red and it curled around the tips of her naked breasts.
“It’ll make you scream.”
He was aware of the woman’s hand moving between her legs. Spocatti looked down and saw the enormous dildo jutting from the harness around her waist. It was black and slick with lubricant and God knows what else. Her hand stroked it in time with the music.
“You’ve got rhythm,” he said.
“I’ve got more than that.”
“Talent?”
“I’ve been told that.”
“Too bad I need to pass,” he said, running a finger along his lower lip. “I like a brown mouth.”
“No worries,” she said. “I’m not into that, anyway."
Though she was trying for the gutter, the tone of her voice carried with it a whiff of privileg
e and sophistication. He wondered who she was when she wasn’t just the pretty woman with the fake cock. He nodded toward Harold, who was writhing, peaking. “I think my friend over there would love to have a piece of you.”
The woman squinted through the flickering red light. When she saw Harold, recognition flashed on her face and her hand stopped caressing the rubber penis. She stared at Harold.
“Your friend is an asshole,” she said. “Two months ago, he pissed in my mouth after I told him not to.”
Spocatti felt a spark. “Just the piss?”
“That’s enough. It crosses a line. It’s not for me.”
“We all have our limits. How long ago was this?”
The woman shrugged. “I don’t know. Two months ago?”
“How often does he come here?”
“Here?” She looked at him quizzically. “This is our first time here.” She tilted her head. “Are you new to this?”
Spocatti admitted he was.
“We move around a lot,” she said. “Have they told you that?”
“Not yet,” he said. “The other group I belong to has one specific place they meet.” He let a beat of silence pass. “How often have you seen him in places like this?”
“You make our club sound like a disease.”
“That’s not what I meant-”
“Are you a cop?”
“No,” Spocatti said. “I’m definitely not a cop.”
“You’d have to tell me if you were.”
“I’m not a cop.”
“Then why all the questions? What is this? A fucking inquisition?”
He was about to speak when she held up a hand. “Never mind,” she said. “I don’t want to know.” She removed the dildo from her vagina and pointed it at Harold Baines. “I’ve been a member of this club for years-and so has he.”
She turned to leave. “If you don’t mind, I’m going find somebody who came here to fuck, not talk.”
As she walked away, Spocatti glanced with bemusement around the room, seeing things he’d only heard about, only read about, but had never actually seen. The thought that these people, these members of New York society, had paid actual money to come here was laughable to him.
To gain entrance, all Vincent had to do was show the doorman his gun.
He returned his attention to Harold Baines. The man was moaning now, his head lolling from side to side. Spocatti checked his watch and wondered how much longer Baines would be. He hoped not too much longer. Vincent wanted to tell Louis Ryan everything by nightfall.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The young man who worked for Redman Place glanced down at the three cardboard boxes stacked in the entryway of Celina’s apartment. He picked up two, calculated their weight to be around sixty pounds apiece, looked at the rest of the boxes and then looked back at her. “He came back from Redman International an hour ago. I just finished helping him carry a bunch of boxes up to his apartment?”
Curiosity flickered in Celina’s eyes. What would Eric be doing at Redman International on a Sunday? “How many boxes?”
“Eight?”
“Do you know what was in them?”
The young man shrugged. “Office supplies?”
“Office supplies?”
“Maybe not. I don’t know. I only caught a glimpse.” He looked at his watch. “Look, Miss Redman, if I’m going to deliver these boxes to him, I should probably get going. My break’s over in another ten minutes.”
Celina turned to the table beside her and reached for her purse. She removed a $50 bill, glanced at him, and then removed another. “Don’t worry about being late,” she said. “You work in receiving here, don’t you? I’ll phone Jake and tell him to give you the rest of the day off-with pay.” She handed him the money. “And this is for you. Thanks for the information, Dan. I appreciate it.”
“My pleasure.” And he was gone with the first of Eric’s belongings.
She moved through her apartment. Every room, every corridor, was quiet and mysterious and changed. Her home seemed foreign to her now. The rooms were weirdly bare. Although she had never paid much attention to them before, Celina now was acutely aware that the photographs of Eric and her no longer rested on side tables or hung on walls. Now they were packed away in boxes.
She stepped into her bedroom. The bed, the antique chairs and tables Eric bought for her while abroad on business all remained, as did the shelves of hardcover books they once read in bed. The books and the chairs and the tables would stay, she decided. Celina needed some tangible proof that what she and Eric had was real.
As she turned to leave, she caught a glimpse of herself in the bedroom’s full-length mirror. She was an unfamiliar woman who no longer looked happy, but years wiser than she had only days ago.
She closed the door behind her when she left the room. It was getting late. She wondered if her father had finished shooting with Frostman. When she left him that morning, she returned to Manhattan to pack the rest of Eric’s clothes. Although the job didn't take long, it had seemed to her like a lifetime.
She wondered if George was angry with her for not returning. After the way he treated her, she decided, for the first time in her life, that she didn’t really care. The phone rang just as Dan was leaving with the final box. Celina answered it in the living room.
“Where have you been?” George asked. “We missed you this afternoon.”
It was not anger she heard in his voice, but something else. Regret…? “I’ve been here,” Celina said. “Cleaning.”
“Since when?”
“Since I decided to get rid of Eric’s things.”
A silence passed. Celina dropped into a chair covered in glazed cream chintz and said, “What’s up, Dad? Why are you calling?”
“Two reasons. First, I wanted to apologize for what happened earlier. I never should have reacted the way I did and I’m sorry. Forgive me?”
Sometimes her father sounded so formal it amused her. “There’s nothing to forgive,” she said, wanting to put it behind her. “Let’s just forget about it, okay?”
“Sounds good to me.”
“How’d your meeting go with Ted?”
“It went fine," George said. "But we’ll discuss that later. I’m calling for another reason.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t think we should discuss it over the phone.”
“Why not?”
“It’s about your sister.”
A part of her recoiled. “Whatever Leana has done now-”
“She was beaten, Celina.”
“Beaten?”
“Eric did it the night of the party-probably not long after you left the room. If I had known that earlier this morning, he would be in the hospital now, instead of just looking for a job.”
Things were moving too quickly. Her mind tried to grasp what her father was saying. “You fired him?”
“Of course, I fired him,” George said. “And that’s just the beginning. Now, look. I don’t want to discuss this over the phone. Can you come out to the house, or not?”
They were in George’s study. After thirty minutes of long silences and raised voices, the room had gone quiet. Celina looked from her father to her mother and then back at George. He was seated at his desk, his face flushed. Few times in her life had she seen him so upset.
George broke the silence. “If we press charges against the son of a bitch, if we bring him to court, our name and Leana’s will be dragged through every rag on the newspaper stand. And for what? So Eric can walk free because no one witnessed the beating?”
Elizabeth frowned down at him. She had just returned from a charity luncheon when George led her into his study, saying they needed to talk.
“What about our daughter?” she said. “Isn’t she witness enough?”
“It’ll be his word against Leana’s.”
“So? Leana will win. Diana Crane will see to that. She’ll put that man behind bars.”
George thought back
to earlier that morning, when Diana answered Eric’s phone. He was almost certain they had been in bed together when he called. And if that was the case, if Diana was sleeping with Eric, she would hardly try her best to defend Leana against him in court.
He looked at Elizabeth and said guardedly, “I don’t think that would be possible.”
“Why not?”
“I have my reasons.”
“What reasons?”
“Reasons you don’t have to concern yourself with.”
He saw the confusion on Celina’s face and glared at his wife. He would tell her later-away from Celina. “What matters is this,” he said. “Leana would lose no matter who represented her in court. Eric Parker has lived a model life. Our daughter’s bout with cocaine was once the center of a media circus. The defense would make it a point to remind the court of that, and her word would become worthless.”
“I saw them in that room together,” Celina said. “In front of Eric, I accused Leana of setting us up. That’s got to be worth something, Dad. It’s a motive, for God’s sake.”
“What you two seem to be forgetting is this-Leana’s not talking. I’m convinced she never wanted anyone to know about this.”
“But why?” Elizabeth said. “Why couldn’t she have come to us?”
“Because she’s angry,” Celina said. “She’s angry with us, angry at life. Leana always has been.”
“I don’t understand why. We’ve given that girl everything.”
“Except love,” George said.
Elizabeth, a woman who was revered for her poise and grace, turned to George without a shred of it. “Are you saying I don’t love my daughter?”
“You love Leana as much as I do. What I’m saying is that we paid very little attention to her while she was growing up and Leana’s angry because of it.” He looked at the picture of Leana that was on his desk and noticed for the first time that it was neatly tucked behind his pictures of Celina and Elizabeth. He wondered if that’s how Leana saw herself-being neatly tucked away in a silver frame-and decided it probably was.
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