“These shoes okay?” Reg said. Cordovan loafers, no socks.
“Perfect.” Jee said to the other women, “Under the circumstances, I think we slut up the hair. For Reg.”
Beth’s roommates put up their hands and ruthlessly mussed their hair, while Beth looked on, her mouth hanging open.
“Get with it,” Pog said. She reached over and tousled Beth’s head. “Perfect. Let’s go eat.”
“I don’t know why he has to lie on that dog bed in the kitchen when he has his own room,” Beth said to Jee the next afternoon, as she paid for her Bloomingdale’s shoe purchases with “Blake Shanley’s” black AmEx. With Jee’s encouragement she’d bought four pairs of shoes to go with her current outfit: black open-toed heels to match her capri pants, red flat sandals to go with the red stripes in her demure red-and-white striped shell, and two pairs of gold slippers, structured and unstructured. Bottom line: fifteen hundred dollars. She’d already bought a range of gold metallic lace tops to go over a gold bra, and some jewelry to match.
“The dog bed is a privilege, not a punishment,” Jee said. Jee was dressed in flagrant too-rich-for-you yellow leather pants with Cuban heels and a teeny floral bandeau. “You have to think like a sub. If I banished him to his room, he’d feel terrible. He wouldn’t be part of the group. He wouldn’t be in on things. This way, he gets to know everything that’s going on—that we want him to know—and he’s also secure in his place.”
“You didn’t want him to listen in yesterday while you—while we were talking about, uh, the past.” Beth said. “But he got to come with us to Vermilion last night.”
Jee was silent, picking up her own shopping bags and leading the way to the lingerie department. “That was a test. He passed. He got his reward.”
Beth couldn’t help smiling, remembering Reg’s reward evening at Vermilion. The dinner crowd had almost gone, so the kitchen was able to deal almost exclusively with the massive orders streaming from Reg’s table. Yes, Reg’s. Because, with Jee’s permission, Reg had assumed a role...host? Hollywood producer? pimp?...and ordered for everyone, right down to the dozens of excruciatingly expensive cocktails, and paid with a credit card Jee slipped him under the table. And their audience had lapped it up. The post-dinner crowd consisted almost entirely of wealthy, attractive, vain young people, but Reg’s table had been the focus of all eyes.
Beth herself hadn’t minded the looks she got.
Her roommates had given her a lot to think about. As they dined, she became aware of moments when she judged the clothes of their audience the way a well-bred North Shore socialite of fifty would judge them. More, she recognized the anger, jealousy, and despair that she felt underneath her haughty thoughts. Every time she caught herself criticizing them with cranky mother-of-two-adult-kids thoughts, she reminded herself, They’re young. They can afford to dress foolishly. Extreme fashion is supposed to be ugly, because it sets off the beauty that is youth. And every time, when she felt that plunge of despair knowing she would never be young enough to wear such clothes, she looked around the table and reminded herself, But I can wear them. I look as good as they do.
Last night, as the cocktail glasses came and went and everyone else in the room hushed whenever her table burst into a roar of laughter, Beth had felt herself beginning to relax. She was with her squad.
Today, she felt as if she were splitting in half. Part of her, the old Blake’s-Beth part, was appalled at the amount of money she was spending on her own adornment. That money should go into Jeff’s startup fund. It should pay for Darleen’s kids’ daycare. Blake needed a new car. He always needed a new car.
The other part of her was scoffing at the top of her lungs. Blake had owned four Mercedes vehicles at the time of the divorce. One had been brand new. He’d had to have it, because the other partners must never know that his financials were rocky. Darleen’s husband pulled down six figures. He could have paid for their wedding himself, if Blake had let him. Everyone spent freely on themselves except her.
She didn’t bring any of this up to Jee. It seemed too selfish.
“Will Reg get more privileges, now that he’s passed the test?” she said instead, picking out bras by how pretty they were, not by size. She could fit any bra she liked now.
“Nah, he’ll fuck up again soon.”
Beth suppressed a gasp. “You don’t know that!”
He will,” Jee said confidently. “The convenient thing about having a dickhead like Reg for a sub is that you can’t give him anything without having to slap him down ten minutes later. He can’t help himself. It’s like he has Tourette’s of the soul.”
“But it’s so mean. First you reward him, then you punish him, then you reward him, then you punish him.”
“He thrives on the drama,” Jee said.
“Are you sure it isn’t you who love the drama?” Beth said drily.
Jee swung around to stare at her. “My, my. You’re unfurling fragrant new petals of assertiveness.”
Beth stood her ground. “I call it like I see it.”
Jee’s eyes narrowed. “Got any other ideas for how to reform him, then? Because if we don’t boss him, he’ll boss us. You really want him telling you how to dress, deciding who and when you’ll fuck, and demanding a blow job from you before breakfast every day?”
Remembering Reg as nature had brought him to them, Beth shuddered. “Well, no.”
This made no peace with Jee. “You still think you’re a whore. Or you will be, if you ever make your quota.”
“Ouch. At least I started, right?” Beth said placatingly. She caught the hot, speculative eye of a rich-looking man in a suit who was buying thong undies, and suppressed a smile. All she had to do to score was tempt him. Nine-tenths of her work was already happening in his head. It was counter-productive for her to be nice, too.
“Don’t weasel around.” Jee looked serious but not dangerous yet. “You won’t make friends by feeling morally superior. Plus, if you bring a load of self-hatred into this job, it’s gonna start to smell, and we’ll notice that.” For Jee that was almost sensitive.
Not for the first time, Beth realized that when she said yes to Delilah, she had bought into more complications than she’d expected. She had expected to despise herself for committing what had seemed at the time to be an entertaining form of suicide. She hadn’t bargained for the team’s weird esprit. She’d never dreamed that her own issues might have a deleterious effect on the other succubi.
“I don’t know how else to feel about it,” she confessed.
Jee looked at her speculatively in a way that made her nervous. “Maybe you should work for Reg for a while. I have an idea that the way he thinks our job should go is a lot like how you think it should go.”
Beth drew back in horror against a mannequin in a peach silk teddy. “That’s not nice.”
“No, I’m serious. Reg would treat you like a real whore. And then when we put him back in his dog bed, you’ll be in a position to see the difference.”
Prickles ran over Beth’s skin. “Uh, no thanks.” She paid for her bras with Blake Shanley’s AmEx, disturbed at the bubbling, plunging emotions and, yes, physical lust that Jee’s suggestion caused.
They gathered up their bags and moved toward the escalator. Beth hoped the conversation was over.
No such luck. “So what would be the difference between you working for Reg and you working with us?” Boy, Jee just wouldn’t leave it alone.
Beth hunched a shoulder, feeling dirty just thinking about it. “He’s—he’s disrespectful. Even when he’s, well, living on a dog bed.”
“Good observation.”
Beth rode the up escalator, thinking. “I don’t think he’s an awful person inside. But the most awful things come out of his mouth.”
“Probably why Ish sent him to us.”
“But you work for Ish! Why would you want to deal with someone who—why would they send you a manager who—”
“They don’t trust women down there.
They really aren’t that different from the Home Office. They’re afraid we’re smarter than they are, and they feel more secure if they have us under male control.”
“But don’t they?” Beth felt completely befuddled. “I mean, you—we—have a male supervisor. In the Regional Office.”
“Look around you,” Jee said, stepping off the escalator. “Do you see any men telling us what to do?”
At that moment Beth heard a male voice behind and below her say, “Mrs. Saunders?” She turned instinctively.
Detective Doyle stood below her on the escalator.
Her skin rippled with panic. She stumbled at the end of the escalator. Detective Doyle stepped forward and caught her under the elbow, and a rush of shock at his nearness washed over her. As she backed away from him, she saw Jee walking briskly away and into a cosmetics store.
Beth made a tiny squeak of protest.
Jee never looked back.
“You okay, Mrs. Saunders?” Doyle said.
Beth stood there staring at him, feeling frozen. “I’m—I’m not Mrs. Saunders. I’m Beth.” For a dreadful moment she forgot her new alias. Then it came back to her. “Beth Asucar.”
“In that case,” Detective Doyle said, coming closer and gripping her arm firmly above the elbow, “maybe you can explain why you’re using her husband’s credit card.” She felt her mouth flapping stupidly. He checked her out deliberately, head to toe, his grip still uncomfortably tight on her arm. She was glad she was wearing a modest shell and capris for once. “Let’s go sit down somewhere.”
She nodded convulsively, and they turned and moved down the escalator again.
He wouldn’t let go of her arm. Panic filled her. His body was like a furnace beside hers on the escalator. Where was Jee? Could anybody save her? She felt his grip deep inside her body, as if her blood were thickening and growing stupid at his touch.
He steered her into a restaurant and all the way to the back, to a table in a corner. There he tenderly parked her in a chair and arranged her shopping bags around her where she would trip over them if she sprang up and tried to flee.
She was thinking like prey. She needed to clear her head. Think like a predator. What would Jee do?
The waitress brought them iced tea.
The whole time, he hadn’t said a word. He just smiled.
By now Beth had had time to come up with answers to his first question and a couple more she could imagine.
His brown eyes were gentle, with lovely smiling crow’s feet.
Her heart wouldn’t stop thundering.
Oh boy, was she in trouble.
“The credit card, Beth?”
She sipped iced tea. “He gave it to me. Blake Shanley.”
“When did he give it to you?”
“Let me think.” How long ago was that fateful meal at Barclay’s, with the interminable Blake-a-thon that followed, and the humiliating aftermath as she scrambled through a bathroom window? “Monday?” Less than a week. How was that possible?
“And when did you meet him?”
She swallowed. “That night. I never saw him before in my life. He came up to our—my table and we hit it off.”
“I guess so. If he gave you his credit card that night.”
Under the table, his knee touched hers, sending heat up her thigh so fast that her eyelids fluttered.
“Does he want it back?” she said boldly. Stop. Stop feeling like this.
Detective Doyle pushed his lips together. “I wouldn’t know. He skipped town.”
Her jaw dropped. She hadn’t heard this from Darleen. “I don’t believe it.”
“Why wouldn’t he vanish?” He shrugged. “His ex-wife disappears before she can collect a settlement, we bring him in for questioning, and the same day he makes bail, we find her blood and her phone in a bachelor pad he’s been keeping for nine years. Oh, and his employer has suspended him. But that happened after you saw him last—right?”
Beth shook her head numbly. Nine years? The kids were still in ballet and lacrosse. That was back when his bonuses stopped. The bottom had dropped out of commercial real estate. Her breath caught. The bonuses did stop, didn’t they? Then she remembered Blake telling her that he’d had to hide his bonuses from his wife, because she was so money-greedy. “Suspended?”
“My guess, he’d been pulling some raw stuff at his company for a while and they used this flap about his ex-wife to dump him. I don’t have to tell you what bastards these real estate guys can be.”
She felt herself nodding absently as she remembered those years, which she was beginning to think of as the middle years of her marriage, a finite thing with a beginning, middle, and end. The kids ten and thirteen. The enormous house in Glencoe. Her suddenly-added socialite duties, charities, business entertaining, all of them Blake’s idea. She would rather have spent the time with the kids. She’d done it all because she had to. Because she wouldn’t give up. Now she was beginning to realize that those were the signs that it was time to give up on Blake.
“I don’t want to offend you,” Detective Doyle said, breaking in on her thoughts. “But there were some photographs in his apartment I’d like you to look at. Whoever they are, they’re wearing masks. But you might be able to identify them from, uh, other clues.” He reached into his coat and pulled out an envelope.
Beth took it with trembling hands. The photos were worse than she remembered. “Oh!” She winced and looked away. “Really, Detective!”
“Please, Mrs. S—Beth. For me? I got nothin’ here, and a woman may have been murdered. Take a look.”
Swallowing again, Beth flipped quickly through the pictures. She must have been drunk. Hot blushes of humiliation rolled over her in waves. She and Jee, wearing the skimpiest paper masks, had tangled their long limbs on the bed, pretending to do things Beth preferred not to remember. Oh, dear God. But here it was in lurid color. She noticed the fancy blonde streaking on the fair-haired girl’s head, just like the streaks in her own hair now. Nervously, she lifted a hand and ran it over her head, thinking of making the streaks go away, and tossed the photos on the table with the other hand. How young she looked! She would never have recognized herself, if she didn’t remember, more vividly by the minute, doing those disgusting things. I’m not that tall, she thought foolishly. Nobody is.
“Do you know either of the women in these pictures?”
“No!”
He was looking at her, at her hair. Oh, heavens. He said gently, “Here’s the thing, Beth. You meet a guy who gives you a very high-power credit card on your first date, and within days he is detained for questioning about his missing ex-wife, who has bled all over his place, and as soon as he’s released, he vanishes. But you’re still using his credit card.”
His voice hardened. “You gave me a fake address and a fake phone number. That is okay with random dorks you meet in a bar, Beth, but it doesn’t fly with the police. Being a hot little number doesn’t actually cut you any slack at all.”
She sucked in an offended breath. “How dare you!”
“Want to tell me about the fake address and phone?” He wasn’t letting up at all. She covered her face with her hands. Gentle again, he said, “You’re a rookie at prostitution, aren’t you, Beth?”
Shame stabbed her to the heart. She covered her head with her arms.
“Here’s what I think happened, Beth. You met Mrs. Saunders and heard all about her ex-husband fucking around with money. She got you to entrap him. You got his credit card. You and your friends trashed his place and left those pictures, I’m guessing for the girlfriend to find, and yes, you were right, she did set you up to meet me at the art gallery. Maybe Mrs. Saunders paid you to do those pictures at her ex-husband’s little love shack. Maybe you’re getting paid via the credit card. But then Saunders murdered his wife, and the whole thing blew up in your face.”
Beth shuddered with every sentence he spoke. It was all so very close to the truth. And so shameful.
“You’re a nice kid, Bet
h. You have no clue how this world works, do you? I’m not going to bust you for using the credit card. Saunders isn’t around to complain about the charges you’re running up, so I guess you haven’t broken the law there yet. If he’s skipped for good, that’ll be AmEx’s problem. But I will ask you this.”
Embarrassed to be hiding under her arms, she sat up. Meeting his eye was the hardest thing she could remember doing since the divorce.
Detective Doyle leaned forward. His craggy face softened. He put his hand over hers, sending her heart into double-bumps and making her lower body flood with heat. “If he contacts you again, let me know. Here’s my card.” He slipped it between her first two fingers, a gesture that felt indecently intimate.
She glanced around the restaurant. No help anywhere in sight.
He stood, took her chin in his hand, and tilted her face back until she made eye contact with him again. “Don’t panic, Beth. You have friends.”
Then he got up and left, sticking her with the bill for iced tea.
She stood and whirled to glare after him, feeling on the edge of tears and offended by the casualness of his touch, only to find that he had gone only a few feet away. He put up his hand. His phone was in it. The simulated snick-sound of a camera shutter closing told her that he had just taken her picture.
“Hey!” She swiped at him, but he backed away, grinning, and strode out of the restaurant.
Why on earth had he done that? Other than to photograph the face of his second-best suspect in a possible murder case, a woman heretofore without identification or history or any known address or phone. Beth put money on the table, gathered up her bags, and went to the ladies’ room, ostensibly to pee, but actually, she realized to her humiliation, to see what Detective Doyle had taken a picture of.
To her shock, the face of old-Beth, Blake’s Beth, looked back at her in the ladies’ room mirror. She looked younger than she had in ten years, but she was very definitely, identifiably Beth Saunders.
Oh boy, was she in trouble.
To Beth’s unspeakable relief, Jee sailed into the restroom. “Okay, what happen—oh. Oh, shit,” Jee said, looking at Beth’s face in the mirror.
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