That was my problem: I hadn’t been using my brain. I’d let my cock make my decisions for me, always a foolhardy strategy.
I checked my watch. It was only a few minutes after one. There was time to kill.
I started to walk again. The city was spectacular, as it always is in autumn. The streets teemed with pedestrians, mostly vacationing Europeans taking advantage of the weak dollar. The air was crisp, the temperature pleasant, the sun still brilliant and strong before taking a powder for the winter. Even though Soho was one of my favorite neighborhoods, nothing snagged my attention today, least of all the beautiful women I passed every few steps or so. In fact, I despised the sight of them. They were the reason I had to do the bidding of some cheap gumshoe today.
I crossed Broadway against the river of humanity and slipped into Balthazar. At the bar I found a seat next to a couple of skinny model types, ordered an expensive beer, and tried to get absorbed in the comings and goings of the chichi crowd, but all I could think about was what was going to happen when I came face to face with Norman Wellington.
I didn’t enjoy the drink. In fact, when I was through, I couldn’t even remember tasting it. I paid up and went downstairs to the men’s room to take a leak. The little dark man who deferentially passed out the hand towels smiled at me and with an accent whispered, “Thank you, sir, thank you,” when I gave him a couple of rolled-up bills. He couldn’t know it, but I was jealous of him and his peace of mind.
I went back out to the street, and after wandering in a few more circles, finally found myself on West Broadway, gazing across the street at the hotel, trying to guess which of the men going inside I was supposed to meet. Of course if Wellington was already in there waiting, it was a fruitless exercise.
I glanced at my watch again—two o’clock on the nose.
What I was about to do suddenly seemed like the most reckless thing in the world.
But it’s nothing, I assured myself as I pulled my hat down to my eyebrows and darted across the boulevard. It’s just a meeting, and what can this clod Wellington really do to me? If he accuses me of something, I’ll just deny everything, everything, like I would if Monica was the one leveling accusations . . .
I wasn’t making myself feel better. Head down, I climbed the fancy staircase to the lobby. I looked around (for what? for who—Gretchen?), then darted across the floor to the elevator.
A car was waiting, and I had it to myself. When I debarked on seven, I passed a dark-skinned man in a maroon vest—some sort of staff, no doubt. He nodded, and I nodded back. I’d kept my big Bulgari sunglasses on; I didn’t want anyone getting a clean look at my face. On the other hand, I’d been here with Gretchen two or three other times already. Wellington was right about one thing: I did know the place, but I’d never seen the same people twice. I’d never set eyes on that black guy before. Turnover had to be high. That was good.
But who was I kidding? There were probably security cameras everywhere . . . I peered into the corners of the ceiling—nothing. Maybe they were deployed only in certain areas, like the entrance and the lobby.
The room number Wellington had given me was at the north end of the seventh floor. How had he known it in advance? When you booked a hotel room, you were given a key card at the desk and that’s when you learned which room you were staying in. Unless you were a regular, of course, or you were already an occupant.
I looked up and down the hall. No sign of the maid service, or anyone else for that matter. The place was as quiet as a funeral parlor. Nobody sits around a hotel in the middle of a spectacular day in New York.
By the time I stopped in front of 708 and put my ear to the door, I was as nervous as a cat. I thought I could hear the murmur of a TV set on the other side, but maybe it was just the ever-present murmur of the city outside.
A wildly happy thought occurred to me: What if Wellington hadn’t shown up? What if the whole escapade was a false alarm, some kind of cruel joke, or misunderstanding, or maybe even a veiled threat or reprisal by Gretchen for not meeting her that weekend I’d taken Monica to the dog show?
What if by some lucky miracle whatever Wellington wanted to talk to me about had already been cleared up?
Sure it had. And the moon was made of cream cheese and scallions.
No, I knew the real deal. Nothing bad ever went away on its own.
My heart sank. I raised my fist and knocked softly.
After an excruciating fifteen seconds, the door slowly opened. A beam of refracted sunlight from the window across the room hit me squarely in the eye.
Wellington wasn’t at all what I expected. He was a wiry little pissant, only about five four or five, somewhere in his mid-to-late thirties, the type of underfed specimen who looked like he could get lost in his clothes, who worked just a little too much L.A. Looks gel into his hair. It wasn’t that he was repulsive, exactly; I could see from his fine, almost delicate features how women might even find him attractive.
He looked me up and down like a side of beef. Being a shrimp himself, he must have loved pushing people twice his size around.
“Marzten—come on in.”
He turned his back on me and took his time crossing the room. He picked up the remote, switched off the TV, and dropped into an upholstered chair. Then he crossed his legs, the picture of confidence and command.
Now that I’d encountered him in the flesh, I hated the guy even more than I did before.
“Why don’t you have a seat.”
Wellington was dressed in a conservative suit, Brooks Brothers style, looking like he was about to attend a meeting of the board of directors. On the black cherrywood footstool in front of him sat a squat glass half-filled with clear liquid. Water—or gin, or vodka.
I shook my head. I didn’t want to sit. I was way too jacked up to sit. Whatever was going on here I wanted to get over with as quickly as possible.
Wellington noticed my agitation.
“Hey—relax,” he coaxed in his irksome, nasal voice. “This is gonna take a little time. You don’t want to be standing there for half an hour, do you?”
Fuck. Was I really going to have to endure his crap for so long? Could it really be so involved? Was my predicament all that complicated?
I took the matching chair against the wall.
“Something to drink? Unless you wanna order something from downstairs, I’m afraid it’s nothing but tap water. You’ll probably find a cup in the bathroom.”
“No—thanks.”
Wellington made a face, as if he were completely indifferent to me. “Suit yourself.” What I thought, needed, or wanted meant nothing whatsoever to him.
I looked rapidly around the cozy room, with its tasteful golden walls and ceiling. What was I searching for—a video camera? A tape recorder? I didn’t see anything, except for the lamps, a desk, and a double bed, the exact kind Gretchen and I had made love on. The memory seemed unreal now, as if it had happened in another lifetime.
Was Wellington wired? Maybe that was it.
Go right at it, Rich, I told myself.
“Why’d you want to talk to me?”
“I don’t really wanna talk to you,” Wellington scoffed. “Be honest with you, talking to you doesn’t interest me in the least.” He smiled patronizingly. “The reason I brought you here is to explain to you the fix you’re in.”
At that moment a nerve in my right hand went berserk, causing the index finger to twitch violently.
“And . . . what fix is that?” My voice was a measly croak.
Wellington tilted his head and grinned, showing a set of small, perfectly white, even choppers. “Not all that bad, if you wanna know the truth.”
Some reassurance. “Yeah, I want to know the truth.”
“All I need from you is a little cooperation . . . and we’ll be finished here.”
My finger was still jumping a
round like a live wire, but there was a flicker of hope in my belly. Maybe this guy could be worked with.
“Except for certain arrangements, that is.”
Hearing those words I felt a sharp pain in my chest, right between the pectoral muscles. All of a sudden I was having trouble catching my breath. Maybe I was about to suffer a massive heart attack. Maybe I was about to die. If that happened, maybe I’d be better off.
“Arrangements . . . what kind of arrangements?”
“Before I go into all that, I’m gonna educate you on some history,” Wellington announced smugly. He nestled his skinny ass more tightly into the chair, as if he was warming to the task.
“It was just about four years ago that Leonard Trecker first asked me to follow his wife.”
Four years ago? What the hell? He has the wrong guy here.
I must have looked confused.
“Oh, come now, Marzten—you don’t really think you’re the first guy to get into Gretchen’s panties, do you?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I looked around the room. “Where is she? Is she here?”
My voice was rising. I had to restrain myself from shouting. I felt my fists clenching and unclenching involuntarily. A rivulet of sweat was traveling in a cool stream down the center of my back. If I was going to have a heart attack a few seconds ago, now I was convinced I was on the verge of a stroke.
“Go ahead and take the place apart, Marzten, and good luck to you . . . Hey, I’m sorry if it’s a disappointment to you, but what can I say? That’s the way it is. In fact, you’re looking at one of the dudes who got into her before you did.”
As if he’d just heard a really good joke, Wellington barked out a laugh. It was the bloodcurdling laugh of a hyena. I felt myself flush, first with humiliation, then with embarrassment and anger. Knowing that this scummy little twerp had made it with Gretchen infuriated me, because I realized then that I was actually in love—at least some kind of love—with the little whore. Even worse, my lovely delusions about her and myself—which I hadn’t really admitted to myself until this moment—were collapsing like a flimsy house of cards.
I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat there waiting to hear more.
“See, when Mr. Trecker retained me to tail Gretchen, I couldn’t help but develop a thing for her myself. Let’s face it, Marzten—what guy wouldn’t? All you gotta do is take one look at her, for Christ’s sake—am I right? I mean, she is one hot little piece of ass if there ever was one. So rather than blow the whistle on her to her old man, I decided to do something different . . . something I never planned on doing, by the way—confronted her after one of her trysts with the guy she was screwing at the time.”
He shook his head, cracking up at the memory.
“I gotta tell you, Marzten, she didn’t know what hit her—sort of like you, right now. I laid out what I had on her, and she, uh, persuaded me not to rat her out to her husband, who happens to be not all that loose and understanding when it comes to his wife’s need for freedom, despite what I’m sure she’s told you.”
The English muffins I’d eaten for breakfast were sloshing around in my stomach like garbage in New York harbor. I was about to barf, I was sure of it. This piece-of-shit flatfoot was crackers. When was he going to start making sense?
“Well, it didn’t take all that much to persuade me . . .”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Could any of it be true? But even if it was all complete and total bullshit, I was mesmerized by the story. Though I didn’t get the whole picture yet, I knew I’d been taken for some kind of a ride.
What I needed to know was just how far.
“Anyway, once Gretchen and I found our rhythm—shall we say—I got my hackles up at the jerk who’d been pounding her,” Wellington went on. “My male ego, right? Believe that shit? And see, by now I had no intention whatsoever of telling Leonard Trecker the truth about his wife—I could do that anytime, the way I saw it, in the event I ever needed to. So I set up a meeting with the greaseball she’d been banging—his name was Tony something or other—and we came to . . . an agreement.”
No—I had no clue what Wellington was talking about after all. All I knew was that I felt like an immense stone, a stone the size of an elephant, was about to roll down on me, and that if I didn’t get away, I was going to be crushed like an insect. As a matter of fact, an insect was all I was.
“And that’s the way it was with the next two, Bret and Larry. Once in a while it didn’t quite work out, because the guy in question was single and didn’t have anything to lose, or he had nothing to come to the negotiating table with . . .”
Still no clue. The scene had deteriorated from the surreal to the scary. The room was twirling around me like a carousel. Wellington picked up his glass and knocked back the rest of his drink.
“See, Marzten, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a honey of a deal for me. I get to keep my relationship with Gretchen reasonably intact, and every time her husband suspects her of screwing around, he calls me and I step right in and make the acquaintance of someone like yourself. And the arrangement keeps the old fella happy. He’s assured that his wife is lily-innocent—which is what I always tell him, of course—and I draw another fat paycheck. Another two fat paychecks, actually.”
“And you . . . you’ve got the balls to tell me this happy horsesh—”
“I’m telling you because there’s no point in beating around the bush. We get straight to the point faster that way, know what I’m saying? Why waste my time, and why waste yours? Thankfully, Gretchen doesn’t mind playing along with the deal. She gets to save her marriage—and her lifestyle, which I have to tell you is lavish, very lavish, if you know the Hamptons—and I get what I want. That’s the dollars and cents end of it, see? Get it now?”
I must have been staring like a bumpkin, because Wellington repeated, “Get it?” and then I nodded, though I still wasn’t completely sure that I did.
“After I caught on to what Gretchen was all about, I understood that it was better to just let her go her merry way, do her thing. So she’s a fucking slut—so what? Why ruin a good thing over something like that, right? You wouldn’t throw Paris Hilton out of bed because she knows how to suck a cock like a pro, would you? So long as I don’t catch any exotic diseases, what does it matter who and what she does? I’ll bet you didn’t know that Gretchen’s the one who usually places the ad, did you? You can dress an alley cat in fine clothes, but it doesn’t change the fact that she’s an alley cat. So whenever I’m feeling petty jealousy, I take it out on guys like you . . .”
“Okay . . .”
“Though I will tell you this, Marzten—I got the feeling Gretchen really liked you. Hell, you lasted longer than all the others. And man, did she keep you a secret. I didn’t even catch on until just a couple weeks ago.”
Was that supposed to make me feel good?
“I mean, she put up a hell of a fight to keep you around, let me tell you. Maybe you got a ten-inch cock—I couldn’t tell from the pictures.” He smirked. “Though I could tell pretty much everything else.”
“The . . . pictures?”
Sure, the pictures. He’d mentioned pictures on the telephone.
Wellington reached to the floor and picked up a nine-by-eleven manila envelope. He turned it over, shook it, and out came a sheaf of paper. He dropped it on the footstool.
“What’s—”
“Check ’em out.”
I got up and picked up the stuff.
Digital color photos: Of Gretchen and me. In a hotel room. Not the Soho Grand, but one of the others, I couldn’t place which. But it didn’t matter where it was.
We were nude. In the first, Gretchen was riding me. And my face was recognizable. In the next I was on top of her, missionary style. And there was that bright red birthmark, plain as day, on my lower back, like I’d b
een branded. In the third we were side by side, my glossy dick halfway inside her. They’d been shot from somewhere beyond the foot of the bed.
Jesus fucking Christ.
The rest were more of the same. There could be no mistaking who each of us was. It was like we’d invited the photographer in to do whatever he wanted while we pumped away, completely oblivious to his presence, like actors in a porn film.
“How the hell did you—”
“Never mind,” said Wellington, waving his hand. “It’s my job.”
I dropped the sheets on the floor. The only way those pictures could have been taken was if Gretchen herself had—
I still didn’t quite get it, not all the way. But I was starting to, a little more.
Anxiety, morphing into flat-out panic, forced me out of the chair again.
“All right, what is it you’re after? I mean, what the fuck do you want out of me?” I heard my voice growing hysterical.
Wellington’s head jerked backward with surprise.
“Do I have to spell it out for you? I thought you were a smart dude, Marzten. Gretchen told me how slick you were, setting this whole thing up. How you pulled the wool over your wife’s eyes. Pretty damned good, I thought. But maybe you’re not all that swift after all . . . So okay, let me put it to you as plain and direct as I can: for the right fee, I don’t talk about you and Gretchen to anybody.”
Right. Something like this was what I’d expected.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. That is, if you deliver on time.”
“Like who exactly am I supposed to be afraid of your blabbing to?”
“Well, Leonard Trecker, for one—since I’m sure you don’t want your name dragged into a messy divorce case as a correspondent. Because then it’s a matter of public record. Then, of course, there’s your wife.”
Of course! That’s what it was all about! Extortion. Blackmail. In the end, despite all the little twists and turns, it was simple.
“And what if I go to Trecker and tell him what you’re doing?”
No Strings Page 7