Satan's Sisters

by Star Jones

  When they went back out into the living room, they were greeted by the other half of their orgy scene. La—ah was naked below the waist, with Ramon’s face buried between her legs. She was moaning and thrashing and actually throwing Shelly’s pillows across the room.

  “Girl, you need to stop throwing around my furniture!” Shelly said, laughing as she said it. La—ah’s eyes flew open. She screamed and pushed Ramon’s head away from her.

  “What the fuck . . . ?” Ramon said. He lifted his head and saw two pairs of eyes staring at him from the other side of the couch.

  “What happened?” he said.

  “I think it’s time for us to go,” Sly said. He shook his head in regret. “Sorry, my dude.”

  Ramon pushed himself up from the couch as La—ah hurriedly pulled her panties back over her plump ass.

  “LaDashah, you’re welcome to go with him,” Shelly said. “I don’t want to break nothing up. Ramon can do some more muff diving—he just can’t do it here.”

  La—ah started to blush. “Muff diving? Damn, Shelly!”

  “Yo, I think you need to wipe your face before we go,” Sly said to Ramon. He turned and headed toward the door without looking back. Ramon followed him slowly. But Ramon did look back.

  “Can I call you?” he said to La—ah.

  La—ah nodded flirtatiously. When the door had closed behind them, La—ah and Shelly looked at each other and burst into laughter.

  As Lizette approached the office on Friday morning, she had renewed pep in her step. She had spoken briefly with Martin Peters, the Patterson & White lawyer, and he seemed confident that a copy of Missy’s manuscript could be in her hands by the end of next week. And the night before, the menu for Maxine’s dinner party was finalized with the caterers, so there was a strong possibility the dinner party would actually proceed without a major hitch. At first Lizette was a bit insulted that she hadn’t been invited to attend the party, but now she was glad to be spared. She would have been a nervous wreck the entire night, just waiting for some disaster to strike. This way, she could go out with her girlfriends on Saturday night and get drunk. Or even better, go out with Channing and finish the night cuddled in bed with his strong arms wrapped around her.

  Lizette’s good feelings quickly were forgotten the moment she stepped into the West Side building that held the set and the offices of The Lunch Club. Something was amiss. Secretaries were flitting about, talking in hushed tones, as if they were trying to pretend they weren’t talking. She saw Callie Sherman literally run down the hall and disappear into Maxine’s office. That could not be good at all.

  “What’s going on?” Lizette asked her secretary, Rena, before she went into her office.

  “Ooh, Lizette, I’ve been waiting for you,” Rena said, pursing her lips. “I tried to call you. Maxine has been looking for you. I think it’s about that website, chattercrazy.”

  Lizette felt her heart leap into her throat. No, not that damn website again. She rushed into the office and turned on her computer. In the seconds it took the machine to turn on, Lizette rocked back and forth in her chair. To an outside observer she might have looked like a mental patient.

  When Lizette got on to the chattercrazy.com site and saw the home page, she audibly gasped.

  “‘The Lunch Club’ About to Fire a Host!” the headline blared across the screen. Lizette clutched her hands against her chest as she read on, almost as if she were praying.

  Sources from the set of “The Lunch Club” have told chattercrazy.com that the venerable daytime institution is on the verge of firing one of the hosts because of faltering ratings. While show insiders haven’t yet decided who might be the victim of the axe, early speculation has centered around Whitney Harlington, the award-winning former NBN News correspondent, and funny lady Molly McCarthy Stein. The two newest members of the cast, Shelly Carter and Dara Cruz, are considered somewhat untouchable, since they attract a demographic—young and non-white—that the show has been desperate to court. “The Lunch Club” recently has been losing consistently in the ratings battle to shows like “Regis and Kelly” and, in some markets, even local news and current events shows. NBN president Riley Dufrane has ordered Maxine Robinson, the show’s creator and boss, to replace one of the hosts as a way of shaking things up and perhaps attracting desperately needed new viewers.

  Lizette felt like her head was caught in a vise and someone was squeezing it tighter and tighter. She wanted to open her mouth and scream as loud as she could. But she couldn’t do that. By the time she had reached the fifth sentence of the chattercrazy story, Lizette had one word bouncing around in her head: Channing! She now had a very strong suspicion that her beloved boyfriend was the source of these stories, the wizard behind chattercrazy.com. It all made sense now, how the stories were all sounding like they might have come out of Lizette’s own mouth. The site had no byline or contact information—both she and Maxine had tried hard to get it—but now she knew why. Her adoring boyfriend, the man she planned to marry and have father her children, had fucked her—and not in the biblical sense.

  In addition to the pounding in her head, Lizette now also felt a shortness of breath. She tried to calm down, to tell herself that she needed to relax and take deep breaths. But deep breaths couldn’t mask the panic that was creeping up her spine, across her neck, into her skull. Even though she might be able to identify the possible source of these leaks, that information would not go far in saving her job. Once word raced around the building that it was Lizette’s boyfriend/wannabe fiancé writing this stuff, she was certain she’d be escorted outside by security in a matter of seconds.

  There was only one possible course of action to save her job: she had to get her hands on Missy’s manuscript. Right away. She was so desperate now, she probably would agree to drop to her knees and give Martin Peters a blow job in the middle of Times Square if he would hand over the manuscript after he zipped up his pants. But until she got her hands on the book, she would have to figure out how to lie low, try to make herself invisible. She looked down at her phone and saw that the messages from journalists were already starting to stack up. She didn’t see how she was going to be able to escape this story. And she was likely going to have to spend most of the day around Maxine anyway, as they put the finishing touches on the dinner party. But maybe she could run out and say that she had some last-minute party planning she had to take care of. She just couldn’t imagine even looking in Maxine’s face right now.

  Just then, Lizette’s office door flew open. Lizette jumped in her chair, frightened by the intrusion. She looked up and saw Karen Siegel, whose face was wet and eyes red and puffy. Clearly, Karen had been crying.

  “Oh God, Lizette, how could you?” Karen said. She started to cry once again.

  “How could I what?” Lizette said, trying to hold back her own tears.

  “I know you must have seen that fuckin’ website by now!” Karen said. “I know it must have been you. Nobody else knows! Nobody! And you’re the one with all the media contacts. Why would you want to destroy me like this?”

  “I swear, Karen, I didn’t feed any information to a website,” Lizette said. She was trying to find a way to phrase it so that she wasn’t telling an outright lie.

  “I don’t believe you!” Karen said. She started sobbing loudly. “I don’t even know how I can face Maxine,” she said more softly, more to herself than to Lizette. “What can I tell her? She trusted me, she confided in me, now she has this disaster on her hands. Lucky for her she’s just about the only person in the building who can’t be fired.”

  Lizette was mortified. Karen appeared to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and it all was precipitated by Lizette and her indiscretions. But how could she know that she couldn’t talk about her job with her man, of all people? That she had to be careful of her pillow talk, even in the throes of a wonderful orgasm? How could Channing have sold her out like this, just for some stupid website? How important could she possibly have been to
him?

  “Maxine hasn’t come out of her office in an hour,” Karen said. “Whitney and Molly have both been crying in their offices. Don’t ask me how in the hell we’re going to do a show today! They are all distraught—and I don’t blame them. It’s all my fault. I thought I could trust you, but I should have known better.”

  She looked Lizette in the eye, sniffling and shedding tears. “You’re a horrible little bitch, you know that?” Karen said. Her nasty stare lingered for an extra second, then she turned around and was gone.

  Lizette was so shaken that her legs felt paralyzed by the emotional trauma. She had no idea what she should do, but she knew that she couldn’t sit there and wait for the assassins to find her. Lizette willed her body to move. She grabbed her pocketbook and her cell phone and fled out of a side door. She had no idea where she would go and what she would do for the rest of the afternoon. Maybe she could buy a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and get shit-faced. Anything to take her mind off this disaster. Her high heels clicked on the sidewalk as she went to the curb to catch a cab. Once again, there was one word bouncing around in her head: Channing!

  ERIC HARLINGTON CHECKED HIS bag for about the twentieth time that morning. He needed to make sure he had all the pieces to make the recordings. He had tested the battery’s charge on the video camera about fifteen times. He couldn’t believe this was about to happen. He had paid for an entire day with these two young girls; he could extend it to an overnight if he was willing to add another five thousand dollars to the pot. He had about that much left. He wasn’t eager to part with it, but he figured the decision would be a no-brainer once he met the girls. For days he had been fantasizing about what they might look like, hoping that they looked like a younger version of the unbelievably beautiful woman who worked the front desk at the hotel where he was staying. A few times he had come close to asking the woman if she had any daughters—and if she might be carrying a few pictures of them. He knew that such thoughts would be alarming and disgusting to most people, but when he was in his hypersexual stalking mode, awaiting his prey in one of these foreign lands, he found it easy to divorce himself from all connections to morality and good judgment. After all, he was in a different land with different rules about such things. These Europeans weren’t nearly so prudish as Americans about husbands having extramarital affairs or, he suspected, about men having sex with girls. Otherwise, this whole production wouldn’t have been so easy for him to arrange. Certainly that was the case in the Asian countries that he had been frequenting before—those parents cared so little about their daughters that he had been offered on more than one occasion (once by the girl’s own mother!) the chance to “buy” one of the girls, to use as a sex slave, for as long as he liked. He had shaken his head in wonder—not so much at the monstrous inhumanity of the offer, but at the assumption that he’d somehow be able to smuggle a young “sex slave” back into the United States with him. What was he supposed to do, stash her in his toiletry bag? He could just see the new airport signs in the United States, warning against liquid containers in excess of three ounces and against stashing young girls in your carry-on luggage.

  Finally, the appointed hour arrived. Eric took several deep breaths and entered the building. It was an old apartment building, about five stories high, made of worn redbrick that was probably at least a century old. He had been given explicit instructions to come to apartment 1C—the door would be unlocked—leave the cash on the table in the living room, then go into the first room on the right to wait for the girls. Eric was pleased that he wouldn’t have interaction with any adults. That had always made him feel a bit squeamish in the past. Interaction with adults could lead to situations where a mother could ask him if he wanted to buy her child.

  Eric walked down a narrow hallway, overwhelmed by the smell of cooking goulash and the sounds behind the doors that he passed. He could hear garbled voices of a conversation in one apartment; a television blared loudly in another. In a distant apartment, he thought he could hear the wail of a crying baby. Or maybe it was a mewling cat?

  When he came upon 1C, he turned the knob and opened the heavy door. He was greeted by an old, sparsely furnished apartment, with a misshapen cloth couch and an old wooden coffee table sitting forlornly in the middle of the living room. There were two windows, but they were covered by drawn shades, giving the room a dark, menacing feel that sent a quick shiver down his spine. He took out the large stack of hundred-dollar bills that represented the remaining balance and placed it carefully on the coffee table. He had wired the initial deposit into a Czech Republic bank account right before he had left for Europe. The instructions were to bring the rest in cash—U.S. currency only. He had laughed at that, as if he would have been trying to find stacks of koruny, the Czech currency.

  Eric hesitated. They must be watching him somehow, on some kind of hidden surveillance. The idea of being recorded on somebody else’s camera was a bit disconcerting. But he was much too far down this road now to get skittish. He would just have to trust his sources. After all, if their intent was some kind of extortion, there was really nothing he could do about it anyway. Trust was a big part of the game when you had a hobby such as his. He looked again around the room, wondering where a camera could be hidden. He noticed an old corroded light fixture in a corner and a lone bulb in the overhead light, with no kind of covering. This place was not intended to exude a feeling of luxury.

  After another deep breath, Eric approached the door to his right. Maybe the girls were already there. He felt his senses heighten as he turned the knob. But the room was empty, containing nothing but a double bed covered by white sheets and a nightstand that could have been an antique. A small window with more drawn shades gave the room a scant amount of light. The walls were covered by faded floral wallpaper and the room smelled a little musty, but it was a scene that was somewhat familiar to Eric. It was a bit more livable than some of the shacks he had entered in Southeast Asia; he was used to having these assignations in places that might be construed as creepy. As he walked toward the bed and sat down gingerly on its edge, Eric wondered for an unfortunate second what Whitney would do if he ever tried to bring her into a room like this to have sex. But he shook his head vigorously. Whitney was the last thing he needed on his mind at a time like this. Besides, Whitney was so uninterested in sex, it wouldn’t matter if he got a suite at the Ritz—she’d still not want him to touch her. If Whitney had been more interested in sex, Eric might not even be in a room like this. Surely her frigid rejection of him in recent years had been a driving force sending him into these rendezvous with young girls. Surely it was, he told himself.

  Finally, Eric loosened up enough to put his bag down on the floor. He checked his watch. It was now ten minutes past the time the meeting was to occur. He was beginning to get antsy. He prayed that nothing had gone wrong.

  When he thought he heard voices outside the door, Eric perked up. The girls were here! Eric felt his pulse quickening. My God, he thought, the moment has finally arrived. He almost couldn’t believe it was about to happen, the culmination of probably his most fervid sexual fantasy. Two young sisters. His mouth actually started to water at the thought of them. He hoped they were very pretty, but he told himself that it didn’t really matter if they weren’t gorgeous. As long as they were slim and not fully developed.

  The door opened and he heard heavier footsteps than he had been expecting. When he saw three male forms enter the room, his heart jumped. What was going on? This wasn’t the plan!

  “Excuse me,” he said, rising quickly from the bed. The men wore serious expressions. They didn’t look like he imagined his European contact to look. In fact, they looked more like cops. He took two steps back and felt himself falling back on the bed. One of the men looked vaguely familiar. Eric was sure he had seen him before.

  “Take it easy,” the first man said in a heavy Czech accent. He had both hands out in front of him, indicating he meant no harm. But Eric was so afraid that he thought he mig
ht soil his pants.

  “Mr. Harlington, we are from the National Police of Czech Republic,” the man said. His voice was stern but somehow kind. Eric, for just a second, thought that maybe this kind man was here to extend some kind of leniency. Maybe they would let him go. Just give him a warning. After all, he hadn’t even done anything wrong yet. Right?

  But then the next voice Eric heard sent a jolt through him so severe that he actually twitched, as if in the throes of a seizure.

  “Mr. Harlington, my name is Drew Finch. I’m from Primeline.”

  Oh God. It was the guy from Primeline, the one who did all those investigative exposé shows that Eric despised but couldn’t stop himself from watching.

  “Oh my God!” Eric cried out. Finch now had a cameraman right next to him, with the lens pointing directly at Eric. Immediately, Eric started blubbering, crying so loudly and severely that snot was shooting from his nose.

  “No, please!” Eric said. He looked again at the camera, his face a mask of horror. Where is the nice man from the Czech police? He looked around madly, for some relief, some escape. A Czech jail would be infinitely superior to this, starring in a Primeline special. Eric wished that he had some kind of cyanide pill or something that could kill him instantly, something he had seen once maybe in a James Bond movie. If he had been able to, he would gladly have chosen to die at that moment.

  “Please forgive me!” he screamed at Finch. “I didn’t do anything!”

  “Mr. Harlington, you know that’s not really true,” Finch said smoothly. He was always so damn smooth and calm. “We know that you had arranged to meet two underage girls here. We have the money you wired into a bank account as payment for these girls, sir, and we saw you just put a stack of cash on the table a few moments ago.”

  Eric was wild-eyed. He knew that he needed to try to control himself. This was on camera and would be beamed across the United States. But control was the last thing he had at his disposal. He thought about getting up from the bed and trying to make a run for it. He must have made some type of movement in that direction because the lead man from the Czech police stepped toward him.