by Meg Cabot
“Well,” Cooper says, “you’re armed now. Just spray them back.”
“The ballplayers are good guys,” I say quickly, seeing the look Pete throws my boyfriend. “They’ll put down their weapons if they hear you say you’re with campus police.”
Pete tosses the paint guns onto the couch, not seeming very reassured. “Who they loading into the meat wagon?” he asks, nodding toward the windows.
I’m not surprised he’s figured out that the siren belonged to an ambulance and that the ambulance has stopped in front of Fischer Hall. Pete’s worked for New York College a long time. His intention is to stay until he can collect his benefits package and retire to his family’s casita in Puerto Rico.
“Someone from the penthouse,” I say.
Pete looks even more displeased. “What’re they doing here? I thought they spend summers at their place in the Hamptons. That way she can get soused on Long Island iced teas without everyone on campus knowing about it.”
Pete’s right: Mrs. Allington, President Allington’s wife, is a woman who has been known to over-imbibe. This has made living in the penthouse of a building in which they have to take the same elevator as seven hundred undergraduates an occasional challenge.
Mrs. Allington is also a woman who keeps a cool head in emergencies . . . enough so that she once saved my life. Not that she’s recognized me ever since. Still, there are few things I wouldn’t do in order to preserve her privacy and reputation.
This, however, is one occasion when she has no need of my discretion.
“I don’t think it’s Mrs. Allington this time,” I say.
Pete looks puzzled. “The president came into the city without her? That’s not like him.”
“No,” I say. “I’m pretty sure the Allingtons aren’t the ones having the unauthorized party.”
“Then who is?” Cooper asks.
“Their son.”
Chapter 3
Bank Card Lover
In the club, bodies tight
Think I may, think I might
See your face across the floor
That’s when you tell me the score
Late at night, lobby light
Press my code, away we go
Hours pass, you make it last,
Just so long as I’ve got the cash
He’s a bank card lover
Girls warned me about him
Just a bank card lover
Don’t let him under your skin
Club is closed, money’s tight
I’m going home alone tonight
I don’t even know his name
But I’m not feeling any shame
I know he’s just a bank card lover
The other girls were right
Just a bank card lover
Gave me the ride of my life
(Dance break, repeat)
“Bank Card Lover”
Performed by Tania Trace
Written by Larson/Sohn
So Sue Me album
Cartwright Records
Three consecutive weeks
in the Top 10 Billboard Hot 100
“Why are we doing this again?” Cooper asks.
We’re alone in one of Fischer Hall’s ancient elevators as it wheezes its way to the penthouse. Pete’s left us to go make sure Simon doesn’t get completely soaked under a hail of paintballs.
“Because Christopher Allington hasn’t exercised the best judgment in the past,” I explain. “I want to make sure he’s not up to his old tricks. That ambulance better be for his mom and not some young girl he roofied.”
Cooper shakes his head. “You always think the best about people, don’t you? That’s what I love most about you, your boundless optimism and faith in the goodness of mankind.”
I narrow my eyes at him . . . but I can’t deny it. There are few people I’ve met since coming to work at Fischer Hall—a job I lucked into after getting kicked off the Cartwright Records label, and then out of my former boyfriend’s bed—whom I haven’t suspected of murder. It’s surprising how often I’ve been right.
Possibly this is an instinct I honed during the years I spent working in the entertainment business. Not that a lot of musicians are murderers, but many of them are damaged in one way or another. Maybe this is what draws them to the profession in the first place. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll are all ways to exorcise your inner demons . . .
Which is how I ended up moving in with Cooper Cartwright. After I found my live-in boyfriend, Jordan—Cooper’s brother and lead singer of Easy Street—exorcising some of his inner demons with Cartwright Records’ newest rising star, Tania Trace, in our bed, I had nowhere else to go.
Cooper and I came to a very businesslike arrangement: He rented me a floor of his downtown brownstone in exchange for my doing his client billing.
How we managed to keep it businesslike for nearly a year, I have no idea, especially given that in the past three months since we revealed our true feelings to each another we’ve managed to boink in every room of the house too many times to count (except for the basement, due to spiders).
“Well,” I say, in my own defense, “the last time he and I talked, Christopher said he was starting a dance club or nightclub or something. Isn’t that what guys like him do? Roofie girls’ drinks?”
The son of the college president and I are not friends, to say the least, mostly because for a while he was not only actually sleeping with every Fischer Hall resident he could lure into his bed, I also suspected him of murdering them. The fact that he was proved to be innocent of the latter is beside the point. The former is still true.
“Why would a budding nightclub mogul who likes to sleep with young girls live with his parents?” Cooper asks.
“I’m pretty sure Christopher’s got his own place in Williamsburg,” I say. “He only crashes here when his parents aren’t in town.”
Or so I’ve inferred when I’ve seen him slinking from the elevator across from my office early in the morning to sign out an overnight guest. It’s always highly noticeable when anyone in Fischer Hall steps off the elevators before ten, since very few students at New York College schedule their classes prior to eleven, but it’s especially noticeable when it’s the president’s son and a blond woman in her late twenties wearing business attire, Louboutins, and a $20,000 gold Rolex. Although I suppose it’s nice that Christopher’s found a friend his own age for a change.
“Williamsburg,” Cooper says with a grunt. “Of course. Where else would any self-respecting young roofier be residing these days but the current hub for indie rock and hipster culture?”
I give him a sour look. “Considering they’ve all been priced out of the Village by this college, celebrities, and trust fund babies like you,” I say pointedly, as the numbers on the dial above our heads reach 20, “where else are they supposed to live?”
“Touché,” he says with a grin. “But all I inherited was the brownstone, not a trust fund. You’re the only celebrity in this neighborhood. What I wonder is why—”
The doors slide open before he can finish his question or I can protest—I was a celebrity back when the Taco Bell Chihuahua was popular, and I’m about as widely recognized now as that deceased canine—and we see that the EMTs are in the hallway outside the Allingtons’ penthouse.
Christopher Allington is standing in his parents’ doorway, holding a clipboard and a pen and saying, “Sorry to be such a pain, but if you guys could just sign these waivers before you come in, that’d be super.”
The two uniformed ambulance attendants, holding their heavy kits beneath their arms, are looking pissed off.
“What kind of waiver?” the female EMT wants to know.
“It’s a quick release stating that we can use your—” Christopher breaks off when he sees me and Cooper in the hallway. “Oh hey,” he says, his expression going from one of cordial welcome to one of complete disdain.
Then, just as quickly, the cordiality is back again. But there’s an unde
niable coldness in his voice as he stares at us. Who can blame him for being touchy, really, considering the murder thing?
“What brings you folks up here?” he asks.
“The ambulance parked in front of my building,” I say just as coldly.
“Your building?” I can tell that Christopher means for his laugh to sound casual, but there’s a hard edge to it. “I believe this building belongs to New York College, of which my father is the president. So it’s not really your building, is it?”
Christopher is wearing a blue dress shirt, white trousers, and a white jacket. He’s sweated profusely through the shirt. I won’t deny that it’s hot in the hallway, which, unlike the rest of the building, is elegantly carpeted and painted a subtle olive green, in deference to the floor’s high-prestige—and only—residents. There’s a gilt-frame mirror across from the elevators in which I can see my reflection. I’m perspiring too, enough so that tendrils from my blond ponytail are sticking to the back of my neck. But I can feel cold air coming from the apartment behind Christopher. He’s got the air conditioning on full blast in there.
Skipping the niceties, Cooper asks, “What’s that all over your suit?” He doesn’t mean the sweat stains either. Christopher has dark brown flecks all over his otherwise pure white linen suit. I know I’m not one to talk, with the big glob of Day-Glo paint I have on my back. So far as I know, Christopher wasn’t on either of the paintball war teams downstairs.
“Oh, this?” he says, swiping at some of the larger stains on his jacket, smiling like it’s nothing. “Well, yes, this is from an unfortunate situation that arose earlier in the evening, but I can assure you that everything is—”
The female ambulance attendant turns to me and Cooper. “I know when I see blood, and that’s blood,” she says flatly. “Either one of you in charge? ’Cause we got a call about an unconscious woman at this address. This gentleman”—she uses the word “gentleman” sarcastically—“says she’s conscious now, but he’s denying us entry unless we sign some kind of waiver.”
“Well,” I say, because between the spots on Christopher’s suit and the EMT’s mention of a woman being unconscious, I’m ready to take total charge. Roofies is all I can think. Roofies and blood. “I’m the assistant director of this building. This man doesn’t even live here. He has no authority to require anyone to sign anything. So I say you can go on in.”
A male voice calls my name from a room in the apartment behind Christopher, apparently having overheard my little speech.
“Heather? Is that you?”
Cooper is past the EMTs like a gunshot, shoving Christopher roughly out of the doorway. “Jordan?” he says in a tone of disbelief.
I don’t blame him. Cooper’s little brother Jordan is one of the last people I’d expect to find in a New York College residence hall, even in the president’s cushy apartment, and especially one in which roofies and blood are apparently present. Cooper and Jordan have never exactly been close, and not only because Cooper, unlike Jordan, refused to become a member of Easy Street when their father, Grant Cartwright, CEO of Cartwright Records, thought it up. There’s also the fact that Cooper’s extremely wealthy—and equally eccentric—grandfather, Arthur Cartwright, left Cooper his pink townhouse in the West Village, now estimated to be worth in the high seven figures.
The way Jordan broke up with me could also be a contributing factor to Cooper’s dislike of him, but I don’t want to make assumptions.
Still, Cooper practically flattens Christopher in his effort to come to what he believes is his brother’s aid. It’s touching, really, although not everyone finds it so.
“Do you mind?” Christopher calls testily after Cooper, adjusting his lapels. “This suit is Armani. And this is private property. I could call the cops.”
“Go ahead,” I say to Christopher as I lead the EMTs past him. “I’ll tell them you’re trespassing. Your parents aren’t here, are they?”
“They’re in the Hamptons,” Christopher replies sullenly. “But seriously, you guys are disrupting a very important scene. They can check her afterward. She’s feeling better now anyway.”
“Scene?” I echo, my heart sinking. An unconscious woman, blood, and cameras? Has Christopher talked Jordan into making a porno? The sad part is, it wouldn’t surprise me.
As I turn the corner from the penthouse’s elegant foyer, I see exactly what Christopher means by scene, however, and also why Cooper has stopped short so abruptly in front of me that I run right into him.
“Cooper?” Jordan Cartwright is sitting on an overstuffed couch clutching the hand of his new—and extremely pretty—young wife, best-selling recording artist of the year Tania Trace. Jordan looks even more astonished to see us than we are to see him, and that’s saying a lot. “What on earth are you doing here?”
“What am I doing here?” Cooper stares at his brother, then broadens his gaze to include the group gathered around his brother and the couch on which his brother is sitting under the glow of two enormous lights set on tripods. “I think the more appropriate question is, what are you doing here? And why are you covered in blood?”
“Am I?” Jordan looks down at himself, surprised. He’s dressed similarly to Christopher, only his suit is a pale beige, and his shirt is pink. Like Christopher, he’s sweating profusely. And like Christopher, there are droplets of blood flecked all over him. “Oh shit, I didn’t notice. Why didn’t you guys tell me?” Jordan glares at the film crew, all of whom are dressed in cargo shorts and T-shirts with various band logos emblazoned across them, though Easy Street is not one of them. Even though the air conditioning is on full blast, the lights make it blazingly hot in the room, so they’re all sweating too.
“The blood’s good. It makes it more real, man,” a guy with a pair of headphones, holding a boom—one of those long microphones with a fuzzy thing over the end—assures Jordan.
The guy holding the camera says, peering through the lens, “Blood’s barely tracking because it’s so dark in here. Could somebody adjust that scrim like I asked, or am I talking to myself here?”
A young woman with her hair tucked into tiny braids to keep it off her neck hurries over to one of the tripods and pulls a mesh screen from in front of the light bank. A second later, the white-hot glare on Jordan and Tania increases about a hundredfold and the temperature in the Allingtons’ living room seems to go up another ten degrees.
“Perfect,” the cameraman says in a satisfied voice. “Now I can see the blood.”
Tania, who’s wearing a metallic gold minidress—and I use the word “mini” loosely, since the dress is barely large enough to cover her nipples and lower extremities—lifts a limp brown arm over her eyes, turning her exquisitely featured face away from the searing light.
“I can’t do this,” she murmurs weakly.
“Sure you can, Tania honey,” says a woman I haven’t noticed before. She’s standing off to the side in the shadows, but not deep enough into the shadows that I can’t see her Louboutins or the glint of gold around her wrist. It’s the woman I’ve noticed so often lately exiting the elevator in the morning with Christopher. “Put your arm down and tell us how it felt when you saw a man get shot right in front of you.”
“I don’t want to.” Tania keeps her arm where it is. From what little I can see of it, her face seems to have gone as olive green as the walls in the hallway outside the elevator.
“Keep it together, baby,” Jordan says, putting his own arm around his wife’s diminutive frame and looking down at her tenderly, though the only part of her he can possibly see from where he’s sitting is her elbow and maybe her knees. “I know what we went through tonight was ugly. But you heard what they said at the ER. With time and our prayers, Bear’s going to be all right. And until then, I’ll protect you. And the baby too, when she comes. I’ll never let anything happen to either of you, I swear it. Not while there’s a breath left in my body.”
I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. Someone named Bear was sh
ot in front of Tania? And they’re making her talk about it on camera, in the penthouse of Fischer Hall? Why?
“That’s good, Jordan,” Gold Rolex says, from the shadows. I can see by the glint of her watch that she’s holding a cell phone to her ear. “But can you do it again, and this time, Tania, can you take your arm down and look at Jordan?”
The bulbs in both tripods go out, plunging the room into darkness. Someone screams.
The room isn’t plunged into total darkness. Numerous Tiffany lamps belonging to Mrs. Allington continue to blaze on side tables, and there are fairy lights sparkling outside on the terrace, so there is some light to see by.
But the sudden contrast in lighting is startling, and it takes a moment for everyone’s vision to adjust.
“What the—” cries Christopher.
“I thought that take was really good,” Jordan says, commenting on his own performance in front of the camera. “Are you guys going to be able to use any of it?”
No one is paying any attention to him. Everyone is running around, trying to figure out what happened. The production assistant is swearing at the camera operator.
“I told you we should’ve gone with the softbox,” she says. “These light banks throw a fuse every time in these crappy old buildings.”
“Excuse me,” I say, again and again, my voice rising in pitch and volume until finally I have the full attention of everyone present. Then I hold up the extension cord I’ve pulled from the wall outlet. “It wasn’t the fuse. It was me. I believe the appropriate phrase is . . . cut.”