On most nights the rooms remained empty, even when some of New York’s most illustrious political, financial, and entertainment figures called for reservations and were told that nothing was available. Never for a moment would Stasny consider putting someone upstairs simply because he didn’t have room for them downstairs.
“Where are we going?” Amy asked, trying not to sound stupid. She made an effort to remember that they had just come up a flight of carpeted stairs, and now they were standing in front of a door that seemed to swim before her eyes.
Georgie said, “Nowhere. We’re there.”
“No, really,” she giggled.
“Yeah,” he said. “Really. C’mon.”
He opened the door with one hand and put the other at the small of her back. A light pressure pushed her forward. He could feel the bones of her spine. She was just about the thinnest girl he had ever seen, all straight up and down. Except that she had surprisingly full breasts. If those were actually her breasts. He didn’t think it likely that a girl her age would have had a boob job, although nothing these rich people did would have surprised him.
Whatever. He was about to find out.
Amy’s eyes drifted around the room, as though she were expecting George to question her about what she saw.
“There’s no one here,” she said, a pouting note of doubt in her voice. She thought perhaps they had come to the wrong place.
“Us,” he said. “We’re going to have our own party.”
He took her arm and turned her around, pulling her body tight to him, kissing her hard.
Her lips were slack, her mouth so unresponsive he thought for a moment that she had passed out in his arms. He grabbed her ass and pulled her into him, hips grinding against hips. Now she made a purring sound and then he felt her tongue move across his teeth. This girl wasn’t asleep. Not at all. No way.
Her hips were moving now, back and forth against him, as her tongue prowled around in his mouth. Christ, she was doing all the work. Which was great as far as he was concerned. He liked girls who didn’t just wait around for things to happen.
She pulled her face away from him and tipped her head to the side, as though it were easier for her to see him this way. She reminded him, for some reason, of old people when they try to read small print. Georgie had an aunt who held her head that way when she read the paper.
“I like you, George,” she said.
He put a finger to her lips and let her kiss it. Then he drew a line down her chin to her neck and down her neck to her chest. Her dress was high, showing no cleavage at all. Which was why he didn’t think he’d find much except paper and stuffing inside. He reached under her collar if that’s what it was called, anyway the top of her dress, and drove his hand down. There was no give in the fabric and none in her chest, so that the pressure of that band of ribbonlike stuff at the top of the dress plus his own body leaning against her plus the awkward position with his wrist twisted around backward was like a tourniquet and he thought for sure he was going to lose circulation in his hand if he didn’t get the dress unzipped in a hurry.
He could feel the top of one of her tits with his fingertips and he was surprised at the softness. She wasn’t flat-chested, that was for sure. His other hand prowled her back looking for a zipper. He found it and started rocking it back and forth to work it down. Already he could feel the pressure on his knuckles easing, although his wrist was still being strangled by the stringy band at the top of the dress, which hadn’t opened at all.
Amy was making a kind of moaning sound and her head rocked back and forth, her lips so tight against his it hurt. And then he realized she wasn’t moaning, she was trying to talk. He also realized that he didn’t want to hear whatever it was she had to say. But her lips came free and she said, “Oh, George, there’s…shit,” just as the hook at the top of the dress ripped out of the fabric and everything came loose.
“There’s a damn hook, George,” she said, sounding surprisingly sober all of a sudden.
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
“I was trying.”
“What do you mean trying?”
“You wouldn’t let go of me, for Christ’s sake.”
“I wasn’t holding you,” he said.
“You weren’t?”
She thought a second, and then she said, “Oh,” and giggled.
Georgie said, “How many hands do you think I got?” and she said, “I don’t know, George. How many?”
There was definitely something flirtatious in the way she said it, drunkenly teasing, challenging.
She stepped back from him, and her dress, ripped and unzipped, fell to her waist. He was looking at just about the biggest and whitest and firmest and roundest tits he had ever seen. They filled a strapless bra that was cut as low as the dress was high.
“You’re amazing,” he said.
“You like?” she said, grinning, thrusting her breasts forward as she reached behind her back to unhook the bra.
Amy Laidlaw was proud of her breasts. Her mother had large breasts, too. That was where she got them. But her mother was short and thick-bodied whereas Amy was as lean as a model.
Georgie hadn’t felt this excited just looking at a girl’s chest since he was thirteen years old. He touched both breasts, one with each hand, and her nipples sprang to life.
“Hey, take it easy,” she said.
He was kneading her flesh with his fingers.
And then she said, “Shit. Oh, hey. What?” and all of a sudden she wasn’t there anymore. She was lying on the floor at his feet, and she had landed there with a thud that was more alarming than provocative. Even Georgie, who thought of himself as the kind of no-nonsense guy who would have fucked her then and there even if she died or passed out or had a foaming-at-the-mouth seizure right in front of him, even Georgie had to kneel down next to her and ask her if she was all right.
He couldn’t hear her answer, so he lowered his ear closer to her lips and asked her again. This time he thought he heard what she said. He thought she said, “Oh, wow.”
“Drunk?” he asked.
“No shit.”
Drunk was fine. Drunk was good in fact.
He didn’t bother with her tits now. He kissed her hard and grabbed her leg with his left hand. He moved his hand up to the crotch of her pantyhose, taking the lay of the land. His hand went to her waist and he thrust it down, under the tight, slick fabric, until he found what he wanted. The thick fur of her pussy was a tangle under his fingers. And then he felt the wetness and his finger was inside her and she made a strange sharp sound of surprise.
Her head twisted back and forth, trying to get away from his kiss, and she grabbed his wrist with both hands. But she was drunk and she wasn’t strong in any case.
She bit at his lip, and when he pulled back she said, “Don’t, George.”
“Yeah right,” he said.
The girl was fucking wet. Where did this don’t shit come from?
But it sure came from somewhere, because she fought him hard, flailing with her legs, even though she accomplished nothing with her wiggling around except for driving his hand deeper into her. She managed to wrench her hips around until she was on her side, and this freed her for a second until his fingers bit hard into the bone of her hip and he pushed her back down, flat onto the floor. She spat at him, but the glob of saliva fell on her own chin and she started to cry.
“What the fuck is with you?” he growled. “All of a sudden you’re a virgin or something?”
“Oh shut up, George, shut up shut up,” she cried.
The fact of the matter was that Amy Laidlaw was a virgin. She had taken off her blouse, her shirt, her bathing-suit top on just about every date she’d been on since the eighth grade. She did it gladly, even triumphantly, and she loved the effect her chest had on boys. She wasn’t a tease either. She always took care of their needs. She gave them hand jobs or let them rub their cocks between her breasts until they came on her chest. But she
was, as far as she knew, the only girl in her class whose mother never took her to the doctor and provided her with a prescription for pills, never even had a talk with her about condoms and safe sex. Amy believed in sex, but she didn’t believe it was something two people shared. She thought it was something girls gave to boys, except that in her case she didn’t have to because she was giving enough.
The boys all knew that. If they didn’t like it, they could find someone else. They had no future with Amy Laidlaw.
So far they had all liked it.
Girls like Renée got on Richie Demarest’s nerves. Not that he knew any girls like Renée. But he sure as hell knew what they were like. Rich bitches who didn’t have the least idea that there were people in the world who had to make car payments, people who had only one house, people who bought dresses when they went on sale. Nothing girls like Renée said ever sounded real. They sounded like they were on a stage or something, saying things people made up for them to say. Absolutely this and positively that and totally something else. If she didn’t like something, she said she was aghast.
Well, Richie Demarest thought, we’ll see about that.
He closed the door. When he looked at Renée she was looking around the room.
“What a delightful little room,” she said. “How did you know this was here?”
She leaned against the wall just inside the door to steady herself.
Richie was in no mood for answering questions.
Renée was on the pudgy side, and she wasn’t really that pretty, although she looked nice enough with her hair done up in such a complicated way and a dress she would never wear again as long as she lived because she had worn it already. But it looked fine, no question about that. Sleek. That’s how Richie would have described it if he had to. It made her look a little thinner than she really was.
He stepped right up to her and kissed her. She kissed back like she was trying to suck his tongue right out of his mouth.
Okay, he thought, if that was the way she wanted to play, he could play that way.
Her hands went around behind him, kneading his shoulders and the thick muscles of his back, holding him, but he took a firm grasp of her wrist, pulled her hand free, and pushed it down until it was at his crotch. This time he wasn’t surprised when it turned out she knew what to do. Christ, did she ever. It took her less than two seconds flat to get his zipper down.
Her hand was inside his pants, stroking his cock, one finger stretched out to tickle under his balls.
He put a hand on her shoulder and she knelt in front of him. He knew it wasn’t supposed to be this easy but he didn’t really give a damn.
In the next room, Grace Tunney was suddenly frightened enough to ask herself what she had gotten herself into. She hardly knew this boy. He was a friend of Jessica’s friend Eddie, but she had broken up with Todd Galen, who had been her boyfriend for three years, so she was kind of glad when Jessica asked her if it was okay for Eddie’s friend Billy Franco to come as her date.
Now Billy Franco was walking toward her with the door closed in back of him and she didn’t know whether she should laugh or scream or what. And then he was on top of her and she was on the floor and she could have screamed but she didn’t want to ruin Jessica’s party.
Franklin remained at his post near the front door until just after eleven o’clock. He later denied that Noel Garver bribed him to leave the door unattended, insisting that he left the door simply to get something to drink. In another version of his story, he said that he went to the bar not for a drink but to relieve Albert, who had been on duty there since before the party began. He wasn’t asked and didn’t say who told him to do this. No one questioned him further because the excuses didn’t particularly matter. If he was lying, he was lying. What mattered was that no one was at the door to prevent Noel Garver’s entrance, with Sharon Lamm on his arm.
The two journalists stayed close together, hugging the side of the room, knowing there was bound to be a scene the moment either of the Blaines spotted them. Which was, in a sense, the whole idea. A scene would serve Garver’s purposes perfectly. A lead paragraph about being thrown out of the finest birthday party of the new millennium was already taking shape in his mind. Still, he wanted to see as much as possible before that happened.
Sharon Lamm didn’t share her colleague’s sentiments. In fact, she didn’t consider Noel Garver a colleague at all. She would be mortified if she were to be thrown out, and the prospect made her almost sorry she had let herself be talked into coming in. If she hadn’t been thoroughly frozen, certain she was suffering from frostbite already and would be suffering from pneumonia by morning, she would have taken a pass. In fact, she tried to. “Just leave me alone,” was what she said.
“It’s warmer inside, my dear,” Garver purred in his most effete and simpering tone. Here was a grown man, in fact a man well along in years, who apparently modeled himself on Clifton Webb. He didn’t deserve an answer and didn’t get one.
“If you’d rather stay out here, that’s fine,” Garver said. “I’m offering you the journalistic chance of a lifetime.”
And so they ended up trudging across the street together. Garver nodded to the police captain on duty, who nodded back but made no effort to stop them. A few seconds later they were inside Stasny’s watching a bunch of spoiled teenagers and spoiled adults dancing to unidentifiable but unabashedly raucous music.
Sharon looked around the room, taking in the whole scene. Those who weren’t dancing were chatting each other up in tight little groups scattered around the floor. No more than a dozen people remained at their tables. Wall Street was her beat, and she realized she was looking at more financial wizards per square foot than she had ever seen collected together in one place. One well-placed bomb, she thought, would send the American economy crashing all the way back to the nineteen-fifties.
“Is this really what you do for a living?” she asked Garver in a whisper. She knew the answer perfectly well, and knew, without needing to be reminded, that Noel Garver made slightly over three and a half times the living she did.
Garver reminded her anyway, making the point with a simple but supercilious arch of his eyebrows. Which looked like they had been drawn on with a pencil.
“Fine. You’re a credit to the profession, Noel. What exactly are we looking for?” she asked.
The eyebrows did a little dance. “What they’re wearing. Who’s drunk. Who’s here.”
“Who’s not here?” she suggested, her eyes scanning the room again.
For the first time since they had been together, he looked at her as one might look at another sentient being. “Is it possible you’re telling me something?” he purred.
“Grace Tunney,” she said. “Don’t you remember, she came in with Jessica Blaine and Amy Laidlaw, that whole crowd?”
“You actually know these children?” Garver asked, oozing sarcasm.
Grant Tunney, Grace’s father, had been indicted six months ago for insider trading. It was Sharon who broke the story, but in the subsequent months she became quite friendly with the family in the course of researching a series of articles on the excesses of the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office in its handling of the case. Just last week she revealed that the SEC and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District had examined the same evidence as the Nassau prosecutor and declined to prosecute. It made the Nassau case look cheap and flimsy and put a lot of pressure on them to drop it. Sharon interviewed Tunney in the palatial seventeen-room house in Plainview where he lived with his mistress ever since he moved out of the York Avenue apartment where Grace still lived with her mother. It was a Saturday and Grace was there for her regular weekend visit. Sharon liked the girl, who struck her as shy and confused.
“My, this is interesting,” Garver scoffed. “Perhaps you weren’t aware of it, but even rich girls have to pee.”
But it was more than that. Sharon Lamm noticed that none of the girls Jessica came in with—the Tunney gi
rl, the Laidlaw girl, the Goldschmidt girl—was in evidence. A few minutes passed. Then a few more. The girls were gone far too long for a girlish meeting in the loo. She decided, for what it was worth, not to mention this to Garver.
She didn’t have a chance to say anything in any case because at that very moment Phyllis Blaine said, “This is a private party, Noel. Really, Sharon, this isn’t very becoming. You should know better.”
It was also the moment when Amy Laidlaw’s scream seemed to come through the ceiling and fill the room. It was a long, piercing scream that roared in over the unamplified sound of the band, who stopped playing at once and looked around in alarm. Every conversation in the room stopped at the same time.
It wasn’t clear at first where the sound came from. After a few seconds of horrible silence, the room began to buzz with hushed conversation as people speculated on whether the sound came from outside or the basement or the kitchen. Maybe someone in the kitchen cut herself or burned herself. It was definitely a woman’s scream.
Phyllis looked around in panic, trying to locate her daughter. Jeffrey ran across the room toward Stasny, who himself was hurrying toward the kitchen. The rapid movement of the two men dialed up the level of confusion in the room almost to the point of panic. No one was quite sure what was going on, except that somewhere someone had screamed. Everywhere men were moving about at random, asking one another questions and getting no answers. For some reason the women stood still, as though they were waiting for their men to bring them news. Phyllis called out Jessica’s name, almost a shriek, which added to the confusion and convinced half a dozen women that it had been Jessica who screamed. In a moment, though, they saw the girl, with Eddie Vincenzo at her shoulder, running toward her mother, which some took to mean she was all right and some took to mean she wasn’t. A wave of people drifted toward them.
House of Lords Page 5