House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  The fingers of her other hand toyed absently with the top button of her shirt, provocative and playful at the same time, as though she didn’t understand what she was doing. But she understood. She understood perfectly. He could see that in her eyes. “We spent the whole summer together, you know. He couldn’t get enough of me,” she purred. “That was your idea, wasn’t it? You paid him to seduce me, right? Get together with that girl, take her wherever you want. I was the best thing that ever happened to him, Mr. Fiore. I fucked him silly. You shouldn’t send other people to do your work for you.”

  She leaned forward, her lips close to his ear. He could feel the touch of her breasts against his arm, the pressure of them. The thought passed through his mind that he had fucked this girl’s mother in hotel rooms and on the floor of an empty mansion, and that the mother didn’t have tits like this and wouldn’t have known how to use them if she did, grinding grimly with her hips, passionless, rubbing at him the way people rub at the silver coating on lottery tickets, eager and heartless, checking for a jackpot.

  This girl was the jackpot and she knew it. He could feel the excitement of her. He toyed with the idea of telling her he was balling her mother, just to see what she would do. There’d be no horror, no screaming. She’d laugh and say, You send Eddie to fuck me and you fuck my mother, and you’re supposed to be a smart man?

  He stepped back from her, and her hands fell to her side. She had a funny, puzzled look on her face.

  “Are you trying to bribe me, Jessica?” he said.

  There wasn’t the same certainty in her voice anymore when she said, “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t need my father,” she said. “You could have any banker you want.”

  “You’d do that for him?”

  “I like to fuck, Mr. Fiore,” she said. “I love to fuck. It’s no big sacrifice.”

  It was her last try, and there was an edge of desperation in her voice just under the bravado.

  “Get out of here,” he said. “You’re just a kid.”

  He turned and walked out the door, leaving it open behind him.

  Tears welled in her eyes as she stared after him. There was nothing, nothing in the whole world, nothing that would ever happen to her as long as she lived, more humiliating than this.

  She walked to the door and leaned her head against the frame. She knew she couldn’t possibly walk out through that restaurant, past him sitting at that table again. He’d point her out to the fat guy in the apron and they’d have a laugh about her. Little cunt wanted to fuck me, he’d say. The fat guy would say, Hey, I’ll take a shot if you don’t want her, and they’d laugh some more.

  She closed the door and leaned back against it, put her head back and closed her eyes, but her eyelids didn’t hold the tears the way she thought they would.

  Wally Schliester’s head hurt. His eyes hurt. Even his hair hurt. He couldn’t remember waking up so sick in his life, and he wasn’t even sure he was waking up because maybe he hadn’t been asleep. A little while ago it was dark outside his window and now it was kind of light, this sort of milky color in the sky, more like, say, something on a blackboard you try to rub out with your hand and it just turns into a smudge that gets bigger and bigger the more you rub it.

  What, he wondered, did it say on the blackboard?

  No, no, that wasn’t the question, there was no blackboard, blackboards had nothing to do with it. He was standing at the window in his apartment holding the neck of a whiskey bottle. Get a hold of yourself, he told himself, and something about that turn of phrase made him chuckle.

  Christ, when was the last time he got drunk like this? In St. Louis for sure. In St. Louis he drank a fair bit, with his friends on the weekends, because it was what you did when you were hanging out with your friends. Getting blotto, they called it, a stupid phrase that sounded like something left over from World War II, sailors on shore leave, guys home for the last time before shipping out to the Pacific or whatever. Nobody said that anymore, and he doubted that anybody even said it during his own lifetime, that’s how old-fashioned it was. But that’s what they said in St. Louis, Wally and Arnie and Ben and Gil. Let’s get blotto, one of them would say, and there was never an objection or even an alternative suggestion.

  He stopped doing that shit years ago. All of them did. They just grew out of it. They settled down, they got married. Schliester moved away. They all led civilized lives now, and if they drank too much once in a while, it was at a party or something like that.

  Until last night.

  It all started with the look on Elaine Lester’s face when they told her about Fiore and the well-dressed blonde, Gogarty piling on the details, trying to get her to blush, or just say anything one way or the other. She didn’t bite. She listened patiently. Do I need all this detail? she asked, when it was beginning to seem like Gogarty couldn’t possibly go on any longer unless he started drawing pictures, and so Schliester decided to put a stop to it and get them back on track. He told her the lady in question was married to a prominent banker, and in just that second he saw the oddest look on her face, as though she knew already, or at least knew something they didn’t know, a look that wasn’t part of this conversation in the office at all, but he didn’t know what it could be connected to. It sent a shiver down his back. And then, when Gogarty told her it was Phyllis Blaine, she said, Yeah, okay, and that was all.

  But it wasn’t all.

  He went out to eat with Gogarty and couldn’t get that look on Elaine’s face out of his mind. By the time he got home, it was mixed up somehow with the fact that she dropped him after one night, which wasn’t a bad night at all, and the fact that he didn’t know why. He hadn’t gotten involved with anyone since he came to New York. A casual lay here, at most balling the same chick for a couple of weeks steady if she was reasonably bright and good-looking and didn’t make his life needlessly complicated. But Elaine Lester was different, and so even before the night he took her to his place he had let himself fall in love with what it felt like to sit in a bar talking cop talk with her at three o’clock in the morning.

  Silly, right? Not even silly. Stupid. But there you were. Like a junior high school jerk, he couldn’t even bring himself to ask her to come home with him. She brought it up. Are you trying to seduce me? That was what she said. So they went to his place and after that he had no trouble asking her to come back. And she had no trouble shooting him down like one of those milk bottles you knock over with a lopsided ball. Twice. And after that he spent more time thinking about what went wrong than he had spent in the relationship itself, which lasted only a few hours.

  Let’s move on to something else, she told Gus Benini. Oh sure, after Gus was dead she had an explanation. But that was after Gus was dead. And then that look on her face when Gogarty told her the rich lady fucking Chet Fiore without window shades was Phyllis Blaine. Just for a second, but it was there. That look wasn’t something he made up. It kept driving him crazy all through dinner and it was still driving him crazy when he got home. It was something in her eyes, click, and it was gone, like a bulb winking out and then coming back on.

  So he put his clothes back on and went out again, and when he got back this time it was three o’clock in the morning and he had a whole new set of things to drive himself crazy with. Because what he had done while he was out was spy on a woman he used to think he was in love with. He tried to tell himself it was part of his job, it was nothing personal, but even a whole whiskey bottle couldn’t make him believe that.

  When he saw a guy leave her apartment he knew perfectly well that this was Jeffrey Blaine even though he had never seen Jeffrey Blaine in his life. Nice to meet you, Mr. Blaine, Schliester thought bitterly. Why couldn’t you just stay the fuck out of my life?

  The whole thing was disgusting, and Wally Schliester knew enough, even drunk, to put himself at the top of the list of the things that disgusted him.

  26

  Phylli
s padded into the kitchen and turned on the cappuccino machine. Jeffrey was still in bed. He hadn’t come home until hours after she went to bed. We’re a fine pair, she thought, Jeffrey and whoever the other woman happened to be, herself and Charles. Not that you could equate one with the other. Her own affair was more or less in the nature of an experiment. It wasn’t so much the sex as the cheating that interested her. She wanted to know what it felt like to be Jeffrey.

  She measured out the coffee, tamped it down, and levered it into the machine. The steam made a sharp hissing sound as it forced its way through the coffee, and then a different sound when she steamed the milk. The sounds were an important part of the ritual.

  She wrote a note for the cook, who should have been in already, and headed back for the bathroom, taking her coffee with her. She stopped as she passed Jessica’s room because the door was closed and Jessica always slept with the door open. She couldn’t imagine Jessica up this early, but apparently she was.

  She knocked and waited, then knocked again more emphatically. When there was still no mumble of response from the other side, she eased the door back.

  Jessica wasn’t there.

  Phyllis felt suddenly, queasily sick. Already she could see in her mind a complete reprise of last summer’s melodrama. She ran back to her room, calling Jeffrey’s name even before she came through the door.

  He wasn’t in bed. She heard the shower running.

  “Jessica’s gone,” she said, bursting through the door into the bathroom.

  “What do you mean, gone?” he asked. He swung open the glass door of the shower and stepped out, half shaven, his face still wearing a thin, slick layer of lather in the places he hadn’t reached yet. He began toweling himself off.

  “Her door was closed. She never sleeps with the door closed. I knocked and there was no answer, so I went in. She’s not there, Jeffrey. She’s gone.”

  “Did you check the rest of the apartment?” he asked as he pulled on a robe.

  She felt like an idiot. She turned and ran out of the bathroom to check.

  When Jeffrey came out of the bathroom, Carlos, alarmed by Phyllis’s shouts, was standing in the corridor in his shirtsleeves as though someone expected him to direct traffic.

  “Carlos, have you seen Jessica?” Jeffrey asked.

  “No, sir, I just came out. I heard Mrs. Blaine and—”

  “That’s all right, Carlos,” Jeffrey said without slowing down. His hair was dripping wet. His wet feet left a trail of footprints on the floor. He rushed into Jessica’s room. A moment later Phyllis was standing behind him.

  “I checked everywhere. She’s not here,” she said. “If she ran off with that boy again…” She left the sentence unfinished.

  “She didn’t,” Jeffrey said without explaining how he knew.

  “Then where is she?” Phyllis demanded sharply.

  Jeffrey looked at her levelly. “I’ll try to find out,” he said, and walked away, offering no elaboration.

  She followed, her voice flung at the back of his head. “Maybe we shouldn’t have taken her out of school,” she said. “At least she would have had something to do with her life. I mean, what was she doing here? How was that helping her, putting her under house arrest?”

  He walked into the bedroom, threw off his robe, and started to get dressed.

  For the first time in her life she felt uncomfortable with his nakedness. She walked to the window and looked out so that she wouldn’t have to look at him.

  “Obviously she wasn’t under arrest or she’d be here, wouldn’t she?” he said.

  “That’s hardly the point,” Phyllis shot back, turning back to him, and then turning away again. “Maybe we didn’t do enough. Maybe we should have put her in a drug program. We said we would. Why didn’t we?”

  He was putting on the brown suit she hated. She almost said something but stopped herself, and then cursed herself for even thinking about what damn suit he wore. It made him look like he was trying to pretend he was twenty-five years old, but what business was it of hers what he looked like?

  He studied the selection of ties in front of him. She knew exactly which one he’d wear. The gold paisley. He always wore that tie with that suit. Why was he fumbling around as though he didn’t know that? She watched for a moment with growing impatience, infuriated by the charade. And then she stepped up behind him, reached over his shoulder, and grabbed the paisley tie from the rack and held it out to him. “For god’s sake, Jeffrey,” she said.

  He took the tie out of her hand and draped it around his neck. Something in her gesture, in the way she handed him the tie, with its claim of implicit control, as though she knew him better than he knew himself, infuriated him and made it easy for him to say something he had known he would have to say someday but hadn’t planned to say now. She knew what tie to hand him but she didn’t know him at all. She thought of him as a mild, bland, docile man, undoubtedly of considerable intelligence, undoubtedly with considerable integrity. But all that was changed now and it wouldn’t ever be changing back. He was going to be what he had to be, and there was no way Phyllis could be a part of that.

  “After I find Jessica,” he said, “I’ll be staying in a hotel for a while. Until I find a place.” Phyllis wanted to scream. The man was trying to drive her mad. Her daughter was missing and he was telling her this? She looked at him in stunned disbelief, her eyes wide, her mouth embarrassingly, unbecomingly open. In that instant she looked like an old woman, looked exactly like Jeffrey imagined she would look in thirty years. He had no intention of being there to see it.

  Wally Schliester walked around in circles, trying to remember everything he knew about what it meant to be a cop. The sun was still low over the East River, playing a game as it dodged among the buildings on the Brooklyn side, then poking out a little higher up, a little farther to the right. The river hid a hundred tiny little suns.

  When he thought he had gotten himself ready he went into the office. Such a crappy little office, he thought, although the location was certainly nice. He liked being by the water. He used to like the office, too, for that matter. He just couldn’t get himself in that frame of mind anymore.

  The bottom of the coffeepot looked downright geological, so he ran some water in to rinse it out the best he could. No one ever covered the coffee can, so the coffee had no taste to it except an oily bitterness, but at least it was an oily bitterness with some caffeine in it. His head still hurt from last night, and he needed something to help him focus.

  He thought about Humphrey Bogart sending up Mary Astor at the end of The Maltese Falcon. Something something something because everything in my life, or something like that. But that was middle-of-the-night thinking, fine for four A.M. In the morning sunlight it was better to assume it wasn’t going to come down to anything like that. Elaine was mixed up with Jeffrey Blaine but maybe she could get herself unmixed if he gave her a good reason to.

  On his desk was a transcript of Gus Benini’s debriefing in the motel. Someone had a great sense of timing. He always wondered who the hell typed all this stuff out. The tapes went away every night and they came back a week or so later as paper. Page after page of them. It was like Hemingway coming out with novels after he was dead. Half an inch thick. The collected works of Gus Benini. What a goddamned pitiful waste. A waste of six months on Schliester’s part, a waste of a whole damn life on Gus’s.

  He leaned back in the chair with his arms behind his head and tried to take stock. Every goddamned fact was contradicted by another goddamned fact somewhere else. Fiore goes to the banker’s kid’s birthday party. Looks like we’re on to something. Fiore porks the banker’s wife. Guess we’re not. Gus Benini sets up shakedowns for Fiore, reports to the boss when there’s trouble. That’s good. Gus is dead. That’s bad. Which brings us to last night, when we learn that the banker himself is shacked up with the assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the case. Which means? Which means?

  Schliester didn’t know what it meant. I
f Fiore isn’t tied up with the banker, then what’s the problem if Elaine Lester is? None. No problem.

  Once he put it that way, Wally Schliester felt as though a tremendous weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Because if the banker was clean, then Elaine was also—

  “No, no, no,” he said out loud. “Fuck! Fuck the whole fucking thing!”

  The chair skittered backward as he sprang to his feet, and for a full minute he paced around the room like a man in a hurry to get somewhere, raking his hand through his sand-colored hair. Look at it from the banker’s point of view, not Elaine’s. He’s in the sack with her. What were the odds of that in a city of eight point something million people? Put it another way. What is this guy after? Her body? Please. A nice ass and a receptive pussy sometimes make a man stupid. Off the top of his head, Schliester couldn’t come up with a single instance where they made him smart, and there was definitely something smart about sharing a pillow with the head that heads an investigation into a man you’re in business with.

  Any other way there were just too many coincidences.

  He struck the side of his fist against the windowpane, alarming the seagulls outside, and cursed under his breath.

  “What’s the matter?” Elaine’s voice asked from behind him.

  He whirled around with a funny look on his face, like a man who has just been caught playing with himself. “No, nothing,” he said quickly. “I mean, just silly stuff. Nothing.”

  She was wearing a light green suit. There was a name for that shade of green but Schliester didn’t know what it was. Her blouse was more or less ivory. “Nothing?” she said. “You’re sure?”

  “No, I’m not sure,” he said. “When did you figure out that Blaine wasn’t tied in with Fiore?”

  “Oh, please, Wally,” she sighed, “let’s not go over this again.”

  “That was yesterday. This is a different question.”