If her father had taught her anything, Lacy reminded herself, it was when to know you needed a lawyer. She opened her purse with a snap and rummaged around in it, looking for the business card Mr. Irving Fishman, of Fishman Brothers Frocks and Superior Sportswear had saved for her.
Less than a half an hour later Lacy was sitting at her corner of the utility table used by the junior fashion writers in the narrow elbow at the back of the art department, with all her things from her former office piled around her untidily, trying to finish her New York Dress Institute story on standardized sizes for women’s dresses and suits but not able to see what she was writing very well through her dark glasses and her even more swollen and irritated eyelids, when she received a telephone call from the executive secretary in the Fad publisher’s office asking her to report at once to the nineteenth floor. The president and chairman of the board of Echevarria Enterprises, Mr. Michael Echevarria was there, and he wished to talk to Miss Kingston.
“No,” Lacy told the Fad publisher’s secretary, and hung up.
She took her notes on U.S. Public Health Department statistics on average bust and hip measurements of women aged twenty-five to forty-five from her desk, crumpled them up and started gathering the paper shopping bags of her possessions together. The blow was going to fall, she thought stoically, but she was holding her pain and humiliation under control. She wasn’t going up to the executive offices on the nineteenth floor to have the president and chairman of the board turn the knife in the wound one more time before he finally fired her. She had already planned to report back to the Leonard Thornton Model Agency in the morning, to see if the Western States Wholesalers had gotten their runway models lined up for their usual spring tour. She could take care of herself. She only asked one thing from life. That she never see Michael Echevarria again.
Lacy was just cramming her desk calendar with digital clock back into the paper bag Gloria Farnham had so thoughtfully provided, along with a half-eaten package of peanut-butter crackers that had been her lunch, when she heard the flurry among the desks nearest the elevators. Out of the corner of her eye, Lacy saw a tall figure in a gray worsted three-piece Cardin business suit striding toward her.
“No,” Lacy cried, scrambling to get her purse, her tape recorder, the digital calendar and clock and the U.S. Health Department volume on physiological measurements by states into her arms. “Beat it!” she yelled as the lithe, powerful frame of Michael Echevarria loomed over her.
“Lacy,” he said in a low, strained voice, “you called me, and my secretary just gave me the message about an hour ago. I want to talk to you. Why didn’t you come upstairs?”
She tried not to look at Michael but found she couldn’t help herself. He was still, she thought moodily, so devastatingly handsome, so outwardly marvelous, with his black curls tamed by an expensive barber, cool gray eyes and grimly sensuous mouth, that she had to brace herself to keep from responding. The broad shoulders in the conservative tailored business suit were lightly sprinkled with rain, as though he had left his office in a hurry without a topcoat and had taken a New York City taxicab, not the Rolls Royce. He always looked so young and appealingly handsome, she thought, dragging her eyes away, to be so ruthless and powerful and rich.
The entire floor of the Fad editorial department was trying to pretend that nothing was going on. That the president and chairman of the board of their conglomerate owners was not standing in the art department carrying on a conversation with Lacy Kingston, the new junior fashion writer—and verifying all the hot rumors that had been circulating for weeks. Ever since, in fact, Miss Kingston had fallen on her bottom in the employees’ auditorium at her first sight of him. Managing editor Gloria Farnham was hovering at the door of her office, vainly trying to hear what was said.
“Go away,” Lacy mumbled. She opened her purse and tried to pry the desk calendar and digital clock into it. “Drop dead. Don’t come back. I’m not destroying Fad magazine with my body anymore—I’m leaving.”
“I can’t talk to you here,” the chairman of the board said hurriedly, glancing around. “Hell, what are you doing back here in this trash heap? Why aren’t you in your office?”
She stood at the utility table and drew herself up to her full five feet nine inches, which was almost tall enough to look him straight in his rigidly clenched jaw.
“You can’t fire me,” Lacy cried, sweeping off her dark glasses to face him proudly. “I quit! Got it right, Mr. Chairman? I quit! Quit!”
“My God,” he groaned, seeing her face. He stepped toward her quickly.
“Lacy, what have you done? You’ve been crying,” he said in a harsh voice. “You’ve been crying, haven’t you?”
“Did you hear me?” she cried. “I quit! I quit!”
“Don’t yell,” he said quickly. “I have to talk to you, Lacy.” He took her hand and tried to press something into it. “I want to give you this. The jewelry is in a safe-deposit box in your name.”
“Yaaagh,” Lacy cried, throwing the key to the safe-deposit box back at him. “Can’t you give up? You know all these people are watching! It really turns you on, doesn’t it, to make me look like—?”
“You can’t keep the necklaces in your West Side place,” he said, picking the key up from the floor, “because the insurance won’t cov—”
“Money, that’s all you think about!” Lacy swung her purse and hit him on the side of his head just as he straightened up. He winced as the digital clock fell out and grazed his shoulder. “Keep your junk, Michael Echevarria. I sent everything back to you in the mail! Can you get this through your head for once,” Lacy yelled, “that everything I did was for free!”
There was a concerted gasp from the Fad editorial employees gathered at a distance around them. The back fringe was already scattering as managing editor Gloria Farnham ran to her office to pick up the telephone.
“Lacy,” Michael said, catching her by the arm, “stop it. It isn’t just the jewelry. That’s not why I’m here. I want to—”
“Get your hands off me,” Lacy shrilled. They were chest to chest, arm to arm, glaring at each other. “Let me go, you’re—harassing me!”
Through the fabric of her lavender sweater and skirt, Lacy could feel the heat of his big, virile body, and she tried to stiffen against its familiar pull. He looked at her with a strangely vulnerable, tormented expression. Lacy’s green eyes widened. Oh, no, it looked as though in another minute he would sweep her into those powerful arms and kiss her!
“Sexual harassment,” Lacy breathed, remembering what Alex van Renssalaer had just told her during her lunch-time telephone call. “Sexual harassment on the job,” she repeated, her voice gaining power. “Let go of me, you lecher!”
A squad of uniformed building security guards hurtled toward them out of the elevators, stumbling through the aisles of makeup and copy editing.
“Mr. Echevarria,” the uniformed guard out in front shouted, “are you all right?”
“I’m being sexually harassed,” Lacy was yelling, burning all her bridges behind her. “Help! Help! Call the feds! I’m being sexually harassed on the job!”
The last game plan of them all had just begun.
Nineteen
The late-autumn sunshine attractively illuminated the Palladian-style splendor of the dining room at the Yale Club, on Vanderbilt Avenue, and the large, prosperous crowd of New York alumni, mostly attired in charcoal worsted business suits and Bergdorf Goodman tweeds with only a token sprinkling of 1960s-style corduroys and plaid shirts. Alexander van Renssalaer had reserved a window table that offered a magnificent view of the sooty domes of Grand Central Station and the distant traffic on Forty-second Street. The Yale Club’s headwaiter, Frank, pulled out Lacy’s chair with an expression of approval as she smoothed the skirt of her subdued all-black velveteen suit, then gracefully lowered herself into her seat.
“I can’t tell you how happy you’ve made me, my dear, coming to me with this problem you’ve had with
the head of a very suspect outfit like Echevarria Enterprises, Incorporated,” Alex van Renssalaer said. He took advantage of the arrival of their white-wine spritzers to cover Lacy’s hand warmly with his own. The New York lawyer’s attractive, well-bred features held an expression that would have been vengeful smugness on anyone less patrician. “It’s about time somebody rang the bell on this parvenu ape from Belmont race track and the Brooklyn docks. Believe me, my dear Lacy, you’re carrying the standard for right and justice, challenging him like this, not to mention just plain old-fashioned good taste!”
Lacy tried to pull her fingers out from under his firm clasp as tactfully as she could. Alex was being terribly sympathetic and supportive; she supposed she owed him a big debt of gratitude for pointing out that Michael Echevarria had violated some very important federal statutes by insisting she date him every Friday night or else he’d fire her. As Lacy gazed at the lawyer’s rather long, aristocratic features, though, she couldn’t help being attacked by another miserable wave of uncertainty.
She’d had two whole days to think over her moment of confrontation with the president and chairman of the board of Fad and second thoughts, Lacy was finding out, were not always the happiest. She was not the sort of person who wanted to cause anyone serious trouble. That is, not the kind with a possible jail sentence attached to it. Even if, fortunately, she was no longer in love with Michael Echevarria.
To add to her unhappiness, she really missed being at work. Did anybody at Fad miss her? Was anybody writing her story on standardized women’s and misses dress sizes? In the morning, when the staff gathered for coffee and Danish, did any of them even mention her name? And get it right—Lacy Kingston, not Stacy Kingsley—for a change?”
“You sweet girl,” Alex van Renssalaer was murmuring, “when you get that expression on your lovely face, it breaks my heart.” Under the table his feet pressed consolingly against Lacy’s. “You’ve been through a lot, haven’t you? You’ve conducted yourself with a great deal of courage and sensitivity in this sorry affair—ah, matter.
“A lot of women are going to thank you for your stand, Lacy,” he assured her with a consoling smile. “This untutored clown Echevarria is utterly ruthless where the fair sex is concerned. Furthermore, his manners are abominable. Last year’s debutante committee was in an uproar when that clod failed to respond to invitations from half of New York’s finest families. He had to go inspect an oil field somewhere, that was his excuse. But we’ve got him this time, thanks to you.” The handsome lawyer picked up a pumpernickel roll, divided it into precise small pieces and began buttering them rather vindictively. “I’ve been waiting for years to nail this arrogant horse boy, and now I’m going to do it.”
“Good grief,” Lacy cried, dismayed. It was worse than she thought. “Don’t tell me Michael’s had this trouble before—harassing women, I mean?”
The lawyer gave her an abstracted look. “Mmmh? Oh, yes, there have been plenty of women—you’ve only to look at the brute to know they throw themselves at him disgustingly. He lives up to his uncouth reputation with women the same way he does business—moves in like a pirate, trims up liquid assets, axes personnel with the zeal of an executioner.”
He reached for a baking-powder biscuit. “But then these people he’s terminated have to report to the unemployment office for their dole at the taxpayer’s expense. As a taxpayer and a Republican, I deplore federal handouts—they’re a disgrace to our national work ethic.” When Lacy moaned softly, he seemed not to hear. “Normally, my dear, we’d go to the Equal Opportunity Commission with your complaint and take this vulgarian straight to the wall, but we’ve got bigger fish to fry. We don’t want a blundering federal bureaucracy to tie up a plum like this in the courts for months, years, with embarrassing investigations, depositions, countercharges and appeals.
“No,” Alex van Renssalaer smiled at her, “we need swift justice now. That is to say, we’re talking punitive damages.”
“We are?” Lacy said, feeling more miserable by the moment.
The handsome lawyer hesitated. “I understand the cad even had you watched by a private detective,” he said delicately.
Lacy stared down at the chicken salad Hawaiian the Yale Club waiter had just set before her. She’d almost forgotten about Walter Moretti. She hadn’t seen him at all in the past week, and then only because she’d baby-sat Sicky-Poo so the detective could take Candy out to a Greenwich Village art theater rerun of The Sound of Music. She wondered if Walter was unemployed. From the way he was hanging around Candy, she got the impression the Italian private eye had plenty of time on his hands these days. That, too, was her fault, she supposed.
“I have to tell you,” Alex van Renssalaer was saying, “I’ve had several long telephone consultations with Jack McLanahan, the Echevarria corporate counsel. They’re claiming, Lacy, dear, that there’ve been some, ah, expensive gifts which would put a different light on this alleged affair.
“Which is nonsense, of course,” he said quickly. “The federal guidelines are clear. The crux of the matter is that he threatened to fire you if you didn’t see him. Any claim of, er, remuneration doesn’t enter into it.”
Inwardly, Lacy shuddered. What she’d told Alex van Renssalaer had been simple enough: that the president and chairman of the board of Fad’s conglomerate had told her either she would have Friday night dates with him, or he’d fire her. And when she made the mistake of telling him that she thought she was in love with him, he’d dropped her and started going out with an interior decorator. Then her boss, the managing editor, took away her desk and moved her out of her office. Then she quit. Lacy decided she didn’t need to add any further details.
“Well, as a matter of fact,” she said, not able to meet the lawyer’s eyes, “I did get ten blenders, eight microwave ovens, a full-length Russian sable coat from Revillon Freres, a sulphur-crested cockatoo—”
“A what?” he exclaimed. “Good lord, stuffed or alive?”
“Oh, alive,” Lacy assured him sadly. “He was very sweet for a cockatoo, but I had to give him to my assistant editor’s kids.
“My former assistant editor’s kids,” she added.
“You’re not serious,” Alex said, staring at her. “Surely you can’t mean that you accepted gifts from this ... hood!”
“Well, yes, but I gave everything back to him as fast as he could give it to me. He just wouldn’t stop! You see,” Lacy said with mounting desperation,” “that was the whole point. I thought I loved him, and all he wanted to do was treat me like his sleazy—” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word. “Well, anyway, it was very demeaning and exploitative!”
Now she tortured herself wondering if she wouldn’t have been better off just loving Michael and leaving things the way they were. Was she ever going to be happy again, charging Michael Echevarria with what was, after all, a federal crime, as Alex had so helpfully pointed out? Shouldn’t she have explored, just for a few weeks anyway, a life of humiliating decadence as his East Side mistress—if that was all he was ever going to offer?
Just the thought of how he made love, and how it was never going to happen again, brought tears to Lacy’s eyes as she picked the pineapple chunks and macadamia nuts out of her chicken salad and laid them carefully on her bread and butter plate.
“My second cousin, Dulcie Ford-Manning,” Alex van Renssalaer said rather stiffly, “has been pursuing Echevarria for two years, poor girl. All that tight-fisted orangutan ever gave her was a book on kitchen design from Hammacher Schlemmer last Christmas.
“Don’t despair, dear heart,” he added with grim relish, “this Wall Street stable hand has met his match. He’ll find out what it’s like to deal with a better class of people who know their rights.”
“I don’t know that we’re a better class of people if we’re going to do anything horrible to him,” Lacy muttered, appalled to learn that the interior decorator who’d been dating Michael was related to Alex van Renssalaer. She lifted a lettuce leaf
hungrily to see if there was any chicken under it or just more chunks of pineapple. “We certainly don’t want to descend to Michael Echevarria’s level and be horrible and ruthless ourselves, do we?”
“My sweet, beautiful plaintiff,” Alex said with sudden, surprising emotion, “don’t worry your beautiful head about it.” He captured her hand, extracted her salad fork from it and dragged it across the lunch table so that he could kiss her fingers ardently. “The resources of my considerable law practice are at your disposal. Surely you know I have more than a professional interest in your case?”
“Please don’t,” Lacy told him. She looked around the dining room, embarrassed. Of all the things to have happen, Alexander van Renssalaer, one of New York’s most outstanding young lawyers and scion of one of the city’s oldest and most prestigious families, was kissing her hand for everyone to see.
“Echevarria has requested a meeting tomorrow in his office,” the lawyer murmured, maintaining a tenuous grasp on Lacy’s thumb. “I told their corporate counsel I’d have to consult with you.
“But darling,” he said with barely suppressed eagerness, “Echevarria is going to make the only move he can under the circumstances. He’s going to settle out of court. To put it in the vernacular, the bastard is going to pay through the nose.”
As the waiter arrived with their hot apple pie à la mode, Lacy finally wrenched her hand away from the lawyer’s fervent clutch. “But, Alex, we can’t ask Michael Echevarria for money,” she protested. “That’s just playing right into his hands! Good grief, that’s his way of settling everything! Now he’ll think we’re as ruthless and money crazy as he is.”
Hustle Sweet Love Page 20