George, quietly lying back after his ride with Janet, turned to watch us. He was getting a fresh new hard-on from Ayako’s pale fingers on my dark pussy.
He went over to the panting Janet and gave it to her all over again.
She came twice from Giradeau’s second turn. She played with her clit to get off while Cahill had another go. He never lasted very long.
By that time, I had turned away, kissing Ayako while all her fingers were inside me, and with my back to the group, only she knew I was stifling a whimper over my own climax.
I leaned against the poker table exhausted, and then I excused myself, glancing over my shoulder to see what was starting to happen in my absence. George Westlake wanted to fuck Ayako. He seemed to always be trying to make it with exotic beauties.
She laughed in his face and said something like “Earn it, George!”
Perhaps meaning the game. And then she turned to Cahill and let him suck on her middle finger, knowing that it had been inside me.
Then it all got too much, as if the group lust in the room manufactured a phoney dry-ice fog that merely blocked you from glimpsing the smallness of all our humanity. All the rampant fucking was simultaneously glorious and vulgar. I stopped enjoying myself. I couldn’t enjoy myself any more here. It’s not that I had found my modesty again, sure as hell not any prudery—I wanted one-on-one back. Whatever this spectacle was, you couldn’t call anything about it intimate. I ducked into a side room of the suite, plopped myself down on a love seat and was surprised to see violet and purple flashes and spots before my eyes. Dizzy. I shook it off, blinked once and twice, and there was Ayako standing in front of me.
“Do you want to come home with me tonight?” she asked.
“I want to,” I answered. “But…”
I thought of the documents I had swiped from her apartment, how they could be a clue to something sinister or could mean nothing at all. Not that I had found anything more incriminating.
Hypocrite. You were more suspicious of Lionel, even of Neil, and yet you still slept with them. And then there’s Giradeau, a suspect as much as Ayako, and you keep getting it on with him—
Ayako looked hurt. After watching her in the games and being intimate with her in her apartment, I had wondered if anything could puncture that veil of cool reserve, could make her feel vulnerable.
“When you’re ready,” she said, keeping a positive thought, some kind of faith in me, and she leaned over—she didn’t have to lean much—and kissed me full on the lips, nudging her tongue inside my mouth. I let her. I returned the kiss and caressed her cheek and offered a silent promise, not knowing yet if I would make it a lie.
I showered—I always showered after one of these games. And then, since we were at The Lotus Eaters, I quickly dressed and headed into the main health club of the complex. Sometimes Helena had brought me in as her guest and I knew it had a big dance studio. Perfect for practising karate forms.
I changed into the keikogi I’d brought along in a gym bag, knowing I’d be here tonight. I felt like going back to my roots and doing sensible meat-and-potatoes karate instead of sloppy, undisciplined kickboxing. I worked my way through the practice forms from Heian Shodan all the way up to Nijushiho-dai.
I had worked up a good sweat and was doing punching and kicking drills up and down the hardwood floor when Janet came in, wearing a bright pink leotard. Something told me the outfit was an excuse to talk to me.
“Do you mind if I watch?” she asked politely.
Panting a little from the workout, I shook my head.
“There are windows at the dojo where I train. People watch us all the time.”
I went back to the drills. When I had punched and kicked my way to the end of the floor, punctuating my last strike with a loud kiai, I stood up formally, staying in the moment long enough for a display of proper awareness. Then I relaxed.
Janet studied me intently. She probably didn’t understand all of what I was doing, but she knew intuitively I was good at it.
“What’s on your mind?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing…everything.”
I tried to put her at ease. Politicians, like actors, must have a constant appetite for both attention and reassurance. “We both saw a little too much of each other tonight, I guess.”
She smiled faintly. “Maybe. I don’t know. Look, I, um, I don’t know why I’m going to admit to this, but…I haven’t cared about the respect of anyone under thirty in quite a while. I haven’t needed to cultivate it.”
Jeez, this wasn’t necessary. “Janet, look…”
“And then along came Neil, and sure, I paid for him the first few times because I was lonely, but…He is under thirty, and he can get armies of girls half my age, but he’s interested in me. I always figured I would have to give him up sooner or later, and I tried to prepare myself for it, but it’s still going to hurt. And then he chases after you—”
“Well, about that—”
“No, please, let me finish. This is hard enough as it is. I’m not going to say what I think you expect me to.”
She looked down. She looked away. Everywhere but in my eyes. “I see how strong you are. Up here.” She tapped her forehead for reference. “You’re no man’s fool, are you? Not ever.”
“I hope not.”
“My husband,” she said distantly, eyes shining. “I loved that man for decades. When we made love, it was good but no angels wept over our heads or anything. I had my daughter, we raised her, and I got on with my career and never even looked twice at another man. And after he died, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I found myself getting horny and feeling ridiculous, hardly experienced at all. And maybe my body looks one way, but inside, I don’t feel older. I certainly don’t feel any wiser! I feel the way I did at your age. And okay, maybe I’m fighting gravity and putting a lot of hope in face creams, but I still don’t want to go out with sad divorced men with bellies and hard luck tales. I want a firm ass and youth and a nice smile.”
“I don’t blame you,” I smiled.
“You wake up one day, and you ask yourself, who are all your inhibitions for? And so I got into the games, and I find out yeah, there are men who do want to fuck me. Still. At my age. The games…There’s bluffing and there are mind games, but in the end, we know what everyone’s there for. If they want you, it’s immediate. Sometimes it’s even better than with Neil because I’m not wondering for how long? Is he with me for the society? Where are we going? Do we have a future? It’s raw. You’re just taken. You’re…Well, you know now. You know what it can be. And tonight…”
Tonight? Yes, I understood. Tonight was about being stripped naked beyond clothes. She had wanted to forget Neil, practically obliterate him with a new memory of a parade of cocks filling her one after another, of her own mini-orgy that had her as the star. Tonight wasn’t about firm ass and youth. She would make do with George Westlake and Cahill and Giradeau.
We had both abandoned our identities in that room in a haze of alcohol and pot smoke, and my little email lie to my consciousness later would be that I’d been on the job.
She was the second woman in the world after that Japanese girl to see me at my most intimate level, and who knows? Maybe she thought I’d been “faking it.”
Here she was, fearing that I considered her a tramp.
Janet Marshall. She just kept on lobbying me. And it always made me withdraw. I wished she hadn’t come down there.
I was lying in bed, enjoying a pretty good dream. I was back on a holiday in Paris that had turned into a case, only this time there were no au pairs from Somalia and no cops, just me walking down to the big Galerie Layfayette. I was laughing and holding hands with Ayako.
I heard her voice in that faraway muffled dream sound you get when you’re asleep. She told me: We should do it at the cosmetics counter. And then suddenly we were upstairs in the bathroom fixture department, all shiny chrome showerheads and pale blue tiles. And I was in a full bathtub under a blanket of b
ubble foam (it’s a dream, don’t ask where the water came from). Ayako had a flannel and was soaping my breasts while customers walked by, and then her dainty white hand dipped into the water and fingered me—
When the hand shook my shoulder, I was flustered and disoriented.
Helena’s very real and audible voice informed me: “Our girl is in a shitload of trouble!”
I rubbed my eyes and said, “What? What are you talking about?”
I threw back the covers and, nude, searched for my robe. Oh, man, I barely remembered coming over to stay in Richmond.
A tall side of pale beef, brunette with a nice six-pack and great biceps, padded naked into the doorway with a coffee pot and said absently, “Hel, I couldn’t find the stuff you wanted so I whipped up a batch with the Kenyan—that all right, luv?”
I heard what sounded vaguely like Aussie accent. He and I inspected each other for a shocked two seconds, and the long thick member between his legs twitched with fresh life. He blushed and darted behind the wall, saying, “Oh, Christ, I’m sorry! Didn’t know—morning!”
“Down, children,” Helena told both of us.
“He came from a land down under?” I asked. Couldn’t resist.
“Get dressed,” she told me, helping me into the robe. “And keep your hands off my fruit.”
“Fruit?”
“Kiwi.”
“Nice,” I said.
She pulled me by the hand into her bedroom, where her large-screen Sony was switched on to the BBC Breakfast show. I saw camera footage of yellow caution tape in front of a smart-looking door. Then a photo inset with the caption MURDER, and cut to a huddle of cops, Carl Norton looking his deeply focussed, rumpled self.
The reporter was ticking off the facts in an appropriately sombre voice: “Anthony Boulet’s body was found early this morning at his Islington house. The high-profile black solicitor was apparently surprised in his home by a burglar. Cause of death has been confirmed as strangulation by a rope or cord. No word yet on what was taken from the home of the man considered to be one of the most prominent voices in the black community for more than…”
10
Mr. Boulet’s wife has been on holiday, visiting family in Jamaica with their daughter, and he was in the house alone,” the reporter droned on. “Their 22-year-old son lives and studies in Florida. Police had no comment on a tabloid report this morning claiming that Mr. Boulet had booked a minicab for around one AM to go to the home of Janet Marshall, his longtime friend and collaborator on many high-profile government and equal opportunity initiatives…”
“Oh, shit!” I said.
“Where did the bastards get that?” thundered Helena.
“Easy,” I said in a monotone voice. “They don’t say who discovered his body. If his wife and kids are out of town, who’s left? Either a neighbour heard a commotion and went to investigate, or he was in plain view to the cab driver through his front window. And one of those little PC shits on the case leaked it. Or maybe the dispatcher phoned up the newspaper for a quick pound.”
“Oh, God, this is awful,” said Helena. “It’s all innuendo. Who’s to know why Anthony would want to come see her in the middle of the night? But the way it looks—”
“Where is she now?” I asked. “Have you tried to reach her?”
“I got you up first.”
“Assume her home phone will be ringing off the hook,” I told her. “You must have her mobile. Try that.”
She did. Janet’s mobile was switched off, which meant all we could do was wait. It stood to reason that by now she was either being questioned by the cops or had gone to ground after they’d tracked her down.
I was having guilt pangs myself because I had probably dug the hole a little deeper for her. In letting Carl know that I was dealing with a blackmail case over a Highly Esteemed Personage, it was a no-brainer to connect the dots from Anthony Boulet to Janet Marshall. And if something as ridiculous as the minicab booking could leak out then the whole deck of cards could be spilled into the open.
We went downstairs to have breakfast with the Kiwi, still looking very hunky in a sleeveless T-shirt and faded plaid pyjama bottoms. He was pretty dumb, didn’t have a clue about the most basic London tourist sites (Helena had picked him up in a club), but he was still adorable, and I have to say he was a class act. He whipped us up Spanish omelettes.
At four in the afternoon, Helena’s doorbell rang, and I opened it to see Janet on the front step, looking very worn out but still in one piece.
“Shit!” I said. “You okay? Get in here.”
“I’m all right,” she muttered.
Helena rushed forward, and in one smooth motion she had three Scotch glasses out and a bottle. I swore I never saw her break stride at her bar.
Pizza. The police knew Janet was innocent, not even involved and didn’t have a clue that Anthony wanted to see her—because of pizza.
After her OTT behaviour at the poker game, she felt a wave of remorse and went over to Neil’s, insisting she loved him, please take her back, and that she didn’t understand how their relationship got so complicated. They both liked their fun, had always thought they were both sophisticated and had strong enough self-esteem to indulge other appetites, get variety, blah, blah, blah. But jealousy was Human Nature 101. Irrational. Inevitable. Makes grown adults do stupid things. Now the two of them had to figure out what they wanted.
Terrific. That’s the advice I gave Neil on the phone. I kind of expected he’d be doing the figuring out over me.
“We talked for hours, just holding each other and hashing it all out.”
She avoided my eyes as she said this, and I recognised that she took no cruel pleasure in defeating me for Neil’s affection. No wish to pay me back for my brief dalliance with him.
“I hadn’t eaten anything, and he said he was hungry, too, so we ordered out,” she explained. “I’m the one who made the call, and I answered the door.”
“You’re damn lucky the delivery guy remembered you,” said Helena.
“At the door, I realized I didn’t have enough pound coins to make up the bill for the pizza, so the fellow had to wait while Neil fished around for some extra money.”
The police checked and had established that Anthony never placed any calls from his mobile or his home phone to Janet. Not to her mobile, not to her house and not to Neil’s, assuming he even had the number. He merely booked the minicab to shoot over to her house in Notting Hill.
Janet looked out the window. “God. So right when I’m with Neil, poor Anthony…And he was trying to get hold of me.” Her eyes brimmed with tears.
I sat down directly in front of her, trying to get her to focus. We were far from out of the woods. “What did the police ask you about the blackmail?”
“Th—they didn’t,” she answered, mildly surprised at the question. “How could they know? They don’t know, do they?” She looked from me to Janet.
“Not yet,” I said.
I’d been worrying earlier about Carl making the natural connection from Anthony to Janet, and from Janet back to me, already connected to Lionel. But since there was nothing so far to tie Anthony’s murder to Lionel’s, he probably thought at the moment he was dealing with two unrelated homicides. After all, he knew I worked for a Highly Esteemed Personage, but he didn’t know which one—not yet. If so, good. It bought us time.
“I think you better tell us about Anthony now,” I suggested.
Janet still wore her expression of baffled innocence. “What do you mean?”
“You were seeing him,” I said. “Come on. If we’re going to help you, we have to know everything.”
Helena was baffled, too, only her surprise was genuine. “Janet?”
Our stateswoman sat on the couch, the edges of her mouth flickering in a sad smile as she asked me, “How did you figure it out?”
“The clincher is that he didn’t phone before booking the cab to come over,” I explained. “He must have presumed you were home. W
ho makes presumptions like that? Lovers do. Even friends call to see if you’re there before they swing by. But a lover could drop in, and he would have a key. He could wait. You also gave yourself away that night at the awards. You told me Anthony was there when the blackmail note arrived. Well, weeks ago, you said the note was slipped through your mail slot first thing on a Saturday morning. And if he was there, my bet is he slept over. Right?”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes, he did.”
“The night of the awards, I actually began to consider Anthony as a suspect. After all, it would have been so easy for him to slip the blackmail note into your mail slot from the inside when you weren’t paying attention. This is a man who told me he ‘didn’t like people who couldn’t control their passions.’ Mix in a little guilt and self-loathing over cheating on his wife along with an obsessed devotion to you, and it added up to motive. But I gave that idea up.”
“Why?” asked Helena.
“Because Lionel still doesn’t compute in a jealousy scenario. Why kill him and not Neil? Anthony told me himself how Neil once showed up and caused a scene at an awards banquet. That’s the guy he’d be pissed at, not Lionel. And if he was trying to frame Neil, remember, the police only questioned him for Lionel’s murder because of a really weak connection with one of Lionel’s old girlfriends, a girl named Shondi. I’ve met her. She doesn’t have a clue about you or your life or any of this. And I would be utterly amazed if Anthony had ever heard of this girl. All of this speculation doesn’t matter anymore now that Anthony is…” I sighed. “How was your relationship with him recently?”
“A little strained sometimes, but nothing serious,” answered Janet. “I think we both knew it couldn’t last. It had pretty much run its course—especially when I got word that Neil was pulled in for questioning. Anthony knew I’d rush to support him.”
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