"We came to give you some advice. There's bad stuff going down, and the two of you may be involved. We wanted to talk to you before the police. But if having us here upsets you so much-"
"they already called," Amanda said.
"they didn't say what it was about. Just that they wanted to come over here and talk."
While Harold showed a pained half smile, Kim gave me an emphatic look.
"I know what it's about," she said. We all moved to the couches and sat down.
"It has to do with Mrs. Z. One of her clients killed an actress." The Duquaynes recoiled.
"Remember Sonya?" they nodded.
"It was her. When I threatened to expose this client-it's safer for you if I don't mention his name-they kidnapped Shadow to find out where I was. And when she wouldn't talk . . ." Kim drew her finger across her neck, then sadly shook her head. The Duquaynes were starting to show signs of extreme distress.
"But why us?" Amanda asked.
"We had nothing to do with any of that."
"Of course not, darlings. But now the whole thing's coming unwound. You were clients too. You had private sessions. Harold's a celebrity. A famous painter. He's been on the cover of Art News. You've both been on the cover of New York. "
"But still, Kimberly, I still don't see .
"Now everything's going to come out. All the glittering names. Yours too. Unless .
"What?"
"Mrs. Z comes to her senses and agrees that reparation should be paid."
Harold squinted at Kim.
"You're talking about money?"
"What else, darling? What other kinds of reparations are there in this world?"
"Money from us?" Amanda was tense.
"Not from you, silly. From the client."
As the Duquaynes looked at each other, I observed their relief-this was not going to cost them any cash.
"But then how-" Harold asked.
"How are you involved?" they both nodded.
"You're not. Except that the cops have got your names. they won't be able to prove anything, of course, not unless certain evidence comes to light. Only Mrs. Z and her client can prevent that. That's why we think one of you should speak to her."
"What should we say?"
"You could say, very simply, very frankly, that you understand a situation has arisen that could be embarrassing to people who have supported her over the years. And that your advice is that she do whatever has to be done to see that the injured parties in the-affair are satisfied. Anyway, darlings, this is just a suggestion. But, you see, if this does go to the cops, all the trees in the forest will fall, and that, I'm afraid, includes the two of you
"We'll make the call," Harold said.
"What about the police?" Amanda asked.
"Refer them to your lawyer."
"Shouldn't we talk with them?"
"That's absolutely the last thing you should do. But I'd talk to Mrs. Z pretty soon, this afternoon if possible. Darlings, you don't want to leave this hanging. Not a thing like this."
Kim nodded to me, we rose, then the four of us moved to the door. Harold and I shook hands, Amanda and Kim exchanged a kiss, Kim whispered to her, giggled, whispered something to Harold, giggled again, and then we left.
On the street I asked her what all the whispering had been about.
"A jest," she said.
"I told Mandy we'll get together when this is over, have ourselves some fun. I told Harold next time we played I was going to tie up a very intimate part of his body-. He loved iti-He adores being tied. I suspect he even likes being hit."
Ilaughed.
"Geoffrey"' She kissed me.
"You're really amused."
"I guess I am," I said.
"they were so awful to me before, it was kind of a pleasure to watch them squirm."
"Well, that's wonderful," she said.
"Progress in a way, because a couple of weeks ago I think you would have been appalled. It's all part of the gig, you see. We come on tough with them, tell them what we want, then offer them a little fun. they're sexually driven people. Kinky obedience training-that's their thing. But the poor darlings are too chicken to admit it. God forbid that the intimate desires of such an Exalted Couple should ever be divulged!" She grinned.
"Carrot and stick is the way to control them. Sex is the carrot. Exposure is the stick."
At 5:00 P.M., while Kim was off seeing Rakoubian, I picked up my proof sheet of the Darling shoot from a photo lab on West Twenty-fourth The proofs looked good. There were a couple of shots of Darling covering his face that showed just the degree of panic I'd hoped to instill. Maybe Frank was right. Maybe we were on a roll. Certainly everything was clicking along. But I was wary, It just didn't seem possible that we could extort a million dollars without having to pay some horrific price ourselves.
I stopped at a Spanish tapas joint where there was a quiet phone booth between the men's room and the bar. I dialed Scotto, the phone rang several times, and then Ramos picked it up.
"Sal's out," he said.
"But I wanna talk to you. Couple things I wanna go over. Come down to the precinct we'll sort them out."
"I'm busy," I said.
"Busy?"
"Pressed is what I mean."
"Isn't that nice? The man is 'pressed." He doesn't have time to help the cops. We're only trying to solve a homicide here. But let's put that on hold 'cause the man is pressed. "
"Your sarcasm's withering me, Ramos. Anyway, I already told Sal everything I know. If you want, we can go over it all again, but I don't have time to come down there now."
"What's a matter? Afraid to face me, let me see your eyes?"
"I think I work better with Sal," I said.
"I'll call back later on."
"Sal's soft on you, Barnett. But I'm not. You're playing games. I don't like games."
"What kind of games do you think I'm playing, Dave?"
"You got your own thing going here. they got a word for that. 'Hidden agenda." I aim to find out what yours is." I didn't say anything; I couldn't. His smart cop's instinct was telling him I wasn't straight.
"Well?" he asked.
"Well, what?"
"What do you have to say for yourself?"
"Is this when I'm supposed to break down and confess?"
"Watch it, sucker."
"Is that a threat, detective?"
"Take it any way you want. But hear this: I don't buy your story. I think you know where the roommate is.
Sooner or later I'm going to find missing Missy Kimberly, and when I do I'm going to find out about you. Turns out you've been lying, I'm going to fry your ass. All I gotta say for now. Sal'll be back in an hour." He hung up.
I started walking uptown. My conversation with Ramos had shaken me up. What am I doing wrong? I asked myself. How am I giving myself away?
Frank was right. The cops were going to be a problem. Even if we brought off the blackmail and collected the money, Ramos and Scotto were not conveniently going to go away
I stoppe@ at Penn Station to call Frank at his gallery.
"Better get back to the hotel quick," he said.
"Kim's they wasted Rakoubian." waiting for you.
"What?"
,I just got off the phone with her. She was on her way to see him when she noticed patrol cars in front of his place. There was a crowd on the street. She edged in and asked what was going on. Seems your fat friend fell or jumped out of his window. My bet is he was pushed."
"Frank!"
"Steady, Geof. And save your regrets. I told you this could happen: They're playing hardball. After what you did this morning, I'm not at all surprised."
"Kim told you?"
"Yeah. Poor Arnold. Pissed on by all those fancy dogs. She also told me about the Duquaynes. You guys played them great."
His compliment was nice, but I was still thinking about Rakoubian. Suddenly I wished I were out of the whole goddamn mess.
"What if they'd come for
him when Kim was there?" I asked.
"They'd have heaved her out the window too!"
"Point is, they didn't run into her. Like I told you last night, we're on a roll. Last night Kim taunted Mrs. Z. This morning you taunted Darling. Rakoubian caused them a lot of trouble. If you were in the same spot, you'd have killed him too."
I was quiet.
"Wouldn't youg"
"No," I said. ,No, Frank, I most certainly wouldn't."
"Look, Geof, I don't condone what they did. But there's one plus here-I predicted how they'd behave, which tells me I've got a good handle on them, which tells me the plan is working, and we should proceed without delay."
Back at the motel I found a badly shaken Mrs. Lynch.
"Sure, Adam was awful. Slime. A real piece of crud. But to waste him like that .
She was pacing while I lay on the bed. Her hands were nervous and she was dripping sweat. Strangely, seeing her so upset actually reassured me. She and Frank talked casually about "wasting" people; now, at least, she was expressing pain.
"I mean he couldn't do anything to them," she said. She stopped, turned to me.
"He wasn't threatening them. He didn't have the pictures anymore."
"He could identify Darling. I guess that was the reason," I said. "I know." She started pacing again.
"Like that's what this is all about. Shows of force and all that kind of crap. God, I hate them. I hate them more than-" She stopped.
"I'd like to see them die, Geof. I really would. Rolling on the ground, you know, in the dirt, their bellies split open, their hands grasping at their guts, trying to keep them from spilling out. Crying, whimpering, dying painfully. That's what I'd like to see."
She became calm then, as if that thought, that awful vision, satisfied her rage. Her shaking stopped. The sweat dried on her forehead. Her fingers were cool when, a few minutes later, she sat beside me and began to stroke my neck.
We made love, showered, then went out to look for a place to eat. On Tenth Avenue Kim spotted a Cuban restaurant. She wanted to go there, wanted to be reminded of Key West. It turned out to be a strange hybrid, Chino-Latino or Cuban-Chinese. We ordered dishes from both sides of the menu, ate pork asado with chopsticks and poured black beans over our Cantonese rice. For five minutes we were amused, then the joke began to pall.
"Why are we putting ourselves through this?" I asked her.
"Why don't we go back to Florida and forget it? Just forget it. "
She gazed at me, her eyes pinning me down. I felt like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car.
"It's getting too rough," I told her.
"I don't know if I can handle much more." She nodded.
"I know what you mean. I feel awful about Adam too."
"Maybe we shouldn't have turned him in, Kim. Oh, I know it might help us marginally. But to turn him over, set him up for slaughter . I put down my chopsticks, shook my head.
"Listen, Geof"-her voice was tender-"you're a sensitive guy and I love you for that. But we're both going to have to toughen up." She smiled.
"Know what your problem is? I think you give up hatred too easily." She patted my hand.
"Anyway, there's nothing we can do for Adam now. We can only go forward and hope for the best-do what we have to do."
After dinner we wandered down to Forty-second Street, merging with the crowds. The neon flashed, the porn stores were open and the hustlers worked the mob. Kim grasped my arm. I looked at her. We listened to their propositions, laughed them away. Then at the apex of Times Square she broke free to face the empty intersection alone. She stood there on the sidewalk, staring at the signs. As she spoke she seemed to glow.
"I love this cesspool. Makes me feel good. Triumphant almost. As if places like this, which people say are so degrading, are the only places I feel I'm really alive. Know what I mean, Geoffrey? It's so damn human down here, like there's nothing phony, no false front. Here you can feel what it means to be a human being. It's the opposite, isn't it, of sitting in a church?"
The moment she said that I felt that she was right. The city swirled with criminality, and we were part of it, part of the great greedy grasping mainstream, competitors in the endless struggle for gain.
She was right about another thing too, the feeling she described of triumph. You could be predatory and sexual and still hold your head high because you weren't pretending nly human, as she said, to be anything else. You were o stripped of all hyp?crisy. There was something wonderful about that, liberating, clean. I began to glow myself.
And so, as I strode with her amid that overheated crowd, my cameras bobbing against my chest, I no longer felt like an observer, a photographer, but like a player in the game.
I woke up in a sweat, disoriented, confused. But when I opened my eyes the room was dark. I reached for Kim. She wasn't there. I called out her name. No answer. I sat up.
She wasn't in the bathroom either. Has she left me? Deserted me aizain? Maybe I was still asleep, trapped in a nightmare. Bl;t of course I wasn't. And her suitcase was still in the room. But not the set of clothes she'd worn the day before. I looked at my watch. It was 5:35 A.M.
Maybe she's gone down to the lobby, I thought, to buy a newspaper, or get some aspirin, or munch on something in the coffee shop. I picked up the phone, dialed the desk, asked the clerk to page the lobby and restaurant for Mrs. Lynch. He said the restaurant was closed and there wasn't anyone in the lobby, and he'd been on since five and the only person he'd seen go out was a man in logging clothes.
He promised he'd page her anyway and call me back if he saw a woman around. I waited ten minutes by the phone before I realized it wasn't going to ring.
Maybe, I thought, she went out for a walk. She was overexcited and couldn't sleep. I dressed quickly, went downstairs, checked in with the clerk. He told me where to find the all-night eating places in the neighborhood. I thanked him and stepped into the street.
it must have
There was a slick on Eighth Avenuerained, though I'd had no sense of that inside the hotel. The air was sticky. The autumnal flavor of the day before was gone. The yellow glow of the streetiamps was reflected in the pavement. I could hear the wail of distant sirens downtown.
No whores around. They'd long since gone home, or were out on dates, or wherever they went. The transvestites and pimps and dope dealers were all gone too. Only a few homeless people remained, a man curled in a doorway down the block, another sprawled across a grating in front of a discount movie house across the street.
I made the round of coffee shops, but didn't see her. And then I wandered aimlessly, After a while I found myself beside the river. No trucks around, everything closed, and the damp air stagnant without a trace of Wind. The sirens still shrieked far away. I watched the oily water lapping around the rotting piers. She went somewhere, 'somewhere specific. She had'a destination. The only thing I could think to do was go back to our room and wait.
The sun was well up by the time I returned. There were people on the streets and the traffic had begun to build. A big air-conditioned bus was double-parked in front of the hotel. The lobby was choked with baggage. The desk clerk didn't notice me. A group was in the process of checking out.
As I rode up in the elevator I felt depressed. I told myself she shouldn't have deserted me this way. She should have left me a note, an explanation. But that wasn't her style. I'd learned that before. She came and went as she pleased.
I knew she was back the moment I opened the door. Her clothes were piled in the center of the room. There was an odor in the room too that didn't belong@omething harsh and resinous.
I could hear water running. She was in the bathroom. I moved to the doorway and looked in. She was taking a shower, singing to herself, an old Cole Porter tune:
"It's the wrong game with the wrong chips, Though your lips are tempting, they're the wrong lips,"
I leaned against the doorframe, waiting for her to finish, watching her perfect body in silhouette against the pl
astic curtain.
"They're not her lips but they're such tempting lips.
She pulled the curtain, saw me, and then, for the briefest instant, she looked scared. A moment later she flung herself upon me, naked and wet. She hugged me while planting kisses on my face.
"Thank God, you're back, Geoffrey! It was terrible."
"What happened?"
"I had to take a shower to wash away the smell. My clothes stink of it too. I'm going to throw them out."
"Stink of what?" She was trembling.
"Varnish remover."
I stood back from her. That accounted for the resinous odor in the other room.
"Why varnish remover? I don't understand."
She shook her head.
"That's what I used. Hold me, Geoffrey. Please." Her eyes were wild. She had the same on-the-edge took the night she'd come to me after running away from Darling's men. I held her.
"Used for what?"
"to set the fire."
"Jesus, Kim! What are you talking about?"
"The message-remember?" I shook my head.
"Come on, Geoffrey. Of course you do. Frank told us to send them a message, demonstrate that we were serious. Well, that's what I did. It was a big message too. It said, Don't mess with us, do what we say."
I could feel her body shaking in my arms.
"My God, what did you do?"
She looked up at me.
"I was so furious about what they did to Adam, I guess I got carried away." She stood back. Droplets clung to her body. Her hair looked great, wet and tangled. She looked so good I wanted to screw her then and there.
She pushed her mouth against my shirt, spoke against my chest.
"Early this morning I torched Mrs. Z's building. Firebombed it. When I left, it was in flames. The whole rotten place was burning up." She looked up at my face again.
"God, how I wish you'd been there, Geoffrey! to see the flames! to see them dance!"
5
Here's something I have to tell you, Geoffrey. Wanted to tell you in the car . . . but I was afraid."
It was I:00 A.M. We were lying naked in a huge double bed in the Seek And Ye Shall Find Motel in Santa Fe. It had been thirty-six hours since we left New York. We'd spent most of the evening in the room eating carryout food and watching TV. I'd just turned off the set. I was bone-weary, about to close my eyes, when Kim announced she had something to say.
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