by Churton, Alex; Churton, Toby; Locke, John; Lustbader, Eric van; van Lustbader, Eric
The third call Janet made was to her best friend, Amy. She got into it quickly. “Did you know about Ken?”
“Know what, sweetie?”
“Did you know?”
“Uh, you’re kind of weirding me out here, babe. Did I know what?”
“Did … you … know?”
Amy was silent a moment. “Oh, honey,” she sighed, “that was such a long time ago. And anyway, there are always two sides, you know?”
“I have a daughter! How could you not tell me?”
“Janet, I’m begging you, think it over before you rush to judgment. Please. Don’t screw this up.”
“Too late.”
“Let’s get together and talk about it.”
“Drop dead.”
20
It had been two days since Cincinnati, when I’d made the offer about beating her up and Lauren had asked, “Just for the sake of argument, how much would you have paid?” When I told her, she decided to at least hear me out. So I handed her Kathleen Chapman’s police file and watched as she reviewed it. She took her time, studied all the photos carefully, read a portion of each page of the police reports. When at last she finished, she’d looked into my eyes and said, “If you know all this about her, and understand her pain, why would you want to physically assault me?”
I shrugged. “It’s not about hurting you. It’s about making my ex-wife happy. Happy in the long run, at least.”
She gave me an encouraging smile and said, “Sugar, you really are pitiful when it comes to explaining yourself to women.”
“That bad, huh?”
“World-class bad,” she said.
She took both my hands in hers and looked into my eyes. She seemed to be searching for something better inside me than what I’d shown her so far.
“You’ll have to explain how beating the shit out of me will make your ex-wife happy,” she said. “It frightens me to think there’s a woman out there who would appreciate that type of gesture, and it makes me wonder why you’d be attracted to her in the first place.”
I nodded and told Lauren I cared a great deal about Janet and Kimberly and wanted only the best for them. I told her I wasn’t interested in taking Ken’s place; I just didn’t want a man like him living in the same house with my family. I told her how horrified I’d been to learn that Janet was planning to marry a habitual wife beater.
With that preamble out of the way, I explained my plan: Lauren would pretend to be Chapman’s ex-wife, Kathleen, and pretend Chapman had beaten her as a warning to keep her mouth shut about the abuse. I assured Lauren that I was a professional, meaning I would assault her very carefully, going for the maximum effect with the minimum pain. I reiterated there’d be no enjoyment in it for me and that I didn’t go around beating up women on a regular basis—but that I couldn’t think of any other way to discourage Janet from marrying Ken Chapman.
Then I gave her a handful of pain pills and told her if she decided to go through with it, she should take two now and one every four hours for two days. I told her the pills would make her feel so good she’d probably call to thank me for the beating.
“Whoa, cowboy,” Lauren said. “There you go again!”
I looked at her blankly. Then it registered. “Oh, right. Sorry.” I shook my head. “That was a figure of speech about thanking me for the beating. I just meant that the pills are incredibly effective. I really am an idiot with women.”
“I’ve had pain pills before,” she said.
“Not like these,” I said. “They’re laced with something that gives you a feeling of euphoria.”
Then I got out my duffel bag and handed her two bricks of money held together with rubber bands, each of which contained ten thousand dollars. She stared at the money. “It pains me to say this, but let’s see if I can help you save a few bucks. Why not just call Janet and tell her about Chapman? Or better yet, send her this folder and tell her you did a background check on her fiancé ‘and this is what turned up.”
“She won’t believe me,” I said. “She knows my people can fabricate legal documents in a matter of hours. We can alter it, falsify it, destroy court records or create published testimony overnight. And don’t forget, she loves the bastard, and he’s persuasive. His last girlfriend still believes Kathleen beat herself up all those years to maintain control in the relationship.”
Lauren was running out of ideas. I knew the feeling. “What if you sent the information anonymously?” she asked.
“Janet would know I did it,” I said, “and she wouldn’t believe it anyway. She really hates me.”
“Honestly, sugar, if this is your best idea, I can see why she might feel that way.” Lauren gestured toward the photos on the bed. “I admit there’s a resemblance,” she said, “but we’re not even close to identical. Really, this whole thing is insane. Even if I agreed to do it, when Janet sees the real photographs, she’ll know I’m not Kathleen.”
“I’ll take photos of you before and after the beating, and my people will alter the police photos to match your face and body. They’ll even do an age regression on you to show the beatings over a period of years. Then they’ll superimpose Kathleen’s injuries on your photographs. The updated packet will be delivered to your home address by courier within eight hours.”
“You can’t possibly know where I live,” she said.
To her horror, I recited her address from memory. “So the story and paperwork will be real,” I continued. “Only the police photos will be doctored.”
Lauren said, “How do you know that Janet never met Kathleen?”
“There’s no way Ken would have let them meet. He wouldn’t want Janet to learn about the beatings.”
“Why can’t I just pay her a visit, pretend to be Kathleen, and tell her the truth about Ken?”
“I thought about that, but we have to make Janet want to protect Kathleen.”
“Why?”
“Because if Janet thinks Ken beat Kathleen half to death as a warning, she’d be putting Kathleen’s life in danger by implicating her.”
“You’re talking about later on, when Janet breaks off the wedding,” Lauren said.
“Exactly. If Kathleen just shows up on Janet’s doorstep without any injuries, Janet will tell him, and he’d either say Kathleen was crazy or that it all happened years ago and he’s cured. Remember, he can prove he’s been to anger management courses.”
“Required by the court.”
“Right, and also counseling.”
“Also a provision of his probation.”
“You know the drill.”
She nodded.
“He’ll claim he was bipolar,” I said, “and that he subsequently took drugs to alleviate his chemical imbalance.”
“All of which might be true.”
“It might be, but that’s not the issue. I don’t want this creep in my wife’s life—or my daughter’s.”
“Your ex-wife, you mean.”
“Right.”
“So, if I pretend to be Kathleen, show up all battered and bruised, and tell Janet he did this to me as a warning, you think she’ll buy it?”
“I know she will. He can’t claim to be cured if he did this to you. But you’ve got to play it a certain way. We’ll need to do a lot of rehearsing.”
“I charge a two-hour minimum.”
I smiled. “I thought the twenty grand might be enough.”
She smiled back. “That’ll help take away the sting,” she said, “but you said the twenty was for the beating. Anything else, such as rehearsing, that’s extra.”
She saw me frown.
“Don’t go cheap on me now, Donovan,” she said. “I’m obviously the only game in town, the only escort that matches Kathleen enough for this crazy scheme to work.”
“Fair enough,” I said, noting she’d called herself a hooker earlier. “But if I’m paying for your time I want your full attention.”
“Of course.”
I nodded. “Good. And, Lauren, I
’ll make you a promise: if my ex breaks off the wedding, I’ll owe you a favor.”
“A favor,” she said.
I nodded.
“You mean like some kind of Mafia thing?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Like what, you mean you’d kill someone if I asked you to?”
I shrugged. “It’s up to you how you use your favor.”
“Mister, you are some kind of twisted freak, anyone ever tell you that?”
“I hear that a lot, actually.”
She looked at me silently for a moment. “Well I intend to hold you to it,” she said, “cause I’ve got a Ken Chapman in my life, too.” Lauren tried to hand one of the envelopes back to me. She said, “Don’t you want to just give me half now, half later?”
“I trust you,” I said.
She nodded. “I guess if you’re willing to beat me up and kill my ex, you’re not the sort of person who gets double-crossed much, am I right?”
“You think you can pull this off convincingly?” I said.
“Are you kidding me?” She said her experience as a successful escort all these years made her a better actress than Meryl Streep.
The way she put it, “Every week, an eighty-year-old man thinks he gives me a screaming orgasm, okay? So this business with Janet’s a piece of cake.” Then she added, “Still, you need to prepare yourself for something.”
“What’s that?”
“She’s never going back to you.”
“I don’t want her back.”
“Then let me put it another way: she’s never going to forgive you.”
“You don’t think she’ll eventually thank me?”
“Not a chance.”
I thought about that a bit. “Okay,” I said. “It’s still worth it.”
In all, Lauren and I were together six hours. The first hour we rehearsed her lines, over and over. Then I ordered room service. We rehearsed another thirty minutes while waiting for the food. Lunch came and we ate it and chatted about life in general.
I couldn’t get over how much she looked like Kathleen Gray. Lauren didn’t have Kathleen’s spark, of course, or her gift of gab, or her capacity to be adorable. Yet she had something special going for her in a Kathleen sort of way.
After lunch, since I was paying for her time anyway and since she looked so much like Kathleen Gray, we had a little casual sex.
Then I beat the shit out of her.
We rehearsed her lines again while I waited for her bruises to bloom. Then I took pictures and got the information about her ex and asked if she had a preference how she wanted the hit to go down. She said, “Two things. First, I want him to suffer.”
“Of course you do.”
“Wait,” she said. “This is really going to happen, isn’t it?”
I smiled. “What’s the second thing?”
“I want to watch him die.”
I smiled again. “Of course you do.”
She asked, “Am I bad?”
I shrugged. “Hey, he’s got to die sometime, right? Now don’t over-think this. It’ll be fun. You’ll see.”
21
One quick glance and I forgot all about Joe DeMeo.
It was Saturday, a couple hours after my meeting with DeMeo at the cemetery. I was staying in a luxury beach hotel in Santa Monica when she knocked on the door.
Jenine.
The first thing she noticed was the envelope fat with cash on the edge of the coffee table. She picked it up and her eyes widened as she riffled through the stack of hundreds. She glanced at me to see if I was serious.
I nodded.
She’d been advertising on Aspiring Actresses, the Internet escort site, and had purchased enough space to display three sultry photographs and a bio listing her vital statistics and limited acting experience.
In the e-mails we exchanged, she admitted being desperate for cash, and I had agreed to share some of mine in return for what might happen when we eventually met.
When she’d called from the lobby, I gave my room number and wondered—having been previously burned in similar encounters—if the girl who showed would bear any resemblance to the photos I’d seen.
I needn’t have worried. If anything, she looked better than advertised—and that was saying a lot. Dressed casually in jeans and a halter top and sporting iridescent ear buds tethered to a surprisingly bulky MP3 player, she looked every bit the college student for whom a distinguished professor might willingly sacrifice his career.
Jenine removed the ear buds and placed the MP3 player on the coffee table before tucking the envelope securely into her handbag. She performed the obligatory small talk in a detached but efficient manner until I let her know it was time to move things along.
Standing before me in the parlor of one of Southern California’s most exclusive boutique hotel rooms, biting her lower lip, she suddenly seemed quite small and vulnerable.
Before she arrived, I had propped open the French doors leading to the balcony. A slight breeze manipulated the sheer curtains into random patterns that caught her eye, causing her to look beyond the small wrought iron seating area. From her vantage point, the Santa Monica Pier was visible, and she smiled wistfully at it or something else that attracted her attention.
On the beach below us, a guy played riffs on a saxophone.
Someone’s stunning twenty-year-old daughter began lifting her halter top for my pleasure, and I thought about what I would do to a guy like me if this had been my daughter, Kimberly. After removing her top, she covered her breasts with her arms and paused.
I asked if there was a problem.
Just that she’d never done anything like this before, she said, and she was only doing it this once in order to make ends meet until her big break came along. I gave her the nod of understanding she expected, and she unbuttoned her jeans, slid them to the floor, and stepped out of them.
Promptly dismissing any misgivings I may have had regarding her age, I appraised her pert body and caught myself saying that what she was doing was no big deal; lots of famous actresses started out this way.
“It shows how committed you are to your craft,” I said, shamelessly.
That wistful smile played about her lips again, and she wriggled out of her panties. “What do you like?” she asked, and something in the tone of her voice suggested she had in fact done this sort of thing many times before.
Demonstrating considerable expertise and a surprising degree of enthusiasm, Jenine did her best to earn the contents of the envelope, and afterward, I told her to lie on her stomach so I could get a better look at the small tattoo on her lower back.
When I aimed my camera phone, she said, “I don’t do photos.”
“Just the tattoo,” I said.
She nodded but said she’d want to check the view screen to make sure I hadn’t included any part of her ass in the shot. “I intend to be a famous actress some day,” she said, “and I don’t want any nude photos turning up.”
I told her I didn’t see any birthmarks on her body and asked if she had any I might have missed. She gave me a strange look and told me about the dime-sized rosy patch on the right side of her head, just above her ear, which would have been impossible to see without parting her hair at that precise spot.
After I snapped a close up of that area, she began collecting her clothes. I noticed her purse on the desk and brought it to her.
“Are we finished here?” she wanted to know.
“We are.”
While she dressed, I moved to the balcony to signal the saxophone player, the monstrous man with severely deformed facial features named Augustus Quinn. I watched my giant pack up his instrument and walk away, knowing he was making his way around the hotel to the waiting sedan. Quinn and Coop would follow Jenine for a couple of hours, find out where she lived, who her friends were. Then they’d come back and pick me up and we’d drive to the airfield for the return flight to Virginia. The only negative was the time difference. By the time we
got back, I’d be too tired to test the ADS weapon.
Reentering the parlor, I found Jenine standing in the center of the room, fully dressed, attempting to make eye contact. There’s an art to saying good-bye in these situations, a sort of silent protocol. You don’t kiss, but a hug is nice. There’s the verbal dance you both do when neither of you want her to linger but neither wants to be rude, either.
You don’t want to be too abrupt, so you tell her it was great and you’d love to see her the next time you’re in town. She reiterates she doesn’t really do this sort of thing, but for you she’ll make an exception.
My cell phone performed a dance of its own, vibrating on the desktop. “I need to get that,” I said.
She flashed a shy smile. “Okay … thanks?” It was almost a question. I gave her a slight frown to imply I wished she didn’t have to go. She shrugged and offered a cute little pout to express the same sentiment. Then she blew me a kiss, let herself out, and closed the door behind her.
When she did that, something clicked inside my head. I thought about Kathleen Gray and felt a wave of sadness wash over me.
22
The cell phone call that caused Jenine to leave had been prearranged. It was Quinn calling to let me know he was in position. I donned my jeans, pocketed the camera phone, poured myself a double whisky from the wet bar. I sat on the edge of the bed with my drink and propped my free hand on the sheets we’d rumpled moments earlier.
The scent of Jenine’s youth hung in the air, and I inhaled it fully, savoring her essence. Maybe Kathleen needed four hundred and ninety calories to de-stress, but not me.
I felt a vibration in my pocket, slid the phone open, put it to my ear.
“It’s me,” said Callie.
“You need to get a butterfly tattoo on your ass,” I said.
She paused for a beat. “Donovan, if this is how you normally start conversations, I think I may have isolated your problem with women. No wonder you can’t find a nice girl to marry.”