by Lolita Files
The big boss contemplated the enthusiastic girl’s face.
“I think so, too, Shecky. I think so, too.”
You’ve been
…doing what?!”
“Feeding her fatty foods so she’ll gain weight and you’ll finally leave her.”
“Oh, Brookie, that’s just absurd.”
Miles was frowning. Brookie rolled away from him, fearing it was an expression of wrath. She didn’t know from the wrath of Milestone Tate. But that wasn’t what she had seen. Miles was angry with himself. That explained why Sharlyn was softer in the middle. Brookie was pushing food on her. He was screwing with the lives of two women. It was time for him to be the man he kept insisting he was.
Enough already.
He was just going to have to face things. He wanted to be with Brookie. He didn’t want to sneak around.
He was leaving Sharlyn.
It was time to start a new life.
“You want a divorce?”
Sharlyn was sitting on the tan Philippe Starck couch. Miles was sitting next to her, calm, objective, as though he were handling another business deal.
“I’m prepared to provide you with a financial package that offers you total comfort for the rest of your life. I’m leaving you with all the residential property, although I would like the ranch in Montana. You were never very fond of it.”
“You always make everything about money,” she said.
“I’m not making this about money. Money will ultimately become a real factor in our divorce.” He saw her flinch at the word. “I preferred to deal with it up front, to make this as smooth a transition as possible.”
“But what about the papers? It’ll be all over the papers.”
Miles stared at his wife.
“What?” she cried. “Don’t look at me like that. You know how these magazines and news rags are. They’ll drag all our business in the street.”
“There’s nothing to drag,” he said. “We can issue a press release that says we agreed to part company as friends and will continue to support each other with treasured respect for the rest of our lives.”
The sound stopped coming out of Sharlyn’s mouth. It hung open for a long moment before she could find the wind to speak again.
“Press release? I’m nothing but a footnote in a press release?”
“Sharlyn,” Miles said, fingering a manila folder, “it doesn’t have to be like this. We’ve been growing apart for some time now. We don’t even vacation together.”
“Whose fault is that?” she said. “You’re always gone.”
Miles exhaled.
“Just let me go, Sharlyn.”
“No!” she said. “I will not have you humiliate me!”
“If you fight me on this, it will get ugly. We both have reputations at stake. We can do this amicably. That will be the best for everyone concerned.”
“But Miles,” she said, her voice thick, “I don’t understand. Why couldn’t we try to work through this? You’ve never indicated we were having any problems.”
“I didn’t see it coming. You can’t control love.”
“Love?” she sobbed. “You’re in love? With who? Someone at work? Someone in Finland? Is that why you were there so long?”
Miles cleared his throat and braced himself.
“No, Sharlyn, I’m not in love with someone in Finland. It’s Brookie.”
She was frozen for a long, long moment. Then the words came out slow, impossibly slow, as she tried to process their meaning.
“Brookie? Your cousin Brookie? My assistant Brookie? That Brookie?”
A vein was bulging in the middle of her head.
“She’s your fucking cousin!”
That f-bomb sealed it for him. He was out of there. He thrust the manila folder in her hand.
“She’ll be coming with me. She obviously won’t be working for you anymore. The terms of the divorce are in there. I would like to do it quickly. We want to marry right away.”
Sharlyn flung the folder across the room.
Miles was stone.
“I advise you to have your attorney review the terms of the financial settlement, and then you should sign it. Or I will make your life a living hell, Sharlyn. I’ve loved you half of my life. I still love you now. If you were asking to be free, I would grant it. That’s all I want. Friend to friend, Sharlyn…just set me free.”
Sharlyn was smashing things.
Lamps. Cordless phones. China, crystal. A plasma screen was destroyed when a vase went flying across the room. At one point, she’d taken a knife and had gone on a literal ripping tear, stabbing the steel into couch and chaise cushions, gouging out feathers, filling, anything that could be gutted, anything she could use as a substitute for Miles.
He was leaving her! Leaving her! For Brookie! How long had that shit been going on?
She’d given all those years of her life to him. He’d plucked her when she was her most vivacious, in her early twenties, fresh from college and living as a free spirit in New York. She came from a family of men who loved strong independent women, beautiful women who were confident in every way, unafraid to express themselves. That’s how her parents had raised her, to express herself and to live life with gusto and appreciation of all her senses. Yet she had fallen for Miles with his Southern ways and no cursing and ladies-should-be-like-this shit. It was quaint. It was different. They’d built a world together, a world she believed, for the most part, had worked. She’d done her best to do his little donkey dance of feminine obedience, as much as it was in her to do. And after all that, he was leaving her for Brookie!
Sharlyn plunged the knife into a portrait of Miles that hung above the fireplace in their bedroom. She slashed the thing frontways and sideways, slicing his face into a jigsaw of hanging shreds.
Splitsville
Media mogul Miles Tate and his wife, sexy bestselling author Sharlyn Tate, have hit the skids. Seems the intense billionaire has finally had his fill of the free-spirited writer, who’s been seen partying it up all over the city. According to our spies, Tate has set his sights on the younger, shapelier, green-eyed beauty who was most recently his wife’s personal assistant. She and Tate were spotted two days ago looking at rings in Tiffany’s. The young girl had her eye on the biggest rocks in the room after the much older Tate told the sales staff to “give her whatever she wants.” Chi-ching!
“So what are you going to do?” Penn asked. He was on a break from his tour. He’d been away for two weeks and was back for the weekend.
“I have my reputation and a career to protect,” she said.
“Were you still in love with him?”
They were in bed at her suite at the Sherry. He was playing footsies with her under the sheet.
“No. I haven’t been in love with him for a while now.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“I just didn’t see it coming. Twentysome-odd years together and then this. This is the stuff you read about all the time in the tabloids, but you never think it’s going to be you. I’ll be the first wife, the old hag who gets dumped for the pretty young thing. It’s so clichéd, it’s pathetic. Our friends are acting so awkward. No one’s calling. Nobody wants to have to pick sides.”
Penn traced his finger along her thigh.
“Fuck ’em. They’re not your friends if they won’t stand by you. And you aren’t remotely close to being a hag. Stop being so melodramatic. You’ll be single, extraordinarily rich…correction, richer, and it’s all happening at an age when women really start to hit their sexual stride. Miles is the loser here. Not you.”
She rolled on her side, facing him.
“You think so?”
“I know so. My Shar is a hot babe if there ever was one. No one has ever made me as hard as you.”
He reached for her hand beneath the sheet and placed it on his rock. She moaned.
“I’m so glad I have you,” she said. “Everything is turning upside down all at once. I haven�
�t heard from Beryl in two weeks. She won’t return my e-mails or calls. They said she had some kind of emergency. Have you talked to her?”
“No.”
“I don’t know,” she sighed, “I’m thinking maybe I’ll take a year off. Maybe a couple. No writing, no touring, no partying. I’ll just lay low in the cut. Chill for a while. Maybe do some traveling overseas.”
She was looking in his face, searching for something. He held her gaze. What’s she looking for? he wondered. Was this a fishing expedition? Was he supposed to say “don’t go”?
“I love you, Penn,” she whispered, a tear running down the side of her face.
“I love you, too, Shar.”
It was the second time he’d said it. He meant it. He did.
Didn’t he?
He felt something for her. He didn’t really know what love felt like, so who was to say that this wasn’t it.
He knew he loved her pussy.
Hey, that was love.
Penn was spooning Sharlyn as she slept. The room was dark except for the twinkling city lights coming into the room. His eyes were wide open.
The tour had been going fabulously. Standing-room-only signings, lines around buildings, both for his book and the CD. No one was outraged by the content of his novel. It was being universally hailed as a masterpiece.
Penn was getting the dream just like he had imagined, through being celebrated as a literary genius, even though his fame had begun first with the Calvin Klein billboard and the video with On Fiyah. That wasn’t a part of the original plan, but no matter. He was still on a magical ride that he didn’t want to end.
“You’re my favorite writer!” a short, pasty-faced woman in Chicago had screamed. “I was the first in line. I’ve been camped out for two days. Could you sign it ‘To my dearest friend Irma’?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the Kittell Press publicist had interrupted. “We already announced that Mr. Hamilton’s doing signature only.”
Penn had smiled helplessly at the woman and shrugged.
“But I love you!” she cried with near-hysteria. “I have your CD! I know all the words to the songs! I’m your number one fan!” She lifted up her shirt. “See?”
Emblazoned across her very-rotund roadmap of a belly was the phrase “Penn is god.”
“Oh my,” said the publicist, shrinking back.
Penn gazed at the inked flesh of the woman, then looked up into her shining eyes. He reached for her palm and kissed her on the hand.
The woman was momentarily stunned, then exploded into a firestorm of tears. She had to be led away. Against his own protocol, a delighted Penn signed her book “To my dearest friend Irma,” and sent the publicist off to catch up to the woman and give her the personalized book.
He thought about all that as he lay behind Shar now. He thought about Beryl. Not a peep since they’d minced her to meat mulch. He’d never realized it was this easy to kill. It was actually thrilling, the seamlessness of it all. From the way Mercury acted, it was something he did practically every day.
Penn found himself fascinated by the whole murder-death thing. He had yet to feel any remorse about it. He knew that he never would.
This could be the topic of his next book.
Writer murders editor and chops her to pieces. Burns the body. Throws the ashes around the city.
He needed to tweak it a little.
Writer murders agent. He’d keep the chopping-burning-ashes part.
He thought about what Mercury had said about the right kind of investigator possibly figuring things out. He would include that in the book. Something to give it a little more juice than what had actually happened.
The public would love it. It’d be another home run.
He fell asleep thinking of what kind of rap song he and On Fiyah could do about murder.
Maybe this time he’d do something with Snoop.
The right
…kind of investigator sat at his desk, eyeing a gunky cheese Danish.
It was enormous, the Danish, half a day old, as sexy as cancer. The cheese was a glutinous clump of thickness that screamed “Eat me and die!”
What the hell, he thought. He was already dying, perhaps even dead. Nothing else could explain this pitiful existence.
It certainly wasn’t living, that was for sure.
He reached for the Danish, undaunted, and raised it to his lips.
It was just after midnight in the garden of not much good and mostly evil, better known as the Twentieth Precinct—the Two-Oh—proudly serving the areas between West Fifty-ninth Street and West Eighty-sixth and Central Park West to the Hudson River. Detective Jameson Rex’s front teeth were halfway through the pastry’s viscosity, his taste buds racing a message to his brain that he’d just made a terrible, terrible mistake, when a large hand slid a file across his desk. Jameson glanced up as he attempted to pry his mouth free.
“Jesus Christ,” said the man who’d passed him the file. It was the boss, his old friend Captain Alan O’Hearn. “What the hell are you eating?”
Jameson’s front teeth were coated with a thick white film, a god-awful substance that nestled in the crannies of his tongue and made itself at home. He breathed through his mouth as he looked around for a napkin. O’Hearn grabbed one from a nearby desk.
“Here. Jesus.”
The detective took the napkin and wiped the goop from his teeth. O’Hearn picked up the Danish with a grimace and tossed it in the trash.
“What are you trying to do, Rex, kill yourself?”
“It looked all right.”
“The hell it did.”
Jameson swiped at his teeth once more and ran his tongue around his mouth. He reached for the file.
“What’s this?”
“Missing person maybe,” O’Hearn said, sitting in a wooden chair facing the desk. “Some big-shot book editor who hasn’t shown up for work. She’s not answering her phone or returning anybody’s e-mails.”
“Who called it in?”
“Her boss,” he said, pointing. “It’s there in the file.”
Jameson opened the folder and scanned the first page.
“Hmmm. So why hasn’t her family reported her missing?”
“They don’t have any info on her family.”
“Nothing?” Jameson asked.
O’Hearn’s brow crunched and he threw up his big-knuckled hands.
“I don’t know. Her boss said she sent an e-mail the Friday before Labor Day saying she had an emergency and needed to take some time off.”
“So there you go. Why’s there a report?”
“It’s a big-time publisher, Kittell Press, and this missing lady—”
“Doesn’t sound like she’s missing to me.”
“Well, apparently she never takes any leave. Hasn’t in all the years she’s been working there.”
“Shit happens,” Jameson said. “Maybe she finally needed a break.”
“Maybe.”
“She married?”
“Nope. No husband, no boyfriend, no kids, no nothing. She was always working, supposedly. Who the fuck knows? Maybe she’s gay and was trying to hide it from her coworkers. These artsy types always turn out to be gay. She’s probably off on a rug-rubbing caper.”
A rookie in uniform, a young woman whose smooth face had yet to be introduced to the etchings of cynicism, sat at a desk doing paperwork just a few feet away. She seemed to sense a pair of eyes upon her. She raised her head and glanced in their direction. Jameson offered a nervous smile, nodded, and turned back to O’Hearn.
“C’mon, Captain,” he whispered. “Do you hear yourself? What, are you fishing for a sexual harassment suit?”
O’Hearn leaned back and shoved his hands in his pockets.
“Yeah, yeah, all right already. I figured it was just us guys talking, old friends, so I took a little liberty.”
“That’s still pretty harsh. Even for you.”
Jameson studied the report as he ran his tongue over
his teeth. O’Hearn yawned and stretched.
“So now, after two weeks, they think something might be up?”
“J. Rex, I already told you what I know.”
“But you’re the one who took the call.”
“It was a short conversation. Nobody’s seen her, not even the doorman at her building. People were starting to get concerned. She lived in that building where we had those arson incidents Labor Day weekend. Her unit was torched pretty bad.”
Jameson’s tongue and teeth felt like they had been dipped in lard.
“Uh…doesn’t that seem like it might be related?”
“Not necessarily. Other units got hit. There was another one torched worse than hers. This girl was already away when the vandals hit her building.”
The detective walked over to the watercooler, guzzled a drink, crumpled the paper cup, and threw it toward the trash. He missed.
“A missing girl and a torched apartment.”
“You got it.”
Jameson picked up the paper cup and this time hit the mark.
“Interesting.”
The detective sat back at his desk.
“So it doesn’t sound fishy to you? The fire and the girl being gone?”
Captain O’Hearn shrugged and rubbed his bald pate. His stomach growled.
“Sounds like a coincidence and nothing more. Now stop grilling me. The only reason I took that report is because it got routed to me by Mabel, that fucking cunt up front.”
“Hey, hey, hey,” Jameson said, eyeing the rookie. “Put a lid on that. You’re a superior, you’re supposed to be setting the tone around here. What’s the matter with you?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” O’Hearn said in a lower voice. “But that Mabel got me so fucking heated. Fucking rabble-rousing bitch.” The edge had returned to his voice. “That call shouldn’t have come to me. Mabel knew exactly what she was doing. She’s done it at least three times a day since I called things off. You wouldn’t believe the shit she’s routing my way. She knows I can’t do anything about it. I’d have to admit I was nailing her, and God knows what kind of Pandora’s box that would be. IA’d be all over it.”