First Class Killing

Chapter 11

MY FIRST STOP AFTER TONY WAS THE BAR, where I knocked back not one but two postfondling margaritas on the rocks. No salt. It was just something, as Tony had suggested, to “take the edge off.” I could still feel his cold, grubby fingers grasping at me. I felt like dousing the area with alcohol to disinfect. Gin would have done nicely for that purpose.

So, Angel had some competition. That certainly thickened the stew. According to Tony, there was a group at the party from Boston, sent out to protect the business interests of Angel’s East Coast operation. He’d also said the LA women had controlled the guest list and stacked it with clients of the Boston ring, mostly using names brought in by defectors from Angel’s group. This wasn’t an introduction party; it was a mass conversion effort. I wondered briefly how the Boston crew had gotten in, then realized how easy it had been for me to get the password.

I took my third margarita with me and started wandering, being invisible and eavesdropping on conversations. At one point, I walked past the front entrance and the massive foyer where the bouncer-greeter remained steadfastly at his post, even though the incoming crowd had dwindled to nothing. He looked bored. In fact, was that…I circled around to get a better look at his computer monitor. Yes, he was playing solitaire. As I watched him, an idea formed somewhere in my fast-pickling brain. I had to wait a few moments for it to float to the surface so I could pull it out and check it over and see if it made sense. It seemed to.

I should steal the guest list.

If the attendees at this party were, indeed, members of the high-roller, Hollywood target market with bulging frequent flier accounts, money to burn, and an enduring interest in extracurricular activity on the road, then a list of their names and addresses was a list Angel would want, especially if they were clients being targeted for conversion away from her group. The names of hooker recruiters and potential recruitees from either coast certainly would be of interest.

I watched for a few moments from the doorway and tried to formulate a plan. Perhaps I could distract the big guy with one hand while downloading, copying, and swiping the file with the other. That might have worked if the guy had been Tony, and it assumed there was even a disk available.

I sipped my drink and tried to discern if I was in any condition to pull it off. I was a little thick by then, but I had all my senses. I could still taste; it was just that all I could taste was tequila. I could still hear, mostly the beat of the music, and I could still walk straight if I really, really concentrated hard. I thought I could pull it off, but I wasn’t positive. What if I got caught? How would I explain? What would I tell Tristan? I should never have started drinking. I knew that, and I had done it anyway. I drained the glass and started back to the bar to think it over some more.

“Excuseme.Walk much? God, watch where you’re going.”

I had bumped into someone. The bumpee twisted in my direction and flipped her hair across my drink. It was Sally, the woman I had photographed with Angel in Pittsburgh. She was standing with Ava and Sylvie and Charlotte and Claudia. Angel’s crew was here, after all, looking scathingly gorgeous in skirts that were micro, boots that were tall, and bell-bottoms lashed low on slithery, tattooed hips.

Having already brushed me off once, Sally had turned away, which meant I was staring at the back of her head. It seemed she hadn’t been quite so impressed with my new look as Dan might have suggested and I would have liked. I was trying to figure out an approach, when Sylvie, who couldn’t have been a day over twenty, gave me a genuine, if fleeting, smile. It wasn’t much, but it was all I needed.

“Excuse me, you’re Sylvie, aren’t you?”

“Yes. What’s your name?”

“I’m Alex Shanahan. We work together. I mean, we’ve never actually flown…I’m based in Boston. You are, too, aren’t you? I’m new. I’ve only been flying about six weeks. I don’t know anyone at this party. I thought I recognized some familiar faces over here. May I join you?”

Now all in the tight nest were staring, with expressions that ranged from completely blank to insulted by my presence. They seemed none too happy with Sylvie, either, who somehow got shuffled to the back of the group.

“We know who you are.” That was Sally again, addressing me as if I were a wad of wax she’d just pulled from her ear. “No, you cannot join us. This is a private thing.” She started to turn away but didn’t. “By the way, did you do that yourself?”

“What?”

“That.” She pointed at my head. “You colored your own hair, didn’t you?”

My hand started automatically toward my head, an instinctive flinch of self-defense.

“Nice outfit,” she said. “It’s so…young. Is this a second career for you?” Her Greek chorus snickered and twittered. She leaned down and whispered, “You shouldn’t try so hard. It’s unbecoming.”

I wanted to make my skirt longer and my heels lower. I wanted to stretch my sweater down to my knees. But what I wanted more than anything was to come up with a bitingly clever, equally demeaning remark that would cut her down to size, or at least keep me from sinking into the hole that was opening in the floor beneath me.

“Here you are, dear.” I heard Tristan’s voice just as I was about to disappear completely. “What are you doing over here with these toxic bitches?” He draped a protective arm across my shoulders. “I see the dirty girls are here. What is this, a call girl confab? A hooker hoe-down? A prostitute parlay? Where’s your Queen of Dairy?”

Sally seemed to have lost her flair for slashing insults, because all she could come up with was, “Fuck off, Tristan.”

He laughed. “So, so clever, Sally, dear. Come, Alexandra. Did she touch you? Maybe we can find some moist towelettes.”

We turned and made our retreat, winding through the crowd. “Oh, my God. What were you doing with them? Didn’t I tell you never to go near that crowd? They are evil, wicked women, and I take it your friend didn’t show up?”

“My friend?”

“The passenger you came here to meet.”

“Oh, him.” That fictitious fellow. Just one of my lies. “No. I haven’t seen him.”

“Poor dear.” He smiled. “I’m sorry. Come out and be with us, the only fun, interesting, and interested people at the party, although most of them are wasted by now. But that shouldn’t be a problem. So are you.”

We walked outside past a large, raised platform that was crowded with dancers. Off to the side was a grouping of lawn chairs. Lounging among the chairs and on the grass like a pride of inebriated lions were beautiful young men, all talking at once-to each other, to cell phones, to people on the dance floor. Surrounding them were empty bottles and used glasses and ashtrays piled high. They were, as Tristan introduced them, his gay LA friends.

They adopted me immediately, and for the first time all night, I started having a good time. They wanted to know about me-if I liked living in Boston, if I was straight or lesbian, if I had seen much of LA, if I liked flying, and whether I wanted to dance. At first I didn’t. Too depressed. But they kept shuttling over drinks from the bar and stroking my ego, and I started feeling better, and eventually that writhing mass on the dance floor started to look like fun, and the next time one of them grabbed my hand to pull me up there, I went.

I climbed up on the platform, where the temperature must have been fifteen degrees hotter than on the ground. I pulled my sweater over my head and tossed it…somewhere.

They all took turns dancing with me, but when my last partner left, I didn’t want to go. I stayed in the middle of the floor and felt the crowd throb around me. It was like a human heart, pushing its raw, sweaty, sexual energy-the party’s lifeblood-out into the night. People danced in pairs, in threesomes, in groups, and in every permutation of man/men and woman/women. Bodies rubbed, hands roamed, boundaries evaporated.

I was far from home dancing under the stars. I was among people I didn’t know, doing things I wouldn’t normally do. When someone came up from behind and put his hands on my hips, I let him because it made me feel connected in all that disconnectedness. I felt anonymous and intimate at the same time, which was exactly right for me at that moment, so I put my hands over his, closed my eyes, and let the music come inside. Soon my body was twisting and shimmying and slithering in ways it should never have been able to. I took his hands from my hips, raised them over my head, and turned, and when I opened my eyes, the music came to a crashing halt, at least in my head, because it wasn’t someone I didn’t know smiling back at me.

It was Angel.

I let go of her hands and stepped back, and all the places where she had touched me started to burn.

She tossed her head like a stallion and laughed. “What’s the matter, sugar? You look so surprised.”

In a cacophony of sounds and sights and smells and tastes, she was the most vivid of all, mainly because there was so much of her. Up close, she was several inches taller than I had expected and bountiful in every sense. Handfuls of platinum blond hair framed her face and cascaded glossily down past her shoulders. Her breasts, full and meaty and freckled, overflowed the low-cut top that tried to hold them back. Her waist was small, her hips generous, and all the features of her face boldly outlined-eyes in black liner and mascara and lips in bright red.

It was hard to break through the blur of tequila except to know that she was there, right in front of me, and she’d caught me at exactly the wrong moment.

“Sweetie…” She reached out and took my hands in hers, then curled to the left and winked back at me over her shoulder. “Are you following me?”

I started to move again to the beat, mostly because she did but also because if I didn’t, my nerve endings, already crackling and hot, might overheat and melt me into a puddle.

“I saw you in Pittsburgh, you know.” My stomach clenched, thinking about her staring in the dark through that camera lens. She couldn’t have seen me. She couldn’t have. “I saw you at the airport with your little friends, Tristan and Irene.”

“I was working a trip,” I said. It was hard to talk in the crowd. I kept getting bumped and shoved, and we had to lean into each other to hear. “Why would you notice who I’m with?”

“I notice everything. What I don’t see, people tell me. What they’re telling me about you is that you’re asking a lot of questions, trying to get close to me.” She put one hand back on my hip and started an upward slide to forbidden territory. Unlike Tony the Actor, she knew how to keep her eyes where it counted-on mine. “Do you want to get close to me, Alex Shanahan?”

I did a quick spin, pivoting away from her. When we were facing each other again, I moved in closer but took both her hands in mine before she could put them where she wanted.

With no hands for grabbing, she began to use the rest of her body, rubbing her hips against mine. “You don’t like to be touched, do you?”

“Not without permission.”

“I don’t ask permission.” She snapped her hands away and, before I had a chance to react, clamped long fingers around my wrists, holding them with just enough pressure to make me aware of the bones underneath. She paused for a few hip swivels, long enough to let the new dynamic sink in. Then she pulled me close enough to put her lips to my ear. Her breath against my skin was so hot it felt cold. The smell of her perfume, sweet and heavy, floated around us. “Do you want to get close to me?”

The music was so distant that all I could hear was my breathing overlapping with hers, and then all I could feel was the tip of her tongue, wet and warm, tracing the edge of my ear. I tried to turn my head away, to fight her off, but she was strong. She held me where I didn’t want to be, which seemed to excite her. I stopped straining, because I could tell it was what she wanted. I also knew I couldn’t win.

“This is close enough,” I said.

She backed a step away, and we were facing each other again. “No one gets close unless they’re invited, sugar, and someone like you with your tight-assed, don’t-touch-me-I’m-so-much-better-than-you attitude will never be welcome in my company. So, fuck off.”

When she finally released my hands, my fingers were numb.

Of the several thousand things that bothered me about the encounter-hell, about the whole evening-I realized as I stood and watched that what bothered me most was what Angel was doing now. She was dancing with her eyes closed, so certain was she that she could put her tongue in my ear and I wouldn’t come after her.

Just before she was about to disappear into the crowd, I stepped forward, reached in, and pulled her out by her very solid upper arm. I pulled her close enough to whisper in her ear, which I could do if I stood on my toes. I left out the licking part.

“I know why you’re here tonight, Angel. I know all about what these girls in LA are doing. They want to put you out of business, and it would be my pleasure to help them, unless-”

She tried to pull away, but I squeezed tighter, ignoring for a moment the pain in my fingers as the blood rushed back in. The two of us stood perfectly still, a calm center in the middle of that surging dance floor.

“I know you’ve checked me out,” I said. “I’m not a hooker, and I don’t want to be a hooker. I’m a tight-assed, keep-your-fucking-hands-off-me management type with homemade hair and enough skill and experience to fix your little business problem here in LA without breaking a sweat. Or I could do the same for the women out here. You decide. But don’t take too long, because, like you, my services go to the highest bidder.”

I let go of her arm. She said nothing, just drifted back into the crowd wearing an enigmatic smile that said eitherI’m going to kill you orI’ll give you a call.

“What are you doing here by yourself? What’s with all the hand wringing?” Tristan had come up behind me. Both my wrists were adorned with flame-red bracelets. Holding them as if they were eggs, he inspected the damage. “What is this? What happened?”

“Nothing.” I tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let go.

“If you don’t want to tell me, Alexandra, say so. Don’t treat me as if I were your mother.”

I looked at him and lied again. “I’m fine. Nothing happened.”

He pulled his hands, with mine in them, almost imperceptibly toward his body, as if to recover from a blow to his midsection. “You should put something on them.”

I turned him, looped my arm through his, and walked him off the dance floor. “I’m going back to the hotel.”

“I’ll go with you. We’ll get a cab.”

“I’d rather go by myself, if you don’t mind. You look as if you’re having a good time here. Is that all right? I’ll get the bouncer guy to call me a cab.”

“If that’s what you really want. Just be careful. Do you have money?”

“I’m okay. Thanks.”

He gave me a hug. “I’m sorry you didn’t have a better time. Don’t forget, we have an early call tomorrow morning. I’ll see you then.”

I made my way back through the house, past the bar, and to the doorway that led to the foyer. Bouncer Guy was alone, still absorbed in his game of solitaire.

I puffed myself up, wet my lips, straightened my teeny-weeny skirt, and strutted over to see him.

“Excuse me.”

He straightened up and clicked the game off the screen. Behind it was what looked like an Excel worksheet, one filled with names and addresses. I could see the disk inserted in the A drive as I leaned closer to him. I took that as a sign that I was supposed to have a copy of that guest list.

“I wonder if you would call me a cab. I don’t want to be here when the police show up.”

His brow furrowed deeply. “Police?”

“There’s a young woman in one of the bathrooms upstairs. It looks like an overdose. Someone is calling the police.”

“Which bathroom?”

“I don’t know. I’m telling you what I-”

He nearly knocked me flat as he bolted out of the entryway, pulling a cell phone from his pocket as he went. I swept around to the working side of the podium. The list was indeed in an Excel worksheet, saved in a file with the day’s date. I steadied my hands, put my fingers on the keys, and went to work.