First Class Killing

Chapter 16

IT WAS AMAZINGLY BUSY AT THE SPA FOR A workday. I never knew things like this went on while I was working a real job. The two women staffing the reception desk both had the same hairstyle. It looked as if it had been cut with a meat cleaver yet was still strangely trendy.

The one who wasn’t on the phone greeted me when I walked in. “May I help you?”

“I’m Alex Shanahan.”

“Oh, yes. You’re the guest of Miss Velesco. Go right on up the stairs, and Siobhan will help you.” She pointed to a spiral staircase.

Siobhan guarded the checkpoint at the top of the stairs. She was slightly older, but no less hip, than her colleagues downstairs. Like all of the spa’s employees, she wore a pink lab coat and a flowery fragrance.

“Follow me,” she said, after she’d checked me in. “I’ll show you to the locker room.”

She took me to the changing area, where the only thing locker room-like about it was the neat row of lockers. Otherwise, it looked like the master bathroom at Versailles. I stashed my street clothes, pulled on my robe, and managed to walk in my paper slippers to the waiting room, where the air was filled with Enya and the scent of heavily spiced candles. I poured a glass of lemon water and looked around for where to sit.

Something odd caught my eye, something so completely out of place it took me a second to register what it was. My long-sleeved sweater, the one I had last seen flying over the dance floor in LA, was lying like a throw blanket across the back of the velvet love seat. About then, I felt a growing sense of unease that turned into an inkling that turned into the certainty that I was not alone.

The chaise longue in the far corner was draped with cranberry-colored mosquito netting that hung from the ceiling. It was just sheer enough that I could see someone lounging behind it, and I realized where the sweater had come from.

The drape billowed, and a voice emerged. “Y’all naked under there, sweetheart?”

“Naked as the day I was born. Spa rules.” I went over to the love seat, pulled off the sweater, folded it, and sat down with it in my lap. “Thanks for returning my sweater.”

The curtains parted, and Angel came out. Her size made the terry-cloth robe seem skimpy on her. Her hair was piled and pinned on top of her head, and she wore little or no makeup. Women as young as Angel tended to look even younger without makeup. Angel looked harder, and I flashed on Tristan’s warning that she was someone to stay away from.

She walked in her paper slippers over to the armoire, where the liquid refreshments were arranged. She twisted the end of her towel and dipped it into the pitcher of cucumber drinking water, then unrolled it and used it to dab at her face.

“You have my attention,” she said with her lazy scrub brush drawl. “Now, tell me what it is you think I need from you.”

“Is it safe to talk in here?”

“No one in here but us chickens.”

I had no idea what kind of attention span she had, so I figured it would be best to get to the point. “I know what you do, I’ve heard you do it well, and I’m here to offer my services in dealing with the LA problem.”

“The LA problem?” She dropped her head back and laid the damp towel against her throat. “I don’t have a problem, and if I did, I wouldn’t need anyone’s help to fix it.”

I sat back on the love seat, trying to look confident. It didn’t help that my terry-cloth robe kept getting bunched up against the velvet seat cushions. “If I were starting a rival group to challenge you,” I said, “the first thing I would do is go after your top earners, the ones who probably generate the bulk of your revenue. I’m in LA, so I already have the advantage of sun, surf, and palm trees. I’d get them to transfer to my base. Then I would start paying them for their clients. I’d give them bonuses for every client they brought. Then I would run a promotion to reward clients for bringing their friends over. I would deprive you of that income and at the same time use it to get myself established quickly in LA. I would copy your strengths, avoid your weaknesses, move into your territory, and keep the pressure on until I wiped you out.”

She drifted around the small waiting room, touching things as she went-the armoire, the back of a chair, a tall potted fern, a picture on the wall. I assumed she was listening, because she hadn’t drifted out.

“I don’t have any weaknesses.”

“Every business has weaknesses. The more women I hired away, the more I would know about the ones you have.”

She stopped moving and took up a position next to a side table filled with crystals of all sizes and shapes. She found one she liked, a purple obelisk, and picked it up to study it. As she turned it this way and that, she pulled up one leg and braced it against the wall behind her. Her robe came open all the way up to her hip.

“What would keep me from sending someone out to break both your legs before you could get all that done?”

I shifted around on the couch. There was something about the brazen way she exposed herself that made a physical threat seem very realistic. Maybe it was her willingness to use her body in any way that was necessary. “As pimping strategies go,” I said, “breaking legs is not a bad one. A little unoriginal, perhaps.”

She dropped the crystal into her pocket and fixed me with a cold stare. “I’m not a pimp. Don’t you ever call me one.”

“Here’s the problem with that strategy,” I said, staring right back. “First of all, if you come at me, I come at you. A catfight like that would find its way into the papers and scare off the clients, not to mention put both our jobs at risk.”

As I talked, she moved toward my love seat.

“Second, I’m not some scared hooker who will pack up and quit at the first sign of push back. I’ll keep coming. Intimidation doesn’t work with me. If you want to beat me, you have to be smarter than I am.”

Now she was standing next to me. With great effort, I kept myself from leaning away as she lowered herself into the compact space next to me. It was a love seat, after all, not a full couch. Being that close was like sitting in the front row at the movies.

Leaving her slippers on the floor, she folded her legs up and tucked them underneath her. Her robe loosened across her thighs. Angel apparently didn’t know any unprovocative poses. She put one hand on her bare leg and used the other to play with a strand of hair that had come loose. “Let’s say you were me, doll. What would you do if you were me?”

“Mobilize an immediate response.”

“What would this response look like?” She edged a little closer. All I could figure was this was her effort to get the upper hand by distracting me. I focused on her eyes.

“I’d find out why my women were so willing to walk, and I would give them more reason to stay than to leave. That would be my first step. Next, I would find out which clients are leaving or thinking of leaving.”

I pulled the diskette from the pocket of my robe and held it up between us. “That’s why you need this.”

She didn’t even look at it. She kept her eyes on me. “I hate computers.”

“This disk contains the guest list from the recruiting party the other night in LA. There are two hundred names with contact numbers, mostly men.”

The left corner of her mouth tweaked up. “How did you happen to come by this list?”

“I stole it.”

She let out a little whoop and nudged my shoulder with hers. “Aren’t you the little spitfire?” Without the slightest hesitation, she snapped up the disk, and it disappeared into her own pocket, the one without the crystal she’d already swiped. “I can put that to good use.”

“That’s not all there is,” I said. “I have a master list from the same computer with another thirteen hundred names. It shows which of your clients are being targeted and which have already left you. It also includes the client list and the target list for your LA rivals.”

“Names with contacts?”

“Business e-mail addresses.”

She pushed her robe open a little more, leaned back, and brushed the towel across the swell of her breasts. “That is interesting.”

“I also have a strategy that will help you crush LA before they ever get off the ground. It’s a program that will help you keep your women from leaving and retain your clients. I think we can get all your clients back with this program.”

“What’s the program?”

“That’s what I’m selling. That and the rest of the names. Hire me, and you get the whole package.”

“Hire you as what?”

“Your management consultant.”

Another whooping cry. “You must have heard all the talk about me, about how I’m nothing but poor, dumb white trash from the wrong side of the trailer park. Is that it? Miss Dairy Queen?”

“If I thought you were dumb, I wouldn’t have approached you first.”

“What do you mean by first?”

“I just told you how I would put you out of business. Hire me, and I’ll tell you how to do it to them.”

She grabbed her lower lip with a couple of front teeth and considered that. “You were right about something, what you said the other night. I have checked you out. You were one straight arrow at Majestic. A big superstar flying up the corporate ladder, working your ass off, always spouting the party line. A company gal, that’s what you were. How the mighty have fallen.”

“I was a company gal…right up until the day they fired me. Now I can’t get work anywhere else, my income is a fraction of what it used to be, I’m schlepping drinks at thirty-five thousand feet and hawking stolen names of married men to you to make a living. I’m through doing the right thing.”

“Now you’re broke and bitter, and you want to run with the bad girls to prove what a bad-ass you are.”

“Right. I’m a real bad-ass.”

She sat back against the armrest and checked me out. She seemed to be taking my physical inventory. “You say you won’t do the nasty, right? Isn’t that what you told me? You’re not in the trade, and you don’t want to be.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not for me.”

“Yet you figure on making money off all the girls who are, including me. You want to have your cake and eat it, too. Or have my cake without letting anybody eat yours. That just ain’t gonna fly, sweetie. Not in my world.”

“Why not?” Here was the stickiest wicket of all, one I wasn’t sure I could get past. “You must have business arrangements with people who are not prostitutes. Accountants and programmers. Other support types.”

“I chose them. Not the other way around.”

“If you don’t trust me, trust my motive.”

“Which is?”

“Money. Don’t have enough. Need more.”

“That’s not good enough, sweet pea. I never work with anyone who won’t get her hands as dirty as me, and here’s a little secret.” She leaned toward me, probably to whisper, but I didn’t want her tongue in my ear again, so this time I pulled away. That seemed to amuse her. “I’m not dumb. I know, for instance, that you being my business consultant would mean me showing you my business. The who, what, where, why, and therefore of things.”

“The more I know, the more I can help you.”

“The more you know, the more you can hurt me. But I tell you what. I will buy those lists from you. Name your price, we’ll haggle a bit, then we’ll come to an arrangement, and we can go on about our separate business.”

“It’s a package deal, Angel. If you want the lists of names, you take me with them.”

She retreated to the armrest again to think that over. “How about this? How about you spend the next couple of months getting to know and understand up close and personal the kinds of services we offer? Then maybe we can talk turkey.”

“You don’t have a couple of months, and I’m not interested.”

The door opened, and one of the pink coats stepped in. “Good morning, Miss Velesco. We’re ready for you in massage room three.”

“I’ll be right there, darlin’.”

“Of course. Take your time. You know the way back. Miss Shanahan, someone will be out for you shortly.”

After the pink coat left, Angel dropped her legs down and found her slippers on the floor. “I do give you credit, doll. You can play the game.”

I felt her slipping away. I felt my chance slipping away. “So can you,” I said. “You’ve built something of value, Angel. I don’t know if you fully appreciate how difficult that is. I can help you keep it. You don’t need me to turn tricks to prove it.”

“If I’ve learned one thing about the world of business, it’s this,” she said. “You can’t get ahead without being willing to spread your legs every now and then for the right person or the right reasons. In my business, it just happens to be for real.”

“Thirteen hundred client names, Angel. Going once…going twice…” She watched me closely. It was a standoff, and I knew one thing about negotiating. You had to be willing to lose. “Gone.” I drank down the rest of my lemon water and got up. “Keep the disk with my compliments. Thank you for your time.”

“I plan to keep it.” I was halfway out the door when she called me back. “You know what you need, sugar? You need some lessons from me. Life lessons.”

This was interesting. I came back in and leaned against the back of a chair. “I don’t want life lessons. I want cash.”

“You can have that, too.”

“I don’t want to be a hooker.”

“Could you say that one more time? I don’t think I got it yet. I’m talking about life lessons, sweetie. I want to teach you how the world works.”

“What do you care what I know about the world?”

She raised her arms to stretch and folded them over her head, a move that pulled her robe open and thrust her chest out, revealing almost everything she had to see from the waist up. “For every lesson you give me, I’ll give you one in return. I like the sound of that. It has a certain…what do you call that when it’s all balanced out perfectly?”

“Symmetry.”

“Right. That’s a good word, and that’s my counteroffer. What do you think of that?”

I didn’t like the fact that she was always coming up with the last word, the one final thing I had to do to get what I wanted. But she actually seemed vulnerable in her own brittle, cocky, self-serving way, as if she really, really wanted the chance to strut her stuff. Herother stuff. That was probably a good position to have her in-showing off.

“I’ll do it.”

“Good. There’s one more thing.” She stood and wrapped herself back together, then casually tossed one more condition on the table. “You have to go on a date.”

“No. I told you-”

“You could be a cop. You could be a spy from LA, for all I know. One date is all I’m asking. I’ll set it up. It’s a deal breaker, too, so think carefully before you make up your mind. If you want to tell me after your massage, that’s okay, too.”

“I’ll pass on the massage.”

“Suit yourself.” She winked. “But I usually do my best thinking with someone else’s hands all over me.”

She moved toward the door. Once she was through it, I knew it was all over. I thought about what little time we had left for the case. I tried not to, but I also thought about the way Jamie had looked at me in my flight attendant uniform. I thought about Harvey…well, best not to do that. I chewed the inside of my cheek. I stuffed my hands into my pockets.

“One date will make the difference to you?”

“There’s a world of difference, darlin’, between one date and no dates.”

I swallowed hard and handed my soul over to the devil. “Deal.”