First Class Killing

Chapter 37

JAMIE HAD GONE INTO THE DEN TO WATCH TV, only he’d never turned it on. He sat stiffly on the couch, staring at a blank screen. When he noticed me in the doorway, it must have been in my face, because he knew. His face looked the same as it had the day I’d showed up at his school unexpectedly.

He had known that day, too.

“She passed.” That’s what the counselors and teachers had whispered to each other about my mother that day, as if she’d been a car in the next lane or a horse coming up on the backstretch. Passed what? Passed go? Passed counterfeit bills? To this day, I hated that gutless euphemism. She died. She’d been dying for a long time, her breath rattling around in her chest, sounding as if she were trying to breathe underwater. Sometimes lucid, sometimes not, but always dying. Jamie was eight, but he knew that, and he knew there was only one reason I would show up at his school in the middle of the morning, and when he walked into the room and took in the scene, he immediately erupted, crying hard and heavy just from the sheer terror of what I might say. He cried so hard it scared me. The counselor tried to move in, but I shoved her aside and put my arms around him. We sank into a pile on the floor, and it smelled like bananas in that room, because some kid had left one in his desk, and the rain outside poured as it often does in Seattle in March, as if it were falling from tipped buckets, and I said it in his ear so they wouldn’t all hear.

“I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry.”

Bananas and rain and Jamie crying with so much anguish I would have done anything to make the thing that was hurting him stop.

But we weren’t in a classroom. We were in his house in Westchester, and it seemed to me he knew now, just as he had known then, that his world was about to crash down, and I was the one wielding the ax.

“I need you to see something.”

I could barely make myself move, but I turned and went back down to his office. When he showed up, I closed the door. I walked over and clicked the start button, and the show began. Jamie watched, blinking a lot, looking as if he’d awakened from a deep sleep and opened his eyes into the glare of a bright light.

His face turned ashen. His lips parted just enough to let all the air exit his body. When he tried to grab the mouse, he knocked it off the desk. It swung by its cord until he captured it with both hands and returned it to its pad. By then, his motor control was so far off he couldn’t manipulate the cursor. He tried and tried, but he couldn’t get it, and his fumbling failure was like a key that opened a door inside me. My eyes filled, and I tried to stop the tears with the heels of my hands, but they slipped out anyway and ran down my face. I took the mouse away from him and stopped the video.

He lowered himself into his desk chair as a man recovering from malaria might do it. There was another chair in the room, but the wheels on it scared me. I stood. I waited. Eventually, Jamie, staring at the frozen image, squeezed out a thought. “She taped it. Why would she tape it?” That thought led him to his next. His perspective seemed to widen from the screen to include the computer, the room, and ultimately me. “How did you get this?”

“Can we get the larger issues out of the way first, like since when did you start patronizing hookers?”

“Hookers?”

“Yes.”

He gestured weakly at the screen with his palm up. “Alex, why do you have this?”

“Angel sent it to me. Will you answer my question?” I needed to know. I really needed to know if he was one of those cocks with wallets Angel had talked about or if this was a onetime thing. Please let it be that.

“Who is Angel?” He answered my question with his own, and I felt what Monica must have felt in her moment of crisis: boiling rage.

“She’s the woman you are screwing in this video for all the world to see, and if we don’t get our shit together right now, all the world will see it.”

He went from stunned to bewildered to defeated in record time, all of it showing right on his face. Then he closed his eyes. His shoulders gave up. With wrists together, his hands dropped into his lap. Then he did the last thing I expected.

He laughed.

“Is this funny?” I was stunned, and I was angry. “I’m thinking of Gina and Sean and Maddie, and I’m thinking this is not quite so hilarious as you seem to find it.”

He slouched down into the seat, let his head roll back, covered his eyes with his hands, and laughed some more. He sounded almost loony. “Thisis hilarious. Fucking hysterical. Don’t you find it hysterical?” He looked at me from under the visor of his hand. “You’re right. It’s not funny. It’s…ironic. That’s a better word.Ironic.”

“What is ironic about this?”

He looked at me as if I were a simpleton. “I haven’t seen you or talked to you in almost a year. I run into you completely by chance. Then I do something so goddamned stupid I want to kill myself, and before I can even turn around, you’re on it. You areon it. I mean…what…how-”

“You’re upset that I found out your secret? That’s what is bothering you?”

“Don’t play high and mighty with me.” He got up from his chair but once on his feet didn’t seem to know where to put himself. That seemed to get him more and more wound up, and when he got near a wall, he punched it with his fist. Then he turned on me with his jaw tight and his finger jabbing the air in front of my face. “This is my house. What gives you the right to come intomy house, drag me in here, and start making accusations about things that are not even close to being any of your business?”

“So, you’re telling me there is some innocent explanation for this?” I pointed to the monitor. “That somehow I got the wrong impression from watching you screw this woman? Why don’t you set me straight, Jamie? Let’s hear it.”

“What do you want to hear? That I fucked up? I did. I fucked up. Does that make you happy?”

“No, it doesn’t, and what I need to hear is whether this is a one-time fuckup or if you are a regular customer of this hooker ring.”

“Hooker ring? Is that what you think of me?”

“I don’t know what to think of you.”

His hand dropped to his side. Now he looked stunned. “I make one stupid mistake with one woman, so that means I frequent prostitutes?” He went off on another flight of sour amusement. “She’s a marketing consultant.”

“She is? How many marketing consultants do you know who make secret sex videos and use them for blackmail?”

“Blackmail?” That stumped him but only briefly. “If this is blackmail, why did she send it to you?”

“Because she wants-” Oh, man. This was getting too complicated. We had to step back and look at this thing piece by piece, and Jamie needed to know the truth if he was going to tell me the truth.

“Jamie, sit down.”

Not only did he ignore me, he raised his foot to the chair on wheels and gave it a wicked shove across the floor. It went skittering into the wall and tipped over on its side. I knew that rolling chair was a bad idea. He stared after it, with dull eyes. “I’m fucked. It’s hard to believe how fucked I am.”

“Jamie, would you please sit down before Gina hears us and comes in here.”

That idea seemed to break through. He dragged himself back to his desk and sank into the chair that was still upright. I picked up the other one and pulled it over so we could look at each other face-to-face.

“Listen to me,” I said. “That woman you were with is not a marketing consultant. She’s a prostitute. Her name is Angel Velesco. She works with me as a flight attendant, and she’s a hooker.”

He wanted to argue, but deep down, he knew I wouldn’t lie to him that way, and even though he shook his head no, he said nothing. He looked scared.

“We will fix this,” I said, not at all sure that we could. “I promise. But I need to know some things. Are you saying you didn’t know this woman was a hooker and you didn’t approach her for sex?”

“No.”

“How did you meet her?”

“She was on the flight yesterday morning to LA.”

“Yesterday? This happened…last night?” I tried to put the pieces together, fit the events to the timeline I understood. The night before, I had been with Stewart, Harvey had been on his way to Orange County, and nothing had happened yet.

“Was she working the trip?”

“I told you she’s not-”

“Would you please just answer my questions?”

“She was in the seat next to mine. We started talking, and she asked me if I would be her guinea pig for a survey she was putting together. She wanted to see ifI…if her questions made sense. She told me her name was Marilyn.”

Guinea pig. Marketing survey. The seat next to his. She’d sought him out. Why? How had she known? She must have heard rumblings. She must have been tipped off somehow. But how did she know about Jamie? Did I ever…I had never mentioned him to Angel, had I?Had I? A palpable feeling of dread began to take over the function of my heart, because even though I didn’t know how, I knew I was responsible.

“She asked you personal questions?”

“Demographic stuff,” he said. “Age. Zip code. Family. Occupation. The product she was flacking was some kind of a combination cell phone-PDA. She had questions about how I kept track of my life.”

“About your family?”

“Yes.”

“Place of business?”

“All of that.”

Business…business…businesscard. I stood up. I walked to the back wall of the office, which was the point in the room farthest from him. Jamie’s business card, the card he had given me on the flight to LA. I had lost it. I thought I had, but I hadn’t. I remembered where I put it. At the hotel before leaving for the party, I took it out of the pocket of my uniform. For reasons I didn’t understand then or now, I slipped it into the pocket of my sweater, the one I had worn to the party, the one Angel had returned to me at the spa. Jamie’s business card with his home phone number on the back.

He said something. I turned to look at him. “What?”

“She was nice. She was easy to talk to, so I talked to her. It turned out she was…” He was starting to get it. “She was staying at my hotel.”

Of course she was. Easy enough. She could have checked his reservation record and found out in advance where he was booked. I didn’t want to hear the rest, but the more he told, the more he seemed to want to tell. His chance to unburden had calmed him down considerably.

“She asked me to meet her for drinks that night. I said no, but I came in late from a client dinner, and I stopped by the bar, and…and I looked in. I don’t even know why I did it. If I’d gone straight up to my room…” He sat there, quietly staring down the road not taken.

I could see her sitting in the bar waiting for him, dressed up to look like a professional woman, being whatever woman she needed to be to lure him into her trap. “I can make any pig come to the trough,” she’d said. She must have had a good time doing it to Jamie, knowing he was my brother.

“We had a couple of cocktails. We showed each other pictures of our kids.”

It seemed hot in the office. “She said she had kids?”

“One. A boy Sean’s age.”

I thought maybe my blood had turned to kerosene and I would burst into flame at any moment. “What else?”

“She asked me to her room. I told her no, but…”

“But then you went with her anyway.”

“No.” He was firm, the way Sean had been firm in his insistence that Zachary Zalinsky’s name was not Zach. “I went up to my own room. I brushed my teeth. I got in bed. I called Gina. Then here comes the knock on the door.” He might have been sweating, too. He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. “She had a bottle of champagne and a couple of glasses. I stood there with my hand on the knob looking through the peephole. She had this sheer blouse thing on.” He did an awkward, incomplete demonstration with his hands. “I could see right through it, and this tight little skirt. I knew when I turned that knob I was dead. I knew it, and I did it.” His voice got very small. “I did it.”

“Why?”

“She was there. I was there. I didn’t think about how it would feel afterward. I wasn’t thinking about Gina. She came in. She poured the champagne. We had a couple of glasses, and…we did it, and she left.” He rubbed his hands on his knees. “Now it’s like I have her fingerprints all over me. I can’t even look at Gina. I think she knows somehow.”

“I don’t think so, Jamie.”

“I keep thinking…I keep thinking I can’t fix this one.”

“Fix what?”

“This mistake. I’m always making mistakes. I go too fast…I do things, but I can always go back and slow down and figure out how to fix them. But this one, I think this one can’t ever be fixed.”

And gravy boats can’t be put back together. “Angel is masterful at this stuff. She knows what she’s doing, and she does it all the time.”

“How much does she want?”

“What?”

He swallowed hard and looked right at me. “You said this was blackmail. How much does she want?”

Everything felt in a knot in my sternum, and I couldn’t think, and it was possible I was having a heart attack. Chest tight. Pulse racing. Breath short. I had to make this right. I had to fix this thing. But first I had to tell him.

“She doesn’t want money. She doesn’t want anything from you.”

“Then what does-” He glanced at the computer, my computer, and the light went on. He seemed almost excited that something finally made sense. “She wants something from you.”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“You don’t know?” I was not doing this right, and he was sensing that he was not the only guilty one in the room. “What’s going on?”

“Angel runs a prostitution ring at OrangeAir. I was hired by the airline to investigate her. That’s why I’m working as a flight attendant. I’m undercover.”

He blinked. Then he blinked again. “You’re not really a flight attendant?”

“It’s my cover job. I’ve been investigating Angel for months.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No.”

He got up and wandered away from the desk. “You’renot a flight attendant. But sheis a flight attendant,and she’s a hooker.”

“Yes.”

“She’s not married?”

“No.”

“No kid?”

I shook my head.

He didn’t know which revelation to deal with first, but it didn’t take him long to get to the heart of the matter. “She used me to get to you. That’s what this is?”

“Yes.”

He found his chair again and sat. He put his elbows on his knees and covered his face. This time, when he emerged, it was with a sense of bitter acceptance. “Could I be any stupider?”

“I told you, she’s a pro. She does this a lot.”

“What does she want you to do?”

“I don’t know. I got her fired, but she apparently didn’t stay fired. I don’t know what she wants. She might just be screwing with me.” I looked at him. He didn’t appreciate the choice of words. “Jamie, I’m sorry. I’m sorry about this whole thing.”

“What will happen if you don’t do what she wants?”

I didn’t want to tell him that I thought she would do what Monica had tried to do to Arthur Margolies, but he deserved to know. “Probably send it out to everyone in your e-mail address book. Your office, your church, the kids’ schools. Gina.”

As he listened, he banged his head with the heel of his hand as if it were a vending machine and the thoughts he needed had gotten stuck on the way down the chute. It’s what he used to do when he was a kid and he got confused and couldn’t think straight. When he was trying really hard and getting nowhere. I couldn’t stand to see him do that.

“Mother of God. Mother ofGod. What did I do?” His muttering was mostly to himself.

“Jamie, please calm down. I’ll take care of this. I promise.”

“Will you do…what she’s asking?”

“I don’t think it will matter. She won’t give it back no matter what I do. I have to find another way to get it back, and I will.”

“Jesus Christ.” He got up and started swerving around the room, looking as if he wanted to cry but grinning instead. “This must feel pretty good to you, huh?”

I stared at him.

“Jamie fucked up again. Time to pull poor, dumb Jamie’s ass out of the fireagain.”

“That is not what is going on here. I never meant for this to happen.”

“And yet somehow here we are, you rescuing me again, so all is right with the world.”

“That’s crap.” I could feel the conversation tipping, teetering on the edge of the slippery slope. “Stop talking like this. You’re upset.”

“Upset? I am beyond upset. Privateinvestigator? Did you just wake up one morning and decide you wanted to be Magnum, PI?”

“Stop it. Just stop.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re doing, or have you completely lost your mind? What am I supposed to do now? Should I…should I call the police? Should I tell Gina?” He slammed the wall again, this time with his open hand. “Tell me, Magnum, what should I do?”

“Hey, I might be the one who put her in your life, and I am sorry about that. But if you hadn’t opened the door and let her into your room, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“You get off on this.” There was that jabbing finger again. “You always have. All this bullshit all these years about protecting poor Jamie from mean old Daddy. Big hero, you are. You wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

Now I was up, and we were facing each other across the desk, and I could not stop the words that were coming out of my mouth, and I didn’t know where they were coming from. “Is that what Walter said? Is that what the two of you talked about at Christmas? How what he did to you ismy fault?”

He shifted his weight back and chewed the inside of his lip. “That’s what’s really bothering you, isn’t it? That I have a relationship with him and you don’t.”

“Horseshit.”

“The one thing he never did was treat me like a baby or someone who couldn’t take care of myself or make my own decisions.”

I waved a flailing hand at the computer. “Look what happens when you make your own decisions.” He looked as if I had slapped him, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t stop. “No, he didn’t treat you like a baby. He treated you like crap. He treated you as if you embarrassed him and he wished you were never born. He made you cry. Have you forgotten all that? Because I can’t.” I also couldn’t breathe. “All I ever tried to do was make it easier for you.”

“Maybe it’s the other way around.” His voice was quiet, like the iceberg that sank theTitanic was quiet.

“What?”

“Maybe you kept him from me. You stood in between us so we couldn’t have a relationship, and now that I’m trying to have one, you can’t stand that.”

“That is crap. That is so much crap, I don’t even…I can’t…I cannot believe you just said that.”

“Come to think of it, Mom dying worked out pretty good for you, didn’t it?”

I took a step back from the desk. I had never struck Jamie for any reason, but I had never felt such a compulsion to do it as I did right then. My fists clenched until my fingernails dug into my palms. My eyes hurt. My face hurt. My heart was about to explode. I couldn’t take this. I couldn’t stand feeling this way. I wanted it to end. I wanted to stop this now, so I said the one thing I knew would stop it, would stop everything.

“Jamie, if you believe that, then you are stupid. You’re just as stupid as he said you were.”

The minute I said it, I regretted it. Before it was even all out. I thought maybe…ifI could just throw my hand up and knock those words down, remove them from the one space in the universe where they never should have been-between us. I could grab them and wrap them in my palm and hold them until they stopped burning, turned to ash, and fell to the floor.

His expression never changed, but something underneath gave way. I could tell. Some critical, load-bearing beam cracked and collapsed inside him, and I was the one who had wielded the ax.

Saying good-bye to Gina and the kids had been the hardest. I’d had to wash my face and put drops in my eyes and drops in my nose and wait until I looked normal again. Gina had been so disappointed that I had to leave, but more because she knew we’d had a fight.

“You have to go tonight?”

“It’s a scheduling thing. I’ll come back.”

Sean gave me a kiss good-bye and thanked me again for his new shirt. He wanted to know if I would ever come back. When I bent down to kiss Maddie, she wrapped her small arms around my neck. They felt like two feathers lying there. She didn’t seem to want to let go. I knew I didn’t want her to. Jamie was nowhere to be found. I had nothing to say to him, anyway.

The first number I dialed when I got to my car was the one that started with 800 on Djuro Bulatovic’s business card. He answered promptly.

“Bo, are you after Monica again?”

“No. I told you I would leave her to you.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“No.”

That was disappointing. I had no good way to find her on my own. “Will you call me if you hear anything?” I gave him my cell phone number. “Where are you? Are you still in Boston?”

“I’m close.”

“Can you stay close? I might need you tonight.”

He said that he would. I checked my watch. Eight-thirty. If I was really lucky and really reckless and irresponsible behind the wheel, I could still make the ten o’clock shuttle back to Boston.

I tried Harvey next. Maybe I could catch him before he left to meet Carl for dinner. He didn’t answer his cell phone, which was not surprising. When I called his hotel, they said that he had checked out, which was more than surprising. It was disturbing. When he didn’t answer his home phone in Boston, I was more than disturbed. I was worried. Harvey rarely deviated from his planned schedule.

I was still trying to find him, leaving urgent messages at both his numbers, when I had to board the ten o’clock flight home.

Back in Boston, the hunt for a parking space was the usual nightmare. The cars double-parked up and down Beacon Street with their parking lights flashing signaled another bad night for anyone in the Back Bay without an assigned parking space. I circled the block several times before giving up and making my way to the mammoth parking garage under the Boston Common, where there was always space for those willing to pay. I hated paying for parking in my own neighborhood.

The idea came to me as I rode the elevator up to the surface. Without giving myself a chance to overthink it, I turned on Charles instead of crossing and walked the short distance to the familiar dwelling on Chestnut Street. I stood for what seemed like a long time on the front steps with my finger poised over the buzzer. I collected myself, pushed the button, and waited. When the answer came, I talked fast.

“It’s me. It’s Alex. Please don’t hang up. I need to talk to you.” What came back was a ringing silence that managed somehow to be cold and angry.

“Tristan, please.”

The buzz that released the building’s front door lock was the most welcome sound I’d heard in a while. I pushed through and headed up the stairs.