Sidney Sheldon - Mistress of the Game

Lexi cut to the chase.

“How much?”

“A hundred bucks a day. We bill monthly. You get a progress report at the end of each month, photographs, any other material we’ve managed to dig up. Expenses are extra.”

Lexi nodded.

“I’ll need a deposit to get started. Seven hundred plus five hundred for expenses.”

“You can have five hundred today. No more. I’ll pay you the rest when I get your first report.”

Tommy King scowled. Why was it always the richest clients who were the cheapest? The dress Lexi was wearing looked like it cost more than his apartment. Still, he figured, he shouldn’t be greedy. If he played his cards right and strung the thing out, the Blackwell girl could wind up being a gold mine.

“Fine. Five hundred. You have it with you?”

Lexi fumbled down the front of her dress and pulled a tightly rolled wad of notes from her bra. Looking around again, she thrust it into Tommy’s eagerly sweating hand.

After he was gone, she thought: What have I done? What if he runs off with that money and I never see hide nor hair of him again?

It was a risk worth taking. After years of saving, squirreling away her allowance and birthday and Christmas gifts in a secret account, Lexi now had over $30,000 in her own name. It wasn’t a fortune. But it was a start.

The time had come.

Prepare to die, pig.

A CHANCE MEETING IN THE PRISON LIBRARY CHANGED Gabe McGregor’s life.

Thanks to Billy, and the zealous attentions of the young prison doctor who ran the Wormwood Scrubs drug program, Gabe was clean for the first time in three years. But temptation was everywhere. The irony was that those guys on remand had been talking out of their arses. Gabe had tried to kill himself, corroding his intestines with bleach, because he thought he wouldn’t be able to get a hit here. The truth was there was plenty of heroin available if you knew the right people.

Gabe responded well to the methadone. Billy told him: “You can’t go back now, son. It’s the road to hell, sure you know that as well as I do.”

“I won’t go back, Billy.”

Gabe heard himself saying the words. He felt himself wishing they were true. But every time he thought of the years of boredom and loneliness stretching ahead, of how he’d let his mam down, of the mountain he would have to climb if he ever did get out of here, the hopelessness and despair became unbearable.

It was only a matter of time before he went back to heroin, and he knew it.

The prison doctor liked Gabe. Sensing his patient’s weakening resolve, he arranged a job for him cataloging books in the prison library.

“It’s one of the better places to work in this dump. Quiet, decent blokes in there, no real hard cases. You’ll be earning money and you’ll be busy.”

Gabe was grateful. The doctor must have pulled quite a few strings to get him such a cushy job. But still he found the work monotonous and soul destroying, arranging books alphabetically by author, title and subject matter.

“That’s the trouble with you bleedin’ Scots. No imagination.”

Gabe turned around. Behind him, seated at one of the Formica worktables surrounded by fat legal tomes, was a small, middle-aged man. He was completely bald and sported a thick, black Charlie Chaplin mustache that made him look as if he belonged in another century, like a music-hall performer or a magician from a Victorian circus.

“I beg your pardon. Are you talking to me?”

“Yes, jock, I’m talking to you.” The man’s cockney accent was almost comically strong. “Every day you come in ’ere, and not once ’ave I seen you read so much as a page. It’s like watching a kid stack shelves in a candy store and never stick his hand in the pick-and-mix.”

“I’m not much of a reader.”

The man laughed.

“Take a seat, jock. Go on. Pull up a pew.”

Gabe looked around. Both the librarians were engrossed at their computers. He wasn’t supposed to stop and chat on the job. In fact, nobody was supposed to talk in the library at all. He’d have to make it quick.

“Marshall Gresham.” The bald man proffered his hand as Gabe sat down.

“Gabe McGregor.”

“Let me ask you a question, Gabe McGregor. You’ve seen me in ’ere, right? Most days?”

Gabe nodded.

“Ever wondered what I’m up to? With all these boring-looking books?”

“Not really,” Gabe admitted.

Gabe’s gray eyes met Marshall Gresham’s blue ones. Marshall had amazing eyes. They literally sparkled, like sunshine bouncing off the sea, and they seemed to invite confidences.

“I’ll tell you, shall I?” said Marshall. “I’m working on my appeal. You see, Gabe McGregor, I ’ave a low opinion of the legal profession in general, and of my own brief in particular. The thought crossed my mind that while I’m banged up in ’ere, fending off shit-stabbers for the next ten years of my life, my poncey bloody solicitor is going home every night for steak-and-kidney pudding and a shag with his missus. Now, which of the two of us would you say is more motivated to see me walk through those gates to freedom?”

Gabe laughed.

“Ah, but motivation isn’t everything, is it, Mr. Gresham? Your lawyer is a professional. He knows how the appeal system works. You don’t.”

“I didn’t. ” Marshall Gresham gestured to the books around him. “But now I bloody do. Tell me, Gabe McGregor. How’s your lawyer getting on with your appeal? Heard much from him, ’ave you?”

Michael Wilmott. Christ. Gabe had almost forgotten the man existed. He’d been so preoccupied with his addiction and the daily struggle to get clean, he’d filed everything else in his life under P for “pending.” Permanently pending.

Marshall Gresham raised a bushy black eyebrow. “I’ll bet his wife makes a mean steak-and-kidney pudding.”

The first thing Gabe did was sack Michael Wilmott. The second thing he did was swallow his pride and write to everyone who might be able to help him raise money to pay for a new lawyer. He composed a simple note, countersigned by the prison doctor, telling people he was clean and determined to make a fresh start. Marshall Gresham helped him with the spelling. (“Bollocks to dyslexia. You have to work harder than other people, that’s all.”) Gabe sent the letters out to everyone he knew who wasn’t a user or a criminal, expecting little. He was overwhelmed by the response.

Thérèse, his last “girlfriend,” the one who’d kicked Gabe out after he stole from her, sent him a thousand pounds.

You could be anything you want to, Gabriel. Make me proud.

When he got her note, Gabe burst into tears.

More money followed, gifts of hundreds from classy London friends (almost all women), tiny donations of a few quid from old mates back in Scotland that again brought tears to Gabe’s eyes. These people have nothing. They can’t afford to help me. But here they are, trying. His mother, Anne, who had not heard from Gabe in almost two years, sent him fifty pounds stuffed into a card that said, simply: I love you. No mention of the fact that he was in prison. Not one word of a reproach.

I love you, too, Mam. One day, I’ll repay your faith in me.

Day by day, as the money trickled into his life and the drugs trickled out of it (he was almost off the methadone now), Gabe’s natural optimism and faith in human nature revived. Claire, his first London sugar mommy, was a lawyer. “I know a great criminal guy, Angus Frazer. He owes me a favor or twenty. Let me see what kind of deal I can do for you.”

Marshall Gresham was impressed.

“I’ll tell you what, kid. You either have the biggest knob in Scotland, or you’re a charming little bastard. You fleeced every one of these birds, but here they are falling over their knickers to ’elp you out.”