Lynne Heitman - First Class Killing

“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.”