Линвуд Баркли - Find You First

Jeremy liked his guests to have a good time.

If ever there was a party house, this was it. And shouldn’t it be, for a place that was listed for $60 million when he bought it four years ago? There were movie stars here, Grammy winners, failed presidential candidates, a former governor, a famous lawyer who offered his expertise on CNN or Fox or MSNBC nearly every night, a composer who’d won a Tony fifteen years before and had been dining out on it ever since, even a sheik from one of the Emirates, dressed not in his traditional Kandura white robe but a pair of thousand-dollar jeans and a silk shirt with the top three buttons undone.

Jeremy had acquired a who’s who of interesting friends and acquaintances over the years. When you were something of a Renaissance man, who’d dabbled in more fields than Hershey’s had kisses, and had a problem, chances were you already knew someone who could help you solve it.

No matter how serious.

Also sprinkled throughout the crowd were a few less-than-famous faces, although what they lacked in notoriety they made up for in beauty. Young, gorgeous women, some younger than others. Aspiring starlets, models, stewardesses, dancers, many looking to make some cash while they waited for their Broadway careers to blossom. Jeremy liked to have at least half a dozen here to serve drinks, gather up coats, tend to the guests’ needs.

Some were more needy than others.

Jeremy worked the crowd. Lots of hugs, plenty of thank-yous.

A silver-haired woman in her seventies, dressed in a glittering floor-length gown, sidled up to him, slipping her arm into his.

She whispered, “On behalf of the Met’s board of directors, I would like to thank you for your generous support.”

“It was nothing,” he said modestly. “Glad to do it.”

“Two million is not nothing,” she said. “I just wanted to show my gratitude.”

He grinned slyly. “But Gretchen, your husband is right over there.”

She laughed, slapped his upper arm. “You’re too much!” And then, whispering again, “If I thought I could get away with it, and if only you had a thing for older women...”

Now it was his turn to laugh. He gave her hand a squeeze and moved deeper into the crowd.

“Thanks for that tip!” someone outside his field of vision said to him. “The stock has doubled!”

Jeremy gave a general thumbs-up and kept moving. He had his eyes on a round-shouldered man who had to be pushing eighty, looking down the dress of one of the young women hired to work the room.

“Judge Corliss,” he said, getting the man’s attention. “How are we doing tonight?”

The man’s head snapped up as he eyed the host. He nodded and extended a hand. “Great party,” he said. “Special occasion?”

Jeremy shook his head. “Do you need an excuse to get together with friends?”

“Course not.”

“I understand you’re going to be presiding over our case,” Jeremy said. “Just found out, in fact.”

“Before or after you sent my invitation?” The judge laughed at his own joke.

“After. Look, I know you have to call it the way you see it. I know you’ll be fair.”

“Without question,” the judge said, but there was something exchanged between them at that moment. A look. An understanding.

Jeremy shook the man’s hand again and was about to strike up a conversation with the anchor for one of the Big Three networks’ early morning shows and a director who’d been up for an Oscar three years ago — how he’d been nominated in the first place was a mystery to Jeremy; the film was utter shit — when someone tapped him on the back.

He turned and came face-to-face with his personal assistant, Roberta Bennington. Fiftyish, shapely, and tall with jet-black hair that she always swept over to rest on her right shoulder. She might not have been able to look him directly in the eye were it not for the four-inch stilettos she wore whenever here at work. Jeremy had a thing that none of the female staff in his employ could wear flats. Not a fetish, he insisted, although not one of the women who worked for him believed that for a minute.

“She’s waiting for you in your office,” Roberta told him.

Jeremy nodded, turned, and departed.

He walked up the two broad flights of stairs to the third floor. Given that his home was three brownstones stitched together, some areas of the third floor were open to wanderers, but to enter the long, wide hallway that led to his office, one had to enter a four-digit code to open the double doors.

He keyed in the numbers, opened the door, and proceeded down the hallway, lined on one side with massive windows made of one-way glass that looked down onto East Seventieth, and on the other, large, framed black-and-white photographs.

These pictures were unlike the Picassos or Pollocks or Pissarros one might find elsewhere in his expansive home. These photos were neither abstract nor landscapes. These were works by Helmut Newton and Robert Mapplethorpe and others. Erotic photographs. Men with women, men with men, women with women. Men alone, women alone. Imaginative couplings and solitary pleasures, many with close-ups of genitalia.

When he reached the end of this gallery, he reached a second set of doors, but there was no keypad this time. He opened the doors and went inside.

It was, if not quite the size of a tennis court, close. One wall, the glass one that had been dismantled earlier in the day and then put back in place, afforded a broad view of East Seventieth Street, but anyone gazing up from the sidewalk, or hoping to get a peek into Jeremy Pritkin’s world from the brownstone across the street, would have been disappointed. This glass, like that in the hallway, was one-way. From the street, this window gave the appearance of a massive mirror.

The angular, boxy Winnebago was parked up against the far wall, the front end pointed toward the street, close to the window. Shelves stocked with art books lined another wall, and more graphically sexual art was displayed on the one behind the expansive desk that dominated the room.

Well, that dominated the room before the RV was put in place.

As Jeremy closed the second set of doors, he heard the crying, even before he saw the girl.

The large leather chair in which she sat enveloped her. With its oversized arms and towering seatback, the chair dwarfed her, like some novelty piece of furniture at a state fair that visitors needed a ladder to crawl into to have their picture taken.

The girl was not waiting to have her picture taken.

Dressed in fashionably ragged jeans and a sweatshirt emblazoned with the letters NYPD, she sat with her knees drawn up to her chest, her skinny arms wrapped around them to hold them in place. Her hair, blond with streaks of pink, hung over her eyes, partly obscuring the tears that ran down her cheeks. When Jeremy entered she drew in on herself, tightened the grip on her knees.

She did not look more than fifteen.

“Oh, Nicky, Nicky, Nicky,” Jeremy said softly. “Nicky Bondurant. Look at you.”

He sat in a matching leather chair next to hers and turned so that he could address her more directly. He drew out the folded silk handkerchief that was tucked into the front pocket of his suit jacket and handed it to her.

“Dry those eyes, darling,” he said.

Tentatively, she reached out for the handkerchief, dabbed away the tears, and wiped her nose. When she went to hand it back, Jeremy raised a hand.

“It’s yours,” he said. He waited, wondering whether she would speak, and when she did not, he said, “You hurt me, Nicky.”

She said nothing.

“After all the things I’ve done for you, this is how you repay me.”

Nicky sniffed. She was studying a frayed opening in her jeans that allowed a peek at her knee.