“Cool it for a while. Maybe it’s a phase they’re going through.”
“They’re going through something, all right,” Mollie said, and rolled her eyes.
“There,” Winona said, “practice makes perfect. This one is yours, Moll.”
Twenty minutes later, both girls were stoned out of their minds. They had smoked the joints down till they’d almost burned their fingertips, and had then opened the roaches and sprinkled the remaining pot out the window, rolling the papers into tiny balls and flicking those out, too. The windows were still wide open to the traffic below, and the girls lay side by side on Winona’s bed, wearing only panties, talking loudly and giggling every ten or twenty seconds.
Mollie wanted to know if this was really the first time Winona had tried this. Somehow the question struck her funny, so she burst out laughing. Winona assured her that she would never do anything for the first time unless it was with her very best friend in the entire world. Both girls began giggling at this fresh witticism.
“Except play with my buzzer,” Winona said.
Since the word “buzzer” was in itself hysterically funny, the girls began giggling all over again. Winona said she’d done that for the first time without Mollie, played with her buzzer, that is. Mollie wanted to know what a buzzer was and how you played with it. Winona told her you had to find it first. She herself had found hers quite by accident in February, up in Vermont, while she was leaning against the washing machine downstairs off the kitchen, doing all her socks and thermal underwear and turtlenecks from the week’s skiing. The machine kept vibrating against her and all at once she realized something was, well, buzzing down there in her jeans. So she pressed a little harder against the machine to make the buzzing a little stronger. Mollie found all this hysterically funny, the idea of somebody having a buzzer in her jeans.
Winona went on to say that in the bathtub later that night, while she was washing herself down there, she began to feel that same buzz again, though not as strong as it had been when she was doing her laundry. So she searched around with her fingers to see if she could find what was causing this very peculiar, very pleasant sensation, and she discovered this little, well, buzzer between her legs — “meine kleine friggin buzzerei,” she said in Frankendrac.
“Sometimes I do it to music,” she said, and sat up, and climbed over Mollie, and padded to the bookcase. Mollie watched as she put a digital disc on the machine, turned the volume up loud, and then came back to the bed. She climbed over Mollie again, lay back down on her side of the bed, and slipped her hand into her panties. “Just do what I do,” she said. “It’s fun.”
Five minutes later, Mollie was masturbating for the first time to the stereo beat of Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” both girls giggling at the wonder of it all. Sixteen-year-old Henrietta in the living room up the hall, watching her movie blithely unaware, thought they sounded like they always did, dumb and going on thirteen.
“How do you know this?” Andrew said.
“We asked around,” Petey said.
“Who asked around?”
“We had a detective check on her.”
“A private eye?”
“No, a real cop. A tin shield. Somebody we got in our pocket.”
“You checked on her without first asking me?” Andrew said.
“We were trying to protect you, Andrew,” he said. “If this was something you didn’t know, we had to find out. For your own protection.”
“What’s his name? The husband?”
“Michael Welles. He put away the Lombardi Crew five years ago.”
“You’re positive about all this?”
“Pos—”
“Because if you’re making a mistake...”
“No mistake, Andrew.”
“Causing me trouble over a mistake...”
“Andrew, I swear on my mother’s eyes, this is the truth. I personally phoned the DA’s Office, asked for Michael Welles, it went right through.”
“Who answered the phone?”
“He did himself. ‘ADA Welles’ is how he answers.”
“Then how do you know he’s a unit chief?”
“’Cause that’s who I asked for on the phone, Deputy Unit Chief Michael Welles. Anyway, Andrew, whether he’s a chief or just an Indian, who gives a shit? He’s a DA who works in the Organized Crime Unit. For me, that’s enough.”
Andrew was silent for several moments.
Then he said, “What do you expect me to do about this?”
“That’s entirely up to you,” Petey said. “I know what I would do. Because you see, Andrew, he may be the one put in the bugs, her husband. And she may be working for him, Andrew, I hate to tell you this. She may be a snitch, Andrew. She may be a rat.”
“So what would you do?”
“I think you know what I would do, Andrew.”
As the last class broke on Wednesday afternoon, Luretta came up to Sarah’s desk and handed her a long white envelope.
“Mrs. Welles,” she said gravely, “if you get a chance, I’d appreciate it if you read this sometime.”
“I’d be happy to,” Sarah said. “What is it?”
“Well,” Luretta said, and ducked her head.
She had never been a shy girl. Sarah looked at her.
“What is it, Luretta?” she asked again.
“Jus’ something. There’s my phone number on it, case you feel like calling me.”
Sarah studied her, puzzled.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“No, no. Well... jus’ read it, okay? When you can,” she said, and ran swiftly out of the room.
Sarah put the envelope in her attaché case.
The sun was blinding as she walked southward on Park Avenue, wearing sunglasses, hurrying toward Dunhill’s where Andrew’s blue Acura was parked in front of the store. She said nothing as she got into the car.
“Hi,” Andrew said, and smiled.
“This is dangerous,” she said, and tossed the attaché case into the backseat. “Could we please get moving?”
Andrew started the car at once, heading directly cross-town, toward the river. Billy usually began driving immediately downtown on Park, but she knew Andrew was taking her to dinner tonight. When he’d told her about it on the phone, she’d wondered immediately if he’d discovered the still operative bugs in the Mott Street building. They were on the East River Drive now, heading uptown toward the Bruckner Expressway.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
Edge to her voice, still nervous.
“I know a nice little place in Connecticut,” he said.
“Connecticut? Andrew, I haven’t got that much time, you know I can’t...”
“Well, I think you may have time,” he said.
She did not take off the sunglasses, even though the sun was no longer blinding her. She sat quite still in the seat beside him, her bag in her lap, her hands over it, Andrew darkly silent behind the wheel.
He was wondering if she was wired.
He knew the car wasn’t bugged. He had taken it to the garage where they kept the Lincoln and had asked Billy to put it on a lift and check it top to bottom, inside and out. The car was clean. Whatever he and Sarah Welles said in this car today would not get back downtown to her husband in Organized Crime. Unless she herself was wired.
“I know who your husband is,” he said.
She said nothing.
“His name is Michael Welles, he s deputy chief of the DA’s Organized Crime Unit.”
Still, she said nothing. Her heart was pounding. He knew about Michael, it was senseless to lie. But if she told the truth...
“Your husband who makes eighty-five a year for putting away people like me.”