“I don’t have to talk to you,” she said, girding herself, thrusting out her chest. Her breasts were evident, but as small as the rest of her.
“You don’t even know what I came to talk about.”
“Yes, I do,” she said, staring into my eyes, “and I don’t have to talk about it.”
“I guess you don’t have to, no, but part of you wants to. May I come in or are we going to have this talk out in the hallway so all your neighbors can hear?”
Her apartment was typical Manhattan fare: a cluttered studio that was probably not much bigger than her bedroom back home-wherever that was-and probably more money per month than most folks’ mortgage payments. But the clutter was of fine things. Her computer, an Apple desktop, had a huge monitor and every peripheral known to mankind. The futon and chairs were high end. No IKEA in here. The clothing and shoes strewn about were SoHo boutique, not Aeropostale. The art on the wall, mostly pieces from famous street artists like Banksy and Shepard Fairey, was either original or a signed and numbered print. Any one of the things in the studio cost more than a restaurant hostess could afford. Natasha came from money. Helps when you’re being blackmailed.
I sat on the futon. The delicate flower pinballed back and forth from the front door to the bathroom door like a trapped fly banging against a closed window. Just my being here had raised her anxiety level into the red numbers.
“What do you want?” Natasha fairly barked at me.
I opened the paper, but hid the headlines. “Do you recognize this woman?”
Her eyes got gigantic and she buried a trembling hand in her armpit. “No.” She was lying and she knew I knew it.
“Listen, Natasha, let’s stop lying to each other, okay? I used to be a cop, but I retired a long time ago. I’m a private investigator now and not a very good one anymore.”
“Get out!”
It was my turn to say no. “I’m not going anywhere until you talk about this, about what happened to you. I have a daughter a little bit older than you and I would hope that if she had trouble in her life and couldn’t talk to me about it, that she would be able to talk to someone else, someone who would listen, who would care and not judge.”
The steel was going out of her, but she wasn’t at the point of surrender. “Please go.”
I showed her Maya Watson’s face again. “Do you recognize this woman?”
“Yes.”
“That’s all, just yes?”
“Why is she in the paper?” Natasha asked, a lot of fear in her little voice.
I ignored the question and pushed her harder. “How do you know her? Have you seen her in the papers before or on TV?”
Natasha tilted her head at me like a confounded puppy. “What?”
“She committed suicide a few days ago,” I said, answering the earlier question. “She couldn’t take the secrets and the lies anymore. Swallowed two bottles of pills. They found her in her bed in a hot apartment. The insects had gotten to her.”
She bent over at the waist, letting out a strangled gasp, and began dry heaving. She covered her mouth as I had in my dream.
I kept at her. “You knew her from Piccadilly, right?”
She nodded yes.
“She drank there sometimes after work like you and the other people from Kid Charlemagne’s. That’s how you met, right?”
She nodded again.
“You knew that she was one of the EMTs who let Robert Tillman die at the High Line Bistro.”
She nodded.
“He had been blackmailing you and he had been blackmailing Maya and probably a lot of other women too.”
Now Natasha fell to her knees and the heaving was no longer dry. She vomited up whatever she had eaten in the last few hours, but she kept heaving. I got down beside her and held her head, stroked her hair and hugged her like I used to do with Sarah. When she was finally done, I laid her down on the futon, and got her a cold bottled water out of her fridge. I wiped her face and put a cold cloth on her forehead. After cleaning her floor, I sat in a chair across from her as she napped for about half an hour. When she got up, she didn’t say a word. Instead she went into the bathroom. I listened to her brush her teeth, gargle, and take a quick shower. She came out of the bathroom in a robe, went directly to her computer, and began tapping at the keyboard.
“Can you please come here.” She uttered her first words in nearly an hour. “See this email?” She pointed to a line in her inbox. It was from RT6969@constop. com. Didn’t take Einstein to figure out who RT6969 was. The subject heading was Ebony and Ivory.
“Uh huh, yeah.”
“I’m going to get dressed and leave for about an hour because I just can’t be here. When I leave, click on the links in the email and then you’ll understand.”
That was it. She gathered up some clothes, disappeared back into the bathroom, and was gone. As she closed the door behind her, I opened the email and clicked on the first link.
The link was to a video. I pressed the play arrow and knew immediately that Natasha was right: I understood, maybe more than I wanted to. In the video, a man I took to be the now late Robert Tillman and three much younger men took turns raping and sodomizing both Maya Watson and Natasha Romaine individually and in groups. I didn’t recognize the younger men in the video. Maya and Natasha were obviously drugged up, but not unconscious. They were pliable, not cooperative, but not uncooperative either, sort of will-less. Then things got weirder.
The women were dressed in fetish wear-leather and latex-and posed in several positions with each other, sometimes with sex toy props. A lot of it seemed totally staged, but in some of the footage, a third woman joined in. She was thin and muscular, clad in a black latex bustier, super high-heeled black stilettos, and a black latex mask. She wasn’t drugged or, if she was, it was a very different drug cocktail than Maya and Natasha had been fed because this woman didn’t seem to need any posing or prompting. She was active, enthusiastic, and none of what she did seemed forced or involuntary. Some of the things she did to Maya and Natasha were very disturbing and had probably been very painful for them.
The second link was to another video featuring much of the same footage, but it had been professionally edited. No longer did the things that had seemed so obviously staged seemed staged. A cheesy synthesized soundtrack played in the background. The sort of low moans, probably from pain and bewilderment, that Maya and Natasha had emitted during the nightmare, had been enhanced so that the women sounded like they loved what was going on and couldn’t get enough. Gaudy pink lettering was superimposed over the video to make it look like an advertisement for Ebony and Ivory Escort Service. Numbers flashed up on the screen and a disembodied voice promised that there wasn’t anything Ebony and Ivory wouldn’t do to make their clients happy. The footage that went along with that particular promise featured a montage of the most disturbing scenes from the earlier video.
The third link was to another video and, in some ways, the most chilling of all. In it, a man’s hand went through both women’s bags and clothing pockets one item at a time. An unusual amount of time was spent on shots of a BlackBerry, an iPhone, an address book, and two sets of keys. I clicked off, but forwarded a copy of the email with the links to my computer.
Okay, I thought, I understood a lot of it. Robert Tillman had drugged Maya and Natasha at the bar, gotten them back to a location where things were set to go, and probably kept feeding both women drugged drinks until he was done with them. And it was no wonder the women were willing to pay their rapist to keep that video footage away from the public. In this day and age, once video is out there, it is out there forever. Even if your parents or fiance would believe your story about being drugged and raped, there might always be some level of doubt. But the fact was, Robert Tillman was dead and the other guys in the video didn’t strike me as criminal masterminds. They seemed more like three frat boy jocks who were promised a good time and were just drunk enough not to give a shit about at whose expense that good time came. So what was Natasha still so scared of and why couldn’t either Maya or Natasha breathe a sigh of relief after Tillman’s death?