“You’d be surprised,” he said. Then, shutting the door and going into the big room after her, he said, “What I’d really like is a cup of coffee.”
She froze. “What the hell are you up to?”
He shook his head. “I don’t honestly know. I was putting on a tough act, the same as you were, but I can’t bring it off, can I? The trouble is, once I make up my mind about someone, I resist changing it even when I get proof that I was wrong. I’ll be honest about it-you’re outside my experience, but then you’re probably outside most men’s experience. I have never understood men who were capable of buying sex. I’ve never been with a whore in my life-frankly, if there wasn’t some kind of emotional communication, I doubt I could get it up. So you see, I didn’t come up with you for that. I came because I’m intrigued. You tried to shock me right out of your life, and it almost worked-it would have, except I’m curious, and a little stubborn, and it seems to me you can’t just label somebody ‘prostitute’ and let it go at that. When you say the words ‘call girl,’ that’s fact, but it’s not truth. I still want to know the truth.”
“Truth,” she said, “is anything but beautiful. You’re babbling like a romantic idiot. Act your age.”
“Why not humor me?”
“Oh, damn it, Russ-if you’ve got any sense at all, you’ll walk out that door and never see me again.”
He said in a flat voice, “I might-if I knew enough about one thing.”
“Oh, God, now we’re back to those shares of stock.”
“That’s right. We are.”
“What the hell do you want of me?” She threw up her hands. “They were a gift from an admirer, all right?”
“A two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar gift? Come off it. I could get a subpoena, you know.”
She gave him a wicked small grin. “Now you’re trying to bluff me.”
“Bluff? Don’t you believe I have subpoena power?”
“You have the power to subpoena the records of corporations and insiders and control stockholders. I’m none of those. I own nine thousand shares of NCI common voting stock. That’s not even one-half of one percent of the outstanding stock. You couldn’t convince a federal judge I was an insider by any stretch of the imagination.”
He made no immediate reply. Only one lamp was lit. Carol stood highlighted in the center of the carpet, statuesque, shadows deepening the roundnesses of her high breasts, soft thighs, and long legs. He came to her, leaned forward, kissed her mouth. It was a long lover’s kiss but her lips were still and stiff under his. She slipped her face away. “Don’t be ridiculous-don’t get intense, Russ.”
He straightened. His face was expressionless. “You’re damned beautiful, you know.”
“You’re forcing me to be cruel,” she said. “You asked me if I enjoyed it. The answer is, it’s the way I earn my living-it’s no more enjoyable than punching a clock, and no less.”
“Maybe-maybe. But you’re a good liar. How do I know that’s true?”
She only gave him the twisted smile he was getting used to.
He said, “You made a mistake, you know, coming back at me with that business about insiders and control stockholders. You were trying to prove it wouldn’t be any good for me to try to push you around, but all you did was convince me you’re involved in something. Whatever it is, you’re in it up to your gorgeous hairline. You’ve been too well briefed in legal technicalities for an innocent.”
She uttered a harsh laugh. “I have never pretended to be an innocent.”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
“Do I? You’d have to prove that, wouldn’t you?”
“Being top-priced in your line may be lucrative, but it’s not that lucrative. Why don’t you tell me who you’re fronting for?”
“Fronting for? I don’t know what you mean.”
“All right,” he said, turning toward the door. “I’ll keep digging until I find out.”
“Please don’t, Russ.”
“It’s my job-what do you expect me to do? You could make it easier for me.”
“I could only get you hurt if I did what you want me to do.”
“Don’t be melodramatic.”
“Melodramatic? You don’t know the kind of people I have to deal with.”
“Do you mean the Mafia?”
“No. That’s not what I mean.”
“I thought they were tied up in-your racket.”
“You don’t have to use that tone on me, Russ. The skin trade doesn’t pay enough to interest the Mafia anymore, they don’t bother to organize it. Oh, they force a lot of kids onto the streets by hooking them on heroin, and it’s true racketeers are like anyone else with money-they can get a girl when they want one. But it isn’t what you think. I’ve got no connection with them.”
“Then stop threatening me. It’s asinine. You’re only throwing raw meat on the floor.”
“No. I’m telling you the truth. I don’t want you to play boy detective in my affairs. There are too many powerful people who can’t afford to have that kind of thing going on.”
“Like the one you fronted for when you bought the stock?”
“Drop it right now, Russ. I’m not kidding.”
He gave her a long, slow scrutiny, as if to fix her image forever in his mind, and suddenly he put a chill smile on his face. “Ciao, then,” he said softly, and turned on his heel and left.
By the time he reached the street he was feeling hung-over and stupid. He lit a cigarette and walked east toward Fifth Avenue, his shoes thudding the pavement; took the cigarette from his mouth and dropped it into the gutter; lifted his shoulders defensively and put his hands in his pockets. He was angry with himself for his stupefying naivete. He had somehow ignored all the signs-they must have been there all along-and plunged ahead, his perceptions corrupted by an innocence so eager it must have been comical to her. It had been a shabby trick; he had made a fool of himself.
He turned downtown on Fifth and walked all the way home. By the time he got there, his thinking had undergone a series of subtle changes. Mounting the steps of the converted brownstone, he found himself remembering her radiance, the range of colors in her voice, the sincerity screened by her mockery. He had opened the gates of his mind to let her flow inside, and now, by the time he entered his apartment, her face and name raged in him like a fever. Incredulous, he sat down on the bed and stared sightlessly, filled with disbelief and a half-hysterical feeling that things had escaped completely from his control.
The more he thought about it, the more outraged he became. He was far too mature for this kind of silly infatuation. It was absurd. She was nothing but a tramp. A prostitute, a cheap Goddamned whore. How many thousands of men had gone through her as if she were a revolving door or a public rest room? It was epic to estimate. He tried to make the dirty degradation of it loom forbiddingly, tried to fill his mind with loathing and contemptuous disgust. And when that didn’t work, he went to his desk and began to write, in a fierce crabbed hand, a list of investigative gambits on which he would get to work first thing in the morning. But when he finished it and leaned back to stretch, he could hear her throaty, mocking laugh and see the twisted smile on her stunning face. He caught himself reaching for the phone to call her; he shouted an oath and slammed the receiver down and sat staring in amazement at his own trembling hands.
8. Mason Villiers
The great yawl of a limousine prowled smoothly and almost without sound at fifty-five miles an hour, surging toward the huge complex of buttressed flying concrete at the Hawthorne interchange. Villiers sat back with his eyes half-shut, too disciplined to reveal even in the dark privacy of the Cadillac his distaste for the idea of having to attend one of George Hackman’s parties. Sanders tooled the big machine through town and along a succession of curving drives. Here and there Villiers saw at windows the reflected blue glow of television. Shrubs and trees nudged the big ranch-style houses, each set off on its own acre of ground. Neat lawns, asphalt driveways, Early American mailboxes. Villiers detested the suburbs. For years Isher had tried to persuade him to buy a house, for the tax advantages inherent in ownership. He had bought one, in Grosse Pointe, but he had never set foot inside it. Either you lived on a forty-square-mile estate on your own Mediterranean island or you jetted from hotel suite to hotel suite; there was no point in half-assed compromises.