First Class Killing (12 page)

“You scared me to death.” I took a deep breath and longed for more pure oxygen. He looked at my face and tried to hold back the merriment that was clearly present in his eyes.

“What? What is so funny? Because I have to tell you, I’m not finding much comical about this day so far.”

The dam gave way, and peals of hysterical laughter burst forth. “You should…you should…have seen yourself. You looked like a crack fiend inhaling your first hit of the day. When that toilet flushed, your eyes got
huge.”

I tried to keep from laughing. I didn’t want to encourage him. He was, after all, laughing at me. But then he made his hand into a surrogate mask, clapped it over his nose and mouth, and showed me a look of wide-eyed alarm, all the while snorting ravenously and loudly sucking down the make-believe oxygen. He looked insane, and I felt ridiculous, and then I realized how absurd the whole situation was and felt a smile sneak up, then a laugh bubble over. I made the mistake of making eye contact with him, and pretty soon it was a full-blown, rolling giggle fest—as soon as one wave stopped, we’d look at each other and the next would begin. We leaned over and bumped shoulders and held our sides and tried to calm down and couldn’t. I was out of control, and somewhere in the back of my swollen, hungover, throbbing brain, I thought it wasn’t such a bad place to be.

I found a cocktail napkin, wiped my face, and counted it as a stroke of good luck that I hadn’t had time to apply makeup. I tried to breathe deeply and make sure not to look at Tristan, who was also coming back to earth.

“Feeling better now?” he asked.

My back creaked, and my joints needed oiling, and my head would probably explode once we reached cruising altitude. But I had to get through this day. The oxygen helped a lot. Laughing helped more.

“Thank you,” I said, “for everything.”

Tristan put his arm around me and gave my shoulders a squeeze. “Go comb your hair. You look like shit.”

Chapter

13

B
Y THE TIME
I
CROSSED THE THRESHOLD AND
slouched into my apartment in Boston that evening, I had been in constant motion for nearly twelve hours straight, much of that on an airplane doing six hundred knots from one end of the country to the other.

I dropped my bags in the middle of my living room, collapsed onto the couch, and let my head loll back onto the soft cushions. My apartment building was alive and noisy at that time of the evening. The heavy door downstairs swung open and slammed shut with dependable frequency as my neighbors came home from work. Next door, the baby cried, and I could smell the onions cooking in someone’s dinner. I sat with my eyes closed, luxuriated in the deeply tranquil state of being still.

I had managed to get through the flight by maintaining a single-minded focus on not dropping, burning, melting, or breaking anything. But the brain at rest is fertile ground, and as I sat there, memories from the day and night before began to bubble up and come back in a flood of odd details. A palm beside the pool with one brown frond. A white napkin with a dark wet ring soaked into it from where the glass had been. My glass? The taste of tequila still on my tongue like a thick paste. Margaritas first, then shots while I was dancing. I couldn’t remember going to bed.

But I remembered Angel.

I remembered the way she had looked at me and touched me and made clear that she took what she wanted.
Do you want to be close to me?
Those words whispered in my ear felt as if they were still there and would always be there, tattooed across my consciousness.

Then there was Jamie. The look on his face when he had seen my uniform, or at least recognized it for what it meant. Watching him as he walked away from me and never looked back. Most of all, the dull ache in my heart that I managed, like the pain in my chronically sore hamstring, simply to ignore. Or live with. Tristan was right. I needed my brother in my life. I needed to call him.

But first I needed to talk to Harvey, and before I talked to Harvey, I wanted to check out my prize. I booted up the computer and shuffled straight over to the A drive, where the disk containing the purloined data was still seated. When I pulled up the directory, it appeared that I had two files on the disk. I clicked on the one with last night’s guest list.

When it popped up, I smiled. All the names were there. They weren’t encoded or garbled or self-erasing, which I decided to count as a big plus. Included on the invitation list were not only names and addresses, almost all from the West Coast, but in many cases e-mail addresses as well. Mr. Bouncer did not seem to have been as meticulous in getting the women’s information as the men’s. The gender was predominantly male, and places of business were frequently included. The list included two hundred names, which didn’t seem like so much in the harsh light of day. I tried the next file.

I didn’t know if I had copied it from the laptop or if it had already been on the disk, but it was large and helpfully labeled “Master List.” The data in the master list were set up like the invitation list, with all the same information, but there were a couple of additional dimensions to the way these data were organized. I read the column headings, and as I began to appreciate what I had stumbled upon and what I could do with it, my brain function stirred awake.

I scrolled down, getting more excited with each page. By the time I reached the end, I was downright gleeful, primarily because it took so long to get there. There were more than thirteen hundred names in this file.

I picked up the phone and dialed Harvey.

“It’s me,” I said when he picked up. “I’m back, and I know how we’re going to get her.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve been going about this all wrong, Harvey. I know how we’re going to get Angel.”

“How?”

“Angel has a big problem, and I’m going to be her solution.”

Chapter

14

H
ARVEY’S HOUSE IN
B
ROOKLINE WAS LIKE THE
suits he wore—formal for the rest of the world but comfortable for him. Also like his suits, if you looked closely, you could see the seams coming apart or the creases fraying from too much wear.

We were in his office, which was the only room in which I ever felt comfortable. That wasn’t because it was so cozy. Harvey’s office was like an elegant reading room in a venerable old library—darkly paneled, highly burnished, and plush with an overstuffed wingback chair, a thickly upholstered couch, and a deep burgundy and blue rug. I always had the urge to whisper there. But I liked it better than his kitchen or his bath or bedroom, because that’s where he kept all the trappings of his illness—pill bottles, heating pads, and walking aids—that he didn’t want anyone to see.

The only personal item he seemed to want anyone to see was the lovingly framed picture in his office of the dark-eyed woman with the luxurious auburn hair. She sat on his desk with a sweet smile, looking like the loving wife who would come through the door any minute to fix his favorite dinner and tend to him in his illness.

She wouldn’t.

It was a picture of his ex-wife, Rachel, and though he might have thought of her often, he talked about her rarely. It took him a long time before he would tell me their story.

He’d met her years before when he traveled to Boston on an insurance fraud case. Rachel was his contact at the insurance company. He fell in love, they married, and she dumped him seven years later, because, he insisted, he snored and enjoyed
Diagnosis Murder.
She had moved out, leaving him in the duplex in Brookline they had shared. When I asked why he didn’t go home to his people, especially since he was bound to need more help at some point, he said he couldn’t bear to leave the city, the neighborhood, the very house where he’d passed his happiest years. But I knew the real reason he stayed. Rachel lived nearby, and on a good day, he caught a glimpse of her. On a very good day, he saw her without her new husband.

“This list is extraordinary.” He leaned back in his executive swivel chair. I had printed out a hard copy of the master list from LA and laid it out for him on his big desk. Even with a small font, it made for a thick stack of pages. “All of these men are patrons of prostitutes? Is that what you believe?”

“Patrons or potentials. According to the column headings, they’re either clients of Angel’s or clients and potential clients of the LA crew. Look, there are even notes showing which of Angel’s clients have already been converted.”

“Where did you get this?”

“The party was put on by the LA women. They were taking names at the door on a computer. It must have been one of theirs, because the lists were in it.”

“It is fascinating, but what value to us and the case? I know I need not remind you that these clients are no doubt passengers and therefore—”

“Off limits. No, you need not. I have a different idea. I want to use Angel’s adversity to our advantage.” I was pacing around Harvey’s furniture, trying to burn off the nervous energy that comes from the birth of a bright new idea.

“How?”

“Angel was not at that party last night to expand her horizons. She was there protecting her interests. She wasn’t there to recruit. She was there to scope out the competition.”

“Please do not suggest to me that you want to open a new front on this investigation.”

“No, I want to finish this one. What I learned last night was that Angel has a business problem.”

“It would seem so.”

“People with business problems need business strategies to solve them.”

“Ideally.”

“Where do you get a strategy if you can’t think one up yourself?”

“Consultants.”

“Exactly.” I stopped and presented myself for inspection. “You’re looking at Angel’s new management consultant.”

“Oh.” He leaned all the way back in his chair. “Oh, my.”

I never seemed to get the reactions I expected from Harvey. This idea had rejuvenated my confidence about the case, but he seemed intent on being ambivalent. I came around the couch and sat in the chair in front of his desk. “That’s how I’ll get close to her. I’ll pitch myself as someone who can help save her business, and I’ll use these names as a teaser. She’ll want those names, Harvey.”

“Dare I ask, what do you know about her business?”

“All businesses are the same when it comes down to it. She’s losing market share to a start-up that is offering promotional rates and discount services to undercut her pricing structure. A problem,” it occurred to me, “not unlike one of the many currently roiling the airlines. That’s how I thought of my strategy.”

“You have a strategy?”

“A frequent fucker program.”

“Excuse me?”

“A frequent fucker program. That’s the solution to Angel’s problems and to ours. It will revolutionize her business.”

“I thought our goal was to destroy her business.”

“Yeah…well, it is. But I have to make her think I’m helping her. I’m a consultant. I have to come up with a strategy, which I have. I just need your help in fleshing out some of the details. I was hoping we could brainstorm. Also, we need to put it in a PowerPoint package so I can present it to her.”

“Oh, my word, you must be joking.”

“Let me explain it to you before you reject it outright. Angel needs a way to retain her women, especially the top earners, and a way to keep her clients loyal to her. The frequent fucker program solves both problems at once.”

“Could we perhaps refer to it as something else?”

“Okay, the FFP. We create a loyalty program with tiers, just like the airlines. Clients will earn points in the program by buying services. The more they buy, the more points they earn. The more points they earn, the more hooked in they are to the provider of those services. It’s like crack. Once you start, you’re in.”

“What are the points for?”

“Free stuff. Prizes. Same as any other program.”

“What sorts of prizes did you have in mind?”

“What do you think? Providers of air service offer free trips. Providers of sexual services offer free f—”

“What would keep the women in LA from just copying it?”

“That’s the genius of this plan, if I do say so myself. Angel has something they don’t have: history.”

“History?”

“She has records of all her clients’ activity to date. She can award points and status retroactively based on prior transactions. She’ll lock in the current customers so they won’t leave, and she might get back some who have left her. She can throw up a limited-time offer. Come back within the week, and get credit for all your prior activity. I love this plan.”

“The LA group could create history, could they not?”

“It’s not the same. Harvey, you have no idea how much people like the concept of a loyalty program. It’s like Dan said: don’t fuck with market forces. Use them.”

“This was Dan’s idea?”

“Sort of. He started me thinking about it.”

He offered one of his stingy smiles. “Why does that not surprise me?”

“The best part is, it works not only for Angel but for us, too.”

“How?”

“I’ll insist on meeting her Web master to develop the specs for the program. I think the Web master is the key to getting Angel.”

“Web master? She has one of those?”

“She has aWeb site. That means someone built it and maintains it. I suppose it’s possible she does it herself, but Irene and Tristan seem to think she’s borderline illiterate. My guess is she has someone who does it for her. If the scheduling is done through the Web site, then probably payments are as well, which is the jackpot for us. That’s how we prove that there is payment for sex. All that information would reside right there with the Web master.”

He shoved out his lower lip and tapped on the temple of his glasses. “Do you really think she will hire you?”

“We’ll see. I planted the seed with her last night. The fact that she was out there with her crew tells me she knows she has a problem.”