The Fifth Favor (7 page)

“You don’t understand.” Lucien’s voice thickened. “It’s tearing me up. I see revulsion in your eyes, know what my feelings have done to our friendship, and it’s killing me. I can’t do this anymore.”

“Yeah? Me, neither.” Adrian stepped into the room, thought better, and backed up again to the safety of the threshold, anger and unbidden guilt vibrating through him.

“Incidentally, I do understand. I understand what a manipulative, lying junkie you are.

You forget that I know you better than anyone, Luke. You’ll do anything to get what you want, even if it’s me. But now you’re all played out. The guilt card’s gone, overused a million times. You just threw down the friendship card. And you’re right. I don’t want you back. Your friendship was all I ever wanted, but that’s over.”

He paused, every muscle in his body thrumming with ire and disappointment. “I’m going to get ready for work. When you’re done feeling sorry for yourself, do us both a favor and go home.”

* * * * *

Lucien stared at the ceiling and listened to the sound of running water coming from Adrian’s bathroom on the other side of the wall. Adrian was preparing for a night at Avalon, donning the aristocratic, princely disguise that would earn Azure thousands of dollars in one weekend alone. His good looks and charisma weren’t the only reasons the club owner was in love with him.

There were so many reasons to love Adrian.

Easing himself into a sitting position, Lucien fought back a wave of nausea brought on by pain and the lingering effects of too much cocaine and Jim Beam. He considered, for an instant, doing what Adrian wanted and checking himself into a local rehab clinic.

Like a good dose of chemotherapy, it would buy a few more months. Prolong what had become unbearable, a life wasted on drugs and sex and empty promises. A love-free existence. It most certainly would buy a taste of Adrian’s approval, and what Lucien wouldn’t give for just a brief glimpse of the old warmth, the old acceptance in his friend’s face.

36

The Fifth Favor

His fists clenched against the sheet. No. He wouldn’t do it anymore. Weariness crashed down on his head, forced tears between his lashes. God, he was tired.

It was the look of derision in Adrian’s eyes a few minutes ago that had sealed his decision. Not a decision, actually—more of a knowing. A knowing that it all had to end, that the time was now and the means to do it a few feet from where he sat listening to the grandfather clock in the hallway tick off the seconds of his torment, while his pulse thudded in tandem.

Down the hall Adrian’s bedroom door opened, and the scent of shampoo and aftershave floated to Lucien’s senses. He closed his eyes and breathed in, missing such a small pleasure even before it was gone.

Soft footsteps approached his door, then Adrian passed by, dressed in the requisite khakis and white oxford Azure preferred for all the companions. Lucien sat in utter stillness and listened to the sounds of his friend moving about the apartment; the low murmur of his voice as he spoke to the dog, the gentle clink of a coffee cup or plate being set in the sink, then footsteps with a sharper ring, indicating Adrian had put on his shoes.

The sounds of a man living a life that would flourish without Lucien in it.

The jangle of keys reached his ears and he drew a shuddering breath, wanting to cry out, to reach out, to offer the farewell and thanks Adrian so deserved from him, but grief paralyzed him. Cowardice. He never could give back an ounce of what Adrian had given him all these years.

So he sat in the tiny guestroom and waited for his friend to depart his life, waited with pulse vibrating as though he stood in the wings, ready to dance across the stage as yet another soapy tragedy from Avalon’s den of iniquity.

The apartment door swished open and Lucien braced himself for the final click that would forever part him from the one person in the world who held his heart.

Adrian’s voice called, “I’m leaving.”

Lucien closed his eyes. “Okay. Have a good night.”

Silence. Then, “Eat something, Luke. There’s food in the refrigerator.”

“Thanks,” he said softly, knowing his friend couldn’t hear his response. Then the door closed, and into the dearth of sound, he whispered, “‘Night, Ad.”

Five minutes later, he pulled on the jeans and T-shirt Adrian had loaned him, rummaged through the living room desk for stationary and a stamp, and sat down to compose what he hoped was a reasonable, decorous letter of resignation from Avalon and life in general. It would be better, more merciful to send it directly to Azure instead of leaving it for Adrian to stumble across, so he left the apartment door cracked and rode the elevator down to the lobby, where he stuck the addressed envelope in the building’s out-delivery mailbox.

37

Shelby Reed

The doorman squinted at him in instant suspicion when he padded back to the elevator, and Lucien offered him a crooked smile as the brass-paneled doors closed between them again.

He rode up with a beautiful teenage girl in low-slung jeans and a belly shirt, who stared at him from beneath her lashes and said, “Wow. What happened to your face?”

“Train wreck,” Lucien said. The doors slid open on the fourteenth floor. He started to exit the elevator, then stepped back and pressed a kiss against her astonished, open lips. “To live well is the best revenge,” he told her, smiling into her eyes. “Take it from a dead man.”

Back in Adrian’s apartment, he tucked his driver’s license in his back pocket, turned off the lamp that sat on the entry console and crossed the living room to the balcony doors. Night had not yet fallen, and the smog mingled with clouds over the setting sun, casting a strange pink iridescence across the city’s tree canopy.

“Stay,” he told Rudy, who waited anxiously at the French doors with a threadbare stuffed banana in his mouth, as though he too had business on the balcony. Then Lucien stepped into the warm summer wind and closed the glass doors behind him.

It took him an eternity to hoist himself onto the concrete ledge, partly due to terror, but mostly because he was still sore from having the hell kicked out of him yesterday.

He straddled the balustrade and stared down at the traffic snaking along Connecticut Avenue as far as the eye could see.

Too many pedestrians crossed the sidewalk fourteen stories down, so Lucien waited. He waited until the sun rested like a fat neon orb on the treetops, until the sidewalk below was clear, until no cars were parked in the building’s circular driveway.

He waited until the wind dried the tears on his lashes and his body quit shaking, and he had no more excuses.

“Adrian,” he whispered. A prayer.

And then he flew.

* * * * *

At Avalon, Adrian left a message with Maria that Lucien was still sick, then flipped through his file to check the night’s clientele.

Helen Feinstein had booked three hours of his time. The fifty-year-old socialite was hell-bent on clinging to her youth, so full of plastic and saline Adrian often pictured a blow-up doll when he watched her undress.

Mary Ellen Frazier came at seven, a new customer he hadn’t met before. She wanted to go to dinner, and then back to the club for intimacies. She liked a dominant lover. She liked bondage.

38

The Fifth Favor

Gwendolyn Campbell came after that, lightly penciled onto the schedule as always, in the untimely event the authorities ever got hold of the records. Gwendolyn was a U.S. senator, a member of the President’s cabinet. Her membership was utterly secret, and despite the tension her hush-hush presence brought with it whenever she visited Avalon, she was a respite of sorts to Adrian. Conservative, intelligent, easy to please.

No weird stuff, just straight screwing, and usually once was all it took.

Adrian sighed and rubbed at the tension between his brows.

Inexplicably he thought of the reporter, of her wide, green eyes and pointed chin and the tenderness in her expression, a permanent disadvantage for someone working in the slick world of media. He pushed her image aside, confused by its appearance.

Later that night, as his second client shuddered beneath the slow, circular thrusts he’d learned she favored, Billie Cort crept back before his mind’s eye. Her reluctant smile, the stubborn wave of dark hair that fell against her cheek, the softness of her breasts pressed against him when they danced…

The way she said his name.

Adrian buried his face in Mary Ellen Frazier’s damp, perfumed neck, unprepared for the fierce climax that coiled in his groin and struck, wrenching a groan from his throat.

When Mary Ellen left, a thousand dollars lighter and sweetly deluded that she’d brought him more ecstasy than he’d known in a lifetime, he showered, dressed again, greeted the senator, his final client, and mustered the energy to wrap up this day he’d thought would never end.

At midnight he climbed into his BMW and took the long way home, through side streets slick and glossy with rain, where he could pass row houses with glowing windows and wonder at the families that gathered behind them, living everyday lives with everyday desires. The back roads reminded him of home. Reminded him of his family, and the past he’d so ignobly discarded.

Approaching his condominium building from the rear, he parked in the back lot, then realized he’d left the security card on the console for Lucien’s benefit, and God only knew if his friend had pocketed it, gone out and never returned.

The doorman would have to let him in.

Annoyed and weary, he strolled, head down, in the tepid misting rain, up the sidewalk and around the corner toward the main entrance, only to be greeted with the cobalt and crimson flash of five different police squad cars. A fire engine. Two ambulances. All parked in the circular drive and lining Connecticut Avenue.

Ahead on the sidewalk, a figure lay sprawled beneath a paramedic’s sheet.

Adrian’s heart quickened and he knew instinctively that someone had fallen from one of the balconies. He stopped, stared up at the jigsaw puzzle of black and illuminated windows checkering the mammoth building. His gaze narrowed on his own balcony, found the windows dark, then darted back to the figure again. Uneasiness 39

Shelby Reed

coiled in the pit of his stomach; a film of perspiration broke out on his skin and sent a shiver through him.

But his mind wouldn’t translate the dread into one solid realization.

Although the flurry of activity focused around the victim, the authorities all but stepped over the covered body as they talked and moved around, as though that person hadn’t been a person at all, but always splattered on the concrete, always lifeless, always a tragic, run-of-the-mill statistic.

“Sir?” A police officer in a yellow slicker approached Adrian, features dogged with weariness and disgust. “You’ll have to cross the street and use the other sidewalk.”

“I live here,” Adrian said absently, his attention riveted on the shapeless lump covered by the sheet. Another, harder shiver ran through him, and in its wake, the dark suspicion he hadn’t consciously grasped until now. It stole the breath from his lungs.

He took another step closer to the corpse, and the officer moved in front of him, clipboard in hand.

“Your name, please, sir.”

“Antoli. Apartment fourteen-oh-one.”

He stood in dull silence while the policeman scanned the sheet of residents, then the officer peered up at him. “May I see some identification, Mr. Antoli?”

He handed the man his driver’s license, waited while he studied it, then took it back and tucked his wallet into the rear pocket of his pants.

Instead of stepping aside to let Adrian pass, the officer cleared his throat and motioned to another official, a stout, bald man in a black trench coat.

“Mr. Antoli,” said the grim-faced detective as he approached. “You were acquainted with Luke DeChambeau?”

40

The Fifth Favor

“But if he’ll agree to see me, why can’t I go back?” Billie paced the office, too restless to sit after her editor had motioned to the loveseat for a third time. “You still haven’t given me a solid reason.”

Nora Richmond leaned back in her desk chair, rubbed a weary hand across her well-plucked brows and exhaled. “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Fine, Billie. I’ll tell you the truth, and then will you drop it?”

“It depends on what it is.”

The editor jolted forward and met Billie’s gaze, her brown eyes dark with concern.

“You’re a real pain in the ass, you know that? You can’t finish the interview because one of the escorts died last night. Fell off a fourteenth floor balcony.”

Billie’s heartbeat hitched and stumbled. “Not Adrian.”

“No, Adrian’s alive and well…and being thoroughly questioned by authorities. It was his condo balcony the guy fell from.”

Stunned, Billie could only sit there. Then she shook her head. “They think Adrian had something to do with it? As in, he
helped
the guy over the balcony?”

Nora’s pen tapped a restless rhythm on the desk. “Did he mention someone named Lucien during your interview?”

Billie couldn’t think. “I don’t know—maybe. He talked about a few of the other escorts, but I’d have to go back through my notes to give you names.”

The chair squeaked under the editor’s lanky weight as she swiveled toward the window and stared out over H Street’s bumper-to-bumper, midday traffic. “Apparently Adrian was tangled up with this Lucien guy. Rumors bounced around the club over the nature of their friendship, although Azure claims they were good friends—nothing more.”

“Adrian’s heterosexual,” Billie said flatly. The warmth of his embrace, the steel press of his arousal against her stomach as they danced had been too certain. She straightened from her slumped position against the wall. “He told me he was.”

Nora’s snort of laughter was her only comment, to which Billie replied, “Damn it! I have no reason to doubt him! I asked him point-blank if he was bisexual, and he said…he said he doesn’t sleep with men.”

“Hmm. Sounds noncommittal to me.”