The Gods of Greenwich (3 page)

Van Nest eyed the woman. She was in her late twenties or early thirties. He could not tell for sure. Her bold lipstick, a shade named Crimson Kiss, mesmerized him. Made him regret his standing reservation, a table for one every Wednesday at Il Riccio.

He decided his life could use a little adventure. So what if he missed the seven
P.M.
seating. The decision was a no-brainer. He would rather spend time with a cute young thing than eat dinner alone.

*   *   *

“Can you pass my inhaler?”

Van Nest pointed to the tiny canister resting on his bedside table. It was sandwiched between his alarm clock and the television remote. He had placed an inhaler in roughly the same spot for the last thirty years.

“Is there a problem?” asked Rachel, alarm registering in her voice.

There was no issue. Quite the contrary. Van Nest was savoring his good fortune. Inside the vast bedroom of his Fifth Avenue apartment, there were more important things to consider than his temperamental lungs. Chances like this were few and far between.

“I may need a puff,” he replied with as much bravado as an asthmatic septuagenarian can muster. “Just in case.”

“Forget it,” the nurse purred. Her eyes shone the emerald hue of a Bermuda lawn. “This calls for mouth-to-mouth.”

Rachel had long since shed her black woolen dress with the deep neckline and empire waist. It lay puddled at the foot of the bed. She perched on Van Nest’s groin, taking great care not to rest all her weight lest she bruise the old man. He was lying on his back with no shirt but still wearing blue pin-striped boxers and black knee-length socks.

“You’re quite the picture, Harold.” She giggled, not in an unkind way, but with provocative, come-hither inflection.

The young nurse studied her reflection in Van Nest’s cheval mirror. At twenty-seven, Rachel Whittier was beauty in bloom. Athletic, milk-pure complexion, and five foot eleven—she turned heads everywhere. She was perfect by all measures except her own. For the slightest, most imperceptible moment, she frowned at her reflection.

If Van Nest spotted the furrows in Rachel’s brow, he ignored them. For that matter he ignored his white oxford, red tie, and tweedy suit spooning with Rachel’s heap. Fastidious to a fault on most days, he could care less that his brown wingtips were still sheathed in waterproof rubbers somewhere in the foyer. He was wallowing in blond hair and lingerie and the sweetest perfume he had known for years.

Rachel leaned down and kissed the patient. Her touch was tender at first. Slowly, playfully, she coaxed his growing desire. With each brush of their lips she grew more fervent. She fondled his ears. She stroked his eyebrows and nuzzled his chin.

Van Nest forgot their age difference, the forty-plus years. He stopped worrying about his looks. Growing younger every second, he was lost in the moment. He was savoring the goddess on top.

“I’ve died and gone to heaven,” he said.

“Don’t rush me, Harold.”

The tryst had evolved quickly—the cab, an invitation, and Van Nest’s favorite bottle of burgundy. The sweet taste of wine lingered between their lips still. He remembered how it all began.

Harold: “Would you join me for dinner?”

Rachel: “Just drinks.”

Harold: “They keep a table for me at Il Riccio.”

Rachel: “What’s wrong with your place?”

Harold: “Do you like wine?”

Rachel: “Only if you impress me.”

Harold: “How about a 1996 Chambolle Musigny Les Amoreuses by George Roumier?” He doubted any woman could resist a premier cru burgundy from a vineyard named “the lovers.”

Rachel: “I’m impressed.”

Bottle spent and clothes more shed than not, she pulled back and sat upright on his soft stomach. Her knees were bent and feet splayed to either side. Van Nest, lying on his back, savored the sight. Her nipples strained against black lingerie, rose areolae peeking over delicate lace. He could not believe his good fortune. It was like being young again.

The drought in his bedroom had lasted three long years, a purgatory of desire even at his age. Others defined “sixty-nine” as a sex act. Not Harold Van Nest. He recalled sixty-nine as the age he last got laid. At least that was what he thought. These days he could not be certain. His mind was forever playing tricks.

No mistake this evening. There was just the here and glorious now of lace garters and black hose. A woman, young enough to be his granddaughter, was straddling him. Van Nest had discovered she was a nurse, and clearly she knew things, erogenous things, but he had no idea what would follow. The uncertainty titillated him. The more Van Nest ogled her breasts, the more he fantasized, and the more he craved his inhaler. The guys at the Harvard Club would never believe him.

Rachel caressed his stomach, pushed down hard until he tingled. She kneaded his chest, first the left side, then the right, and worked her way along his narrow shoulders. Van Nest had never been an Adonis. Under the soothing touch of powerful hands, though, he felt like Superman.

“Too hard?” asked Rachel, the gentle and caring nurse, the deft masseuse seeking feedback.

“I’m in seventh heaven,” he sighed.

“Don’t rush me,” she repeated.

“Why do you keep saying that?”

“You’re in for a surprise.” She tweaked him playfully between the thighs and asked, “Do you trust me?”

“More and more every minute.” Van Nest found her question odd but played the game anyway.

“Close your eyes, Harold.”

“Huh?”

“You heard me.”

“Okay,” he complied.

“No peeking.”

With a goose-down pillow cradling his head and a woman rubbing his torso, Van Nest was happy. He dared not look. At seventy-two he could not risk a sure thing, and now was no time to take chances. He allowed himself to relax, succumbing to the wine’s afterglow and Rachel’s steamy banter. Gone were the qualms about saggy nakedness in front of a woman half his age.

Rachel moved with a black widow’s fragile grace. The mattress eased under her weight. It sprang back as she shifted positions. Two clicks to his left, two clicks to his right, and four clicks behind—she was done almost at once.

“You can open your eyes, Harold.”

Her sultry voice, the timbre of innuendo, kindled his quiescent loins. It was aural sex, the way she purred and whispered into his ear. Van Nest opened his eyes and spied his inhaler. Like a turtle emerging from its shell, Adam’s apple barely visible under the folds of sagging skin, he craned his neck and appraised the situation.

The sight, the sensation drained his breath. He was handcuffed to the headboard of his iron sleigh bed. He pulled with his arms toward the bars. Ankle cuffs held him fast. He lay spread-eagled, incarcerated by Rachel’s carnal web, one word surging through his thoughts: kinky.

For the first time in all his seventy-two years, Van Nest would experience bondage. It felt dirty. It felt nice. It weirded him out. He had no idea what to say, but he was bound and determined to make the best of it.

“Hey, I’ll cut my wrists, Rachel.”

“Don’t worry. The cuffs are padded,” she explained, working his inner thighs. “And I know what I’m doing.”

Van Nest agreed 100 percent, until Rachel stopped kneading and began rustling with a package. “What’s that?”

“A girl can’t be too careful,” she replied, and showed him a condom, now out of the packet.

“You’re kidding, right? I haven’t worn one of those in fifty years.”

“It’s like riding a bike,” she purred, unrolling the latex.

“You’re supposed to do that on me,” Van Nest objected.

“I got your size,” she replied, not responding to his protests. “It’s extra large.”

“Nobody’s ever accused me of that before.”

“Trust me. I know what I’m talking about.” Rachel touched her forefinger to the tip of his nose, the gesture a cross between impish and provocative.

“Hey, what happened to your hand?” he asked, noticing a raised white scar. It looked like a childhood accident, one of those puffy burns that make people gawk.

Rachel recoiled abruptly. Her face clouded. She hated when people asked about Daddy’s little gift, the hazard that never appeared on cigarette warning labels.

Van Nest saw her flinch and backtracked away from the blemish. “I still don’t get what you’re doing.”

His confusion—whether real or polite diversion—proved short-lived. Half naked, Rachel scooted up the septuagenarian’s stomach and onto his chest. “Are you ready?”

“All yours.”

She relaxed for a moment and allowed her weight to crush his asthmatic lungs. Then she wiggled from side to side, using her bottom like a rolling pin to mash out his air.

“Get up,” he gasped, the words wheezing from his mouth. “I can’t breathe.”

Rachel moved lightning fast. A cyclone of twists and grunts, a few hellacious tugs, she yanked and jerked the condom down over his balding pate, down past his ears, over his nose, and finally down over his mouth. She cut off the asthmatic’s air intake.

He could not breathe or comprehend why his good luck had soured. Hands bound, feet cuffed, lungs drained of all oxygen—he could not rip off the latex. He could barely see his inhaler through the .09 millimeters of a murky red Trojan.

“Harold, condoms increase up to eight times their normal size,” Rachel explained. Bored and indifferent to his struggles, she examined her fingernails as the old man writhed.

Van Nest’s panic soon gave way to a full-fledged asthma attack. His bronchi contracted. Natural spasms and man-made latex closed the oxygen from his lungs. Inflammation followed and grew progressively acute. Mucus filled his narrow airways. The padded cuffs that left no marks, pleasure toys of bondage, made escape impossible.

“Just relax, honey. It goes easier.” There was a heavy Texas twang in her voice.

Rachel waited for Van Nest to stop bucking. She checked her makeup with a flip mirror and fussed her blond hair back into shape. She admired the fullness of her lips. Doc did good work.

The sweep hand on the bedside clock ticked off the seconds, then the minutes, indifferent to Van Nest’s futile struggles. It did not take long. He expired, and she pulled the condom from his head. She checked his pulse just to be sure, and found nothing. He was dead beyond all doubt.

Rachel considered Van Nest’s bulging eyes, which came as close to saying, “Fuck you,” as a dead man can say. A deft nurse, she shuttered his lids. She tucked her four sets of handcuffs into a purse and pulled out some tunes. It was the only way to clean.

Headphone on, iPod clipped to her bra, “Satisfaction” blasting in her ears—Rachel studied Van Nest with clinical detachment. His gray face was frozen in a final good-bye gasp, his thin lips smudged with lipstick. Rachel pulled a Handi Wipe from her bag and dabbed the traces of Crimson Kiss from his mouth. Then she pulled out a second wipe, moistened it with burgundy, and patted the old man’s lips once again.

“Where’s your vacuum cleaner, Harold?”

*   *   *

An hour later, Rachel surveyed Van Nest’s Fifth Avenue apartment one last time. For all her care and cleaning, she assumed there was DNA everywhere. That was the problem with ripping off clothes and jumping the bones of a man forty-plus years your senior. No Hazmat suit.

Rachel had overlooked something—hair, fingerprints, a wisp of evidence waiting to be found. She knew it. The Feds turned water into wine and trace elements into life sentences. She once read about a New Hampshire woman who went to prison even after she pulverized her boyfriend’s bones with a hammer and tried to incinerate them. The investigators found shards of burnt fragments that contained enough DNA to jail the woman for a long, long time.

Van Nest’s death looked like natural causes, an aging asthmatic caught short without his inhaler. But just in case, Rachel reached into her purse and pulled out a plastic bag holding brown hair from the scalp of David Sanchez: Plan B.

Sanchez was a registered “Level 3” sex offender living on West Twenty-third Street. He had been easy to find on the Web site hosted by New York’s Division of Criminal Justice Services. Rachel had planned to gather up his hair at a barbershop, which proved unnecessary. Sanchez, aging and balding, shed all over a demo keyboard at the Apple store on East Fifty-ninth Street.

Inside Van Nest’s apartment, Rachel tweezered Sanchez’s hair from the bag and dropped it near the island counter where Harold kept his wineglasses. The Feds would find the strands if they bothered to inspect the premises. Sanchez’s DNA would trigger a five-alarm alert from the federal database. She smirked at the idea of screwing with the guy’s life. It served the pedophile right.

After exiting through the front door, Rachel removed her latex glove and dropped Van Nest’s inhaler in the hall. She headed for the elevators and exited into the December night. She felt like ordering Chinese, sipping table wine, and listening to Édith Piaf. A few more jobs, a little luck with her savings, and she could say good-bye to nursing and move to Paris, where she would smoke cigarettes, shop at the fashion houses, and flirt with buff Euro studs in the sidewalk cafés.

Maybe she could find a gig with somebody else. All these seventy-year-olds, the men and women of the Harold Van Nest era, were too easy. It was time for a challenge. Something to generate a little walking-around money.

CHAPTER FOUR

TUESDAY
,
JANUARY
22

Cusack glared at the envelope on his desk. He knew what was inside: the monthly invoice for his mortgage payment of $17,507.19. He was down to his last $20,000 in cash, which was not the bank’s problem. Unless they received their money, there would be late fees and dings on his credit report, maybe even a phone call—the usual flak from lender ack-ack.

His hedge fund was toast. Not yet, not officially. But it was only a matter of time. Nobody was investing new money. For the last two weeks Cusack had been smiling and dialing, anything to replace the $120 million that walked out the door per Caleb’s instructions. Most everybody advised, “Call back next year after we see what happens.”

Cusack could sort out his finances. He had seen tough times growing up, the way his father struggled when plumbing work was slow. Eventually, a job would come.