Exposed (17 page)

We kissed and fondled until I finally said, “Wait. I’ve got something.”

“What?” he asked.

“Would you like to be the one giving or receiving?” I said, turning around from my suitcase with two pairs of handcuffs.

“Oh, I think you’d better receive first, because after I do, there will need to be some recovery time.”

It was wonderful fun. My hands locked over my head to the posts of the Edgewater bed, Max using his mouth on every inch of my body until I cried out in pleasure when his fingers and his tongue brought me to orgasm. And when I’d locked him in place, I just used him. I took him in my mouth, then deep inside me as I straddled him, then in my mouth again as he came and came.

When he was finished, I got up and went to the bathroom.

“Hey, you forgot me,” he said with a laugh, still cuffed to the bed.

“Not really,” I said, and walked back into the room.

I reached into my purse and pulled out the small video camera I had positioned there to film the room.

“Here is legal lion Max Moore,” I said in my best documentary voice. “He is Seattle’s most respected, and feared, lawyer. Tonight he lies chained to my bed in The Edgewater Hotel, where we have been having sex for hours.”

“What are you doing?” asked Max from the bed.

“My name is Jessica Love. The Washington State Bar took away my law license eighteen months ago after Max Moore and an unknown cohort staged an auto accident and planted drugs in my car.”

“That’s just crazy. I didn’t do any such thing. Why would I? You were a good lawyer, when you kept your pants on.”

“Ooooh, do you hear the different tone in Max Moore’s voice, now that he knows who I am?”

“You were a slut who fucked in public.”

“Ah, but that wasn’t reason enough to destroy my career and try to destroy my life, was it Mr. Moore? The real reason is that you faked evidence and got me to introduce it in court, exonerating your daughter of a smuggling charge.”

“I did no such thing!”

“And I think you wanted me out of the way so that my very smart and handsome husband would marry your shy and vulnerable youngest daughter!”

Max Moore slumped in bed.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Moore? What did you ask?” I said from behind my camera.

“Put that away. What do you want? We can make a deal,” he said.

“Do you mean it?” I asked, and put down the camera.

“Yes. You put everything together. Let me go. W
e
’ll figure this out.”

“How do I know you’ll keep your word?”

“You’ll have the evidence. I’ll confess everything to you on tape, on that camera. You keep the camera; that’ll make sure I keep my word. What do you want?”

“I want my law license back. I’m a damn good lawyer, and I helped a lot of people. There may come a time when I want to do that again.”

He looked at me then, really looked at me. “Yes, you are a damn good lawyer. And a very interesting person. I think Mark gave up much too easily.”

“You were part of the reason he gave up,” I said.

“Yes, I was. But I didn’t know you then. Why is this important to you? Respectability?”

He was surprised by how loud I laughed, and for how long.

“I am perfectly respectable, thank you. Maybe I want a fallback when I get too old to have this much fun.”

“That’s going to be a while. What are you terms?”

“I don’t want your money. I want my law license. Even if I never use it again, it’s mine. I earned it. And I want it back.”

“That’s it? You’ll have to take some continuing legal education…”

“I can do that.”

“Deal,” said Max Moore.

“Oh, good,” I said with my brightest smile. I walked over and put my hand on the side of his face. “Because you know something? I really, really do like you, and you are very, very good in bed. The best,” I said.

I unlocked the left handcuff, and then the right. His hands were barely free when he slapped me, hard, across the face, grabbed my wrists, locked me to the bed.

“We had a deal!” I said, more than a little frightened.

“You stupid bitch,” he said.

“Help!” I cried out once before he clapped a hand over my mouth and hissed, “If you do that again, I will smother you with a pillow.” Just to be sure, he wadded up the hand towel I’d brought out of the bathroom and stuffed it in my mouth.

He got up and got his phone, typed a quick message. Then he looked at me, shook his head as if I were the dumbest thing he’s ever seen, picked up the camera and threw it into Puget Sound.

“Salt water will probably take care of that in less than two minutes,” he said, then sat next to me on the bed, gently brushing the hair away from my face.

“You know, Jessica, it might have been possible for this to have all worked out without this whole charade,” he said.

“I have to hand it to you. You put all the pieces together beautifully. You got it right. From the time I hired Mark, I was pretty sure I wanted him to be the father of my grandchildren. I thought at first I could hire you, break up your marriage, and it would work out. But you said no.

“When Mark told me why he’d left you…”

I was stunned at this, and it must have showed in my eyes.

“Oh yes. You see, Mark was like a son to me, I was like a father to him. When he told me that the two of you had broken up, I gave him the support he needed. Explained it wasn’t his fault, but yours. That he was just acting like a man, like any man would act, but you were acting like a… well, a whore.

“I thought it was all good until Ashley was arrested. I knew she was guilty, just one more stupid stunt by my stupid youngest daughter who is just like her stupid mother. I couldn’t have my firm represent her, and you were the best. Arm’s length. And everybody knows Tony is too fucking honest to falsify evidence. So I had to get it to you, and get you to believe it. Wasn’t easy, it was expensive, but it worked.

“Then when your ex-husband learned what a great job you did, he began to have second thoughts about leaving you. That left me with no choice.” He paused for a good ten seconds, gazing out the window and then turned to me. “You were actually supposed to die in that car wreck.”

I squeaked disbelief through the rag.

“No, not directly. Of course not. You’ve already met the man who does the dirty work. I imagine he is going to look forward to fixing his previous fumble.”

With that, Max Moore stood up, and pulled the sheet up over my naked body. I tried to kick him, but he caught my ankle and twisted it. I cried out but not too loudly.

Max pulled on his coat and walked over to the windows looking out on Puget Sound. Seattle can be almost painfully beautiful at night.

There was a soft knock on the door. Max turned around and walked over to me, bent down and kissed me softly on the forehead, went to the door and let in Rick aka Richard Meyers from Los Angeles.

“I believe you two know each other,” said Max Moore.

Richard Meyers looked at me on the bed. “I remember her. Every inch of her,” he said.

“I need to go to the Olympic Club, meet as many people as I can to build an alibi. Finish this up. I’ll see you in the office tomorrow afternoon.”

“What do you want me to do with the body?”

“Leave her there in bed. No, leave her on the bathroom floor, as if she was sitting on the toilet when she died. A needle in her arm, or nearby. Leave the handcuffs on the bed, but wipe them down. Wipe the whole place down. Don’t leave anything to chance this time. It needs to look like an overdose.”

“I brought what I needed,” said Richard Meyers.

Max Moore left the room. I started to say what I could through the rag, but Meyers snapped, “Shut up. I can make your last couple of minutes easy or very painful.”

He opened the briefcase he was carrying and pulled out some wipes, some bottles of disinfectant, and a large black wallet, which he opened to display a row of hypodermic syringes.

“You want to die from a plain heroin overdose, an overdose with too much wine, or heroin and demerol, maybe with a little cocaine?”

He finally made his own choice, filled a syringe and grabbed my arm, even as I struggled.

I heard a siren in the distance. It seemed to be going away.

I did everything I could to put warmth or humor into my eyes. A lot of communication is nonverbal, even if that’s hard to control. Then I said something to Richard Meyers through the rag, giving it the tone of a question.

“What?” he said. I nodded my head, to confuse him, and said it again, the question voice quite plain.

“You scream, I’ll make sure you suffer,” he said, before pulling the rag out of my mouth. I nodded to him.

“Do you play backgammon?” I asked when I was able.

“Backgammon?” he said, incredulous.

Just then, the door to the adjoining room burst open and four large men came rushing through, guns drawn and pointed directly at Richard Meyers.

“On the floor! Seattle Police!” commanded the largest black man I have ever seen off the basketball court. Richard Meyers was thrown to the floor before he could even comply, and was instantly bound up with plastic ties. Not handcuffs. Handcuffs are for fun.

Then, through the same door, walked US Special Agent Deborah Riddle.

“God, half of me wants to leave you there, just to think for a while about whether all of this was really necessary. You should have thought about not being able to say your safe word. I’ve never even played backgammon,” she said to me. She found the button that would unlock the cuffs and set me free.

“I almost had to hose these men down several times… ” She kept talking, but I wasn’t listening.

“Max Moore… ” I started to say.

“Max Moore is sitting in the back of a Seattle Police Patrol car, having just been read his rights,” she said.

Suddenly the fear and the anger and the grim determination I’d been carrying for so long broke. I started to cry, holding a pillow in front of me. Deborah Riddle put her hand on my head and said,

“Oh, sweetheart, you are just fine. It’s okay. You did really, really well. And thank you for including me. They’ll get what they deserve.”

• • • •

No need to go through all the details. Suffice it to say, I was reinstated to the bar. Max Moore went to prison, and he will be there for a while.

By the way, they added possession to his list of crimes. Proof was the small case they found under the seat of his car containing Rohypnol and cocaine and heroin and anything else I could get my hands on. I had friends in all the right places, after all. He maintained all through his trial that the drugs had been planted, but he was the last one out of the Bentley, his prints were the only ones all over the case, and the car was locked in the hotel driveway and watched over by staff the entire time he was in the hotel. It destroyed his reputation.

That one was personal. I don’t mind taking ownership for what I do and paying the price for who I am, but for them to make me into somebody I’m not and then use that to destroy the idea of me, after trying to kill me, was just out of bounds.

Not that I condemn the whores and the junkies. I don’t. Really, truly. They make decisions every day, just like the rest of us. Not the decisions I would make, but that’s none of my business.

Besides, they destroyed my first Porsche. I really loved that car. Some things are just not forgiven.

Tony was the first to call when he saw I’d gotten my license back to practice law.

“Lunch? Maybe a drink afterwards?” he asked.

I laughed. “I’d love lunch, Tony. Let’s meet at Place Pigale, where you first gave me my job,” I said.

“I haven’t been there in years,” he said. “I wonder if I was last there with you.”

“You know how to make a girl feel special.”

“Boy, do you have the town buzzing,” said Tony not long after I sat down. “Not only that you were willing to plant the drugs, but that you had the opportunity!”

“I’m sure I have no idea what you mean,” I looked him dead in the eye.

“Jess, there is no way that Max Moore would have had those drugs in his Bentley. He’s far too smart. He could have a dozen people carry any drugs he wanted to be involved with. That means it could only have been you. You had a reputation before, but every lawyer in town is a little wary of you now.”

“Every lawyer?” I asked.

“Well, not
every
lawyer,” he said with a smile.

Tony was on his second beer when he offered me my old job back.

“We can set it up just like we had it. You’re kind of famous now, too, being the one who took down Max Moore.”

I considered that for a minute and came to the conclusion that the legal world was a strange place, where what was right and what was wrong were not quite the absolutes that most of us were brought up to believe. And I was glad.

“Tony, I’m not going to work for you. But we won’t be far apart. My office will be on the floor below yours. I signed a lease this morning.”