The First Wives Club (57 page)

“We need a driver.”’ “Hudson,” Annie said. “But I wouldn’t want to get him into any trouble. Maybe it’s best not to get him involved. I mean, we could get arrested.”

“Nah, in New York you can only get arrested for homicide and tax evasion.” She hooted, thinking of Morty.

“Be serious, Brenda. Gil Griffin is still a force to be reckoned with.” Annie remembered Stuart’s warning and shivered.

“Then let’s get Elise to drive the silver cloud. Christ, no one scares her. And let’s face it, Annie. She’d murder us if we left her out of this caper.

Gil Griffin sat, coolly surveying this worm, this annoying piece of shit from the SEC who had the gall to stare right back at him. “Of course, Mr. Delasantis.”

“De Los Santos,” the worm corrected.

“Yes, of course. Well, we are prepared, of course, to cooperate in any way we can with your investigation, short of disclosing anything that would be proprietary. That has always been our policy.” It sounded as glib and insincere as it was meant to. “We’ve been strict in our compliance with SEC regulations and will continue to be.”

“Have you?”’ Gil stopped for a moment and looked again at the Puerto Rican bug before him and wished he could crush the man under his shoe.

The insolence! The audacity of this spic! It was unbelievable. But best not to let his annoyance show. Let the lowlife drive Stuart Swann round the bend. Gil ignored De Los Santos’s question.

“If you need any help, our compliance officer, Mr. Swann, will answer any questions you have. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I—” “No. I’m afraid I have some questions for you.”

Only he didn’t look afraid. He looked … Gil searched for the word. He looked feral. Gil was enough of a hunter to recognize the look of someone who thought he was close to a kill.

“Really? What do you wish to know that can come only from me, Mr. De Los Santos?”

“Well, firstly, I wondered about one particular account, Aaron and Anne Paradise in trust for Sylvie Paradise.”

Gil felt his stomach tighten, but made sure no sign of concern showed on his face. So that was what this was about. Fuck that little cunt.

She must have gone to these pencil pushers. Well, she’d better be ready to have old Aaron’s face smeared in the gutter and herself look like the fool she was. He shrugged. “It doesn’t ring a bell. But we do have over three hundred thousand trading accounts. Who is the broker? You would have to talk to him.” He paused. “Why? Do you think there’s been any irregularity?”

“No, I don’t think it.”

Gil waited, but De Los Santos was silent. Gil looked at him, and he kept looking back. Interesting. Gil had to admit this one was more than the usual hack. One of his first laws of business was never to underestimate the opposition. Always a fatal error.

“What do you think, Mr. De Los Santos?”

”I think I’m going to bring you down.”

Gil sat for a moment, the silence of his office almost ringing in his ears. This was absolutely unbelievable.

The man must be crazy.

“Really?”

“Really.” Gil surveyed De Los Santos. I’ll-fitting suit, frayed cuff.

Cheap shoes. But the eyes. They were as dark as his own were pale, but they shared his intensity. De Los Santos’s eyes were the eyes of a fanatic, an assassin. For a moment, the hairs on the back of Gil’s neck stood up. Then he smiled. Too bad this worm had chosen the wrong victim.

“Ever played squash, Mr. De Los Santos?”

He saw him hesitate, confused. Fine, just fine.

“Yes, in college.”

“Would you care for a game now?”

De Los Santos, nonplussed, paused. Then he shrugged, nodded.

Gil picked up the phone. “Mrs. Rodgers, call Boseman and cancel our squash game. But keep the reservation for the court. I’ll be going on down there shortly. And have Max bring my dinner jacket and things to the locker room. I’ll be leaving for the Metropolitan directly afterwards.” He hung up and looked back at De Los Santos. ‘Shal] we adjourn to the playing fields of Eton?”

Miguel stood, in borrowed Nike sneakers, on the smooth blond wood of the squash court. He’d been very good back in college, but he hadn’t played in some time. He remembered the rules, of course, such as they were. Hit the ball so that it didn’t bounce between the wall and the line, then return anything the motherfucker slung at you. Of course,there weren’t a lot of squash players in his neighborhood.

Miguel had gone back to handball to keep in shape.

He was sweating already, but it was nervous perspiration, not the clean sweat of activity. Griffin looked cool. His equipment, his game, his turf. Well, Miguel had played four or five tough sets of handball this past weekend, at the playground on 116th Street, and the competition there was fierce enough. Plus, he was younger than Griffin, he told himself, and angrier, too. This was the man who had hurt Annie, a man who’d ruined his own wife, cheated common people, a man with no remorse. Miguel shifted the racquet familiarly in his hand. Now he wished he could smash the ball directly with his hand, the way he’d like to hit Griffin, the arrogant pendejo.

Above the court, a glass window-wall allowed observers to watch the match.

Only one man stood there noW, elegantly attired for sport, as Griffin was, in a polo shirt and shorts. Miguel had accepted borrowed shorts bUt was wearing his own undershirt.

He would dress as his muchachos at the handball courts did. Fuck these gringos.

Griffin bent over, stretched, and turned back to Miguel. “Ready?” he asked.

Silently, Miguel nodded. Griffin lifted his racquet and served.

The ball came slamming out of nowhere, past his ear, then behind him, almost too quick for him to have his racquet up. Almost, but not quite, and he returned it, though without finesse or strategy. Wham.

It was sent back, high, and off the back wall. Miguel twisted, jumped, and slammed, once again returning it, but once again having no time for strategy.

The ball was harder to hit than in handball, even with the racquet extending his reach. And it was far harder to place. Wham. The ball rocketed off the walls, the noise ricocheting with almost as much force as the ball itself. Miguel had forgotten about the noise. In the boxlike court, the noise was thunderous. And each time Miguel hit the ball, Griffin returned it with renewed force and a scream of effort as he controlled the orbit of the sphere. Miguel hated the noise.

He was already breathing hard and covered with sweat. Little matter.

He would not let this jefe win. He must focus.

Wham! It came at him, but Miguel had time to concentrate. It wasn’t thinking, it was the absence of thought, other than the pinpoint of awareness. Wham! Ball, racquet, opponent, movement. Now.

Slam it there. He did. Now. At him again. Wham! Twist, jump for it. Swing. He was fast. Concentrate. Get the pendejo.

Wham! Past him. He tried, diving for it. Too late. Missed it. What was the score? No matter. Just hit him.

Hit him. Wham! And again. And again.

Gil jumped, missed, and fell heavily on one foot. Miguel heard him curse, then mutter. What had he said? Was it only “shit” or had “cunt”’? Had the bastard dared?

Miguel served, slamming the ball with all his strength. Wham! And wham! Miguel was rage, movement, power. He would not lose this game.

.

Gil Griffin limped out of his elevator and through the lobby to the lift that took him down to the garage. He looked elegant, cool as ever in his Bijan dinner jacket, but his legs were actually shaking, and he couldn’t tell if it was from anger or exhaustion or both. His ankle throbbed, the pain maddening, but he could tell it was only a slight sprain. He would ignore it. Just as he had to ignore Miguel’s level gaze after the match, and ignore the snickers in the locker room.

It had been a stupid mistake to play the man. Like a trial attorney asking a witness a question that he himself didn’t have the answer to.

And like an attorney at a trial, bungling in front of an audience. He had only taken a single glance up to the observation window, but he had seen a dozen faces, at least. Swann, DiNardo, Boseman. They must have paged people to watch him go down in flames. Well, it was his own goddamn fault.

He stepped, wincing, into the spotless, well-lit garage and moved past the guard’s office without acknowledging the man’s hat tip. Christ, he wished the goddamned party weren’t this evening. It was the last thing he needed. Now, he simply longed for the silence and power of his baby, his E. But as he approached the Jaguar, he stopped. It was unbelievable. Someone had left a soda can, or something worse, right in the center of the hood. Jesus Christ. There were eleven layers of hand-rubbed lacquer finish on that car, each one lovingly, expertly applied, and some asshole piece of shit had left their garbage on the hood. Unbelievable!

He felt new energy, fueled by rage, well up in him. Christ! They paid God knows how many hundreds of thousands of dollars a month for high-tech security systems down here, for those deadbeat security bastards to keep out vagrants, madmen with a grudge, terrorists, and the homeless, and this still happened. The entire city was a cesspool and nothing was safe.

With a yell to the old black guard, he ran across the cement floor to the Jaguar and grabbed the can off the hood. As he lifted it, the cardboard that had been placed across the bottom of it was pushed aside by the heavy, glutinous contents, which poured out onto the hood, dripping, moving slowly, like lava, all across the car. Without thinking, he threw away the can, violently casting it off, and heard it clatter somewhere behind him. Cupping his hands, he scooped up some of the goo and pushed it off the hood, leaving an immense smear.

Horrified, he watched as the finish on the car began to bubble, the deep, deep red paint curdling up, sizzling and blistering like bacon in a pan. “Jesus Christ!” he shouted, and redoubled his efforts, but then he felt the stinging as his hands began to tingle, then burn, with a hellish ferocity. They were on fire! “Christ!” he screamed, and rubbed them down the front of his dinner jacket, but the burning continued, intensified.

“Acid!” he screamed to the guard. “They’ve got me with acid!”

“It’s paint remover, sir,” the guard said, carefully holding the retrieved can by the top edge. “I’ll have it checked out, though.”

“But it’s burning! It’s eating into me,” Gil screamed. He began to hop With the pain of it, bUt when he came down on his sprained foot, he screamed again. “Help me!” he yelled. “Help me!”

“I’ll call for aid. Meanwhile, try this.” He brought a red fire bucket filled with scummy water over. Gil plunged his arms in, up to the elbow. Thank God!

Some of the pain stopped. Perhaps it wasn’t acid. Cautiously, he rubbed one hand against the other, removing the stuff under the water.

It hurt, but it was better.

“If I wipe you down with a rag, it might help,” the guard offered, pulling out an old chamois.

“Don’t touch me with that filthy thing, you stupid nigger,” Gil yelled at him as he held his hands out helplessly and looked down at his ruined dinner jacket. Then he looked over to his car. The paint remover was still merrily bubbling on the Jaguar. Holy Christ, the car was being destroyed before his eyes.

Gil turned away and vomited into the fire bucket.

“Oh, my God!” Annie whispered as she, Brenda, and Elise crouched on the back seat of Elise’s sedan, peering out the rear window, “Don’t go all compassionate on us now,” Brenda whispered fiercely. “That’s the man who robbed your daughter.”

“But his hands are burned,” Annie said, thinking of her patients at the burn center. “I never meant to burn his hands.”

“Those hands are the hands that beat Cynthia,” Elise added grimly.

“It’s not serious. It just stings,” Brenda whispered. ‘Look, the son of a bitch just threw the rag at the guy that was helping him. What’s that all about?” She jabbed Annie. “Crack open the window. I want to hear this.”

Annie and the others could hear Gil’s screams of rage plainly now.

After a minute, Brenda started to laugh.

“He’s going to get the guard fired,” Brenda said to her friends, as if translating. “The guard is a tub of shit. A cocksucking, shiftless, black, motherfucking—” “Stop, Brenda, we can hear,” Elise said, beginning to laugh also. “Oh, my word, I never heard such language

!”

Gil was raving. The guard had picked up the thrown rag and was standing with both hands on his hips.

“Get me help, you asshole.”

“Get your own fucking help,” the guard said, and throwing his hat on the pavement, began to walk away. “This nigger’s just quit. He don’t like working for scumbags.”

The three women fell over each other, the tears streaming down their faces.

“He should never have called the guy shiftless,’ ” Brenda said.

Bette and Bob’s Bash.

It was another New York society ball, and as always, a limousine drove up to River House so that one socialite could pick up another. It was more ecological. Larry Cochran visibly squirmed as he waited for the driver to get around the car to open their door. Then he helped Elise out of the car. It was the first time they’d be appearing in New York society together, and he, at least, was nervous. But Elise looked more serene, more beautiful than ever. She was dressed in the special costume that she, Brenda, and Annie had cooked up for the three of them, and she looked adorable.

Larry followed her into the building, then up to the Bloogees’ penthouse. A butler opened the door and led them through a huge entry hall to a vast room where the walls were covered in a goldbrocade fabric. Over the enormous marble fireplace was a painting that looked a lot like a Holbein to Larry. That wasn’t all. There was an enormous Turner, a breathtaking sunset on the Grand Canal. And what looked like a Paolo. Impossible. There were only half a dozen of those in the world. Hey, but who knows? This is the richest guy in America, he reminded himself. Maybe there are three more in the kitchen.

The room was filled with antique gilded furniture, the tables covered with objets and vases of magnificent flowers. Larry had found it a little difficult to adjust to Elise’s Park Avenue place, but this made hers look like the load farm. “Quite some place he has here.”