The Hinky Bearskin Rug (14 page)

Steven glowered.
“How about I can get you fired.”

“I doubt it.”
Her brain started working, and she calmed down. “What do you want?”

“You know what
I want.”

“No, I don’t.
I’m not nice, remember. You’ll have to spell it out for me.”

He leaned
forward. “Kill this case. Make it go away.”

She was about
to tell him to go fuck himself when she remembered that the woman who ran the
Artistic Building, source of Hoby’s pastries and hinky porn, was named
Tannyhill, too.

Was it
possible that Steven knew how Wilma and the Artistic Building were connected to
O’Connor’s pocket zones?

Hell, he was
in real estate, wasn’t he? And they were looking for a scammer with ties to
real estate and hinky porn.

She would have
to pay Onika Tannyhill another visit.

He misread her
thoughtful look. “Don’t play dumb. I know exactly who and what you are.”

“Yeah, but
which case?” she blurted.

Steven opened
his mouth. No sound came out. He scowled.

She nodded. “Work
on that and get back to me.”

Heart pounding
unpleasantly, she walked away from her desk.

Time she
touched base with her new best friend, Maida Sacker.

But Maida’s
office door was closed. Jewel peered through the window beside the door. Tonia
from the proposal center was in there, in tears, while Maida snarled visibly.

Jewel was fed
up with how these people talked to the help.

She walked in.

“Mind if I
join you?” She plopped down in the chair beside Tonia. Tonia’s eyes rolled, as
if Jewel was a two-hundred-pound bumblebee.

“I’m in a
meeting,” Maida said.

“Just pretend
I’m not here.”

“Was there
something you wanted?”

“Yeah, I was
wondering if you could tell me exactly why your daughter left the firm and how
long she worked for Steven Tannyhill before he did something inappropriate to
her.”

Tonia gasped.

Maida turned
white. “You can go now,” she told Tonia.

Tonia scuttled
out.

Maida got up,
slammed her office door, returned to her desk, and leaned forward. “What,” she
hissed. No more.

“What does
this have to do with my case? I don’t know. I come here looking into something
hinky and inappropriate happening at BB.” Once again she spotted someone
peeping through the window into Maida’s office. Jewel ignored them. “And I find
a smorgasbord of options. It seems to go back a long way. Like, before Lena was
born.”

“My daughter
has nothing to do with your case.”

“Was she
assigned to Steven right away, as I was? Does he get all the fresh meat?”

Maida curled
her lip. “You are hideous.”

“You are
unmarried, and the father of your child is or was your boss. He was also
Steven’s boss. I hear great things about old John Baysdorter. A real gentleman.
He paid for your daughter’s education, didn’t he?”

Maida folded
her lips shut. Her eyes were fierce.

“In fact it
might be simpler if I have a conversation with Lena myself—”

“Don’t keep
saying her name! Lena is dead!” Maida lifted her face and raised her voice. “I
have no daughter!”

“Really,” said
a new voice.

Jewel felt a
draft on the back of her neck. She turned.

A young woman
stood in the doorway, a tall, cool brunette in a black anorak, black stockings,
black miniskirt, black boots. Big steel cross. Lots of raccoon mascara. Very
goth-art-student. “I told you before that you would have to take a stand.” Her
cultured voice had a threat in it.

She looked
familiar.

“I can’t,”
Maida choked out.

“You mean you
won’t.”

Jewel
swivelled in her seat to stare at her. Goth Girl
sounded
familiar.

“You never
learn, do you?”

Maida didn’t
answer.

The girl
looked searchingly at Jewel. Then she walked out.

Jewel wasted
thirty precious seconds watching the color come and go in Maida’s face. Then
she got it.
The missing Lena!

She dashed out
of Maida’s office.

But the goth
girl had gone.

Whoa. What was
that? Jewel figured she wouldn’t get anything out of Maida.

She went back
to her desk.

Steven stayed
in his lair all day. The only time he opened his door it was to admit Tonia. He
shut the door in Jewel’s face and Jewel opened it immediately, ostentatiously
propping the door open with a shoe from her bottom desk drawer, which was full
of shoes.

She went back
to her keyboard, feeling unsettled. Now that she wasn’t engaged in battle with
him, she had time to wonder why Steven had gone looking for naked pictures of
her on the Internet.
I mean, what, do I
have ‘girl most likely to have dated extreme jerks’ tattooed on my forehead?
He sure was proud of finding them, too. He seemed to think she’d curl up die.

It gave her a
nasty feeling to know he was looking for dirt.

Not like the dirt on me is hard to
find.
She’d been a
busy girl, back before Randy.

Tonia came out
alone, shutting the door. She brought the shoe to Jewel. “I think you’re
amazing,” she whispered. There were still tearstains on her face, but she
seemed composed.

“Hey, whose
shoe is this?”

Tonia looked
at it. “That’s Lena’s.”

“After
how
long?” Jewel whispered skeptically. “The
drawer’s full of them!”

“Nobody will
touch them. It’s been almost two years.”

The old “two
years” song again.
I have got to get the
story on this.
“Oh, another question. This company buys pastry for the
break room from Hoby’s, right?”

“Yeah, it’s
our best employee benefit.”

“Do you get
the same pastry in for meetings? Like, did what’s-her-name order it for Mike’s
rollout meeting that turned into an orgy?”

Tonia blinked.
“Yeah, like extra. Huge piles of it. Why?” She leaned closer and hissed, “You
think Steven put Ex on the pastry?”

Jewel lifted
her shoulders.

“Boy.” Tonia’s
eyes widened. “I hope you get him for it.”

Jewel stuck
her thumb in the air and winked. “Thanks for the intel. Keep me posted, Agent
Ninety-Nine.”

Tonia giggled
and went away.

Hm. Hm and hm.
What was Maida up to? And were the
girls right? Was it simply a street aphrodisiac? It couldn’t be. Not with the
girls turning into dogs, and Mike and Precious on the ceiling.

She could ask
Randy if he thought the pastry was hinky.

Oh, except
Randy was in a bearskin rug, doing porn stars.

Her stomach
twisted, along with something in her chest.

With
superhuman effort, she put that out of her mind.

Jewel wasted
the afternoon sticking mailing labels on envelopes, bored to screaming point.
Nobody else came up to dish. She knew she should be trying to think through the
chain-o’-hinkyness: the porn, the poppet, the portable pocket zone, the
publishing company, the cow plops.
Mmm,
Hoby’s.
She went to the break room and found some Hoby’s cinnamon twists and
brought them back to her desk to nibble.

Instead her
brain was a squirrel cage: Randy in bed with porn stars, Steven trolling the
Internet for dirt about her, Maida trying to sneak her out of proximity to
Steven, Onika proudly showing off her women’s porn, the slow stroke of skin on
skin on that bearskin rug, Wilma dancing on stacks of magazines, that goth girl
confronting Maida, Clay showing her that movie and trying to take advantage of
her. She almost wished she’d let him. In spite of last night’s bout with the
vibrator, she felt ready to explode.

She wondered
how the porn stars were getting along with Randy’s special effects, and then
she wished she hadn’t, because that forced her think what she’d been avoiding
thinking:
Randy’s diary.
And a world
of guilt.

Holy Moses.
The most she’d known of Randy before she read his “porn” diary was two things:
He was a wow in bed and a spoiled brat on his feet. She had never really
wondered what went on in his head.

That made her
flush with shame
. I use him.
Did he think
she was as bad as those johns back in 1811? Because it had never occurred to
her to wonder if he was having fun. God, she felt horrible. He’d once said to
her,
I cannot afford to be angry with
you.
And she had actually said to him,
Can
we just have sex and go to sleep?

She was a
horrible person. Horrible.

C’mon,
he loves it.

Part of him,
probably, sure. And part hated being a slave. And part — apparently he had more
parts than she’d noticed — a part new to her thought deep thoughts about it
all, and was actually, like, a responsible grownup or something.

And that
diary.
Failure will live with me the rest
of eternity, I think... I will slip into the nearest bed... and serve out more
shameful centuries until some angel comes to set me free.

It made her feel
soft and hard at the same time. That diary was more words than Randy had ever
spoken to her, in three months of joined-at-the-hip contact.

Some angel I am.

At
four-thirty, she realized she was still emotional and horny, mentally replaying
Randy’s Greatest Hits in Bed.

Thoroughly
annoyed with herself, she phoned Britney’s cell. “I need margarita therapy,
stat.”

“I’m on it,”
Britney said. “But it’s pouring rain.”

“I’ll pay for
your cab. I need to talk to somebody normal.”

“Thanks, I
think. How was the porn company?” Britney said avidly. “Is anybody listening?”

“Probably.”
Jewel glanced at the clock on her desk. “Ten minutes, in the Bennigan’s on
North Michigan.”

“Deal.”

In the bar
downstairs from Baysdorter Boncil, Jewel ordered two pitchers of margaritas and
watched rain bucket down on Michigan Avenue outside. The margaritas arrived
when Britney did. “Keep ’em coming,” Jewel said.

“Yikes,”
Britney murmured, putting her dripping umbrella under her bar stool. “Extra
limes?” she said to the waitress.

Jewel growled,
“I’m walking home. Plus I’ve had the week from hell.”

“Do tell,”
Britney said cozily. She wrapped her lips around the straw in her margarita,
and Jewel noticed for the first time that her friend would make an acceptable
porn star.

Jewel
described the porn factory from top to bottom. Britney made suitable noises.
Jewel began to feel semi-human.
I may be
a slut but at least I’m not a whore.

“The thing is,
the guy porn didn’t bother me.”
Much.
“It was the girl porn that made me nuts.”

“Good nuts or
bad nuts?”

Jewel pursed
her lips. “Itchy. Antsy.” She admitted, “Okay, it was kind of hot.”

“Huh.” A grain
of salt clung to Britney’s pretty upper lip. She licked it off thoughtfully. “And
you say it was less skanky than guy porn.”

“Yeah. Like,
the actors were having real sex but they were pretending to be in love. Really
twisted my head.” Jewel’s right temple felt soft and achy. “I should stop
drinking.”

Britney poured
her another. “Don’t stop now. Tell me about the women.”

“They’re
perfect,” Jewel said gloomily. She looked around her at the bar, packed full as
it could hold of secretaries and admin assistants, who weren’t chopped liver,
either. In her frumpy navy polyester, she felt like a sea lioness among otters.
“Oh, probably you could look at them on the street and not even notice them.
But once they’re naked? Boy.”

“Are they
skinny? I heard they’re skinny in real life.”

Jewel tried to
be fair. “Well, it’s movies. They say the camera adds ten pounds.” She thought
of those naked pictures that Steven had been so glad to find, and how fat she
looked in them, the one time she’d had the courage to look. Steven’s cracks
were getting to her, delayed reaction. She added hollowly, “I think more like
twenty pounds. In person, the skinny looks really odd with those beachball
boobs.”

“I heard
they’ve all had work done.”

“That Velvita
Fromage wasn’t. Didn’t. Hadn’t.” Now Jewel was sure that the girl in last
night’s movie was the one on the bearskin rug. “She looked normal, boobwise. It
was freaky.”

Britney
emptied the first pitcher into her glass and reached for the second. “You’re
not making sense, Jules.”

“They’re
whores,” Jewel blurted. “They do it for money.”

“I do it for
money sometimes,” Britney said, shocking her. “Like that time my car caught
fire and burned up because a pigeon dropped a butt on it when I was filling the
tank from a can out on Mannheim Road? I was flat broke. Sayers offered me money
and I took it.”

“Sayers?”

“He was really
sweet. It was right after he came back from psych leave.”