The Kept Woman (Will Trent 8) (30 page)

Angie had watched the entire thing from her office one floor down. Will had no idea that everything in the conference room
was recorded. He sure as shit didn’t know she was close by. On her screen she could see him looking more and more frustrated as the lawyers threw out more and more obstacles. All Angie could do was shake her head. Poor thing. He was asking Marcus questions when he should’ve been talking to LaDonna.

‘Hey, doll.’ Laslo was leaning against a desk. A flute of champagne was in his hand. He was wearing his usual tight black pants and shirt. The look wasn’t bad. He had a fantastic body. And a bitchy nose for fashion. He glanced down at her shoes. ‘How much?’

‘Fifty,’ she said, annoyed that he had noticed they were knockoffs. Thanks to her job, she finally had enough cash in the bank to buy the real thing, but they weren’t as comfortable as the fakes and her back could only take so much standing around before it started to spasm.

He said, ‘We gotta thing later.’

‘Kip already flagged me.’

Laslo sipped his champagne. They both watched Kip tossing the basketball in the air. His eyes were on the door to the lobby. He was like a lovelorn schoolgirl. Like Sara Linton waiting for Will to come home.

My heart jumps in my chest every time I hear his key in the door.

‘Yo.’ Laslo snapped his fingers. ‘You in there?’

She took his glass and downed the champagne. ‘What does Kip want?’

Laslo shushed his finger to his lips and walked away.

‘Ma’am?’ A good-looking waiter offered her a tray of champagne glasses.

Angie wasn’t old enough to be a God damm ma’am. She snatched a glass off the tray. She walked across the room, picking her way past the Snotleighs and Bratleighs who made up the 110 Sports Management team.

Five months ago, she had tapped Dale Harding for a job. He’d been his usual asshole self about it, but Angie knew how to be an asshole, too. She’d told him that she needed money to pay off her dealer. He’d believed her, because Dale’s life was filled with dealers and bookies who took out interest with their fists. Angie had never had a dealer problem. What she had was a Kip Kilpatrick problem. She needed a way into the agent’s inner circle, and Dale was ideally equipped to understand the expertise that Angie could bring to the table.

Many of Kip’s clients were from the street. They missed the girls they used to have fun with. Angie knew these girls. She understood how their habits were grinding them into the ground. Backing off the pipe or needle a little, cleaning up a little, and letting a rich basketball player show them a good time was a hell of a lot easier on their bodies than throwing down in the back seat of twenty different cars every single day. And if it put a little money in Angie’s pocket, all the better.

That had turned out to be the easy part. Kip’s inner circle was a harder nut to crack. The agent had kept Angie at arm’s length. He had Laslo. He had Harding. He didn’t need some broad busting heads for him. All of that had changed the day Angie ran into the bad end of LaDonna Rippy.

The meeting was a fortuitous accident. Angie was sitting across from Kip at the glass table he used as a desk. They were discussing compensation for a girl who’d had it a little rough
from one of Kip’s players. The negotiation was winding down when LaDonna had slammed open the door. Rippy’s wife was an Amazon, the kind of woman who wasn’t afraid to pull the loaded gun she kept in her purse. She was mad about something Angie could no longer remember. LaDonna got mad about a lot of things. Angie had suggested a solution, LaDonna had gone away less pissed off, and Kip had asked Angie on the spot if she wanted a more permanent job.

Angie didn’t want a permanent anything, but she knew that Marcus Rippy had been charged with rape and she knew that Will was working the other side of the case.

Talk about romantic. Sara could praise him for lifting a stupid bag of dirt but she couldn’t hand him evidence on a silver platter that broke open his case.

That had been Angie’s initial plan, at least. She had honestly meant to help Will. Then she had seen how much more lucrative it would be to help the case go away. Looking after Will didn’t put food on the table. Bribing a few witnesses was nothing she hadn’t done before. If Angie hadn’t been willing to do it, Harding would have, and if Harding hadn’t, then Laslo would’ve stepped in. When you looked at it that way, it was Angie’s patriotic duty to make sure the job went to a woman.

The room started to hush. Marcus Rippy was here. LaDonna was at his side. Her long blonde hair was curled tight, draping over her shoulders. She must have gotten Botoxed this morning. Tiny red dots showed through the almost white powder she used to cover acne scars. She looked pissed, but that could be from a recent plastic surgery. Or it could just be her general disposition. She had a lot to be angry about. Marcus had been her high-school
sweetheart. They were married at eighteen. She was pregnant at nineteen. By that time, he was already stepping out on her, drawn to the women who were drawn to his fame.

Of course, LaDonna had been clueless about the other women. At least at that point. She started working as a hotel maid when Marcus attended Duke on a full scholarship. Because of strict NCAA eligibility rules, her paycheck was the only thing that had kept the family afloat. There were a lot of ups and downs in those early years, including an almost-career-ending injury that had cost him his scholarship and kept him out of his first draft.

LaDonna had stood by her man. She had taken on a second job, then a third. Marcus had trained his ass off and come back to what was considered one of the shittiest sophomore seasons in history. He almost got cut from the team, but then something happened. He found his groove. He grew up a little. He’d had another kid by then, and an ailing mother who needed hospice, and a father who wanted to make amends. Marcus Rippy had turned into a superstar and finally LaDonna’s hard work had paid off.

Her victory lap had lasted one season. That’s how long it took for Marcus to rise to the top again. The magazine covers and endorsements followed, as did all his other shit. Through it all, LaDonna kept up the Tammy Wynette act, standing by her man. She had stood by Marcus when TMZ posted photos of him with various young actresses. She had stood by him when he was accused of rape—both the time Will knew about and the time he did not. And now she was standing by him as the blonde receptionist hung on his arm like taffy at the fair.

Angie put down her glass as she hurried through the crowd. She had her hand around the blonde’s waist, her fingernails digging into the skin of the girl’s arm, before LaDonna could notice.

Angie told the girl, ‘You so much as look at him again, your ass will be on the street. Understood?’

The girl understood.

‘Excuse me, please?’ Ditmar Wittich tapped his pinky ring on the side of his champagne glass. He looked around the room, waiting for silence. It came quickly. The lawyer had gotten Marcus Rippy off a serious rape charge. His firm had put together the All-Star deal. He made more money than could ever be put on the LED sign, and through the kindness of the Lord Jesus, he was going to let the assembled people share in the making of even more wealth.

He said, ‘I would like to propose a toast, please.’

Everyone raised their glasses. Angie crossed her arms.

‘First I must say that we are very pleased that Marcus’s problems have been dealt with.’ He smiled at Marcus. Marcus smiled back. LaDonna looked at Angie and rolled her eyes. ‘But today is a celebration of our new collaboration between One-Ten, our international partners, and some of the greatest athletes the world has ever known.’

He kept talking, but Angie wasn’t interested. She glanced around the room. Harding was drinking champagne because he wasn’t yellow enough already. Laslo was slinking in the corner. Kip was playing with his ball. Two more of the bigger stars had arrived. They stood in the back, towering over the mortals in the room, their gorgeous wives at their sides.

That was when Angie saw them.

Reuben and Jo Figaroa. Fig was not the biggest star, but he was the only one that Angie was interested in. At six feet eight, he was easy to pick out of the crowd. His wife was harder to find, mostly because she worked to stay in the shadows. Jo was petite compared to most of the players’ wives. She was built like a ballerina. Not Misty Copeland, but the old-school ballerinas who were such wispy waifs that they could turn sideways and disappear.

That was obviously what Jo was trying to do now. She stood beside her husband, not touching him, her body turned at an angle as she looked down at the floor.

Angie took the rare opportunity to study the girl. Her curly brown hair. Her perfect features. Her graceful neck and elegant shoulders. She had poise. That was what made you notice her. Jo was trying to disappear, but she didn’t understand that she was the sort of woman you couldn’t take your eyes off of.

‘Jesus, Polaski.’ Harding elbowed Angie in the ribs. ‘Why don’t you ask for her number?’

Angie felt her cheeks go hot.

‘Sick bitch.’ He elbowed her again. ‘She’s a little younger than your usual.’

‘Fuck off.’ Angie stalked across the room to get away from him. She could still hear him chuckling his old pervert laugh even with fifty people between them.

She leaned against the wall. She watched Ditmar finish his toast. He did that German thing where he had to look everybody in the eye. He did it with Marcus. He did it with LaDonna. He did it with Reuben Figaroa. He could not do it with Jo. She was staring down into her champagne flute, not drinking.
Her hand was at her neck, fingers playing with a simple gold chain. There was something tragic about her beauty that broke Angie’s heart.

Maybe Dale Harding wanted to fuck his daughter.

Angie just wanted to make sure that hers was okay.

Angie sat alone on the giant couch in Kip’s office. The lights were off. The party upstairs was winding down as people headed off to dinner. Her shoes were on the floor. A glass of Scotch was in her hand. She could hear the steady hum of traffic snaking down Peachtree. Monday night. People still wanted to go out. There were clubs, shopping malls, restaurants. The rich and famous looking to see and be seen.

110 Sports Management was located in the center of Buckhead. Half a mile north, you could find one of the most expensive zip Codes in the country. Sprawling mansions with guest houses and Olympic-size swimming pools. Private security. Heavy iron gates. Mega-star athletes. Rap stars. Music people. Drug lords living beside hedge fund managers and cardiologists.

Since the seventies, Atlanta had been a mecca for middle-class African Americans. Doctors and lawyers from the historically
black colleges graduated and decided to stick around. A lot of professional athletes from other towns kept homes in the city. They wanted their kids to go to private schools that understood that the only color that mattered was green. That was the great thing about Atlanta. You could do anything you wanted so long as you had the money.

Angie had a lot of money now, at least relative to what she usually kept in her bank account. There were the checks she got from Kip every two weeks, and the pocket change she made off the girls.

None of it made her happy.

For as long as she could remember, Angie had only ever looked at the future. Nothing could be done about the past, and more often than not, the present was too shitty to contemplate. Trapped with her mother’s pimp? Temporary. Shuttled to another foster home? Just for now. Living in the back of her car? Not for long. Time is what kept her moving forward. Next week, next month, next year. All she had to do was keep running, keep looking ahead, and eventually she’d turn that corner.

Only now that she’d turned the corner, she found that there was nothing there.

What did normal women want that Angie didn’t already have?

A home. A husband. A daughter.

Like everything else, she already had a daughter that she had thrown away. Josephine Figaroa was twenty-seven years old. Like Angie, she could pass for white or black or Latina, or even Middle Eastern, if she wanted to freak out people on an airplane. She was thin. Too thin, but maybe that came with the territory. The other wives on the team were always cleansing or dieting or
going to spinning classes or plastic surgeons to get things sucked and filled and pinned back up so they could compete with the groupies who swarmed their husbands. They need not have bothered. Their husbands were not attracted to the groupies because they were hotter than their wives. They were attracted to them because they were groupies.

It was a hell of a lot more fun to be with somebody who thought you were perfect than it was to be with a woman who wouldn’t put up with your shit.

Angie didn’t know what kind of wife Jo was. Only twice had she been in the same room with her daughter, both times at the 110 offices, both times from a distance, because both times Reuben had been there. He towered over his wife, radiating a quiet confidence. Jo seemed to like this. She leaned into his shadow. She kept her eyes down, demure, almost transparent. The best word that came to mind was
obedient
, which pissed Angie off, because this girl had her blood and that blood had never taken orders from anybody.

Kate.

That’s what Angie had thought she would call her daughter. Like Katharine Hepburn. Like a woman who knew how to hold herself. Like a woman who took what she wanted.

What did Jo want? Judging by her demeanor, it seemed like she wished for nothing more than what she already had. A rich husband. A child. An easy life. The painful truth was that Jo was ordinary. She had attended a small high school outside of Griffin, Georgia. She had been smart enough to get into the University of Georgia, but not smart enough to graduate. Angie wanted to believe Jo had dropped out because she was a free spirit, but the math didn’t support it. She had left school for a man. Eight
years ago, she had married Reuben Figaroa. He was two years her senior and already in the NBA. His reputation was that of a laser-focused player. Off the court, he was often described as reserved, cerebral. He wasn’t into flash. He was about doing the job right and going home to his family. Apparently this was what Jo wanted. She’d followed him to Los Angeles and to Chicago and now she had returned with him back to her home state. They had one kid, a boy, six years old, named Anthony.