Authors: Daphne Uviller
The intercom buzzed, startling both of us. My heart clenched. What if it was Ferdinand/Alonzo coming back to finish us off? I looked around for a phone to call 911. The door buzzed again. Roxana looked at me.
“Answer it,” I instructed.
Rubbing her arms briskly as if she was cold, Roxana picked her way through the boxes.
“Yes?” she croaked into the speaker.
“I’m here for Yvette,” said a gruff voice.
Roxana looked at me again and spread her hands, palms up. I shook my head. She put her finger on the lever to speak.
“I… I’m very surry. We are out of girls right now.” She flicked the lever up to listen. I acted casual, like I was used to listening to the discussions between a madam and her clients.
“Fuck.” Pause. “You free, Roxana? I’ll pay extra.”
It was an effort to keep my eyes from popping out of my head.
“Surry. Eet’s nut a goot time. Tomorrow, meh- bee.” I shot her a look.
“Fuck,” the voice said again. I darted over to the window in time to see the top of a balding head bouncing down the stoop. At the bottom, he looked right, then turned left. Where the hell was he going now? How many buildings on this block were pandering to this prick? I felt a surge of anger toward Roxana.
“Jesus,” I muttered. “It’s one in the afternoon. Don’t these people have jobs?”
Roxana stood in the middle of the living room, staring at her boxes. If she stayed, she was going to have to find another source of income. If she left, where would she go?
“Roxana,” I said suddenly, “I want to see the rest of the apartment.” It wasn’t a question. She nodded silently and gestured for me to follow her.
The layout was the same as James’s, up to the bedroom. At the end of the hallway, there were two doors where downstairs there was only one. Roxana slid her palm into her jeans pocket and fished out two keys. The two locked rooms Gregory hadn’t been able to spray.
She pushed the first open, flipped on a light, and stepped back.
Oh, for a sweet pink staircase.
Inside, the tiny room was filled almost to the walls by what looked like a jungle gym. There was a small plastic swing, but where there would have been gymnastic bars were instead handcuffs dangling from chains. Leather straps and buckles hung from a third bar, and a side table—a nice Danish piece, I noticed, that matched the living room sofa—held whips and spiky instruments that looked like meat tenderizers. The walls were painted black, and a red light cast a hellish hue over the whole mess.
“So there’s quite a demand for bondage?” I said weakly.
Without answering, Roxana opened the door to the other room and I braced myself. But when I peered inside, I saw only a modest bedroom, tastefully decorated in pale greens and yellows. It was half its original size, thanks to James’s skillful handiwork.
“Is this your room?” I asked, spotting the closet door that led to the staircase.
She nodded. “And for customers.”
“You don’t have a bedroom that’s just your own?” I asked, alarmed. The idea was too depressing.
Roxana shook her head. I stared across the room at the closet door, as if it were alive and taunting me. I pounced on it and flung it open. There were the silky negligees and the feathery mules. I pushed them aside to confirm that I hadn’t imagined the secret doorway. There it was, looking worn and exposed, drained of mystery. My eyes lingered for a moment on the carpeted floor and I allowed myself a brief shudder of pleasure at a memory that I was now prepared to shelve forever. I slammed the door shut.
I turned and headed back down the hall, but stopped where there should have been a coat closet. Instead, there was
a small alcove with a cushioned bench and a coffeemaker. I turned to Roxana, my eyebrows raised.
“Security,” she said tiredly “Guards. To protect zuh girls.”
My jaw flapped in the breeze.
“Armed guards? With guns?”
She nodded, and I decided I’d seen enough. The entire day had been one big reality bender, and all I wanted was to get back to the safety of my own apartment, which seemed a hemisphere away.
“Zepheer.” Roxana put her hand on my arm. “I’m skerd.”
D
O YOU KNOW HOW MANY FRIGGING TIMES I’VE DROPPED
everything and come running?” Mercedes hissed at me over the phone a few hours later. “Hayden stands you up, you freak out, I’m there. Hayden tells you he wants to go to Paris with you, your head disappears up your ass, I’m there. For the first time in my life, I need to talk to you about a relationship and you avoid me. You suck, Zephyr. You really suck.”
“I know, Merce, I know,” I wailed from my doorway as two more men in thin, nylon FBI jackets wrestled another box of James’s oil- soaked, kitty litter-encrusted stuff up from the basement, a box the Sterling Girls and I had painstakingly filled and stored just six days before. I watched as they dropped it next to other boxes already stacked on a tarp in his living room.
“I can’t believe you’re so small that you’d be this jealous of me.”
“Mercedes!” I yelled into the phone. “I’m dying to hear about you and Dover.
Dying,”
I said truthfully. “There’s nothing
I want more. But you have no idea what’s been going on over here today. I just can’t come over.”
“If it involves Hayden, I’m never speaking to you again. That man makes you an assho—”
“It has nothing to do with Hayden,” I assured her.
“You got the contents of the bedroom?” Agent Mulrooney shouted down the stairs at two men in NYPD jackets. “We needa label those!”
“We know, we know,” one of the detectives crabbed. If this little petri dish was any indication, interagency rapport had not vastly improved since 9/11.
“Excuse me?” Mercedes said.
I took a deep breath. “You remember the staircase?”
“The pink one or the regular one?”
“Pink. The old super built it so that johns could get upstairs to visit prostitutes. Roxana’s a madam and the whole operation is run by the nice folks whose party Tag and I crashed at the St. Regis three weeks ago. I can’t come to Lucy’s tonight and hear about Dover because I need to cooperate with the FBI and the NYPD and get them to protect me from the Spanish mob.”
Silence.
“Spain has mafia?” she finally said.
“Turns out.”
More silence.
“Do you need me to come over?”
I exhaled with relief. “No. Look, when we finish up here—” Mulrooney overheard me and laughed. “If we ever finish up here,” I said with determination, “I will make a beeline to Lucy’s. I swear.”
“Zeph?”
“Hmm?” I said, grimacing as another duo dinged the wall with a box of flatware.
“I’ll be right over.”
I wandered through James’s apartment, surveying the hive of activity. In the bedroom, agents were setting up a makeshift surveillance command center, showing Roxana how to work her wire and instructing her on what to say when a member from the Pelarose family next paid a call. She nodded wearily and sipped silently at a chalky orange protein drink my mother had foisted upon her.
Near the closet door, a young female agent was going through a box of handcuffs, tagging and recording everything. I recognized the purple pair Tag had clipped on Mercedes the week before.
“This guy would have given Pleasure Chest a run for their money!” I joked lamely, referring to the novelty shop down Seventh Avenue.
The agent looked at me over her glasses and said nothing.
Inside the staircase, agents were traipsing up and down the pink steps, swabbing, studying, photographing. My heart sank as I watched them. When was the next time I’d have such a weird and sordid secret? When was the next time I’d have a man to share it with?
I headed back to my apartment and collapsed on the couch, next to my parents, who had brought their sherry and whitefish downstairs to enjoy courtside seats. Technically, though, my dad was on the clock.
“So this is what it’s like to work from home!” he chortled, running his eye over a wiretap request that a rookie prosecutor had put in front of him. He clapped his hand over the nape of my neck and shook me proudly.
“ Da- a- a- d,” I said, feeling like an over- loved puppy.
“I’m so impressed,” he said for the tenth time.
“ Da- a- a- d,” I said again, hoping he’d continue.
“Not only did my daughter here have the courage to break
up an assault—” he said to the young attorney, who nodded dutifully.
“Dad, it wasn’t an assault,” I protested, wondering, not for the first time, how his fondness for hyperbole hadn’t hampered his career.
“Did you or did you not have a gun pointed at you?”
My mother shuddered and downed her sherry.
“I did,” I admitted.
“Not only,” my father continued, “did she have the courage to break up an assault, but she,
she”—
another ragdoll shake of my neck—“she made the connection between the Pelarose family and the prostitution ring.”
The A.U.S.A. nodded again, murmured respectfully, then darted out the door and across the hall clutching her paperwork.
My mother poured herself more sherry. “In whose business plan,” she demanded, “does a kickback scheme serve as a
front
for a money- laundering operation?”
“Bella, honey, that wasn’t their plan. The oil company itself was the money- laundering operation, but then James decided to steal from that, and it looked to the investigators like it was just kickbacks in an otherwise legit business. They didn’t even realize until our daughter”—a proud hair tousling—“figured it out, that the entire oil company was a mob front.”
In fact, I hadn’t gotten quite that far in my detective work, but it couldn’t hurt to let the details slide for now. I was glowing under the floodlight of my father’s praise.
My mother shook her head. “I’ve seen lemonade stands run better. Ollie, are there any women in the mob? Because things would be a lot smoother if they had some female capos. Capas?” She munched thoughtfully on a cracker. “I don’t suppose the mafia would pay for MWP to offer their wives—or sisters or mamas or whoever—some training seminars, do you?”
My father took away my mother’s sherry glass.
“I know!” my mother shouted. “I know how to help Roxana! I’m going to hire her!”
“Honey?” said my father, who was normally my mother’s biggest fan.
“Can you imagine the revenue she could generate for us? Name one other financial consulting business that can offer a seminar by a former madam!”
We couldn’t.
“Ha!” my mother said, as if she’d won an argument.
“Mr. Zuckerman?” An agent popped his head in. “We still need your signature on the tap request before we bring it downtown. Could you come across the hall?”
My dad slapped my thigh and stood up. “Come on, Zephy Let’s go do this together.” It was Take Your Daughter to Work Night here on Twelfth Street.
As we started across the hall, some new arrivals in NYPD jackets headed through the front door, chattering loudly, and made their way up the stairs. I glanced down at them, then did a double take. I’d only known it for two weeks, but I’d have recognized that soft, chestnut hair and those slightly sticking- out ears anywhere.
Gregory felt my gaze and looked up, pausing mid-sentence.
“Go on inside,” he told the guy he’d been talking to. “Tell Mulrooney I’ll be right up.”
Excuse me? I tried to say it aloud, but my lips wouldn’t form the words.
Is that Ridofem’s new uniform? I wanted to say. Again, nothing came out.
Oh, Gregory, if you didn’t waste your time rigging very complicated pranks such as this one—because this had to be a joke—we might actually have a chance …
“Hey!” my dad said. “It’s the exterminator! The washer-dryer fix-it man extraordinaire.”
“Dad.”
“What are you doing here?” my father continued easily, as if the world wasn’t standing on its head. Gregory looked at me with genuine apology. I’d never seen him look humble, and it was actually quite attractive. Too bad I was going to have to kill him.
My father, never one to be hindered by social convention, took Gregory by the shoulders and turned him around to get a better look at the stenciled letters announcing him as one of New York’s finest. Either that, or he’d been cold and one of New York’s finest had generously offered this random exterminator his jacket.
“I knew it! Zephy, I
told
your mother he didn’t look like an exterminator.”
“Mr. Zuckerman?” an agent said gently, entreating my father to follow him.
“Right, sure. But I knew it. I knew it,” he muttered, disappearing into James’s apartment. “I have a very finely attuned sense of character …”
Gregory and I stood alone on the landing.
“Zephyr, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I couldn’t tell you the truth.”
I put my hand on the banister, feeling my face do acrobatics as it tried to land on an appropriate expression.
“That you’re an undercover cop?” It sounded absurd. It was the kind of thought that was better off staying in my imagination.
“Yes.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
I flipped through the last two weeks, trying to see everything through this lens, but all I saw were sunspots.
“So how do you know about Harvey Blane?” I finally sputtered.
Gregory pressed his lips together, dimples appearing in both cheeks.
“Don’t laugh at me!” I said threateningly.
“I’m sorry, it’s just—that’s what you want to know first?”
“Are you really in a position right now to question my questions?” If I couldn’t kill him, maybe I could at least kick him in the knees.
“I really was a grad student studying Shakespeare at NYU,” he said soothingly. “I really did have a fight with Professor Blane. I really did begin a thesis about Christopher Marlowe theorists—”
“What?”
“People who think Kit Marlowe actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays.”
“And?”
“And it turned out, a couple of hundred pages later, I thought all of them were completely off their respective rockers. And I got really depressed, and I was on the subway, and there was a recruitment ad for the police department.”
“The subway ad? You called one of those subway ads?” I’d always fantasized about answering that ad, of taking the exam, of being the one person who could beat Hayden to a crime scene.