“You don’t smell like a puddle.”
Mike sniffed Tonya’s neck while pulling her into his apartment. “Gardenia, baby powder.” He kissed her and then smacked his lips together, a sommelier searching for the right notes to describe a fine wine. “Maybe coffee. A touch of strawberry.”
Tonya rolled her eyes. “I haven’t eaten any fruits in twenty-four hours.”
“It must be all the sweetness mixing with…” He inhaled behind her ear where skin had sweated beneath a wool beanie. “Just a touch of sour.”
Tonya laughed. “So a little dirty, then?”
“Aren’t we all?” She felt a wet tickle as Mike’s tongue flicked her ear.
“See why I had to do that laundry?” she asked, referencing her earlier phone rant about Imani’s offended reaction to her attempt at fixing Philip’s soiled jacket. Tonya laughed to show she was over the incident—even though she wasn’t—and stepped farther into a living room that could have been the stock photo for “bachelor pad.” Black leather couch. IKEA coffee table. A notable lack of other furnishings.
“You can come over smelly,” Mike said. “Most of the time I stink of spilled liquor. Well, I did.”
Tonya extended a hand, inviting him to join her as she flopped onto the couch. “Maybe the layoffs are a blessing in disguise. You can focus more on auditions.”
Mike sat beside her but didn’t make eye contact. Instead, his gaze drifted to a shelf of liquor bottles. Light shone through empties, testifying to a recent binge. “Yeah. Maybe,” he said.
Tonya understood his lack of enthusiasm. The entertainment industry was perhaps the only arena hit harder by the pandemic than the service industry. Broadway was shut down. Moviemaking had been put on an indefinite hold. “I also didn’t want Imani coming home to a full dryer,” Tonya said, changing the subject back to their flirty banter about her laundry. “It’s bad enough that she caught me swapping out Philip’s clothes for my own.”
Mike’s gaze retreated to the hands in his lap. He’d folded them, Tonya realized. Around her, they were never stationary. His hands were always busy. Pouring drinks. Snapping for orders or attention. Caressing her body.
“That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about,” he said.
Conversation was actually on the agenda? When Mike had asked her to come over and “talk,” she’d assumed the chatting part was a euphemism for another four-letter word. She and Mike didn’t do deep conversations, though Tonya was guilty of several drunken, postcoital confessions.
She scooted over another inch, wanting the extra distance in case Mike intended some grand romantic gesture like asking her to move in with him and his roommates. If she was going to break something, she wanted to be on the edge of the impact zone, not in it. “You wanted to talk about my living arrangements?”
Mike ran a thumb over his knuckles. “Not exactly,” he said. “More about Imani.”
Hearing Philip’s wife’s name on Mike’s lips made Tonya shift onto another cushion. She’d been wrong about him, she quickly concluded. Mike was a womanizer who’d gotten entangled with his boss’s hot wife. Tonya could imagine how it had happened. Imani had come to the restaurant, seeking her husband. Philip had been too busy to pay her any attention, so she’d sat at the bar chatting up the handsome man behind it, ordering drink after drink after…
“She messaged me on Instagram.”
Tonya felt as if she were taking her own pulse. That’s how conscious she was of the beating in her chest. “Why?”
“She says the police are looking at me in relation to what happened with the Walkers.”
Of all the responses Tonya had suspected, that had not been one of them. As far as Tonya knew, Mike had never met the Walkers. “Why?” she asked again.
“Don’t be mad,” Mike replied.
The phrase worked like an electrical pulse, lighting up Tonya’s nerves. As a parent, Tonya knew that such a request always preceded a terrible admission. I colored all over the walls. I lost what you said to make sure stayed in my pocket. I had an accident. I told them…
“Say it.” Tonya’s voice came out a whisper, smoke in the air. She’d entered Mike’s apartment full of fire and sexual energy. It was gone, turned to ash by his ominous statement.
“I messaged his wife.”
“Imani? I thought you said she—”
“No. Melissa.”
Tonya felt a hollowing in her stomach, as if someone were chiseling out her insides with an ice pick. “Why would you—”
“Because of what you said that night.” Mike finally made eye contact. He had a puppy-dog stare, providing the puppy was a Doberman. “You were so nervous that she’d find out what her husband did and blame you for it. After everything you went through with him, that wasn’t fair. I wanted—”
“You told her what happened to me?”
“I didn’t use your name.” Mike’s gaze retreated to his hands. “But I messaged her and said I wanted to talk, claimed we had common friends. To be honest, I didn’t think she’d respond. I was so angry, and I wanted to do something to hold him responsible. She must have been bored, I guess, because Melissa replied.”
The hollowing expanded through Tonya’s body. She was being scooped out from the inside, reduced to a shell to be filled up with whatever others gave her. Whatever Nate had given her.
“We met in a park,” Mike continued. “I got right to it, told her that her director husband was cheating on her and abusing his power, pressuring young actresses that I knew into sex acts and stuff under the guise of auditioning, implying that their compliance would show how far they were willing to go and help them land parts in his films.”
The bachelor pad blurred before Tonya’s eyes, becoming a different room. Its lights lowered to a candle’s glow. Chocolate-leather chairs appeared in front of overbearing bookcases decorated with tomes chosen for their colors rather than content. She saw Nate leaning back in a barrel chair, face lit by a reading lamp and the glowing end of a cigar. She heard the doors close as the waiter exited, emphasizing that the hotel bar’s back room was truly private. They could do whatever they wanted. Whatever Nate and his friend wanted.
“Your audition starts now.” His voice was deep and rumbling, distant thunder in the dark. There was power in it. Threats. “You’re playing the part of a waitress attracted to the brooding, wealthy man in the corner.”
“What’s my line?” she asked.
“Improvise.”
She strutted to the couch, palm in the air to balance an invisible tray. She lowered it and then plucked the pretend stem of a martini glass from space, placing it on the table beside him. “Your gimlet.” She offered a wide smile. “Is there anything else you’d like, or will that be all for the moment?”
She punctuated the question with a flick of tongue against bottom lip. Her character was supposed to be flirting.
“What else is on the menu?”
“The kitchen’s open,” she cooed. “Are you in the mood for salty or sweet?”
Behind her, the friend laughed at the line. Nate didn’t seem to find it as funny. He sat back in the chair and examined her as if looking at a handsome sweater that he’d just noticed had pulls in the fabric. His smile twisted into a frown. “I don’t believe you.”
An actress couldn’t receive a worse note. The job was to embody a part, to lose oneself within a character’s skin. How was she failing? The part wasn’t a stretch. She was a waitress in real life, after all.
“What am I doing wrong?”
“I don’t believe you want me.” Nate’s eyes narrowed. “Make me believe it.”
Tonya considered Nate anew as her character, donning imaginary glasses that filtered out the fact that he was far too old and too married for a single twenty-something. She focused on the boyish cut of his auburn hair and intense blue eyes, ignoring the scruffy salt-and-pepper beard drawing down his cheeks. She reminded herself of his successful films and the mind that worked behind that forehead, what it was capable of—a godlike power. Nate could create a character perfect for her. He could make her a star.
“Do you want a part in one of my movies?” Nate asked.
“Yes.” The word came out breathless, reflecting the twin desires held by her and the character she was pretending to be.
“Then think about what you’re willing to do.”
“I’ll do anything.” Tonya didn’t know who was speaking anymore. Her? The lustful waitress? They were the same person. No, she told herself. They weren’t. She wasn’t even in the room anymore. There was only the character.
“Whatever you need. Anything. Absolutely anything.”
“I have a room,” Nate said.
Tonya shuddered, the memory of her voice bringing her back to reality. She channeled all her residual shame and anger into the look she shot the man in front of her. “It happened to me. It wasn’t your story to tell.”
Mike reached for her hand. She pulled it into her chest. He couldn’t touch her. She was certain she’d never let him touch her again.
“I felt like it was my burden, though.” Mike scratched at the stubble on his cheek. “I mean, I understand why you didn’t want to come forward. I get not wanting your name dragged through the mud and needing to protect Layla. I know the fact that he helped with Layla’s school complicated things. But once you told me, I knew. And I kept thinking that, unless somebody said something, this predator was going to keep getting away with it. I thought, maybe if I told his wife, she’d hold him accountable in a way that didn’t involve you.”
Tonya wanted to run from the room. She forced herself to stay still, though. Mike was confessing his betrayal for a reason: Her landlord wanted to talk to him. “We both work at Imani’s husband’s restaurant. It doesn’t take much to draw a line from you to me.”
Mike nodded, conceding the point. “That’s why I wanted to discuss it with you before speaking with her.”
Instinctively, her arms crossed over her chest. “Now you want to talk it over.”
“Listen, the cops must have found the messages between Melissa and me. They were kind of cryptic. I wanted her to come out and meet me so I could tell her. I may have been a little effusive in my compliments. As a result, I think the police think we were romantically involved. At least, that’s kind of what Imani implied.”
It didn’t take a genius to see where Mike was going. To clear his name with regard to Nate’s murder, he’d have to explain that he wasn’t a jealous lover but a concerned citizen in the acting community. He’d have to tell Imani and everyone else all about what had happened.
“You can’t use my name.”
Mike picked at a hangnail on his thumb. “I’ll say that I’d heard about Nate through the grapevine, and I thought that his wife should know. Hopefully she’ll tell the police and that will be the end of it.”
Tonya threw up a hand in frustration. Mike couldn’t really be this dense. “You don’t think the cops will want to talk to you after? You don’t think they’ll demand names?”
Mike bit off the jagged piece of skin. “Worst-case scenario, they’ll talk to us, and that will be the end of it. It’s not like you or I could have done anything. The newspapers said Nate was killed Thursday night. We were together at your apartment.”
“How convenient.” Tonya again rolled her eyes. “You think they’ll believe that?”
“I took the subway to your place. I’m sure I’m on a camera somewhere. They’ll have to look. I have my MetroCard too. That probably scans somehow. And Layla knows I was over, or that someone was.”
Tonya closed her eyes, imagining how Mike’s conversation would inevitably play out. He’d talk to Imani, revealing Nate’s bad acts. Imani would tell the police.
Or not, Tonya realized. Knowledge of Nate’s actions gave Melissa motive for murder. If Imani was truly Melissa Walker’s best friend, then perhaps she wouldn’t want to give the cops any more ammunition against her. Perhaps she’d stay quiet, let law enforcement figure out Mike’s identity on their own.
“The police didn’t message you?”
“Not that I know of.” Mike examined his irritated finger, perhaps avoiding eye contact. “I did get a random message from some stranger claiming to be a producer seeking talent for an East Village production. I checked all the usual posting sites, though, and there wasn’t anything about it. Nothing on Backstage or even Craigslist.”
If the police were being cagey about interviewing Mike, then they wanted to do more than simply talk to him, Tonya thought. They wanted to trap him in case he’d somehow kidnapped Melissa so that he couldn’t get rid of the evidence. Finding the real identity of an Instagram user couldn’t take that long. For all Tonya knew, the cops already knew who Mike was. They could be spying on his apartment—or on their way over.
Tonya jumped up from the couch. “I have to go.”
“Please, don’t leave. I’m sorry.” Mike finally looked directly at her. “I never wanted to cause trouble for you.”
“Well, you did.” Tonya started toward the door.
“I’ll do whatever you want,” Mike shouted.
Absolutely anything.
Tonya shook the memory of her earlier statement from her head. “Do what you need to, Mike. Just leave my name out of it. If she pressures you, make something up.”
“Like what?”
“You’re an actor.” Tonya pulled open the door, calling over her shoulder as it swung back, “Figure it out.”