“Might I indeed be arrested for driving with too much spirit?” Randy said to Clay as they waited in Jewel’s Tercel for Jewel to get off work.
Clay shrugged. “I guess.”
“But on television only criminals and comely women are detained for driving.”
“Sadly, life is not enough like TV. I wish she wasn’t doing this stupid job.” In Clay’s view, undercover should take place only in the haunts of the rich and famous.
It was four-thirty. Men in fancy suits came out of the office tower, looking at their fancy watches, talking on their phones. They jumped into cabs or private cars or marched briskly into the bar on the street level of the tower.
Clay drummed on the steering wheel. “Where’s all the women?”
“Is that why I am not permitted to drive this evening?” Randy said with an edge in his voice. Good, it was about time he started acting needled. Clay had been needling him for nearly three weeks, since the end of the last job. He’d begun to think the haughty Englishman had no nerves at all.
When Clay didn’t answer, Randy said drily, “Perhaps I drive not too badly but too well.”
Bingo. The mark takes the fly. “It’s rush hour, dude,” Clay said in a kinder tone. “You’d hash it, and she would hate that. Didn’t they have traffic cops when you came from?”
“We had no traffic control of any kind. Bow Street Runners had more important things to do than to harass gentlemen for the speed of their horses.” Randy was silent a moment. “I once drove from London to Brighton in four and a half hours. Not at ‘rush hour,’ as you call it. By moonlight, before dawn. Match bays, two teams, one stabled in town, one on the Brighton road.” He sounded wistful and off-guard.
“Fast, huh. How fast was considered fast?”
“Sixteen miles an hour at a canter. Faster if you put ’em along, but one could not, of course, spring ’em in town.”
“And you never hit anything?”
“I was no whipster,” Randy said with amusement. “Any man may own blood cattle if he can afford them, but he won’t drive them hard more than twice. Horses are tricksier than cars.”
“Cars are hard,” Clay said indignantly. “Try handling a clunker like this on the expressway in the rain at rush hour.”
“It’s not raining now.”
Clay let that remark lie between them a couple of beats. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to.”
“I want to drive. There is no subterfuge.”
Clay huffed. “Criminy! All right, all right.” He switched seats with Randy.
Randy settled behind the wheel with a satisfied little wiggle.
“Seat belt,” Clay said.
“We are stationary.”
“Seat belt.”
“Such petty tyranny,” Randy said.
“It’s the law.”
“Which you honor so much.”
Clay said with as much annoying patience as possible, “A con artist has the sense not to get busted for a lousy seat-belt charge.”
At that moment the office building started tossing out dozens and dozens of women. Out they poured, fat ones, skinny ones, tall ones, short ones, every single one dressed like a real female, high heels flashing, all legs and hair and flirty clothes, chattering and giggling and shouldering against each other through the door of the bar on the street level.
Clay sighed. “Ed should have sent me in there.”
Randy looked at his watch. “She’s late.”
“She’s the boss. And she won’t let you drive.”
“She wants me to acquire independence.”
“The least you could do is stay home once in a while and, like, do the laundry or something. Run the vac. Cook dinner.”
“If you have tired of teaching me,” Randy said pointedly, “I will ask her.”
“All right, all right. Let’s work on your identity. What’s your social security number?”
“Two zero four, nine one, nine eight five three.”
“Born?”
“Guam, 1980.”
“Employment?”
Randy paused. “Companion,” he grated.
“I’m thinking we change that to houseboy,” Clay said thoughtfully. “A companion doesn’t skank off and bone the suspect in the middle of an undercover operation and then disappear for days when the person he’s companioning needs backup,” he said, referring to how Randy had messed up on their last undercover case.
“You found my absence convenient,” Randy said, now sounding pissed off.
“I certainly did. Jewel knows who she can count on. Plus, she’s good company,” Clay said, alluding delicately to the fact that he’d got Jewel into bed twice while Randy was waiting for Jewel to rescue him from being magically trapped in the suspect’s bed. “I was surprised you gave us a chance for quality time — surprised and grateful.”
Randy grunted.
Clay pushed. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, how many times did you do my stepmother while you were haunting that bed?”
“I never kiss and tell,” Randy said drily, and Clay felt himself go hot. “She’s a very sweet woman.”
Sheesh! So Clay had a little Oedipal something for his stepmother. Randy sure knew where to stick the knife in. Clay said with less than his usual finesse, “One thing Jewel told me. She can’t wait to get you shut of this curse. She’s sick of having you underfoot.”
“I’m sick of the curse myself. Perhaps when I am shut of it, and can support myself, I’ll be able to woo her in form.”
“Woo her!” Clay blurted. “Is that what you call it? Sending her to work bowlegged every morning?”
The one area where he felt definitely outclassed was this sex demon thing. If Jewel had been one of these giggly virgins clattering out of this office tower on high heels, she’d have tried Randy for one night and never slept on that brass bed again.
On the other hand, if Jewel had been one of those virgins, Clay wouldn’t be the least bit interested.
“Do you call what you do wooing?” Randy sounded genuinely curious.
Clay didn’t have an answer to that one. He’d put off closing the deal with Jewel a hundred times this summer, blaming Randy’s eternal underfootedness. He couldn’t pursue his interest in her until Randy was out of the way. Could he?
While he pondered this question, Jewel opened the driver’s door of the Tercel. “Out.”
“Clay said I might drive,” Randy said, sounding like a four-year-old.
“Not after yesterday’s performance. Out.” She seemed to be in a temper.
They played musical car seats. Clay got out and got into the back seat. Randy took the front passenger seat, looking smug.
Clay felt pretty smug, too. Let him think he has an advantage, sharing the front seat with her when she’s like this.
Randy could take the edge off her.
And then Clay could soothe her.
Jewel got in, handed her purse to Clay in the back seat, and banged the door. “Morons.”
Nobody said anything while she turned on the traffic report, then switched to “Ask Your Shrink.”
Ask Your Shrink was taking call-ins. “—Wife is never interested! Is that fair?”
“No, it isn’t,” said the soothing voice of Your Shrink. “You could take her to dinner or a spa. Offer her chocolate. Get her drunk.”
“It’s ruining my marriage!”
“Or, if the marriage is more important than the sex, you can try taking salpetre to match your libido levels to hers—”
Jewel slapped the radio button to off.
“How was your first day at work?” Clay said.
“Sucked. My boss is hot and knows it, the girls screw their bosses, and the office manager is a wimp. My best informant so far is taking child support, and pipe, from a man forty years too old for her.”
“It must have been bad.”
“Why do you say that?” she said dangerously, changing lanes and cutting off a taxi.
“You’re driving crazy.”
“Fucking moron!” she yelled at the taxi.
“And swearing.”
“Forced abstinence. Those girls—” She snorted. “I’d call them women, but they’re so desperately afraid to seem adult. They dress up like ice cream frappès to fucking type and answer the phone, they sneak and they backbite and they get chewed up in politics between the white guys in suits, they get sexually harassed, and then they lose their rag because I cuss a little.”
“Sexually harassed?” Randy said.
“So is that where the orgy came from?” Clay said.
“I have no friggin’ idea. The slick willy I work for is part of it. What do these motherfuckers think? This is their own personal private stag movie? Sunday driver!” She slapped the horn and leaned on it. “Jesus Christ on a bicycle!”
Clay leaned forward from the back seat and slid his hand over her mouth.
She shut up.
“It must be bad,” he said. “You’re channelling Ed.” He pulled his hand back, peeked — her lips worked—then he slid his hand back over her mouth.
Randy said critically, “Ed’s diction during a seizure is more elaborate.”
“Funkier,” Clay agreed. “More creative.”
“Sometimes he fails to blaspheme,” Randy said.
“And when he’s really upset Ed doesn’t use the F-word. I think he actually forgets it,” Clay said.
“Difficult to believe,” Randy said.
Behind Clay’s hand, he felt Jewel smile. He took his hand away and relaxed into the back seat. “So, the orgy. What do you know?”
She drove silently for a minute. “I don’t know. There’s a woman I can talk to at lunch Wednesday. Maybe more, once I’ve been around the place. I made a lot of friends by telling Steven to call his own cab today. Of course that’s why I may not be working there by Wednesday.” She looked at her watch. “Plus I’m meeting the complainant at six at the Billy Goat.”
“What is sexual harassment?” Randy said.
This should be good, Clay thought.
“It’s something you could use to learn more about, roomie,” she said to Randy. “When someone puts unwanted moves on a coworker or subordinate.” She stopped the Tercel at the light. “Any kind of unwanted advances, a look, a verbal approach. Touching, exhibitionism, showing her feelthy pictures.”
“You see me as one who tampers with chambermaids?” Randy said, going lord on her.
Jewel said calmly, “I think that a guy who has been a stealth fuck to more than a hundred women over the past two centuries might not realize how important consent is to a woman.”
In the back seat, Clay’s ears flapped.
“I always obtain consent,” Randy grated.
“Oh, bull. You can’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Prying into her dreams — and disguising yourself as whatever she wants — is not the same thing as asking, in English, under circumstances that allow her to refuse freely—”
“I take ‘no’ from you!”
“—Allow her to refuse without consequences,” Jewel said, raising her voice. “I’m not going to argue this with you.”
Randy shut up.
Darn. Just when Clay was getting a nice clear view into something he’d been dying to know about for months.
Clay glanced at her in the rearview mirror. In her navy polyester, with her chin sticking out and her eyes ablaze, she looked all cop. Very hot.
o0o
After a million years they got to the bottom of Michigan Avenue and Jewel surrendered the car to Randy, not without misgiving. She took the ferry stairs down to Lower Mich and made her way through bowels of the Wrigley Building to the Billy Goat, a newspapermen’s hangout that was everything Dick’s Last Resort wanted to be: rude, grubby, greasy, smoky, and short on elegance. Way at the end of the bar, Maida Sacker perched on a stool, knees together, in front of a double highball.
Jewel ordered a beer and then lunged for an emptying booth. Maida joined her.
“Okay, tell me about the orgy. Who was behind it?”
Maida leaned forward. The highball was full, but her breath was 180 proof. Her second, then. “I have an educated guess. Since Mr. Baysdorter passed away, the corporate culture has become a little, um, destabilized.”
“You mean Baysdorter kept the boys in line?”
“He must have,” Maida blurted. “Steven — Mr. Tannyhill has always expressed himself very freely.” Translation, he propositioned all the girls.
“So it was Superstud Steven?”
“The pressures on him are much higher, now that he’s in line to be second partner.” Maida frowned. “And recently he inherited part of Artistic Publishing Company — a family business.” Her mouth soured. “He always comes back from there in a poor humor. Mr. Boncil has remarked on it.”
Jewel thought of single-mother Sharisse. “That reminds me. Mr. Boncil is doing his girl, too. Don’t make a face, she didn’t say anything. I just saw it. It was in his smile. The way he didn’t touch her. Who else, besides those two?”
Maida covered her mouth with both hands.
“You’re positive it’s Steven, then?”
Her eyes pleaded with Jewel.
“But you don’t know how he did it, or why it was hinky.”
No answer. I’m screwing this up.
“Listen, you really might want the EEOC. I’m here because you said there was something hinky about the orgy. That’s my division,” Jewel said bitterly. “If it was just Viagra in the coffee, you could get a harassment expert, but since it was magic, you get me.”
“No! No one else! I can’t risk it.” Maida took a deep breath, then a slug of her highball, then another deep breath. “He — it was under control for a long time. I don’t know what’s got into hi — them.”
Jewel caught the slip, but she didn’t pounce. She said as gently as she could, “You can’t just hire me to throw a scare into the white guys, Maida. You’ve called in the city over hinky phenomena. That doesn’t go away. Regardless of the stink, I’m here until I find out what happened, and decide that I can be reasonably sure it won’t happen again.”
Maida sipped. “Understood.”
“And you can’t blame yourself for the way bosses behave. Though I admit I’m a little sickened by the dress code. Those girls dress like victims.”
Maida glanced at Jewel’s navy polyester pantsuit with a shudder. “Perhaps you’re right.”
“Okay, I get the message.” Jewel rolled her eyes. “I’ll find something girly to wear tomorrow.”
An almost human smile twisted on Maida’s lips. “Don’t bother. Even in appropriate attire I expect you’d, uh, stand out. Telling a senior to call his own cab!” She tittered. “‘Is your finger broken?’” She seemed thrilled and horrified.
“That’s made me, huh?” Reluctantly Jewel grinned.
“Maybe you’re helping more than you think.”
“Even if I dress and talk like a cop?”
With a sigh, Maida said, “You might put heart into the girls,” as if that was the one thing she hoped Jewel could accomplish. She slugged back her highball and got up. “I can’t be seen with you.” She put a twenty on the table and whisked away to the ladies room in back.
Interview over.
She may not have meant me to interpret that last remark as blanket permission to interrogate the employees. But I’m gonna assume she did.