Lena had kind of hoped Onika would never find out about last night. Fat chance. Friday morning, bright and early, Onika was unwinding in her office and Lena was tidying up and Onika said, “So you brought company to the building.”
Harry, the night security guy, must have blabbed.
Lena sent her a guilty look. “Just showing some people around.” She put the ice bucket on Onika’s desk, dropped an ice cube in a clean glass, and measured rum and coke into the glass.
“That DCS guy who was here the other day? He wants a job.”
Onika blinked. “Doing what?”
“He wants to be in Hot Pink movies.”
Onika leaned forward, put her elbows on the desk, and put the end of her cigarette holder between her lips. “Does he, now. Well, that’s interesting. Maybe he’s a plant.”
“A what?”
“Maybe,” Onika said, dragging on her cigarette, “that DCS woman sent him here to spy.”
“I doubt it,” Lena said guiltily. “I think he’s just gotten sucked into the place, same as I did.”
“I suppose he’s waiting for an interview right now.”
“Harry tells you everything.”
“Everybody tells me everything. That’s how I stay a step ahead.”
So Lena phoned down to the lobby and told Randy to come up.
He walked in looking like he owned the place, his too-long black hair like a mane around his face and his jeans fitting nicely.
“Onika, this is Randy. He’d like to work at Hot Pink.”
Lena shot a glance at him.
He stood very straight and stiff, like a butler or something. “I’m very pleased to meet you.” He sounded so English.
“Is that so?” Onika fitted another cigarette into her silver holder with the diamonds on it and squinted at Randy. They exchanged names and handshakes, and Lena went to the door.
“If you’re his reference, you can stay,” Onika said.
Obediently Lena came back in.
“You got a green card?”
Lena had coached him on this part.
“I shall have one within the week.”
Lena could tell Onika was impressed with his accent. “Well, Randy, are you comfortable taking your clothes off in front of people?”
Randy bent his head and looked at Onika and Lena felt the room heat up. He started unbuttoning his shirt. Onika watched him with her cigarette holder halfway to her lips. Randy folded the shirt neatly and laid it on the corner of Onika’s desk. Then he unbuttoned his fly — he wore those old 501s — and stepped out of his jeans. No undershorts. Lena swallowed. She hadn’t even noticed him take off his loafers. He folded the jeans and laid them on top of the shirt with a chink of loose change.
A lot of guys looked smaller naked, but not Randy. He was built like one of those old Greek gods, with a big deep chest and bulky shoulders and serious thighs, like Ahnold’s, and an meaty, muscular butt. And of course he was hung like nobody’s business.
While they watched, his cock slowly rose and saluted.
Onika wasn’t to know that all of this, nice as it was, didn’t hold a candle to his real qualifications. If Lena had her way, nobody would ever know except her.
“Well,” Onika said in a squeaky voice. “That’s certainly useful.” She cleared her throat, sipped her drink, and said, “Let me ask you this, Randy. How long do you think it would take you to make a woman come?”
His eyebrows went up. “That would depend on the woman.”
“How about Lena here?”
He looked at Lena, and darned if she didn’t feel a blush creeping up her neck.
“Do you object to this question?” he said to Lena. Right then she knew that there really was such a thing as a gentleman.
She smiled. “Nope.”
Randy said to Onika, “In recent years I have never required more than ten minutes. Conditions vary.” He exchanged a glance with Lena and said no more.
So we’re not telling Onika about the magic part. Good.
“Lena, you know him. How’s his manners?”
Meaning, his manners in bed. “First rate.”
“Clean?”
“I’ll vouch for him,” Lena said, mentally crossing her fingers and hoping it was true. Could a sex demon get STDs? She had no idea.
Onika sent her a shrewd look. To Randy she said, “We’ll try you for one scene. That’s two days shooting. Show up at six a.m. for makeup call. We’ll draw blood then, and if you test clean you’re eligible to work with somebody besides Lena. Shooting lasts anywhere from eight to fourteen hours, depending if we have to wait on wood. Will we?”
Lena had prepared Randy for this question, too.
“I anticipate no difficulties in that realm,” Randy said, his smile quietly confident, and Onika turned toward Lena and raised her eyebrows.
Lena nodded.
“Dandy. Okay, you’re in.”
“Uh, Onika, can he possibly get a little advance for the first scene? He’s kind of broke.”
Onika watched Randy get dressed with visible regret. “Hell, I’ll spot him fifty just for the strip.” Lena noticed Randy’s lips tighten, but when Onika pulled out her purse and handed him a bill, he took it. She smiled over her cigarette holder. “Congratulations, Randy. You’re gonna be a porn star.”
o0o
Jewel met Clay at her place for pizza. She felt whipped, but satisfied with her day. “Well?” she said, throwing her purse on the pile of mail on the front hall table. “How’d it go?”
“How’d what go?” Clay was reading a Lou Malnati’s menu.
“The orgy at the department, dummy. I guess your experiment proved you right. How did you break it up?”
He looked odd, sort of thoughtful and blank and twitchy. “Don’t ever, ever ask me to do that again.”
Her eyes danced. “You realize I’ll ask Britney tomorrow and she’ll dish.”
“Then she’ll dish,” he said. “No guy should be asked to walk into a roomful of naked, willing women and make them stop.”
“It was your idea to fill them full of aphrodisiac pastry.”
He shuddered. “I’ve learned my lesson.”
That made her smile. “Did you do any work this afternoon? I sure earned my paycheck. Wait til you hear.”
Clay drank beer and turned over the pizza menu. “You first.”
She told him how she’d handled Bing Neebly, and what she’d learned. “Now we have a provable link between the two of them.”
“And this is good because?” He handed her the pizza menu. “Sausage, ham, and pineapple for me.”
“Euw! Pepperoni, sausage, and anchovies for me. It’s good because Bing must have got those lists for Steven. We have to prove they met at a time when Bing had an opportunity to leak the sensitive info. What did you get?”
Clay smiled for the first time. “On the CTA Circle Line project, out of approximately eight hundred properties the city has bought to demolish to make way for the “L” tracks, twenty-one properties changed hands within eight months before the city bought them.”
“Holy crap. That’s a lot of money.” Jewel took his beer off the coffee table and swigged. “Coincidence?”
“I doubt it. It’s almost eighteen million dollars.” He paused while she phoned for the pizza. When she’d hung up he added, “Here’s another little surprise. Follow the money back far enough, almost all of those sales went to or through the same blind real estate trust.”
She slumped onto the sofa, pressing the cold beer to her forehead. “Shoot. We’ll never crack one of those.”
“Ahem.”
She glanced up. Clay managed to look modest and smug at the same time. “You cracked it? How?”
“Not only that, but the physical side of the trust is managed by Baysdorter Boncil,” he said, skating over the “how” part, she noticed.
“Wow.” No wonder Steven was the blue-eyed boy of BB, harassment or no harassment. She thought of something. “Is Baysdorter Boncil bonded with the city?”
“Yup.”
“As what? You almost have to have WBE or MBE certification to do that much city business on a single project these days.”
“What’s WBE?”
“Women’s Business Enterprise. Or Minority Business Enterprise, MBE. C’mere and rub my feet and I’ll pay for the pizza.”
“Baysdorter Boncil is certified WBE,” Clay said, coming to sit on the coffee table across from her end of the couch.
She frowned. “You’re kidding. Upper management is all men. Who in hell’s name are they certified under?”
Clay picked up her left foot and started rubbing. “Some woman named Sacker.”
Jewel’s mouth dropped open. “Holy frozen shit dipped in chocolate.”
“You know her?”
Her head fell back on the sofa. “She’s the office manager at BB. Mistress to old John Baysdorter — listen to me, I’m calling him ‘old John’ just like everybody over there. But she sure as hell is not the owner.” She smiled unpleasantly. “Well, well, well. I can see I owe Ms. Sacker another visit. Y’know, for someone in as much deep doodoo as she is, she sure hasn’t opened her heart to me yet.”
“She will. Everyone does.”
Everyone but you, she thought.
Clay’s hands were a miracle on her sore tendons. Jewel moaned. “Oooh. You’re killing me. I was freakin’ brilliant today. I figured out that Steven arranged for Bing Neebly to visit the Kraft.” She relaxed on the sofa and slowly tipped over, groaning like a dog, as Clay massaged her feet.
He said, “What’s with this guy Steven, anyway? You talk like he’s evil.”
“Oh, he’s hot, but he has no idea what it’s for. And he’s alpha. He’s packed full of energy. Okay, he’s kind of mean, and I could tell that even two years ago, that night in the bar. But you don’t see that kind of — of vitality in every man. It’s like a bright light, leaking through all his cracks.”
“What do you mean, alpha?” Clay’s hands got rough.
“Ouch. Leader of the pack. He’s a dominator. I was sort of into that in those days,” she admitted. “Only I kept getting these utter pricks, and I realized what a bad idea that was in the long run. Sooner or later, one of them would do me harm. Steven proved me right there, I guess.”
“You got what you deserve, then.” His tone made her crane her neck.
“You’re touchy tonight.”
“A good con artist doesn’t praise one guy to another unless she has a motive for gain in mind,” he said primly.
“I’m not praising him. Like you said, he’s evil. Steven schtupps his office girls to prove something to himself.”
“So your motive for gain is?” His blue eyes went crinkly.
Boy, Clay’s ego was getting as sensitive as Randy’s. “I’m telling my partner about a suspect.”
The smile came back into his voice. “That’s kind of weak, but I’ll buy it.”
“Since when do I have to treat you like a sensitive plant?”
He squeezed her arch. “Because you want to keep me happy?”
Suddenly she felt alert. “Do you want to be happy?” She wriggled up on her elbows and looked straight at him.
He looked at her across her feet, and a boylike expression of fear and guilt crossed his face, before the mask of what he liked to call his “Buddha-calm” erased it.
Now what?
“Do you mean to tell me,” she said, “that now you’re gonna be jealous about men I talk to? Because I get enough of that from Randy.”
He didn’t say anything.
“You are. You’re jealous.” If it had been Randy, she would have felt exasperated. She studied Clay’s blank, good-natured face. Well, this is a new development.
She lay back on her back, staring at the ceiling, and he began working his thumbs into the sole of her left foot.
She shouldn’t be surprised. They were always competing. Clay gave a good impression of a passive-aggressive beta male, but around Randy he got territorial. When he’s around Randy — and me.
Boy, how dumb could she get?
“You’re too quiet, Officer. What are you thinking?”
No point discussing this with him. He wouldn’t tell her the truth. And she wasn’t sure how she would feel about the truth, whatever that was. In his slippery, ex-con-artist way, Clay had become a rock in her life, something sane and predictable and normal in a maelstrom of hinky sex and fierce, gut-tearing jealousy.
Now it turned out he’d been hiding something big after all.
And she couldn’t handle it. With Randy making porn, and her insides all stirred up like this, she just didn’t have room for more confusion.
She said abruptly, “I’m gonna go turn over my laundry.” She sat up and pulled her feet out of his grasp. “Tell you what, you can read Randy’s diary. It’s on my computer in his folder. Maybe it’ll explain some things for you.”