“What do you mean ‘gave him a number’?” Coco asked.
“He gave him a number, as in an amount of money he could give to the temple so that he could keep getting tattoos and still be buried in a Jewish cemetery!” Olivia laughed.
“So I don’t understand. You broke up with him just because he got religion? That’s kinda cold,” Bailey scolded.
“Bailey, that’s rude!” Coco admonished.
“No, I just meant….” Bailey began to explain.
“No, stop. I hear what you’re saying. But that isn’t what broke us up. I’m just setting it up so you understand what kind of guy he really was,” Olivia said.
“Oh, okay, sorry, didn’t mean to judge you,” Bailey said.
“Well, yes you did, but we can let it go. Here’s what happened,” Olivia continued. “I accepted that this was his choice and just another aspect of what, at the time, I was willing to put up with despite the hypocrisy of his life and his religious choices. The final straw was New Year’s Eve a year ago. We were living in Chicago, and there was this beautiful church where every year they did the blessing of the animals and lots of other secular events. They were known for their really wonderful New Year’s party. There would be live music, food, dancing. It was a nondenominational good time, and everybody went: Jews, Catholics, Baptists, Buddhists—everyone. As a matter of fact, the bands they had that year were a bit of a shock because some of their music was rather risqué—but they didn’t play any of those songs that night out of respect for the church they were in.”
“That sounds like a lot of fun, actually. New Year’s Eve is usually such a bummer,” Coco interjected.
“Right? Yes, it was fun. And there were dozens of families there. It was really lovely. So we show up and they hand us a program, with descriptions of the bands and some of the events and games of the night. But the front of the program has an angel on it, you know, it’s sponsored by a church after all, and Benjamin completely flips out! He starts yelling at me in front of everyone, saying: ‘You said this was nondenominational, what is this bullshit angel on here? You lied to me! You’re a liar!’ He starts calling me a liar over and over, in front of all of these people,” Olivia said. “I just started crying right there, and I’m like, almost seven months pregnant. I was completely mortified, inconsolable.”
“Holy crap, what did you do? I would’ve stabbed him on the spot,” Bailey said. “Tell me that’s what you did.”
“I wish,” Olivia said, cracking a slight smile, though still clearly traumatized by the memory. “No, I was so humiliated at that point I tried to stop crying in front of everyone and just said let’s go home. So we went, him screaming at me the entire way, the baby kicking, me nauseous. It was the worst New Year’s Eve I’ve ever had, and I’d thought it was going to be so nice.”
“Oh, my god.” Coco was horrified, but she privately started to think some of the troubles she had with Sam weren’t so bad after all. “What happened when you got home?”
“Oh, well, that was the best part. He started telling me that if I ever took him to a church again, he would walk out the door and never speak to me. He’d just sue for custody and that would be it. And I’m like ‘What? Over this?’ and he said, ‘Yes. You need to convert to Judaism so you can understand why we can never go to a church again.’ So I said, ‘Ben, you go to friends’ weddings in churches all the time!’” Olivia said.
“Yeah, I was gonna ask about that. What did he say?” Bailey asked.
“He said, ‘I sit in the back, come late, and leave early so they know that I disapprove.’ Can you imagine?” Olivia chuckled.
“So really, he’s not a religious fanatic, just a douche bag,” Bailey said.
“Yeah. What a dick, ” Coco added. “Sorry, honey, but jesus. ”
“Pretty much. But the final, final straw took place a few weeks after the New Year’s Eve fiasco. He kept harping on that night, and he bought me this video called The Rise of Anti-Semitism that I refused to watch. He said to me, ‘Watch it, Olivia, it will help you with your soul.’ He wouldn’t let up. It was like he was fighting a Jewish jihad. If he hadn’t been sleeping with a nineteen-year-old student in his religious studies class at the same time, I might have taken him seriously,” said Olivia.
“What? Oh, my god, this guy is too much,” Coco said.
“Good thing you dumped that asshole,” Bailey said.
“Not soon enough. But thank goodness I’ve moved on and away. He left Chicago when he got the opportunity to go work at that station at the South Pole, and I came back here,” Olivia explained.
“Oh, I thought his moving there was what broke you guys up,” Coco said.
“No, clearly we were doomed way before that.” Olivia laughed. “Now he’s some teenager’s problem.”
“That nineteen-year-old went with him?” Bailey asked.
“Not that one, another one. But at least they’re at the same maturity level. The only sad part is that Simon doesn’t get to see his daddy. He was a crappy boyfriend, but a boy needs a daddy. Makes me sad he doesn’t have one,” Olivia lamented.
Just then the doorbell rang. Finally, the man of the hour had arrived. The women were anxious to hear everything he had to say.
Olivia and Coco ran to the door. Bailey was too cool to budge from her relaxed pose on the couch. They expected to see CJ walking in bursting with information, but what they got instead was him walking in with welts, hives, and red blotches all over his face, which he scratched furiously.
CJ pushed the door open and practically shoved Olivia out of his way. “Oh my god, I have to use your shower immediately, I’m freaking out! The Benadryl isn’t working!” He was indeed frantic.
“Okay, okay, follow me. Oh, my god, what happened?” Coco said as she led CJ to the guest bedroom.
“Malcolm has this five-thousand-dollar Bengal cat named Shakira,” CJ said as he began to strip down, “that I am deathly allergic to. I never saw the cat until this afternoon. It was hiding in the closet or something, so when I broke out, I just thought I was having a food allergy. Please, I have to wash off these cat oils and hair and whatever else is on me. I’m dying! I’m going to die!” he said, panicky.
“No, you’re not dying, you’ll be fine. Here’s a towel, I’ll get you some of Sam’s clothing so you don’t have to wear your cat-hair clothes,” Coco said calmly as she exited the room.
CJ stopped her before she walked out. He brought his hissy fit to a screeching halt and looked directly at her. “Honey, why is your face orange? Have you been eating Cheez Doodles?” CJ asked.
“Oh, god. It’s foundation,” Coco said in an exasperated tone. “It’s supposed to be the good stuff.”
“If that’s foundation, honey, then let that house collapse! You look like an Oompa Loompa!” CJ quipped.
“Don’t you have cat hair to wash off?” Coco snapped as she slammed the door and headed back to the others.
Detective Casey spent his day doing his usual police work. This generally consisted of vital tasks such as filing complaints about noisy neighbors, or dealing with the woman who called to say her gardeners had trimmed her hedge an inch shorter than she wanted, yet they were still demanding payment. But today he was so distracted that he kept filling out the forms incorrectly and having to start over. His suspicions of the chief were nagging at him, and he was feeling like he was going to get to use his brain and his FBI training for a change. He was afraid of overly scrutinizing the man and raising his suspicions, so he did his best to avoid him. If he were going to investigate his boss, the Greenwich chief of police for crying out loud, he would have to do so surreptitiously. Crossing the blue line is frowned on not only by the officer you’re investigating but almost as much by your fellow officers. So he waited for the chief to leave before making any phone calls.
He didn’t have to wait long. Chief Bruno frequently cut out early, since the bulk of his job seemed to involve his many social engagements. It was clear to Detective Casey tha
t the chief was a social-climbing, starstruck leech; he was allowed to hang around with the überwealthy not because he was one of them but because they were willing to buy his influence. When you are very, very rich, it’s not a terrible idea to have the local police chief in your pocket. This fact, however, was totally lost on Chief Bruno, who was under the delusion that they considered him an equal when they actually thought of him as nothing more than hired help. What Detective Casey needed to determine was just how “hired” he was. And if the chief were being greased, then how closely involved was the mayor?
Casey knew that at the first mention of his suspicions he would be labeled a paranoid conspiracist. But, he thought, paranoia is not such a terrible quality for a detective to have, despite the fact that there’s really not a lot of crime in Greenwich.
Which there wasn’t.
The most cops did in that town was break up rowdy parties thrown by dilettante trust-fund kids. The big joke in Greenwich was that, when you saw a police car screaming by, someone would always say, “Ah, there must be a kegger.”
Detective Casey was used to real police work, serious cases that had life-and-death consequences; so a side of him thought that maybe he was looking for trouble where there wasn’t any in this quiet burg. He’d had to leave Quantico when his mother was diagnosed with cancer and had no one to care for her while she underwent chemotherapy. He took the job in Greenwich (the department was happy to boast that it had one of the FBI’s finest on loan, because even city employees had a taste for the elite) so that he could be close enough to commute to her place in Stamford. So the thought of pursuing a real case and uncovering something truly scandalous here got him excited.
There was most definitely something about his boss and the story of Bailey and her rather, er, stimulating, doctored sex tape and the whole mayor/murder story that got his dander up. He didn’t want to stir up something that on its face sounded almost farcical and make a fool of himself, but he just couldn’t leave this alone. He thought if he just started with those envelopes—and he’d spent several years at the Bureau becoming an expert in fingerprint analysis—he would be able to dispel his suspicions…. or give them strength.
Go with what you know, he thought.
Police work is one of those fields where your particular training determines how you assess a situation. A deceptions expert would want to do interviews to see who is lying; a forensics specialist would want to gather as much material evidence as possible to run through microscopes and machines. Detective Casey would certainly have to rely on those investigative techniques later, but right now he had his strongest skills to put to use, and he did fingerprints. And, like all guys with toys, he wanted to try out some of the new fingerprinting techniques he recently learned.
The first thing he knew he had to do was get ahold of the envelopes without arousing suspicion. He had built a bond with Bailey, and she seemed to trust him, so he started with her.
“Uh, good evening, Ms. Warfield, Rob Casey of the GPD here.” He’d gotten her voice mail. Funny how she always carried that BlackBerry around yet she couldn’t answer the damned thing.
“I was just, uh, hoping to get a chance to meet with you. There is some…. follow-up I’d like to do regarding your case. I basically need to put some paperwork to bed and ask you to sign off on a thing or two so we can close everything up properly. It’ll only take a minute since there’s no longer any investigative work to be done.”
He paused, realizing he was overcompensating, and thought for a bit, then added, “I’d certainly be happy to come out to your place so as to not be an inconvenience. If you can give me a call and let me know what time would work best, we can wrap this right up. My number is….” Well, it seemed plausible enough in case anyone was listening to him. I’ll just take it from there when I see her, he thought.
One more call and he could get the heck out of there. The office was giving him the creeps, and he was starting to feel like he was being watched. This time, though, he discreetly pulled his FBI-issued cell phone—the one with the secure SIM chip in it—from his pocket, punched in an access code, and called.
“Gary, it’s Rob.”
“Casey, you bastard! How the hell are ya? How are things at the country club? Golf game improving? How’s your mother?”
“She’s getting through it, thanks. Yeah, it’s kind of a bore here, but I got a little something going that I need your help on.”
“You’re shitting me. You need real FBI work for a town full of blue bloods?”
“Yeah, I might be onto something big. There are a couple of young ladies here who are being extorted, and there could be some big players involved. I need you to do a background check for me on the police chief and a few of his colleagues. This guy smells dirty. And I have to crack the network here.”
“A couple of women, eh? You sure you’re not trying to get a sugar momma?” Gary was a kidder, but the silence on the other end of the line assured him Casey was serious. “Okay, okay. You got it, pal. Give me names and a secure line where I can e-mail the code. You still have your kit, right?” He meant the ultrasecure FBI-issued laptops that used the highest level security and could be accessed only with an iris scan and a 128-bit key card.
“Yep. You know the address. I’ll get back to you with additional names as they come up. And I’ll need you to run some fingerprints through the database, okay, bud?”
“You got it. Take care of yourself and get your ass back here. You’re missed.”
CJ walked into the living room with wet hair wearing Sam’s long-sleeve J. Crew T-shirt, an orange cotton roll-neck sweater, and a pair of Gap jeans.
“Are these the guy version of ‘mom jeans’?” CJ grimaced.
“Oh, my god! They are!” Olivia squealed.
“Don’t get me started. I’ve been trying for years to get him to throw those away. He likes high-waisted jeans, what can I say? That I got him to stop buying clothes from the five-dollar bin at the Salvation Army was a major victory,” Coco replied.
“Okay, sorry, not really interested in Sam’s fashion tragedies. Can we please get to why we’re here?” Bailey said impatiently. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m meeting with my lawyer tomorrow, and if you have information that can help me, I need to know now.”
“Okay, fine,” CJ began. “Then I’ll just be as blunt as I can. The mayor did kill that girl. We saw what we saw and it wasn’t a prank. The police lied to us. Period. What are we gonna do about it?”
“Hang on, what?” Olivia said. “How on earth do you know that?”
“Well, Romeo here,” Coco said, “has been ‘romancing’ the mayor’s right-man hand. I mean right-hand man.” She grinned.
CJ interrupted. “I met Malcolm, the mayor’s aide, out the other night and seduced him—as a favor to you three, of course…. I enjoyed none of it.” He winked. “That’s why we called the meeting. I didn’t think we should be talking on our phones. I’m worried they’re tapped.”
Coco chimed in. “But the good news is that apparently CJ will do anything to get information, so we may just have the upper hand.”
“This is unbelievable,” Olivia said. “How did you manage that? You met him ‘out’ where?”
“At a bathhouse. I figured out who he was, and then I let him take me home.” CJ smiled.
“Huh? You did what in the where now?” Olivia was confused, so she turned to Bailey. “What’s a bathhouse?”
“Why would you assume I know?” Bailey replied.
Coco interjected. “It’s a nice clean place where very dirty things happen.”
“That’s a lovely way to put it. Thank you,” said CJ.
“What do you mean ‘dirty things’? Are you saying guys hook up there? Tell me more! Who goes? Is that even legal?” Olivia asked, clearly titillated.
“Oh, so now you want to hear about the gay bathhouse? Look at you, missy!” CJ teased.
“I’m kinda curious as well,” Bailey said.
“Look,
we really have more pressing matters at hand. I’ll give you all the lowdown on the down-low tomorrow morning in yoga.”
“Umm, okay,” said Bailey, confused. “Then tell us how you met…. Malcolm? Maybe I should be afraid to ask, but I’m curious. How did you know who he was? How was it you both were there?”
“Oh, I really didn’t know who he was at first. But I’ve seen him here in Greenwich and suspected he might play for my team. He didn’t appear to recognize me at the baths. I was curious to know what his story was, so I sat close by, and then I overheard him talking about last summer when the lifeguard called the cops on those women who were doing yoga on the beach. Remember?” CJ said.
“Oh yeah. Crazy!” Bailey replied.
“What? What happened?” Olivia asked. “I wasn’t here last summer.”
“Four African American women from Greenwich were doing yoga with their instructor on the beach, and the clueless, racist lifeguard called the police on them, saying they were loitering and trespassing,” Coco explained.
“God, nothing changes here. They’re all a bunch of rich, white bigots,” Olivia said.
“Yeah, so you can imagine how important it is for me to stay in the closet here. Not to mention, of course, that my father is running for governor,” CJ said.
“Oh, wow, that suuuuuucks,” Bailey replied.
“So, wait. I don’t get it. This gay guy from Greenwich just opened up to you and told you all of this in a sex club? He just tossed off that his boss committed murder while he was in the steam room?” Olivia was incredulous.
“Oh no, honey, he didn’t tell me at the bathhouse. It was the next night, while we were cuddling in bed,” CJ said.
“Why would you even see him a second time? I thought the bathhouse was all about one-night stands. How did you swing a second date?” Bailey asked.
“He invited me to Rao’s, so I went,” CJ replied.
“Rao’s?” Coco was almost drooling. “He invited you to Rao’s? You don’t just take a one-night stand to Rao’s. Oh, my god, he liked you if you went to Rao’s. ”
The Yoga Club Page 13
