by Lois Greiman
“Or maybe he thinks he deserves more,” Solberg said.
“But getting rid of Laney won’t help him. It’s not as if he can take her place.”
“Maybe he’s so bitter he doesn’t care,” Solberg suggested. “You know what those good-looking guys are like.
“Baby,” he turned to Laney with panic in his eyes. “We should get you a bodyguard.”
We stared at him as if he’d just grown a second head.
“What?” he said.
“A bodyguard,” I repeated.
“Yeah.”
“Someone big and burly and manly to shadow Laney’s every move?” I said, and watched him pale some more.
Laney shot me the kind of look she used to give bullies who were picking on the skinny kids.
“I didn’t say Sergio wanted to get rid of me,” she said. “It was just … I thought of him, the unfairness of this business. That’s all. He’s a nice guy.”
“And extremely good-looking.” I glanced at Solberg. Sometimes I am kind of a bully.
17
I’d rather be happy than be president.
—Jamel Blount, weighing
options
“How’s Jamel doing?” I was back at work. Neither talk of Morab the man-slave nor dead of night shall keep me from my appointed tasks.
Micky Goldenstone sat on my couch. “All right, I guess.”
“Is Jackson back home?”
Micky nodded stiffly, then glanced out the window toward the coffee shop. “Back home, filling my son’s mind with shit.”
“What do you mean?”
He shook his head. “Lavonn thinks he’s some kind of damned savior. Bought that house in Glendale, and a big-ass Cadillac.”
“Where’d he get the money?”
He shrugged. “Not all assholes are morons. I heard he got a scholarship to some Ivy League school. Made a shitload of money in biochemistry or something, then came back here to save us poor niggers.”
“How do you mean?”
“He got some investors together, bought up a bunch of property on the east side. Tried to …” He made air quotes … “save the culture.”
“Didn’t work?”
“Place is a fucking wasteland.”
“He must have lost some money in the deal.”
“You’d think, wouldn’t you?”
“So how’d he recoup?”
“I have no idea.”
He drew air slowly through his nostrils, thinking as he scowled. “Turns out he wasn’t on drugs.”
“The reports came back clean?”
“And they didn’t find anything in his house.”
“Which means you may have more trouble getting custody than you had hoped.”
“It means he’s a fucking bastard!” he said, and clenching his teeth, ran his palms down his black denim pants legs.
I gave that some judicious consideration, but couldn’t quite make sense of it.
“At least if he was high he would have had an excuse,” he said.
It seemed like there was some problem with that logic, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
“What about Lavonn?” I asked. “Was she tested?”
“Clean, too,” he said.
I remembered the woman’s wide pupils, her erratic behavior, juxtaposed against her beau’s dreamy persona. I also remembered a possible drug called Intensity, but I wasn’t ready to mention that to Micky. “Maybe Jackson’s frightening behavior will convince her to ditch him.”
He looked at me, dark face inscrutable. “You believe in the Tooth Fairy, too?”
“Please don’t,” I said, then continued without explaining Laney’s threat about Santa Claus. “People change, Micky,” I said. “You did.”
“Did I?” There was tight anger in his tone.
“Yes.”
“Then why was it my first instinct to shoot?” he asked.
“Is that why you went to Glendale? To kill Jackson?”
“I went to see my son,” he said, and rose jerkily to his feet. “Shooting that asshole was just a bonus.”
I watched him pace. “If it was so much fun, why the guilt?”
He shut his eyes. A muscle danced taut and jittery in his jaw. “She never cried,” he said, and stared out the window, fists deep in his front pockets.
I waited for him to continue, but Micky always had more patience than I.
“Lavonn or—”
“Kaneasha. When I …” His jaw jumped again. “When I raped her,” he said. “She just looked at me. Like Jamel does sometimes. Like they expect more. Like they expect better.”
I let those words steep in the air for a moment. Seconds ticked away, thick with regret, sticky with self-loathing.
“Then give them better,” I said finally.
“I can’t!” He turned on me like a snarling Rottweiler. “Don’t you see that? This is what I am.” He thumped his chest with stiff fingertips and took a terse step toward me. “You can’t change what you are.”
Rottweilers are scary as hell, and I didn’t like being intimidated in my office by wild dogs, so I raised my chin and gave him my best bad-ass glare. “Not if you stand there and whine about it, you can’t,” I said.
He glowered at me for half of forever, then snorted his disdain. “Where did you grow up? Disneyland or something? I bet you had yourself a daddy who thought the world revolved around your pinky finger.”
I gave that a moment’s thought. On my good days, Dad had referred to me as “the girl” and treated me as if I had a chronic case of the pox, but that was hardly the point, was it?
“You deserved better,” I said. “No one’s denying that.”
“Damned right, I did,” he snapped. “I deserved—”
I closed the trap with hardly a tickle of guilt. “And so does Jamel.”
He paused, eyes gleaming, then gritted his teeth and sat down. Seconds ticked away like time bombs. “You think he’s better off with me?”
“Than with Lavonn and Jackson?”
He nodded.
In my own little mind, I thought living with a pack of man-hungry hyenas would be preferable to living with Lavonn and Jackson, but I smugly kept that opinion to myself. “What do you think?”
He glanced toward the window, expression solemn, dark eyes so sad they would have made a weaker woman cry. “A boy needs a mother,” he said.
“Even if she’s a mother on drugs?”
The muscle jumped in his jaw again. “I don’t even have a girlfriend.”
I refrained from asking if he wanted one, even though the sight of him, introspective and broken, weakened some part of me that was generally as hard-assed and grumpy as a curmudgeon. “You have a grandmother.”
He gave me a look from the corner of his dark eyes. “I’m hard up,” he admitted, “but I think Grams is a little old for me. And aren’t incestuous relationships still frowned upon?”
I didn’t honor his facetiousness with a response, though high-sarcasm often garnered awards in a clan as obnoxious as the McMullens. “How did she and Jamel get along?”
“She made him eat All Bran. For roughage,” he said. “All Bran tastes like sidewalk chalk.”
For a moment I almost asked just when he had become aware of the similarities. He’d never mentioned having brothers like mine—inclined to “encourage” siblings to try new delicacies.
“And she smells funny,” he added.
“Is that your opinion or Jamel’s?”
“Both.” He said the word with some feeling, but I contained my laughter. My grandmother had smelled funny, too, but she could still make my mother grovel, and for that I would be eternally amazed.
“I don’t think odor precludes a person from parenting,” I said.
“How about great-grandparenting?”
“Probably not,” I said, but he was already shaking his head, leaning his close-cropped skull against the couch’s cushion, sighing.
“You have any idea how old she is
?” he asked.
“How old?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and looked at me with wide, frightened eyes. “Fuck. You don’t think I’m ballsy enough to ask her, do you?”
I liked this woman more every moment. “Maybe age doesn’t preclude a person from parenting, either.”
He exhaled heavily. “She gave up her life for me,” he said, and winced, remembering. According to his stories, he hadn’t made it easy. “I couldn’t ask her to do more.”
“Are you sure you’d have to?”
He glanced at me.
“Are you sure you’d have to ask,” I explained.
He said nothing. I changed tack.
“I thought you had decided not to tell her about Jamel yet,” I said.
“I didn’t tell her. I planned to introduce them. But not like that. Not …” He paused, grimaced. “I didn’t want her to think I was a fuckup. Not again. Not anymore.” He chuckled. Humorless. “All grown up and still trying to impress my grams.”
“Maybe it’s admirable,” I said.
“Yeah.” He snorted, then scowled at me, curious. “How about you, Doc? You still trying to make your parents proud?”
His question spurred some hidden part of me, because deep inside I was pretty sure I had given up even before I had yanked my proverbial roots and escaped to the desert.
“You don’t think your grandmother is proud?” I asked.
“She didn’t cry, either,” he said. “Not when she saw Jackson on the floor. Not when she came to see me in jail. She didn’t even look surprised. Just disappointed. Just …” He exhaled, sliding into the black hole of self-recrimination. “Like Kaneasha. Like—”
“Did you lie to me about the events that night?” I asked, tugging gently at the rope that kept him swinging above the bottom of the abyss.
“What?”
“About how Jackson was shot. You said it was his gun. You implied that he would have killed you if you hadn’t stopped him.”
He looked away, face hard. “Maybe that’s how it should have gone down. Maybe he should have shot me.”
My stomach churned like a cement mixer. Some people believe therapists shouldn’t get involved with their clients. Obviously I’m not the only one who believes in fictitious characters.
“So you think it would be good for Jamel if his aunt’s boyfriend killed his father?”
He looked at me, eyes solemn. “Fuck,” he said finally, but softly.
“Did you lie to me?” I asked. “About that night?” He stared at me, eyes angry and strangely accusatory, but I continued. “Was the gun his?”
His face was devoid of expression. “He pulled it out of his waistband.” He swallowed, reliving. “He had that look,” he said. “That cocky-ass ‘I’m invincible’ look. I’ve seen it before. Seen it. Lived it.” His lips jerked spasmodically.
“What should you have done differently?”
“I don’t know.” He dropped his eyes closed for a moment, then shook his head. “Shit! I …” He exhaled a laugh. “Lavonn had bruises on her throat. You see that? I swore at him. Called him a fucking coward.” He laughed again, but his eyes showed his agony. “You know what you shouldn’t do?”
“Call a man names when he’s holding a gun?”
“See.” He flipped a tense hand at me. “Normal folks know those things.”
“Are you referring to me?”
He almost grinned, though the sadness never left his eyes. “If it had been you, Jackson wouldn’t have been in the hospital.”
I considered telling him that if Jackson had pulled a gun on me there was a fair chance I would have peed my pants and swooned like a debutante, but I’m a professional. “Jamel wouldn’t be better off with Lavonn than with you,” I said.
He raised his brows in surprise. “You actually giving me your opinion, Doc? I thought that was against shrink code or something.”
“They’ll probably forgive me if they find out I’m suggesting that you have something to live for.”
He watched me for a moment longer, then nodded. “Jamel,” he said.
“I think a boy needs a father, too.”
He sighed, frowned. “I fucked up.”
“Sometimes there are no perfect options.”
“Well, there should be.” He rose to his feet again, restive. There had been a time, early in our relationship, that I thought he might be using, but I had learned since then that thoughts of his past made him jittery. “There should be choices: education, consideration, kindness …” He paused, all but breathless.
I let the silence swell around us for a moment.
“Is that what you want for Jamel?” I asked.
“Fuckin’ A,” he said, but his tone was chagrined, as if embarrassed by his emotion.
“Then give it to him,” I said.
“And how the hell am I going to do that? I work fulltime. My apartment’s the size of your …” He waved wildly. “… shoe. And …” He laughed. “… I just shot someone.”
“Not to mention the fact that you’re kind of whiny.”
“Jesus, woman!” he said, turning toward me, aghast. “Do you drive everyone this crazy?”
I thought about avoiding that question, but the answer seemed so obvious. “I believe I do.”
He stared at me for several seconds before his mouth quirked up a little. “Want a ready-made family?” he asked.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, and he laughed.
18
The good thing about dating an ex is that they already know you’re a moron.
—Donald Archer (Mac)—a
man who has never been
particularly adept in social
situations
Later that afternoon, I sat alone in my diminutive kitchen. Laney and the Geekster had gone to extinguish yet another wedding fire. Elaine had, in fact, passed up the opportunity to attend the afterparty for Jungle Heat to do so. It wasn’t exactly the norm for a television spin-off to have such an event, but this party was expected to be quite a blowout, mixing financiers, minor celebrities, and shining stars into one intoxicating brew. Laney, however, had opted to see to her wedding instead. Sometimes I don’t know where I went wrong.
As for me, I had expected to put in a full day at the office, but my last two clients canceled, which meant I had time to go for a run … or to eat a supper rich in saturated fat and fall into a lipid-induced coma. After some nasty internal warfare, I lost my mind and chose running, but as I slipped out of my business clothes, I noticed my bridesmaid dress. It was a thing of rare beauty. Made of a coppery fabric that caressed every curve, it was the equal to anything seen on the red carpet. In fact, it would look great at the Jungle Heat party, the party where Laney’s peers would be gathered, where people like Colin Farrell and Gerard Butler might well stroll past in tuxedos while sipping intoxicating beverages. There was a rumor circulating around town that Colin had gotten smashed at the last shindig and danced the jitterbug wearing nothing but a cummerbund.
My imagination reared like a wild stallion, but I reined it down because, obviously, Colin wasn’t the reason I was interested in Heat’s party at all. It was because Laney had been receiving threatening mail and it was conceivable that the author of that mail would be commingling with the likes of Colin Farrell and Gerard Butler, who would stroll past in tuxedos while sipping …
I closed my eyes and tossed my skirt on the bed. Insanity. That’s what it was. I was not going to crash some party just because there was a mermaid dress hanging on the back of my closet door. I was more mature than that. Besides, I didn’t have any passes … and after a fairly exhaustive search, I realized Laney must have taken hers with her. Which was just as well. I was going to go for a run, get to bed early, and never tell Elaine I had entertained any idiotic thoughts to the contrary.
I was set on that course for all of thirty-four seconds, but the temptation of seeing Colin in nothing but a cummerbund and a burr was more than I could resist.
> “Mac?” I was gripping the receiver in both hands.
“Christina?” said the voice on the other end of the line.
I closed my eyes for a minute and wondered if I was out of my mind. “Yeah. How are you doing?” I asked. I had met Donald Archer while investigating a murder. He was his father’s heir apparent and would someday inherit a boot manufacturing company called Ironwear. Originally I had thought he might also be a murderer. Now I believed him to be a genuinely nice person. Does it seem odd that a licensed psychologist can’t tell the difference?
“What’s up?” he asked.
I cleared my throat and reminded myself that although Mac was extremely wealthy and undeniably sweet, he had always been more interested in me than I was in him; I had no right to play with his emotions, but I needed a favor and told him as much.
He paused for a minute. “Is this the kind of favor that’s likely to get a guy killed?”
As it turned out, he was also a pragmatist. I considered his query for a second. “I don’t think so.”
“Wow,” he said. “That’s not quite the answer I was hoping for.”
“Looking for more of a thrill?” I asked and he chuckled, inexplicably charmed. Poor guy.
“What’s the favor?”
“There’s an … event that I’m hoping to attend. A Hollywood event. I know you sometimes get invitations and was wondering if I could maybe be your escort.”
He paused a moment. “That might actually be worth getting killed for.”
A little more guilt seeped in. I fought it off. I’m frickin’ amazing at fighting it off.
“What’s the event?”
“The afterparty for Jungle Heat.”
“Jungle … Hey, I think I do have an invitation for that.”
“Yeah?” I couldn’t decide if I should be thrilled or terrified.
“When is that again?” he asked. Mac was, it seems, the kind of unassuming bazillionaire who gets so many invitations to stare at Colin that he can afford to forget about them.
I bit my lip. “Tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Man, I wish I were a girl,” he said.
“Ummm …”
“I have to start looking for a date a full month before the actual event.”
“Does that mean you’ll do it?”
“Is it in Cincinnati?”
