Denial of Service 4: L.A. Conspiratorial

by Steve Jordan

  “This,” Gail said, “was formerly a detective agency. It was owned by a fashion model as a tax shelter, but she fell on hard times: Her accountant embezzled just about every dime she had, leaving her with nothing but the agency. She tried to keep it afloat, but she was constantly fighting with her staff, especially the lead investigator, and the place closed down after three years under her control. Our firm is leasing the space now. We plan to set up a local branch here.”

  I looked around. “Nice digs.”

  Gail nodded non-committally. “We’ve been head-hunting for people to staff this location, all around the country. Mel Cooley was discovered putting covert feelers out for a new position, and his qualifications were perfect for us. He’ll probably be one of our senior staff members… assuming he takes the job, of course.”

  Gail turned to me. “I wanted to make sure you knew I was doing my job, meeting him here, and spending the day with him.”

  “What did you guys do all day?” I tried to frame it innocently, but I wasn’t sure if I’d pulled it off.

  “Pretty much everything but sex,” she replied. She looked at me, and smiled wryly. “Which, for the record, is saying something.”

  “Gail—”

  “No,” she stopped me. “No, we’re here now… you should know this.”

  10: Confession

  Gail led me into the glass-walled conference room, over to a large conference table that was the sole piece of furniture there, probably because it was too large to remove from the room without disassembling either it, or the glass wall. She casually hopped up and sat on its edge, and the table was so massive that it didn’t shift with her weight. “I was still with Pete when I started working for the company. At the time, I was a handful… full of myself, and especially of my power over men. I slept with the boss to get hired, and I slept with other execs to get further along. Pete knew this, of course… we didn’t have the kind of relationship that precluded that kind of thing.

  “Anyway, it didn’t take long for me to become known as the company’s ‘secret weapon,’ willing and able to be deployed against any enemy… or to make a potential friend,” she went on, looking wistfully out the window at the L.A. skyline as she talked. “That was the kind of girl I was. You may have noticed, I’m something of a sex-crazed loon.”

  She paused, and I didn’t reply.

  “So,” she continued, “life went on… and the livin’ was easy. I was having fun, at home and at work. And somewhere along the line… it started to move past just sex.” I narrowed my eyes as she paused, and decided to take off her suit jacket. She laid it down on the table, and now that I could see her strapless top, I knew she had nothing on underneath it. “It started with a potential client who had… some extreme notions of fun. I went with it, because I wanted to land that client… and discovered I actually liked it. Then came another incident with a merger, a year later… then another, to settle a lawsuit out-of-court. I loved ‘em all. They turned me on like nothing I’d ever experienced. More, even, than… the U-bolt.”

  “ What?” The U-bolt was her nickname for one of her toys, which I had used on her one night, and… well, without getting graphic (too bad, perv), that thing made her a screaming lunatic! I personally don’t know how a human body could survive more pleasure than that thing gave her…

  “No s**t, Mike… more than that,” she said, having no trouble picking up on those leaking thoughts. “So I started to explore… the wilder stuff. With Pete. And he was game, at first, I mean he liked a lot of it. He liked the dress-up stuff… the bondage was cool… and the multi-setting unisex—”

  “TMI, babe,” I said quickly.

  “Yeah, well. Anyway, after awhile, he started resisting. He wasn’t into it that much. I… started demanding. I needed… more. I was becoming a junkie, a wild-sex nymphomaniac.

  “Then, one night, I went too far, and Pete just… snapped. He ran away from me and locked himself away in the guest room, and wouldn’t come out all night. The next morning, he told me he couldn’t do it anymore… he told me he wanted out.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “You’re telling me that my brother couldn’t handle having wild sex with you? You’re telling me he broke it off?” Gail nodded. “Bulls**t.”

  Gail shrugged. “Pete’s a good man. He’s also got a healthy ego. The very idea that a woman was the sexual better of him really didn’t sit well with him, and I could tell. If anyone else we knew had found out…” She paused again, and I thought she was finally making an effort to maintain her composure. “So we concocted the whole thing about me leaving because of his ‘boyish irresponsibility’. Believe it or not, he was actually okay with that…”

  “No,” I said, “I’m not believing this…” But even as I was saying it, I was remembering all the moments since I’d come to California… all the words between them… all the looks… all the posturing and attitudes and banter… and I thought of Riley. Pete had said Gail’s name, in a moment of passion with Riley. Even after what they’d gone through…

  “He still loves you,” I said.

  “I know,” Gail replied quietly. “As much as I still love him. But I drove him away, Mike. I did it… not him. And I kick myself for it, every day.”

  Gail went quiet, for a time. I tried to think of something, anything, to say, but I just couldn’t. I finally walked over to the table and sat down next to her on its edge.

  After another few moments of silence, Gail said, “I decided I had developed a problem. I needed help. I’ve been trying to… curb my appetite. For the past two years.” She looked at me, and I returned her wry smile, thinking of all the things we usually did when we had sex… that was curbed? “Yes, this is me taking it easy on you,” she said. I must be a sieve today.

  “I also started resisting the same temptations at work,” she continued. “That was hard. After so many years of being a total slut, going cold turkey was not popular with the fellas. They came close to firing me, more than once, when they realized I wasn’t going to earn my living on my back anymore. I had to work hard, to prove that I could still bring in clients, that I could still do a real job, pull my weight… without…” There was a pause, as if her mind was running ahead and her mouth wasn’t bothering to keep up with the details. “…a-and then Pete started seeing Riley, and it was too late for me to…”

  Her voice promptly folded up and keened away, her head dropped, and her hair cascaded forward, hiding her face from me. After a moment, she sniffed, once. When she raised her face to me again, I could see the lights of the city reflected in the tears running down her face. “I’ve been a good girl, Mike! I’m cutting out the crazy stuff! And I’ve been trying to change my rep, but it’s, it’s so hard!—”

  “I know,” I said, shaking my head and putting an arm around her shoulder. “It’s hard to turn yourself into a new person. Especially when you didn’t think the old person was that bad.” And as I said the words, I couldn’t help but think of one other person I knew who could use that same advice. “Don’t worry, you haven’t done wrong by me.”

  “Oh, thank you,” Gail said at once, and turned to me, stifling a sob. “ Thank you…” She put her arms around me and kissed me gratefully… and passionately. After a moment, she pressed into me. Before I knew it, the warmth of sympathy over her vulnerability was turning into the heat of passion for same. She felt it, too, and momentarily, she started leaning backward, forcing me down to the tabletop.

  In between her kisses, I tried to get a word in edgewise. “Gail—I—”

  “I know.”

  “We—”

  “We will.”

  “Should—”

  “Yes, we should.”

  “Table—”

  “Fine.”

  “Windows—”

  “Mirrored.”

  “Sure?—”

  “Who cares?”

  “—”

  11: Decisions

  I was lounging in my underwear in Gail’s hotel room in the Mille
nnium Biltmore, actually not far from Gail’s new office building… we had ended up here after “christening” her new office… twice (but that conference table wasn’t nearly as sturdy as it looked)… then cleaning ourselves up just enough to avoid getting arrested on the street, and rushing over to finish the night, and each other, off. In the morning, Gail had told me to stay here and wait for her call, then went off to meet Cooley again.

  As a good 250 cable TV, numerous pay-per-view and porn channels presented themselves to me, I gave them no mind at all. My whole world, at that moment, was Gail, and the truth about her and Pete. It made me fully realize how much they had been torturing themselves over the past few years, not just the months I’d been here… just thinking about it hurt me deeply.

  Occasionally, my thoughts and feelings for them were interrupted by the reality of my own situation. I had been spending a lot of time trying to recover my lost life in Baltimore… and increasingly found myself asking “Why?” Not just because it was Baltimore, mind you… because there hadn’t been anything special in my life back there. Certainly nothing even remotely like… Gail. Was there any good reasons for me to go back, even if I could? As the days went by, those reasons numbered fewer and fewer, and now, I could scarcely think of a single one.

  Well, maybe just one: Unfinished business.

  I was also reflecting on the strangeness of finding the answer to my two biggest questions in life, on the same day. If you told me that would happen a week ago, I would’ve assumed that the space-time continuum would collapse an instant afterward. Yet, here it was. And now that I knew the answers, I had to figure out what I was gonna do with them.

  It was about 2pm when my cellphone rang. I had put in a new ringtone that morning, a series of ten notes from the opening bars of an old R&B song. I’d be willing to bet that most people wouldn’t have been able to identify the song: Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel. (Go ahead… say “Awww.”) “Hey, babe.”

  “We’re downstairs at La Bistecca,” Gail said. “Come meet us here.”

  I dressed and came down to the hotel lobby. La Bistecca was one of two restaurants in the huge lobby space of the hotel, and at that time of day, it was easy to find Gail and Cooley at a table nestled against the far wall. I walked over casually, trying to present as upstanding a citizen as I could in such an ornate and expensive place. I smiled sheepishly at Cooley, and nodded at Gail. “Good afternoon.”

  “Please, join us,” Gail said, and I took the chair opposite Cooley. I glanced his way, and was glad to see no sign of rancor on his face after my little con-job performance yesterday. In the meantime, Gail went on to say, “We have something to announce.”

  I turned to her, momentarily unsure whether her “we” meant her and me, or her and Cooley. “Yes?” I said finally.

  “Mel has accepted a position with our firm’s new L.A. offices,” Gail smiled.

  “Oh! Well,” I said, extending my hand across the table to Cooley, “congratulations, Mr. Cooley. I’m sure you’ll be very happy here.”

  “I’m sure I will be,” Cooley said, shaking my hand. “Gail can be very persuasive. I’m looking forward to it.”

  A waited showed up, and I ordered a drink to go with both of theirs. Once the waiter had moved away, Gail said, “Actually, there’s something else we want to discuss with you.” I looked at her expectantly. “Mel and I have talked about your situation. I explained everything to him.”

  I turned to Cooley, who nodded. “Mister Schitzeiss… Mike… you got a raw deal at the hands of my employers… my former employers,” he added, pausing to smile at Gail. He turned back to me. “If I can, I’d like to help… along the lines you mentioned in my hotel.”

  My eyes popped. “Seriously?”

  “Yes,” Cooley said. “After Gail and I talked, I realized you might be right… simply waiting things out on the left coast might not be enough to prevent me from being implicated by any future use of Merc… especially after I deliver my resignation. You said that you’d like to do something that will not only make them pay, but clear your name and mine. If you can do that… I’m in.” He extended his hand across the table again. I took it gladly, and we shook across the table. We both glanced at Gail, who reached out and put her hand on top of ours.

  When we pulled our hands back, I said, “Now, that’s something to consider: When you give your notice, B&M will immediately be concerned that your knowledge of Merc might compromise them. That might make them plan to act sooner than later… and since we didn’t know when they were going to act anyway, we might be able to take advantage of forcing their hand.”

  “That’s true,” Cooley admitted.

  “Well, if that’s so, we’re going to have to put a plan together that can react fast enough, and stop them. It’ll be tricky… and I can’t guarantee I can pull it off, at least, not until I know more about Merc.” I arched an eyebrow at Cooley. “Are you up for a challenge?”

  “A challenge to get at my old bosses, before they screw me? Let me see…” Cooley said, lifting his eyes to the ceiling in mock-consideration, and prompting smiles from me and Gail. Then he dropped his eyes and said, “ Hell, yes!”

  At that moment, the waiter arrived with my drink, which I promptly lifted in the air. “In that case: I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship…”

  Stay tuned for the inevitable (and hopefully satisfying) conclusion of Denial of Service!

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  It’ll be over soon. Just breathe.