Adventures of a Salsa Goddess

by Hornak, JoAnn

  “Do you remember that night at Cubana when Javier and Isabella were dancing together? ”

  He nodded, clearly uncomfortable at venturing into the non-work realm of our relationship.

  “Why did you lie to me and tell me that Isabella was Javier’s ex-girlfriend?” I’d been thinking of it constantly since I’d found out about who Robert really was. How could I have chosen such a loser over Javier? I felt sick thinking about it.

  Sebastian shrugged his shoulders.

  “I love Javier like he’s my brother,” he said. “But he’s too nice for his own good. Sometimes he lets other people take advantage of him. I knew you were lying about why you were really in Milwaukee, so I didn’t want you to get too close to him. But I can see now ...” He paused.

  “See what?”

  “I was wrong about you, Sam, I’m sorry.”

  The doorbell rang. I jumped, and looking outside, could see that night had fallen. I must’ve been sitting there in the chair for six hours. I noticed that the muscles in my legs had stiffened to boards, and I wobbled to the buzzer like an old lady to open the door.

  “I took a couple days off of work,” announced Elizabeth, who plopped down an overnight bag. “I’m going to stay with you until the news breaks.”

  As much as Elizabeth didn’t like her job, I’d never known her to call in for a single mental health day or ever take all of the vacation she was entitled to. I hugged her tight.

  “Have you eaten?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  She walked over to my telephone and called our favorite Thai restaurant.

  “You’re going to be okay, Sam,” she said, with the receiver pressed to her ear.

  “With friends like you, how could I not be okay?” I said. I felt the tightness around my mouth slightly loosen as I attempted my first smile in days.

  Two days later, I picked up my New York Times and took it over to the kitchen table where Elizabeth was drinking coffee and eating half a grapefruit.

  “The circus begins,” I said, as I dropped the paper in front of Elizabeth and we read it silently together.

  INDICTMENTS HANDED DOWN AGAINST

  MILWAUKEE DATING SERVICE:

  MYSTERY WOMAN’S FIANCE

  ENTERS GUILTY PLEA

  A federal grand jury in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, handed down indictments yesterday against Bunny Woods, the owner of the Milwaukee franchise of Single No More, the nation’s largest video dating service, and against her husband, Dmitri Woods, a former guard at the Urbana halfway house in Milwaukee. The charges against the couple include theft, extortion, and fraud, in connection with a scheme that has left single women across the nation reeling in shock and anger.

  Also implicated in the plot is Robert Mack, 45, former fiance of Samantha Jacobs, better known as the Mystery Woman of the New York-based Tres Chic magazine. Mack pleaded guilty on lesser charges of fraud in exchange for turning State’s evidence. He faces up to three years in prison.

  The indictments were handed down after a 15-month investigation, spearheaded by Special Agent Sebastian Diaz of the F.B.I., into the operations of the Milwaukee office of Single No More.

  According to the indictment, Bunny Woods, 47, and her husband, Dmitri Woods, 49, devised a plan to fill the depleted ranks of Single No More by recruiting newly paroled male prisoners who had been convicted of white-collar offenses from federal minimum-security camps in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Dmitri Woods is charged with stealing master lists of names and addresses of released prisoners from the halfway house where he worked as a guard, which he then provided to Mack. Mack then contacted and recruited the convicts. In exchange for nominal sums of money, Mack lured the convicts to the office of Single No More, where they went through the process of posing as legitimate clients, having photographs taken, making videos, and preparing false profiles.

  Investigation has revealed that some of these imposter clients went beyond the original plan and actually went on dates with unsuspecting female clients. In exchange for a standard $2,000 fee, the service had guaranteed its legitimate clients that it did a thorough background check, including a criminal check, on anyone applying for membership before allowing applicants to join the dating service.

  “I feel sick to know I might have gone out with a sexual offender,” said Jane, a former client of Single No More and a Milwaukee anesthesiologist, who refused to give her last name. “We join services like this to weed out the bad ones for us. And what did they do? They set us up to meet these creeps. They put our lives in danger.”

  Mack, a former attorney, who earned his law degree from John Marshall Law School in Chicago, Illinois, lost his license to practice law when he was convicted in 1996 in federal court of three felony theft offenses for embezzling over $225,000 from his clients. Mack was sentenced to three years in prison and spent the last six months of his sentence at the Urbana halfway house in Milwaukee where he originally met Dmitri Woods.

  Recently, Mack had experienced a spate of publicity including an appearance on the Larry King Live show after he became engaged to Samantha Jacobs, 41, a native of Scarsdale, New York. Jacobs, a 15-year employee of Tres Chic, was sent to Milwaukee during the summer in the hopes of finding a professional, well-educated husband to flout a new statistic reported earlier this year by Harvard sociologist Dr. Victoria Huber that a well-educated, never-married woman over 40 has a better chance of winning a seven-figure lottery jackpot than of ever tying the knot. Jacobs joined Single No More last May and met Mack, who had also posed as a legitimate client of the service. They dated throughout the summer and became engaged early last August.

  “At least the article doesn’t make you look bad,” said Elizabeth when she’d finished reading.

  “No, not at all. I got engaged to a three-time convicted felon. Who hasn’t done that at least once in their lives?” I said. “And to top it off, I probably dated some of his jail buddies.”

  “You can’t beat yourself up about this, Sam. You didn’t know. None of us did. He fooled all of us,” she said, shaking her pretty brunette head. “He seemed so nice.”

  “I had warnings, but I didn’t listen to them, as usual,” I told her. I had ignored what my gut was telling me, that Robert wasn’t right for me. But I’d also ignored what else my gut had been telling me, about who was right for me. And because of that, I’d lost Javier, the sweetest, most wonderful man I’d ever known.

  “Sam, you will meet a great guy someday. It will happen,” she said with the confidence of a happily coupled woman. Elizabeth was sure Judge Doug was going to propose before Christmas.

  Could I ever meet another man like Javier? A man whom I’d felt so comfortable with, it was as though we’d known each other forever? It was impossible to imagine.

  Elizabeth left an hour later to go back to work. I flipped on the TV. I just wanted to veg in front of the idiot box and forget about my life. I had five entire minutes of blessed mind-numbing TV-land drivel until I flipped the channel one too many times and saw Elaine seated behind her desk holding a press conference.

  “I was just as shocked as you were by this unfortunate turn of events,” she said, reading from what looked like a prepared statement. “But what you didn’t know and what I myself just found out, is that Samantha Jacobs knew almost from the beginning that her fiance, Robert Mack, was a fraud and a convicted felon.”

  “What? What are you talking about?” I screamed, but no one heard me, except perhaps everyone within a three-block radius.

  “After Miss Jacobs found out about Mr. Mack’s true background, they devised a plan to get engaged and go through with the wedding scheduled for December thirty-first. But at some point in the future after the publicity had died down, they planned to get their marriage annulled. All of this was in exchange for securing a lucrative job in New York for Mr. Mack along with a sizable payoff to him.”

  “You can’t be serious!” I screamed at Elaine, who was managing to ape perfectly the pained, deeply trou
bled and unjustly wronged victim, as she paused significantly to let her last words sink in.

  “It is also with deep regret that I am forced to announce that Miss Jacobs’s articles that were published in Tres Chic this summer about the Milwaukee dating scene were exaggerated and in several instances outright fabrications. Of course, I fired Miss Jacobs as soon as I found out. I sincerely apologize to the readers of Tres Chic and everyone across the nation who was following this story.”

  “Mrs. Daniels, what in your opinion was Miss Jacobs’s motivation?” one of the female reporters called out.

  “Well I can’t be sure of course, but I believe she did it for the most selfish of motives,” Elaine said smoothly. “To promote her career as the new columnist for ‘La Vie’ at the expense of our readers who wanted to believe in the dream that they too could defy the statistics, meet a wonderful man, and get married.”

  Oh God! My life was no longer in the toilet bowl. It had just been flushed far back into the bowels of the New Jersey sewer system.

  Twenty-four

  Missing Persons

  I’d barely moved from my chair in the past twenty-four hours. Elizabeth had offered to come over again last night, but I didn’t want to see anyone. My mother, my sister, Andre, and Lessie had called, all of them mouthing words of sympathy and encouragement. I’m not even sure what I’d said to them in return.

  I felt as hollow as if organ thieves had scooped out my insides in the night and the only thing they’d left was skin and bones. I was completely numb. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t feel. My brain was on automatic pilot.

  I remember so many times over the past fifteen years of my life feeling so bored that I would have welcomed almost any jolt just to spice things up. But now I’d give anything to have that boredom back. I craved normalcy.

  I stared at the television set, watching yet another tearful interview of a betrayed Tres Chic reader. Throughout the day CNN featured clips of women picketing outside the Tres Chic building—me, not the magazine. Several dozen well-dressed women bundled up in wool coats, gloves, and scarves moved clockwise in a semicircle on the sidewalk. Some were holding signs, others were there mingling on the sidelines out of curiosity or, I suppose, for moral support, we hate you mystery woman! was the most common sign. Others included burn in singles hell forever mw. Clearly, the cold spell that had hit New York two days ago had done nothing to dampen their enthusiasm.

  The phone rang. I picked it up without thinking.

  “I know you didn’t know Robert Mack was a fake,” said an unfamiliar voice.

  “Who is this?” I asked. My initial reaction was to clutch at the voice like a nicotine addict for a cigarette. It was the first positive thing I’d heard about myself in days. But then my brain remembered to be wary. It could be a reporter trying to ingratiate herself by buttering me up.

  “This is Maya Beckett.”

  Her voice was small, as if she were calling from overseas. A hundred thoughts swept through my brain at once. Where was she? Why had she quit Tres Chic two months ago without giving notice? And why in the world was she calling me?

  “Listen, I think I can help you. Can you meet me in an hour?” she asked.

  A cold drizzle fell as I exited my building and walked to the corner to hail a cab. Maybe I was imagining it, but it seemed as though everyone I passed was examining my face extra carefully. The dark sunglasses I wore on this gray dismal day were practically an invitation for passersby to give me a good ogling so they could figure out if I was someone famous who was trying to hide her identity, which of course was exactly what I was trying to do.

  Maya had refused to tell me any more on the phone, and the place she had suggested for us to meet was strange, giving the whole thing a bit of a cloak-and-dagger feel to it. But at this point I had nothing to lose. Maybe she had some information that could help me? Normally I’d take the subway uptown, but it was easier to face the possibility that one cab driver might recognize me versus a mob of irate Tres Chic readers that might take their anger to the rotten vegetable level or even worse.

  Thankfully, the cab driver, a woman in her mid to late forties, had barely glanced at me during the drive. We crawled through the traffic.

  “I’ve been married three times,” she said breaking the silence, which had been interrupted only by the static of her radio and the steady scrape of the wipers back and forth across the windshield.

  “The first two cheated on me. The last one, the only one I really loved, went out for a carton of cigarettes and never came back. So I decided to try being a lesbian,” she said, the same way someone might say, “I decided to try that new Ben & Jerry’s flavor.”

  I felt as though I should say something, but I don’t know that I could’ve thought of anything to say, even if my brain had been in peak working condition.

  “It’s not bad, but sometimes I miss having a hairy, hard body next to mine at night. Not that any of my husbands had a lot of muscle or hair, but I liked the way they felt.”

  Swish, swash, swish, swash went the wipers.

  “Have you ever thought about trying it?” she asked with a glance at me in her rearview mirror. “Nah, by the looks of you I don’t suppose you have.”

  I didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, but I didn’t care enough to try and figure it out. We stopped at a light. She studied me in her mirror and then turned her body around to face me. “Are you all right, honey?” she asked me. “You look like you ain’t got a friend in the world. I’m not coming on to you or nothing. It’s just, well, you look like shit.”

  I smiled. It was the nicest thing anyone had said to me in days. “I’ll be okay,” I said.

  “This one is on me,” she said with a flip of her hand when we pulled up to the curb and I handed her a twenty-dollar bill. “We girls need to stick together. You just take care of yourself,” she said with a smile.

  Inside the white spiral building that had always looked to me like an upside-down wedding cake, I looked about for Maya. The last time I’d visited the Guggenheim, I’d come with my sister, Susan, when she was eight months’ pregnant, and she’d waddled down the exhibit ramps like a rocking ship, taking lots of breaks.

  “When I think of Elaine Daniels, this is what I see,” said Maya when she appeared at my side five minutes later, pointing to a statue by Alberto Giacometti, aptly named “Nose.” The bronze head hung from a rope suspended in a rectangular cage with an enormous pointed nose that would’ve made Pinocchio’s look like a button in comparison.

  “I didn’t mean to be so mysterious,” Maya said. “The Guggenheim is my favorite museum. I live just a couple blocks away. I come here at least once a week.” She was much taller than I, probably six feet in her stocking feet and close to six three in the black leather boots she wore. Her thin legs stuck out of a red leather miniskirt. If she walked into a bar, heads would turn. But if you took her features apart one by one, the bump on the bridge of her nose, her shiny but too-thin straight brown hair, and her mouth, which was too wide for her narrow face, they weren’t attractive. But at a glance, the total package was striking.

  “I have to tell you something difficult, but promise me you’ll hear me out,” she said tensely, moving with the fluid grace of a dancer.

  “Okay,” I said. What could possibly be worse than what I’d just been through? God, could it really have been just one week ago today that I’d found out my fiance was a lying scoundrel?

  “I’m the person who told the press that you were the Mystery Woman,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said with a shrug. I was far too shell-shocked to let anything I might hear jolt me. “How did you find out?”

  Maya exhaled and looked relieved. “Elaine told me,” she said.

  “But Elaine wanted it kept secret. The only other person who knew was Sally.”

  “Do you remember the day you called Elaine to tell her you’d gotten engaged?”

  I nodded. How could I ever forget celebrating the day that I’d made
the biggest mistake of my life, saying yes to Robert’s proposal?

  “Right after that call,” Maya continued, “Elaine had called me upstairs and told me that I was being transferred back to Features and she’d decided to give my column to you.”

  I couldn’t help but be amused by Maya’s proprietary tone about “my column.” I’d felt the same way for the short six weeks I’d had it.

  “But Elaine told me you were giving it up voluntarily, that you asked to be transferred back to a regular department,” I said.

  “Who’d be crazy enough to do that?” Maya said. “I loved that job. I never wanted to leave it. At first, Elaine told me she was no longer happy with my work, which I didn’t believe. I don’t mean to brag, but I got tons of fan mail. So I confronted her and demanded to know what was really going on.”

  I raised my eyebrow but said nothing.

  “Then she told me everything. About you, your assignment in Milwaukee, and that she’d promised ‘La Vie’ to you if you pulled it off. She said if I agreed to go along with everything, she was going to give the column back to me in January while you were on your honeymoon.”

  “That bitch!” I said. A security guard, a small thin black man wearing wire-rim glasses, raised an eyebrow in my direction and lowered his chin in disapproval.

  “I quit right then and there,” Maya went on. “I was so furious all I wanted to do was get back at her. So I went to a good friend of mine who works for the Associated Press and well, the next day, you were exposed.”

  “It’s okay. I probably would’ve done the same thing in your shoes.”

  “But I’ve got a plan to fix everything,” she said.