by Peter Manus
“I am quite sure that you are brilliant at taking the hints,” I assure him. I drop my bills on the bar and snap my bag. “In fact, I am sure that you are brilliant at all things you do.” I swivel past him. “Nevertheless, at the moment I need a smoke.”
“A smoke?” he repeats stupidly.
I shrug. “Not nearly my greatest vice.”
“Heartening to know,” he banters back. “And where do you commit this particular sin?”
“There is a designated area.” I raise my chin for a moment, indicating the ceiling. “On thirty-two. A roof patio.” I pause as if struck by this. “One trifles with one’s mortality under the stars. La destinée, eh?” I smile, fleetingly, for the first time.
Elliot smiles back, encouraged, but he is not the one to blunder back into the ring at a flicker of the crimson muleta, and as I drop from my stool, he eases round to face the bar. His whiskey has arrived. It is chilly, the old-fashioned cubes melded together. He raises his glass and sees me in the mirror. I am looking back at him, my expression bemused. He turns.
“Maybe I can handle one more after all. Are you still buying?”
“What’s it going to be?”
“An Irish coffee. Make it a double, won’t you? It will be chilly up there.”
When Elliot turns with the steaming glass, I am walking off, glancing over my shoulder at him, the smile still playing on my lips. Beyond me, he spots the trust department girl eyeing him expectantly, her dog-in-heat still at heel. He smiles and winks across the expanse. On her part, she spies the two drinks in his hands, sticks out her skinny little tongue, then turns her attention to the lucky lad who has earned her affection for the evening.
Unburdened by the idea that he may have inflicted some momentary wound, Elliot turns back to his new conquest. But I have disappeared. He scans the crowd, moving forward with his elbows out to protect his drinks, and happens to go eye-to-eye with a wolf wearing an ascot and a suit with a tight silhouette. The man palms his hair and looks away sharply, as men will do when they are caught displaying curiosity in another male. Elliot, without formulating a thought, follows the man’s gaze in time to catch a glimpse of leopard print gauze as I exit through the doors to the hotel lobby. Elliot sees no reason to abandon the chase.
Out in the lobby, he is momentarily conscious of the fact that he is toting a couple of alcoholic beverages and, strictly speaking, ought to be waylaid for a polite scolding. But he is not the type minions take on. So he strides across the busy carpet, comfortable in his eight-hundred-dollar pinstripe. He scores an empty elevator and rides straight up, all paranoia squelched by his image in the antique-mirrored doors. Death is near, but he does not sense this. The Irish coffee vibrates, sending its acid aroma up to his nostrils.
On the thirty-second floor of the Hampstead Arms, an emergency spotlight aims a cone of light down at a stark circle of flowered carpet in front of the elevator. Otherwise the place is black. Elliot steps off. The doors thump behind him. To his left, a pair of massive doors—a ballroom, no doubt. To his right, a door is open, vague light oozing from beyond. I am calling him, you see, though his ears hear nothing.
Elliot saunters through to a small room, its bar stripped to the shelves. City lights do not quite pierce the windows, creating a murky half-glow that causes the draped tables to shimmer. At the far end, the French doors are ajar. Elliot can discern a terrace, one or two wrought-iron tables with stools arranged around them. A glass ashtray glimmers in the night, a yellow spark playing above it. Yes, he has found me, tapping at my precious cigarette. I turn away as he steps onto the patio.
“Is that my Irish, then?” I ask over my shoulder.
He crosses the tiles, feeling the night breeze riffle his hair. It is chilly, as I forewarned. He leans a palm against the stone railing, careful to keep his clothes from touching it, sips his whiskey and surveys the city. It is not a particularly scenic venue. Tremont Street looks gridlocked; he can hear the distant honks and, fleetingly, an angry voice that disappears into the air exactly as it reaches him. Still, there is something erotic about the scene. A hidden den of eros above the cruel, cold city—that manner of tripe.
I gesture with the cigarette. He shakes his head.
“I’m Elliot, by the way.” He offers his hand.
I touch his palm with icy fingers. “Florrie,” I say.
The name means nothing to him. Still, I pronounce it with my vague lilt and am more attractive to him for doing so. He watches as I expel smoke from my mouth; it rolls forth in splashy clots, evaporating before it can douse my chest.
“You’ve lost your scarf,” he observes.
I gesture with my coffee. He spots it, tangled among the flourishes of the stone cornice that trims the edge of another level of the roof, down a story from where we stand. “You would not mind retrieving it?” I ask.
He snorts. “Then you blow me and we’ll call it an evening.”
I jerk my head as if to toss the smoke I exhale over my shoulder. “You’re on.”
He laughs, liking me for not shying away from his schoolboy humor. “Afraid I’m not that hungry for it,” he says amicably.
“A shame. There was a time when you would have risked life and limb for some lipstick round your manhood, eh?” I pause to duck my head and light myself a fresh cigarette. I fail twice, my lighter sending harmless spatters of sparks into the breeze.
“May I?”
I look up at him, then pass over lighter and cigarette. He rolls the cigarette between his lips, enjoying the feeling, then cups his palm and defies the wind by firing it up on his first try. He passes it back to me, ignoring the fact that I touch his hand with mine a little longer than necessary during the exchange.
“You are the—how do we call it—the self-made man,” I say.
“What makes you think that?”
“A man does not carry himself like you do when it is family money, and so…”
He interrupts with a sharp laugh. “I strike you as having crept in through the kitchen?”
I answer logically. “You carry yourself as if you have had the opportunity to discover your capabilities. You are cavalier, and you have earned it.”
He smiles. “Never thought of a supercilious attitude as something a person rates.”
“Mmm, but it is,” I say assuredly. “So tell me, Elliot, what made you who you are? I do not mean your life story. I mean…” I circle a hand, “the big break. The event you knew would jumpstart your career, propel you to where you are today.”
He thinks, studying the city windows beyond me, then bringing his gaze down to my eyes. When he speaks, his tone is even and casual. “You’re working,” he says simply.
I am taken aback—so this is how he interprets my dead-on Jeanne Moreau! After a moment, I recover. “We are all working for something, Elliot, are we not?”
He gestures back at the hotel, equally pleasant. “What, do you have some sort of arrangement with the hotel detective?”
“I’ve learned my way around,” I say opaquely, turning to gaze at the city.
He snaps a finger. “The guy watching when you left the bar. Has a lot of styling going on, maybe a goatee and some sort of neck scarf. That the house dick?”
I murmur noncommittally. In truth, I have no idea who he is talking about.
He chuckles. “Never realized a stuffy joint like this would allow hookers. But I guess men who stay in nine-hundred-dollar rooms have the same needs as anyone.”
“Men are men,” I agree. “Look, Elliot, I can assure you that I meant you no insult—pas du tout. I merely came across an attractive man who looked like he could use some company.”
He is irked by my trade patter, but lets it slide as he realizes that in fact he is not wholly uninterested. In any event, he is all the more curious about where he’d set eyes on me before. Had I been on the arm of one of his partners at a function? Elliot is not a man who has natural allies. Blackmail of an informal nature is certainly in his line.
; I sigh. “I will leave you to your thoughts,” I say, easing my weight off the wall.
“You asked about my big break,” he says into the night sky.
I pause. “I did.”
“Probably less long ago than you’d think. Spent the first decade of my law career kicking around as appointed counsel to lowlifes I wouldn’t have recognized the day after I got them their plea. Graduated to rich chumps and their controlled substances. This case marked the end of all that. Got in on something big, used the opportunity, and haven’t looked back since.”
“Intriguing.” I slip back to my former position. “What sort of case was this?”
“Assault trial,” he says. He glances at me. “I was hoping for attempted murder at the time, but it turned out even better as it was. Heard of the Dorchester Five?”
“I have read that name, certainly, but it was quite recently.”
“Yeah, you’re talking about the drive-by shooting down by Savin Hill,” he says. “Con just out of Walpole took a bullet in the skull, maybe six weeks ago. Terence D’Amante was one of the Five, so the local stations revived the old story. Personally, I barely remembered the man’s name until I read it in the papers, and I sure as hell didn’t realize he’d been inside all these years. World’s better off with him dead, frankly. Guy was an animal.”
“But the Dorchester Five case itself,” I steer him gently.
“Short version: eight years ago some schmuck ran over the neighborhood saint and then tried to blow the scene. Crowd turned, car tipped and burned. Mess all around.”
“I remember now,” I say in a low, distant voice. “Those men were local heroes.”
He scoffs. “You flip a car with someone inside, don’t expect a parade. You should have seen this kid. One of his ears gone, half his face a molten mess. Like out of Friday the 13th.”
“Nightmare on Elm Street,” I correct him automatically. “Freddy Krueger resembles the burn victim. In Friday the 13th, Jason wears a hockey mask.” I may be circling in on my first kill—a delicate proposition indeed—but horror was Jakey's personal ballad.
“Right,” he says, not caring. “Anyway, at trial, we played some vids of the kid from a couple weeks before he hit the old bird. Happy as a pup, lip-synching to his favorite bubblegum pop with his shirt off. What was that song—‘Numa Numa’ something—had the tune bopping around in my skull for the duration of the trial.”
“‘Dragostea Din Tei,’” I say. “The Moldovian hit from some years back.” A favorite of Jakey’s. I hum a few bars of the chorus.
Elliot smiles. He has always been charmed by a woman singing. “Point was to display this so-called hit-and-run killer as nothing like the charred wreck sitting in that courtroom. Something like that happens to a kid, intentional or not, someone’s got to pay.”
I nod, smoking. “But the Dorchester Five walked. So who, then, paid?”
He takes my cigarette from me and has a drag. “Fuel line manufacturer.”
I try to look thoughtful. “I suppose the fuel line ruptured, causing the car to go up in flames and burn this poor fellow?”
He snorts a laugh. “No car should need to withstand being bounced around by a bunch of dumb bastards, but you better believe that those pasty engineers in their short-sleeved dress shirts, trying to explain solder reflex and shock delays in open court, looked guilty as hell.”
He drags on my cigarette and then pinches it, sending it pinwheeling into the night. This is a trick from his past—he realizes that he is flirting. Elliot Becker, Esquire is considering doing the deed with a high-priced hooker! And she’s French, by God!
“So the Five walked because you maneuvered it so this company took the blame,” I say.
He grants my summation. “More or less covers it.”
“Which of the Five did you represent? Not Terence D’Amante, I gather?”
“Oh, I didn’t represent any of the baddies. I stood for the vegetable,” he says.
My voice fails me as I tamp down a flame of rage in my chest, but delicately, only to a point. Rage will be useful, quite soon. “By this you mean the victim?”
“What victim? Originally they charged the punk, too, while he’s still in intensive care getting skin grafts. Those charges got dropped, but it wasn’t because he hadn’t broken any laws. Anyway, not the point. Point is, I saw the story when it broke and went directly to the mother. Bushwhacked through the clueless horde choking the streets of Southie, sat her down and told her about the money I could get them for handicap ramps, fancy wheelchairs, a life supply of pharmaceuticals, a healthy stipend for mother and son to live off, and—for the kicker—in every room, the latest in surround sound entertainment systems. Lady sees her life change—retired from whatever hapless job she’s been dragging her fanny through these decades, parked in front of her favorite dramas on her new Naugahyde lounger, day in and day out for the rest of her sorry days. I talk about lifetime care packages, home health aides, someone to cook and clean and walk the mutt. By the time the old bag’s heard me out, she’s practically wetting herself. One of her boys has finally come through for her—what were the odds of that?”
I smirk at his dead-on depiction of Jakey’s ma. “I do not see, though, how this could translate into your big break. Would the community respect you, representing the injured driver as you did, when you allowed the defendants to walk?”
He laughs. “Litigation’s not about winning. It’s about tucking something nasty into the past. Trust me, I was the big swinging dick on the deal, and they all—I mean everyone involved—owed me a major debt. Talking about the DA, the defendants, the kid’s family, the mayor’s office. Lady, the governor was rolled up in a corner with his thumb up his ass. This was a race riot waiting to ignite, and Boston knows how long it takes that stench to clear. Elliot Becker figured the way to allow the proud neighborhood dudes to walk and the Irish proles to retire in style. And sister, at eight years out, Elliot Becker hasn’t seen the end of the thank yous.”
“All of this just by pinning the blame on the fuel line manufacturer?”
He flashes a boyish smile and gives me a wink. “Let’s just call that the public story—a necessary element, but not what I’d call the crux of the victory.” He seems about to continue talking out at the stars, but then he feels my hand as I slide it between his legs from behind. I caress the material of his trousers.
“Uh, you mind telling me what you’re up to?” he says casually.
“I was wondering if your favorite war story had put you in the mood,” I say. I press gently with my fingertips. “Well, well.”
He glances over his shoulder and into my eyes.
“Just out of curiosity, how much do you go for?” he asks.
“I…start at two hundred,” I say, feeling my way.
“For?”
I purse my lips. “Why, for these.”
He laughs in genuine disbelief. “How much does all of you go for?”
“Oh, you get all of me in a blow,” I assure him. “But a lay is four hundred, and a combination—including the back door—runs up to five, depending on circumstances.”
“The package deal,” he says in an ironic tone. He turns to face me and shines me his killer smile. “And why would I pay,” he says, “for what I can get for free?”
“You pay for talent,” I say, then glance over his shoulder. “I offer myself free of all charges tonight, however, if you retrieve my favorite scarf.”
He turns to the streak of leopard print silk, still straining to escape, then drooping as if with exhaustion. “Sorry, sweets. I may be a ballsy attorney but roof hopping’s not my shtick.”
I realize, then and there, that my need to pay homage has caused me to miscalculate. Naturally, my plan was to push him as he leaned out for my scarf. But this is not to be. I selected too high a roof, too precarious a reach. I calm myself. Jeanne Moreau would not panic. I must improvise, and to stall I back off while unzipping my skirt, then drop it to my feet and step out of it. Next I u
nbutton my jacket and let that fall behind me. I am wearing a silvery shell. I whisk it up over my head. I am braless and he takes in my breasts—two brown swollen wounds on a chest that is young and taut as a child’s. Then I free my hair from the blouse, and my arms come down. I am all woman again, my breasts small but fleshy. My tummy settles, soft, round, the navel deep. I drop to a stool and peel off my hose. I am—how do you say it?—natural, unshorn, and as I stand, he feels himself go fully erect. It has been years since this has happened so spontaneously. He is half-stunned.
I cast a warning eye. “Payment first. Then I take care of you like never again.”
He flips his wallet over to me in a gesture. I catch it and remove some bills, all while meeting his gaze. “Jacket, please,” I say. He shucks it with a graceful shrug and passes it to me. I tuck his wallet in the breast pocket and drape it over one of the iron chairs. “The rest is up to you,” I say, gesturing at his clothed physique.
For a moment, he hesitates. He is aware of the danger of being recorded these days and is also vaguely conscious that the whole episode—me, the terrace, the scarf—smacks of the playact. What he is not sure about, however, is whether he gives a damn. He has a sudden craving for risk that makes him almost desperate at the prospect that he might come to his senses and leave without having coupled with me. Playing it safe would surely be a suicide of sorts. And what would it mean if I were, in fact, setting him up, if he were exposed as having gotten a little kinky on a hotel terrace? Some sort of sanction from the stiffs at his firm? Roger Coburn openly despises him, but where would they stand if their biggest rainmaker were to walk? Fact is, maybe he could use a bit of a scandal. Fact is, he might enjoy one.
