The Guest Room (15 page)

“Wet dream,” Spencer said, pretending to correct him.

“Wet dream. Agreed. But the next? A nightmare. I mean, how much legal trouble are you in?”

“Me? A lot. My lawyer is going to stress that I thought I was just hiring dancers. The problem is that I used this service before, and the girls—different girls, but still smoking hot imports—were pretty much down for whatever. So, it will depend on how much the police feel like digging and how much the feds feel like prosecuting me. It's early, but it looks like the deal will be something like this: no criminal charges in exchange for my testimony against the escort service.”

“You would testify against the Russians? Are you nuts?”

“I probably don't have a choice. If I don't, I'm looking at charges that may even include sexual assault on a minor—if they can prove either of the girls was underage.”

Richard felt himself cringe reflexively at the word
underage
. He almost said something, but his brother beat him to it. “How would they prove that? And…
either
? Does that mean you fucked them both? You dog, you! Wow!”

“I only fucked the blonde. But I had the other one naked on my lap, and it's not like I was sitting on my hands. That could be a problem if it turns out she's a kid. Besides, that's only part of the nightmare.”

“Only part? God. Can't wait to hear the rest, man.”

“My legal fees are going to be…costly. You would not believe what I had to plunk down. Scary big. And I may be looking at some very costly civil crap.”

“Civil crap?”

“My lawyer has already gotten…overtures…from Chuck's lawyers. And Brandon's.”

“Are you kidding me? What the fuck is that about?”

“It's all just preliminary right now. But he's hearing words like ‘emotional distress.' ‘Mental anguish.' All, of course, caused by my ‘reckless' conduct.”

“Those pricks! Those gutless bastards! Look, I'll call them right now and—”

“Don't. It's Brandon's wife. And I don't know what the deal is with Chuck. It may be nothing at all. This all may go nowhere. But your calling them won't make it better and could make it worse.”

“Bottom line, you're not looking at jail time, right?” Philip said, both hands silencing an imaginary percussion section.

“God, no. Can you imagine? Holy fuck, that would be crazy awful. Still, even my legal fees are going to be astronomical. I wonder…”

“Go on,” Philip encouraged him.

“Do you think your friends at the party would kick in some dough to cover my lawyer?”

“Yeah, I don't see that happening. Didn't everyone already give you a few hundred bucks each for the girls?”

“Most of the guys did. Not all. But this isn't about that. We're not talking a few hundred bucks each. My legal bills are going to be batshit crazy.”

“We're all dealing with fallout,” Philip told him. “I have a fiancée that is still royally pissed. I mean, I have a sick feeling any minute now she is going to call off the wedding.”

“Are you serious?” Richard asked. He had been so appalled at the conversation around him—it was like dining with sexist (and sexually voracious) seventh graders—that he hadn't spoken in a few minutes, and the sound of his voice surprised him.

“I am. And you have to really fuck up to get someone like Nicole so pissed off at you that she calls off a wedding.”

“I am really sorry, Philip.”

His brother rolled his eyes and put out his hands palms up, the universal sign for
what-the-fuck
. Then Philip turned to Spencer and continued. “Meanwhile, my brother here? Leave of absence from work. Not kidding. His company is making him take a leave of absence. How messed up is that? And I think he's going to have to burn his fucking house down and rebuild it. He'll have to salt the dirt and the ashes. I mean, you saw the living room. You saw the front hall. You saw—”

“Spencer?” Richard asked, interrupting his brother and turning toward his brother's friend.

Spencer swallowed the last of the beer in his mug and waited.

“You're younger than me,” Richard began.

“Oh, but I aged in the last two days, man. I have aged a lot.”

“Do you guys just naturally bring hookers to bachelor parties? These days, is that a thing? Is that just…done?”

“These were party girls. Not hookers.”

“You just said you were paying for girls who were down for whatever.”

“Well, yes. But it's a fine line. An escort—a real high-class chick—can cost a lot more than what I was paying. Given what I'd forked over and what I'd told them, I kind of assumed they were going to fuck Philip and fuck you. I did. I mean, I would never admit that in a deposition or a courtroom. But even that was just an assumption. It's not like there was a legal expectation. It's not like I was paying a housekeeper and we laid out precisely what she was supposed to clean—or not clean. And I had no idea that the blonde would let me fuck her. That was just a happy little treat. And, man, it was a treat. Wow…”

Philip clapped those hands of his. “I know, I know, I know. It was like fucking a porn star—but real!”

“Spencer said he had sex with the blonde,” Richard pressed his brother. “And obviously I saw you with her. We all did. But what about Alexandra? Did you have sex with her, too?”

“God, she has a name,” Philip said, his grin a little mordant. “Nope, I only fucked the blonde. Why, my older brother? Do you have a proprietary interest in this Alexandra?”

“No. Of course not.”

“I was just giving you shit. But seriously, what do you think her real name is? I guess we'll find out when they arrest her.”

“Or when they find her corpse,” Spencer added. “Which would, I must admit, decrease dramatically that whole underage issue thing they're holding over my head.”

Philip sat back in his chair and dropped his hands into his lap. “You know, I kind of prefer just viewing them as the blonde and the one with the black hair. It makes this all easier.”

Philip continued to talk, but Richard stopped listening. He was exasperated and had to shut them out.

Still, a part of him was relieved that neither Philip nor Spencer had been with Alexandra. She wasn't his daughter—after the party, he could never view her as a daughter—but he had felt a fatherly pang spring from his chest when he had imagined her with his brother or a creep like Spencer. And the idea of her…dead? Or hiding? Or hurt? It left him woozy. He recalled that moment when she had taken his arm on the stairs in his home, and there in the restaurant he looked down at the spot near his elbow. She was just a kid. It just wasn't fair.

He felt a wave of sadness nearly smother him and wondered where she was now.

Richard was walking two blocks north of the restaurant on his way back to the Millennium when suddenly someone was calling his name and jogging through the afternoon crowds on the sidewalk to catch up to him. It was Spencer.

“Unless I have managed to get very lost or I have early-onset dementia, your hotel's the other way,” he said to his brother's friend when Spencer was beside him.

“I told Philip I had a dentist appointment. Can I walk with you?” He was a little breathless. He dabbed at the sweat on his temples with his handkerchief.

“Sure. But does that mean you really don't have a dentist appointment?”

“Yeah, I lied. I need to talk to you.”

Richard couldn't pinpoint precisely what Spencer would need to discuss with him that he didn't want Philip to hear, but he knew it had something to do with the bachelor party. It had to.

“Okay,” he said, but he was wary.

“I'm sorry about your leave of absence. That sucks.”

“Yeah. It does.”

“But it's paid. Right?”

“It is.”

“Good.”

They were passing a luggage store. Briefly Richard fantasized taking Kristin and Melissa and disappearing somewhere. Someplace you could reach only by airplane.

“And obviously you do pretty well as an investment banker. That's some house you have. And Bronxville? Not a cheap place to live.”

He couldn't see specifically where this was going, but the wariness he had felt from the beginning ratcheted up a notch. “I do fine,” he said evenly.

“I mean, Philip and I don't make anywhere near the scratch you do. We do what we do because we love it. It's not about the money.”

“It's true. You're all saints at the Cravat. A person either teaches Native American kids to read on a reservation in New Mexico or goes to work at a boutique hotel in Chelsea.”

He chuckled. “I hear ya. I just meant we chose not to be, you know, investment bankers.”

“You have no idea how hard I work,” Richard told him. He could have said more. He restrained himself from alluding to what a fuck-up Philip had been in high school and college.

“Oh, I do. You guys work crazy hard.”

“Thank you.”

“But you're paid for it. I mean, you have assets.”

He stopped walking and turned to Spencer. All around them people were passing, sometimes buffered from the world by their earbuds and sometimes in conversations of their own. Reflexively he put his hands on his hips. “Are you about to ask me for money for your own little legal defense fund, Spencer? Is this a follow-up to your feelers at lunch?”

Spencer nodded and then looked boyishly down at his shoes. But Richard could see through the movement. It was an act. Feigned sheepishness. Spencer, like his brother, had no shame. None at all. “Yeah,” he said, finally. “You nailed it. I do need a little help.”

“No. I'm already paying a hefty retainer myself. But even if I weren't, the answer would still be no.”

“Is that it?”

“It is.”

“Well, it's not. I mean, I'm pretty scared. Scared enough that I'm having to make compromises with, you know, who I am. What I stand for,” the fellow said, looking up at him now.

“You stand for nothing, Spencer.”

“I'm honestly not the jerk you think I am. I want your marriage to make it through this mess. I really do. Philip says your wife is kind of hot. And you have a kid. A daughter.”

“I think we're done here,” Richard said, turning and starting to walk away. But as he half expected, Spencer stayed with him.

“We can be done here,” said Spencer, “but it's not in your best interests if we are.”

“No?”

“Nope. I'm thinking of your wife. I'm thinking of your career—at that bank of yours.”

“Why does that sound like a veiled and utterly misguided threat?”

“Whoa! Where did that come from?”

“Spencer, there's no polite way for me to say this: you are seriously creeping me out. I'm not giving you any money. Let it go.”

“I have pictures. Even a little video.”

He stopped walking. He knew what Spencer was suggesting, but he couldn't believe it. Instantly he felt sick. “Of what?” he asked.

“Well, some of you.”

“Do you mean from the party?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You wouldn't have dared. We were all terrified of those Russian strongmen. There's no way you took your phone out.”

“I did. Upstairs.”

“You went upstairs? You went upstairs in my house?”

“Yup. And there you were. There you…both…were.”

“What kind of pervert are you?”

“I think I would have been way more perverted if I hadn't filmed that little thing you brought upstairs. I mean, I would have preferred you weren't in the shots with her. I know you. And I prefer girl-on-girl porn, to be honest. But that's probably more than you need to know about my personal predilections.”

“I should take your phone and break it.”

“Which would be dramatic and awesome, but I have already downloaded the images and video clip to my computer. Also, you would be making my job super easy. I'd make sure the assault got in the papers. Maybe I'd sue you.”

“You're despicable.”

“I'm not. I'm really not. I'm just scared I have nowhere near the war chest I need to get through this.”

“I think you're bluffing. I think you're such a weasel that you wouldn't have risked pissing off the bouncers and taking one single photograph.”

“Try me.” Spencer reached into his pants pocket and offered Richard his phone.

For a long couple of seconds Richard stared at it. On there, if this moron was telling the truth, was the moment that he regretted most in the world, and a noxious mix of guilt and disgust compelled him to steer clear. And yet he had to know whether this was a ruse for quick cash. “We're on a street in the middle of Manhattan. Not here,” he said finally.

“Oh, here's fine,” Spencer countered, and already he was holding the phone so Richard couldn't help but see that his brother's loser friend was telling the truth. There she was, Alexandra, naked on the bed, and there he was naked before her; there she was reaching out for him. Abruptly Spencer paused the video and closed the phone window.

“I have about ten seconds on either side. Plenty of her. Plenty of you. She was about to go down on you when my own girl sort of, you know, distracted me and we moved on.”

“That didn't happen. She didn't—”

“Yeah, I believe that,” Spencer said sarcastically. “Looked good and filthy to me.”

Richard felt himself chewing on the insides of his cheeks and stopped himself. The fact was, Spencer was right. It looked incriminating. Certainly it would appear that way to Kristin. He'd already lied to her about the kiss. This video? It would destroy the little credibility he had left.

“How much do you want?” he asked.

“I have a feeling you take home some mighty righteous bucks. I was thinking twenty-five thousand to start.”

“To start?”