Never Too Rich (16 page)

“
Why?” His head was down but his
eyes were looking up at her with deceptive benignity.

“
Why?”
she shot back.
“Because if you suspected me, then that clears me, goddammit.
That’s why!”

He didn’t speak.

Her voice was hushed. “Doesn’t it?”

She saw the merest flicker of his eyelids. “People
have been known to hire killers.”

She stared back at him. “You just don’t give up, do
you?”

“
When it comes to finding a savage
killer, no,” he said finally. His pale eyes seemed to turn into
dark holes, bottomless pits that stretched through flesh, bone, and
time to the blackest reaches of infinity. “And make no mistake,
Miss Arpel. I don’t care whose feet I might have to tread on to get
results.”

His benign smile held no humor.

It was then that Olympia had an inkling of brute
doggedness, as though an unmanned steamroller was starting on a
relentless downhill roll, ready to smash anything that stood in its
path. She stared at him as though really seeing him for the first
time. She was glad she was innocent. She wouldn’t have wanted him
on her trail.

When she spoke again, her voice was low and held a
note of grudging respect. “I’m glad you’re on this case,
detective.”

If he heard her, he gave no indication.

“
How much money in commissions did
Vienna Farrow make for your agency over the past year?”

She was thrown off-balance by the renewed onslaught
of questioning. “A hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty thousand.”
She shrugged wearily. “Somewhere in that neighborhood. I’d have to
check my records for the exact amount.”

He scribbled something into his notebook. “We may
have to check your office records to verify that, so it wouldn’t
hurt for you to have your files ready.”

Olympia sat up exceedingly straight, her electric
vitality and bossiness returning. “Look,” she demanded, “is this
going to take much longer? It’s getting late and I still have
urgent business to attend to.”

“
Are you telling me, Miss Arpel,
that you consider business more pressing than finding the butcher
who made mincemeat of a young woman?”

“
I am not!” she snapped angrily.
“Don’t try to twist my words around.” Then she said, more
moderately, “Look, it’s not going to stop the investigation if I
make a couple of quick phone calls before we continue, is it? For
your information, Vienna had been booked to do a cosmetics shoot,
and I’ve got to find a substitute—and fast. If I don’t, I’ll lose
my biggest account.” She gave a bleak, sardonic smile. “You don’t
think ad agencies and their clients care about little
inconveniences such as death, do you?”

She had risen to her feet halfway through the speech
and stood, feet splayed and hands on hips, staring questioningly
down at him. Her sagging shoulders had returned to their normal
challenging set, he noticed, and every inch of her body quivered
with impatient purpose. Her initial shock had worn off: life went
on for the living.

“
Well?” she demanded. “Do I get to
make my calls, or are only booked criminals allowed to do
that?”

Sighing, he made a motion with his hand. “All
right,” he said. “Go ahead, make your calls. The phone’s already
been dusted for prints, but don’t touch anything else.”

Olympia nodded briskly, compressed her lips, and
marched over to the little pine telephone table between the two
south-facing windows. It was getting late in the afternoon, and
outside, daylight was fast fading into winter’s purplish darkness.
Quickly she got busy on the phone.

First she rang Bernie Fink, whose ad agency, Fink,
Sands, and Sanders, had won the Mystique Cosmetics account. Like it
or not, she had to let him know that Vienna, around whom their new
ad campaign had been designed, would never be making Monday’s
scheduled shoot. Best he learn that from her now, rather than from
the evening news later on.

His reaction when she told him didn’t surprise her;
she’d been expecting an explosion.

“
Listen, Bernie,” she said softly
when he finally ran out of expletives and gave her an opening,
“what would you say to Jerry Hall doing the ads?”

She heard his sharp intake of breath, followed by a
moment of stunned silence. Then: “Would you care to repeat
that?”

Olympia said, a little louder, “What’s the matter,
Bernie? Is the connection bad? Or is your hearing impaired?”

“
I thought I heard you mention
Jerry Hall.”

“
That’s right,” she said, “you did.
Well? Do you want her?”

“
With what’s happened to Vienna,
I’d gladly give my right arm for her. Is she available? And are you
representing her?”

“
No.” Wisely, Olympia held the
receiver away from her ear; his furious squawks could be heard
halfway across the room.

“
Olympia,” he yelled, “what the
fuck are you trying to pull? You’re jerking me around, and I don’t
like it.”

“
Just listen to me for a minute,
will you?” she half-shouted. “I’ve got a new girl who puts even
Jerry to shame, which is the only reason I mentioned her. I mean,
this girl’s red hot and gorgeous . . . but unlike anyone you’ve
ever seen. If you take one part Paulina Porizkova, one part Cindy
Crawford, and two parts Jerry Hall, and you mix them all together
...”

When she hung up four minutes later, Olympia allowed
herself to breathe a little easier. Twenty-three years of marketing
some of the world’s most beautiful female flesh was paying off. In
less than five minutes she’d half-sold Bernie Fink on Shir . . .
Billie Dawn
—sight unseen; the rest would depend on the model
herself. And there Olympia knew she had nothing to worry about.
Billie Dawn’s looks would sell themselves, just as surely as they
would sell five million eyebrow pencils and four million bottles of
shampoo. It was a gut feeling she had, and she couldn’t have
explained why if she tried. She just knew.

She lit a cigarette with calmer fingers and stabbed
out the number of Alfredo Toscani’s studio. “Yeah, this is Olympia
Arpel,” she said through a hazy cloud of smoke. “I need to speak to
Billie Dawn. Put her on, will you?”

One of Alfredo’s assistants put her through to
Alfredo instead.

“
Olympia, baby.” Alfredo didn’t
waste any words. “I told you the contact sheets wouldn’t be ready
until six, six-thir—”

“
I’m not calling about them, Al. I
need to speak to Billie Dawn.”

“
She left some time
ago.”

There was a brief silence; then Olympia said, “She
left?”

“
That’s right, Superagent. Panther
told me she slipped out about half an hour ago.”

“
Th-thanks, Al.” Shakily Olympia
replaced the receiver and stared a million miles out into space.
She had to get hold of Shir . . . Billie Dawn—and fast. She
desperately needed to produce her the first thing Monday morning
for Bernie Fink. And right now it was—she glanced at her wristwatch
and shut her eyes wearily—one past five on Friday
afternoon.

And the girl had disappeared.

Chapter 16

The sun had already gone down when Shirley came up
out of the subway at Astor Place. After the jam-packed train and
urine-soaked platform, the air smelled clean and fresh. Cooper
Union squatted, a dark hulking stone island against the purple
twilight. Waiting for the Third Avenue light to change, four
finger-snapping youths bopped in time to the raucous din of a
shoulder-held ghetto blaster. A little girl, clutching her mother’s
hand, smiled shyly up at Shirley and then quickly hid her face in
her mother’s skirts. Peeked back through the splayed fingers. Hid
again. Peeked again.

Shirley smiled and wiggled her fingertips. The
friendly innocence of the girl warmed her momentarily, distracted
her from thoughts of Snake and the music she’d soon have to
face.

The pedestrian light changed to Walk. Shirley
hurried across, turning her head halfway around to look back behind
her. The little girl, still clasping her mother’s hand, tripped
charmingly along, like a wobbly baby colt. She could hear her
laughter. Then the sharp, strident voice of the mother overrode the
girl’s and cut her laughter short like a knife. Instantly the image
of a raging Snake intruded back into Shirley’s mind. She was so
close to the clubhouse now. Just a few more blocks, and she would
be there.

Her step quickened on the cracked concrete sidewalk
as she hurried east, the tenements becoming grimier the closer to
Snake’s she got. Rings of fluorescents and bare bulbs glared behind
dirty windows and thin curtains. Refuse overflowed from dented
garbage cans, scattered by rummaging winos, the homeless, and the
wind.

The Upper East Side had been so clean. The block
where Olympia had her office now seemed like an imagined slice of
pure heaven . . . and Murray Hill, where Alfredo Toscani had his
town house, had been so groomed and spotless, with front gardens
and carefully sanded, painted woodwork. It might as well have been
located in another galaxy.

By the time she reached Satan’s Warriors’ turf, many
of the depressing tenements had become burnt-out shells, more like
Dresden after the bombing than New York in the 1980’s. As usual,
the ever-present row of lean, chopped Harleys was parked in front
of the clubhouse—an easy quarter of a million dollars’ worth of
customized machinery.

Suddenly Shirley shivered, and not because the
temperature had plunged twenty degrees from that day’s noontime
high. Seeing Snake’s chrome-customized panhead leaning rakishly on
its kickstand had done it. He was home. Waiting. Any desperate
hopes she’d entertained of his not noticing her hours of absence
were dashed.

As she let herself into the clubhouse, she could
hear a Rolling Stones tape blasting from a stereo upstairs. She
shut the front door quietly behind her. After the chilly, windswept
twilight outside, the tenement seemed overheated. Sweltering. Dark.
And smelly. The stench of stale beer and fresh pot hit her in a
wave. There was a crunch underfoot as her right heel made contact
with something soft and metallic. She looked down in disgust and
kicked the crushed Budweiser empty aside.

Five steps later, she nearly tripped over a heavily
muscled biker with oily swept-back hair who was passed out at the
foot of the steep staircase. His mouth yawned wide, displaying
crowbar-rearranged teeth. He was snoring loudly.

Stifling an expression of disgust, Shirley stepped
over him and started up the listing staircase. As she approached
the second-floor landing, the Rolling Stones grew so loud in volume
the stairs were actually vibrating. Drunken voices and raucous
laughter rose briefly behind a closed door. The noises were coming
from the communal clubroom; from the sound of it, everyone was
getting stoned and drunk.

Shirley headed in the opposite direction, to the
rear of the tenement, down a long narrow hall covered with ancient
linoleum so worn that the backing showed through. For a moment she
paused outside the door to the room she and Snake shared. Taking a
deep, bracing breath, she forced a smile to her lips.

“
Snake?” she said hesitantly,
twisting the doorknob and pushing the door open. “Baby?”

She stopped short the instant she stepped into the
room. Soft laughter was coming from over by the window. For a
moment she could only blink rapidly, her smile frozen in place. She
couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Snake was spread out on the
bed, fully clothed, his arms folded behind his head. There was a
look of painful concentration etched on his bearded face, and she
saw why. A naked girl rendered faceless by a curtain of long black
hair was kneeling over him, her head in his lap, holding his penis
in her hand.

Shirley’s brows drew together sharply as the girl
took him in her mouth, her head slowly bobbing up and down.

Shirley turned away quickly, a sick feeling turning
somersaults in her stomach. Of all the terrible scenarios she’d
imagined coming home to, this was not one of them. She’d thought .
. . She blinked back her tears and swallowed the acrid taste of
bile in her throat. She’d always thought that she was Snake’s ole
lady. His one and only, his house-mouse, his common-law wife. But
she wasn’t his one and only. At least not anymore. She could see
that now.

It was a moment before Snake became aware of her.
When he did, he pushed the naked girl roughly aside and sat up, the
grim concentration on his face replaced with dark anger. His yellow
eyes leapt across the room at her. “Hey, bitch,” he snarled, the
giant rings on his fingers flashing silver as he gestured. “Get
your ass over here!”

Shirley shut her eyes and hugged herself. She was
still too shocked to move.

“
Are you gonna come here, or do I
have to come and git ya?”

She still didn’t move.
Couldn’t
move. So much
had happened to her today that she’d barely been able to digest it
all . . . and now there was this to top it all off. It was just too
much.

Before she knew what was happening, his
steel-cleated boots hit the floor with a thud. Three long strides
and he was upon her. His giant hand clamped around her wrist, the
four giant silver rings digging painfully into her bones.

“
You been out again,” he accused
grimly. “Whattsa matter? This place ain’t good enough fer you no
more?” His grip on her wrist tightened even more.

She looked at him through eyes burning with pain.
“You’re hurting me, Snake,” she said quietly.

“
If you think that hurts, you got
another think coming. This ain’t nothin’, li’l filly.” His face
turned even uglier as he smiled. “C’mon.” Not bothering to tuck his
penis back into his pants, he dragged her out into the
hall.