The Finishing School (10 page)

“Gee, thanks. But I shouldn’t.”

“No, seriously. I want you to come up. It’s me and Brianna and a special friend of mine who really wants to hang with you.”

“Who’s that?”

Whitney gave an evil giggle. “It’s a surprise.”

Carmen felt sick with anxiety at the thought of what might be going on up there. Drugs? Orgies? She knew the gossip. Who didn’t? Whitney was all anybody talked about.

“I really can’t,” Carmen replied. “Maybe you’re ahead of where I am for the quiz. I really need to just, like, study all night.”

“I need your notes, girl,” Whitney insisted.

“Okay, well, I guess I could bring them upstairs. Do you have a way to copy them?”

“Duh, yeah, it’s called like a fucking Xerox machine. What do you think?”

Carmen didn’t exactly have a Xerox machine in her own apartment. “Okay. I’ll bring them up, but I can’t stay long.”

“Fine, be that way. But come up now, okay? I mean,
right
now.”

“Okay.”

She’d told Papi she was going upstairs to the Sewards’. His whole face brightened, like he was proud his daughter had such fancy friends, and it made Carmen pity him and want to protect him at the same time. How could she explain that it wasn’t like that?

She took the service elevator up to the penthouse floor. Inside the building, Carmen was help, not a tenant. Even if Whitney invited her, she wouldn’t presume to ride in the front elevator. The service elevator let her out in the back foyer, where the Sewards kept their trash cans. It smelled of garbage and brass polish. All day, every day, Papi polished the building’s brass fixtures. It gave him a rash that he had to treat with a special ointment.

Just as Carmen reached out to press the buzzer, the dead bolt opened from inside.

“Smile, you’re on
Candid Camera
!” Whitney exclaimed, holding a tiny pink phone up to her eye and pressing a button.

“Did you just take my picture?”

“Mmm-hmm. God, I’m starving. Fucking major munchies. Want some smoked salmon or something?” Whitney asked, backing into the kitchen. Her eyes were funny, the pupils nearly invisible pinpricks in the light blue irises. Carmen knew enough to realize that Whitney was high on something.

“No thanks.”

Whitney opened the door of an enormous stainless-steel built-in refrigerator and peered inside. She was dressed exactly as she had been in school earlier that day, in an abbreviated navy sweater, white thigh-highs, and electric blue Pumas, but she’d taken her kilt off and was walking around in teeny-tiny thong panties. She had a small flower tattooed on her lower back. Whitney turned, shoving a piece of orangey pink smoked salmon, sliced so thin it was nearly translucent, into her mouth with her fingers. The panties were sheer enough that Carmen saw Whitney had one of those Brazilian bikini waxes, everything gone except a small triangle, like a stripper. Carmen had read about that in a
Cosmo
magazine she kept hidden under her bed but had never seen it in real life. Whitney had a long, perfect torso and legs, tanned a dusky gold. Carmen tried not to stare, but it was almost impossible to look away from Whitney’s unreal beauty, so recklessly displayed. In Carmen’s house they didn’t prance around half naked.

“Mmm, yum. Salty.” Whitney licked her oily fingers.

“I brought the notes,” Carmen said, holding out her calculus notebook.

“We’ll get to that. Come on. Back in my room.”

Carmen followed Whitney down the hallway leading to the rear bedroom, marveling as she had the previous few times she’d visited at the enormous, empty rooms they passed. A darkened dining room with a glittering chandelier and elaborate murals of New York in the time of the Algonquins. A library whose floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookshelves were filled with perfectly aligned hand-tooled leather books. A “music room” that held no musical instruments but boasted numerous settees, ottomans, and window treatments in candy-hued silk. It went on and on, all of it looking as if no people ever set foot in it. A neutron bomb might’ve hit and killed all the humans, so undisturbed were the spaces. Strange to be fabulously rich and yet leave no impression on your own home.

Whitney turned and walked backward down the hall in front of Carmen. She lifted her phone to her eye again and began snapping Carmen’s picture repeatedly.

“Why are you doing that?” Carmen asked.

Whitney didn’t reply.

They got to Whitney’s bedroom. Whitney whisked in ahead of Carmen, heading straight through to the bathroom door across the room, and disappeared.

The second Carmen stepped over the threshold, she knew something was terribly wrong. Her nose told her. The whole room reeked of shit. There were piles of it in spots on the otherwise pristine white-and-gold carpet. At first Carmen thought dog and racked her brain trying to remember if Whitney had a pet. But no. The turds were human, no doubt about it, and here and there had these strange, bright orange
things
in them, like plastic pellets.

“Whitney?” Carmen called, her voice shaking. She felt cold and dizzy, practically welded to her spot near the door. But events were unfolding exactly like a nightmare, because Carmen simultaneously had a powerful compulsion to see what was in that bathroom. She knew it was bad. She knew she should turn and run screaming right out of that apartment and down fifteen flights of stairs. Yet instead her leaden feet advanced step by step across the floor until she stood right in front of the bathroom door, which Whitney had left slightly ajar.

A wheezing sound emanated from inside. Like ragged breathing. Of its own accord, Carmen’s hand reached out and pushed the bathroom door inward.

Brianna Meyers sat naked on the toilet, reclining backward, almost sliding off, her arms and legs slack. Her eyes, which had been staring into space unseeingly, seemed to flicker in response to Carmen’s appearance. Carmen remembered that Brianna hadn’t been in school today, wondered how long she’d been in Whitney’s bathroom.

“Jesus,” Carmen whispered in shock, stepping all the way into the bathroom. “What is it, Brianna? Are you sick?”

Brianna’s mouth opened and tried to form words, but no sound emerged. Her entire body dripped with sweat. It ran in rivulets down her belly. Her long, dark hair was wet, plastered to her forehead. Carmen looked down and saw streaks of shit on Brianna’s legs and feet. Meanwhile, Whitney sat on the edge of the bathtub idly examining the label on an Ex-Lax package.

“Whitney, Brianna needs a doctor. We should call 911,” Carmen said accusingly.

“It’s something she ate. Right, Bree?” Whitney giggled, but this time Carmen saw real fear in her eyes.

“Listen to the way she’s breathing. Something is really wrong,” Carmen insisted. She still thought there was a possibility of salvaging this situation, of making things normal again. Little did she know.

Whitney’s head jerked up. She was looking past Carmen, at the open doorway behind Carmen’s back.

“Okay,” Whitney said sulkily to whoever was standing behind Carmen. “Here she is. Happy now?”

The split second it took Carmen to whip her head around and see who was behind her was the most nightmarish of all. Because she instinctively knew who she’d see standing in the doorway, and the knowledge was terrible. With Whitney’s words a lot of small events from the previous days snapped into a pattern for Carmen, with the precision of a mathematical sequence. It all made sense. Now she understood perfectly why she’d been lured to Whitney’s apartment. She’d walked right into a trap. A trap she probably wouldn’t get out of alive.

AFTER THE DEA AGENT found the dope in Carmen Reyes’s locker, Patricia Andover excused herself politely, walked back to her office, and, nerves jangling, dialed James at home. It crossed her mind to worry about the trail of telephone records. Two calls this morning so far. But the next few days leading up to the gala were critical and dicey, and she had to make sure the ODs didn’t disturb their carefully laid plans. Neither of them could put a foot wrong if they wanted to pull this off. The calls were necessary and could be explained if it came down to it. They were simply evidence of the headmistress’s offering comfort to a bereaved family.

Charlotte must’ve been at least semiconscious—how unusual!—because when James answered, he pretended Patricia was someone from his campaign. He made her wait for what felt like ages while he went to his library, locked the door, and called back from his cell phone. Patricia sat there with palms sweating and heart pounding. Why put her through this? Screw Charlotte anyway, that drug-addled whore. Patricia could walk around that apartment buck naked, and Charlotte wouldn’t notice. Goddamn junkie, just like her daughter. Patricia hated them both with a passion. Correction—
had
hated them, before Whitney got what she so richly deserved.

The phone on her desk finally rang. She snatched it up.

“Hello?” she said breathlessly.

“How’d it go?”

“Fine. It was her, the one you told me about. Melanie Vargas. She was with some DEA agent.”

“Chinese guy, right?”

“Yes. I’m their best friend now.”

He chuckled. “Good. That’s the way to handle it, I’m telling you. Look at Martha Stewart. She didn’t go to jail for anything she
did
. Just for lying to them. They hate it when you don’t cooperate. Offends their little egos.”

“Well, I cooperated, all right. I even had Ted Siebert go through this song and dance about a search warrant so I could pretend to overrule him. You know, good cop, bad cop.”

“Oh, yeah. I was going to ask you about that, because that prosecutor called me for permission—”

“I know! I was sitting right there. Ted took me way too seriously. He wouldn’t let it drop, so she had to mollify him. I swear, it was almost like he
wanted
them to think we had something to hide.”

They were both silent for a moment.

“Do you think he did it on purpose?” James asked.

“What, over that old thing?” But Patricia considered the possibility.

“You know he hates me.”

“Honestly, with what I have on him, I don’t think he’d dare. He has a position to protect. Not just his family either, but you know he’s very big in the Bar Association now.”

“What a thought.” James laughed sharply, then stopped short, his tone turning ominous. “I’m glad it went well, but still…We need to talk. There’s a problem, you know, Patricia.”

“Yes, I know, dearest,” she said. “You’re angry about Whitney. I want you to understand, I
tried
to keep a lid on things. It wasn’t my fault—”

“Whitney’s the least of our problems. This is serious. It’s about the second set of books.”

“The…books?” Patricia’s heart began to beat erratically.

“You told somebody, didn’t you?”

“About our plan? Of…of course not, darling.”

“You’re lying.”

“James, what’s this about? Why are you talking this way?”

“Somebody’s been tampering. Accessing the computer files behind our backs. Or at least behind
mine
.”

Patricia felt suddenly ill. The fact was, she
had
told somebody. She’d been forced to. Did James really think she could handle the accounting all by herself? Or even the computer? She was not a math-science type. He knew that, and yet he’d refused to help her himself because he didn’t want to take the risk. Naturally she’d had to turn elsewhere. She’d been so careful about whom she’d trusted. What could possibly have gone wrong? But she couldn’t admit this to James now. He’d be furious at her.

“There are two possibilities,” he said. “Either you told someone and
they
invaded the account—
or
you’re fucking around with things behind my back. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming the former.”

“I swear, I didn’t breathe a word to anybody, James. Why would I? How could it even
benefit
me to get somebody else involved?”

“I don’t believe you, Patricia. Who was it? Was it Ted? Didn’t it ever occur to you he’d double-cross us?”

“I would never trust
Ted
. Are you crazy? James, please tell me, is the money missing? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

He paused, then said, “You’re a talented actress, but you don’t fool me.”

“You think I would steal from our future? If money was what I wanted, don’t you think I could’ve gotten it from you by now?”

“How, by blackmailing me?
Please
. How much could you really hope to gain from that? You know my situation.”

She hated the way he was talking. James had promised to marry Patricia after the campaign was over, and she planned to make him keep his word. She’d worked so hard to overcome the obstacles. There was the small matter of finances. The real so-called Seward money belonged to Charlotte, and James had told her from the beginning there was an airtight prenup. He wouldn’t get a red cent if he left. The endowment money would solve that little problem. Then there was the question of bloodline. Patricia had been born Andrewski, the daughter of a maid and a garage mechanic, Polacks from Paterson, New Jersey. The Andover, like the Mrs., had been her own invention. But she was confident James would overlook her origins once the financial end was taken care of. After all, Patricia was polished to a fine sheen, truly deserving of becoming Mrs. Senator Seward, whereas Charlotte spent her days so stoned she could hardly hold her head up.

Patricia couldn’t take this. She’d call his bluff.

“If you don’t believe me, James, I’ll prove it! The Van Allen money doesn’t get wired in until Friday night. I’ll rejigger the accounts, put everything back the way it was, and we’ll pretend this whole thing never happened. We can still be together. We don’t need that money.”

He said nothing.

“James?”

“
I
need it, Patricia,” he said with quiet urgency. “Of course it’s not about the money for me either, but campaigns are expensive. The new headquarters, those sixty-second spots in prime time, that smart Jew I hired away from Bell’s staff.”

“Get it from Charlotte, then!”

She waited to hear what he’d say to this. She had her suspicions. The rumors about what Whitney was doing for money, about the status of their finances. James would never admit he was broke, even if it were true. He’d never let her see that he was desperate.