The Hinky Bearskin Rug (28 page)

Onika laughed
harder, then started coughing. “Oh-oh, Steven, you’re killing me—” She doubled
over and reached for her highball glass.

“I hope you
croak!” Steven yelled.

Onika turned
red. Jewel reached out a helpless hand. Lena came to her side with a glass of
water and chewed her lower lip while Onika fought for breath.

“I’m — I’m
fine — oh, h-hell—” That set off another fit of coughing. After a long, scary
moment, her snappy old blue eyes widened and she took a slow, deep breath
through her nostrils.

“One sick day,
Onika,” Steven said over the sound of her wheezing. “You miss
one day
and the board will force you out
on a medical. I’ll make them do it!”

The old lady
pulled in a deep breath and held it, then breathed very shallowly and
carefully. Jewel watched her fists clench. “You’re a vulture, Steven,” Onika
said in a weak voice. “You wouldn’t dare.”

Steven
laughed, long and nasty. “Try me.”

Another
convulsion came on. She slapped the phone dead. “Okay,” she squeaked. She
signalled for her highball and Lena handed her water. She waved it away. Lena
put the Scotch in her hand and Onika drank deeply. “That’s better.”

“I don’t
understand,” Jewel said. “Why try so hard to drive Steven crazy?”

Onika cleared
her throat. “It’s a strategy. Don’t trouble your pretty head. It’s all worked
out. I know exactly how to corner him on the edge of his personal cliff.” She
chortled hoarsely. “And then I’m gonna stick out my pinky and push him over the
edge.” Her chest tightened visibly and she took a slug of Scotch. “Honey, call
Harry up from the front door and get out your notary seal. I need two
witnesses. You’ll witness something for me, Miss Thing?”

Jewel nodded,
worried.

Lena went to
the phone. When Harry arrived, he and Jewel signed what turned out to be a
power of attorney, ceding control of Artistic Publishing to Lena “until I get
back from sick leave or I croak,” which didn’t look legal to Jewel, but nobody
was asking her. Lena sealed and notarized the power of attorney. Jewel eyed
her.
Onika must really trust her.

Onika was
still wheezing. One hand kept pawing at her chest, while the other clutched the
Scotch glass. She signed the letter, let out another squeak, grabbed her
throat, and then held absolutely still.

Lena froze,
notary seal in hand, her eyes big.

Harry said, “I’ll
call you an ambulance.”

“Sure,” Onika
wheezed, “In about, oh, ten minutes.”

She went off
into another coughing fit.

“I think now,”
Harry said.

Lena put a
hanky to Onika’s lips and took it away spotted with blood. She told Jewel, “You’d
better go.”

Jewel left, realizing her question was unanswered. What
did Onika hope to accomplish by pushing Steven over the edge?

o0o

When the
Consumer Services investigator was gone, Onika hacked painfully for two solid
minutes. Then she said, “Time to tell you the rest of the plan, I guess.”

“Yeah, explain
to me why you want to drive Steven nuts?” Lena watched her anxiously. The wail
of an ambulance siren sounded outside the window.

Onika sent her
an evil grin. “Revenge, honey. For trying to destroy my company. And for being
mean to you.”

Lena said
nothing.

“Don’t tell me
you don’t want to see him lose his job, his friends, and his sanity. Did you
ever go down into the printing plant?”

Lena frowned. “You’re
coughing less.”

“Ever look
behind the door marked Do Not Enter?”

Lena remembered
tile walls, red votive candles, and Wilma posters. “Yes.” Her eyes widened.

“Ever light a
candle to Wilma?”

Lena shook her
head.

Onika sipped
whisky calmly. Her cough seemed gone. “Guess you were never desperate enough.
My father did, though.” All the creases in her face reshaped into a smile.

“You faked
that attack! Should I send the ambulance away?”

Shaking her
head, Onika showed her the bloody handkerchief. “Here’s the plan.”

It sounded
loony to Lena, but she sat holding Onika’s hand, listening, while the
paramedics strapped her into the stretcher.

As they rolled
the old lady across the sidewalk to the ambulance, Lena said, “You didn’t tell
Jewel Heiss about Wilma.”

“And have her
shut down my company?” Onika coughed. “No way.”

Light broke
for Lena. “That’s why Steven is afraid of Artistic, isn’t it? He’s not afraid
of you. He’s afraid of Wilma!”

“You’re
getting smart, honey.” Onika’s grin disappeared behind an oxygen mask, and then
the double doors slammed shut.

Jewel’s next
stop was Maida Sacker’s office at Baysdorter Boncil. “You’ll be happy to know
that my case is complete.”

Maida narrowed
her eyes. “In what way?”

“As in closed,
finished. I know what caused your little impromptu orgy. Two things, a powerful
aphrodisiac and a toxic corporate culture.”

Maida’s face
showed no recognition of personal guilt. Well, it wouldn’t.

Jewel went on,
“I guess you personally can’t fix the culture, but you could blow the whistle
on them.”

“Let us shelve
your opinions,” Maida said.

“For the moment.
If you don’t want another orgy, however, you can stop ordering Hoby’s pastries.”

“Stop —
pastries?”

“The cinnamon,”
Jewel said, wondering if Clay had trained her well enough at lying, “apparently
comes from a shipment tainted with psychoactive fungal spores. Hoby has
disposed of the problem cinnamon, but you had best keep your people away from
their products for a while. The spores linger in the human system for months.
Even a taste of ordinary cinnamon, in the context of a work atmosphere like
this one, could reactivate the spores and send somebody over the edge.”

At the word
edge,
Maida’s eyes flared.

Jewel crossed
her legs. “Oh, and by the way, I figured out why you phoned in the anonymous
complaint about the orgy. You had been feeling guiltier and guiltier about
Steven molesting your daughter, and the orgy put you over the
edge.”
Maida flinched. Jewel showed her
teeth. “What I don’t know is, how long have you been the majority stockholder
of this firm?”

Maida froze.
Her eyes went deer-in-headlights. “Majority
what?”

“You didn’t
know?”

“I don’t know
it now.”

Jewel nodded. “I
wasn’t sure. So I brought you these.” She tossed a thick wad of photocopies
across the desk, the results of Clay’s research.

With a
suspicious look at Jewel, Maida picked them up and glanced through them. The
bandaid was gone from her hand. Only a faint white mark showed where the bitch
had bit her.

“Note the
signatures,” Jewel said.

Slowly Maida
stood up, as if she didn’t realize she was rising out of her seat. She stared,
riffling through the packet. “I signed these,” she said in a hollow voice.

“Yup.”

“He said — he
said they were for bonds and securities for Lena. He’d stop me before I could
read them.” Her thin lips got thinner. “He did it more and more, the last few
years.” She flipped through the papers again. “These were notarized by someone
outside the company!”

“He was making
you titular owner of the company and filing for Women’s Business Enterprise
certification with the city and the county, so Baysdorter Boncil could get government
contracts.”

Maida looked
up. Jewel recoiled from the blaze in her eyes. “Hugh Boncil must have known,”
she hissed.

Hairs prickled
on the back of Jewel’s neck.

Maida whispered, “I see,” not to Jewel. She seemed to swell
up and grow solid in her flimsy little body. Jewel was impressed.
Maybe all she needed was some real clout.
Not just sleeping-with-the-boss clout.

Jewel hated to
give Maida the benefit of the doubt, but she suggested, “So if you want to kick
someone’s ass up around his neck like a collar, it would appear you are in a
position to do so.”

Maida was
nodding, again not to Jewel.

Alarmed at the
fire in those cold blue eyes, Jewel got up and walked out.
If she kills him in the workplace, I might almost feel guilty.

o0o

“Jewel? Lena
Sacker.”

Jewel was
driving home from Baysdorter Boncil. She felt tired and fragile and fed up. “I
can’t talk now, I’m driving.”

“Don’t talk,
listen. I’m going to Baysdorter Boncil tomorrow to get into Steven’s files.”

Jewel’s eyes
widened. “If you’re planning to break the law, don’t tell me.”

“It’s legit.
I’ll be his office temp for the day.”

“Uh, still
iffy. I can’t solicit an illegal act from an informant.”

“I’m not
asking your permission. I’m just informing you. What’s your E-mail?”

This could be
useful, if neither of them flubbed it. Jewel spoke carefully. “You can forward
legally obtained
evidence to me at
[email protected]” She spelled it.

“Weird E-mail,
girlfriend.”

“I don’t get a
lot of spam.”

“You will
tomorrow. Don’t delete it till you look. By three o’clock at the latest.”

Lena hung up,
presumably to go home to sleep with Jewel’s ex-boyfriend, and Jewel thumbed
speed dial.

“Ask Your
Shrink, you’re on the air, caller.”

“Hi, this is
Emerald again,” Jewel said. “I think I may have a, a social disease and I don’t
know what to do.” She was still shaken by her hink-o-weird moment with Clay.
Could she have caught it from Randy? “A
hinky
social disease.”

“Now,
Emerald, you know what to do. First, you abstain from relations with anyone
else.”

No problem
there. She’d probably never have normal sex with anyone ever again. “Of course.”

“Then
you go to your gynecologist and get checked out.”

“Checked out,
check.”

“Then,
if you test positive, you contact all your recent sex partners and let them
know. It’s the only decent thing to do.”

Jewel groaned.
“I know, I know.”

“Next,
you make an appointment with a psychiatrist and ask him to test you for
grandiose fantasies. Would you like me to spell that?”

“What!?”

“Have you been dumped recently,
Emerald? It’s very common for people who are suffering from a broken heart to
overdramatize their condition. What seems hinky to you is in fact a hormonal
condition that has been documented back to the Middle Ages. Treatment is much
easier now, of course.”
Your
Shrink’s voice stopped sounding sympathetic and took on her
lecturing-the-public tone.
“Victims of
love sickness reported hinky emotional sufferings as long ago as the time of
the Holy Roman Emperors—”

Jewel hung up.
She glanced at the grocery bag with the bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream and
half-gallon of chocolate ice cream beside her. What she needed was mudslide
therapy.

o0o

She spent the
evening at home alone again. She made a pitcher of mudslides and a bowl of
egg-drop-ramen soup and holed up in front of the TV, pretending she wasn’t
jittering to pieces.

Now that she
couldn’t have it, she felt an irrational yearning for plain old sex.

Poor Clay.
He’d been as freaked out as she was.

She wondered
if Clay was worried that he could catch hinky sex from her. Ugh. Thank God she
hadn’t fucked anybody but Clay since she took up with Randy. That would make
for an interesting confession.
Hi, I bet
you’re wondering why I called.

Ugh, ugh.

No point in
panicking before she had some facts. No doctor would be able to diagnose her
problem.
So I’d better ask Randy what he
thinks.

Breathing
deeply, blushing fiercely, trying to pretend she wasn’t making a lame excuse to
call him, she opened her phone.

“C’mon, pick
up, you’re not supposed to go anywhere without your cell.” Her heart was
thumping louder than the ringing in her ear.

“Yes?” Randy’s
voice said. Her chest tightened.

“Hi, um, am I
interrupting you at work?”

“Not at the
moment.” Randy sounded anything but pleased to hear her voice. His tone cut her
like a razor.

“Um, I had a
question for you.”

Silence. A
woman’s voice came from somewhere on Randy’s end, in the same room.
He must be at her place. Velvita’s.

Jewel’s
temperature fell ten degrees and her pulse skyrocketed. Her insides felt cold
and icky and hot. “Look, if this is a bad time, I can call later.”

“Tell me what
you need.” He was so brusque. Never before had he showed her anything but
patience.
He probably thought of it as
subservience.

How to phrase
this?
Did you give me the hinky-sex
disease?

Velvita’s
voice came even closer, saying “—glass of wine?”