Authors: Daphne Uviller
“Yep.”
“Yep? And then you became a cop? That’s it?”
“Yep.”
“I need more, Gregory,” I said, shaking my head, but unable to resist a surge of joy at merely being this close to him again.
“Well, as you and your friend and your mother and your father have all repeatedly pointed out, I don’t look like much of anything besides a Jewish academic. I don’t look like an exterminator and—”
“And you don’t look like an undercover cop,” I concluded, taking a deep breath. Then I pulled back and whacked him on his shoulder as hard as I could.
“Ow!” he said, glaring at me. “What the hell was that for?”
“What
wasn’t
it for, you …” I felt tears spring to my eyes. “You made me feel like shit this whole time for not believing you were an exterminator. You left the second that schmuck on the skateboard made random accusations. And I don’t even know why you’re here at all—this is a federal case. And …” I was crying now, and my nose was running, and I didn’t care. I felt like I was being given another opportunity to get Gregory, to get
to
him, but I had no idea how to pick my way across this new minefield.
Mulrooney appeared at James’s door. “Hey, schoolboy! You finally got here. Man, you gotta come over to the Feds. We got cars that go over thirty! I keep tellin’ him, he gotta come over to the Feds,” Mulrooney said to me as if their camaraderie didn’t look like an alien do- si- do from where I stood. “When the guvament goes on strike, you getta six- week vacation!”
Gregory rolled his eyes.
“Seriously, Samson, you gotta come see this stairway. It’s fuckin’ hilarious.”
Gregory had the good grace to blush. He cleared his throat.
“I’ve seen it. Dude, I’ll be there in a minute.”
Mulrooney headed back in, chuckling to himself. “Six fuckin’ weeks. Man, that was all right.”
“ ‘Dude’?” I said. He shrugged. “You’re such a man of the people.”
“Okay, take it easy.”
“So your name is actually Gregory Samson?”
“Yes. Have dinner with me.”
“We tried that once. It didn’t work,” I said, wanting him to insist.
“Then lunch. A picnic on the Charles Street Pier. To morrow. I’ll answer every one of your questions. Every single one.” He took my hand and threaded his fingers through mine. I blushed at the intimacy and looked around quickly—my mother was still just a few feet away, inside my apartment.
“Fine, but not a picnic.” A few days ago, I might have acquiesced to this romantic overture, but if all secrets were coming out, big and small, I wasn’t going to pretend anymore. “I hate picnics,” I told him defiantly
“That’s un- American.”
“I hate sitting cross- legged—it makes my back hurt,” I told him. “No one brings a sharp enough knife and the tomatoes get all drippy. You wind up carting dirty dishes home, and everything stinks.” I felt ridiculous.
“You’ve thought a lot about this.” He burst out laughing and I almost protested, but then he drew me to him. “We’re going to start again, Zephyr.”
He planted a quick, soft kiss on my lips and turned to go to work.
F
INALLY, AT ONE IN THE MORNING, EVERYONE EXCEPT THE
two men and one woman camping out in James’s apartment manning the surveillance operation had cleared out. The remaining agents were a quiet bunch, subsisting on bags of Chex mix and my mother’s energy drinks, which they were imbibing with gusto.
I lay in bed, exhausted but wired. I was as excited about my second chance with Gregory as I was about the fact that Operation Barcelona was going down in my home. Watching Gregory at work that night, as he conferred with colleagues and spoke gently with Roxana—both of us catching each other’s eyes and sharing knowing glances in the direction of
the staircase—I thought I would combust from sheer longing. I couldn’t stand that he was insisting on having a proper date before we could jump each other again.
I got out of bed after a third failed attempt at sleep and padded into the kitchen, where I lit the stove under the kettle and sank down on the step stool. I wondered how Roxana was doing upstairs. She wasn’t out of the woods yet, not by a long shot. The successful prosecution of the Pelarose family for prostitution—and her own evasion of jail time—depended entirely on her. She had to pretend to Ferdinand/Alonzo that she had changed her mind, that she wanted to keep working for his family, and get him to say incriminating things either on the phone or in person. The FBI also wanted her to catch Senator Smith—who turned out to be a school district superintendent in Queens—in the act of handing over money. Thanks to James’s pre- existing photo and video setup inside Roxana’s apartment, surveillance would be a technological piece of cake.
I had felt sorry for Roxana, watching her trudge upstairs that evening as nothing more than a puppet in the hands of various men. She was a long way from starting over again, a dream she’d thought was within reach when she’d woken up that morning. Now it looked like the FBI and the police would be hanging around for weeks. I tried not to think about what this meant for my cash flow.
The kettle boiled and I took my tea into the living room, curling up in the dark to watch night owls make their way up and down the block. I cringed when a boisterous group passed by, knowing Mrs. Hannaham would renew her request for triple- pane windows the following morning.
Mrs. Hannaham had, in her usual way, made everything worse that evening.
“I knew it,” she kept crowing gleefully to the various law
enforcement officials who had questioned her as a witness. For the occasion, she’d put on her dead husband’s white, ballooning collared shirt; her white sequined pants; and ankle- high white leather boots that I’d never seen before. The effect was that of the Michelin Man if he had sat on Prince and one of the Bangles two decades earlier.
“I told the Zuckermans that there were unseemly people traipsing in and out of that woman’s apartment at all hours. I
told
them. And I told James, though, of course, now I see why he didn’t do anything about all those awful people. He was one of them.” She glared at Roxana, sitting across the room.
Roxana roused herself from her defeated stupor long enough to erupt in a string of beautiful French curses, bestowing upon Mrs. Hannaham a long- overdue tongue- lashing. The cops made a dilatory show of chastising Roxana, clearly enjoying the performance.
My breath caught as someone started up the stoop in the dark, but it was only Cliff, lugging his bass home from a late-night gig. He’d missed the whole thing.
I squinted at him suspiciously through the window as he fished for his keys. What did we really know about him? I was no longer certain there wasn’t a dead body crammed into that case. The “ponytailed jazz musician working late nights” bit
had
to be a cover. After all, how did he afford the rent here?
I sighed and padded back to the kitchen, aimlessly opening and closing cupboards. I opened the fridge and then the freezer, thinking that if I was going to be up all night, I might have time to at least freeze some juice in ice cube trays.
But in the freezer were the ice packs I’d found inside James’s window seat. I had forgotten about his mysterious liquids. I slammed the door closed, finally feeling tired, but certain now that I was never going to fall asleep.
I opened my apartment door and peered across the hall. Two of the agents were dozing and the third, the one who’d been sorting handcuffs earlier, was reading a newspaper.
“Excuse me,” I said. She looked up, unsurprised to find me there in my T-shirt and boxers. “Am I, uh, allowed to talk to her?” I pointed upstairs.
The agent shrugged. “As long as it’s not about the case, sure.” She went back to reading her paper.
I hesitated. Really, an FBI agent should be more explicit. I tiptoed up the stairs and knocked lightly on the door.
“What? What is it?” came Roxana’s panicked voice. She must have been in her living room, wide awake.
“It’s okay, Roxana, it’s just me.”
She opened the door. “I con’t zleep” she said, her gravelly voice rougher than usual. “I con’t zleep at all.”
“I have a question.”
She waved her hand at me as if to say she’d had enough questions for a lifetime and slumped back to the couch.
“Roxana, do you know anything about some liquid James was keeping refrigerated in his window seat downstairs?”
“Hees beer?”
“No, not in the refrigerator. Refriger
ated
. In the window seat. It was in test tubes.”
“Ooooh,” she groaned. “Zay found dat?”
“No, I found it,” I said, alarmed. “I forgot to tell anyone today.”
“Oh, Zepheer.” I waited. She passed her thumb and forefinger along her forehead in a series of pinches. “I dun’t know why he wunted it. I deedn’t ask.”
“Just tell me,” I said, ready for the worst.
“James made us geev him zee used condoms. He wus doing an experiment.”
I wasn’t ready for the worst.
“With the condoms?” I asked, feeling queasy.
“Wees duh sperm. He wunted to be a biologeest when he was a leetle boy. Hees fahder unly laughed at heem.” She shook her head sadly.
I stared at her. Was I supposed to give a rat’s ass about James’s stifled dreams when he had amassed a veritable Baskin Robbins of semen in my house?
“And you don’t know why?” I prodded.
She shook her head, sniffling. My eyes had focused now in her dark apartment, and I spotted an empty bottle of vodka on the floor next to the couch.
“Okay, then, Roxana. You get some sleep.” She nodded morosely.
I made my way downstairs again, pausing only for a second in front of the agent. She glanced at me and I waved.
I had probably just gleaned some very important news about something that was almost definitely evidence. It was crucial that law enforcement be alerted immediately.
I went back inside my apartment and picked up the phone. Luckily, I now had the home number of my very own law enforcement official.
F
ORTY- FIVE MINUTES LATER, AT TWO IN THE MORNING, GREGORY
arrived. He opened my door, waved bashfully at the agents across the hall, muttering something about new information, and then slipped inside my apartment, where I was waiting for him in the dark living room.
“Where are you?” he whispered.
“Here,” I rasped from the couch. I was clutching a throw pillow, my nerves on edge from a deadly combination of sleep deprivation and the singular strain of middle- of- the- night lust.
He felt his way over and sat down on my feet.
“Sorry,” I said, starting to pull them out from under him.
“It’s fine. Leave them,” he said, adjusting himself so that my feet were in his lap, pressing against his crotch, which was already hard. I felt my chest cave in as the oxygen left.
“Do I really need to tell you right now about this creepy new evidence?” I panted, raising myself up on my elbows. I could only make out his silhouette in the light from the street lamp.
“No,” he said gruffly, pressing my feet onto him harder. “I’m just glad there was creepy new evidence you needed to tell me about tonight.”
Gregory got up on his knees, pushed my elbows down and stretched out on top of me. I moaned and closed my eyes.
“Did you lock the door?”
“ Uh- huh,” he said, his breath hot in my ear. He ran his lips along the length of my neck, then nudged the collar of my T-shirt aside and lightly bit my shoulder.
“Zephyr?”
“I’ve got condoms,” I assured him. “Plenty of them. And
not
from James’s stash,” I clarified.
“Did you sleep with that guy who was here the other day? The barefoot one with the beer?”
I froze.
“I don’t think you have a right to ask me that,” I said softly. “Not yet.”
“I know. I know I don’t,” he said quickly.
“You’re still thinking about what LinguaFrank said about me,” I said sharply. We were face- to- face, his hands pinning mine down, our breath mixing into one warm cloud.
“Zephyr,” he pleaded. “Wait, who’s Ling—the skateboard? No. I mean, yeah, at the time I was trying to figure out whether you were one of Roxana’s prostitutes—”
“What!” I freed my hands and heaved him off me.
“What?”
“Oh, shit.” He flopped back on the couch. “I don’t know why I said that. I mean, obviously, I know
now
you’re not. I only asked about that other guy because—”
“Wait,” I said coldly, “you thought I was
a prostitute?”
As I said it, I realized he hadn’t been the only one. I suddenly remembered Senator Smith eyeing my friends and me on the landing the night we’d gone to Soho House, as if he was sizing up the juiciest lobsters in the tank.
“No. I really didn’t. Not at all.” Gregory put his head in his hands. “But when that guy said it, suddenly I wondered if I had lost all judgment. I mean, here I was, investigating what I suspected was a whorehouse, but I was also falling in love with you, and I got scared that I was falling for a subject. I shouldn’t even be involved with you
now.”
“You’re in love with me?” I asked.
“But the only reason I asked about the other guy,” he continued, his voice straining with the effort to persuade me, “is because I just want to know where we’re starting from. I want to know that neither of us is tangled up in something else.” He paused. “Yes, I’m in love with you.”
“I didn’t sleep with him,” I said, happy for the first time since I’d laid eyes on Hayden that this was true. “And I’m not a hooker,” I confirmed, letting a snort of laughter escape.
He reached for me again, letting his palms cup my breasts, feeling their weight in his hands. He squeezed gently.
“I’m really glad,” he whispered hoarsely. “About both.”
T
HE SOUND OF THUNDER ROUSED ME FROM A DEEP SLEEP THE
next morning. My arm automatically shot out to answer the phone.
“Mrs. Hannaham?” I said blearily deciding to change my phone number.
Thunder again, and pounding. I pulled the phone from my cheek and looked at it, slow to understand that no one was on the other end.