The Hinky Velvet Chair (2 page)

Britney put her head close to Jewel’s. “Tell me about your
new partner.” They both glanced at Clay, who seemed to be deep into his
computer.

“He’s weird,” Jewel whispered. “You know how every guy I
work with hits on me?”

Britney grunted. “I can’t believe that one isn’t after
poontang. Those eyes. You look so pooped, I figured you two—”

“It’s not that.” Jewel sent Clay another suspicious look. “I
think he wants to know me better.”

Britney gasped. “You mean he doesn’t want sex?”

“He probably would if I said yes. But I think he wants to
get under my skin.”

“Don’t they all. Honestly!” Britney sounded exasperated. “Where
have all the brainless horndogs gone? Now Digby wants to get all, like,
serious. After three weeks! ‘What makes you tick, Britney?’ Like I want to bare
my soul ’cause we’ve done it. What if I just want to get laid?”

“Exactly!” Thank God for Britney, who made sense.

At this point Randy himself sauntered into the staff room
with a garment bag over his muscular shoulder. Tall and dark, with hot black
eyes that could see through women, he really didn’t need to be magical, too.

Before she could chew Randy out, Clay beckoned him over, and
soon their heads were together. They were getting along better these days,
Jewel noted. Thank goodness.

The staff room was filling up with investigators dumping
their day’s paperwork. Jewel took the thick psychic-spa file to the copy room.

When she got back to the staff room, Clay had moved to the
conference table. He had playing cards in his hands and he was surrounded by
investigators. He seemed to be teaching a class.

“So now Randy signals to me what he’s holding. Don’t look at
me, Randy, look at somebody else. Good. So you’ve got two aces and a king?”

“Queen,” Lolly said, looking at Randy’s cards over his
shoulder.

“That’s the other eyebrow. Okay, good. Wait two beats,
then
look at me.” Clay turned his head. “Now
I’m looking away so I can signal my hand. What have I got? Not you, Randy.
Someone else tell me.”

“Uh, three hearts?” Sayers blurted.

“Very good, Sayers. But what’s wrong with that
interpretation? Three hearts is a bridge term. What card is high? I’ll give the
signal one more time,” Clay said.

“Lemme try,” said Finbow the monosyllabic.

It was miraculous. A dozen contentious, competitive,
bad-mannered investigators reduced to a schoolroom.

“No cards in the staff room!” Ed bellowed from his office
door, and everybody got up fast.

“You were supposed to stay with the car,” Jewel told Randy.

“I grew bored with the automobile.” Randy sat in Jewel’s
chair, looking smug. “Did we earn anything?” he said to Clay. Clay slapped some
money in front of him and he pounced on it.

“Would you mind not corrupting this man?” she said.

Clay was looking in his wallet. “Honey, you have no idea how
corrupt this guy is. He must have been born with a deck in his hand.”

“Very nearly,” Randy said, stuffing money in his pocket.

“If you’ve been teaching him—”

Clay’s voice dropped. “Okay, here’s how I think we should
handle this. You chase after the street vendor.”

“Now, wait a minute—”

“Then you two check out the spa while I go to Thompson’s and
wriggle into the woodwork. You and Randy show up after I’m in.”

“Randy is not on this team,” she stated. Randy looked up
with a wary expression. “How about the background check?” Her tired heart was
dancing.
Undercover!

Clay tossed some printouts on the desk. “Complainant is a
former Jersey showgirl. Her brother, the millionaire, collects antiques,
crackpot stuff. Newage.” He pronounced the word to rhyme with “sewage.”

She smiled. “Real or fake antiques?”

“The machines are fakes. The golddigger looks like the real
thing,” Clay said. He tapped a picture. “And she’s got the right bait for her
mark. This one here is a well-known piece. It’s been in several private
collections over the last century. Keeps disappearing.”

Jewel took the picture. “What is it?” She turned it upside
down. “Is this a chair in the middle?”

“The chair is Hepplewhite. A valuable antique itself. This
unit here,” he pointed to a chunky box covered with dials and Frankenstein
switches, “is the CPU, if you will. The tubes and wires probably do something
like convey mystic vibrations to the subject. The straps, I’m guessing, keep
him from flying out of there like a scalded cat when the current comes up his
rear end.”

Yowch.
“Did they even have electricity back then?”

“Sure. Remember my brass bed? The one you wrecked
for me? Many devices of that vintage favored the juice.”

Randy took the picture from Jewel. “Graham’s Celestial Bed
was electrical. Built in 1778 to treat impotence in men.”

Randy would know. It happened only about five years before
he was born.

“So this guy collects swindling machines? Kinky.”

Clay shrugged. “The chair sits in the middle of the
Katterfelto Miracle Venereal Attraction Accelerator Apparatus, otherwise known
as the Venus Machine. Supposedly it makes you irresistible to the opposite sex.”

“What’s it worth?” she said, studying the picture.

“Maybe half a million dollars. If it’s stolen, we can bust
this golddigger tomorrow. Won’t even have to infiltrate.”

“Not so fast,” she said. “Check the stolen property angle,
Mr. Underworld Connections. If this is the real thing, then who owned it before
her, and did they part with it voluntarily? If not, she’s holding stolen goods.
If it’s still in somebody else’s possession, we’ve got her on counterfeiting
antiques.”

Randy pricked up his ears. “We are investigating a lady?”

“That’s no lady,” Clay said, tossing Randy another picture.

“You
are not
investigating anyone,” Jewel told Randy. “You’re my driver.”

“But you don’t let me drive.” Randy took the picture.

“Hey, he could sleep with her, read her mind, and tell us
all her secrets,” Clay suggested. “Save time. Is that the new suit?” He
indicated the garment bag Randy had draped over Jewel’s chair. “How’s it look?”

“I made them replace the buttons,” Randy said.

Distracted, Jewel squinted. “How did you pay for it? Oh, no.
You didn’t use my credit card again, did you?”

“I have my own credit card, now. The shop offered me one.”

Uh-oh.
“What did
you use for a job reference?”

He drew himself up to his full height. “They didn’t ask.”

She slapped her head with one hand.

“And a social security number?” Clay said, sounding amused.

Randy waved that away. “I made one up. Why? Is it important?”

Jewel slapped her head with both hands. “Argh!”

“Is this the suspect?” Randy picked up the Sovay picture.

“Don’t change the subject,” Jewel said. “You do not ‘make
up’ a social security number to get a credit card!”

Randy ignored this. “What is your parlance? She appears to
be ‘hot.’”

Jewel rolled her eyes. “You are such a horndog!”

“No, seriously. He can, like, read women’s minds in bed,
yuh?” Clay looked innocent. “Our secret weapon.”

“I should like to be a secret weapon,” Randy said.

“By boning suspects? I don’t think so. We need a new angle
on this spa,” she said.

“You puzzle on that,” Clay said. “Let me take point on the
machine. I’ll go in undercover. Then you come in after me.”

“We’ll meet in the morning and talk it over then.”

Clay cupped a hand at his ear. “Sorry, I didn’t catch that.”
He pooched out his kissy-face lips at her and his blue eyes crinkled.

“Nyet, nein, non,”
she said. “You don’t go in alone.”

He cocked his shaggy blond head. “You’re just saying that.”

“I am your senior partner and I say we go in together.” She
felt her blood pressure rising to almost normal levels. God, what she wouldn’t
give for a full night’s rest.

Clay said, “You know, if you got some sleep, your judgment
wouldn’t be impaired. I know Randy didn’t do anything but nooky for two hundred
years, but can’t he spare you shut-eye time?”

“I am present,” Randy said stiffly.

“Dude, you’re
omni
present,”
Clay said, squaring off with her glowering incubus. “Look at this woman. Dark
circles under her eyes. Her hands shake. Her hair’s a mess.”

“Hey!” Jewel said. “I am present.”

Clay shook his finger at Randy. “You may not remember what
being human is like, but a person who misses sleep loses judgment, endurance,
mental acuity—” Jewel swiped at him and he ducked. “—And her reflexes go. This
isn’t about finding the hundredth woman to make you human, is it?” he sneered
at Randy. “It’s your ego.”

“Sh!” Jewel flapped her hands. “Don’t talk about that here!”

Randy inflated his chest, his long black hair bristling.
They were the same height, but Clay was actor-slim. Randy looked like he
bench-pressed taxis.

She began, “Can you two please—”

Randy said with sinister softness, “Jewel is your senior
partner. She chooses her own bedmates.”

“So you’ll leave her alone tonight?” Clay said offensively.

They were nose-to-nose.

Randy looked like thunder. “She did not choose you.”

Jewel picked up the files and headed for the car. They would
knock it off when they saw their audience was gone.

Probably.

In the middle of the night, dead exhausted and fuzzy in the
head, Jewel rolled over in bed and realized something was different. Blindly
she reached out. Her palm touched warm skin.

Then she remembered.

This wasn’t different. It was the same, the new same.
Different from how things used to be, back when she had privacy and loneliness
and perpetual body-hunger.

Her sex demon was in bed with her.

She groaned.

Awake again?
she
heard him say inside her head.

“Why do you ask if you already know?” she said aloud.

He rolled to face her. His hand slid up her leg, around her
bottom, up her back. He pressed gently, so that her back arched and a lot of
muscles stretched.

Give him this: The first week, she used to wake up sore. Now
her body was getting used to him, though her brain was still in first gear. She
arched more and her belly touched his marvelous schlong.

“You want me to ask,” he said aloud, his voice husky.

Tired, tired, she was so tired. Her eyes were gluey with
unfinished sleep.

He traced a circle on the small of her back. Two square
inches of skin woke up. She squeezed her eyes shut. “No, no.”

He moved in again, nuzzling her throat with dream-soft lips.

Her eyes closed. “Can’t it wait? Please... uh... mm.”
Friday, two hours of sleep. Saturday, three hours, but then he did that thing
with the swings and the vat of chocolate pudding. Sunday he had magicked
himself into a football offensive line, and she’d slept ninety minutes. She was
losing short term memory. Her eyeballs were dry. She couldn’t think.

The thing was, he did it for her. He always did it for her.

He bit down, his teeth sharp against the curve of her neck.
Every muscle in her back zinged down to her tingle-tangle, and she arched up
tight against him.

Then he was spinning her back toward sleep, into demonspace,
where he could be anything and do anything and she loved it.

He floated in grayness.

Where are we?

As always, he replied, “Somewhere between your desires and
mine.” He reached for her.

She flinched and floated out of his reach.
If you would please listen to me!

In her head, in demonspace, his voice gonged,
I listen to you every moment. I can count
your breaths. I know when you want me, before you know.

But why does it have
to be all night, every single night?
Her throat tightened. Everything was
such a contest with him.

You are my equal here,
he said, answering the thought. She had no mental privacy, here in his world.

I’m trying to tell
you, not tonight. Don’t you ever rest?

When I know you are
satisfied.

She rolled her eyes.
I
am satisfied every single night!
she yelled into the faceless clouds.
And don’t tell me how many breaths I took
since the last time we did it, because it’s pissing me off!
Suddenly she
was back in her bedroom, her eyes full of exhausted tears. “You
don’t
always know what I want, and I
never asked for this mess!”

That wasn’t fair. He hadn’t asked for it either.

“Don’t you ever settle for a quickie?”

He said, sounding shocked, “I have learned to make it last.”

God yes. He’d learned it well. “Okay, maybe less magic
sometimes?”

“But you love the magic!”

This was true. “But I shouldn’t.” She felt guilty. She
looked away from his nine-inch temptation and tried to assemble a reasonable
argument. “My job is to minimize magic’s impact on the city. I’m not paid to
play sex games with it. Bad things happen to cities that don’t fight magic.
Pittsburgh is total chaos.” That made sense. She must be waking up. “New Orleans
is above water finally, but half of it is blue zones, and tourists are
disappearing nightly. Most of ’em are crackpots, all voodoo-happy, like a bunch
of doped-up runaway teenagers, letting their hair grow in the Haight in the
Summer of Love.”