The Hinky Velvet Chair (7 page)

While Griffy went off to get their room ready, Jewel went
into the ladies’ cloakroom in the foyer and called Nina. The cloakroom was as
elegant as a ladies’ room at the opera house, with a pink silk sitting room and
a lavatory beyond.

“Where have you been?” Nina wailed. “I need girl talk!”

“Me, too.” Jewel lowered her voice. “I’m undercover. I need
a favor.”

“And I need a big old drink with salt around the rim.”

“Please, I’m serious. I need you to go to my condo and pick
out some clothes for me and bring them to me.”

“Don’t tell me you’re sleeping around on Randy already!”
Unfortunately, Nina knew all about Randy.

“I’m
undercover,”
Jewel hissed. “I’m on a case.”

“So Randy’s all alone in your apartment?” Nina had been one
of Clay’s best customers, back when he was selling bogus sex therapy on Randy’s
brass bed.

“Back off. He’s on the case with me.”

Nina laughed. “Just testing. So I get to dress you up?”

“Raid my closet.” Jewel thought of her closet and groaned.
She had two kinds of clothes: the polyester body-bags she wore to work, and
weekend slutwear, which was no longer appropriate. The slutwear would have to
do. She gave Virgil’s address. “About a week’s worth. Tell the butler they’re
for
Julia Hess.”

“Wow, an alias
and
a butler! Evening dresses? Jewelry?”

“Who do you think I am, Kim Kardashian?”

“Relax, I’ve been wanting to buy you clothes for years.”

“Nina—” No point asking Nina not to go off the deep end.
Nina lived on the high-dive board.

Her friend gave an evil laugh and hung up.

Jewel came out of the cloakroom, hoping to find Clay, but
Griffy pounced on her for more girl talk.

Randy didn’t turn up until suppertime. The butler made a
noise in the front hall like Ringo Starr beating gently on the biggest garbage
can lid in the world, and here came Randy, sauntering downstairs with Virgil
and Clay.

With them slithered a woman who made Jewel feel fat, homely,
ill-groomed, badly dressed, badly made-up, poor, and short.

Short,
if you
please. Jewel was six feet tall.

Up close, she realized Sovay Sacheverell was five-ten, tops.
Must be the tight gold dress that made her look taller. She had snake hips,
fabulous legs, and shoes to kill for: black, shiny, pointy, and strappy, with
little bows in the back. Jewel tried not to look at her face. Too depressing.

Also the English accent.

“Julia, delightful to meet you, I’ve spent the most
marvelous hour with your
too
exciting
Lord Darner. Isn’t he rugged?” Sovay sat beside Virgil and fluttered beringed
fingers. “He says he measures psychical vibrations in antique furniture.” She
eyed Randy across the wineglasses and gold plates.

Sovay’s scarlet mouth curved, and her eyes were a glorious
hazel, and her hair was black and thick, and her throat was a miracle of smooth
whiteness, and Jewel hated her with every drop of her blood.

Jewel felt it was too bad that she couldn’t cite Sovay
Sacheverell for homewrecking. Griffy was in pain. And charming, dithery old
Virgil wasn’t paying attention.

Maybe she would end up busting Sovay for something else.

Randy drank Virgil’s wine with a look of deep satisfaction
on his too-exciting, rugged, fascinating face. “A nice young claret,” he said,
pursing his lips.

“A connoisseur.” Virgil toasted him. “Drinkable, I think.”

Randy sniffed the glass. “Oh, very.” He was in his element,
surrounded by beautiful women and expensive food. Now Jewel realized she was a
poor hostess as well. The most she’d ever given him was a thorough grounding in
take-out Thai.

“And your expertise is?” Sovay said to Jewel.

“Debunking phonies,” Jewel said, sucking down claret.

“A skeptic! How challenging!” Sovay smiled, and Jewel knew
the challenge would be between them. This bitch would get Randy in bed for
practice. Because her focus was obviously on Virgil. “Virgil-darling, she would
be perfect for our experiment.”

“What experiment?” Clay said. He was wearing what Jewel
thought of as yacht-club casual: boring hundred-dollar khakis and a silky polo.

Jewel’s brain caught up with her ears. “What experiment?”

Virgil clapped his hands. “The Katterfelto Venus Machine. It
hasn’t been used in more than two hundred years. It’s way out of adjustment,
but we’ll tinker. We may get a buzz off it.”

Jewel knew the whites of her eyes were showing. “Randy?”
Call her superstitious, but the mention of two hundred years reminded her of
the brass bed. She’d had as much fun as she could stand with that.

Randy ate a green bean. “Katterfelto boasted that he had
enhanced the charms of beauties who later made advantageous marriages. He
wouldn’t name them, but everyone knows he meant the Gunning sisters. One of
them married two dukes.”

“Two dukes!” Sovay said, showing him her cleavage.

Randy’s eyes gleamed. Jewel could have sworn the bitch’s
hand was on his thigh under the table.

“Surely that’s not possible!” Sovay looked as if she would
have tried it, if she had known bigamy was legal with dukes.

“Miss Gunning married her dukes random-tandem, not as a
team,” Randy murmured, dangling his wineglass in his fingers and looking at
Sovay under drooping eyelids.

Jewel felt her hackles go up. The butler came by with the
claret again and she drained her glass so he could refill it.

Virgil patted her hand. “Now, don’t spoil our fun.” He
reminded her of the family lawyer back in Homonowoc, Wisconsin. Dusty and
old-fashioned on the outside and funny and sexy underneath. “I rely on your
good sense to offset the placebo effect. We’ll play a few hands of poker and
then see how this thing works. Bordeaux?” Before she could answer, Virgil
pointed to one of the forest of crystal wineglasses in front of her and asked
Randy, “You’re familiar with Graham’s work with electricity?”

“The Celestial Bed man,” Sovay said, erupting into a
fountain of flimflam about the effect of electricity on latent auras and psychic
contagion of charismatic individuals on personal property. Virgil, Randy, and
Sovay put their heads together and talked newage with great energy.

Jewel’s eyes glazed over. She tasted the Bordeaux. She
tasted more claret. In desperation, she turned to Clay, whom, she remembered
now, she was supposed to be investigating. “And what do you do, Mr. Dawes?”

Clay smiled his crinkly-eyed smile. “I’ve always wanted to
explore my theories of
sexualis imaginarium
with a skeptic. Do you ever
dream about sex?”

He was just like them. She felt tongue-tied.

“My experiments,” he said with a straight face, “show that
partial submersion in REM sleep, or a hypnogogic state mimicking REM sleep, is
ideal for those moments of transcendent, extradimensional eroticism that—”

She felt herself going down for the third time.

After dinner they all moved into another room and the men,
plus of course Sovay, sat down to their poker game with a bottle of old Scotch.
Jewel hid out in a corner with Griffy, who hadn’t said a word throughout the
meal.

Griffy looked depressed.

“Cheer up,” Jewel said. “It can’t last.”

“I’d like to kill her.”

Looking at Virgil’s turtle head and his slow fumbling with
the cards, Jewel was surprised Griffy wanted to hold onto him. Maybe she didn’t
have any palimony paper.

Griffy watched Sovay. “She doesn’t even like him.” She
turned to Jewel.
“You’re
doing okay.
What’s Lord Darner like?”

“Moody.” The butler brought a tray and glasses to them and,
against her better judgment, Jewel accepted champagne.

Griffy frowned. “But Lord Darner cares about you.”

“How can you tell?” Jewel put her chin on her hand. Randy
was laughing at Sovay. She’d never seen him look so relaxed. Something twinged
inside her chest.

Just then, Randy looked at her. She flushed, as if he’d
caught her feeling something about him. He spoke to Virgil.

Virgil put his cards down. “Julia! Can you play poker?”

“I suck at cards,” she called back. But Virgil sent Clay
over to get her.

Griffy said, “I’ll order drinks for upstairs.”

Clay put his hand on Jewel’s elbow and watched Griffy go
with a grim expression on his face.

“Do I have to do this?” Jewel complained.

“Yes.” Clay didn’t look happy. But by the time they were
seated at the poker table he was the life and soul of the party.

Jewel expected to hate poker, but a funny thing happened.
She started winning.

“Julia, you brute, you can’t raise again!” Sovay cried. “How
long have you been a blonde?” she added,
sotto
voce.

“All my life,” Jewel said. Bottle-brave, she said, “Five or
fold.”

“So difficult when the color begins to fade. The choices
that beset one,” Sovay said, tossing five dollars into the pot.

“See you and raise you,” Clay said.

“I’m in,” Virgil said, and Randy echoed him.

And where was Randy getting the money to play cash poker?

Duh. Clay must be leading her sex demon into temptation.

Virgil poured her a long Scotch. Clay and Randy fawned on
Sovay, but Virgil flirted with Jewel. And for the first time in her life,
tiddly with three kinds of wine and Scotch and victory, she won.

Then Virgil proposed they all go take a look at the
Katterflibbertygibbet Machine upstairs. “Maybe our hardened skeptic will prove
it’s a fraud. Ante up, my dear,” he said, twinkling like her Homonowoc lawyer.
Jewel felt at home. “You’re on a winning streak.”

“Yes, a skeptic is irresistible to a certain type of man,”
Sovay said through her teeth.

“Do you type men, as a rule?” Randy asked Sovay languidly.

“Oo, what type am I?” Clay asked Sovay, frisking like a
damned puppy.

Which was how Jewel found herself sitting on an elegant
green-velvet-padded chair with a curvy gold frame, surrounded by a Rube
Goldberg machine made of mahogany and teakwood, copper-inlaid dials, brass
switches, and mother-of-pearl buttons in gleaming, important-looking rows. It
had more class than her car. She felt underdressed again.

“What does this thing do?” Her voice sounded far away.

“In theory, it’ll make you irresistible to men,” Clay said,
examining the machine. “It’s in nice condition.”

“I’ve cleaned it,” Virgil said. He leaped around the machine
like an aged spider monkey, twiddling this, unscrewing that, adjusting and
clanking and throwing levers. Clay and Randy hemmed and hawed and talked
newage. Randy sounded well-informed on supernatural phenomena, as well he
should. Griffy came in, trailed by the butler and a drinks cart.

Sovay accepted a martini from Griffy with a ‘Thank you’ that
blended condescension toward a social inferior with a case of sulks, and would
have made Jewel want to stab her to the heart with a swizzle stick.

Jewel lounged on the green-velvet-padded chair, feeling not
quite ready to pounce on evildoing.

“Ready!” Virgil threw the switch.

She didn’t feel a thing.

True, getting out of the velvet chair she tripped over a
silver-inlaid rosewood potentiometer and fell on her ass, but that was the
Scotch.

“You’ve been had,” she announced to Sovay from the floor.

“Jew — Julia!” Clay cried. “Are you all right?”

Randy leaped forward to help her to her feet. It comforted
her to see concern on his face. “You’ve suffered no hurt?”

“Only my pride.” She dusted off her fanny. All three men and
the butler goggled at her. “No worse than falling off a donkey.” They stared. “Well?”

Clay swallowed. “I think this case has sprung a leak.”

She glared at him. “And I’m looking right at it.”
This is the last time I take you undercover
anywhere.
Had she said that out loud? She’d had too many Scotches. “Can I
go to bed now?”

“I’ll help,” Randy and Clay said.

But Virgil was at her side before the words were out of
their mouths. “My dear, thank you for your cooperation. Perhaps it is time to
say good night.”

“You think I’m drunk,” she blurted. “Well, I’m not so drunk
I can’t tell this thing is a big old drunk of junk. Very impressive, but a junk
of hunk,” she enunciated.

“Coffee, Griffy?” Virgil said, putting his arm around Jewel.

Griffy sent Jewel a wounded look and poured a cup.

“How do you feel?” Clay said.

“You’re a phony, too!” Jewel accused, then put her hand over
her mouth.
Would Julia Hess say that to
the person Clay was pretending to be?

“Any ill effects?” Virgil ushered her to a lab stool by his
workbench.

Her ears buzzed. “I’m telling you, that thing’s a fake.”

“Check the settings,” Clay said, and Virgil went to fiddle
with the Venus machine. Randy leaned on the bench beside her, sleek and dangerous,
like a Doberman pinscher guarding a baby carriage. Virgil called out numbers
and Clay wrote them down.