“Sure. You can count on me.”
As the conversation becomes more stilted, the real purpose of Jack’s call dawns on me. He needs money. Probably lots of money. Grizzled old goat that he is, he’s finally racked up one floozy too many or at least encountered a woman who’s demanding more money to hush up his misdeeds than he’s able to pay. Sixteen years ago, he called me into his living room to tell me the then-current price of buying off a woman was $4 million. Times have changed. Just the other month, a former Fox News Channel honcho was forced to pay $32 million to settle a sexual harassment claim. Sometime soon, Jack’s going to make a large withdrawal from Trish’s account. He wouldn’t be calling unless it was going to be a stupendously large amount. Maybe millions. Maybe more.
The distracting echoes of other conversations on this phone line become quieter. I can still hear the other voices, but not as loudly. Jack, too, is silent.
“You still there?” I ask.
“It’s about women. Roosters have come to roost on my escapades. I finally bit off more than I can chew.”
I think back to our conversation a year ago at the Coterie. Trish, enraged at the idea of surrogacy, had stormed out of the dining room, leaving me alone with Jack. I got up to run after her, but Jack urged me to stay. He was old, he said, and could deal with some companionship. I felt sorry for him, traveling up from the Caribbean only to have his daughter run out like she did. And besides, I knew I could charm my way back into Trish’s good graces, so I reached for my Scotch and asked Jack how he’d been lately.
Jack leaned back, rolled up his sleeves, and cracked his knuckles. “Do you want to know?” he asked. His arms were scaly, reptilian, inflamed with xerosis and dried out by too much sun. He grinned, and when I assured him that I really wanted to know, he mentioned the wife of a famous movie star whom he befriended on the white-sand Cayman beaches. The movie star owned a compound not far from Jack’s own beachside compound, and being that the movie star was stuck in Los Angeles filming a high-budget romcom, Jack and the wife had been laying out their beach blankets together every afternoon. He mentioned the chocolate heiress who lived on the other side of his compound and their yacht excursions to an uncharted atoll. He mentioned the ladies who flocked to the island in search of sugar daddies. He mentioned the scantily clad girlfriends of suspected drug lords who’d winter in nearby cabanas and were appreciative of his attentions.
Jack winked. His voice dropped down a level, requiring me to lean over the restaurant table to hear him. “These are by no means chaste endeavors. The urge gets worse the older I get. Maybe I’m lowering my standards too much, but gimp leg and all, I can’t walk five feet without spotting another woman I want to stick my prick into.”
In retrospect, I wondered if he engineered the whole restaurant conversation—including planting the seed of surrogacy in my mind and egging Trish to walk out on us—for the purpose of seeing the shock in my eyes. Now, listening to Jack on the phone, I feel no shock. Profligacy, even for wealthy septuagenarians, has a cost. No drug lord relishes being cuckolded by an aging banker, or so I guessed.
“I’ll end up okay,” Jack Riggs says over the phone with a voice that suddenly sounds tired and haggard. I could picture him slumped down on a chair in a darkened room, ruing his bad choices. “I’ll have to transfer funds into my account here soon, though, so it’s good to hear you and Tricia will be fine without my money. That’s . . . that’s all I can ask for at this step.”
“I told you: we’re fine.”
“Good to hear, James. Good to hear. I’ve got to—”
The electronic ping . . . ping . . . ping reestablishes itself over the background static.
“Speak up, Jack. I can’t hear you.”
The call cuts off suddenly. My attempts to ring him back don’t go through. He might have fallen down, had a heart attack, suffered a stroke, but there’s no way to reach him. He’s been good to me, a brother-in-arms who accepts my alcoholic foibles. He has people in his employ to watch over him—caretakers, valets, servants who will summon medical assistance should it be needed. But me? At this moment, I’m all alone without a nickel to my name.
Driving, I turn onto Georgetown’s cobblestone streets. My mind races to the immediate questions I need to pose to Trish. Jack’s not the only person who has designs on Trish’s money. I park in Savory Mew’s circular drive, where fresh tire tracks of a recently departed vehicle are visible in the dusting of snow beside Trish’s Mercedes. Inside the house, I go through the rooms calling Trish’s name. She’s been popping Valiums by the handful, so many that it’s easy to imagine her taking too many. A half-eaten rack of lamb, the leftovers from the meal Trish prepared the other night, sits cold on a ceramic platter on the kitchen counter. “Trish? Trish? Where are you?” I say, circling through the living room, the sitting room abundant in tapestries and gilded Louis XV settees, and the oak-paneled library shelved with first editions and leather-bound books that haven’t been opened since Jack Riggs first acquired them decades earlier.
A high-tech electric baby bottle sterilizer lies in the center of the mahogany dining room table where normally a flowered centerpiece would sit. Through its clear plastic top, I peer at a batch of recently steam-sterilized bottles. I bought a sterilizer just like this for Anne Elise, and my first thought is that she must’ve somehow broken into Laurel’s apartment and stolen it. But then I see the cases of baby formula and diapers sitting on chairs around the table. Some of the cases are ripped opened, the contents of those cases spilling to the floor. Plastic Babies“R”Us shopping bags sit on top of new rosewood cradle in the corner of the room. I’d wanted to buy a cradle just like this for Anne Elise, but I couldn’t find one. I lift a pink baby dress from one of the shopping bags, finger its silk fabric. “I didn’t hear you come in,” Trish says, entering the room through the swinging doors leading from the kitchen. She’s wrapped in an aqua-green silk robe I’ve only seen her wear when she’s under the weather. Her hair is in a towel, but it’s been hours since she stepped out of the shower. Upon seeing me, she smiles. “I was upstairs. In the study. Thank you for coming home.”
I lay down the baby dress I’d been holding. No woman buys hundreds if not thousands of dollars’ worth of baby goodies unless she has a baby. Anne Elise. Laurel said she suspected Trish had stolen her baby, but I didn’t think Trish would stoop to such a criminal act. “Why do you have all these baby things?”
Trish sweeps her eyes over everything, expressing surprise, but she can’t deny possessing them. Her smile becomes shakier. She pulls out a chair for herself, stretches her arms, and looks at me with tired eyes. “I’m glad you’ve come home. I’ve got some big news to share with you.”
“What’s that?”
“I threw up again this morning. The second morning in a row. Yesterday, I asked a pharmacist about it, but she said it was impossible to know this early. Today though, two days in a row, there’s no denying it.”
Trish doesn’t seem sick, at least not now, but I ask if she needs me to take her to a doctor. Or an emergency room.
“I’m pregnant,” Trish says. Something tightens within me. She holds her gaze to judge my reaction. “We’re going to have a baby of our own. Isn’t that grand?” She grabs my hand, places it against her cheek, her happy tears sliding from her eyes onto my fingertips.