Aphrodite

30

Gordon and Wendell Touay were in the small gym in their house, the narrow rectangular space that had originally been built as a laundry room off the garage. Gordon was spotting Wendell’s bench press. He was up to his eighth rep at three hundred and twenty-five pounds when the cell phone rang. The special cell phone. Gordon looked down at his brother, helped him ease the bar into a resting position. Then Gordon picked up the phone, flicked it open, and said, “Yeah.”
“They’re alive,” Alfred Newberg said.
Gordon didn’t say anything. The muscle in his right cheek began to twitch. It pulsed in and out. Did it again. In and out …
“You’re fired,” Newberg said. “You no longer work for this company.”
Gordon slapped at his cheek with his right hand. “I don’t think you want to do that,” he said.
“It’s already done. You are no longer employed by this firm. Your weekly payments have been terminated.”
“We’ll finish the job,” Gordon said.
“You’re free to do whatever you want. But whatever you do now you’re on your own. You don’t work here anymore and you will never work here again.”
Gordon Touay’s right hand closed into a fist now. He kept it clenched so tightly that his entire hand turned red, then white as the blood supply was cut off.
“Whichever one of you idiot freaks I’m talking to,” Newberg said, “I’m assuming you are about to fly into a psychopathic rage. So let me explain something to you. It is not an accident that you have never been allowed to contact me or know where we are. If, by some slim chance, you have been clever enough to learn anything at all, understand that we’ve done video surveillance on you over the years. If anything happens to me, those tapes will be delivered, along with your names, phone number, and address, to the proper authorities. Your activities have been chronicled in great detail. And, believe me, there is no possibility of connecting those activities to this office. If you so much as try to contact me, you will be arrested immediately and spend a very long time in jail.” When Gordon didn’t respond, Newberg added, “This conversation is now over,” and hung up.
Gordon closed up his phone, slowly turned to his brother, who was still lying on his back on the bench, his feet planted firmly on the ground. Gordon repeated Newberg’s words. Then he went back to the bench, added twenty more pounds of weight to the bar, stood over his brother, and began to spot him for his next set of repetitions.
“We’re going to find them,” Wendell Touay said slowly, as he forced his first rep upward. “That’s what you want to do, isn’t it?”
Gordon nodded. “We’re going to find them and we’re going to kill them.”
Wendell finished his tenth rep, laid the bar to resting position. He grabbed a small towel, wiped the sweat from his forehead and then his bare chest. He smiled. “I can’t wait,” he said to his brother.
Then they were both smiling.
Justin drove the Toyota along Highway 27, past the town of Water Mill, and they both saw the road sign pointing to a turn on the left and reading: east end harbor 7 miles. He drove past without turning.
“It’s a little creepy to be back here,” Deena said. “I used to think of this place as so normal. A nice, all-American town. Now I think of it as someplace to be running away from. It feels sinister to me. It doesn’t feel like my home anymore.”
“It’s like everyplace else,” Justin said. “Nothing’s ever as normal as it pretends to be.”
“Jay, I don’t want to have that kind of dark view of life. I don’t want Kenny to have it, either. It scares me.”
He didn’t say anything to reassure her. He didn’t have anything reassuring to say.
Deena understood the reason for his lack of response, and she gave an involuntary shudder. “What’s creepier,” she said, breaking the silence, “is Manwaring coming back here.”
“It’s a conference. Media, business, and politics. Thrown by Herb Borbidge, the Wall Street guy. They’ve had it here the last four or five years. Manwaring was signed up to come months before any of this happened.”
“I know. But if he killed that girl, if he killed Maura Greer, to come back so close to the spot …” She shuddered again. “The paper said the Greers are leading a protest against him.”
“It’s going to be a media circus. Security’s always tight for this thing—all the local forces are called in. I was on call for it the last few years. But this year it’s going to be brutal. It’s why I hope you know what you’re doing.”
They drove until they drew near the town of Montauk, at the very tip of Long Island. Houses became fewer and fewer. The beach terrain turned more rugged. They passed by the popular local sandwich place, Lunch, then Justin slowed the car down as they passed the Havens Hotel & Resort, the ultraluxurious beach and spa complex where Borbidge held his annual conference. The Wall Street mogul had a house— a compound, really—nearby, in East Hampton. He was one of the wealthiest and most dominant figures of the Hamptons social scene. He hosted charity events and presidential campaigners and sometimes threw huge parties just for the hell of it. When he asked someone to participate in his conference, that person didn’t just agree, he or she came running.
Justin had seen Borbidge once, a couple of years ago, at the local breakfast joint in East End Harbor, Art’s Deco Diner. He was in his early fifties, nearly completely bald, and had ears that looked like, with just a little bit of flapping, they could lift off, fly him around the town, and make a nice, comfortable landing at the local airport. He had been having breakfast with a gorgeous actress at least twenty years younger than he was. She had made a name for herself by doing several nude love scenes in successful movies. She was looking adoringly at Borbidge as he paid the breakfast check. He paid no attention to her. He was too busy studying the check for errors.
The conference had started earlier that morning, and security was out in full force. There were four police cars on the highway near the entrance to the grounds of the resort. Justin knew from experience that in addition to the eight uniforms guarding the exterior, there had to be at least that many in plainclothes inside. Depending on who was attending this year, there might also be Secret Service. Two years ago, Clinton had shown up at this thing. Heads of Wall Street, senators, cabinet members, presidents of media conglomerates, opinion makers, even leaders of foreign countries appeared to listen and lecture. This year Giuliani was one of the keynote speakers.
But the person who was clearly causing the biggest ruckus at this year’s event was ex-secretary of Health and Human Services Frank Man-waring.
The protesters were already out in force. There were probably a hundred of them, men and women, holding signs, parading back and forth outside the entrance to the Havens. Several had bullhorns and were periodically screaming out words and phrases such as “Murderer!” and “Tell the truth!” and “What kind of human service is murder?” Justin thought he recognized Maura Greer’s parents from their newspaper and magazine photos. The father looked placid and out of place. The mother was one of the ones with a bullhorn.
Justin cruised by, followed Deena’s instructions as she directed him to go half a mile past the resort, then up to the left, into the oddly barren hills near the ocean. Soon they came to a small house, a shack clearly meant for summer living only. She asked Justin to wait in the car, then she knocked on the door of the shack, opened it herself, and disappeared inside.
Five minutes later, she came out, followed by a small, thin, muscular man—lithe is the word that came to Justin’s mind—with short-cropped brown hair. He wore loose-fitting sweat pants and a tank-top T-shirt. Deena had a grin that spread across her entire face.
“This is Curtis,” she told Justin. “He’s the one I used to work for sometimes, when I was a masseuse.”
“Nice to meet you,” Curtis said and shook Justin’s hand.
Deena’s grin seemed to grow even wider. “I told you. If there’s one thing wealthy people always want at a conference, it’s a massage.”
“And you’re doing the massages for this conference?” Justin asked Deena’s friend.
“I’m providing all the outside work,” Curtis explained. “They don’t have enough regulars to keep up with the demand. I’ve done it since this thing came to the Havens.”
“So you can get us in?” Justin said.
“I can do better than that,” Curtis told him.
And when Justin gave him a look that said, I give—what could be better? Deena jumped in, her words tumbling out. “Guess who has a massage appointment for tomorrow morning? At eleven o’clock.”
That’s when Justin smiled. And his smile was almost as wide as Deena’s.
“And it gets even better,” Deena said. “How can it get any better than that?”
“He wants a massage for two people,” Curtis said. “He asked for two masseuses.”
“Is his wife with him?” Justin asked.
Curtis now joined in the grinning. “Not according to my pals at the hotel,” he said.
Curtis was driving; Deena sat shotgun. Justin, a baseball cap pulled down low over his forehead, was in the backseat. As they made the turn into the Havens driveway, the protesters began booing and screaming. One of them even made a feeble attempt to kick the car, until a policeman came running over and the protester disappeared into the throng.
They drove a few feet farther, inside the gate that separated the property from the road, and reached the security checkpoint. Curtis rolled his window down as a policeman approached the car.
“Oh shit,” Justin murmured.
Deena turned around then, responding to Justin’s tone, and turned in the direction of the policeman.
“You have your passes?” the cop asked.
Curtis nodded, handed three official laminated passes through his window. The cop examined them, glanced at Deena, nonchalantly started to hand the passes back to Curtis, then swiveled back to face Deena. He stared at her for several seconds, then jerked his head to look in the window of the backseat.
Justin lifted his baseball cap, raised his head to meet the cop’s stare. He saw Gary Jenkins’s mouth open, not to speak, simply to take in the rush of air he needed after his gasp. Justin said nothing, nor did he change his expression. Their eyes stayed locked. Then Gary lowered his gaze, handed the passes back in through the driver’s window. Justin thought he saw the cop’s lips move—a silent prayer—as he waved the car forward.
Deena exhaled a breath, the one she’d been afraid to release since Gary had approached the car.
“We’re in,” Curtis said.
“Just barely,” Deena whispered.
Curtis opened the trunk, let them each lift out a collapsible massage table. He asked if they wanted him to stick around, but Justin told him it wasn’t necessary. If they got caught, there was no reason for Curtis to be stuck in the middle of things. With a little luck, he said, they’d call him in a couple of hours to come pick them up.
Justin and Deena lugged their tables to the front desk, told the clerk whom they were there to see. The clerk dialed the room, got the okay, and directed them to suite 317 on the ocean side. A few minutes later they were knocking on the door of the suite and Frank Manwaring, wearing nothing but a white terry-cloth robe, was ushering them inside.
“I told them I wanted two masseuses,” Manwaring said, agitated, as they set the tables down. “I didn’t want a man.”
“Are you going to make me quote the words of the immortal Mick Jagger?” Justin said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s a good lesson for you to learn. ‘You can’t always get what you want,’” Justin told him and, pulling out his gun and pointing it at the ex-secretary, the next thing he told him was to sit down and shut up.
Deena went into the bedroom, came out dragging a woman, who also wore nothing but a terry-cloth robe. The woman was attractive in a plain and simple way, about five foot five, straight black shoulder-length hair. She was thin and fragile looking, and right now she appeared terrified.
Manwaring immediately started telling Justin that he was making a huge mistake, that there were police all over the place, that if he was part of the protest group it was all an error, that nobody knew what was really going on.
“We actually know what’s going on,” Justin told him. “Or at least a big chunk of it. And we’re not part of the protest group. We’re here to get some answers and I have to say, if we don’t get them I’m going to use this gun.”
“If you pull that trigger you will never get past the lobby. You’ll be committing suicide.”
“Mr. Manwaring, you may be right but I can’t say it scares me any. You don’t have any idea of the kind of shit we’ve fallen into. If I pull this trigger, my guess is the only thing it can do is make me a lot more popular than I am right now.”
“I know your voice,” the woman in the robe now said to Justin. She had a soft, whispery tone that Justin thought could never become too harsh or too loud. “I recognize your voice.”
“Congratulations,” Justin told her. “Now please sit down and keep quiet while I ask my questions.”
“You don’t understand,” she said now, her voice rising to a higher pitch as she got more excited. “I recognize your voice. You left messages for me. Warnings. I know you!” Turning to Manwaring, her soft voice as loud as it could get, she said, “He’s the policeman, Frank.” And turning back to Justin she said, “We’ve been trying to find you!”
“Who are you?” he asked.
“You’ve been looking for me,” she told him. “I’m Helen Roag.”
“Jesus Christ,” Justin said to Manwaring. “Are you guys all the same? Does every politician think with his dick?”
“This is not what it appears to be,” Manwaring said.
“That’s good. Because what it appears to be is that you’re a sleazeball married guy who’s being investigated for murdering his mistress, who flushed his career down the toilet, and who’s now f*cking an FBI informant who everybody thinks is dead! What am I missing here?” Justin knew he was on the verge of losing it. His anger was overwhelming him. He remembered the breathing exercises Deena had taught him, part of her yoga session. He slowed down his breath, concentrated on slowing his whole body down. He felt himself getting calmer. The anger was still there, but he was in control of it. “Why were you trying to find me?”
“Because I suspected they were doing the same thing to you that they’ve done to me,” Manwaring said.
“Which is?”
“Distort the truth. Destroy your credibility. Make sure you’re unable to reveal the things you know.”
“We thought you could help us,” Helen Roag said.
“We thought you could do the same for us,” Deena said.
Justin walked over to a tray set on top of the television set. He took a bottle of water off the tray, opened it, and took a long sip. “I need to know what’s going on,” he said. But before Manwaring could respond, the anger erupted again. “Christ,” Justin said, and he stood up, looked around the room for something to throw, to destroy, couldn’t find anything, and forced himself to stop moving. “You’re one of them! Why the hell should I believe anything you tell me?”
Manwaring didn’t say a word. Helen Roag reached over to him, touched his knee. He looked up at her and she nodded. Her eyes turned sad, deeply sad, and she nodded again. Manwaring patted her hand, turned to face Justin and Deena. “I’m a married man who cheats on his wife,” he began. “Nothing else that you think is true is even remotely true.”