“I am really sorry, Philip.”
His brother rolled his eyes and put out his hands palms up, the universal sign for what-the-fuck. Then Philip turned to Spencer and continued. “Meanwhile, my brother here? Leave of absence from work. Not kidding. His company is making him take a leave of absence. How messed up is that? And I think he’s going to have to burn his fucking house down and rebuild it. He’ll have to salt the dirt and the ashes. I mean, you saw the living room. You saw the front hall. You saw—”
“Spencer?” Richard asked, interrupting his brother and turning toward his brother’s friend.
Spencer swallowed the last of the beer in his mug and waited.
“You’re younger than me,” Richard began.
“Oh, but I aged in the last two days, man. I have aged a lot.”
“Do you guys just naturally bring hookers to bachelor parties? These days, is that a thing? Is that just…done?”
“These were party girls. Not hookers.”
“You just said you were paying for girls who were down for whatever.”
“Well, yes. But it’s a fine line. An escort—a real high-class chick—can cost a lot more than what I was paying. Given what I’d forked over and what I’d told them, I kind of assumed they were going to fuck Philip and fuck you. I did. I mean, I would never admit that in a deposition or a courtroom. But even that was just an assumption. It’s not like there was a legal expectation. It’s not like I was paying a housekeeper and we laid out precisely what she was supposed to clean—or not clean. And I had no idea that the blonde would let me fuck her. That was just a happy little treat. And, man, it was a treat. Wow…”
Philip clapped those hands of his. “I know, I know, I know. It was like fucking a porn star—but real!”
“Spencer said he had sex with the blonde,” Richard pressed his brother. “And obviously I saw you with her. We all did. But what about Alexandra? Did you have sex with her, too?”
“God, she has a name,” Philip said, his grin a little mordant. “Nope, I only fucked the blonde. Why, my older brother? Do you have a proprietary interest in this Alexandra?”
“No. Of course not.”
“I was just giving you shit. But seriously, what do you think her real name is? I guess we’ll find out when they arrest her.”
“Or when they find her corpse,” Spencer added. “Which would, I must admit, decrease dramatically that whole underage issue thing they’re holding over my head.”
Philip sat back in his chair and dropped his hands into his lap. “You know, I kind of prefer just viewing them as the blonde and the one with the black hair. It makes this all easier.”
Philip continued to talk, but Richard stopped listening. He was exasperated and had to shut them out.
Still, a part of him was relieved that neither Philip nor Spencer had been with Alexandra. She wasn’t his daughter—after the party, he could never view her as a daughter—but he had felt a fatherly pang spring from his chest when he had imagined her with his brother or a creep like Spencer. And the idea of her…dead? Or hiding? Or hurt? It left him woozy. He recalled that moment when she had taken his arm on the stairs in his home, and there in the restaurant he looked down at the spot near his elbow. She was just a kid. It just wasn’t fair.
He felt a wave of sadness nearly smother him and wondered where she was now.
…
Richard was walking two blocks north of the restaurant on his way back to the Millennium when suddenly someone was calling his name and jogging through the afternoon crowds on the sidewalk to catch up to him. It was Spencer.
“Unless I have managed to get very lost or I have early-onset dementia, your hotel’s the other way,” he said to his brother’s friend when Spencer was beside him.
“I told Philip I had a dentist appointment. Can I walk with you?” He was a little breathless. He dabbed at the sweat on his temples with his handkerchief.
“Sure. But does that mean you really don’t have a dentist appointment?”
“Yeah, I lied. I need to talk to you.”
Richard couldn’t pinpoint precisely what Spencer would need to discuss with him that he didn’t want Philip to hear, but he knew it had something to do with the bachelor party. It had to.
“Okay,” he said, but he was wary.
“I’m sorry about your leave of absence. That sucks.”
“Yeah. It does.”
“But it’s paid. Right?”
“It is.”
“Good.”
They were passing a luggage store. Briefly Richard fantasized taking Kristin and Melissa and disappearing somewhere. Someplace you could reach only by airplane.
“And obviously you do pretty well as an investment banker. That’s some house you have. And Bronxville? Not a cheap place to live.”
He couldn’t see specifically where this was going, but the wariness he had felt from the beginning ratcheted up a notch. “I do fine,” he said evenly.