He smiled cryptically and took another sip of his drink. “You don’t.”
“In the old days, I would pay you—you know, get down in the muck with you, really sink to your level of leech and—”
“Flattery will get you everywhere. If you want, I can simply send you my legal bills and whatever part of Mrs. Fisher’s ‘treatment’ I’m saddled with. Let you handle it.”
“I would sink to your level and hand you a check for thirty thousand dollars,” he went on. “And you, in turn, would hand me the negatives and the prints. But now? I have no guarantees. You could be storing the digital files anywhere. For all I know, they’re already in the cloud with all your other filth.”
“Okay, you brought me a check today for thirty. I will, of course, take that off your hands. And someday soon, I may ask you for more. But if that day comes, I will give you my assurance that I have deleted the files everywhere and you have nothing at all to worry about. You will have my word as a scholar—and, I guess, a bit of a rake.”
Richard swallowed the last of his beer. “No, you’re not a rake.”
“Well, I can try. Gives me something to aspire to.”
“You’re just a grotesque little parasite. And kind of a loser,” he told him, standing. “And I’ve decided, Spencer, I’m not paying you a penny. Send the pictures to my wife. Share the video with my office. Do it right this second, for all I care.”
Spencer turned to face him, and for the first time Richard felt he had the creep’s full attention. “You will regret that,” he said slowly.
“Nope. I won’t.”
“Sleep on it. I can wait until tomorrow.”
“Oh, I feel okay about this decision. As a matter of fact, I feel pretty damn good about it. One more thing.”
Spencer glared at him, a slow seethe starting to fester. He waited.
“The tab? It’s yours.” Then he turned away and left the restaurant, grinding the remnants of Spencer’s cigarette into the sidewalk as he exited Rapier’s glass door.
…
As Richard was heading north on the FDR Drive, his cell phone rang, and he saw on the dashboard screen that it was Dina Renzi. He was still agitated (though, yes, also rather pleased with himself) after standing up to Spencer Doherty. In addition, he knew, he was still rattled from the morgue. Now that he could only wait to see if or when Spencer dropped the hammer, his head was awash with the vaporous images of the dead. There was one bleeding out on his living room couch. Another in his front hallway. There was one who had been pretty nearly decapitated. And so he waited for the phone to stop ringing, and soon enough he heard the ping that told him he had a message in his voice mail. Only then did he press “listen” and wait for Dina’s voice to fill his car speakers. He didn’t believe there had been enough time for Spencer to send a video or photos to Franklin McCoy and for someone to watch it, digest it, and fashion a diatribe to launch upon his lawyer. But you never know. Maybe it was possible.
Nevertheless, he was pleasantly surprised when he heard Dina’s voice sounding uncharacteristically chipper.
“Hi, Richard. I hope you’re out and about and doing something fun. Call me back. I might have good news. I don’t want to get your hopes up and over the moon, but it sounds like your friends at Franklin McCoy—and I am using friends with at least a small scoop of irony—want to meet next week. Hugh and I have gone back and forth since our meeting the other day. And the vibe I’m getting now is that they want to figure out a way to save face and maybe green-light your return to work. It’s not a done deal, but I think we are, as we like to say, moving in a good direction. You may be back helping big sharks eat little sharks—That is what you do, right?—before you know it. So, call me back. Bye.”
He thought how he might be back in his office in a week or two, and how much he craved that. He considered briefly whether he had made a mistake ignoring his lawyer’s advice and telling Spencer to go fuck himself, but he reminded himself that this decision was about trying to do the right thing. He would not allow himself to regret standing up to the cloacal ooze that purported to be his idiot younger brother’s best friend.
He breathed in deeply through his mouth and tried to keep his attention squarely on the bumper and taillights of the shoddy-looking locksmith van directly ahead of him. He tried to be happy. But it was difficult when he surveyed his world this afternoon. He kept recalling the dead girl in the morgue, which made him think of Alexandra, who most likely was dead now, too.
No, happiness wasn’t possible. He should lower that bar. Accept something less. And again the word normalcy came to him, as it had on this very road earlier in the day. He yearned for it. But he couldn’t imagine what it would take for his life to return to…normal.
…