Sam hit the stop button. Kingsley opened his eyes. He would have kissed the girl, but he decided to save that for later.
“You seduced my wife and videotaped it?” Fuller asked, his hands curling into angry fists.
“Someone sent a goon to my apartment offering me money to rat on Kingsley. I asked to meet who Mr. Goon was working for. Turns out it was your wife. We had a nice long talk about you and her.”
“You fucked Lucy Fuller,” Kingsley said, still laughing. “You and your fetish for straight girls.”
“Straight girls? Not this time,” Sam said. “Lucy Fuller’s a lesbian.”
“My wife is not a lesbian.”
“And yet you two haven’t had sex in ten years,” Sam said. “She told you that?” Fuller asked, horror-stricken.
“Ten years?” Kingsley said. “I barely made it ten days. How do you do it?”
“Lucy says he masturbates all the time. She showed me his porn collection. He confiscated dirty mags from the kids at his church and keeps them for himself.”
“You bitch, how dare you—”
Kingsley took a threatening step forward. Fuller’s face was red, his jaw clenched. He looked like a man on the verge of a meltdown. Kingsley loved it.
“Watch your language,” Kingsley said. “There are ladies present.” He turned around and looked at Sam. “How did you know?”
“That night in your bed when I told you about me and Faith at camp…I hadn’t thought about that in ten years. I didn’t want to think about it. But Faith had said something I hadn’t forgotten. She said she’d been sleeping with her youth pastor’s wife, and the husband had caught them in bed together. Wife gets to stay in the ministry. Faith got sent off to camp, to die. WTL runs the camps. I had a hunch—turns out I was right. Faith Spencer went to WTL’s first church. She was in your youth group,” Sam said to Fuller. “Your wife killed my friend.”
“Your friend killed herself.”
“It was the only way out for us. But not for your wife. She gets to live in luxury, raking in millions of dollars by telling women how to live their lives. She stands in your pulpit and calls us all demon-possessed sinners. And meanwhile, she’s sleeping with every little queer girl that crosses her path.”
“Lucy is a very ill woman.” Fuller lifted his chin. “I’m trying to get her help. But she is not a lesbian.”
“Want to watch the rest of the tape? She seems to think she’s a lesbian.”
“You burn that tape and you burn it right now.” Fuller marched over to the television.
“Go for it,” Sam said. “I made copies. Dozens of them.”
“Can I have one?” Kingsley asked.
Sam glared at him.
Fuller ripped the tape from the VCR and broke it into two pieces.
“Do whatever you want to it,” Sam said. “There’s more where that came from. Your lovely wife and I have been in bed together quite a few times by now. I’ve got a tape from my apartment, one from your bedroom in your house, one from a hotel… I like the hotels. Easier to hide the camera.”
Fuller dropped the tape to the f loor and stomped on it.
“Are you done with your temper tantrum?” Kingsley asked.
Fuller looked at him with a murderous gleam in his eyes.
“What do you want?” Fuller asked.
“I want The Renaissance,” Kingsley asked. “We’ll make it a fair deal, and I’ll pay you half what you paid to the city.”
“Done.”
“And I want all your camps to close,” Kingsley said. “All of them. Every last one of them. You are out of the conversion business.”
“Those camps make us a lot of money,” Fuller said. His every word sounded pained and restrained. If he dropped dead of a heart attack on this f loor right now, Kingsley wouldn’t have been surprised.