The Gray Zone (13 page)

The thought of him touching any woman’s breast wiped the smile off her face. She could easily imagine the lies this man had told woman after woman in the game of sexual conquest to satisfy his ravenous yet fragile ego. Suddenly she felt hugely impatient, and a wave of rage rose against the futility this man represented and the blather he was churning out for her. She kept her eyes on the salesman’s and saw a slight hesitation enter them, as if he’d picked up on her mood shift.

Easy, girl
, Kelly reprimanded herself. The lessons came back like muscle memory. From within, she heard her husband’s voice: “Impatience is the enemy of a successful con.” Kelly disciplined her mind and returned the broad smile to her lips. Time to appeal to this man’s ego and his greed.

Kelly moved closer so that she could whisper. “Ali. Would you help me convince my husband … ? I would give anything to own that car …”

“Of course, madam,” Ali replied in a low voice. “That’s my specialty.”

Kelly edged forward to bring Ali closer to the perfume on her
satin skin. She assessed her chances.
Couldn’t hurt, might help.
“Is there a
private
office that I could use to call him?”

“Yes, of course, madam.” The salesman looked around the dealership, then led her to the manager’s office. As he stepped around her, his arm brushed her hip, just above her ass. She could see a few pinpricks of sweat on his forehead, and his breath caught just long enough for her to recognize a sexual reaction. Was he attracted to her or to the potential sale?

“Manager’s out to lunch,” said Ali as he ushered Kelly into the glass-fronted office. Kelly smiled sweetly. She put her hand on the phone as if to lift the receiver, then hesitated for a moment, conveying, “I’m uncomfortable speaking to my husband in front of a stranger.” Ali picked up on the hint and left, obsequiously closing the door.

Again Kelly wondered, was it her or the sale?
Who gives a shit,
she thought, and went to work.

As the salesman oozed back to the display floor, Kelly slid into the manager’s chair. She punched in the number for Dial-A-Prayer and sat examining her fingernails while the inspirational message played. When it asked if she wanted another selection, she pressed
1
for
Yes
and heard another prayer. This time she pretended to talk to an extremely thrifty husband who couldn’t possibly understand why she’d want to trade her Mercedes two-seater for a 1968 Corniche. She shot a look out to the sales floor. Ali was chatting with another salesman. She waited until he glanced over, and then she held up one finger, smiling brightly, drew her mouth into a pout that was worthy of Libby, and slid herself down in the chair like a four-year-old.

Her other hand shot out and went to work like a Nevada desert rattler. She tried the top drawer first. Locked.
Shit
. The next drawer down was filled with files. She riffled through, keeping her mouth moving and her eyes darting back to the salesman. She felt her heart pounding.
Where the fuck are the checkbooks?
Once again she could
hear Gillis’s voice in her head: “Corporate checkbooks are usually kept in the lowest drawer.”

She saw Ali heading back to the glass office. She jumped up and shouted into the phone, “I gave you two babies, right on schedule, lost all the weight, gave up my career! It’s my time now!”

The salesman stopped in his tracks and turned back, his hand nervously patting his hair. Still standing, Kelly slid the last desk drawer open with her knee. She peered into it.
Bingo!
Payroll checkbooks. The bank name imprinted on the checks was American Capital Investment.

“Yes!” she hissed, jubilant. She spotted a different salesman looking at her through the glass. Kelly jumped up and down a little, clutching the phone, smiling as if she’d won the lottery. She sat down in the chair behind the desk, lifted the last book of checks onto her lap, and pretending to dig through her purse, carefully pulled out the last twenty pages. She folded them neatly in her purse and replaced the checkbook. She closed the drawer gently.

With a solemn expression on her face, as if being chastised not to spend her $350,000 all in one place, she listened intently to the daily prayer. She was elated to see her salesman had been dispatched to show another poser a car. The anonymous voice on the phone preached: “You are the Lord’s child, and to you he listens. Pray to the Lord, my child, and you shall walk your path through life with the Lord’s hand upon your shoulder.”

“Amen to that,” said Kelly and hung up. She left the office, closing the door carefully behind her, and went up to Ali. She put her hand on his arm.

“I did it! He will be here to see the car in a couple of hours.” She looked at her watch. “Enough time for a little shopping.”

At this, Ali attached himself to her like a tick, indicating to his colleague to take over responsibility for the other customer. He
galloped to his desk at the side of the showroom and brought back his card. Beneath his solicitude, Kelly sensed both an attraction and a repulsion to the woman she was portraying. No matter how upscale the environment of his employment, he knew he could never afford this girl. Right now, Kelly was playing the kind of bitch who sniffed out money the way K-9s sniff out drugs. How could he ever get her interested in him? Kelly could practically hear his thoughts:
If I could get her between the sheets, she’d change her mind. They all do
. Ali touched her hand when he handed her his card, and she pulled away.

“What is your husband’s name?”

Kelly glanced over at an old issue of
Fortune
on the display desk. On the cover, Baron Hilton smiled a victorious smile. Kelly couldn’t resist the irony. Brand names always go over well with salesmen.

“Hilton … Baron Hilton, Junior,” she responded.

The man’s nostrils flared with recognition, but he betrayed nothing in the rest of his body language. Kelly thanked him, promised she’d be back in a couple of hours, and managed to walk out leisurely, looking up at the palm trees and down at the petunias planted in terracotta tubs in front of the showroom. At last she reached the corner where she’d parked the Corolla. She glanced over her shoulder before unlocking the car, then got in and collapsed into the driver’s seat.

But she didn’t have time to stop now. She drove to the Beverly Center, a mall on the eastern edge of Beverly Hills, and pulled the car into a corner of the vast parking garage. Working quickly, she slipped off her Donna Karan dress and pulled on a pea green pantsuit, blandly tailored, and low black pumps. The red wig came off and Kelly worked some gray-tinted mousse through her own honey mane, then pulled it all back into a bun, with a center part. She frizzed out the sides with a comb. Large, black-rimmed glasses with thick lenses distorted her eyes. A mouthpiece pushed her upper lip forward.

On her Sidekick, she pulled up the screens she had downloaded
at the library in Nogales and scrolled through them until she found the one she wanted. After consulting the map, she pulled away from the Beverly Center and headed north, back into residential Beverly Hills, where wide streets lined with palm trees separated the mansions of the rich and famous.

The house she parked in front of was colonnaded and white, like a Southern plantation. A green half-circle of lawn arced around the front like a Christmas tree skirt. A black wrought-iron fence surrounded the property, softened by a square-trimmed hedge.

Even though she had planned this for lunchtime, Kelly knew it could be a long wait. She settled back in her seat and watched the house.

She had called all the Joan Davises on her list the night before from her favorite pay phone—the one next to a restroom in an old Italian restaurant near her hotel. This particular Joan Davis seemed most promising and, unbelievably, her address was listed. Kelly needed her to be white, between fifty and seventy, and, with luck, a combination of wealthy and greedy.

After waiting an hour and a half, Kelly got her chance. The black gates opened and a white Mercedes sports car nosed out into the wide street. Kelly followed surreptitiously.

The car drove straight to Neiman Marcus and stopped at the valet. When the woman got out, Kelly could hardly believe her luck. This Joan Davis was the epitome of a lady who lunches. Every city had them, but the ones in Beverly Hills were the best in the world.

Kelly waited her turn, then handed her car over to the valet. She pulled a black satchel over her shoulder. The pea-green-suit-and-mousy-bun ensemble would be perfect—dowdy enough not to attract the attention of shoppers or salesclerks, respectable enough to put off the watchdogs.

Neiman Marcus at one o’clock on a weekday was a parade of leisure, of women whose compulsion and means had turned them
into professional shoppers. The badge of their uniform was a Louis Vuitton, Prada, Chloé, or Chanel handbag, preferably in black, either a shoulder hugger or a clutch.

Kelly easily spotted her mark, air-kissing a friend by the MAC cosmetics counter. The two were carrying identical black Chanel shoulder bags. To an untrained eye, the women were anywhere between thirty-five and fifty, their bodies slim and toned, their hair blonde and tousled, their skin taut and moisturized. From experience, Kelly knew they were probably well into their fifties—and owed their looks more to their plastic surgeons, dermatologists, and masseuses than to the private yoga instructors and personal chefs they employed. These women accepted their role as trophy wives, doing everything in their power to remain perfect and married to their husbands at least past the decade mark, which legally qualified them as “community property” legitimates.

Keeping an eye on the pair, Kelly located the identical black Chanel purse in the handbag department. The saleslady rang up the purchase and started to wrap it in tissue paper, but Kelly shook her head. The woman shrugged, dropped the purse in a large Neiman Marcus bag, and thanked Kelly for shopping at the store. Kelly thanked her too, and resumed stalking the lady shoppers, wondering what possessed women to become walking free advertisements, flashing a designer’s logo on everything they wore. Her marks moved slowly through the store—lingering in the scarf section, fingering some sunglasses.

As she followed them up the escalator to the second floor, Kelly sent up a furtive prayer that they would bypass the shoe department. Shoes could take all afternoon. One of the women veered toward a display of Stuart Weitzman boots but was pulled away, laughingly, by the other. Kelly was close enough to hear her say she “had to splash the porcelain first.”

Perfect
. Kelly followed the women through the swinging doors and stepped into a stall. She hung her satchel on the hook on the back of the door and then took the purse out of the shopping bag. Swiftly, she pulled a new Chanel lipstick, $500 in crisp bills, a sterling silver compact, and a beautifully embroidered handkerchief out of the satchel—enough goodies to encourage a finders-keepers mentality. She slipped them into the Chanel bag. A few seconds later, she heard the toilets flush and the doors click open. Their private business completed, the women went back to bragging to each other about their conquests.

“I bought that Gucci, wore it once, and returned it. They took it back and put it on the reduced rack. I bought it again two days later for seventy-five percent off.”

“I love sticking it to them, don’t you?” the other responded.

“What’s it to them? They
need
us.” The two giggled as if they were still in junior high, enjoying the steal. Kelly thought they probably used this method regularly. She took a deep breath and clicked the Chanel bag shut. She flushed the unused toilet and casually walked out to the sink where the ladies were washing their hands, positioning herself at the sink next to Joan Davis and placing her new bag on the countertop. They had lowered their voices, and Kelly waited for them to lean in to each other, probably to whisper about
her outfit
, or
that hair
, or
those glasses
—whatever it was about her that conformed least to their view of fashion.

Choosing her moment carefully and using the mirror as a guide, Kelly waited until they weren’t watching. Then she switched her Chanel bag with the one belonging to Joan Davis. Nonchalantly touching up her lipstick, Kelly slipped the purse into her Neiman Marcus bag while the women left the restroom. After a moment, Kelly left too, and within seconds was lost in the crowd of lunchtime shoppers.

HIGH IN A GLEAMING GLASS TOWER ABOVE Los Angeles’s Century City, Jake’s office overlooked a development of skyscrapers. The streets below were named after celestial bodies: Avenue of the Stars, Constellation Boulevard, Galaxy Way. Built on what used to be the back lot of Twentieth Century Fox, Century City continued in the hopes-and-dreams business, housing law firms and talent agencies, weight-loss conglomerates, and plastic surgeons’ offices.

Jake’s domain, a corner suite, was a maze of fastidious untidiness. Law books were grouped into specific areas on the floor, each stack representing a particular case. Charts were pinned to the walls, labeled with the names of different cases. The center of his desk was stacked with city newspapers from all over the country as well as international papers from Europe and Asia. The perimeter of his desk was edged with Redweld expandable pockets barely holding on to their white and yellow innards. Except for one small section, the
width of one cushion, the couch was covered with law journals and popular magazines ranging from the
Atlantic
to
People
. The guest chairs were covered with clippings and notepads, videotapes, DVDs, and CD-ROMs.

The disorderliness belied Jake’s genius but also helped it: His gift was an ability to work on several cases simultaneously, and he needed them all in front of him at once to do that. Even with the noticeable chaos, clutter was not what dominated Jake’s office. What defined the room, down to its low lighting, was a wall covered in television screens—nine in all, built into the cherry bookcases. Jake swayed in front of them, blowing into a saxophone, watching the news programs terrify their audience with reports on freakish accidents and random violence, then soothe them with features on food and celebrities.