A Fistful of Rain (10 page)

Fred Chapel came on the line and greeted me like we’d spoken just yesterday, instead of never.

“Miriam, what can I do for you today?”

“I’m in Portland, I don’t know if you heard about that.”

“Yes, Graham told me. How are you feeling?”

“Can I come and see you?”

“Is it urgent?”

“There are nude pictures of me being sold on the Internet.”

“Are you getting a percentage?”

“This isn’t a joke.”

“It was a serious question.”

“Wouldn’t a percentage require my permission? And if I’d given permission, do you think I’d be calling you?”

“Can you be here in twenty minutes?”

“I can be there in ten,” I said, but I was lying.

I was there in eight.

CHAPTER 13

Chapel’s office was near the PSU campus in downtown Portland, on the other side of the Willamette from where I lived, just off Market Street. I pulled into the parking garage just before ten and then rode the elevator up to the offices of Chapel, Jones & Nozemack. The offices were nice, comfortable and quiet, and the receptionist behind the desk was extremely pretty, and she recognized me the moment I came in, giving me a big smile.

I wasn’t even at her desk before she was speaking into her headset, saying, “Mr. Chapel? Miriam Bracca is here to see you . . . yes, sir, right away.”

“You took my line,” I told the receptionist. “Now I don’t know what to say.”

She looked immediately and sincerely apologetic. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s okay.”

“You can head on back.” She indicated the interior door, still giving me the big smile.

“I don’t know where I’m going.”

“Just left and down the hall. You can’t miss it.”

I thanked her and went through the door and left, and down the hall. There were framed posters on the wall, and four of them were Tailhook related—our covers and the European version of the tour advertisement. There were also a couple movie posters featuring actors and directors and writers who lived in the Rose City, and a promotional poster from last year’s Rose Festival. Apparently Chapel, Jones & Nozemack were a civic-minded firm.

The office door was ajar, and I knocked on it before pushing it open further, sticking my head inside. The last lawyer’s office I could really remember spending any time in had been the Multnomah County District Attorney’s, and Chapel’s office bore about as much resemblance to that as fish do to penguins. It was clean and bright, with a chrome desk and black leather chairs and black modular filing cabinets, and two walls were windows, giving a view of the river and the eastern sprawl of the city. I could see Mount Hood in the distance, snow-covered and sharp against the sky. The tinting on the window made the heavens look touched with green.

Chapel came around his desk to greet me, extending one hand while using the other to pull his headset off. The headset looked better suited to Mission Control than the legal profession. Fred Chapel himself was maybe in his early forties, but that was a guess, and maybe not a good one, because nothing else about him really indicated a specific age as much as a lifestyle. He was wearing blue jeans that looked either well cared for or brand-new, and a bright multi-colored sweater, and black leather walking shoes that I knew had to have come from Europe, because that was the only other place I’d ever seen them. His face was smooth and tanned, which meant he either spent a lot of the winter out of town, or under a lamp someplace, and his teeth were very white, and he smiled like he’d known me forever and was always glad to see me.

“Mim, please have a seat,” he said. “You want something to drink? Coffee or water?”

“No. Thanks.”

He dropped back into his chair, smiled. “Graham called about three minutes after you did.”

“Did he?”

“It’s a Tailhook issue as much as it’s an issue for you.”

“I’d think it’s more for me.”

“He said you’d say something like that. But you’re still part of Tailhook.” He extended an open hand. “Did you bring it?”

I hesitated, then pulled the folded sheet from my pocket and handed it to him. Chapel unfolded the paper and looked it over, then raised his gaze past it and looked me over in much the same way, and though there was nothing reductive or objectifying in the gaze, I couldn’t look at him while he did it, and so settled on the view of Mount Hood out the window instead.

“Is it possible that the photograph is a fake?” Fred Chapel asked. “Could someone have edited your head from a publicity shot and then grafted it onto the body of someone else?”

“It’s me.”

“You’re positive?”

“If it’s a fake, they’re working from an original,” I said, shrugging out of my jacket. His look was quizzical, then turned to slight alarm as I began pulling off my overshirt.

I let him worry while I got my arms out of my sleeves, leaving the shirt around my neck, revealing the tank I was wearing beneath. I turned in the chair, left and then right, showing him each of my arms. “The ink’s the same.”

“You’ve had shots showing the tats,” he said, musing as I got my shirt back in place. “Could be whoever did this just edited the tattoos, as well. Doesn’t seem likely, though. Can I ask where you got this copy?”

“My brother gave it to me this morning.”

“Did he say how he got it?”

“Someone e-mailed it to him.”

“Your brother has friends e-mailing him pictures like this of his sister?”

“I think this was a friend asking if he knew about this, rather than saying, hey, your sister’s got a great rack.”

He didn’t smile. “Do you know where the friend got it?”

“Mikel—that’s my brother—said it was off of some pay site, one of those ones that does naked-celebrity pictures.”

“Do you know the name of the site?”

I shook my head. “But I can give Mikel a call, he’ll know.”

“Maybe later. One of my assistants is looking on-line right now. When he gets back to me we’ll want to determine if the sites are the same. Let’s assume for the time being that the picture really is of you, and not a fake, then.”

“I’ve never posed nude for anyone,” I said.

“Never?”

I just looked at him.

“Maybe for a boyfriend, for fun? Or as something romantic between the two of you?”

“You’re confusing me with Vanessa. She’s the one with all the boys. I’m the one who sits in the hotel room with a guitar in her lap and crap on the TV.”

Chapel grinned. “You’re keeping your sense of humor, that’s good.”

“Am I? I’m not trying to be funny.”

“Can I ask you some questions?”

“You mean more questions? Sure.” I freed a cigarette and stopped myself from lighting it long enough to get a nod from him.

He took an ashtray from a desk drawer and slid it over to me. “You have any idea when or where the picture could have been taken?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been in over one hundred hotel rooms this past year, easy. It’s not a dressing room, I’m sure of that. I can’t remember ever being totally naked in a dressing room. In my undies, yeah, but not in the buff.”

“So you think it’s from the tour?”

“It must have been.”

“Do you take drugs?”

The question surprised me, but only a bit. “I did a few on tour.”

“You understand why I’m asking?”

“You’re worried that there might be pictures of that, too.”

“I’m not judging you here, please understand that,” Chapel said. “This is all confidential, between us, unless you tell me you’re going to commit a crime. That happens, I’m obligated to act.”

“Not planning on it.”

“Always good to know. So this is between the two of us. But I want to be prepared if more pictures surface, maybe showing things you’d rather the world didn’t see.”

“I never did drugs alone,” I told him. “Parties sometimes, or with Click, but never alone.”

“What about sex?”

“What about sex?”

He gave me the professionally reassuring smile. “I hear you rock stars get a lot of it.”

“I’m not one of them.”

“You never took a groupie backstage or back to your room?”

“Wasn’t my thing. Van’s thing, sometimes Click’s thing. Never my thing.”

“Are you gay, Mim?”

I stared at him.

“Like I said, I’m not judging. Just asking. I told you Graham called.”

I fidgeted, feeling the heat come back, rising along my neck. “Yeah.”

“I asked him a lot of these questions, too, just for background. He says he remembers you taking a groupie back to the hotel when you were in Montreal. He remembers it because it was the only time he can recall it happening. He also remembers it because it was another woman.”

“I don’t remember doing anything like that.”

“It’s important, because if you took someone back to your room, I’m less inclined to think that’s a setup, rather than you going with a groupie to her house.”

“Well, it never happened,” I said. “So you don’t really need to worry about that.”

Chapel stared at me, then nodded slightly, as if willing to let it go for the time being. “All right, could the picture have been taken with your permission and you just forgot about it?”

I crushed my cigarette out, lit another one. I didn’t want to get bitchy, but I felt it, and I knew it was in my eyes.

“I understand you drink pretty heavily,” Chapel said. “That’s why you’re on hiatus.”

“That’s why Van says I’m on hiatus.”

“I understand that there were a couple of instances on the road where you passed out.”

“I never missed a gig. I never couldn’t play.”

“Would you call it passing out or blacking out?”

I snorted smoke at him. “There’s a difference?”

“When someone passes out, they don’t do anything else. When someone blacks out, they don’t know what else they might be doing.”

“Sometimes I black out,” I admitted.

“So it’s possible you could have had a blackout on the road and someone could have taken these shots then?”

“No.”

“You sound awfully certain considering that you wouldn’t be able to remember.”

“I am.”

“Why?”

“Because when I drink like that, I drink alone. Consequently, I black out alone.”

That stopped the questions for a few moments. Chapel’s hand went to the folded photograph on the desk, almost idly, caressing the edge with his fingers. Then he leaned forward and rested his arms on the desk.

“These are our options as I see it. Further action, or possible action toward prosecution, will require discovering who took the picture, and how. I can get a TRO against the Web site, as soon as it’s identified.”

“TRO?”

“A temporary restraining order.”

“I don’t want temporary. I want it stopped for good.”

“A TRO is the first step in any injunction, so we’ll have to start with that. It won’t be a problem, you’ve got multiple grounds—appropriation, right to publicity, public disclosure of private facts, even emotional distress. The TRO will force the site to take the image down. Then there’s the issue of damages.”

“I don’t want money. I want it stopped.”

“I understand. But there’s the issue of where the photograph came from, how the site acquired it. Until we know who took the picture, we can’t move against them. And if they have multiple images, we could have the same problem, but at a different site. I can contact the Portland PD, let them know about this. Oregon has a specific statute for this kind of crime, the ‘Video Voyeur’ statute—a lot of states have yet to address this issue specifically, so we’re ahead there. We can even contact the FBI, since this is obviously an interstate activity.”

There was a new tone in his voice, not a lack of confidence, but almost a hesitation, a lack of conviction.

“You don’t sound certain,” I said.

Chapel made a slight shrug. “We talk to law enforcement, and it really doesn’t matter if it’s local or federal, we’ll get publicity. As soon as that happens, this picture will be everywhere, we’re talking millions of people around the world seeing it. A TRO won’t stop people from e-mailing it to each other.”

I just sat there, trying to fathom a million people looking at the picture. It was too abstract to be humiliating. Sitting opposite Chapel when he looked at the photo was one thing; a million teen boys at their computers was something else. But then I thought of those three kids at the Fred Meyer, the way they’d looked at me then, and the way they would look at me now.

It hit me that I was totally helpless, and I opened my mouth to tell Chapel as much, but then there was a knock at his office door. I turned in my chair as another man leaned through the doorway. He was younger and dressed a little more formally than Chapel. He gave me a glance, then looked to Chapel.

“Fred? You should check your e-mail.”

“You find the site?”

The man glanced my way again, as if he couldn’t help it. “Two of them. You should check the e-mail. I’ll be in my office.”

He pulled the door gently shut after him. Chapel was already clicking his mouse, focused on his monitor. I felt the same slow-motion-can’t-stop-it-something’s-wrong feeling coming on me, the way it had when I’d entered the lobby in Sydney to see Van and Click and Graham all waiting to give me my walking papers. My hands were trembling, the way they never trembled before a gig.

“How bad?” I asked.

He frowned at the screen. I got out of the chair, started to come around his desk. Chapel put a hand up, as if ready to swivel the monitor away from me, but I was already at his shoulder, then, and he dropped the arm, conceding.

The pictures were open in a viewing window on the monitor, side by side, and it took only an instant to realize why his instinct had been to hide them from me, only an instant to realize just how bad it was.

What stung was the pose—hand on my hip, hips cocked to the side, pouting. It would have been a convincing mockery of a Van pose, if I’d been clothed and not holding a bottle of beer. As it was, it looked like I was giving the photographer an eager show.

The border—again the blue and red motif—once more named me as Miriam Bracca of Tailhook, but this time the caption read
HERE SHE CUMS AGAIN
.

It was Picture Three, though, that was like a punch in the stomach.

I was lying on my back, on a bed, the sheets mussed beneath me, and again I was totally naked. The shot was from above, as if the photographer had straddled my body, looking down. My eyes were half-closed, my mouth slightly open, my hair a mess, and some of it hung over my eyes, but not enough to disguise my features. My right hand extended up above the pillows and out of the frame, with the shot cropped just above my knees.

My left hand was resting between my thighs.

The caption read
COME MAKE PUSSY PURR
.

Chapel hadn’t moved in his chair, hadn’t even turned to look at me, but I put my back to him, anyway, trying to find something else to see. Mount Hood didn’t help; it didn’t matter where I looked.