Hints of Heloise (2 page)

Was that all he wanted to establish? Maybe he wasn't as big a dick as he seemed. “I understand. If you'd like to work with one of my associates—”

“You don't get it. I'm not paying anymore. Now that I know who you are and where you live, I think you ought to take care of me for free.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because if you don't, I'm going to tell everyone you're a whore.”

“Which would expose you as my client.”

“Who cares? I'm divorced. Besides, how are you going to prove I was a customer? I can out you without exposing myself.”

“There are your credit card charges.” American Express Business Platinum, the kind that accrued airline miles. She was better at remembering the cards than the men themselves. The cards were tangible, concrete. The cards were individual in a way the men were not.

“Business expenses. Consulting fees, right? That's what it says on the bill.”

“Why would a personal injury lawyer need to consult with the Women's Full Employment Network?”

“To figure out how to value the lifelong earning power of women injured in traditional pink-collar jobs.” His smile was triumphant, ugly and triumphant. He had clearly put a lot of thought into his answer and was thrilled at the chance to deliver it so readily. But then he frowned, which made his small eyes even smaller. It would be fair to describe his face as piggish, with those eyes and the pinkish nose, which was very broad at the base and more than a little upturned. “How did you know I was a personal injury lawyer?”

“I research my clients pretty carefully.”

“Well, maybe it's time that someone researched
you
pretty carefully. Cops. A prosecutor hungry for a high-profile case. The call girl on the cul-de-sac. It would make a juicy headline.”

“Bill, I assure you I have no intention of telling anyone about our business relationship if that's what you're worried about.”

“What I'm worried about is that you're expensive and I wouldn't mind culling you from my overhead. You bill more per hour than I do. Where do you get off, charging that much?”

“I get off,” she said, “where you get off. You know, right at that moment I take my little finger—”

“Shut up.” His voice was so loud that it broke through the dreamy demeanor of the counter girl, who started and exchanged a worried look with Heloise. A moment ago, Heloise had been pitying her, and now the girl was concerned about Heloise. That was how quickly things could change. “Look, this is the option. I get free rides for life or I make sure that everyone knows what you are. Everyone. Including your cute little boy.”

He was shrewd, bringing Scott into the conversation. Scott was her soft spot, her only vulnerability. Before she got pregnant, when she was the only person she had to care for, she had done a pretty shitty job of it. But Scott had changed all that, even before he was a flesh-and-blood reality. She would do anything to protect Scott, anything. Ask Brad for a favor, if need be, although she hated leaning on Brad.

She might even go to Scott's father, not that he had any idea he was Scott's father, and she was never going to inform him of that fact. But she didn't like asking him for favors under any circumstances. Scott's father thought he was in her debt. She needed to maintain the equilibrium afforded by that lie.

“I can't afford to work for free.”

“It won't be every week. And I understand I won't have bumping rights over the paying customers. I'm just saying that we'll go on as before, once or twice a month, but I don't pay for it anymore. It will be like dating, without all the boring socializing. What do the kids call it? A booty call.”

“I have to think about this,” she said.

“No you don't. See you next Wednesday.”

He hadn't even offered to pay for her chai or buy her a muffin.

 

S
HE CALLED
B
RAD FIRST,
but the moment she saw him, waiting in the old luncheonette on Eastern Avenue, she realized it had been a mistake. Brad had taken an oath to serve and protect, but the oath had been for those who obeyed the laws, not those who lived in flagrant disregard of them. He had already done more for her than she had any right to expect. He owed her nothing.

Still, it was hard for a woman, any woman, not to exploit a man's enduring love, not to go back to that well and see if you could still draw on it. Brad knew her and he loved her. Well, he thought he knew her and he loved the person he thought he knew. Close enough.

“You look great,” he said, and she knew he wasn't being polite. Brad preferred daytime Heloise to the nighttime version, always had.

“Thanks.”

“Why did you want to see me?”

I need advice on how to get a shameless, grasping parasite out of my life.
But she didn't want to plunge right in. It was crass.

“It's been too long.”

He placed his hands over hers, held them on the cool Formica tabletop, indifferent to the coffee he had ordered. The coffee here was awful, had always been awful. She was not one to romanticize these old diners. Starbucks was taking over the world by offering a superior product, changing people's perceptions about what they deserved and what they could afford. In her private daydreams, she would like to be the Starbucks of sex-for-hire, delivering guaranteed quality to business travelers everywhere. No, she wouldn't call it Starfucks, although she had seen that joke on the Internet. For one thing, it would sound like one of those celebrity impersonator services. Besides, it wasn't elegant. She wanted to take a word or reference that had no meaning in the culture and make it come to mean good, no-strings, quid pro quo sex. Like…“zephyr.” Only not “zephyr,” because it denoted quickness, and she wanted to market sex as a spa service for men, a day or night of pampering with a long list of services and options. So not “zephyr,” but a word like it, one that sounded cool and elegant but whose real meaning was virtually unknown and therefore malleable in the public imagination. Amazon.com was another good example. Or eBay. Familiar yet new.

But that fantasy seemed more out of reach than ever. Now she would settle for keeping the life she already had.

“Seriously, Heloise. What's up?”

“I missed you,” she said lamely, yet not inaccurately. She missed Brad's adoration, which never seemed to dim. For a long time she had expected him to marry someone else, to pursue the average family he claimed he wanted to have with her. But now that they were both pushing forty with a very short stick, she was beginning to think that Brad liked things just the way they were. As long as he carried a torch for a woman he could never have, he didn't have to marry or have kids. Back when Scott was born, Brad had dared to believe he was the father, had even hopefully volunteered to take a DNA test. She had to break it to him very gently that he wasn't, and that she didn't want him to be part of Scott's life under any circumstances, even as an uncle or Mommy's “friend.” She couldn't afford for Scott to have any contact with her old life, no matter how remote or innocuous.

“Everyone okay? You, Scott? Melina?” Melina was her nanny, the single most important person in her employ. The girls could come and go, but Heloise could never make things work without Melina.

“We're all fine.”

“So what's this meeting about?”

“Like I said, I missed you.” She sounded more persuasive this time.

“Weezie, Weezie, Weezie,” he said, using the pet name that only he was allowed. “Why didn't things work out between us?”

“I always felt it was because I wanted to continue working after marriage.”

“Well, yeah, but…it's not like I was opposed to you working on principle. It was just—a cop can't be married to a prostitute, Weezie.”

“It's my career,” she said. It was her career and her excuse. No matter what she had chosen as her vocation, Brad would never have been the right man for her. He had taken care of her on the streets, asking nothing in return, and she had taken him to bed a time or two, grateful for all he did. But it had never been a big passion for her. It had, in fact, been more like a free sample, the kind of thing a corporation does to build up community goodwill. A free sample to someone she genuinely liked, but a freebie nonetheless, like one of those little boxes of detergent left in the mailbox. You might wash your clothes in it, but it probably didn't change your preferences in the long run.

They held hands, staring out at Eastern Avenue. They had been sweeping this area lately, Brad said, and the trade had dried up. But they both knew that was only temporary. Eventually the girls and the boys came back, and the men were never far behind. They all came back, springing up like mushrooms after a rain.

 

H
ER MEETING WITH
S
COTT'S DAD,
in the visiting room at Super-max, was even briefer than her coffee date with Brad. Scott's father was not particularly surprised to see her; she had made a point of coming every few months or so, to keep up the charade that she had nothing to do with him being here. His red hair seemed duller after so many years inside, but maybe it was just the contrast with the orange DOC uniform. She willed herself not to see her boy in this man, to acknowledge no resemblance. Because if Scott was like his father on the outside, he might be like his father on the inside, and that she could not bear.

“Faithful Heloise,” Val said, mocking her.

“I'm sorry. I know I should come more often.”

“It takes a long time to put a man to death in Maryland, but they do get around to it eventually. Bet you'll miss me when I'm gone.”

“I don't want you to be killed.” Just locked up forever and forever. Please, God, whatever happens, he must never get out. One look at Scott and he'll know. He was hard enough to get rid of as a pimp. Imagine what he'll be like as a parent. He'll take Scott just because he can, because Val never willingly gave up anything that was his.

“Well, you know how it is when you work for yourself. You're always hustling, always taking on more work than you can handle.”

“How are things? How many girls have you brought in?”

Unlike Brad, Val was interested in her business, perhaps because he felt she had gained her acumen from him. Then again, if he hadn't been locked up, she never would have been allowed to go into business for herself. That's what happened, when your loan shark became your pimp. You never got out from under. Figuratively and literally.

But now that Val couldn't control her, he was okay with her controlling herself. It was better than another man doing it.

“Things are okay. I figure I have five years to make the transition to full-time management.”

“Ten, you continue taking care of yourself. You look pretty good for your age.”

“Thanks.” She fluttered her eyelashes automatically, long in the habit of using flirtation as a form of appeasement with him. “Here's the thing…there's a guy, who's making trouble for me. Trying to extort me. We ran into each other in real life and now he says he'll expose me if I don't start doing him for free.”

“It's a bluff. It's fuckin' Cold War shit.”

“What?”

“The guy has as much to lose as you do. He's all talk. It's like he's the USSR and you're the USA back in the 1980s. No matter who strikes first, you both go sky-high.”

“He's divorced. And he's a personal injury lawyer, so I don't know how much he cares about his reputation. He might even welcome the publicity.”

“Naw. Trust me on this. He's just fucking with you.”

Val didn't know about Scott, of course, and never would if she could help it. The problem was, it was harder to make the case for how panicky she was if she couldn't mention Scott.

“I've got a bad feeling about this,” she insisted. “He's a loose cannon. I always assumed that guys who came to me had to have a certain measure of built-in shame about what they did. He doesn't.”

“Then give me his name and I'll arrange for things to happen.”

“You can do that from in here?”

He shrugged. “I'm on death row. What have I got to lose?”

It was what she wanted, what she had come for. She would never ask for such a favor, but if Val volunteered—well, would that be so wrong? Yet the moment she heard him make the offer, she couldn't take it. She had tested herself, walked right up to the edge of the abyss that was Val, allowed him to tempt her with the worst part of himself.

Besides, if Val could have some nameless, faceless client killed from here, then he could—she didn't want to think about it.

“No. No. I'll think of something.”

Not my son's face,
she told herself as she bent to kiss his cheek.
Not my son's freckles. Not my son's father.
But he was, she could never change that fact. And while she visited Val, in part, to convince him that she had nothing to do with the successful prosecution that had been brought against him when undercover narc Brad Stone somehow found the gun used to kill a young man, she also came because she was grateful to him for the gift of Scott. She hated him with every fiber of her being, but she wouldn't have Scotty if it weren't for him. She wouldn't have Scott if it weren't for Val.

Maybe she did know something about divorce, after all.

 

F
IVE DAYS WENT BY,
days full of work. Congress was back in session, which always meant an uptick in business. She was beginning to resign herself to the idea of doing things Bill Carroll's way. He was not the USSR and she was not the USA. The time for Cold Wars was long past. He was a terrorist in a breakaway republic, determined to have the status he sought at any cost. He was a man of his word and his words were ugly, inflammatory, dangerous. She met with him at a D.C. hotel as he insisted, picking up the cost of the room, which was usually covered by her clients. He left two dollars on the dresser, then said: “For housekeeping, not for you,” with a cruel laugh. Oh, he cracked himself up.