Magdalene (53 page)

He respected her as a financial powerhouse,
one who, with nothing more than a lifetime of trying to juggle
household budgets veneered by a token MBA, could step into
Sebastian Taight’s role as America’s corporate hammer without a
hint of insecurity.

No, it wasn’t
sin
that had drawn him
to New York. He could’ve gotten
sin
anywhere.

And, according to the rumors Greg
cultivated, he’d gotten it right in his own backyard with who knew
how many women. Mitch couldn’t begin to sort it out, the whos and
the whats and the whys and the wheres.

It didn’t matter now. He’d set the cogs in
motion himself, back in November, by confronting Greg with his
fraud, releasing him from the calling he needed to play his mind
games and step up the ladder. Once the stake president and stake
high council got their copies of these photos, Mitch could expect a
knock on his door and an envelope inviting him to his
excommunication.

The question was: Did Greg have the
credibility necessary to get Mitch out?

He didn’t know.

There was only one person strong enough to
hold him up right now, and he needed her so badly, needed to feel
her strength behind him in a bathtub full of hot water lulling him
to sleep because he knew she wouldn’t let him drown.

Cassandra’s phone rang and rang, but finally
she answered. “Well, hel
lo
,” she breathed, her voice
husky.

“What are you doing right now?” Mitch
murmured, hoping she’d say something shocking.

“I,” she answered matter-of-factly, “am
standing in the middle of the actuarial department of Vorcester
& Minden, watching people scramble when I bark.”

He chuckled, then began to laugh when she
barked, “You! Over there. Yes, you, in the cheap pinstripes. You
put that file in the shredder and I’ll put
you
in a wood
chipper. You—young lady! Taniqua? Get maintenance up here to get
these fucking shredders out of here.” Pause. “NOW!” She sighed into
the phone.

“You seem to be having a very good
time.”

“God, I love this job— Oh, I don’t think so,
sweetheart!” she bellowed, and Mitch’s eardrum protested. “You! Go
downstairs. Tell the cops I need them up
here
. Sorry about
that.”

“No problem. Cops?”

“Had to rustle up some shysters to get a
court order and put the company into receivership, appoint me
trustee. So now I’m having all the paper in this place, all the
hard drives—everything—boxed up and sent to Nigel so he can figure
out what the hell happened here. He started out in insurance, so
he’ll know better what to look for than I do.”

“Mismanagement or theft?”

She paused. “You know, I’m not sure yet,”
she said in a thoroughly bewildered tone of voice. “Usually I can
tell, but this is...very strange. Probably a mixture, like
Jep.”

“How’d you get a court order if you don’t
know?”

“These old Southern men, you know. The judge
didn’t hear a word my attorney said once I presented him with an
entirely accidental view of tits and ass.”

Of course. “I miss you.”

“I miss you, too,” she said huskily, then
lowered her voice even more. “I do love my job, Bishop, but I must
confess there is one thing I like more than this.”

“What’s that?” he asked, fiddling with a
fountain pen, his mouth twitching because he knew.

“Fucking you.”

Mitch grinned, the pictures on his desk now
back in their proper perspective: The documentary of a romance
between equals.

“What are you doing today?”

Watching my enemy take me down and being
unable to do anything about it.

“Thinking about you. About what to do when I
get released from the bishopric.”

Next week.

“We could buy an RV. Like your parents.”

He sat stunned for a moment. “Uh... Am I
speaking with Cassandra St. James? Midas the Second?
My
wife?”

She laughed with hearty, wicked delight.
“Actually, I was thinking something like a Tuscan villa.”

“Everybody does that.”

“Caribbean. Lie on the beach. Dance with the
natives.”

“Then see the rest of the world.”

“Together,” she purred.

Mitch could feel the thud of his heart
through his breastbone. “That would...uh...take longer than a
year.”

She said nothing for a couple of seconds,
then murmured, “I might not remember that little detail. I...forget
things that cease to be important to me.”

In the midst of tragedy, hope. “That would
be okay with me,” he said, his voice gruff.

“Officer!” she yelled then. “Get that fucker
away from the computers!
Nobody
touches the computers but
my
people!” Mitch burst out laughing and she muttered, “Good
thing I brought my own techs. Just like children, feeding their
dinner to the dog. Little bastards hiding their dirty deeds.”

“Done dirt cheap.”

“Around here, cheap is less than poverty
level.”

“I called Nigel.”

“Oh, good. Now you won’t need to bug me
about it.”

“Wishful thinking on your part.”

She snickered, then snarled at someone else
for not jumping when she snapped her fingers.

“I better let you go.”

“Ever had phone sex?”

“No.”

“You will tonight.”

* * * * *

A Poor Wayfaring Man
of Grief

April 19, 2011

“Hello, Bishop.”

Mitch turned to see an older woman he didn’t
know in the threshold of his office. Frail, a bit stooped, with
thinning salt-and-pepper hair and sunken cheeks, she had the look
of chaotic desperation about her.

It was Tuesday night and he was gathering
his things to leave and lock up for the last time. He hadn’t been
instructed to; in fact, he hadn’t heard a word from the stake
president nor anyone else. Greg, as a newly called member of the
stake high council, had attended different wards Sunday, which
Mitch had otherwise spent presiding over sacrament meeting and a
slate of other meetings, interviews, fires to extinguish.

As usual.

He’d thought the building empty, but no. His
first instinct was to panic, being alone in the building with a
woman he wasn’t married to, but it didn’t matter now. The silence
from his superior after the delivery of those photos meant it
wouldn’t be long until—

“Hello, Sister...?”

Her mouth trembled. “Guerrero,” she
whispered, a tear sparkling at the corner of her eye.

Mitch thought his heart had stopped. He
could barely breathe. “Inez.”

“I’ve changed, I know,” she murmured. “Don’t
try to be polite about it. Nobody can pull that off.”

“I— Uh...”

“I heard you got married again.”

Mitch tried to take a breath. “Yeah. Uh,
last month.”

“The brunette, Cathy...?”

“Cassie.”

“Yes. I saw her Sunday. She’s
beautiful.”

“She is. What can I do for you, Inez?”

Asking the question was conditioned reflex,
and he had too many strong conflicting emotions running through him
to do anything other than act by rote.

Inez was here.

Why did you come back here, Inez?

Questions, protestations, confusion rushed
his mind, turning it to mush, with only two thoughts screaming to
be voiced:

Why? Why now?

She shrugged. “I have a list of things I’d
like you to do for me, but all I really wanted was to say I’m
sorry.”

“For what?”

Inez is here. Why?

“For what I’ve done to you.”

Mitch’s breath hitched.

“You don’t deserve it,” she said, no emotion
coloring her words. “But I’m desperate. You’ve always seen me at my
most desperate. I was desperate for a dance partner, there you
were. I was desperate to be taken care of, there you were. I’m
desperate now. There you are.”

She laughed then for no reason Mitch could
think of, and he saw that time had wreaked havoc on her. She’d
lived hard and he didn’t have to wonder if she had walked the
streets after her lover kicked her to the curb. Cassandra had
chosen her path deliberately as a means of exacting vengeance; for
Inez, it had always been about survival.

“Turn your arms out,” Mitch said abruptly,
but he didn’t need to see the tracks to know. He’d spent a good
share of the last thirteen years dealing with junkies of one sort
or another, in varying stages of addiction and varying states of
remorse.

Inez complied slowly, but without hesitance.
Mitch imagined she did everything slowly, and she was probably
hardened to humiliation. She rolled the tattered sleeve of her
dingy Oxford above her left elbow.

“Are you clean?”

“No.”

“Are you interested in getting clean?”

She shrugged. “I could say I was. I’d try.
For you. But it wouldn’t last.”

Mitch’s breath left him in a whoosh, and he
sat back on the edge of his desk, wiping his hands down his
face.

“I had to see you again,” she said bluntly.
“Let you take a look at what you escaped. I told you I wouldn’t be
good for you, and you ended up marrying well. Good girls. I knew
Mina. Barely. Nice little girl, good family. Your wife looks like
butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.”

Mitch barked a laugh, at once thoroughly
amused and thoroughly saddened.

“And you made something of yourself. I knew
you would.”

He searched for something, anything, to say.
“How are your kids?”

“No idea. CPS took ’em away from me before
they were teenagers.” That didn’t surprise him. “I told you what
would happen with me, and I was right. I would’ve dragged you
through life from ghetto to ghetto.”

Yes.

“What do you need, Inez?”

“Sixty thousand dollars.”

“You know I won’t do that.”

“What’s it to you? You won’t miss it.” She
waved a hand. “For you, it’s like, what, sixty dollars?”

“Six,” he said flatly. “The answer’s no. And
you know why.”

“Got over your rescue complex, then?”

He studied her, and saw none of the
beautiful twenty-five-year-old woman who had left him behind with a
broken heart. She’d be fifty now, but looked seventy. “No,” he said
absently. “I just don’t use that method. Money doesn’t fix
addiction.”

Inez laughed with no humor whatsoever. “You
got that right.”

“Okay, look,” he said finally. “If you’d
like a place to stay, an opportunity to get clean, I have a
carriage house you can stay in. Free room and board. I can send you
to the best rehab program in the country if you want.”

Not like he hadn’t tried that a couple dozen
times over the years for a couple dozen other people.

She shook her head. “No, I’m good. For now.
Got a little cash on me. I’ll be heading out, here in a couple of
hours. Thought I might try to pop you for a few benjamins.”

“Have you eaten?” he asked, low, now too
overcome with sorrow and pity to worry about propriety or what his
enemy might do with it. “Let me give you dinner, at least.
Cassandra can whip something up for you. She makes a killer
gumbo.”

She shook her head slowly. “No. Thanks. Your
wife wouldn’t want to dirty her kitchen for a whore.”

“Oh, Inez. You have no idea how wrong you
are.”

She looked straight at him then, held his
gaze. “Maybe someday, you’ll forgive me.”

“Forgive you for
what
?”

But she was gone, and he followed. There,
disappearing around the hall corner, into the foyer, toward the
doors.

“Don’t,” she called over her shoulder as she
put her hand on the glass door to head out in the darkness. She
looked down at the ground. “Just...remember me kindly. That’s all I
want.”

“Inez! Let me take you to a shelter at
least
.”

She looked back at him, tears streaming down
her cheeks. “I love you, Mitch. I always have. And I will love you
until the day I die.”

Mitch stood in the middle of the large
foyer, watching her go, trying to make sense of it all, but it felt
like swimming through mud.

“How. Fucking. Pathetic.”

Mitch’s jaw clenched.

Greg drew abreast of him. “You want to hit
me, don’t you?”

No. He would not give in to the taunts.

“You’ve always had a taste for whores.
What’d she ask you for? Sixty? Shit, I only gave her thirty. But at
least now you’re fucking a whore with some class, who knows what
she’s worth.”

Mitch swallowed. Hard.

“And your kid— Heh. Like father, like son.
Do it, Mitch,” he murmured, getting closer. “Hit me. I promise I
won’t hit back.”

Mitch’s nostrils flared.

“So, how much is Cassie worth? Sixty
thousand? No, I know better than that. Six million, more like.
Yeah, I looked up her tax returns. That was her
lowest
year.
Girl topped out at twenty-nine million. Ah, but Inez is a cheap
bitch. She always was. You escaped that train wreck pretty well,
but you got a different one and as usual, you were a stupid shit.
You should’ve slapped Mina in a cheap nursing home and been done
with it. I bet she was a lousy lay, to boot, so I suppose I owe you
for rescuing
me
from
that
.”

Mitch’s fists clenched.

“Poor Mitch, couldn’t bring himself to pay a
whore for sex, but of
course
marriage makes it okay. Barely.
How much did Cassie charge you to get her name on a marriage
certificate? I’m sure there’s a time limit on the prenup—all the
better for her to get out from under you. Really. Satisfy my
curiosity. How much
did
you pay her for that sham of a
marriage?”

Mitch could feel the muscles of his
shoulders, arms, back tightening, ramping up the way they did
before a particularly laborious task in the foundry, the way they
had when he’d beaten Elder Snow into a French hospital.

Greg grabbed Mitch’s wrist and touched
Mitch’s knuckles to his jaw, just before Mitch jerked it away.
“It’d be so easy. You’re a lot bigger than me, Mitch. You could lay
me out flat with one punch, because when it gets right down to it,
you’re just another loser steel worker, exactly like old man Monroe
always knew.”