Not That Kind of Girl (16 page)

She shrugged, then plowed ahead. “He said, ‘that girl I’m with now, that reporter chick, if she could give a decent blow job she’d be perfect.’ ”

Roxanne’s eyes shot toward Eli, as if challenging him to come up with a gentle yet pithy response to
that
. No way was he even going to try. He stayed silent.

She continued. “So I reached over his shoulder and grabbed his cigar—which was lit, by the way—and started grinding it into the big-ass bald spot on his head.”

Eli shivered, remembering Rick’s claim that the whole place smelled like burning flesh.

“That’s when I started the Web site,” she said, perking up dramatically. “I started it because I needed to vent. I needed to tell the world about my experience. At first, I was sure I was the only woman who’d ever been through something so horrible—but guess what? I’m not! Women like me are everywhere!” Roxie’s arms flew up over her head. Lilith popped up from her sleep and rested her snout on the edge of the bed, keeping a wary eye on her mistress.

Roxie noticed, and stopped herself in mid-rant. She took a deep, ragged breath and reached out to pat her dog calmly. “It’s okay, Lily Girl,” she reassured her. The dog sat on her haunches, tail wagging.

“Anyway,” Roxie continued. “Women started writing in from all over. Their stories blew me away. I posted them. And the thing just grew and grew.” Roxanne swiveled her head back and forth, cracking her neck.

Eli leaned back against the pillows of Roxie’s bed, thinking that this girl needed a masseuse as much as she needed a dog whisperer. He smiled to himself. Lucky for her, he was skilled at both.

“Can I ask you something?” he asked her.

“Of course.”

“All this venting on the Web site. Your Jerk-of-the-Week award. All the blogging you do about your horrible ex-boyfriend. Has any of it helped?”

Roxie looked puzzled. “You know about my Jerk-of-the-Week contest?”

Eli grinned. “I have a computer, too, Ms. Bloom.”

She laughed.

“So?” he asked again. “Has it helped?”

“Helped what?”

“You,” Eli said, sitting up straighter. “Has it helped you to heal? Has it helped you feel happier? Brought you any peace?”

She choked in surprise. Her lips parted and she stared at him. “Hell yes, it has,” she said, as if he’d missed the point entirely. “I’ve got steady income. I have a reason to get up in the morning. I have something to be passionate about.”

Eli smiled.

“What?” she asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

He reached out for one of her hands and waited until she slipped it into his palm. He held it softly. “I wondered if it might be the opposite.”

She frowned.

“Have you ever considered that being the ambassador of angry women might make things worse for you on a personal level?”

“It makes things better,” she said with a crisp nod of her head. “I should know.”

Eli let that settle for a moment, and he had an idea. “Out of curiosity, have you taken a break since you started your Web site, just stepped back for a few days?”

“I couldn’t possibly.”

“You could leave a message saying the site is down for a week while you’re on vacation.”

“No.”

“Everyone takes vacations.”

“I don’t.”

Eli realized that a grin had begun to spread across his face. His gaze wandered to Lilith and then back to Roxie. “Would you consider it?”

Both her eyebrows were raised now.

“Would you consider taking a road trip? You, me, and Lilith?”

Roxanne blinked. “Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“But …” Roxie laughed. It was a real laugh, deep and loose. “You only just
met
me! We don’t even know each other. That would be totally nuts!”

He chuckled. Yes, it would be. Eli held up the questionnaire. “I know a whole lot about you, Roxie Bloom,” he reminded her. “And by the time we got back, you’d know everything there was to know about me. We’d be even.”

She lowered her chin, leveling her gaze on him. “Where did you have in mind?”

“Ever been to Panguitch, Utah?”

“What the hell is that and why would I want to go there?”

Eli laughed. “It’s my home. My ranch.”

Her lips parted.

“I’ve got one thing I need to take care of in town tomorrow—plus I’ll need to swing by the doctor’s and get stitched up, but then I’m free. How does early Friday morning sound? We’ll be at the ranch by suppertime.”

She stared at him blankly.

“C’mon!” he said. “When’s the last time you went on a road trip? A wind-in-your-hair, music-blaring kind of road trip?”

“It’s been a while,” she said.

“So how about it?”

She tapped her fingertips on her lips, weighing the offer.

“Just think—no harassing phone calls from your ex. A few days away from the city and the Web site. Nothing to do but work with Lilith and relax and build your pack leader skills. And when we come back, we’ll go to the hearing and kick some ass.”

That last bit must have hit a nerve, because Roxie looked at him and nodded. “I guess it wouldn’t kill me,” she said.

He stretched up and placed a kiss on her cheek, smiling to himself. From what he’d seen of Roxanne Bloom, that response had been downright enthusiastic.

Eli closed his eyes for a moment, keeping his face hidden in her hair as he wrestled with the weight of what he’d just done.

*   *   *

That instant—as the sip of forty-year-old Glenfiddich merged with the CAO Gold’s creamy smoke at the back of his throat—that was Raymond’s version of a religious experience. The walls of the Havana Club formed his church. Blended Scotch was his altar wine and cigar smoke his incense. Raymond’s disciples were gathered at his table, enjoying the tale of how his ex-girlfriend’s attack dog had gone for his throat, and how he planned to eviscerate her in a court of law.

“A bitch with a bitch,” said one of his buddies, to much hearty laughter.

Ah, yes. A bitch with a bitch.
Dos biatches
. It amused him, really. Poor little pathetic Roxanne. She had to go out and get herself an ugly, vicious bitch-dog to keep her company after he dropped her ass. She must have needed something to keep her warm at night that could also double as the mascot for her castrating Web site. Raymond took another puff of his CAO Gold, then twirled it in his fingers, mesmerized by the series of perfectly round smoke rings he’d just produced.

She’d been such a fresh-faced go-getter when he first met her, wide-eyed and in awe of him. Raymond couldn’t help but smile as he remembered. Those were truly satisfying days. She would come when he called. She would drop everything when he had a few hours to spare. He had the girl on a schedule, for Christ’s sake! If she wasn’t in his bed, Roxanne would call him when she woke in the morning and when she went to sleep at night. She relied on him to advise her, comfort her, guide her, and fuck the hell out of her.

Raymond knew that for good or ill, relationships were like litigation—you found the hole in your opponent’s case, and you went in for the kill. And like a whole lot of fucked-up young women these days, Roxie Bloom was looking for a daddy, whether she realized it or not. So that’s what Raymond gave her—a mean ole daddy she could worship.

It wasn’t his fault that he was more than she could handle.

“I saw your new assistant,” said one of his disciples. “She’s got a hell of a booty on her.”

“I’d do her,” said someone else.

Raymond chuckled.

“How long is it going to take you to start tapping that ass?” someone else asked.

Raymond took another sip of golden nectar, swirling it around in his mouth. “Already tapped and flowing, gentlemen,” he told them, to a burst of appreciative laughter.

He smiled to himself, thinking he might hurry things along with Ricky. Maybe it was time for a late night at the office with some Chinese takeout. He’d let her think she’d made a real contribution, then he’d let her suck him off.

“Damn, I wish I were you, Sandberg,” said one of his disciples.

Raymond raised his glass to that.

Chapter 10

Eli entered the revolving door of the downtown skyscraper, glad there weren’t many more of these meetings ahead of him. He’d survived ten of them in the last ten months. That meant that he’d reminisced with ten middle-aged men about their years at Berkeley. He’d cautiously asked ten men whether they remembered a pretty yellow-haired anthropology major named Carole Tisdale. Then he’d talked ten men into giving a sample of their DNA to a diagnostics lab and waited, sometimes for weeks, for the results.

Each time there was no match. And Eli was downtown that day to find out about number eleven, a guy who ran a real estate leasing company. Milt Horvath was fifty-three, on his second wife, with three grown children. His hobbies included cruises to Hawaii and golf at least twice a week. That’s how Eli had originally cornered him—in the parking lot of the Union League Golf and Country Club. It had been one of his more blatant stakeouts.

“Mr. Horvath,” he’d said, as the man unlocked the trunk of his BMW and stored his clubs.

“Yes?” He sat down on the fender of his car to remove his golf shoes. “Can I help you?”

Eli broached the subject gently. The guy looked at him with shock and wonder as Eli explained why he’d tracked him down. Then the man shook his head as if to clear his mind. “Sure I remember her,” he said. “I always wondered what happened to her—she just disappeared.”

Eli filled in the blanks for him. Carole Tisdale had moved back home to Denver to have the baby; she’d gone back to school, where she’d met a great guy named Robert Gallagher. Eli had assumed Bob was his biological father until his death last year, when he’d discovered otherwise.

Milt Horvath looked up at Eli for a moment, quite serious, then slammed the trunk door before he turned to him. “That sounds tough,” the man had asked. “You’re, what, thirty-two? Why didn’t they ever tell you?”

Eli gave Milt Horvath the same antiseptic story he’d told the others: his parents didn’t want to upset him when he was younger, then believed it was pointless to bring the subject up once he was an adult. He’d told Milt that with his mother’s help, he’d narrowed it down to a dozen possibilities. Two of the men had moved to other areas of the country—New York and Atlanta—and Eli went there first. Then he moved to Northern California to find, contact, and get lab results for all the rest. If Milt wasn’t a match, he told him, there was just one more possibility.

Of course Eli left out the more personal details. Like how he’d been so furious at his mother that he hadn’t spoken to her for six months, not even during the funeral. How he’d become obsessed with filling in the blank of his origins. Who was he? He needed to know. What kind of man was his real father? What parts of him had Eli inherited?

Milt Horvath listened patiently, studying Eli’s face with intensity. He gave Eli his card and Eli handed him the packet containing everything he’d need to complete the DNA test. When they agreed to meet again to review the lab results, Milt looked melancholy.

“You seem like an exceptional young man,” he’d told Eli, placing a hand on his shoulder. “There’s one thing I want to ask you to do for me.”

“Sure,” Eli said.

“Don’t think too harshly of your mother. We were kids. I’m not saying that Berkeley was any more wild back then than it is today, but those were the days before a one-night stand could kill you outright. We didn’t see things the same.”

Eli nodded. He’d heard the same excuse from a few other men, though they were usually asking Eli not to judge
them,
not his mother.

“It was nice to meet you, Eli,” Milt had said, getting in his car and driving away from the country club lot.

That had been three weeks ago, and now Eli was taking the elevator up to the twenty-first floor to meet with Mr. Horvath, who’d received the results several days before.

Eli went to a reception desk and waited for only a few minutes before Milt came out to greet him. He ushered him into his large, tasteful office and had him take a seat near him at a grouping of comfortable chairs.

“Shall we?” he asked, holding up the FedEx envelope. “Would you like to do the honors?”

“Sure,” Eli said, pulling at the envelope’s tear strip. He reached in and slipped out the results. The findings weren’t exactly a shock. Eli handed the paper over to Milt, saying, “Looks like you’re off the hook.”

He watched Milt read and reread the test results, then sigh deeply. “I’m sorry, Eli,” he said.

“No problem. I appreciate your willingness to do this,” he said, standing.

Milt put out his hand. “If there’s anything else I can do for you, you just let me know.” He shook his head and laughed. “You know, while we were waiting for these results I started thinking back to when I knew your mom. It was, uh, you know, pretty crazy. Things got a little out of hand sometimes.” Milt looked down at his shoes, embarrassed. “I hadn’t thought of all that in a long, long time.”

Eli cocked his head. “How do you mean?” None of his mother’s accounts painted her as a saint, obviously, but nothing she’d described sounded “crazy” or “out of hand,” words Milt had just used.

“Oh.” Milt shifted his weight and shrugged. “I only meant that I’d been with your mother a couple times. She and a bunch of her girlfriends came around the off-campus hole in the wall where I worked as a part-time disc jockey.” Milt laughed. “And I’m talking right at the peak of disco. Polyester wide-collar shirts and gold chains and the whole bit. Jesus, it’s funny to look back on that now.”

“So what happened with my mother?” Eli asked, suddenly uncomfortable.

Milt cleared his throat. “Nothing terrible. It’s just that I’m not very proud of myself for my behavior back then, that’s all I’m saying.” He pasted a smile on his face and extended his hand again. “It was a pleasure. I wish you the best of luck in sorting all this out.”

Eli nodded, knowing two things: Milt Horvath wasn’t telling him the whole story and Eli had just been told to get the hell out.

“Thank you,” Eli said, ending the handshake. He headed for the office door. “I’ll be out of town for a week or so. If you should think of anything else I might need to know, please call.”