Phantom Angel (10 page)

“How old were you when he started in on you? Fifteen, sixteen? Let me guess—he told you that if you said one word to your mother about it he'd claim
you
seduced
him
and you were an evil nympho slut who ought to be locked away somewhere.”

All of the color had drained from her face. “I—I don't know what you mean.” Her voice was a hollow whisper.

“Yeah, you do. You don't have to pretend with me. I saw it in your eyes the first time Morrie showed me your photo. You can see it in my eyes, too, if you care to look closely enough. People like us, we recognize each other.”

“People like us?”

“I'm a rape victim, too.”

She began to breathe rapidly in and out, gulping. “Could you … please pull over?”

I pulled over to the curb. Our tail pulled over, too. Boso jumped out and threw up her breakfast. She stayed there a moment, doubled over, gasping. Then she got back in, her eyes avoiding mine.

“You want something to drink?” I offered. “A breath mint? A premoistened antibacterial towelette?”

“What are you, a rolling mini-mart?”

“I like to be prepared.” I steered us back into the flow of traffic, our tail joining us.

She turned around to check out my supplies in the backseat. “Is that a jug of apple juice on the floor?”

“Not exactly.”

“Okay, eeeeeeew.”

“There's water in the cooler.”

She grabbed herself a bottle and took a long drink.

“Feel better now?”

“I'm okay. I must have eaten some bad clams last night.”

“Try again. You're a vegan. And don't bullshit me. Don't even try. I can see right through you.” We came to a stop at a red light at Willow Avenue, where there was a gas station and not much else. “I need for you to hang on, okay? I'm going to shake our tail.”

“Someone's
tailing
us? Oh, this is just great.”

“You may want to close your eyes.”

No sane cop is willing to risk life and limb on a routine tail job. That makes it pretty easy to lose a police tail. You just have to do something incredibly reckless and foolhardy. Like, say, make an illegal left turn from the right lane across an intersection of oncoming traffic while a dozen furious drivers are honking and waving their fists at you and the blonde riding next to you is screaming her head off.

“I
told
you to close your eyes,” I reminded her as I floored it down Willow and took the first quick left onto Langere Place. Then I made a screeching left onto Lynhurst Avenue, a right onto Anderson Street and circled my way back to Bay Street by way of St. Mary's Avenue. I took that back to Hylan Boulevard and then shot way onto the Staten Island Expressway.

“Hey, wait, where are you taking me?” Boso protested.

“I'll bring you right back. I'm not kidnapping you. We're members of the same club, remember?”

Boso shifted the gym bag at her feet and stared out the window at the traffic on the expressway, scrunching her mouth to one side again.

“Want to talk about it?”

“There's nothing to talk about,” she said woodenly. “He did whatever he wanted to me because he could. My mom wouldn't believe me when I told her. Didn't want to. She thought I blamed him for what happened to my dad. So as soon as I saved enough money I left. That chapter of my life is over now.”

“No, it's not. It'll never be over. That's our curse.”

She looked at me curiously. “Was it a priest who did it to you?”

“I'm Jewish.”

“So, like, it was a rabbi?”

I shook my head. “I ran away to Hollywood three weeks before I graduated from high school. When I was down to my last twenty-three cents a real nice guy named Larry offered to buy me a meal. Then he introduced me to his friend Steve. Next thing I knew they were both doing whatever they wanted to me in a motel room. My dad found me there three days later, drugged and dehydrated.”

“How on earth did he find you?”

“He was the best detective on the NYPD.”

“What is he now?”

“Dead.”

“Do you…?”

“Do I what?”

“Get nightmares?”

I nodded. “All the time.”

“Me, too. I hate going to sleep. If I could just function twenty-four hours a day without sleep I'd be so much happier.”

“Me, too.”

“How about … sex? With someone who you like, I mean.”

“That takes time, but I'm getting there. You?”

“Whenever John touched me I'd cringe and get all tense. I
couldn't
tell him why. I just told him I've always been shy and I—I…” She trailed off, breathing in and out. “I don't usually talk about this.”

“I don't either.”

“I mean, we hardly even know each other, Bingo.”

“It's Benji.”

“Oh, right. Sorry.”

We were on the Verrazano Bridge now heading over the Narrows toward Brooklyn. Off in the distance, the lower Manhattan skyline was shrouded in a cloud of steamy, putrid smog.

“Talk to me about R. J. Farnell.”

“Are you
sure
you're not playing me?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“People do all sorts of things for weird reasons.”

“I'm not playing you. What you see is what you get. You told me I don't know anything. What don't I know?”

Boso took a sip of water and gazed out at the skyline for a moment. “Well, just for starters, there is no such person as R. J. Farnell.”

 

CHAPTER FIVE

“THERE'S NO R. J. FARNELL?”

“There's no R. J. Farnell.”

“Okay, maybe we'd better start from the beginning.”

“Ya think?” Boso chided me, shaking her blond head. “Listen, meeting Morrie's the first big break I've gotten since I came to New York, okay? I mean, he's like a major, major producer. And he promised he'd put me in
Wuthering Heights,
okay? Hire me as the understudy for Isabella, Edgar's sister. If I'd do a sort of favor for him.”

We'd crossed over the bridge into the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn by now and were cruising the Gowanus Expressway.

“What kind of a favor?”

“He told me he was playing an elaborate prank on a friend, which is something that rich New York guys do, I guess. What do I know? I'm just a little girl from Dumbfuckistan. And, let me tell you, when that man phoned me up I was
so
excited. All I've ever wanted to be my whole life is an actress. Except for when I thought about being a massage therapist. And don't laugh. Not the sleazy kind. I mean somebody who helps people with chronic pain. I think anatomy's real interesting. Did you know that giraffes and mice have the same exact number of bones in their necks? Nineteen. Guess how many we have. Go on, guess.”

“I really have no idea. How did Morrie—?”

“Seven.”

“How did he get your phone number?”

“I auditioned for a role in the chorus. Me and everyone else. There were people lined up all the way around the block.”

“A cattle call, sure. Been there, done that.”

“Wait, you're an
actor
?”

“I was. Did a couple of episodes of
Law & Order,
a week on a soap.”

Boso looked at me in astonishment. “Who
are
you, my brother from another mother?”

“You'd like my mother, actually. She used to be a pole dancer.”

“What happened to your acting career?”

“The phone stopped ringing. And my family's business needed me.”

“Don't you miss it? You must.”

“We were talking about you, remember?”

“Right, okay. No need to get touchy, Mr. Sensitive.” She gazed back out the window. “I couldn't believe it when my cell rang and it was Morrie Frankel on the other end.”

“Did you leave your headshot there after the cattle call?”

“Yeah, I did. And he told me an associate of his had recommended me.”

“Was it Vicki Arduino?”

“He didn't say.”

“What was the favor Morrie asked you to do?”

“Pretend to be this guy Farnell's executive assistant. Drive out to East Hampton and rent a fancy house for a month. He gave me an outfit to wear and the keys to a killer Porsche. Plus a briefcase stuffed with cash. It was kind of fun, actually. I got to act all bitchy with the realtor. Plus Morrie let me housesit out there. I swam in the pool and worked on my all-over tan, which I need for my modeling. A real tan is so much better than a salon tan. When you know it's real you
project
that it's real.”

“The realtor has a signed lease agreement. Who signed it?”

“Morrie did. He talked to her on the phone, too, British accent and all.”

“Did he ever show up out there?”

“Yeah, he came out once, on a Saturday, and took me to lunch at this super-fancy place in Sag Harbor called the American Hotel. A whole bunch of people kept coming over to our table and saying hi to him. Don't ask me who any of them were. They all seemed rich and super impressed with themselves.”

“Did they ask Morrie what he was doing out there?”

“They did. He said he was visiting a new backer. Me they ignored. I was just there to look nice. I had the seasonal mixed greens, which turned out to be arugula drowning in citrus-herbal vinaigrette. Morrie had clams and a steak and huge piece of strawberry shortcake. He sprays food when he talks. He's a really disgusting eater.”

Not to mention a major league bullshit artist. The great Morrie Frankel was paying us good money to find someone who he was fully aware didn't exist—because he'd made him up. What in the hell for? “Tell me about that phony Web site for the Venusian Society. Did Morrie set that up himself?”

“Not even. He isn't tech savvy.”

“Is Leah?”

“Who's Leah?”

“His assistant.”

“I wouldn't know. I've never dealt with her. Just Morrie. And he…” Boso suddenly let out a gasp, her eyes widening as she stared out the windshield ahead of us. “Oh, lord…”

We were descending into the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which burrows its way under the East River into lower Manhattan. She didn't speak the whole time we were down in the tunnel. Or breathe, near as I could tell. Just sat there rigid with her fists clenched until we emerged back into bright daylight amongst the impossibly tall towers of the financial district.

“Are you okay?”

“I
hate
tunnels,” she gasped, inhaling deeply. “I always think they're about to cave in right on top of me.”

“How are you with the subway?”

“
Hate
it. I need to be in the fresh air and sunshine. Hey, listen, I don't mean to be rude but where are you taking me?”

“Not to worry. You're in safe hands.” I steered us uptown on West Street, skirting alongside of the Hudson River toward TriBeCa and the West Village. “So who set up that phony Web site?”

“Petey. He's the webmaster for
sweetgirls
and
babesalone.
He works downstairs in the computer room.”

“You mean at the Crown Towers?”

“Yeah. He's very shy, but a total wiz. Pretty much the brains of the outfit. Although don't let his cousin, Little Joe, hear you say that. Little Joe thinks
he
runs things.”

“Are you talking about Joe Minetta, Jr.?”

“Yeah. He thinks he's some kind of rock star because his dad owns the company.”

West Street becomes Eleventh Avenue once you hit Gansevoort in the West Village. I took that uptown past the Chelsea Piers—home to Silver Screen Studios, where I filmed my guest shots on
Law & Order
and also auditioned for a Mucinex commercial that I didn't get.

“By ‘the company' you mean the Minetta crime family. You do know that you're working for the mob, don't you?”

“You make them sound like bad people.”

“They
are
bad people.”

“No, you're wrong. The guys I work for are, like, total sweeties. They went to Seton Hall together. They're frat boys. And the girls are real nice, too.”

I took Twelfth Avenue past the Javits Center and Hell's Kitchen, or Clinton as people now prefer to call it. When we reached Midtown I hung a right onto West 57th and maneuvered us toward Lincoln Center, where I ditched the Brougham in one of those garages that charge by the half hour. Morrie Frankel was still paying for my time. And, for all I knew, Sue Herrera had put out a BOLO on me. She seemed like the vindictive type.

“Let's walk,” I said.

Boso wouldn't budge. “
Where
are you taking me?”

I grabbed us two water bottles from the cooler in back, then reached for her gym bag on the floor at her feet. There was something inside of it that was surprisingly heavy and clunky. “Here, you may want this,” I said, placing the bag in her lap.

“Why should I go anywhere with you?” she demanded.

“I've been sitting in this car for hours. I think better when I stretch my legs.”

“What's there to think about?”

“How we're going to get you out of this mess that you're in.”

“I'm not in any mess.”

“Trust me, you are. So just shut up and walk with me, okay?”

She shut up and walked with me. She was at least two inches shorter than I am. Maybe even three. It felt kind of nice to walk with a girl who didn't tower over me. We headed west on West 66th Street. After one block Boso no longer had to wonder where we were going—we'd run smack into Central Park, which was crowded with people seeking relief from the heat. There was deep shade and coolness to be found in the park. Young mothers were out pushing their double-wide all-terrain strollers. Vendors were selling cold drinks and Italian ices. I steered us toward the Sheep's Meadow. Every guy who walked in our direction eyeballed Boso as he went by. She was eye candy. A tanned, toned blonde in a cropped, skin-tight tank top and spandex shorts. She seemed oblivious to their stares. The male of the species, I supposed, had been staring at her for as long as she could remember.