The Queen and I (17 page)

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Love and Sushi

She felt guilty. She always did whenever she was unfaithful, whether it was in her personal life or her professional life. Her honesty and no nonsense way of doing business was something that she took a great deal of pride in. But there was something about Richard Kearney, who was able to manipulate her in ways that she could not explain, that made her do things that she normally would not even consider.

Their evening together had been exactly like it was their first time all over again, full of exploration and awakening. She knew she did not belong with him, but she could not avoid his pull and was drawn to him the way a moth is drawn to the light.

She had seen to it that no one knew where she had been last night, and she had covered all of her tracks so that word would never get back to Jeffrey, but Rachel knew deep down that eventually she would slip up and someone that she did not want to know about her affair would find out and that person would be the first to tell her companion and lover of the last five years.

Rachel sat in her office checking e-mails and catching up with some work that she had neglected; she had a couple of deadlines on reviews she had not yet gotten to and that needed to be addressed immediately. As far as her other messages were concerned, they were mostly the obligatory type that she could put offfor a couple more days.

Her calendar was full, and she knew that work was the best way for her to escape from the guilt she was feeling over her infidelity and disloyalty. Loyalty had always been something she took very seriously and prided herself on, but here she was acting in the most treacherous of ways. Work was her answer.
Bury yourself in your work
, she told herself.

Her assistant, Cheryl, came into the office to go over her schedule for the day, and Rachel examined it to see if there was anything that she could put offfor a couple of days, if not weeks, and she came across the name for her next appointment and a lump formed in her throat, for it was Mendel Fujikawa.

This was the last person she wanted to see, and she wanted to know how he had wound up on her schedule without her knowledge. Cheryl told her that it was due to the fact that she was not able to be reached over the last twenty-four hours, and he had said that it was an urgent matter regarding a play that was coming to the theater soon.

“Is there any way that we can reschedule him or cancel?” Rachel asked, concerned.

Cheryl shook her head and said, “He’s outside right now.”

Mendel Fujikawa was the man who she knew was behind the destruction of Jeffrey’s career and personal life, and there was no one on earth whom she hated more than this man, with the possible exception of Jacob Stone. She swallowed hard against the feelings of anger and rage she was experiencing and told Cheryl to let the little man in. She was determined to make this a very short meeting.

Fujikawa entered her office like a conquering general and smiled broadly with that toothy grin that gave him an almost unnatural quality when you looked at him. He was decked out in a canary-yellow sports jacket, turquoise pants, and white slip-ons.

The man has flare, if nothing else,
she thought.

He walked around her desk as she stood to greet him professionally, and he gave her two shadow kisses and stood back to look over her body and her outfit. He took a deep breath and put both hands to his mouth, and said, “Look at you, Ms. Benjamin! How do you do it? Do you ever eat?” He giggled and looked out her office window to Times Square below and continued, “This must be some gorgeous view at night when everything is lit up.”

She did not answer; she only watched as he made small talk, as if the two of them were the best of friends, and she made a motion with her head toward Cheryl to let her know that she was to come back in five minutes to get her out of this meeting.

“You won’t need her to come in and save you, Rachel,” Fujikawa said without turning, in a slightly menacing way. “I promise what I have to say won’t take more than five minutes.”

Rachel and Cheryl exchanged uncomfortable looks, and Cheryl took her leave of the office, closing the door behind her. Rachel motioned for Fujikawa to take a seat and took her place in her own. Mendel sat across from her and crossed his legs.

“Don’t you want to offer me anything?” he asked.

“How about a slap in the face?”

“Tsk, tsk. No need to stop being a lady on my account. Besides, you’re not my type.”

“It must’ve been hard on you when the Berlin Wall went down. No more East German men,” Rachel replied.

Mendel winked at her and said, “There’s always a good man around when one needs one.” He pulled a pair of glasses from his jacket pocket and looked at the lenses for any dust and continued, “Where is Jeffrey?”

Rachel was not expecting such a blunt question about the whereabouts of her boyfriend; she was more inclined to believe Fujikawa would play a game of cat and mouse with her first.

“Did you check his apartment?”

“Don’t insult my intelligence,” Fujikawa answered curtly. Rachel shifted uncomfortably in her seat due to his harsh tone and continued, “He’s out of town for a few days.”

Mendel smiled at her and looked at her ceiling. “You don’t say. That’s nice. And when will he be back exactly?”

“He didn’t say.”

“You wouldn’t be lying to me now, Ms. Benjamin, would you?”

Rachel was staring at her desk clock, wondering if Cheryl was going to come in looking for her any time soon. She felt as if she were in a jail cell, nude, and all of the eyes of the prison were staring at her; she was exposed and knew it, and what was worse was that Fujikawa knew it. He knew she was lying, and she also knew that he was losing any patience that he had for her.

“I told you what I know, he’s out of—”

“Shut up!” he screamed. “You know what I am talking about. I want to know where he is, and I want to know right now!”

Her heart skipped a beat at the sudden outburst by this odd little man, her office door immediately opened, and a stunned and frightened Cheryl looked in, not knowing what to expect.

Mendel leaned over her desk and stretched as close to her as he could and whispered, “It would be in everyone’s best interest if you would tell me where he is.”

She swallowed hard, trying to maintain her composure and answered, “He didn’t say.”

Fujikawa held her gaze for a few moments and slowly turned to leave her office. He stopped next to Cheryl, quickly grabbed her by the throat, and in one motion withdrew a butterfly knife and held it to her cheek. Rachel reached for the phone and Fujikawa yelled at her, “Stop! Put it down.” He smelled Cheryl’s neck and gently blew on her ear, “It would be such a shame for you to have her blood on your hands. Besides, I don’t like the police.”

Rachel was breathing heavily, and Cheryl was fighting back tears as Mendel pointed the blade at Rachel and continued, “I think you know where Jeffrey is, and I think you are going to tell me in the next forty-eight hours.”

Cheryl was now trembling so hard that Mendel’s hand was shaking, and he quickly swiped the blade across her cheek, breaking the skin, causing it to bleed freely. He allowed her to drop to the floor and said, “I know you will have some information for me by then. Believe me when I tell you that you want me to find him before some others do.”

He left her office and Rachel ran to Cheryl’s side. The two of them embraced and began crying loudly in each other’s arms.

For all of her sins and other forms of betrayal, Rachel knew that she had done the right thing; she had not sold out Jeffrey to this very dangerous and vindictive man. She had protected his whereabouts and also given herself time to get word to him that he was being hunted. She just had to be careful.

* * *

Abby Tisch sat watching as Sean Wagner approached her bookstore. She had never liked Sean’s stepfather, Sheriff Pitts, but there was something about Sean that she always found appealing. Maybe it was the simplicity of the man.

He was not exactly what you would call complicated. There was no pretense with Sean, no deception, and no bullshit; he was who he let you believe he was when you first spoke to him, and you either took it or left it.

Abby was inclined to the former. She enjoyed being around people who left very little to the imagination. Even though she was a person who enjoyed playing mind games with others, she despised it when it was done to her. That was one of the things she had hated most about her encounter with Jeffrey David Rothstein a couple of weeks ago; the man was obviously hiding something from her, and she didn’t appreciate it.

With Sean, she knew what she was dealing with and knew that he could easily be manipulated to do things that she wanted, whether it was her carnal desires that he happily filled for her, or those jobs she sometimes needed done without the authorities being made aware of them.

One of the interesting jobs he had been doing lately had come to her when she realized there was a ghost living at the old cabin where that Richard Kearney fellow had lived. The brainstorm hit her that she could possibly bring the town to its knees by making everyone frightened of the prospect of a phantasm watching every move, and making them certain that it had brought friends. That was when she had conceived the notion of starting her own ghost hunter service, and Sean was the one to facilitate the need for business.

She would have him go around to some of the more out-of-the-way homes in the Zion area and give the homeowners the distinct impression that their homes were haunted. Thus, the needs for her services would grow exponentially.

The only problem was that nobody was calling on her, because Sean was not very good at what she had hired him to do, and the town was in such a state of excitement at having this pseudo-celebrity living among them that they refused to acknowledge anything was wrong.

The way most of the town’s residents saw it, it was better to live in a town with ghosts and have a celebrity in their midst than to expel these supernatural visitors and dwell in mediocrity.

Sean entered the store, and she could smell the stench of cheap whiskey on him almost immediately. Most people found this to be repulsive, but to her there was a certain masculinity that it evoked, making her want him all the more. The man excited her, and she was a slave to those urges and desires.

She lit a cigarette and watched as he looked at a copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird
. She could actually see his lips moving as he tried to sound out the last word, and that made her want him that much more. He was so primitive that she sometimes felt like Jane Goodall on safari, and he was the beast that could satisfy her urges.

“Did he say anything useful?” she asked.

Sean shrugged his shoulders and answered, “He’s a regular, old, smart city boy. Don’t know shit from Shasta.”

She walked over to him and continued, “I need him to be out of that house long enough for me to have a proper look around on the inside. You were supposed to endear yourself to him, not piss him off.”

He dismissed her comment with a wave of his hand and continued, “That boy ain’t going nowhere; his head’s so far up his ass he thinks he’s God or something.”

“You were supposed to make friends with him so that you could invite him out for a couple of drinks.”

“I don’t drink with no Jews.”

Abby shook her head in disgust and lit another cigarette. “But you’ll drink with Carl Thomas, and he’s an asshole.”

“Asshole ain’t kosher.”

She could not argue with him sometimes. When he told her that the sheriff wanted Sean to keep a close eye on Jeffrey, she had seen it as the opportunity she needed to get close to the man and to find out everything that she needed to know about the ghost, but instead Sean had only alienated himself to the writer, and now she was left with nothing but to scramble for a new idea.

“What do you plan on doing next about him?” she asked.

Sean smiled and replied, “Give him some new bumps in the night to worry about.”

“I thought the sheriffsaid you weren’t to touch him.”

“He didn’t say nothing about his house.”

Abby smiled at Sean, and the two of them instantly communicated without speaking what it was that could be accomplished by Sean going about this course of action. Sometimes he surprised her; maybe he wasn’t as stupid as she thought he was.

She was becoming hot with desire for him and put out her cigarette. She walked to the front door and locked it, putting up a sign that read “Back in One Hour,” and immediately started taking off her clothes. He watched as she got undressed and thought about how much more fun he was having not being Jewish.

* * *

When Jeffrey arrived home, there was no sign of Saul, so he took advantage of the opportunity to get back to work on some potential outlines for scripts he was thinking about.

He wrote about a small town with an identity crisis and also about a ghost who just wanted to be loved. Maybe if he combined the two outlines he would have something. But then he brushed aside the notion, because neither one of those provided a way for him to exact his revenge the way he wanted to against Heinrich Schultz and Mendel Fujikawa.

Jeffrey got up from his desk and walked to his back porch to look out over the lake, and he heard Saul’s voice from behind him.

“I just want to be loved? Is that what you think of me?” the ghost asked, offended. “I thought I left much more of an impression than some superficial, whining pisher who needs to be reaffirmed at every turn.”

“It was just an outline, Saul. Nothing serious.”

Saul looked at him accusingly and continued, “I thought you said I was going to be able to help you with this.”

Jeffrey nodded his head. “I did and I meant every word of it, but I have been writing for a long time on my own and have never collaborated with anyone before. It’s just a little unnerving.”

Saul understood what Jeffrey was talking about and so decided that he was not going to approach him about his visit to the library. Instead, he was going to use it as his ammunition in the battle that he was about to fight with the reclusive playwright in convincing him to let Melissa Foreman come to the cabin for her acting lessons. Maybe she could even show Jeffrey that there were better ways of getting revenge than writing a vindictive and abusive script meant to cause nothing but embarrassment and humiliation.