Hex and the Single Girl (10 page)

Back in the front lobby, Jeff Bragg was just now getting a room key card. He went straight for the elevators. A family of six entered after him trapping him way in the back. Not sure why (frustration? curiosity? commitment to her client?

), Emma rushed into the elevator, too, just before the doors closed.

When the car got to the ninth floor, Jeff pushed through the family and out of the elevator. Just as the doors were closing, she ducked out. Emma skulked down the hallway, keeping a distance of thirty feet between her and Bragg.

She felt like a private eye, a sleuth, a shamus. She smiled crookedly, liking her accelerated pulse, the actual thrill as opposed to the parasitic kind she was used to. But what did she hope to achieve, following him? Maybe she was taking the risk for the sake of it. Putting herself out on a limb. That would show Susan Knight and her theories. If nothing more, Emma would know where to find him, not that she’d send Susan anywhere within fifteen blocks of him.

Jeff turned a corner. Emma double-timed. She was wary of rushing, but she didn’t want to round the corner and find an empty hallway.

Which was exactly what happened. She walked slowly down the corridor, her ears pricking, her skin prickling. She looked left, then right, searching for sound and motion. As she tiptoed past the ice machine closet, an arm reached out and grabbed her by the uniform sleeve, pulling her into the closet.

Jeff slammed her against a Coke machine, hard.

A can of diet Dr Pepper clunked into the tray on the bottom.

They both looked at it.

“My favorite,” said Emma.

“Who are you?” demanded Jeff, gripping her shoulders. Emma felt the cold penetrating her uniform tunic, slowly seeping into her flesh. William turned her into a flame; Jeff turned her into a block of ice.

“I’m just the doorperson,” she said. “I wanted to apologize for my impertinence. I’m only a trainee, sir, and I’m still struggling to act as lowly as I should.”

“How did you find me?” he demanded.

“I wasn’t looking for…”

“You’re lying, Connie Quivers, or whatever your name is.”

Emma said, “Okay, okay. You’ve got good eyes, Mr.
Roger.
You’re right. I am spying on you. My people want to know where you are, at all times, and if you try to sneak off again, you’ll wake up in a pool of your own blood, dead.”

“I’ll wake up dead?”

“You’ll wake up nearly dead, and then you’ll die. And it’ll look just like this,” she said and then put her bare fingers on his neck.

Emma tried to conjure up a scary scene from a horror movie. Any blood bath would do. She closed her eyes and

transmitted the first image that came up.

Jeff released her and lunged backwards across the closet and crashed against the opposite wall. He said, “A crazy picture just popped into my head.”

“That’s what I’m going to do to you,” said Emma, menacingly.

“You’re going to turn me into a naked blond with a klieg light up my ass?”

“Don’t think I won’t!” she screamed. Emma grabbed the diet Dr Pepper and ran down the corridor into a conveniently waiting elevator. She rode down to the lobby and ran out the front door, which Mr. Reade held wide open.

“Break over?” he asked. And then, “Slow down. Watch out!”

Emma hit someone, hard, and fell on her ass on the sidewalk, soda, cap, and shades flying.

“Trainees,” said Mr. Reade. “All sass. No class.”

“Hello, Emma,” said the man she’d careened into. He wore a tan suit and offered his hand.

“Hello, Hoffman.” Emma accepted his help, and he yanked her to her feet. She bent down to pick up her accessories and the bottle. “What a coincidence,” she said. “Running into you here.”

“I’ve been waiting all day for someone, but he never showed,” he said. “I ate alone.”

“What’d you have?”

“Lamb chops,” he said. “What are you doing here? And why are you dressed like a doorman?”

“You were waiting for William Dearborn?” asked Emma, deflecting his question. From Hoff’s bashful look, she knew she was right. “I saw you try to talk to him Saturday night at Haiku.”

“You were there?” he asked.

“Well?” asked Emma.

“Well…done?” asked Hoff.

“Did you feel a spark? Did you get excited in Dearborn’s presence? Did the sight of him send high voltage to the groin?”

“The only groin jolt I felt all night was when I saw your face on the computer screen. Times twelve,” said Hoff. “None of this makes any sense. And just now, seeing you sprawled on the ground, your legs splayed, hair a mess”—he

whispered the next part—“it gave me a hard-on. I’ve still got it. When I saw Dearborn the other night, nothing. But, today, I wanted to know if, in a different setting…I thought I’d ask him if he’d ever considered working on a book project.”

Emma wanted to end Hoff’s sexual-identity crisis. No reason he should be tormented with longing for William

Dearborn. Especially since she was tormented enough for both of them. “Hoff, I need to confess something to you,”

she said.

“What?” he asked.

She hesitated. Guilt. Fear he’d be angry. She should have been upfront from the start. Her mouth felt dry. She unscrewed the cap of the diet Dr Pepper. Promptly, explosively, the agitated soda erupted like Krakatoa. Brown liquid doused her eyeballs, flew up her nostrils and between her parted lips causing her to blink, sneeze, and cough at the same time. Her tunic and hair were soaked.

Mr. Reade and Hoff started pounding on Emma’s back, forcing her head between her knees and then attempting to get her to drink the few drops of Dr. Pepper that remained in the bottle.

“Stop,” she insisted, pushing the bottle away.

The two men backed off. Hoff looked her up and down, and said, “This is the second time in a row I’ve seen you in a soaking wet top.” He paused. “Not that I’m complaining.”

Mr. Reade said, “The boss isn’t going to like this. Employees have to represent the proper image of the hotel. And this”—he waved at her clinging tunic—“isn’t the kind of image the Four Seasons wants to present.”

Emma said, “Tell the boss I can’t continue to work under these dictatorial conditions.” She turned to Hoff. “You can stop staring at my chest now.”

He said, “I don’t think I can.”

“Me either,” said Mr. Reade.

Emma shook her head with disgust. “This is just the kind of thing that happens when you go above 14th Street,” she said, taking her cap, empty bottle, glasses, and wounded pride west on 57th Street.

Chapter 12

S
usan Knight was frantic. “Jeff’s home phone has been cut off,” she ranted, pacing in Emma’s living room.

The Good Witch had found Susan on the bench in her lobby when she returned home. Her friend looked distraught, her hair in a disheveled pony, the drawstring of her track pants (on a workday!) untied, her shirt misbuttoned.

Emma brought the sad rabbit upstairs to her place, made her a cup of soothing chamomile tea, and told her to drink it while she rinsed off the diet Dr. Pepper. Emma cleaned up and, dressed in a bathrobe, returned to her guest on the living room couch.

“Why aren’t you at work?” Emma asked.

“How can I work when the man I love is missing?” asked Susan, no calmer, despite the tea. “I think something terrible has happened to him.”

Emma said, “I know where he is. But I’m not going to tell you. He’s out of his mind, Susan. Completely paranoid.

Possibly delusional. He thinks I’m spying on him.”

“You are spying on him,” she said, “And why haven’t you called me?”

“I’ve been busy with that other case,” said Emma. “Let me ask you something, and then we’ll get right back to wasting our breath on Jeff Bragg.” Susan nodded. “When you picture a scene in your imagination of, say, people in a room, are you in the room, too?”

“I don’t understand the question,” said Susan, who preferred reality to fantasy.

“I observe the scene, like I’m the audience,” said Emma. “But lately, in my daydreams, this one person seems to see me. He looks at me, talks to me.”

“Honestly, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s like a movie, when a character looks into the camera, talks into it. It’s called breaking the fourth wall.”

“So?” asked Susan, impatiently.

I am that wall,
thought Emma. She certainly felt broken into. Dearborn had somehow come to life in her fantasies.

“I’m wondering if I’m having a psychotic break,” she said. “Or an emotional breakthrough.”

“You’re not having a psychotic break,” said Susan. “But emotional breakthroughs are few and far between. You

certainly need one, so we’ll go with that.”

Emma liked her logic. “Jeff Bragg is staying in a hotel—I’m not telling you which one. He must have moved out of his apartment with a few days left before leaving on his permanent vacation.” Emma felt a chill remembering Friday night at Bull when Jeff literally made her blood run cold. “He’s moving to an island. To stay.”

Susan couldn’t believe it. “He’d never do that. It’s childish! It’s irresponsible!”

“From what I’ve seen, that fits.”

“You don’t know Jeff at all,” said Susan.

“How well did you know him?” she asked, having a sketchy idea of their relationship.

“Intimately,” challenged Susan.

“How many times did you go to his apartment?”

“He never invited me to his place, but he had good reasons. He traveled a lot. Or his apartment was too messy. Or he had no food in the fridge. Or he was out of toilet paper.”

Emma asked, “What about his friends? Colleagues? Did you meet any of them?”

“We didn’t socialize,” she admitted. “It seemed like a waste of time when what we really wanted to do was hole up at my place, order in Thai, and make love for hours.”

“Not all night long?” pushed Emma.

“Jeff was particular about sleeping in his own bed.”

“Did he ever leave stuff at your place? A shirt? A toothbrush?”

“You’re missing the point.”

Emma waved her off. “You never saw his place, met his friends—if he had any—or spent a whole night together. You don’t find that odd?”

“No.”

“Did he bother taking off his shoes when you had sex?”

Susan said, “Most of the time.”

The Good Witch could hardly believe her exceptionally sensitive ears. “You call this love?” she asked.

“I don’t expect you to understand,” said Susan. “You’ve never had phenomenal sex. You can’t appreciate how hard it is to lose it.”

Emma’s frustration with Susan rose to the boiling point. “I’m putting myself out for you,” she snarled. “In return, you remind me how empty my life is.”

Susan sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m acting reprehensibly. It’s the break up.”

Not good enough, thought Emma. “This is exactly why I don’t want to deal with the endings. I only get involved with the beginnings. The fun part. The joy, the bliss. I’m not supposed to be in the picture when it all comes tumbling down. I make a point of avoiding that part. I don’t want to see it, and I don’t have to. It’s in the fucking contract.”

Susan’s eyes got round. Emma glared into them. “I’m going to get dressed,” she said. “Give me five minutes, and we’ll sort this out.”

Susan nodded numbly. The Good Witch went into her bedroom and crashed around in her closet to find a long-sleeved T-shirt and velour track pants. She crashed around in her bathroom to brush her hair. When Emma returned to the living room, Susan was gone and she’d left a piece of paper on the couch. It read:

Emma,

You have obvious objections to working on my case. Consider it closed. Please write up a detailed report

of your encounters with Jeff Brag so that I might continue the investigation on my own. Send your

material to my office.

That is all,

Susan

Along with the note, Susan left a check for one thousand dollars.

Emma picked up the phone and called Susan’s home number. She left this message: “I just read your pink slip. Forget about a detailed report. You might be determined to bury yourself with this loser, but I’m not going to hand you the shovel. The next sound you hear is me ripping up your check.”

Emma hung up, put the pieces of the check in the trash, went into her bedroom, and assumed the fetal position on her soft white coverlet.

Sex had the power to turn otherwise coherent women into desperate maniacs. Susan behaved as if Jeff Bragg’s touch was food, water, and air. That she’d starve and suffocate without it. Emma hugged her knees, afraid for her friend’s sanity (and safety). She felt tired suddenly, weary. She closed her eyes.

And there was William Dearborn again, on the white couch, shirtless, shoeless, bangs grazing his long lashes. He was unfastening the buttons of his jeans, plunking them open one by one, revealing more of his flat belly, an inch at a time.

Then he looked up—right at her—and shouted, “What the hell are you waiting for?”

Chapter 13

T
he entrance plaza to the Brooklyn Museum of Art had recently been redesigned to resemble the Louvre’s in Paris, although the glass and steel structure looked more like a hovering UFO than the French pyramid.

The renovation—millions of dollars and years in the making—was impressive, if bizarre, and Emma oohed and ahhed as she walked underneath it. She moved slowly, with the aid of a wooden cane. She pulled the mesh veil on her pillbox hat low to cover her rose-colored specs and to obscure the penciled-on crow’s feet and forehead creases. She gripped her cane and shuffled in orthopedic shoes to the revolving doors at the entryway.

Two cops stopped her. One held out a hand and said, “The Museum is closed to the public tonight, ma’am.”

“Isn’t there an exhibition?” she asked in her old lady voice.

“I need to see an invitation or check your name off the list,” said the black cop. He was short but wide with a mustache—and a clipboard.

Not again. Could one go nowhere in New York City unless her name was on a list? Emma formed an orange lipstick smile. She fished into her needlepoint purse for her wallet, extracting a laminated rectangle and waved it in their faces.