overcoat and jacket, and his blue shirtsleeves were rolled over thick forearms. I stood in the door and he recognized me right away. He was still for a moment, and then the wide, greedy smile appeared.
“Fuck if Tommy wasn’t right about you,” he said. His voice was deep Brooklyn, and hearing it was a little shock. Some part of me had been expecting synthesized speech. “Fuck if he didn’t say I should keep away today. But I didn’t listen- I wanted to have a look.” He turned to the redhead. “Take a lesson from that, Chris: don’t argue with your lawyer.”
Chris looked from Fenn to me, and his doughy face was puzzled. He put his big hands on his knees, as if he was about to get up.
“He a friend of yours, Mitch?” he asked. His voice was surprisingly high-pitched, and full of adolescent tough. He ran a hand over his spiky hair, and his stupid blue eyes narrowed.
Fenn smiled wider. “We haven’t been introduced, but we’ve seen each other before- haven’t we?”
“I think I’ve seen a little more of you,” I said.
The big smile didn’t falter, but it turned colder, and a shade meaner. “Yeah? Hope you didn’t get some kind of inferiority complex from it.” His laugh was a throaty bark.
“It was something closer to indigestion.”
The grin held, but even Chris couldn’t miss the radiating anger. He had no idea what was going on, but he stood up anyway. “You want to watch your mouth, buddy,” he said. He was maybe an inch taller than I, and heavier by twenty sloppy pounds.
I looked more closely at his face- the freckles, snub nose, thin lips, and chipped front tooth- and I recognized him from the brochure: Christopher Fitz-something, the head sales guy. Which explained his eagerness to impress his boss. I shook my head.
“You don’t want an audience for this, Mitch,” I said.
Fenn barked out another laugh. “An audience for what? You doing tricks or something?”
Chris took a step toward me and poked a finger in my direction and then at the door. “You, out- now.” His face was red, and his fists were clenched. Fenn’s dark eyes were shining with expectation.
“You’re going to get him hurt,” I said to Fenn. Behind Chris’s back, he shrugged. Chris took another step.
“There’s only one guy gonna get hurt, asshole,” he said. Then he put his hands up, to shove me in the chest. I stepped aside and he fell past me, and I hurried him along with a push between the shoulders. I stuck out my foot as he went by, and he stumbled into the hallway, down on one knee and flapping like an ungainly red bird. I shut the door and turned the lock and looked at Fenn. He laughed out loud.
“Tommy said you were a piece of work,” he said, and his wide frame shook. Behind me, Chris cursed and worked the doorknob. Then he started pounding.
“You okay, Mitch?” he shouted. “You want security for that asshole, or the cops?”
“No,” Fenn called. “No cops. Everything’s fine, Chris- I’ll catch you tomorrow.”
“You sure? I can-”
“Tomorrow, Chris,” he repeated, and Chris got the message and went away. Fenn picked up a red rubber ball from his desk and started squeezing it. He shook his head.
“Or was I wrong, and you’re going to try and push me around, too? ’Cause I’m telling you, it won’t be so easy with me.”
“As appealing an idea as that is, I came to talk.”
Fenn leaned back in his chair and smiled. If there was relief there, it was hard to tell. “You want to talk, talk to Tommy.”
I walked to the desk and slung my coat on one guest seat and sat in the other. “I heard what he had to say. I didn’t find it convincing.”
“That sounds like something between you and Tommy.”
I sighed heavily. “You’re going to make me go through the motions?”
Fenn squeezed the rubber ball, and watched his knuckles go white. “Which motions are those?” he asked.
“The ones I make while I’m calling the cops.”
“Calling them about what?”
“About you and the Williamsburg Mermaid, for starters.”
Fenn was quiet for a while, and studied his fingers on the red ball. “Is that supposed to make me go weak in the knees?” he asked eventually.
“Worry more about the effect it has on the cops, and especially when they see Cassandra’s video.”
He smirked. “You know, I’ve never watched the final product. I hope she made me look good.”
A little rushing noise started in my ears. “Yeah, you look great choking her, Mitch- almost as good as when you’re slapping her around, or burning her breasts with candle wax.”
Fenn let go of the ball. It took a small bounce on his desk and came to rest against his phone. He pointed at me, and finally the grin went away. “Fuck you, March- that bitch was a freak, but she was a grownup freak. She knew what she was getting into, and she liked it, so don’t lecture me.”
I felt my hands grip the armrests of the chair, and I felt something shift in my face. Fenn pushed his chair back from his desk by half a foot.
“What- she was a friend of yours or something?”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Don’t call her ‘bitch’ anymore,” I said softly.
“Whatever,” he said. “My point is, she was no schoolgirl, and the cops will figure that out. And, anyway, I can account for my time.”
“Sure, and while they’re figuring, and you’re accounting, who knows what other agencies will start asking questions- about your business, maybe, and Tommy’s, about your clients…”
Fenn’s eyes narrowed. “What agencies?”
“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging. “The IRS, maybe, or the SECthere are all sorts of initials out there, and all just a phone call away.”
Fenn’s mouth was an angry line, and I could almost see the steam rising from his dark curls as he stared at me. He shook his head. “Tommy wasn’t bullshitting you; it’s been years since I had any contact with her, and I had nothing to do with what happened.”
“Why did you send him looking for her, then?”
He ran a hand across the back of his neck and let out a long breath. “I got a letter a while ago- about three months back- pictures of me and her, from when we were together. A few days later a note came, from somebody squeezing me, or trying to.”
“Somebody who?”
Fenn snorted. “Do blackmailers usually sign their letters?”
“You assumed it was Wren?”
“From the photos and the bullshit threats, that’s what I thought, but I never knew who the fuck Wren was. That’s why I called Tommy.”
“What were the threats?”
“The same crap as two years ago,” Fenn said. “Sending pictures to the boss, the wife, the in-laws- all that shit.” Fenn paused and surprised me with a satisfied smile. “She didn’t know that it was all old news, though. That ship sailed a long time ago.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means in the last couple years I’ve become pretty much squeeze-proof.”
“Squeeze-proof how?”
Fenn laughed. “Two years ago, I was still married, I was working for somebody else, and I was just putting together the money for this.” He gestured around him. “Now I’m single, I’m in charge around here, and I bought out the last of my investors six months back. So if somebody wants to put pictures of me fucking a beautiful girl on the Internet, they can go right ahead. The way we went at it, it’d probably get me more dates.”
“Why not ignore the letter, then? Why send Vickers to look for her?”
“That’s just what Tommy said- leave it alone- but I said no way. Immune to it or not, I fucking hate the idea of someone trying to shake me down. I hate being harassed; I hate people messing with my privacy. And the fact that there’s somebody out there who thinks they can get away with it- who thinks I’m a soft touch- that’s a fucking
