The elevator stopped on the eleventh floor, and we stepped out into a white, furniture-lined hallway.
“You think I’m a stalker now, don’t you?” she said, pouting, when we arrived at her door. “I’m not a stalker, Mike. No, wait-that’s what a stalker would say.”
I got her room door open with her passkey. Inside, she immediately ran down a short hallway and then through another doorway. Then she ran back out.
“Don’t leave, Michael Bennett,” she said. “If you leave, I’ll come looking for you. You wouldn’t want a drunk woman running around the streets of New York on your conscience, would you?”
I stepped in and closed the door.
“Not me. I’m not going anywhere,” I said.
She went back into what I assumed was the bedroom. The room was a suite, with a living room window that looked north up Fifth Avenue, toward Central Park. How much money did she have, exactly? I thought. And exactly how drunk was she?
After a minute, I heard water running in the next room. When she came back out a minute or so later, my jaw dropped. Uh-oh. She was wearing a fluffy white bathrobe-quite a short fluffy white bathrobe.
She stopped at the love seat, sat, and tucked her long legs up underneath her.
“There. Okay. Much better. My head isn’t spinning so much,” she said. “Hey, c’mon. Sit down. Do you want a drink?”
I started laughing at that.
“I think the bar’s closed, Tara.”
“I like how you laugh, Mike,” she said, sounding a little more sober. “I’m so glad you came. Down at the bar, some Eurotrash creep tried to pick me up. When I blew him off, he said some nasty things to me before he left. I got afraid. That’s when I called you. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re in trouble, right? Call a cop?”
I laughed again.
“And here I am.”
“Exactly. Here you are,” she said, and stood and undid the spill of her hair.
As I watched it fall, I thought of a fragment of an Irish song from my childhood for some reason.
It was actually her robe that slipped down over her shoulders a moment later, revealing pale tan lines at the nape of her neck. I swallowed. It was a really nice nape.
BUT AT THE last second, as Tara rose up to kiss me, for some unknown reason I suddenly gave her my cheek and turned her embrace into a quick hug.
She stiffened in my arms. Then her head sank.
“Too much?” she said.
She turned, stomping away, and collapsed back onto the love seat.
“I always push it. Always,” she mumbled into the arm of it. After a minute or two, she started to sob as if I’d just broken her heart.
I stood there, speechless, in the middle of the luxury suite. What was I doing here? First hugs and kisses, and now tears?
But as I scrambled for a clue, I finally caught a break. I thanked my lucky stars as the muffled sobbing turned into soft snoring.
After another minute, I lifted Tara up and carried her back into her bedroom, where I laid her under the seven- hundred-thread-count ivory sheets, carefully keeping her robe properly placed at all times.
I stood for a moment and smiled down at her as she slept. I didn’t think goofballs came this attractive. Would she even remember all this tomorrow? I wondered. I thought about deleting her text messages to me, but then decided not to. It was what it was. She’d gotten a little drunk and gone a little crazy. I knew how that felt. I was the last one to judge.
“See you at the trial, Tara,” I said as I closed the door behind me.
The same stern desk clerk frowned at me downstairs as I stepped back into the lobby. I suddenly remembered who she reminded me of-my fierce seventh grade teacher, Sister Dominick.
“Do you have the time, ma’am?” I said, winking as I passed her.
“Actually, no,” the reincarnated Sister D. said, as if she were aching to put a ruler to my knuckles one last time. “Fresh out.”
The cop cruiser on the corner hit me with his brights as I got out of the taxi in front of my building back on West End Avenue. Great. It was bad enough that my doorman knew all my dirty rotten nocturnal activities; now my coworkers did as well. There goes the department’s Father of the Year award.
When I got upstairs, the house was dark, everyone snug as a bug in a rug. Even Mary Catherine wasn’t waiting up for me, which was probably a good thing, considering I smelled like Tara’s perfume.
Though when I finally completed the last steps into my bedroom, I did see something. On my bed were lumps. Highly suspicious lumps.
“We miss you, Daddy,” one of the lumps mumbled as I took off my shoes.
“Miss you so much,” the other cute lump said as I searched for a hanger, gave up, and just tossed my jacket in the corner.
“It’s okay. I’m here now, girls. You can go to your own beds,” I said to Chrissy and Shawna as I lay down. I felt a whole bunch of smaller lumps flatten underneath me. Oh, criminy, I thought, pulling an itchy fur ball out from under the back of my neck. It looked like the girls had invited their entire Beanie Baby collection to the Daddy’s- room sleepover.
“Nugglance?” Chrissy said, pulling on the sheet beside me.
I shook my head. Nugglance in Chrissyese, if I remembered correctly, was a cross between nestling and snuggling.
“Yes, Daddy. We need nugglance,” Shawna said, pulling on the sheet from the other side.
“Fine, fine. Have your nugglance,” I said scooting over as I let them burrow in behind me. Giggles started as one of them started to pet the back of my head. With her foot.
I closed my eyes, too tired to protest. More women. I was completely surrounded. Resistance was futile. There was no escape.
CHAPTER 33
THE HISTORY BOOKS say that when the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, entered one of the seven hundred glittering rooms at his Palace at Versailles, his courtiers would fall to their knees and shade their eyes from his royal face as if from the sun itself.
Times change, I guess, because when U.S. marshals led Manuel “the Sun King” Perrine into the federal courtroom in his prison jumpsuit that Monday morning, falling to my knees completely slipped my mind. And instead of looking away, I stared nothing but daggers at the murdering son of a bitch.
I wasn’t the only one in a lather at the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse that morning. One of the dozen off-duty cops and federal agents who had come out in support of Hughie and the other murdered officers stood and began loudly letting Perrine know exactly what he thought of him. The newly appointed federal judge, Susan Baym, banged
