double-crossed much, am I right?”
“You think you can pull this off convincingly?” I said.
“Are you kidding me?” She said her experience as a successful escort all these years made her a better actress than Meryl Streep.
The way she put it, “Every week, an eighty-year-old man thinks he gives me a screaming orgasm, okay? So this business with Janet’s a piece of cake.” Then she added, “Still, you need to prepare yourself for something.”
“What’s that?”
“She’s never going back to you.”
“I don’t want her back.”
“Then let me put it another way: she’s never going to forgive you.”
“You don’t think she’ll eventually thank me?”
“Not a chance.”
I thought about that a bit. “Okay,” I said. “It’s still worth it.”
In all, Lauren and I were together six hours. The first hour we rehearsed her lines, over and over. Then I ordered room service. We rehearsed another thirty minutes while waiting for the food. Lunch came and we ate it and chatted about life in general.
I couldn’t get over how much she looked like Kathleen Gray. Lauren didn’t have Kathleen’s spark, of course, or her gift of gab, or her capacity to be adorable. Yet she had something special going for her in a Kathleen sort of way.
After lunch, since I was paying for her time anyway and since she looked so much like Kathleen Gray, we had a little casual sex.
Then I beat the shit out of her.
We rehearsed her lines again while I waited for her bruises to bloom. Then I took pictures and got the information about her ex and asked if she had a preference how she wanted the hit to go down. She said, “Two things. First, I want him to suffer.”
“Of course you do.”
“Wait,” she said. “This is really going to happen, isn’t it?”
I smiled. “What’s the second thing?”
“I want to watch him die.”
I smiled again. “Of course you do.”
She asked, “Am I bad?”
I shrugged. “Hey, he’s got to die sometime, right? Now don’t over-think this. It’ll be fun. You’ll see.”
CHAPTER 21
One quick glance and I forgot all about Joe DeMeo.
It was Saturday, a couple hours after my meeting with DeMeo at the cemetery. I was staying in a luxury beach hotel in Santa Monica when she knocked on the door.
Jenine.
The first thing she noticed was the envelope fat with cash on the edge of the coffee table. She picked it up and her eyes widened as she riffled through the stack of hundreds. She glanced at me to see if I was serious.
I nodded.
She’d been advertising on Aspiring Actresses, the internet escort site, and had purchased enough space to display three sultry photographs and a bio listing her vital statistics and limited acting experience.
In the e-mails we exchanged, she admitted being desperate for cash, and I had agreed to share some of mine in return for what might happen when we eventually met.
When she’d called from the lobby, I gave my room number and wondered—having been previously burned in similar encounters—if the girl who showed would bear any resemblance to the photos I’d seen.
I needn’t have worried. If anything, she looked better than advertised—and that was saying a lot. Dressed casually in jeans and a halter top and sporting iridescent ear buds tethered to a surprisingly bulky MP3 player, she looked every bit the college student for whom a distinguished professor might willingly sacrifice his career.
Jenine removed the ear buds and placed the MP3 player on the coffee table before tucking the envelope securely into her handbag. She performed the obligatory small talk in a detached but efficient manner until I let her know it was time to move things along.
Standing before me in the parlor of one of Southern California’s most exclusive boutique hotel rooms, biting her lower lip, she suddenly seemed quite small and vulnerable.
Before she arrived, I had propped open the French doors leading to the balcony. A slight breeze manipulated the sheer curtains into random patterns that caught her eye, causing her to look beyond the small wrought iron seating area. From her vantage point, the Santa Monica Pier was visible, and she smiled wistfully at it or something else that attracted her attention.
On the beach below us, a guy played riffs on a saxophone.
Someone’s stunning twenty-year-old daughter began lifting her halter top for my pleasure, and I thought about what I would do to a guy like me if this had been my daughter, Kimberly. After removing her top, she covered her breasts with her arms and paused.
