Chapter Twelve
The next morning, two things happened simultaneously. One. A dozen red roses on Pam’s desk.
“Wow, these from Bobby?” I asked.
“They’re for you.” She tapped a pen to the desk blotter, as if writing a song in her head.
Before I could open the paper flap of the card, the second thing happened. I caught the image on my assistant’s screen of Antonio and me in the hallway. It had been shot through the window the moment before we kissed. Next to that image was one of Daniel and me sitting together at dinner.
I’d feared looking weak. I’d feared the op ed pieces about my neediness and desperation, about Daniel’s ambition and mindless drive for power. The inevitable comparisons to greater women’s choices about cheating political mates. Maybe I should have worried about looking like a whore.
“Who’s that?” Pam asked.
Who was he? I ran the question over and over in my mind, and I didn’t have an acceptable answer. He was a man I’d met the other day. He was a magnet for my sexual hunger.
“He’s being investigated for fraud,” Pam said, as if he was just a guy on the screen and not someone I had been standing so close to I could feel his heat. “Is he the same guy with the cars?”
“Same,” I choked. “What’s the article say?” I opened the envelope so I wouldn’t have to look at the screen. I figured the flowers were from Daniel, asking for another reprieve.
“Says you and Antonio Spinelli are friends through WDE. And you’re reconciling with Daniel Brower.”
“They used that word? Reconciling?” I looked at the card.
One more question.
No name. An arrogant avoidance of redundancy. I folded it back into the envelope.
“Yeppers,” Pam said. “Right next to that picture with the hot Italian guy. Sneaky.”
“Journalist. In Latin it means ‘to say everything while saying nothing.’”
“Really?”
“No. But if the ancients had known anything at all, it would.”
* * *
I’d gotten up and dressed like any other morning, expecting nothing more than the usual inconveniences. Traffic. Runny stockings. Coffee too hot/cold. Daniel and I had parted amicably the previous night, with him whispering “think about it,” in my ear. I promised to, and I would, but it was hard to think of Daniel when I woke up with a soaked, sore pussy courtesy of Antonio.
I relieved myself, fingers stroking the soreness. I loved the pain of remembrance. He’d been so good, so hard, and talking during sex was something new. I whispered to myself fuck me fuck me fuck me hard until I came, ass tightening, hips twisting, balancing my whole body on the top of my head and the balls of my feet.
Only when I took my first panting breaths, cupping myself in my palm, did I consider how poorly we’d parted. I couldn’t be with someone so closed off. Later at work, when Pam told me he was under investigation, I knew why he didn’t like being interrogated. I had her hold my calls for an hour.
One more question.
What would it be? More about Nella? Another reason to land in Los Angeles besides easy Bar exams? No. All that was too facile and obviously loaded for him.
I locked my office door. I had a million things to do, but none would happen while those pictures sat in my mind. I needed to solve all of it immediately with an internet search.
If I could have bottled the next hour in a fragrance, it would have been called frustration. If the size of the bottle contained the amount of information I found on Antonio Spinelli, it would be one ounce, not a drop more, and the contents would be worth less than the vessel.
In other words, one sidebar article in Fortune had not one undigested word. I found one professional photograph in which he looked gorgeous, an unsubstantiated complaint in the comment section of a real estate blog bitching about how many cars he had and how much property he owned, a short fluff piece about Zia Giovana in the San Pedro Sun, and an investigative piece in the same paper from two years later.
The investigative piece was recent enough to matter. Antonio Spinelli, owner and proprietor of Zia’s restaurant, was under investigation for laundering millions through the establishment. The claim was absolutely impossible to prove, and apparently the money trail died before the reporter’s deadline.
Pam texted me.
—Mister Brower is on the line—
—I have another twenty minutes—
—He’s pretty insistent—
Pam knew me, and she knew my ex-fiancé. She wouldn’t interrupt for nonsense. I picked up the phone.
“Hi,” I said.
He started before I had the chance to take another breath. “What are you doing?”
“What?”
“With a known criminal. What are you doing with him?”
I was shocked into speechlessness.
“Tink? Answer me. It was in the LA Times.”
“I’m not with anyone. Not that it’s your business.”
“Your safety is my business. I’m sorry. That’s not negotiable now or ever.”
His voice seemed physically present, coming through not just the phone but the walls, and I realized he was right outside my locked door.
“Let me in,” he said.
I hung up and opened the door. “You have to relax.” It was barely out of my mouth before he slammed the door and shut out his bodyguards, who seemed to be holding back Pam.
“Daniel, really—”
“Really? Really, Theresa? Where did you pick him up?”
I put my hands on my hips. I had to bite my lips to keep in all the pointless recrimination. We didn’t need more of it. Daniel knew things.
“Do you want to take it easy and talk to me?” I said.
“No,” he said, taking my shoulders. “I don’t.” He kissed me, pushing me back against my desk.
I kept my mouth closed not out of anger, but confusion. By the time he pulled back, we’d both calmed down.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Sit down.” I indicated the chair across from my desk, and I sat next to it.
He pulled his chair close to mine as if he was still entitled to breathe my air, as if I’d agreed to the newspaper’s reconciliation in real life. “I need you to tell me everything,” he said, gathering my hands.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“How did he approach you?”
I pulled my hands away. “This is not fair. You’re not exactly entitled to any information about me or my love life anymore. If I tell you it’s nothing, you’re going to think I’m lying. If I tell you it’s something, it’s like I’m trying to hurt you. I’m just trying to live my life, okay? I’m just trying to get through my days and nights.”
“You’re stumbling into a place where you can get hurt.”
“All roads lead to hurt, trust me.”
“I deserved that.”
“It wasn’t directed at you.” I threw his hands off me. “Can I just talk to you without all the baggage?”
“No, because you’ve forgotten who you are.”
“I’m not yours anymore.”
“You’re an heiress. A socialite. You run one of the biggest accounting departments in Hollywood. You funnel millions of dollars a day. You have access to the district attorney.”
“This is about you?”
“No! Fuck!” The curse was pure exclamation. Not a lead in or a modifier.
He paused for half of a microsecond, but I caught it. When he and I were together, I hadn’t liked cursing. I thought he didn’t do it until I found his texts to Clarice, and I found out just how well he used the word fuck.
He put his elbows on his knees and put his face in his hands. “He’s the capo of the Giraldi crime family, Tinkerbell.”
If I’d had a muscle in my body that wasn’t tensed to pain, they caught up. Even my toes curled. “You’re making that up.”
His face was red and sweaty. He looked more like a man and less like a mayor than he had since the morning I discovered his infidelity. “I wish I was. I wish I was only jealous.”
My ex-fiancé didn’t get jealous often, but when he did, he burned white hot. I’d never betrayed him or any of my boyfriends. My relationships had ended because of educational choices (Randolph went to Berkeley, and I went to MIT) or because the other party strayed or because there was nothing worth bothering with, as was the case with Sam Traulich. He was a nice guy, just completely incompatible with me.
Sam and I stayed friends, and when he’d called to ask if I had any contacts at Northwestern Films, I agreed to a lunch. It had gone long. At three thirty p.m., Sam and I were laughing over some crumb of nostalgia when Daniel stormed into the little diner. At first, he was thrilled to see me alive. He’d apparently been calling the office for hours about our dinner plans, and no one knew where I was. My cell battery had died, so he tracked me down by having his friends on First Street look into my credit card transactions for the previous two hours.
For some reason, that didn’t bother me.
Once he’d gotten over his initial delight, he got a good look at Sam, who was burnished brown from the sun, joyful as always, laid-back, and in good humor. Daniel put on his politician game, apologized, and appeared to forget about it. We made it to dinner on time. Life moved on.
But not for Daniel. I was shocked to find out years later, through a mutual friend, what had followed. As an extraordinarily popular young prosecutor, Daniel had arranged for Sam to be picked up by the police, brought in, roughed up, and detained. Daniel visited the detainee and mentioned that if he ever kept his girlfriend too long again, Sam would be joined in his cell by at least three gang members who owed him favors.
I had been livid. I slept on the couch for three weeks and barely spoke to him. That was the last intolerably stupid thing Daniel ever did on my behalf.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m listening. Antonio is what… in the mafia?”
“Yes.”
“You mean there’s still a mafia?”
“Yes, Virginia, there is a mafia.”
I paused for a long time. On the one hand, he might as well have told me Antonio was a leprechaun. On the other, I couldn’t say I was surprised.