Babylon Sisters (24 page)

69

There was only one message on my machine when I got home.

“Mommy.” My daughter’s voice was singing with happiness. She never called me
Mommy
anymore except in unguarded moments of absolute joy. “This is me. I got your message. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I can’t wait to see you. I’m going to try to get an earlier flight if I can, but it’s a holiday, so who knows? I’ve got exams all day, but I’ll call you tomorrow. I love you so much. I can’t stand it when we don’t talk. Let’s never do that again, okay?”

It wasn’t necessary to remind her, even telepathically, that she was the one who had cut me off, not the other way around. But she had cause; I had admitted it. Now she was back! That was all that mattered.

70

When B.J. and I decided he would stay at the house again tonight, I knew it wasn’t just for safety’s sake. It was time. We were ready, and we both knew it. I had stopped for condoms on my way home from Miss Iona’s, and since I didn’t want to make a habit of making him beg, I asked him if he wanted to stay in my room this time. And he said yes. Just
yes,
like I’d asked him over to watch a movie on TV. Just
yes,
because everything that needed to be said had already been said. The message we needed to send now could only come through skin.

So we took off our clothes with the lights on so we could see who we were now and how we’d weathered the storms. His body, and his hands on mine, were still as familiar to me as the movement of my own hips. Even after so long apart, we came together like two halves of the same whole. We were like we were before, but better, truer, deeper. We made love like we’d been saving it up for all those years and this was the moment we’d been waiting for longer than that.

Wrapped up in his arms, I felt a part of my brain stop trying to think ahead, and I just relaxed into the moment.

“B.J.?” I whispered, my cheek against his chest.

“What, baby?” His hand was stroking the small of my back gently, enjoying the curve of my hip.

“Promise me something?”

He leaned back and looked into my face. “Anything.”

“Let’s live every minute of every day we’ve got. Okay?”

He smiled slowly. “Is that it?”

I nodded, loving the length of his body pressed against the length of mine.

“I promise,” he said softly.

I kissed him then, and he kissed me back like he would never stop. Whatever was going to go down tomorrow would have to take care of itself. Tonight, I gave Burghardt Johnson all the love I thought he could stand; then I curled up in his arms and slept like a baby.

71

I woke up at five, and B.J. and I went over the plan one more time. I was to go to Ezola’s office, where her secretary would meet me and make sure I had come alone. At that point, she would leave so the only people there to see the moment of transfer (on the cop shows, those are called potential witnesses) would be me and Ezola. She would hand over the four girls and I’d walk them out the front door. At that point, the Atlanta police would move in to arrest Ezola and I’d take Etienne home to meet her sister.

As I drove through West End so early in the morning, the streets were almost empty. Later on, they’d be clogged with people headed for the Falcons game or down to the newsstand to pick up the morning paper. But now everything was quiet, almost in a state of suspended animation, waiting for the day to begin.

It had already begun for me. I turned into the parking lot behind Mandeville Maids and looked around. It was empty. Ezola and Desiree were probably parked in the tiny underground lot that was just for VIPs. I wondered where the police officers were hiding with Louis and B.J. It would have made me nervous to know, so I hadn’t asked. Now, I wished I had.

Desiree met me at the elevator with a curt nod and no other greeting of any kind. She headed down the hallway and I followed her, wondering which door stood between me and the four girls I had come to claim.

“Where’s Sam?”

“Mr. Hall is on special assignment,” she snapped, and pushed open the door to Ezola’s office.

I stepped inside, looking around for Ezola herself, but Desiree stepped in behind me and kept walking. “What’s going on?”

“There’s been a change in plans,” she said, opening a small door beside Ezola’s desk.

“What are you talking about? She’s supposed to meet me here at seven. She agreed.” Had Ezola spotted our carefully concealed police backup? Had she decided to call off our deal?

“She still agrees,” said Desiree. “Nothing has changed except the location of your meeting. Is there a problem?”

“Of course there’s a problem,” I said, trying to quickly to consider my options. Was she bluffing? If she wasn’t, as soon as we walked out of the building, the police would know something was wrong and swoop down on us. Then we’d never find Etienne. I couldn’t risk that, but what could I do?

“This is not what I agreed to. What if I say no?”

“Then I’ll have to call Miss Mandeville and tell her she can go ahead and transfer the girls to their new sponsors.”

“Is that what you call them? Sponsors?”

“That’s what she calls them,” Desiree said, stepping through the open door into what I could now see was a tiny private elevator.

“That doesn’t make it true,” I said.

“Listen, Catherine.” She sounded annoyed. “If you don’t come with me, what’s going to happen to your friends isn’t pretty. Mr. Hall has been hyping his Miami connection way up on the fact that these girls are still virgins, and these guys are animals.”

“What does that make you for being a part of it?”

“It makes me a Harvard MBA,” she said. “Surprised? Don’t be. Miss Mandeville liked to say that I was a success story to impress people with what she was doing.”

“You were never a maid?”

“Do I look like a maid?” She sneered and held up a cell phone she was carrying. “Now, are you coming, or should I make that call?”

“Where are we going?”

She waggled her finger. “If I tell you, then you’ll know as much as I know, and we can’t have that.”

“Even if I go with you, how can I be sure that she’ll turn over the girls to me? If she reneged on one thing, she’ll renege on another.”

Desiree raised her perfectly plucked eyebrows. “You’re the one who said you’d come alone and then brought the cavalry.”

Damn!
We were good, but they were better.

“We can’t walk out together. There are people watching the building.”

She raised her eyebrows even higher. “No shit.”

Harvard was out the window now. We were playing by street rules, where smarter and stronger always came out on top.
So be it,
I thought. “If they see me without the girls, they’ll know something’s wrong.”

“They’re expecting to see me leave right after you come in, right?”

“Right.”

“Then that’s what they’ll see.”

“How?”

“This elevator goes down to secured underground parking. You’ll get in the trunk of my car—don’t worry; it’s clean. We’ll get you settled in and make our exit without a hitch. They’ll still be waiting for you, and we’ll be on our way.”

This was getting scarier by the minute, but we were in it now, and there was nothing to be done but
go with the flow.
“If you think I’m going to get into the trunk of your car and go God knows where, you must think I’m as stupid as you are crazy.”

She looked at me. “It’s your choice, but I think you should know one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Before they give your girls to these guys, they’re going to tape their hands and their mouths with duct tape so they can’t fight back and nobody can hear them screaming.”

I stepped into the elevator beside her, and she punched the button for the garage. I wanted to punch her. “Did they teach you this at Harvard?”

“No,” she said, cool as a cucumber. “I picked this up right here in Atlanta.”

72

The trip took about twenty minutes. Of course, she had confiscated my cell phone, and since I couldn’t see anything, I had no idea where we were going. Desiree had music playing loudly, so I couldn’t even pick up any sounds from outside. Her car had one of those switches that opened the trunk from the inside, but what good did that do me? I wanted to go wherever Ezola had told her to take me. If I knew anything, I knew where she would be was where I’d find Etienne. I only hoped that someone had been suspicious when they saw Desiree leaving and followed her, but why would they? Her departure was part of the plan, and the truth was, I was probably on my own.

When the car finally came to a stop, Desiree blew the horn to announce our arrival and popped the trunk from up front. I didn’t wait for her to give me permission; I scrambled outside and looked around. We were in front of a large house that seemed to be located in the middle of a whole lot of great big Georgia pines. The road we took was the only way in or out that I could see. The overgrown yard and shuttered windows made the house look unoccupied, but it wasn’t. The first person I saw was the guy with the ponytail coming across the grass in our direction. Somebody was definitely at home.

“Anybody follow you?” he said to Desiree, keeping an eye on me.

“No way.” She shook her head, and then spoke to me like we were girlfriends. “Mr. Wilson thinks I’m not ready for the big leagues.”

He ignored her, took hold of my arm, and started walking me toward the house.

“Tell her I’ll be back with her sponsors by noon.”

“You better be,” he growled over his shoulder. “We ain’t got all day.”

Desiree climbed back into her car and drove away without another word. If the sponsors were coming here, that could mean only one thing: the sale of the girls was still on. The man Desiree called Mr. Wilson opened the front door, and once we were inside, he locked the dead bolt and released my arm. The house was nicely furnished, and I could hear the low drone of a TV nearby.

“I want to see Ezola,” I said, trying to sound braver than I felt.

“She wants to see you, too,” he said, pointing toward the living room. “Go in there and sit down. I’ll tell her you got here.”

He said it as though this were a social call. I walked into the living room and looked around for exits, wondering if I should run for it while I still had the chance. The television in the corner was tuned to the Playboy Channel, and two blond white women with obvious implants were making fake love on a bed covered in black satin sheets. I sat down.
No.
I couldn’t leave Etienne here. If these girls were in this house, we’d all go free together, or we’d all go down together.

When I was a kid, my mother told me a story about a serial killer who captured eight Filipino nursing students and herded them into a bedroom in one of their apartments. He had a gun, and he told them that if they tried anything, he would kill them all. They were so terrified, they were completely immobilized. So, over the next few hours, he took them one by one into another room, tormented them, and then murdered them. Only one escaped by hiding under the bed.

What I wanted to know as she told me, even as a kid, was what were the others doing when they were left in that room together between the murders? He didn’t tie them up or drug them or knock them out. He depended on their fear to keep them rooted to that spot until he had killed them all, one by one.

There are crazy people and mean men everywhere,
my mother said, folding the paper with the photograph of all those dead girls and putting it aside.
But there’s almost always more of us than there are of them, so remember these two things.
My mother held up one finger and then another.
Don’t let them separate you from your sisters, and always fight back.

Her words came back to me now as I looked around this ordinary room, searching for clues or escape hatches. I could imagine Etienne and the others cowering somewhere close by, too scared to grab one another’s hands, dash off into these pine trees, and run like hell. All I had to do was find them in this great big house and teach them the lesson my mother taught me:
Stay together and fight back.
I hadn’t bounced around in the trunk of a car for twenty minutes to come out here and surrender to an evil woman and a man with a ponytail.

Ezola walked into the room, followed by Mr. Wilson, and looked at me. I looked right back.

“Did you really think I was that stupid?” she said.

Wilson sat down near the TV, his eyes glued to the screen.

I stood up. “I think
this
is stupid. We had a deal.”

“It’s too late to make deals,” she snapped. “And we both know it. Once you call the police in, all deals are off.”

“What are you talking about?” I reached in my purse and pulled out an envelope. “I’ve got a letter from the editor of the
Sentinel
right here.”

She shook her head, looking disappointed. “Sit down and stop waving that thing around so we can have this conversation and be on our way.”

That sounded promising. I sat back down as far away from Mr. Wilson as I could.

“It’s too bad we couldn’t work this out,” she said. “You were a great help to us. The perfect early-warning system, but that damn reporter just kept digging around, didn’t he? He just wouldn’t stop digging around.”

Ezola had hired me to let her know who was looking at Mandeville Maids, and I had willingly supplied her with all the information she needed. It had all been a big setup.

“So you never had a problem with Sam, did you?”

“My only problem was with you,” she said. “But now it’s over; you know it and I know it.”

“It’ll be over as soon as you give me what I came for.”

“And why would I do that? So you can waltz out of here like some kind of hero and they can come take me to jail? For what? After all I’ve done and all I’ve built, for nothing? Now I’m going down because of four little bitches who aren’t worth my time or yours?”

She was getting worked up, and that was the last thing I wanted. “Then let me have them. The police don’t even know I’m here. They’re waiting for me to come out of your office.”

“How long do you figure they’re going to wait?”

“Long enough for you to get as far away from here as you need to.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Ezola raised her little voice, and Mr. Wilson glanced up, but seeing no problem went back to the Playboy girls, who were now taking a candlelit bubble bath together.

“You’re still underestimating me,” she said, “but you know what? I’m going to use that to my advantage, just like I always do. And once it all goes down the way it’s all going to go down, you’ll have plenty of time to think about old Ezola Mandeville and how she was a lot smarter than anybody gave her credit for.”

“I never thought you weren’t smart.”

She leaned forward and looked at me like she had caught me in a lie. “Then why are we sitting here?”

“Because we made a deal.”

“You keep talking about that damn deal!” she said, suddenly angry again. “Okay, let me tell you what the new deal is. The new deal is this. I don’t care whether you run those stories or not. I’m leaving Atlanta as soon as Desiree gets back with my friends from Miami. They’re prepared to pay enough to take over the network Sam and I have put together so that we can disappear for a while. Sam’s on his way to the Bahamas right now to get things in order for our little hiatus. Once the heat dies down, I’ll start over, and believe me, this time I’m not going to waste my time on a bunch of damn maids. There’s always more people who want to
do
dirt than there are who want to clean it up.”

“What’s all that got to do with me?” Every possibility was a nightmare, but I had to know.

“Didn’t I tell you? At first my friends were a little hesitant, what with all the bad press, so I threw these girls in as a bonus. My sponsors like the idea of six virgins at one time. They think it’s good luck.”

What did she mean,
six
virgins? “I thought there were four girls.”

“There were four,” she said, nodding thoughtfully, “but you have to add the two we picked up this morning at your house.”

“My house?”

She sat back, enjoying my surprise. “I told you you were still underestimating me. We picked them both up this morning, right after you left for my office. Of course, we were watching your house and when they showed up, one right after another, I couldn’t believe my good fortune.”

I felt like she’d kicked me in the stomach. Had Miss Iona and Miriam come over to wait for me there? They wouldn’t do that. Not today. Besides, Miss Iona was nobody’s girl. “What girls?”

She ignored me. “They’re two of the prettiest ones we’ve got; wouldn’t you say so, Mr. Wilson?”

His eyes never left the TV. “They’re not as young as the others.”

Ezola chuckled at that, fingering her pearls and looking at him with the affection of an indulgent aunt for a mischievous nephew. “He really likes the younger girls. Once they hit sixteen, Wilson thinks they’re over-the-hill.”

I swallowed hard so I wouldn’t faint or throw up. This was no time to fall out.

She turned back to me. “But in the case of these two, he’s prepared to make an exception.”

“You’re not making any sense,” I said. “Who was at my house?”

“That little bitch’s sister, the one who’s been working for you, but Mr. Wilson said that when he got there, he found the bonus prize.”

She turned toward Wilson again. “What did she say her name was?”

“Phoebe,” he said, his eyes glued to the girls as they toweled off each other’s towering silicon titties. “Her name’s Phoebe.”

I stood up and reached Ezola across the room in two steps. Not as distracted as he appeared to be, Wilson stood up, too, and grabbed my arm before I could grab her neck.

“Where’s my daughter?” I said, shaking so hard I thought I’d shake loose of his grip, but I didn’t. “If you do anything to hurt her . . .”

Ezola stood up in my face as close as she could without touching me. “You’re not in a position to do much of anything, are you?”

She was right. Wilson’s hand on my arm was large and cruel. I couldn’t even move.
Think, think, think!

“I’d throw you in, too,” she said, “but you’d be more trouble than you’re worth—to me, or to them.”

B.J.’s words came back to me.
She doesn’t like to be told what to do.
The girls were about business. Her interest in me was personal.

“Let me see my daughter,” I whispered.

Ezola sat back down, but Wilson still had hold of my arm. “Of course you can see her, Catherine. It’s only fair. Just think, she came home early just to surprise you, and it turned out we surprised her instead. You two will probably have a good laugh about it later.”

Her face was a tight mask, and her smile wasn’t a smile at all. “You know this isn’t personal, no matter what you might think.”

She was still reading my mind.

“There’s just too much money to be made for you to mess it up trying to save the world.”

“I want to see my daughter.”

She glanced at her watch. “You can see her right now if you want. The rest of them, too. Desiree will be back with their sponsors in a minute, and once she gets here, they won’t have much time to talk.”

“Why?”

“Because Wilson always tapes their mouths first.”