Never Too Rich (3 page)

But she’d done well and proved her worth; her trunk
shows were consistently the most successful. This last one had
culminated in I. Magnin’s unheard-of two-million-dollar order, the
biggest to date from a single store.

Small wonder, then, that when the symptoms of
Rubio’s illness increasingly manifested themselves, Antonio had
begun to drop hints that she, and not Klas, would be filling
Rubio’s shoes . . . that when the time came, she, not Klas
Claussen, would be promoted to become Antonio’s all-important and
prestigious number two. And although Antonio had never gone so far
as to say so outright, Rubio had. A scant month ago he’d bravely
told her, “I’ve talked to Antonio, Girl-Girl, and it’s all settled.
As soon as I kick the bucket, you’ll get kicked upstairs. See?
We’re both going to get kicked somewhere.”

And they’d both had a good long cry.

Now, as she stared ahead at the bumper-to-bumper
traffic and the gray towers of Manhattan, crystal clear and sharply
defined in the distance, a little thrill raised the skin on
Edwina’s legs and prickled the hairs on her neck. She would be
filling Rubio’s vacated number-two spot.

The thrill drained away as swiftly as it had come.
Damn that disease! Why did life have to be like this?

Under normal circumstances, a rise up the corporate
ladder and the prospect of a fifty-percent raise would have dazzled
her, but Rubio’s death having made it possible left a very, very
bad taste in her mouth.

She hoped Antonio would have the grace to wait a few
days before making her appointment official.

_Chapter
2

Antonio de Riscal was on the prowl. It was only
eight-thirty in the morning, and already he was horny as all
hell.

He growled to himself as he lit a cigarette with a
slim gold Dunhill lighter. Why couldn’t his libido shape up? On the
very morning of Rubio’s memorial service, here he was standing on
the southeast corner of Thirty-sixth Street and Seventh Avenue
ogling the crotches and buttocks of the black and Puerto Rican boys
pushing the hanging garment racks laden with coats and dresses.

A deadly disease was stalking the streets, but his
penis couldn’t seem to get the message.

As always, Seventh Avenue was a madhouse. The chaos
and congestion spread up and down the avenue and the narrow one-way
side streets of the Garment Center, where belching trucks making
pickups and deliveries snarled the traffic hopelessly, and porters
pushing racks of unprotected bolts of fabric or finished clothing
made you wonder how on earth anything clean ever got to the stores.
And, as though there wasn’t enough confusion, union pickets were
marching up and down the sidewalk in front of one manufacturer,
while shrill shouts and blaring horns and wailing sirens and dope
peddlers selling joints and coke and crack bewildered the mind. The
scene brought to mind an industrial casbah in hell.

Antonio de Riscal was tall and lean and sleekly
predatory, as out-of-place amid the raucous grime as a diamond in a
mud pit. His body was aristocratically elongated and streamlined,
which made it a perfect clothes hanger for beautifully tailored
suits. His features were as polished and artful as his manners:
prominent cheekbones, green-gray eyes, and a ski jump of a nose set
on a copper-tanned face. His nails were manicured and buffed, and
even his bald pate with its fringe of silver and black hair looked
prosperous.

“
Watch your back!” someone shouted
behind him, and he jumped out of the way just as a rattling garment
rack bore down on him.

He felt a flush of hot anger. The bastard! he
thought, his hands clenching at his sides. They always seemed to
seek out the best-dressed pedestrians to run down!

Suddenly his irritation disappeared and was replaced
by a roaring hard-on of heroic proportions.

Hel-lo! And what is this? he asked himself. As the
rack that had nearly run him down rattled past, he caught sight of
the porter pushing it.

Sweet mother of mercy. How old could he be?
Eighteen? All of nineteen? And with practically no hips to speak
of.

But thick, muscular thighs—oh, yes, he had those.
And under the thick quilted jacket—more muscles, surely. And he
strutted so cocksure, with those washed-out, torn Levi’s so tight
that the thick outline of prick and the glorious bulge of balls
were blatantly displayed for all the world to see.

Antonio, whose one major weakness was that he
sometimes thought with his penis instead of his brain, now once
again let himself be guided solely by his crotch. Throwing caution
to the four winds, he tossed his cigarette into the street and
began to follow the hunk.

He has tight buns too, he thought, his blood surging
and roaring. Yes, yes, he’s very yummy, and he knows it too. Nobody
was born with that stud walk, with those lean hips swinging, and
that crotch thrust forward like a beacon. That walk was studied and
perfected.

And what was he? Puerto Rican? Or maybe half
black?

And what could he possibly earn? Minimum union
wage?

Antonio considered the effect that waving a Ben
Franklin in front of the boy’s nose would have. Might it make him
forget, for a few minutes at least, that he was straight?

At Thirty-seventh Street the garment rack rattled
noisily across Seventh Avenue, and Antonio was jaywalking at the
porter’s heels, happily oblivious of the honking horns of oncoming
traffic.

Then, on the sidewalk, the garment rack came to such
an abrupt stop that Antonio collided with the young man.

Before he could mutter an apology, a darkly handsome
face with brooding black-olive eyes turned and glared
belligerently. “Hey, man, wassa matter?” the boy yelled. “You
followin’ me?”

Antonio, forgetting momentarily the accolades just
heaped upon him by the fashion industry’s weekly
Tobe
Report,
which had proclaimed him to be
“the
premier
American designer,” who dressed and personally fitted America’s
richest women, including three former First Ladies, who headed his
own 325-million-dollar fashion empire, which had grossed $420
million the last year alone, whose after-tax personal income in
1987 had been somewhere between eighteen and nineteen million
dollars, and who had won more Coty awards than any other single
designer in the nation, was suddenly reduced to feeling very
foolish, very embarrassed, and very humiliated. Which made him feel
only that much hornier.

He cupped his hand and coughed delicately into it.
“I . . . ah . . . excuse me . . .” he said softly, but made no move
to scurry off.

“
What are you,” the kid snarled
contemptuously, “a fag?”

Antonio reveled in humiliation and discipline, and
now he felt the creep of a guilty flush as he stammered softly,
“I’m sorry if I made a nuisance of myself.”

Antonio watched the young man’s eyes narrow. He
seemed to be deciding whether to ignore Antonio, scare him off, or
play him along. While he was doing that, Antonio kept staring
blatantly at him. He just couldn’t tear his eyes away.

The boy
was
handsome, in that rough
street-wise kind of way that Antonio found so appealing. The boy
was just his type—hell, the boy was the personification of his
type.

He was worth more than one bill, Antonio thought
desperately. Two bills. Three.

“
How would you like three hundred
dollars?” he croaked softly.

The kid stared at him. “What?”

Antonio took a deep breath. “I’ll give you three
hundred dollars if you’ll come back with me for half an hour,” he
blurted.

The kid grinned suddenly. “You mean, you wanna pay
to get fucked?”

Antonio nearly swooned. He nodded eagerly. “I’m just
two blocks away.”

The boy shrugged. “All right. Why not?” Then his
voice hardened. “But I gotta make some deliveries first. I’ll meet
you here at ten.”

“
Okay.” Antonio could barely speak,
he was so excited. His mind was flying. At ten-fifteen he had an
appointment for a fitting; he’d simply have his secretary make the
rich bitch wait until he’d finished with the kid. He’d smuggle the
boy in and out of his office by the fire stairs. That was easy
enough; he’d done it often before. “Ten o’clock,” he said
dreamily.

Just thinking about it very nearly made him
cream.

Antonio virtually floated back to 550 Seventh
Avenue. He whistled to himself all the way up in the elevator, and
didn’t drop the tune until he was past the lavish reception area
with its Napoleon III decor and almost at his office door.

At the desk directly in front of it, like a grim
sphinx, sat his secretary, Liz Schreck.

She was anything but decorative—a tough plump woman
of no style who schlepped in every morning on the BMT from the far
reaches of Queens with an alligator bag in one hand and a clear
plastic shopping bag printed with daisies in the other. As though
to compensate for her shortness, her aggressively orange-dyed hair
was wrapped tightly atop her head like a towering coiled snake, and
she resembled nothing so much as a cross between a piranha and a
goldfish.

She was in her early sixties and was one of the most
efficient secretaries in the city. She didn’t take anything from
anyone— including her boss.

“
Good morning, beautiful sight for
sore eyes.” Antonio flashed his best white enamel smile as he
drifted into his office.

“
What’s good about it?” Liz rasped,
lighting up her tenth cigarette of the day. “Our morning’s
overloaded with work and the afternoon’s shot because of the
memorial service. Tell me what’s good about that.” She squinted at
him through a cloud of blue smoke.

He paused at the door. “By the way, the ten-fifteen
fitting—”

“
Doris Bucklin, yeah, yeah, I
know.”

“
Since it’s too late to change the
time of her fitting, and I . . . will be busy with something, have
her wait in reception until I buzz you to let her in. Until then, I
do not wish to be disturbed.”

He thought fleetingly of the kid. All hard muscles
and bulging crotch. In an hour and a half, I’ll sneak him up the
back stairs and in through the emergency exit. We’ll be balling
right in my office, and the old bat will be none the wiser.

He could barely contain his excitement.

Liz fixed him with a glare. “Is there anything
else?” she asked tartly.

“
That’s all.”

“
That’s plenty.” She flushed
angrily. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, you know. It’s always
me
the customers come down on, not you. Like
I’ve
messed up the scheduling somehow.” She sniffed primly. “I don’t
know why you make appointments if you’re not going to keep
them.”

He sighed as he went into his office and shut the
door. Sometimes he wondered why he put up with Liz. She sure knew
how to take the sunshine out of anyone’s day.

If you didn’t watch it, she would castrate you
before you even knew what had happened.

Chapter 3

Edwina loved coming home.

The San Remo at 145 Central Park West was one of New
York’s indisputable architectural crown jewels, rising for
seventeen floors of substantial prewar splendor before splitting
into twin butter-colored stone towers of eleven floors each. Its
Central Park-facing facade was ornately handsome, embellished with
rococo stonework and balconies. The terrace-laden spires seemed to
scrape the feathery white clouds scudding swiftly across the pale
wintry sky. Inside, the palatial lobby, generous room sizes, high
ceilings, and wide hallways bespoke a more gracious era.

“
Good morning, Miss Robinson,” the
silver-haired doorman greeted her as he rushed out to open the
Mercedes’ door. He wore a stately dark gray uniform with pale gray
piping, and tipped his black visored hat to her.

She ducked out of the car. “Hello, Randy,” she said
in her alluringly smoky voice. She smiled the kind of brilliant
smile that puts sunshine into rainy days, just as the folded tip
she slid discreetly into his hand would have warmed the cockles of
any doorman’s heart. “Would you mind helping Winston with my
suitcases? There are two of them.”

Randy tipped his hat again. “I’ll have them sent
upstairs immediately,” he promised.

She had an elevator to herself. Eagerly passing her
tongue over her magenta lips, she felt a thrill of anticipation as
the elevator rose up the south tower and bobbed to a halt on the
twentieth floor. Home. Here was the center of her universe, the
lavish hearth that was a throwback to warm safe caves, her
sanctuary from the hustle and bustle of the naked city, her
terraced, landscaped fairy-tale getaway high in the sky.

The throbbing bass beat of a punk-rock song sounded
like the building’s heartbeat as Edwina unlocked her front door and
stepped inside the foyer of the duplex. She snap-locked the door
behind her and turned slowly around. She frowned deeply. Thundering
lyrics which sounded disturbingly like a refrain of “Brain dead . .
. dead head . . . gonna be brain dead ...” clashed with the elegant
black-and-white marble floor, the wine-colored silk walls, and the
huge oval Portuguese painting of flowers over a William Kent table
laden with two enormous candelabra and a lavishly expensive
arrangement of red and white anthuriums, fragrant white freesia,
and long-stemmed white orchids amid a fanning spray of palm
leaves.

On the table there were, as always, four neatly
sorted stacks of mail awaiting her. The first was composed entirely
of copies of
WWD,
as well as the January issues of
W,
House and Garden, Gourmet,
Town and Country, Vanity
Fair,
and other magazines; the second was obviously junk mail;
the third consisted of bills and letters; and the fourth, in a
Meissen porcelain basket, consisted the heavy, feloniously
expensive envelopes which unfailingly held beautifully printed
social invitations, of which, as a rule, she received an average of
ten each week. Well, she would get to the mail and RSVP’s later.
First things first.