The Hinky Bearskin Rug (15 page)

Jewel tried to
smooth the shock out of her face. Since Britney first joined the department,
they’d made a pact to accept each other’s sex lives. No wigging out, no
judgments.

Brit must have
sensed her shock. “So, what’s your point? If they’ve had work done, that means
they’re whores, and that’s bad? Or is it that they look better than you, and
you think you couldn’t get paid for it if you tried?” She sounded cranky.

Jewel realized
it was time for damage control. She opened her mouth to soothe, then stopped.

Over by the
door stood the goth girl from Maida’s office.

She was
looking at Jewel.

She walked
straight up to where they sat.

“You must be
Jewel. Randy sent me.”

“Hey, Cinderella,” Jewel said, as the tequila finally
fired a few synapses. “I think I have a drawerful of your shoes.”

The newcomer
nodded. “Lena Sacker.”

“Jewel Heiss.”
Then Jewel’s eyes caught up with her ears.

Holy
crow, that’s the girl from the bearskin rug. Lena. Velvita Fromage. She’s
Onika’s assistant.

And doing
Randy.

Lena put her
hand out. Jewel stared at it stupidly. “Velvita Fromage is my porn name.”

She’s
doing Randy on that bearskin rug.

When Jewel
didn’t shake, Brit said, “Wow! Put her here! Are you really in movies? I’m
Britney.”

Lena shook
hands coolly with Britney.

Jewel blinked.
I’m being a bitch.
“I’m sorry. Hi.
Uh, thanks for finding me.” She offered her hand, meeting Lena’s eyes with a
painfully fake apologetic smile. “I’m a recovering moron.”

Lena gave
Jewel a limp, three-fingered handshake.

“Margarita?”
Britney said.

“Thanks.” Lena
slid up onto a stool.

Britney waved
to the waitress for another glass. “And some curly cheese fries. And one of
those deep fried onion blossoms.”

“How did you
recognize me?” Jewel said. It was harder to hate Velvita now that she had a
real name and a mother.

“Randy showed
me your picture.”

“He doesn’t
have a picture of me.”

Lena eyed her.
“He can make one.”

Randy could
show her every dimple of Jewel’s cellulite if he wanted. Jewel covered her face
for a moment.

“This is the
guy who’s been living with you?” Britney said. “He’s some kind of sex demon,”
she explained to Lena.

“So I
gathered.” Perched on the stool, Lena crossed her legs as if gravity had never
been invented. The black miniskirt rode up her thighs, revealing that the black
tights were in fact stockings on lacy black garters. Lena caught Jewel looking
and raised her eyebrows.

Rub it in. Those legs have been wrapped
around my boyfriend.
And, argh, she’d just thought the B-word!

“We have other
things in common,” Lena said, smiling. “If you’re not too much of a moron to
discuss them.”

Jewel realized
Lena was trying to be polite in the face of Jewel’s attitude problem.

She also
remembered why she needed to talk to Cinder-Lena. “Steven Tannyhill.”

“That’s him,”
Lena said. The waitress put a salt-rimmed glass in front of her.

“This is your
boss upstairs?” Britney said.

Lena poured
herself a margarita. “Don’t let me interrupt.”

It occurred to
Jewel that just because she and Lena both hated Steven Tannyhill, it didn’t
mean Lena was trustworthy. But she was three margaritas down. Her grrl-radar
said the porn star was okay. And Randy had trusted her to fetch Jewel, hadn’t
he?

“Well. I was
about to tell Britney that Steven is acting bizarre. He seems to think he’s
God, or at least the big cheese of Baysdorter Boncil.”

“That’s
Steven,” Lena murmured.

“But, well,
get this. He knows I’m undercover in there. Maybe Maida told him. He seems to
have her under his thumb.” Lena scowled. Jewel said, “I can’t believe he grasps
the risks. I could sue BB for a skillion frillion dollars for what he’s said to
me. It’s like he thinks he’s got the drop on me, and he’s absurdly pissed
because I’m not rolling over.”

“He’s a
compulsive risk-taker,” Lena said.

“Yeah, but
talking about clothespins on my nipples? How dumb is that?”

Britney’s
breath hissed in. “I’ll hold him down so you can kick him.”

Jewel noticed
Lena didn’t address Maida being under Steven’s thumb. “Today’s little gem?” she
said to Britney. “He found those naked pictures of me on the Internet and
threatened to send the URL to my boss if I don’t ‘kill the case.’”

“The pictures
with the clothespins?” Britney said.

Jewel said
darkly, “It’s a friggin’ shame I’m not a lawsuit kind of girl.”

Lena said, “If
you don’t like it, why don’t you have them taken down?”

“How the heck
do I do that?” Jewel grumbled.

“There’s a
website you go to. I log in four times a month.”

“But you’re a
porn star.”

“And, duh, my
image is for
sale.
That means no one
can give it away. For example, some fool got into the shoot one day about six
months ago, pretending to be an electrician, and took a lot of candids. We took
him to the cleaners.” Lena bit a lime wedge in half and chewed. “You didn’t
know you could do that?”

Britney looked
at Jewel with concern. “I thought you liked having those pictures up.”

Jewel shook
her head.

“Well, shit!”
Britney said. “And here I thought—”

“Skip it.”
Jewel felt like an idiot. Why hadn’t it occurred to her she could have those
pictures taken down?

Turns
out even a porn star can get protection from that crap. This is exactly what
the Department of Consumer Services is for, and I’m acting like a poster child
for the poor dumb helpless consumer who doesn’t even know it’s there.

Lena looked at
Britney. Jewel felt annoyed at the degree of intimacy she detected between them.

“I thought she
was tougher than that,” Lena said, over Jewel’s head.

“That’s just
an act,” Britney said.

Lena raised
elegant eyebrows. “Don’t let Steven know. He can smell blood in the water a
mile away.”

First my boyfriend, then my buddy.
Steam hissed out of Jewel’s ears.

“One curly
cheese fry, one fried onion blossom,” said the waitress, serving, and saving
them from a blast of Jewel’s rage. “Another pitcher, ladies?”

“No,” Jewel
said.

“Yes,” Lena
said.

“Sure,”
Britney said.

Jewel defended
her honor. “Look, I figure I’m not supposed to feel ashamed.” She flushed. “I’m
supposed to be a free spirit. All liberated and stuff. I guess,” she said, her
blush burning hotter on her cheeks and ears, “I guess I feel like I’d be
betraying my — my macho if I blink.”

Britney patted
her hand. “Well, I feel ashamed sometimes, but hey.”

Lena said, “Every
woman in my industry feels ashamed. We live with it. Even when we aren’t
ashamed, we feel bad because we aren’t ashamed. And then some jerk makes a rude
remark to you, and you hate yourself, and you hate him. It’s part of being a
porn star.”

“It’s part of
being a woman,” Britney said. “I don’t think there’s any protection for anybody
from that stuff.”

“Wait, I
understand.” Lena pointed at Jewel. “You think you should feel like a guy.”

“Hey!” Jewel
said. “Enough already with the margarita-grade psychoanalysis.”

“Guess what,
guy porn stars feel ashamed, too,” Lena said.

Jewel changed
the subject. “There’s something odd about the way Steven threw those pictures
in my face.”

“Who took ’em?”
Lena said.

“Some guy I
met in a bar. I got royally snockered, and we had dinner, and then we went back
to his place. I didn’t know anything about it until Roller Skates Jason
mentioned the pictures to me. I guess he did them while I was passed out at his
apartment.”

“Jason is this
dickhead at our office,” Britney said.

“Who
did them?” Lena pursued.

“I said I
don’t remember.” Jewel felt exposed. Her blush was now all over her entire
body. “I used to, uh, get around.”

The whole
margarita thing began to seem like a dumb idea. She felt like everybody in the
bar was flapping their ears and pretending not to listen. A huge,
balloon-shaped, middle-aged guy in a raincoat came into the bar. He looked
straight at Jewel and turned as white as his raincoat.

God, I’ve got slut written on me so
big, they spot it when they walk in the door.

Raincoat Guy
stared at her. Then he blundered through the bar and into a private dining room
in the back.

“So what site
are these pictures on?” Lena said, pulling out her phone.

“Oh, no,”
Jewel said. “Please. No. Let it alone.”

“I can report
it for you right now.”

Jewel knew the
URL. Even if she’d forgotten, Steven had reminded her. She rattled it off.

“Those
degenerates,” Lena said. “They’re notorious for posting involuntaries. Many
times I don’t complain, but these guys are such sleazebags that I always rat
them out. Hm.” She looked closer at the teeny screen on her phone. “Have you
looked at these pictures?”

“Not lately.”

Lena squinted.
“Because I think you should.”

Reluctantly
Jewel took the phone from her and squinted.

“Use the arrow
at the bottom to zoom in.”

Jewel used the
arrow. “Oh. Holy shit.”

The guy who
took the pictures had carefully kept himself out of range of the camera, but
he’d apparently failed to consider the mirror behind the bed. As Jewel zoomed
in, he came into focus, his digital camera held out at chest height, giving her
a clear view of his face.

He was, hello,
Steven Tannyhill.

The phone
clattered to the table. Lena scooped it up.

Jewel put her
hands on either side of her splitting head. “I don’t get it.” But she could
feel the pieces coming together.

“Who is it?”
Britney said.

Jewel felt a
rush of damp air and looked up in time to see Lena point at the front door.

“Him. That’s
who took the pictures,” Lena said, pointing her phone like a camera at the
doorway.

Steven walked
in, looking like Satan in a good suit. Just like the fat guy in the raincoat,
he stopped dead when he saw Jewel, and turned color.

Then he, too,
swung off through the bar and into the private dining room.

“Why on earth
would he do a thing like this?” Lena said, going back to studying Jewel’s
public shame on her phone. “Steven likes to have power over women, but he’s
very pragmatic. Every woman he’s screwed at BB, it was for a reason, and he got
leverage with it.”

Britney had
her cop voice on. “When did this happen? Try to remember.” Jewel felt doubly
humiliated. She was a pathetic victim and her ditziest friend had to play cop
with her.

She shut her
eyes. “It was at least a year ago, maybe two. The Cubbies were losing
spectacularly, I remember. People in the bar were, like, in tears. That’s what
we started talking about.”

“Against the
Cardinals,” Britney said positively. “I lost a hundred dollars on that game.
That was two years ago.”

“Were you on a
case at the time?” Lena said.

“No. No, I was
on vacation.” Was she supposed to tell just anybody that? God, these margaritas
were a liability. “And I was wearing this red top! That’s how he recognized me.”
He must have recognized me sooner than
that,
she realized. Because he’d gone straight home and looked up those
pictures. “Only what-the-lady-mother is Steven so afraid of that he feels like
he has to blackmail me?”

The others
leaned closer over their curly fries.

“It must be
something that happened when you were dating,” Britney hissed.

“I would
imagine,” Lena said.

“Yeah,” Jewel
said cautiously. The margaritas were fuzzing out her edges.

There was a
mystery here. She felt that if she could just sit quietly somewhere with a cold
wet towel wrapped around her forehead, she could work it out.

A woman walked
by with a stupid-looking white furry purse that caught Jewel’s gaze.

Randy.

Bearskin rug.

Her chest
filled up with tight, cold worry.

“Britney, can
you find my dipshit partner outside and tell him I left already? I, uh, need to
spend some more time with this source.” Her head tipped toward Lena.

Plus, I have to get Randy out of that
rug.
She didn’t want
Clay or Britney along for that ride.

“Oh, are you
going to the porn place? I’d love to see it,” Britney said, ignoring Jewel.

“Do you mind
if—” Jewel began.

“Of course,”
Lena said, damn her beautiful eyes.

“You guys done
yet?” said a brusque male voice behind them.

Jewel looked
around.