And One to Die On(4)

“You only like to sleep in the guest room because there’s a mirror on the ceiling.”

“Sure. I like to see your bony little ass bopping up and down like a Mexican jumping bean.”

Hannah made a face at him and headed out of the bedroom toward the living room. She had to go down a hall carpeted in pale gray and across an entryway of polished fieldstone. Like most houses costing over five million dollars in Beverly Hills, hers looked like the set for a TV miniseries of a Jackie Collins novel. The living room had a conversation pit with its own fireplace. It also had a twenty-two-foot-long wet bar made of teak with a brass footrail. Hannah went around to the back of this and found a bottle of Smirnoff vodka and a glass. Vodka was supposed to be better for your skin than darker liquors.

Hannah poured vodka into her glass straight and drank it down straight. It burned her throat, but it made her feel instantly better.

“You know,” she said to John, who had followed her out to get a refill for himself, “maybe this won’t be so terrible after all. Maybe I’ll be able to create an enormous scene, big enough to cause major headlines, and then maybe I’ll threaten to sue.”

“Sue?”

“To stop the auction. You’re good at lawsuits, John, help me think. Maybe I can claim that everything they have really belongs to my mother. Or maybe I can claim that the whole auction is a way of trading on the name of my mother. Think about it, John. There must be something.”

John filled his glass with ice and poured a double shot of brandy in it. This time, he didn’t seem any more interested in mixers than Hannah was.

“Hannah,” he said. “Give it up. Go to Maine. Scream and yell at your father. Tell your aunt she deserves to rot in hell. Then come home. Trust me. If you try to do anything else, you’ll only get yourself in trouble.”

Hannah poured herself another glass of vodka and swigged it down again, the way she had the first.

“Crap,” she said miserably. “You’re probably right.”





3


THE FIRST TIME RICHARD Fenster put a poster of Tasheba Kent on the ceiling of his bedroom, laid down on his bed, and masturbated while looking into those big dark eyes, he was thirteen years old. He was now thirty-six, and if he wanted to abuse himself in homage to the greatest movie star who ever lived, he no longer had to make sure his door was locked and keep himself from crying out in the clutch of passion. His mother and father still lived in the tiny two-bedroom house in Newton where he had grown up, but Richard didn’t. He had a nifty one-bedroom apartment just upstairs from this store he operated in Cambridge, where he could be private any time he liked. In fact, he owned the whole building, and nobody lived here he couldn’t stand. It was absolutely the best arrangement, and there were days when Richard couldn’t believe he’d lucked into it.

Actually, luck had nothing to do with it. Richard wasn’t doing what his parents wanted and expected him to do, which was something along the lines of being the next in line for a Nobel Prize in physics. Richard had been declared a math prodigy at seven, sent to MIT at fifteen, and received a doctorate in theoretical mathematics from the California Institute of Technology before he was twenty-four. At that point, he had decided that he’d had enough. He may have been a math prodigy, but he had never been that interested in math. Working with numbers came easily to him, but it also bored him silly. As it turned out, however, it was a highly translatable skill. Richard was in his second year of doctoral work at Cal Tech the first time he bought a block of stock. That first time, he used money from his fellowship, which was supposed to go into his living expenses. He never had to miss a meal. Three months after buying the stock, he sold, at a profit of almost 15 percent, a nice haul even after having to pay capital gains tax. He bought another block and then another, throwing dice on quick turnovers and hunches that came from so deeply inside him, they might not have been hunches at all. His success was astonishing even to him, and he was used to being successful.

What made Richard Fenster a rich man was the Black Monday minicrash of 1987. Just before it hit, he had pulled himself out of the stock market totally, not because of any business intelligence or sober analysis of the state of the deficit, but in a fit of pique. He had spent the Monday before the Monday of the crash bidding on the fan Tasheba Kent had used to seduce Ramon Navarro in Flame of Desire. He had lost it to an aggressive little man who reminded him of Peter Lorre and who had much too much money to be beaten. Richard had cashed out of the market because he was angry that he hadn’t had the cash when he needed it. The next thing he knew, he was buying back in at rock-bottom prices that wouldn’t be seen again for quite a while. Six months later, the market bounced back and he sold out again. It was scary, how much money he made. It was scary to look through the careful financial records he kept on his Macintosh and realize he was worth well over six million dollars.