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Taking the Lead(43)

By:Cecilia Tan


"Well, I don't mean make a sex tape or do anything insanely stupid, but you know, when I have a boyfriend and I go out for a drink why should I care if some housewife in Phoenix, Arizona, sees it on the cover of a tabloid magazine?"

"Gwen, you should care more than me, probably, if you're trying to get acting gigs."

"Be serious, Ricki. They don't care if I can act. All most of them care about is whether I'm skinny enough and blond enough, and the more famous my name is, the better in that regard."

"There's a difference between famous and infamous."

"I'd be infamous for being seen in public holding hands with a guy? I think that would just prove my name value. If it'll sell magazines, it'll sell tickets."

I frowned. "Have you forgotten that we actually have something that will make us instantly infamous forever? The dungeon in the basement?"

"Or maybe it will make us infamous for five minutes and then everyone will get over it because BDSM is so mainstream now?" she suggested.

"Dream on. People are more uptight about sex than ever. That's why TTT made such a big deal about Mom's death. Not because they care about her. Because she might have died in a sensationalist way, because of the kinky sex implication."

"Okay, but let's approach this rationally. What are we afraid of? We're afraid of our private lives being exposed. Why? Because we're afraid of being judged? Okay, but who cares what the people who would judge us think?"

"The people who would be paying you for your marketability and the people who would be paying me not to be a PR liability." I sat up straight suddenly, as I put two and two together. That was what my boss had told me today, basically. Don't be a PR liability. Was it a coincidence that this talk came right after I'd taken a day off work to hide at home because of the article about Mom's death? I was sure that wasn't a coincidence. For that matter, was the way Gwen was dismissed today because of that? I couldn't tell, but I couldn't rule it out, either. "The media doesn't care if it ruins your life or even if what they say is true. They especially don't care about ruining your life if they've lied."

"Yes, but what if they're not even lying? What if it's the truth? There is a dungeon in our basement."

"And that's why the dungeon has to remain a secret."

Gwen sighed. "I suppose."

* * *

The locksmith came in the morning, and I hovered around while he changed the lock to the office and gave me two copies of the key, and he changed the combination on the safe. I hoped Schmitt was trustworthy and that I was just being paranoid, but better safe than sorry.

I kept waiting for Dad to show up while Paul and I took the opportunity to look through what was in that safe. I'd given it all a cursory look right after the will had been read, but this was the first time in the two months since then that I had a chance to look in greater depth. Deeds, the titles to various vehicles, other official papers, bonds, the annual reports of the winery  …  most of it wasn't terribly surprising.

Then I came to the folder that had the clippings about Mom's death. I thought I'd had it in my desk upstairs but I guess Grandpa Cy must have taken it back at some point.



       
         
       
        

Under that was another manila folder with a carbon copy of an old typescript that at first glance looked like papers of incorporation. But I realized, aha, these were The Governor's Club bylaws. I kept them where they were. That reminded me again about Dad.

"Paul, do you know what the arrangements are for getting Dad home today?"

"Your sister sent Riggs in the car to pick him up," he said from somewhere above me.

I looked up to find him standing on a chair, dusting the top of the eagle's head. "What are you doing? You don't have to do that."

"Housekeeping never does this thing," he said, as if it bothered him. "You can see the dust in the carved grooves of the feathers."

"Paul, seriously, don't bother. Just leave Rachel a note about it."

He climbed down looking chastised. He was the same age as me but somehow always seemed younger, maybe because he had a clean-shaven, boyish look to him, his hair cut short but with a little cowlick aided by gel at the front, and skinny jeans that showed his sometimes colorful socks. "Why did you keep it, anyway?"

"The eagle? I don't know if you noticed but it's bolted to a steel support column."

He ducked around one curving wing to look. "So it is. That's odd."

"Maybe that makes it earthquake-safe?" The office was the only upstairs room where a steel beam was exposed. "Otherwise it could topple and kill someone."

Paul made a non-committal noise at that.

"Hey, why are you here on a Saturday, anyway?"

"Because the locksmith was coming today?"

"Yes, but I could've handled that without you."

"And your father," he went on, coming over to help me sort through the folders I'd moved from the safe to the top of my desk. He took one to the other side of the desk and stood there, starting to page through. "I didn't think you should be on your own today."

"You are sweet, but you are an assistant, not a babysitter."

"A personal assistant," he said with a little emphasis as he turned over a page. "Ricki. You know this job has nothing like regular hours."

"Maybe for Grandpa Cy it didn't, but, you know, you could have weekends off if you wanted to see your family. Or a boyfriend."

He clucked his tongue. "The last thing you need is to be worrying that some gossipy queen is in my pants trying to find out everything about the Hamilton clan." Then his breath caught and I looked to see what he'd found.

The folder had photographs in it. Although it was upside down to me, I could see the top one was a black and white shot of the eagle statue, clearly taken in a bar or nightclub, with a naked man. His wrists were locked in the claws of the statue and there was something blurry crossing his figure. I came around to Paul's side and from there I could see it was a man in black leather swinging a flogger. The blur was the flogger's tails. 

Paul looked over his shoulder at the statue. "Well. I never realized."

"Realized what?"

" 'Eagle' is historically a name given to gay leather bars," he said. "I've never been in one but, you know. You hear stories."

I picked up the folder and looked through the other photos there. Several of them were of Grandpa Cy with various people, posing like they were on vacation. In one or two he and the woman with him looked startled and annoyed. I recognized that expression: the "paparazzi got me" look. I didn't recognize any of the people in the photos. None of them were my grandmother.

And not all of them were women. "Paul?"

"Yes?" He was standing by, very pointedly not craning his neck to look at the photos.

"Did my grandfather-how does the expression go-swing both ways?"

Paul waited a moment before giving his answer. "By the time he hired me, Ricki, he didn't swing at all, you know."

"Does that mean you don't know, or you don't want to speculate?"

"I don't know, but I'll speculate that your grandfather was enough of a sexual explorer that a little thing like his partner's gender would probably not have stopped him from having a good time."

I flipped back to the picture of the two gay men and the eagle. "Wait a second  … " I showed him the picture. "Do you think that's him?"

"That guy doesn't look anything like him."

"Not the one with the flogger. The guy being flogged."

"Oh! You know, it's really hard to tell from the back." He shrugged. "And I'm not just saying that. Ricki, I have no idea who that is. But I do wonder if there are other historical photos of the statue. It looks like a public place. I wonder if it was at the New York Eagle or Chicago or what?"

He sat down at the computer to start an image search while I continued looking through the folder of photos, hoping to find another one from that same session, maybe one that showed the face of the man being flogged.

"Oh," Paul said, and then I saw him quickly blank the screen and then turn toward me with his hands on his knees.

"What?"

"Nothing. I'm sure it's nothing. Should I move these items back into the safe now?"

"Paul, that was the worst job you could do of convincing me not to look at whatever you just saw. What was it, animal cruelty photos?"

"Um." He looked a little crushed. "Just tabloid  …  stuff."

My heart sank. More? I wondered if there were photos of Dad coming out of the rehab clinic or what. Well, I could look now or I could wait until later. Either way it would still be there.

I shooed him aside and brought the screen back to life.

And found myself staring at a full-color photo of Axel-his shoulder tattoo starkly obvious in his shirtless state-bending a woman back with one fist in her hair, one hand hitching her leg up on his hip so he could kiss her neck or collarbone. The headline blared: POP STARS AXEL HAWKE AND SUN-LEE CAUGHT IN THE ACT!

For half a second my breath caught and I wondered if they had made a sex tape or something crazy like that. But I could see the dateline and first sentence of the article: it was from a movie premiere in London. I turned away from the screen. "Sensationalist clickbait," I said, but my voice was shaking a little. Hadn't Sun-Lee been flirting with him at the Grammy after-party? I tried to remember. Was the photo from today, or was it from some earlier event?