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“Why did you do this to him?” she asked Rory, but he ignored her.
“Let’s do this,” he said to Mitzi and the other man. “I’m sure Crissy wants to return to her suite and her better class of peeps at the Buckingham Palace. Where’s Tim?”
“Right here,” said Tim, and the photographer who’d taken her picture at Red Rocks appeared from the bedroom with a camera against his chest and a round white reflector twice the size of a manhole cover in one hand. “I think we’re better off doing it here than in there,” he told Rory, pointing with his thumb over his shoulder at the bedroom. “That chair he was in would—”
“No. I want them in the bedroom,” Rory said. He turned to Betsy and studied her for a moment. “Mitzi, can we mess up her hair a little bit? Make her look a little disheveled, too?”
“I’m not doing this,” Betsy said, and retreated a step away from the stylist.
“Yes, you are. Your sister and Aldred had a pretty hot thing a while back, and that’s how we’re going to finish off his reelection campaign.”
So, that was it. She was a honey trap. “I told you: no.”
“Fine. Walter, break her finger. Left pinky.”
Walter, the young guy in the suit, came for her, but she grabbed the empty wine bottle and swung it toward his face. His reflexes were good, however, and he deflected it with his arm, swearing at the pain as the bottle broke into pieces, and he tackled her. She tried to poke at his eyes, but he seized her hand and he was about to snap back her pinky. She managed to knee him in the crotch, but the dress was tight and the blow barely slowed him. Still, he released her finger. Instead, he smacked her under her chin, whipsawing back her head. For a split second she feared that he’d broken her neck. He hadn’t, but it hurt like hell, and he picked her up as if she were a giant bag of flour and dumped her into the chair in which Aldred was sitting. The senator’s eyes had closed, but they opened now, and once more he murmured, “Crissy. So good to…”
“You are one stupid cunt,” Rory was saying, as he picked up the largest shard of glass. He aimed it at her and said, “I should fucking maim you.”
“Do I break the finger or not?” Walter asked. He had her pinned, her left hand in his, and now he was pulling the digit so far back that the pain was shooting up into her arm.
“Last chance.”
Beneath her, the senator said something, a term of endearment, but his pronunciation was so bad that if she hadn’t seen her sister’s show, she would have had no idea that the word he had murmured was “Squidgy.”
* * *
Rory drove her home, and at first neither of them said a word. He turned on the radio and went to a Sirius station that played hits from the 1950s—it was as if he were reaching back to the era when the mob and the Rat Pack ruled the strip and he could call himself a made man, and the stars aligned to give him Tony Bennett crooning “Rags to Riches”—but Betsy switched off the music, and Rory didn’t bother to turn it back on.
“What will you do with the photo?” she asked finally.
“Send it to him. Make it clear he needs to drop out of the race. Tell people he wants to focus on his family. Or, suddenly, he believes in term limits. Whatever.”
“And if he doesn’t drop out?”
“Oh, he won’t drop out. We just want to give him that option. But most pols are so in love with the power, they rarely go willingly. And they’re fighters by nature. So, he’s going to delude himself into believing he can weather this scandal when we release the picture: extramarital dalliance with Crissy Dowling, the Lady Di of Las Vegas, drunker than drunk at a hot-sheets casino like Fort Knocks. His marriage is pretty tenuous, and so I don’t know if he’ll get his wife to do one of those stand-by-your-man photo ops, but it won’t matter, even if she does. He and Erika are neck and neck. You can stick a fork in John Aldred.”
They’d posed them on the hotel bed, leaning back against the headboard. Or, to be precise, she’d had her back to the headboard: he was leaning into her. Falling into her. She could barely support him. It took a few shots to get one with his eyes open. They’d unbuttoned his shirt so his bare chest was revealed, but much to her relief, they hadn’t forced her to take off her gown. The photo wasn’t explicit, by design, so it would get as much traction as possible and be used wherever they sent it. But they also wanted it clear that the photo had been taken tonight—not when Aldred and his wife had been separated and, apparently, he had been involved with her sister. The dress was the time stamp. That was clearly another reason why they’d wanted her posing with Oliver Davies and Neri Lombardo: journalists could compare that photo with the one of her and Aldred, and confirm it was the same evening.
“Oliver calling me the black widow,” she mumbled. “That was creepy. He really thought I was Crissy.”
“Of course, he did. As did Aldred.”
“Aldred was so drugged, he would have thought you were Crissy.”
“Maybe.”
“And both Oliver and Neri thought I—well, Crissy—helped kill that dude out at Red Rocks. That’s what they meant by black widow. A black widow—”
“I know what a black widow does,” he said.
She was unsure whether she was more disgusted with Rory or with herself. She tried to take comfort from the idea this was over and when she got home, Marisa would be waiting.
* * *
When they arrived at her apartment, Damon Ioannidis was sitting on the couch and watching Monday Night Football. He must have gone on ahead. But there was no sign of Marisa.
“Where is she?” Betsy snapped at Damon. “I want her home right now.”
