One Fifth Avenue - Candace Bushnell [193]
“Lola,” James had said after reading the first installment about his sexual exploits. “How can you do this? Don’t you worry about your reputation? What if you want to get a real job someday and your employer reads this?”
Lola only looked at him like he was once again hopelessly out of touch. “It’s no different from all those other celebrities with sex tapes. It hasn’t hurt them. Just the opposite—it’s made their careers.”
Now, continuing to read Lola’s blog, James felt himself getting a hard-on that pushed against his leg, demanding immediate attention. He went into the bathroom and jerked off, hiding the evidence in a tissue that he flushed down the toilet. He looked into the mirror and nodded. The next time he saw Lola, he decided, he would definitely try for anal sex.
Mindy watched Sam get on the bus for Southbury, Connecticut, waving at his window until the bus pulled out of the underground garage. Hurrying through Port Authority, she was relieved to have gotten Sam safely away, where Paul Rice couldn’t hurt him. She flagged a taxi, slid onto the backseat, and fished the folded piece of notepaper out of her bag. “Sam did it” was written in pencil, in Paul Rice’s tiny block lettering. The paper bore the logo of the Four Seasons Hotel in Bangkok. Apparently, Paul Rice had quite a few of these pads.
She refolded the note and put it back in her purse. She’d found the tightly folded paper in her mailbox just the other day, and while James was convinced she wanted a country house for her own self-aggrandizement, she’d begun pursuing it as a way to get herself and Sam out of Paul’s way, without raising suspicion. A man who could take over an entire country’s stock market was probably capable of anything, including persecuting a little boy. While everyone else in One Fifth had been diverted by Billy’s death, Paul hadn’t attended either his memorial service or Annalisa’s party. For all Mindy knew, Paul might still be investigating who cut his Internet wires, and eventually, he might be able to prove it was Sam.
Like Paul Rice, Mindy knew Sam had done it. She would never tell anyone, of course, including James. But it wasn’t the only secret she was keeping. Striding into her office, she passed Thayer Core, sitting in his cubicle like a caged animal, scrolling through a long list of e-mails. Mindy stopped and stuck her head over the edge of the cubicle, looking down at Thayer as a reminder of her authority over him.
“Have you printed out the notes from yesterday’s meeting?” she asked.
Thayer pushed back his chair and, as if to thwart her authority, put his feet up on his desk and crossed his arms. “Which meeting?” he said.
“All of them.” She moved away, then stopped, as if remembering something. “And I also need a hard copy of Lola Fabrikant’s sex column.”
When Mindy was safely in her office, Thayer muttered, “Can’t you read it on your computer? Like everyone else?” He got up and strolled through the maze of cubicles to the printer, where he retrieved Lola’s column. He read it briefly and shook his head. Lola was fucking James Gooch again. Could Mindy really be so dense that she didn’t know Lola was writing about her own husband? Ugh. It meant he and James Gooch now had one degree of separation. But James gave Lola money, and since Thayer enjoyed the same privileges as James for free, he couldn’t really object.
“Here you go,” Thayer said with a flourish, placing the printout on Mindy’s desk.
“Thank you,” she said, continuing to stare at her computer.
Thayer stood for a moment, watching her. “Can I have a raise?” he asked.
This got her attention. Putting on her reading glasses, she picked up the printout and glanced at it, and then him. “How long have you been here?” she asked.
“A month.”
“I’m already paying you a hundred thousand dollars a year.”
“It’s not enough.”
“Check back with me in five months, and I’ll see what I can do.”
Fucking old bag, Thayer thought, returning