The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [78]
Art booked a room, dropped off his satchel and the extra sixty grand in the closet, then headed upstairs to the club with Amy for some drinks. They were early, and by the time Dmitri arrived they were already fuzzily drunk, dancing to a live band. “Amy was dancing on the floor and she looked great,” he remembers. “Up until that time, me and Amy had gotten very close. We’d never done nothing, but I had taken her out to dinner. Maybe we had talked sexy to each other, nothing real major. You gotta understand that I love Natalie. It was a game. I keep telling myself, ‘You don’t want to do this. Watch yourself around the little sister. Sister not good, sister not good.’ ”
Art and Dmitri caught up at the bar, then headed up to the room to conduct the deal and snort a little cocaine while Amy chatted and danced with two other Russians. Once business was taken care of, Dmitri invited everyone to a party over at his place, which Art thought was a good plan.
“Can’t we go to another club first? I want to see more of the city,” Amy pleaded after the Russians left.
Obliging her, Art took her to a nearby club where he knew the staff. Neither of them realized it was gay night until they entered and beheld an eclectic mass of writhing, shirtless men on the dance floor. Art wanted to leave, but Amy insisted on a few dances, so they started boogeying down with the guys. By now they were both trashed, and Art’s powers of libidinous resistance—a Maginot Line even when he was sober—began to crumble. He became convinced that Amy wanted to take things further than flirting. The possibility ripened when, during one of the dances, Amy accidentally ripped her pants and ran off to the bathroom, returning shortly afterward with the embarrassing news.
“How bad is it? Do you want to leave?” Art asked her as they sat down at a cocktail table.
“See for yourself,” she said. To show him the rip, she grabbed his hand and placed it in her lap.
Art pulled his hand away, but it was too much for him to resist. “She put on one of those sad puppy-dog faces. And so I put my hand back down there. And I’m like, ‘What am I doing? If we’re gonna do this, let’s get back to the House of Blues.’ ” Back at the hotel room, Amy hopped in the shower while Art rolled a joint. She insists that she was preparing to go to sleep and that Art was having delusions of sexual grandeur, but whatever might have happened between them was moot, because he had passed out by the time she got out of the shower. Just as Amy stepped out of the bathroom wearing a robe, there was a knock on the door. Art jolted awake, and before he could tell her that it was a very bad idea to respond, Amy opened it a crack.
That’s when four Chicago police officers pushed their way into the room.
Earlier that evening, a hotel security guard had called CPD after overhearing Art and Dmitri at the bar talking about scoring an eight ball of cocaine. Since hearsay didn’t constitute just cause to enter Art’s room, CPD told the guard that they could enter the room only if a disturbance was reported. Conveniently, the guard had reported a loud noise complaint shortly after Art and Amy returned.
One of the cops pinned Amy to the wall while the others moved toward the back. And once they were in, the sight of Art’s marijuana on the coffee table was the only invitation they needed to stay and have a look around.
“This smells like really good shit, I wish I could smoke some,” one of the cops joked as he sniffed Art’s weed. “What else have you got in here?” They roused Art from the bed, sat them both down at a table, and began searching the room. Rifling though Art’s suitcase, Amy’s clothes bag, and a chest of drawers, they were frustrated to find nothing. Art had no outstanding warrants, and the possibility of nothing more than a marijuana violation seemed tantalizingly close. But just as the cops looked like they were about to wind up their search, a young, redheaded officer named