Work for Hire (30 page)

But that wasn’t the important issue, I reminded myself.

“Gemma,” I spoke slowly, so she would grasp every word, “you
have to tell your mother
. Now.
Someone
has to go back to the house and get him out and make sure he’s fine. Xander can’t stay in the closet overnight.”

“Can’t you do it?” Gemma rushed on.

“Do what?” She couldn’t possibly think
I
was going back to the house. No way. No how.

“Can’t you tell
Maman
?” Gemma clarified. “She’ll just yell at me.”

Oh. Well. As long as she didn’t think I was going back to Manhattan …

“No. You locked Xander in, you have to get him out.”

Gemma stayed quiet. So did I.

“Fine,” she finally huffed.

“And Gemma?” I added. “I want to hear you do it.” I didn’t really think she wouldn’t, but then again …

“Fine,” Gemma snapped, and apparently went in search of her mother. I heard the swish of her clothing and the static of empty rooms, until a plaintive, “
Maman
, I have to tell you something” filled the silence, followed by an explosion of rapid French.

Then Gemma hung up.

Well, the problem was now out of my hands. Except, I sat staring at the phone, I had a feeling things weren’t going to be that easy.

H
ALF AN HOUR LATER
, my hunch proved right.

“Tekla, I’m so sorry to disturb you this late.” It was Lisa, again—sugary tone in tow. Not Monique. Not Stephen Lamont, although he seemed to have my cell number on speed dial—oh, no:
he
only called to yell, never to beg for favors.

Still, I picked up because, well, it
was
Lisa. If she was calling
me
voluntarily for a second time something
had
to be seriously wrong with Xander.

“I guess you heard about our little situation?” Lisa said.

“Uh-huh,” I answered, “though I wouldn’t call it little.”

“Yes, well,” Lisa replied, some of her sugary tone dissipating. “The thing is that we have a snag. You see, Stephen can’t leave the Hamptons tonight.”

Of course he couldn’t
, I snickered silently.
Why would Stephen Lamont bother to complicate his life for his son?

“He has an important business meeting in the morning,” Lisa tried to explain. “And Monique is all the way in Hastings-on-Hudson with no car. She had sent her driver back to the city earlier in the day. He’s on his way back to get them now, but it will take hours to make the trip to and from, and well, you know, that’s just too long.”

I itched to point out there had to be plenty of trains and buses making the trip to Manhattan, but figured I’d save my breath. Public transportation, apparently, was not for the Lamonts, not even in an emergency.

“So we were hoping that, since you’re already in New York, you could go get Xander and wait with him until Monique arrives,” Lisa finished.

“Me?” How did I know this was coming? “But I don’t have keys to the closet, or, for that matter, to the house. How am I going to get in?” Besides, it was past 11:00 already and I had class in the morning, not to mention the brief that had to be handed in by 9 a.m. sharp. “Wait a minute. Gemma said Vivienne was the one who locked up the house, so she must have the keys. Why can’t she go?”

“Vivienne,” Lisa hissed through what surely must have been clenched teeth, “is at her sister’s in Pennsylvania. We already called. You’re closer. And, in any event, she doesn’t have the keys to the closet either, so it doesn’t make that much of a difference.”

“I don’t know … I’ve got things to—”

“You will,” Lisa cut in, biting off the words, “of course, be generously compensated for your time and efforts. Since it’s Sunday and very late, Stephen has agreed to pay twice your hourly rate. Travel time and expenses included. Very generous for such a simple task, don’t you think?”

Now wait a minute
, I wanted to bite back.
The money hadn’t even occurred to me. Not that, come to think of it, I would turn it down. $300 per hour sounded pretty great. But still …

“And as for getting in,” Lisa continued, “we already took care of that. I called the locksmith who installed the closet locks, and he’ll meet you at the house to disable the closet locks, the bolt and the security system.” Security system for a
closet
? No doubt about it, Monique’s closet had to be Ali Baba’s cave. “Unfortunately, you will first have to go to Stephen’s corporate apartment to get his extra set of keys to the house’s front door. No point destroying those locks if we don’t have to.”

Lisa’s last bit of news had me doing a double take: Stephen Lamont had
another
apartment in the city? Well, well, suddenly, the situation had whole new possibilities. Contemplating those made me miss what Lisa had said last.

“Sorry, can you repeat?” I had to ask, reminding myself about curiosity and the cat.

“I said,” Lisa definitely sounded irked, “that we already notified the doorman to let you in. The apartment is on East 79th and York. Once you get the keys and go to the townhouse, call me and I’ll give you the security code for the front door.” She stopped, then virtually snarled, “Well, will you do it?”

Yup. I had pissed her off. I smiled.

“I guess, for Xander’s sake, I had better.”

“Fine,” Lisa said abruptly, and ended our call.

I frowned for like the umpteenth time that night. This hanging up on me by the Lamont household was becoming too frequent.

Oh well
, I though as I got up to leave,
no use complaining now. I had agreed to participate, for better or worse.

I ended up pausing midstride, as an idea suddenly percolated. Why should I be the only Lamont underling inconvenienced?
No, siree.
I grinned, reached for the phone and dialed. If Monique was not working, he had to be off as well. And he just might be curious enough to see Stephen Lamont’s love nest to make the trip with me. Talk about taking advantage of a perfect opportunity.

“Hi, Julian,” I said when he picked up the other end. “By any chance, are you free tonight? Yes? Great. Because you’re never going to believe what has happened … ”

CHAPTER 23

“
D
ID YOU FIND
the keys?”

“Not yet,” Julian answered as he hit the light switch on Stephen Lamont’s bureau lamp. “How many desks does this man have?” he asked, rummaging through the bureau’s drawers. “Though I gotta tell you, I’ve been dying to see this place.”

Julian’s head was barely visible above the bureau’s top, his voice muffled by its heavy mahogany wood.

“I don’t think Monique’s ever been here, though she knows all about it. I’m sure she’ll be pumping me for details,” he said when his head bopped up. He winked at me. “It feels so clandestine, going through Stephen’s not-so-secret love nest, especially at one in the morning.”

“Uh-huh,” I grunted and continued searching through Stephen Lamont’s secretary. Where were those damn keys? Lisa had mentioned a desk drawer in a study, but Julian was right: Stephen Lamont had more desks than a first-grade classroom! There was the bureau, the secretary, a Chinese table—probably Ming, and probably real—a drop writing desk, a roll-top and three other desks whose origin I couldn’t identify—although, from the look of them, they had to be antique.

Actually, everything in Stephen Lamont’s apartment looked like it had aged for at least two hundred years. The place closely resembled his office, and was as far from the modern townhouse as the South Pole was from the North. How Stephen and Monique Lamont ever claimed to cohabit together was beyond me. Of course, the location of the keys was a far more pressing matter than the Lamonts’ living arrangement.

I slammed the secretary’s drawer closed. Clearly, the keys weren’t here. Unfortunately, neither had they been in the roll-top, the writing desk, nor, if Julian’s grunts were any indication, in the bureau.

Lisa obviously didn’t know jack.

I contemplated one of the three yet-to-be searched desks, this one by the window with a stunning view of the East River.

Lisa had made things sound so simple: Go to Stephen’s penthouse. Pick up the keys and let the locksmith in once you get to the townhouse. Piece of cake.

Except things hadn’t turned out quite that way.

First, my mother had actually tried to stop me from going.

“Are you crazy?!” she had screamed as I prepared to leave Brooklyn. “It’s the middle of the night! You have class tomorrow. And did you forget your paper?”

“I’m done with the brief, and it’s my job to help,” I’d reasoned in reply. “I get paid lots of money to do what I’m doing.”

“Your job? Your job!” my mother had continued screaming. “Your job,” she’d almost spat out, “is to help with homework and not run around the city at all hours of the night doing something these … these
parents
should do! No, actually,” she’d paused, “your job is to get a law degree and not deal with
these
people in the first place.” She had snarled the words, then had forbidden my father from driving me to the city.

“If she’s stupid enough to jeopardize her future for some spoiled, good-for-nothing, rich people who care nothing about her in return, she can do it without our help!” she had said, then given my father ‘the look’ that promised dire consequences if he didn’t do as she ordered.

My father would have disobeyed, of course, but I hadn’t wanted my parents arguing because of me, and so I had quickly said I’d take the subway—as catching a cab in Brooklyn was close to impossible. Unfortunately, this being the middle of the night on a weekend, the train had taken four times as long as usual.

Luckily, Julian had arrived as promised and on time, but that was where my small stroke of good fortune had ended. The doorman who should have eagerly let us in had stood stone-faced and uncooperative until Stephen Lamont personally called to give him the go-ahead. And then the keys, which Lisa had said would be readily apparent to anyone with eyes, were nowhere to be found.

I pulled open a drawer of the window desk, resigned to another futile search, and stared down at a set of keys on an antique silver keychain. Engraved on the chain’s face was “227 East 30th Street.”

“Found them,” I called out to Julian.

“T
HESE DOORS WERE BUILT TO WITHHOLD
a military invasion,” groaned the locksmith, a heavyset man with massive forearms and even bigger hands. The groan turned into a proud beaming smile as he drilled through the deadbolt. “Bulletproof, waterproof, fireproof, soundproof.”

The last word certainly explained why we had yet to hear a peep from Xander.

“This is top notch security,” the locksmith observed as he leaned his balding head into his raised left arm, the one holding up the jumbled remains of the bolt, and rubbed it back and forth, apparently in an effort to wipe away the trickling beads of sweat.

Opening Monique’s closet door clearly was hard work. It had already taken the locksmith more than two hours, but the door hadn’t budged.

“What a shame to destroy such fine craftsmanship,” the locksmith said as he smiled at me again.

I stood anxiously behind his back waiting for the smallest sign of progress in our effort to get Xander out. Julian had long ago abandoned his post beside me, and was now drowsing against the wall opposite the closet.

Looking at Julian’s hunched-over body, I felt a pang of guilt. It was past three a.m. I had dragged him out for little more benefit to himself than the pleasure of my humble company. He would be getting paid nothing for his efforts, as far as I was aware. And the excitement of searching through Stephen Lamont’s semi-secret apartment had worn off long ago, as had the fun of being in each other’s company.

After all, this was no date.

“It took us a week to install,” the locksmith kept on gibbering like it was high noon instead of the middle of the night. “Me and four other guys. The electronic sensors were the hardest,” he mentioned, nodding his chin towards the disabled security panel. “Funny how they were the easiest to undo, though. That’s why I keep telling my clients, go for the good old-fashioned metal locks. They hold up the best. No thief will bother to go through this.” He gestured towards the jumbled bolt and drill in his hand.

That metal finally clanked off, and the locksmith pushed the door ajar.

Open sesame.

M
ONIQUE’S CLOSET
was
a treasure trove.

It was huge, bigger than my whole dorm suite, with stacks of designer clothes—many in Monique’s signature black—lining three of the four walls. Above the stacks, cubbyholes overflowed with bags: Prada, Armani, Fendi, a clutch, a hobo. The fourth wall had rows of shoes running from ceiling to floor. I stared at the various stilettos, pumps, sandals and boots, my mouth ajar. Manolo Blahnik. Sergio Rossi. John Galliano. Jimmy Choo. There must have been more than four hundred pairs. In the middle of the closet stood a glass island, with a bouquet of white fresh cut flowers on its top. Inside its glass cases, I could make out jewelry—necklaces, earrings, rings and bracelets—some costume and some, surely, real. Diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires sparkled in the recess and under lighting that had come on the instant we opened the door.

This
was what I expected to find in Monique’s workspace. The closet—if that was the right name for such a warehouse of high fashion—must’ve rivaled those at any major magazine. Hell, with its mahogany floors, Persian rug and climate control—I noted this as I took in a cool breath of air—it rivaled the grandeur and opulence of any five-star hotel. In fact, Xander was stuck in a virtual Taj Mahal.

But where
, I thought as I scanned the room,
was he
?

“X
ANDER
?”

I stepped inside the closet. Julian, who had awoken for the occasion, followed, the locksmith at his heels.