She laughed. “You should’ve been an actor or a politician. You do misdirection well. You don’t strike me as a beer and takeout kind of guy.”
If it wasn’t for the laugh, he’d have worried about her saying that. “You met me in an Irish pub.”
“You were having a bad day.”
He couldn’t afford to be off his game tonight. He had four stratospherically rich-ass whales to tickle. They’d take the whole Everlasting scam and lift it from lucrative to a moon-shot. If he could rope two of the four, he’d ensure all Sherwood’s environmental activism was well funded for a good while. Three of the four and he could relax about outgoings, albatrosses, and plastic in the ocean, maybe take a vacation for the first time in years. And four. If he could rope the four of them with Fin’s help, he could secure his cut-and-run money and rebuild his personal fortune.
It wouldn’t all happen tonight, but tonight was the first step.
He gave up watching out the window and looked at Fin. She was truly beautiful to him, even as concern streaked over her features.
“You drifted away,” she said.
He shook his head. “Thinking about what I need from tonight.”
“I won’t let you down.”
There was more of convincing herself in that than him. He twisted to face her. “You’d have to shoot someone to let me down, and depending on who you shot, it might make my week.”
“Now you tell me.” She held up a tiny purse that matched her shoes that would’ve cost him a packet. “I need to size up if I’m going to carry.”
He was still laughing when the car stopped, and he unclipped his seatbelt, opened the door and got out, reaching back for Fin’s hand, grateful for her humor.
She looked up at the apartment building. “Lights, camera, action.” She squeezed his hand. “Remember the cue for pretend you don’t know me?” After lie detection, she’d learned about cueing, the secret instructions they’d give each other to communicate what they couldn’t say in words.
“Is that the one where I pinch your ass?”
She laughed. “You pinch any part of me in there, I’ll tell everyone you wet the bed at night and not in a sexy way.”
He looped her hand over his crooked arm. “See how brilliantly mutually dependent we are.” He quirked his head towards the building. “Let’s do this.”
“Holy shit,” she said under her breath when the elevator opened on the Langleys’s penthouse and the assembled guests. Cal didn’t know if that was because it was the height of old world luxury, or because they were thrust into the mix of greetings and welcomes without a pause. He kept Fin close, doing the introductions, laughing as Bette Langley patted Fin’s hand.
“You look like someone Cal can enjoy himself with. It’s about time he hooked up again. That’s what they say, isn’t it?” Bette said.
In Bette’s day, it was no sex before marriage, and Eisenhower was President. She was eighty-nine years old, could pass for sixty because her surgeon was good. This was her seventieth wedding anniversary dinner.
Cal liked Bette as much as he liked Clement, her ninety-two-year-old husband. They were good people, generous, but blind to a fault about their only son, Ronald, who Cal had been able to con time and time again. Ronald would lose money on Everlasting, and maybe this time, he’d actually notice. It was Ronald who was friends with the whales Cal was most interested in: John Alington, Pat McGovern, Keith Belling, and Arthur Lowenstein.
Fin had experienced Alington already, as they were leaving the retrospective. She now knew how often he’d intimidated and silenced women he’d sexually abused, but this was her first experience with the other three.
He maneuvered Fin to Arthur Lowenstein’s side, opening the conversation by introducing Fin to Arthur and his wife Theodora and telling them they’d missed a great night at the retrospective.
“I have to say, I didn’t really get a lot of it,” Fin said. “I’m more into ballet.” Her throat contracted on that lie, but no one other than Cal would notice, and it was a scripted line predicated to endear her to Theodora.
“We’re patrons of the New York Ballet,” the painfully thin Theodora said.
It was a sore point with her husband, who no doubt would’ve preferred that money to go into campaign contributions to candidates who would help him keep the wages he paid the workers in his national restaurant chain at the bare minimum. Lowenstein was worth billions, but he stiffed his workers and his suppliers and paid the smallest amount of tax possible.
“We give like there’s no tomorrow,” said Arthur. It wasn’t meant to be funny, and it was the prompt Cal had hoped for.
“Don’t say that, you’ll have Fin hitting on you. She’s started a microfinance charity.”
Theodora turned away, already bored now that the attention was off her.
“How do you like to be hit on, Arthur?” Fin asked, with a hip shift that drew his eyes.
He frowned. “Preferably not before dinner. Keen to talk to your man here about other business first,” he said dismissively.