The Guest Room(30)

“Then don’t.”

“Look, you f*cked one of the girls.”

“You did, too.”

“I didn’t.”

“Fine, you took her upstairs and did whatever. None of my business. That’s not the point. It was my bachelor party. Grooms f*ck strippers at their bachelor parties all the time. I’ve told you the shit that goes down at the hotel. I’m not proud of what I did, but if the girls hadn’t lost their minds, none of this would have been a problem. We would have had a good time with some jiggly little things and moved on. We wouldn’t have reporters camped out on our doorsteps right now. We wouldn’t have spent hours in a f*cking police station last night. And my fiancée wouldn’t be so royally pissed off that who the hell knows if she’s actually going to marry me two weeks from today.”

Richard heard his mother-in-law turn on the radio in her bedroom. Classical music. She had turned the volume up high, either because her hearing was suspect or she wanted to give him privacy. He gently pushed the guest bedroom door closed with the toe of his shoe.

“Grooms don’t f*ck strippers all the time,” he told Philip.

“A, they do. The next time you’re at a place like Thong, go upstairs with one of the girls to a private room. And B, it’s a fine line.”

“What is?”

“How much worse is it really to have a naked woman grinding her crotch against yours in a lap dance and—pardon my French—you whipping it out? Obviously, the latter is worse. I get it. But, seriously, how much worse is it really?”

“Listen to yourself. It’s a lot worse.”

“I’m not so sure,” his brother said, his tone petulant and defensive. “It’s all just foreplay. A couple Fridays ago when Spencer and I were there—”

“Where? Thong?”

“Yeah. We took a couple of girls upstairs, got a little nasty, and when I got home, I was awesome with Nicole. A beast.”

“You made love to your fiancée after going to a strip club?”

“I showered!”

“That wasn’t my point.”

“And my point is simply that no one was hurt,” Philip insisted. But then, when he continued a second later, he had lowered his voice and sounded a little worried. “But this will blow over, right?”

“Are you asking me my opinion or trying to reassure yourself?”

“I mean, as a culture we have the attention span of five-year-olds. Don’t you think? Tomorrow we will be on to the next human disaster. And, maybe a disaster we should give a rat’s ass about.”

“Meaning two dead people in my house isn’t a disaster we should give a rat’s ass about?”

“You know what I mean: they were hookers who killed some mobster jerks. This isn’t, I don’t know, a bazillion starving children somewhere in Africa.”

Richard looked at his watch. The musical had probably ended half an hour ago. Kristin and Melissa would be back any minute. He tried to will his younger brother to ask him about them, but he knew it wasn’t likely. Philip just wasn’t hardwired that way.

“Yeah,” he said simply, allowing a sliver of sarcasm into his voice. “This isn’t a job for the Red Cross. I agree.”

“You talk to Mom and Dad?”

He knew he should call them. Should have called them. Any second now, one of their friends was going to tell them what they had just seen on TV, utterly thrilled to have something to discuss other than angioplasties or Coumadin or someone’s hip replacement surgery. His parents had retired three years ago to Fort Lauderdale, buying a house in one of those developments deep into what had once been the Everglades. There was a golf course that sometimes had alligators among the hazards. Everyone was between the age of sixty and embalmed. “No,” he answered. “I haven’t.”

“Me neither. I think it’s almost best to wait for them to call me and then I can say, ‘Mom, I didn’t want to worry you. It was scary, but I’m okay.’ You know, sound brave and stoic.”

“That’s you, Philip. Brave and stoic.”

“So what’s next? What did your lawyer say? Spencer’s wigging out. He’s worried he’s looking at some serious legal misery. He’s convinced this little clusterf*ck is going to bury him in legal fees.”

“It very well might. The retainer request I agreed to this morning was impressive.”

“And given what you bring home, that says something.”

“I guess.”

“So what did you learn?”

“Well, those two girls have considerably more to worry about than I do. Or, I guess, than Spencer does. Or you do.”

“They killed people. That’s kind of obvious.”

“They might have been sex slaves.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I’m serious.”

“They were high-class escorts if they were anything,” his brother said. “Well paid. Gym memberships. Have a little Pink Wink in their medicine cabinets.”

“What in the name of God is Pink Wink?”

“Intimate bleach cream. Are you really that naive?”

“So it would seem. How do you know such things? Nicole?”

“I wish! I know because I’m a hotelier. We’re paid to know such things. It’s what we do.”