Honey Read online

  Not for the first time since she’d sat down twenty minutes ago, her thoughts went to Marc. He would be wondering where she was. Worse, he’d assume she’d stood him up. A smart girl would have text-messaged him an excuse, preferably one that was believable. With luck, he would even buy it. But she’d promised them both that she would never lie to him and despite the odd—horrendous—circumstances, it was a promise she was doing her level best to keep. Besides, Honey wasn’t feeling particularly smart at the moment; ditto for lucky.

  She divided her gaze between Agent Carlson, seated at the conference table across from her, and his associate, the SUV driver, Agent Wilkes. Ten minutes into their interrogation, their good-cop bad-cop routine was already wearing thin. “I think it’s time you told me exactly what sort of trouble I’m supposedly in; otherwise I’d like to leave. I have a luncheon engagement,” she added, not that she expected them to care but because (a) it was true and (b) a luncheon was a far more respectable activity than how they probably imagined a former call girl passed her time.

  The agents traded glances.

  “If this is about my past, I can assure you that when I left the … service, I left that life behind. I don’t have any communication with anyone from those days, not the other girls, not the former clients, and certainly not the agency owners.”

  “It’s not about your past … employment. It’s about your boyfriend.”

  She hadn’t expected that. “My … ” Marc, what could they possibly want with Marc? He was as straight as straight arrows came. Though she hadn’t known him all that long, not really, she’d stake her life that he wouldn’t dream of doing anything remotely illegal.

  Apparently reading her confusion, Agent Carlson quickly cut in, “Not the doctor, the other one—the finance guy, Andrew Winterthur.”

  Staring down into her tea, which Agent Wilkes, a.k.a. Good Cop, had insisted on providing, she willed herself to relax. If Drew had gotten himself into some sort of trouble with the feds, that was too bad but it wasn’t her worry, not anymore. “I broke it off with him several weeks ago,” she said, never happier to admit the truth in all her life.

  “Is that why we found you standing outside of Forty-One Park, the building where he’s put you up for the last six years?”

  “How long have you been following me?”

  Carlson’s gaze shuttered. “Answer the question, ma’am.”

  “Very well, I was there to collect my belongings.”

  “And yet, other than your shoulder bag, you walked out empty handed.”

  A mental picture of the apartment in the aftermath of Drew’s rampage leapt to mind. Even though she had bigger worries now than replacing her ruined things, a lot bigger, anger swelled, squeezing out the fear—for now.

  “That’s because he didn’t leave me anything to pack. If you don’t believe me, then maybe you’ll believe this.” She opened her Prada purse and pulled out Mr. Pinky’s remains, stuffing spilling from the severed head. In a last weak moment, she’d scooped him up in the hope he might be salvaged after all. “He slashed or smashed every piece of clothing, every memento, every photo I’d left in the apartment. Other than the clothes on my back, a few toiletries, and my rescue kitten, I have nothing left.”

  “I’m sorry.” The two agents exchanged looks. As much as Honey wanted to believe they were expressions of sympathy, she was too smart for that degree of self-deception.

  “Is there any chance he might take you back?” Wilkes asked.

  “Take me back! He put me in the hospital last February. He could have killed me. He broke my wrist. I shouldn’t have gone back to him after that, but I did. I certainly wouldn’t be so stupid, or self-destructive, a second time.”

  “You may not have a choice,” Carlson said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “How much do you know about the Wolfgang Fund?”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “What about HG Enterprises—that ring any bells?” Carlson persisted.

  Stunned, Honey stared up at him. With the sunglasses removed, she saw that his eyes were blue, weary-looking and bracketed by lines. He probably wasn’t much more than forty, and yet he had the mien of a much older man. And suddenly she got it. He and his partner might be gaming her, but only to a point.

  She really was in a serious lot of trouble.

  “Other than that it’s my initials, I’ve never heard of it,” she answered honestly. Drew, what the hell have you done now?

  Carlson’s gaze bore into hers. “Sure about that? I should remind you that lying to a federal agent brings a penalty of up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.”

  “Of course I’m sure!” Lowering her voice, she added, “Drew never spoke to me about his business dealings.”

  “Never? Do you mean to say that in six years, there was no pillow talk ever?”

  The thought of drinking more tea gagged her. She pushed the cup aside. “Beyond the general complaint here and there, there wasn’t. Look, I was his mistress. When he visited me, it was for sex, not to gather my opinions on the latest market trends.”

  It was the truth—but would the truth be enough?

  “In that case, allow me to enlighten you. HG Enterprises is one of several dummy corporations Winterthur and his partner, Frank Dawes, set up almost six years ago. Like the others, it’s a ghost corporation—it doesn’t exist anywhere but on paper.”

  She fitted a hand to her forehead, pounding apace with her heart. “I don’t understand. Drew is a partner at his firm. I may not know anything about finance, but I do know it’s a very well-respected private equity firm with offices not only in New York but worldwide.”

  “That’s true, but it seemed your boy was feeling entrepreneurial—and greedy. He set up the Wolfgang Fund as a shadow syndicate operating within his private equity firm. Right now it looks like he and Dawes are the only insiders involved, though it’s too soon to be conclusive. Most of his marks are middle-class folks from out of state looking to make some scratch for their kids’ college funds, time share properties, supplemental income for retirement, that type of thing. When he cold-calls from his interior office line, his firm is what shows up on their caller IDs—perfectly legit, or so it would seem to the average Joe.”

  “But that’s—”

  Carlson cut her off. “Fraud, Ms. Gustafson—securities fraud, and we have reason to suspect money laundering, too. Like it or not, you’re implicated. He set up that dummy corp in your name, using your social security number and what looks an awful lot like your signature. Are you telling me it’s not, that it’s a forgery?”

  He nodded to Wilkes, who slid a stapled sheaf of papers across the conference table toward her. Feeling numb, Honey picked them up and began flipping through to the final page.

  “Oh my God.” The signature was unmistakably hers, down to the thick blue-felt pen she used.

  She remembered that pen as well as the day. Certain she was embarking on her fairy tale future, she’d stepped over the threshold of 6C, Forty-One Park for the very first time, hand-in-hand with Drew.

  “Like it?” he asked, leading her about the empty apartment.

  She turned to him, her mouth tiring from all the smiling she’d been doing. “Like it? Darling, I adore it.”

  They made love on the air mattress he’d just happened to have waiting and inflated. Afterward, while sipping champagne in bed, a lease document (or so he’d told her at the time), had materialized along with a pen.

  “Babe, I need your social for the lease. No need to read it, baby, just fill in your SSN and sign on the dotted line; I’ll take care of all the rest. This way if anything happens to me, I’ve got you covered.”

  I’ve got you covered.

  Honey replaced the top page and slid the stapled document back to Carlson. “No, it’s not a forgery. I thought … He told me I was co-si
gning the lease on our apartment.”

  “You know what, Ms. Gustafson, I believe you. Agent Wilkes, you believe her, don’t you?”

  “Sure I do.”

  Carlson turned back to her. “We believe you, ma’am, but whether or not a jury buys your story, well, that’s another matter.”

  “A jury!”

  The two agents nodded. Carlson answered, “Whatever promises Winterthur made you, the bottom line is that he’s a married man and you’re the other woman, and not just the other woman but a former escort who was paid for her … services. You’re not going to have much luck playing the sympathy card with a jury, not in this economy.” Yep, definitely the Bad Cop.

  “You’re arresting me!” So much for one hour of her time! Had she traded one prison for yet another impenetrable one?

  “Not yet,” he admitted, “but there’s a pretty high probability it’s going to come down to that—unless you cooperate.”

  “Cooperate how? I’ve told you everything I know, which is nothing. What more can I possibly do?” she added, half-afraid to find out.

  Wilkes regarded her over steepled hands. “Winterthur’s holding an Investor Day at the Waldorf Astoria this Friday. It seems the natives are getting restless—it was a suspicious investor who tipped us off. He’s past year five, the year when investors expect a liquidation event to occur, only there’s nothing to sell or take public. To cover his ass and buy more time, he’s flying in his top investors from as far away as Ohio for a day-long dog-and-pony show at the Waldorf, a razzle-dazzle play to make them feel important, special. Little do they know it’s all smoke and mirrors, and they’re footing the bill for all of it—the venue, the booze and food, even the hookers. Apologies, ma’am, no offense intended.”

  As much as she hated to, Honey thought back to her last night with Drew, to the early part of the evening before Frank showed up and things went from weird to crazy bad.

  “Remember I told you about that Investor Day I wanted to throw? Well, the funding came through and it’s happening: a blowout bash at the Waldorf for my key out-of-town investment clients, and I want you there.”

  And later Frank had said, “If he wants me to cover his ass on Investor Day, he knows he has to keep me happy …”

  At the time she’d been too terrified to think beyond getting herself and Cat safely out of there and to Marc’s, but in retrospect the veiled exchanges made stunning, sickening sense. Drew had used her yet again, only instead of emotionally and physically battering her, he’d set her up as his patsy. Unless she “cooperated,” whatever that meant, she might well end up going to prison for him.

  It seemed her mother’s prophecy was to be proven true after all. She really was about to come to a bad end.

  Carlson’s voice called her back to the current moment. “Text him and say you’ve thought things through and you realize you’ve made a mistake. Play to his ego. Tell him you want to come back—and to prove it, you’ll be at the Investor Day as promised—only what he won’t know is that you’ll be wearing a wire.”

  Honey shook her head, which was drumming apace with her heart. “But I told him I never wanted to see him again. I threatened to call his wife if he didn’t leave me alone. Obviously he believed me, otherwise he wouldn’t have destroyed all my things. If I contact him out of the blue, suddenly willing to forgive and forget, won’t that make him suspicious, even spoil your investigation?”

  This time Wilkes took the lead on answering. “Ego is always these guys’ downfall. They operate on the assumption that the rules don’t apply to them. They think they’re always the smartest guy in the room and though that’s often the case, eventually they trip themselves up. Jeffrey Skilling, Bernie Madoff, Jordan Belfort—history repeats itself again and again. Right now Winterthur figures he’s covered his tracks. We’ve given him no reason to suspect otherwise. Play your part well and there’s no reason he will.”

  “Don’t you think you’re giving me too much credit? After all, I did sign incorporation papers thinking they were a co-op lease. I’m not exactly Mensa material.”

  Carlson stared at her askance. “I think you can play dumb with the best of them when it suits your purposes, as it does now. Sure, at the time it was easier to go along and not look too closely at the fine print, but that time is past. If Winterthur isn’t stopped, a whole lot of people are going to lose a whole lot of money, some of them their life savings.”

  Honey bit her lip. Until now, she’d told herself the only person her poor life choices had hurt was herself. Now she was forced to see that wasn’t so.

  “What makes you so certain he hasn’t moved on to some other girl already? He may not have prostitutes on his payroll, but I promise you he’ll have hired models as servers. He can be funny and charming when he wants something—or someone. Finding a girl to take my place at Forty-One Park won’t be hard. He may have one in mind to move in already.”

  Once, the prospect of Drew replacing her would have prompted panic and thrown her into a total tailspin. Now she could only hope that he had. If she reached out to him and was rebuffed, would she still be let off the hook? Even in the midst of all the unknowns she suddenly faced, she paused to appreciate how far she’d come. In these last few weeks, she’d evolved to a better place—thanks, once again, to Marc.

  Carlson didn’t exactly roll his eyes, but he looked like he wanted to. “Don’t be so modest, Ms. Gustafson. Like all rich guys, Winterthur can have—buy—anything and anyone he wants, and yet he picks you. And not only does he pick you, but he sticks with you for six years, puts you up on Park Avenue, no less. A guy like that doesn’t go to that kind of trouble and expense, not to mention risking his marriage, unless he feels he’s getting a good … return on his investment. Obviously, he thought you were worth it. You’re the one who broke things off, not him.”

  “But he—”

  “Knocked you around and wrecked your stuff, I know, and I’m sorry for your suffering, I am. But you, Miss Gustafson, had to have some idea of who you were … getting into bed with. Joe and Judy Smith from Cleveland don’t know who they’re dealing with. What happens to them when they realize HG Enterprises is a bust and they’re looking at living out their supposed golden years with next to no savings? Do you want that on your conscience, ma’am? Because I surely don’t want it on mine.”

  “If he finds out I’m betraying him, he’ll kill me, Mr. Carlson. I know I’m no better than a hooker to you, but still, do you really want my death on your conscience?”

  “He’ll never touch you, you have my word,” Wilkes, the Good Cop, broke in. “We’ll be in a van parked a few blocks away, listening to every word. The moment things get too hot to handle, we’ll get you out.”

  “You really think he’ll take me back?”

  “I don’t think—I know he will,” Carlson answered. “How do I know? I know because Andrew Winterthur is obsessed with you. Even more so than his ego, you’re his Achilles’ heel—and I intend to use that, you, to put him away.”

  Honey bristled. “And if I won’t be used?”

  All her life men had been manipulating her, telling her what to do and when and how to do it. Her stepfather Sam, the paunchy thin-haired “suits” who’d paid for her favors, Drew, and now Carlson and company—they all seemed to be cut from the same cloth. They’d all been out to take as much from her as they could—a piece of her ass, her self-respect, her future. The one exception was Marc. Other than trying to save her from going back to Drew, he never asked anything of her other than to be herself, to be “real” with him. And he’d given her so much—friendship, a safe haven, superlative sex—all without expecting anything in return.

  Carlson’s eyes, weary-looking no longer, drilled into hers. “With or without your help, eventually I am going to get this son of a bitch. And when I do, I’m going to put him away for the next twenty-five years, not to mention the millions of dollars i
n restitution he’s going to have to pay to the government and SEC. The only question is whether, when I do, you go away too or stay free to live your life. It’s your choice, but I need you to make it now, this minute. Are you in or are you out, Ms. Gustafson? What’s it going to be?”

  Honey swallowed hard. “Choice” in this context was really an egregious misnomer. There was only one path left open to her. Her “choice” came down to taking it—or not.

  “I’m in, Agent Carlson. Only, under the circumstances, hadn’t you better start calling me Honey?”

  Chapter Nine

  “I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong.”—Audrey Hepburn

  Honey returned to the apartment that night in what Marc could only call an agitated state—restless, hypersensitive, and altogether on edge. It made total sense that she would be upset, even devastated, about Drew’s trashing the apartment and destroying all her belongings, and yet all things considered, she’d seemed in good spirits when he left her.

  Not so now.

  Pacing the apartment’s four corners, she couldn’t seem to settle. Was she maybe experiencing a delayed reaction to the trauma? When he asked what had happened to her at lunch, she responded with an obviously manufactured excuse—something to do with her interior designer friend calling about a sample sale in Brooklyn, poor cell reception, and a generally lost sense of time. Marc wasn’t buying.

  Unable to take it any longer, he put down his tablet and rose from the couch. “Damn it, woman, look at me. Talk to me.”

  She folded her arms. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “What do I … It’s not like I have a script. Just be real with me. Tell me whatever’s on your mind. It’s obvious something is.”