“He’ll claim he was bipolar,” I said, “and that he subsequently took drugs to alleviate his chemical imbalance.”
“All of which might be true.”
“It might be, but that’s not the issue. I don’t want this creep in my wife’s life-or my daughter’s.”
“Your ex-wife, you mean.”
“Right.”
“So, if I pretend to be Kathleen, show up all battered and bruised, and tell Janet he did this to me as a warning, you think she’ll buy it?”
“I know she will. He can’t claim to be cured if he did this to you. But you’ve got to play it a certain way. We’ll need to do a lot of rehearsing.”
“I charge a two-hour minimum.”
I smiled. “I thought the twenty grand might be enough.”
She smiled back. “That’ll help take away the sting,” she said, “but you said the twenty was for the beating. Anything else, such as rehearsing, that’s extra.”
She saw me frown.
“Don’t go cheap on me now, Donovan,” she said. “I’m obviously the only game in town, the only escort that matches Kathleen enough for this crazy scheme to work.”
“Fair enough,” I said, noting she’d called herself a hooker earlier. “But if I’m paying for your time I want your full attention.”
“Of course.”
I nodded. “Good. And, Lauren, I’ll make you a promise: if my ex breaks off the wedding, I’ll owe you a favor.”
“A favor,” she said.
I nodded.
“You mean like some kind of Mafi a thing?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Like what, you mean you’d kill someone if I asked you to?”
I shrugged. “It’s up to you how you use your favor.”
“Mister, you are some kind of twisted freak, anyone ever tell you that?”
“I hear that a lot, actually.”
She looked at me silently for a moment. “Well I intend to hold you to it,” she said, “cause I’ve got a Ken Chapman in my life, too.” Lauren tried to hand one of the envelopes back to me. She said, “Don’t you want to just give me half now, half later?”
“I trust you,” I said.
She nodded. “I guess if you’re willing to beat me up and kill my ex, you’re not the sort of person who gets double-crossed much, am I right?”
“You think you can pull this off convincingly?” I said.
“Are you kidding me?” She said her experience as a successful escort all these years made her a better actress than Meryl Streep.
The way she put it, “Every week, an eighty-year-old man thinks he gives me a screaming orgasm, okay? So this business with Janet’s a piece of cake.” Then she added, “Still, you need to prepare yourself for something.”
“What’s that?”
“She’s never going back to you.”
