Municipal Blondes
18
Dinner with the enemy
I WILL GO TO HELL FOR THIS. If I’m lucky, I’ll be dead first.
Angel told me, back in November when I was trying to get a feel for what her business was all about, the objective was never to sell sex to an old fart. It was to sell the idea that sex wasn’t beyond the realm possibility. And to make him pay for the dream rather than a reality.
It’s not as easy as it sounds.
Selling the dream
I met Mr. Reinholdt in the hotel lobby and he introduced himself as Jon Rentz. Not very imaginative but then, look at the name I’m using. There’s no Riley Finn to complain about me using his name outside the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I chose it because all my aliases have something to do with Riley.
So, there we were, two impostors having a lovely polite but flirtatious dinner together beside the pool in an 80-degree paradise with the most spectacular night sky above I’d ever seen. There are several people I can think of, living and dead, I’d rather share this experience with.
I wasn’t at all hesitant to order the ‘grill marinated lobster tail with rice and sauce vegetables’ at $65, nor to have my fill of single origin dark chocolates with coffee for dessert. Mr. Rentz, however, seemed somewhat disappointed when he offered me a glass of Chenin Blanc ($120 per bottle) from a Northern California vineyard that would have cost $12 at Fred Meyer. Of course, the menu I had didn’t have prices on it, but I looked last night when I ate alone. The Dom here is $750 a bottle. Unbelievable.
“So, Miss Finn,” he said, “from where do you hail.” He’s as pretentious as the menu.
“Chatham, Mass,” I answered. “How about you?”
“Seattle,” he answered. I told you he wasn’t creative. Fake name but he’s living in the same place. I doubt he even used a fake passport to travel.
“Does it really rain there all the time?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “we just tell people that to keep the population down. If everyone knew how beautiful our city is, we’d never keep them out.”
“Ah. Like an exclusive club, huh?” Probe.
“You might say so. Finn. What nationality is that?”
“My father claimed to be full Irish, though it was his grandfather who immigrated to the US in the 1800s. He said that’s where I get my red hair. And my temper,” I laughed.
“And the blue eyes?” Oops! I usually wear green contacts with this wig but I didn’t bring those with me.
“My mother is as Swedish as they come,” I said. “She’s tall and blonde and blue-eyed. I don’t know why I couldn’t have gotten her hair as well as her eyes.”
“You’d look good as a blonde,” he said. “You should try it. They say blondes have more fun.”
“Oh, hair color never stopped me from having fun,” I said. “What do you do in Seattle, Mr. Rentz?” It was time to move the conversation of my fake identity and see what I could get out of him.
“I manage a little pharmaceutical company. Seattle is very big in bio-tech.” Really no imagination. I bet he doesn’t know what other businesses are in Seattle outside those owned by his cohort.
“That sounds very exciting. Are you finding a cure for cancer or AIDS?” ‘Where’s your social conscience?’ is what I was saying.
“That’s a tough problem, better left to people smarter than I am. I just sell what they develop.” What? Was that a hint of false humility I detected? He didn’t add ‘at grossly overpriced profit margins.’
“You must sell a lot of it to vacation down here in Belize. I had to save a year for this little trip. This is a vacation, isn’t it? Or are you selling drugs?” I whispered.
“Mostly… Let’s say a working vacation. I have a business meeting to attend Monday but other than that, it is a lovely place to spend Christmas.”
“It’s such a shame you are here alone,” I said. “Don’t you have family to spend the holiday with?”
“Well, my wife will be joining me Wednesday after the meetings are over. She doesn’t really like it down here that much.” He dropped his voice conspiratorially. “We have three days to enjoy ourselves before she gets here.” The cheating cad.
“Oh, I can’t enjoy myself too much. I’m here with my boyfriend.” Let’s see how you handle that, lech.
“Where is your boyfriend now that he lets you wander unescorted where any manner of ne’er-do-well could attach to you?”
“He got hit with a stomach bug the minute we landed. He’s absolutely no fun to be with when he’s running to the bathroom every ten minutes. I’m sure you’ll see him around by the time your wife gets here, though,” I said. Will you pay for my company with a little information. “What kind of business meeting gets held on an island in Central America?” I asked. “When you say pharmaceuticals, you don’t mean you’re a drug runner, do you?”
“I sell drugs,” he answered. “But they are all legal drugs. Some with a better profit margin when imported from facilities where labor is cheaper. In the US, there are certain restraints on what people can discuss in a meeting if they are in the same business. We have to discuss these things as we share many of the same suppliers. We’d never get anywhere with our businesses if one manufacturer was selling a product at a significantly reduced rate. It’s a matter of self-regulating the trade, so to speak.” Price fixing.
Okay. He’s a bigger idiot than I thought. Who the hell covers up an illegal meeting by inventing a different kind of illegal meeting? Or maybe he is meeting others in the pharmaceutical industry as well. And maybe he isn’t an idiot but is just flat-out so arrogant that he believes he’s immune to consequences. He might actually be telling me that he’s meeting people to divide up the market or fix the price of aspirin around the world. Why? Because he simply can’t believe anyone in the world could be smart enough to understand what was going on. He’s probably right. Who’d believe little old me if I launched a story about a secret meeting in Belize that would result in a 500 percent increase in the cost of an EpiPen?
By the time he started trying to push a glass of cognac on me, I’d pretty much had enough. By a stroke of good fortune, that’s when Prince Charming arrived.
He was a nice sex feet tall—I mean six feet—dark hair cropped close, trim and fit, and about thirty years old. I was looking forward to meeting him on the beach sometime soon. I bet he looks great in his swim trunks.
“Jon, fancy meeting you here,” he said, striding up to my dinner date with an outstretched hand. Mr. Rentz rose reluctantly and accepted the greeting.
“Hawkins. The surprise is mutual. What brings you here?” He was just a little tetchy.
“Obviously, the same thing as you. I’ve heard how magnificent the women are down here. I see you’ve already reeled one in, eh?” He turned to me and smiled the most brilliant perfect smile I’ve ever seen. I melted just a little. He held out his hand.
“I’m Ray Hawkins, Miss. If you wear out the old guy, look me up.”
“Thank you,” I said, taking his hand. I was contemplating taking it home with me. Him attached, of course. “Riley Finn.”
“Nice to meet you, Miss Finn. I certainly hope to see more of you.” Yes, yes. Much more of me. Okay! OMG! He’s beautiful. “I’ll see you around, Jon. Maybe we can go out for some deep-sea fishing.”
“Sure, sure. We’ll make an arrangement later. Good evening.”
Ray Hawkins took his beautiful body to the bar. Mr. Rentz ordered another cognac.
“Young ass,” Mr. Rentz said confidentially across the table. “He thinks those video games he sells are real. Let me give you some advice, Miss Finn. Stay away from him. He’s a user. Reputation for going through beautiful women like water. Wouldn’t have him in my club, I’ll tell you that, for sure.”
Suddenly, the conversation took an interesting turn. My dear Mr. Rentz became a fatherly sage. The presence of a man about half his age must have struck his ego much harder than I imagined. The more glasses of cognac Mr. Rentz drank while I put away $8 glasses or Perrier, the more fatherly and protective he became. He leaned across the table and patted my hand, whispering deep secrets about how men behave when in the presence of beautiful women.
“I see it all the time,” he said. “Hell, when I was that age, I was the same way. You see, Miss Finn—may I call you Riley?” I think he’s paid enough for that privilege. I nodded. “Young men only see a woman’s beauty. They don’t understand what a great contribution women make to society, business, science, or even politics. Older men, like myself—I don’t kid myself about my age; I’m old enough to be your grandfather—older men see the potential for a smart woman to make a real impact on the world. What we really want to do is help her realize her potential. For example, what do you do, Riley? What is your profession?”
“I’m a customer engineer for a manufacturer of precision instrumentation. I’m responsible for making sure their installations are properly set up, their employees are trained, and that they never have a problem with our products.” Thank you, Lars for insisting that when we create a persona for an alias, we do a complete background on where we are supposed to work, even what color our house is.”
“You see!” he exclaimed. “You see what I mean?” He drank down another cognac. He seemed to have forgotten I wasn’t drinking and poured two more. In the next few minutes, he drank both of them. “I knew the minute I saw you, you weren’t just a pretty face. You have real talent and promise. If you were in Seattle, I could arrange for you to meet people who could help your career. As your sponsor, I could get you a job with one of the big companies. Not just a field job, but something to allow you to develop your management potential. I’ve a young woman working in my company who has that kind of potential as a senior marketing manager. She was introduced to me by one of my associates. We are always on the lookout for smart beautiful young women.”
Ding-ding! Bells went off in my head. My dear little Cinnamon happens, in her real life, to be a marketing manager for a pharmaceutical company. Was. Apparently, Rentz didn’t know she’d just resigned. In short, Mr. Rentz was leading up to an offer to come join the women of the Condo. If only he knew how I’d just escaped from the Condo. But the invitation wasn’t forthcoming tonight. Mr. Rentz was now seriously into his drinking. I’d seen it with my mother a hundred times. Once they get to a certain point, the booze is the most important thing, not the people you are with. It made me sick.
I didn’t show it. I didn’t show how much I loathed him, his drinking, or his insinuations. I didn’t show my intention to bury him and the other seven men on the Committee.
I actually supported him all the way to his room—excuse me, suite—with another bottle of cognac and managed to extract myself at the door with many sincere thanks for all the advice he’d given me and an excuse that I needed to see how my sick boyfriend was doing.
I glanced over my shoulder as we left and noticed the handsome Mr. Hawkins watching us leave.
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