Fic: The Task At Hand (Leighton/Victoria, Adult, 59,000 words) 4/6
Master Post - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3
Victoria kicked off her shoes and threw herself down onto her bed. Victoria Asher was supposed to be tough, but Victoria Teague had just had a fight with her boyfriend and Victoria herself had to storm out of there past the one person she most wanted to be with. She let herself cry into her pillow - and doing it without Gizmo there to curl up against her and lick her face only made her cry more - until she ran out of tears. She turned onto her side, pulled her knees up toward her chest, and stared at the room that wasn't really hers until her eyelids kept dropping shut, when she gave in and fell asleep.
She woke up later to an insistent buzzing. It took her a long moment to realize it was someone buzzing up. They were still waiting when she made her way from the bedroom to the door and asked who it was.
"Delivery for Victoria Teague."
Victoria buzzed her up and glanced at her reflection in the mirror in the entryway. Her eyeliner and mascara had run all down her cheeks. She scrubbed briefly at it with a Kleenex from the box on the table below the mirror, but it didn't do much good. It was only a delivery anyway.
The uniformed delivery woman was carrying a vase with a single red rose and a card holder. She smiled sympathetically at Victoria when she handed it over. Victoria signed for it, thanked her, and took the vase into the apartment. She put it carefully down on the kitchen counter before she took the envelope from its holder and sat on the couch to read the note.My dear Victoria,
You're right. I've been neglecting you. Let me make it up to you?
It was signed with a scrawling G.
Victoria rubbed the last of the sleepiness out of her eyes and got up to rummage through her purse for her phone.
"Victoria," Saporta said softly when he picked up.
"What did you have in mind?"
"Dinner," he answered promptly. "Just you and me. Tonight?"
Victoria looked at the flower on her counter. She wanted to say no and spend the evening eating the ice cream she was sure was still in the freezer and watching bad television. But Victoria Teague was willing to be coaxed.
"Phone off?"
"Yes." His voice curled around her, too comfortable. "Just us."
Victoria glanced across the room at the clock on the microwave and did a quick time calculation. She would need to shower, or at least wash her face and redo her makeup, and change, and it would be good to make him wait a little.
"You can pick me up at eight."
"On the dot with bells on. You won't regret this."
She couldn't, not when it was her job, not when it was going to get Saporta off the fucking street, but he would.
*
The club was a good time, but the volume of the music was starting to give Leighton a headache. The hell with it. Saporta didn't always party there; there was no reason Leighton had to stay.
Just the silence of the stairway was a relief, and the deli was quiet enough, a few people on their way in and Novarro behind the counter.
Leighton's stomach rumbled, but she didn't want to eat at the deli. She'd had enough of sandwiches. She couldn't go anywhere she and Victoria usually went, and she didn't really want to deal with the hassle of one of the more upscale places Elle Masters favored. But there was the tapas bar, where she'd made the connection that led to all of this. There was a good chance she'd run into Dueñas, but that could work in her favor.
The place was packed. Leighton worked her way to an empty space at the bar next to a man who appeared to be alone. He smiled at her, and she smiled back while she waited for Antonio the hot bartender to bring her a menu and take her order for a glass of sangria.
He leaned toward her. "Hi. Come here often?"
"No, actually, this is only my second time. You?"
"Recently, yeah." He shifted closer to her. "Food's good, and the sangria does the job."
Leighton laughed a little and turned her attention away when Antonio came back with her sangria and took her order for the tortilla Española.
"It is good."
"Elle?"
Leighton turned at the question. She was right to think she might run into Dueñas.
"Bianca!" Leighton stepped down from her barstool so she could hug Dueñas. "It's good to see you."
"You too." Dueñas glanced at the man Leighton had been talking to and squeezed into the space between him and Leighton. "Did you ever talk to Gabe?"
Leighton scooted her barstool down to give Dueñas a little more room. "I did better than that. I'm investing in the club."
That actually seemed to leave Dueñas speechless for a moment. "I didn't think he'd ever take on a partner."
Leighton shrugged. "He needs the capital to expand and it seems like a good investment." She sipped her sangria casually but caught the way Dueñas's eyes flicked up and down Leighton's body.
"Just an investment?"
Leighton held up her hands. "Bad divorce, remember? I'm not getting involved with anyone." Dueñas seemed like a nice woman, questionable taste in ex-boyfriends aside, and Leighton didn't want to hurt her. On the other hand, Dueñas would do well to stay as far away from Saporta as possible. "Besides," she added, "he has a new girlfriend."
Going by her sharp inhalation, Dueñas wasn't over Saporta, dating the hot bartender or not.
Leighton put her hand on Dueñas's arm. "Sorry."
Dueñas smiled, but not all the way to her eyes. "No, no, it's fine. We've both moved on."
*
The buzzer rang at eight o'clock precisely. Victoria threw on her coat and went downstairs to meet Saporta.
His smile when she stepped through the door was soft, and he came forward to take her hands. "Hi." He raised one of her hands to his lips. "My phone is off, and I'm yours for the evening."
Victoria stepped closer, close enough that his arms slid around her and she could press her face into his shoulder. "Promise?"
Saporta kissed her, a soft brush of his lips on hers. He really was a romantic. "Promise."
Saporta held her hand in the car, but didn't try to talk. Victoria expected something like their first date: expensive and trendy. Instead, the car left them at a small, cozy Italian restaurant. There was a place like it in their neighborhood that she and Leighton liked to go to.
After they'd ordered, Saporta took her hand across the table. "I'm sorry I neglected you."
"You should be."
Saporta's mouth twisted into something rueful. "I promise you I am. I also promise you that Elle is nothing more than a business associate." He squeezed her hand. "You're the only girl for me."
He seemed to really mean it, and in truth Victoria hadn't seen him being more than casually friendly to another woman. She nodded a little. "Okay."
Saporta's smile took over his whole face. "Good." He leaned across the table to catch her lips in a light kiss. "You look lovely."
"Thank you. This is a nice place."
Saporta shrugged a little. "I know it's not one of the trendy places we usually go, but the food's good, and it's quiet enough to talk."
"I like it. It's comfortable."
Their waiter came back with the wine, and their dinner came just after that. The food was good. Not that Victoria expected anything different; criminal he might be, but Saporta had good taste in restaurants.
"Good?"
"Very." Victoria had ordered their fettuccine Alfredo without the optional shrimp, so she held out a forkful of it. "Want to try?" Saporta wasn't the only one who could use sharing food as a way to build intimacy.
Saporta offered her a bit of his lasagna in return. From the outside they probably looked like a couple in the first stages of love. While they'd never been quite so cutesy in public, Victoria remembered what that stage was like with Leighton; it wasn't that hard to fake it with Saporta.
They lingered over coffee and a shared order of Tiramisu.
Saporta took her arm, pulling her close as they left the restaurant. Victoria went easily, tipping her head onto his shoulder.
"Thank you for dinner."
"Thank you for letting me make it up to you."
When she glanced up, Victoria could see Saporta's smile. She looked at him for a long moment. He was being genuinely sweet, and she'd been working on maintaining his interest for a while now.
"I'm glad I did." She leaned up to kiss his cheek. "Would you like to come back to my place and keep making it up me?"
Saporta looked surprised for the briefest moment before a slow smile spread across his face. "I'd love to."
*
Dueñas chatted briefly with Leighton for a few more minutes before excusing herself with the excuse that she'd seen someone else she knew. While she did stop to talk to someone else across the room, Leighton was pretty sure it was mostly because she didn't want the reminder Leighton presented that Saporta had moved on. Leighton could sympathize. The last thing she wanted was to think about Saporta with Victoria.
That was the part of this operation she hadn't thought through very well. Or maybe she just hadn't let herself think about it. She and Victoria both knew what being undercover meant, and they'd both done things they would have preferred not to in the course of an investigation. Usually, though, they were together, or close enough that they could come home from that and be together. This time, Victoria was stuck seducing Saporta alone and all Leighton could do was watch from afar and hate every minute Saporta got to touch Victoria.
Leighton shook her head to shake it off. She had to concentrate. There was no time off in undercover work, and she should be using this time to either build her cover or figure out how she could get Saporta to share the details about the drugs with her. It was definitely drugs; she'd seen a couple of women coming out of the bathroom glassy-eyed and sniffling, and she'd witnessed at least three of Saporta's employees selling to club patrons. But without the links, without proof that Saporta was involved and without names of his suppliers, they couldn't bring him down. Saporta was more than smart enough to stay clean enough to sidestep casual investigation. What she really needed was to get him to include her in a meeting with a supplier.
As soon as she'd paid for her dinner and drinks, Leighton slid off her barstool and headed for the door. What she needed was a plan, and Saporta had entrusted her with copies of the paperwork on one of his other suppliers. There had to be a way to make that work for her. It would be better if she could get Smith to look it over, but she'd prepped this case long enough to know what to look for, and she'd call him in the morning.
She hailed a cab outside the bar and made herself use the ride back to her apartment to calm down. There was nothing she could do, right this minute, to get Victoria back from Saporta. It was going to take time.
It was hard to remember that, though, when she got home to an empty apartment, no Gizmo there to welcome her home, no Victoria, not even a trace of them in the life she had to lead until they could get enough to put Saporta away for good.
*
Victoria woke up confused. There was another body next to hers, but she and Leighton were working different parts of their case. It was that thought that made her remember: the case, and Saporta. She didn't want to open her eyes, but keeping them closed wouldn't change the fact that Saporta was in her bed.
Saporta was already awake, watching her as she turned toward him and opened her eyes. "Good morning."
"Morning." Victoria scrunched her eyes shut, then opened them again. Saporta was smiling softly at her. "What?"
"Just thinking how beautiful you are." His hand came to rest on her hip, slid up to the edge of her breast.
Victoria stretched, making his hand slide down a little, away from her breast. "You're already in my bed. You don't have to flatter me."
"Does it count as flattery if it's the truth?"
Victoria rolled her eyes. "You can get out of my bed if you're just going to bullshit me." She wanted him out of her bed. She wanted to burn the fucking sheets.
Saporta laughed, but only dipped in for the slightest brush of his lips to hers. "I'd rather not get out of your bed, but I have a meeting and I should go home and change first."
"Mmmm, okay." Victoria ran her hand down his arm to tangle their fingers together. "If I come by the club tonight, are you going to have time for me?"
Saporta raised their hands to his lips and kissed each of her fingers in turn before kissing the back of her hand. "I think I can pencil you in." He turned her hand over, placed a kiss in the center of her palm, and curled her fingers around it.
Victoria pulled the blankets tighter around her after Saporta got out of bed. Anyone else would have had to rummage for their clothes, but Saporta had laid his carefully over the back of the chair in the corner.
"You can find your way out, right? I'm going back to sleep."
Saporta leaned over her to kiss her forehead. "I think I can manage it." He ran the back of his hand over her cheek. "You rest. I'll see you tonight."
Victoria managed a sleepy smile for him that she only let drop entirely when she heard the door to the apartment shut behind him. This was the part she fucking hated about undercover work.
The bed was still warm from the heat of both their bodies, but Victoria was shivering. She bunched the blankets up around her and made herself stay there for long enough that she could be sure Saporta wasn't coming back. Then she went to the bathroom without looking back and took the hottest shower she could stand.
This was the shittiest part of undercover work, but the shower washed away the worst of the feeling and sleeping with him would make him trust her, which could only help them close this case faster.
*
Saporta rolled into the club looking self-satisfied, freshly showered, and vaguely surprised to see Leighton waiting for him at the bar.
"I hope you don't mind," she said. "I thought I would tag along, see if I could make myself useful."
Saporta's eyes narrowed at her.
"Relax," she laughed. "I'm not trying to take over. I'm just looking to do my part to protect our investment."
Saporta looked her over - she'd dressed professionally, in a skirt suit and low heels - and said, "All right. Let's see what you can do."
Leighton did her best not to smirk as she followed him to his office. It was only a small victory, and someone was likely to notice her doing it.
"I'm sure you've looked over the numbers," Saporta said as he took his place behind his desk.
"And the counteroffers from other suppliers." Leighton took one of the chairs in front of the desk, the one farther from the door. "We should be able to use those as leverage."
Saporta pinned her with a look. "I believe in loyalty. We don't want to break off our relationship completely, just get a reasonable deal."
"Understood." Leighton made herself look suitably chastised.
"Good." Saporta unlocked the file cabinet and drew out a file, probably the one with the supplier offers in it.
No sooner were he and Leighton settled than Suarez opened the door and ushered in a man slightly less well dressed than any of them. Narcotics' files on him said that he was Tyler Rann, and that he was one of the principal liquor suppliers for the city's underground clubs.
"Tyler." Saporta stood and came around the desk to grip Rann's hand in a vigorous handshake. "I don't believe you've met my latest investor. Elle, this is Tyler Rann, one of our suppliers. Tyler, Elle Masters."
Leighton stood to shake his hand.
"Nice to meet you," Rann said.
"Likewise." Leighton sat down again, and Saporta waved Rann into the other chair.
"I have to tell you the truth," Saporta said. "I've had other offers." He tapped the folder on the table. "We've been doing business a long time, and I don't want to ruin our relationship, but Elle is an investor and I have to look out for the best interests of both her and the club."
Rann glanced at Leighton, then seemed to dismiss her from the conversation. "Gabe, come on, we're running at razor-thin margins already."
"Really?" Leighton said. If Saporta was going to put her in the role of bad cop, she could play that role. "Our other offers seem to disagree with that assessment of the market."
Rann turned to her. "Do your other offers include insurance? Yes, my price might be a little higher than theirs, but I'm not going to get picked up by the cops two weeks from now and leave you making emergency runs to Costco while you scramble to find a new supplier."
"We don't doubt your reliability," Saporta said. "But let's see if we can shave a few cents off here and there."
Leighton had no doubt that a few cents was all Saporta had ever wanted to shave off.
*
As much as she wanted to, Victoria didn't wash the sheets. If there was a chance that Saporta would come home with her again, she didn't want there to be anything that might make him start to ask questions about her life. She was careful about her choice of clothes, too: short skirt, cleavage-baring top, and heels, just like any other day.
She knew she had it right when she got to the club and Novarro's eyes ran down her body in a quick, appreciative glance before he dialed it back and greeted her with a wave.
Victoria waved back and headed down the stairs. The most important thing to remember was that Victoria Teague was confident in her hold on Saporta.
She strode through the club to the bar. She wanted a drink, plus there was a good chance that was where Saporta would be. She was in luck on both counts; Saporta was at the far end of the bar, and she gestured to the bartender, who had a drink waiting for her by the time she got there.
Victoria ignored the crowd around Saporta - Leighton was there, and she wasn't sure she'd be able to hold her cover quite so strongly if she looked at her - and went right up to him. She twined her arms around his neck as she kissed him, deeply enough to stake her claim to both him and the other people around him.
She stopped kissing him and whispered, "Hi," into his ear.
"Hi," he murmured back, pressing a kiss behind her ear. He waited for her to pick up her drink before he turned her around, arms still around her, and said, "Everyone, this is Victoria. Victoria, you know Elle. These are some of our patrons."
Victoria smiled at the group, mostly women, surrounding Saporta. "Nice to meet you." She sipped at her drink and leaned back against Saporta's chest. Leighton, standing next to them, didn't look very impressed, and struck up a conversation with the woman on her other side.
People moved away after a while, and others came to bask in Saporta's attention. Victoria, both as herself and as Victoria Teague, quickly became bored with it. Nothing of consequence was happening or, she judged from the increasing noise level, going to happen.
Victoria turned in Saporta's arms to capture his attention. "Are we going to stand here all night? I want to dance."
Saporta brushed his lips over her cheek. "There are still people I want to talk to." He glanced to the side, toward Leighton. "Why don't you go dance with Elle? You can get to know each other better."
The twist to Leighton's lips said she found the whole thing very amusing. Victoria looked her over, blatant enough that everyone around them would catch it. She downed her drink and reached past Saporta to put it on the bar.
*
"Come on," Victoria said, or Leighton thought she did. Victoria's hand had closed around her wrist with the words, and it was hard to focus on anything but her touch, the almost electrical tingle it sparked.
She caught the tone, if not the words of whatever Victoria said after that, something flirtatious directed at her.
It was smart. If Saporta was like most of the men they investigated, he would get off on the idea that Victoria might be sexually attracted to her, and it would give them an excuse to be a little closer on the dance floor than they might be otherwise.
Leighton put her glass down. "Don't worry," she said for their audience's benefit as Victoria pulled her to the dance floor, "I'm not trying to steal your man."
"You couldn't anyway." Victoria sounded completely sure of herself, so sure Leighton wasn't sure if she was sure or if she was playing at being sure to scare off Elle. Being undercover got messy that way.
And then they were dancing. It was both familiar and not. She and Victoria had danced together in clubs so many times, but this time they weren't themselves. They couldn't twine around each other, ignore the rest of the world and let go. At the end of the night, they weren't going to go home together.
Leighton had to focus to remember that. If she let go, if she just danced, she would forget that she was Elle Masters dancing with Victoria Teague and just be Leighton dancing with Victoria. She wanted that back.
Victoria was keeping a careful distance between them, just a few inches. It put them close enough that to anyone watching, it would look like they were just a couple of girls dancing together, but it kept them far enough apart to be a reminder.
"You're good at this," Victoria said, almost shouting over the music.
Leighton laughed. "I've been learning how to party, since the divorce." She shimmied closer to Victoria and used the pretense of turning them on the floor to try to catch a glimpse of Saporta's reaction. There were too many people in the way for her to see him clearly, but Blackinton was in the crowd, and he raised his eyebrows at her. She grinned back at him and turned them again. It could have been happenstance that he was in the crowd at that moment, or it could have been Saporta keeping an eye on one or the other of them. There was no way to tell, and it made doing anything other than dancing for Saporta's pleasure too dangerous.
Victoria dipped closer to say, "It's a little loud to get to know each other."
"Yes," Leighton said. "I'm not sure this was Gabe's best plan."
"I think he likes it." Victoria nudged Leighton's arm, and she turned her head in that direction to see Saporta coming through the crowd toward them.
*
Victoria stayed where she was instead of going to meet Saporta. Sleeping with him should have made him sure of her, and the look on his face showed that he had something of an appreciation for the picture she and Leighton made together.
Saporta slid into place behind her, his arms coming between her and Leighton. "Vicky-T, you are an enticing creature."
Victoria turned in his arms. "I should hope so, since this was your idea."
"That it was, but you're neglecting Elle." Saporta turned her around so she was facing Leighton again.
Leighton was watching them with a cool gaze. Victoria wanted there to be more there, some feeling about Victoria's closeness to Saporta, but if Leighton was feeling something about it, it didn't make it onto her face.
Victoria moved toward Leighton, Saporta coming with her, keeping the contact between their bodies. In a crowd, it was easier not to think about that contact, about how well Saporta knew her body now. One of his hands gripped her hip while the other settled over her stomach.
Leighton laughed - Victoria could see the motion, even if it was quiet enough not to be heard over the music - and moved closer to them. "Don't worry," she said to Saporta over Victoria's shoulder. "I'm not trying to steal your girl."
Saporta pulled Victoria closer, his whole body pressed to her back. "I wouldn't blame you if you were. She is a lovely thing."
It took every last bit of Victoria's willpower not to jam an elbow into his groin. "So I'm just a thing?" she asked lightly.
"Oh, more than that," Saporta said. "You're a most interesting woman." Victoria wasn't sure if she should believe it or if he was just saying it because he knew it was what she wanted to hear.
"I'm sure she is," Leighton said, drawing their attention back to her. "And I'd love to get to know her sometime when we can hear each other without shouting."
Saporta laughed hard enough to shake them both. "I'm sure she'd like that."
Victoria put her hand over the one of his on her stomach. "I would. Another time." She turned, dismissing Leighton, and hooked one arm around Saporta's neck. "Tonight I just want to dance with you."
Saporta smiled that charming, open smile at her, then made some kind of face, complete with shoulder shrug, at Leighton over her shoulder. Victoria could hear Leighton's laugh for a moment before it was swallowed up by the crowd and Saporta reclaimed her attention again.
"She's my business partner. Play nice." One of Saporta's hands was still on her hip, the other roaming over her back.
"I was playing plenty nice." Victoria kissed the corner of his jaw. "I wanted to dance with you more."
"Flattery will get you everywhere, Miss Teague."
Victoria smirked at him. "I've already been there."
Saporta threw back his head and laughed.
*
Blackinton slid into a space next to Leighton at the bar. "Making nice with the boss's girl?"
Leighton gestured at the bartender to make it two. "No reason for us not to get along." She nodded her thanks to the bartender and handed the second shot glass to Blackinton. "Cheers."
Blackinton tapped his glass to hers. "Cheers. What are we drinking to?"
Leighton ordered a second pair of shots. She couldn't afford to actually get drunk, at least not in public, but watching Victoria with Saporta had her more unsettled than she would like and the application of a mental numbing agent held a certain appeal.
"Do we really need a reason?"
"I have no problem furthering my hard-drinking reputation," Blackinton answered. "Yours seems to be of a different sort."
Leighton took the second pair of shots from the bartender. "The club is full and we're all having a good time." She gave Blackinton one of them. "And this is my last one."
Blackinton held up his glass. "To the last drink, then."
"To the last drink." Leighton threw back the shot and put the glass on the bar. "It's not the last dance, though. Care to join me?"
Blackinton followed suit with his drink and gestured her to the floor. "I'm not sure I can keep up with you."
Leighton laughed. "I think Victoria was just making me look good."
Blackinton jerked his chin at the crowd, toward Victoria and Saporta. "She does do that."
Leighton took them in, dancing close, Saporta's hands on Victoria and her attention on him, and then resolutely shifted her focus to keeping up with Blackinton. "She does. Think you can make me look good?"
Blackinton raised an eyebrow at her. "Get a couple of drinks in you and you become downright flirtatious. What happened to not interested in a relationship?"
"Still not interested. Just having a good time." And better if she could cement relationships with people in the organization other than just Saporta. The more contacts she had, the more information she could get. Blackinton was cagey enough not to let anything drop to a stranger, but she wasn't sure how he would be in the company of a known entity. He and Suarez were Saporta's lieutenants; they had to know about everything that was happening in the club. Besides, he was a good dancer, and he really could make her look good enough that she could follow his lead and split her attention between him and the rest of the room.
As much as she tried not to, Leighton couldn't help looking at Victoria and Saporta every once in a while. They never, as far as she could tell, moved apart, and Victoria was flirting up at him the whole time. Once, she saw them kissing. It only made her more determined to get the evidence they needed - and quickly - and get Victoria away from him.
*
Victoria woke up in Saporta's bed feeling like she hadn't gotten any sleep at all. She sat up and rubbed her eyes. She was alone, for the moment at least, and she glanced around the room until her eyes fell on the note on the nightstand.I'm unfortunately not prepared to entertain a lady of your caliber. Went out to buy you a suitable breakfast.
xoxo
It finished with the scrawled G that was becoming familiar.
Victoria dropped the note back onto the table. Part of her wanted to just lie in bed, but she was alone in Saporta's apartment. It was too good a chance for at least preliminary snooping to pass up.
Saporta had left a bathrobe draped over the foot of the bed. Everything else about the room was so precise - even her clothes had been draped over the back of the chair in the corner, with her shoes placed precisely under it - that Saporta had to have left it for her. Victoria put it on and made sure it was open low on her chest before she belted it. It was, like every other textile in Saporta's place, expensive and extremely high-quality.
Someone as compulsively organized as Saporta seemed to be wasn't likely to keep business papers in the bedroom. Victoria gave it a cursory once-over - opening each of the dresser drawers and peeking into the closet - before leaving in favor of more productive spaces.
Victoria hadn't seen much of the apartment the night before - Saporta had been intent on taking her straight to bed - but she could see the kitchen and living room from the bedroom door. There were two more doors along the short hallway beyond the bedroom. The first one she tried led to a bathroom smaller than the one off the bedroom. The other led to what was probably intended as a second bedroom but seemed to serve as Saporta's home office.
The room held a desk, two bookshelves, and a pair of comfortable-looking chairs. The center drawer of the desk held only the sort of thing she would expect to find in the center drawer of any desk: paperclips, pens, a couple of Post-It pads. There were two drawers to either side of the center. The top ones held only envelopes and stamps. The file drawer on the right had neatly labeled hanging files containing Saporta's personal files: co-op association paperwork, copies of bank statements, tax returns. The drawer on the left was locked.
After checking to make sure the key itself wasn't in the center drawer, Victoria took a pair of paperclips from it instead. Once they were unbent, it was easy enough to jimmy the lock on the drawer.
She didn't expect to find much - most of the records were probably at the club - but the drawer had to be locked for a reason. Every file was neatly labeled in Saporta's writing. Victoria skipped the obvious ones - copies of the deeds to the building the club was in and several other properties, club maintenance records - and skipped to the ones labeled only with alphanumeric codes of some sort.
*
"Tell me you've found something." Leighton paced the length of Smith's office.
"There's nothing about drugs in here." Smith was maddeningly calm. "He has to be laundering money somewhere, but only some of it's going through the deli. If you can get me records, we can get him on that if nothing else."
"Fuck." Leighton stopped and turned to face him. "What about Strenge's jewelry business?"
Smith shrugged. "Carden and Chislett are trying to get something on it, but there's no pretext for getting the records. All we have so far are the tax records, and they look totally legit."
"Okay." Leighton started pacing again. She could get access to the jewelry business they didn't have. If nothing else, she could check it out and see if the business seemed to match the tax records. "I'll check that out."
Smith nodded. "You want me to pass on any messages?"
Smith would tell Mike and Michael she'd been by. She could use that to get more of a message to them than her obvious frustration with the case, but it was only a few days until her next meet with Michael, and there wasn't anything she was willing to channel to Victoria through Smith.
"No." Leighton gathered up her purse.
"That club has to be raking in a lot of money," Smith said, "and it has to go somewhere."
Leighton smiled tightly at him. "Thanks to my cover, some of it's coming to us. I'll let you know what else I find."
There was a Starbucks two blocks from Smith's office. Leighton ordered herself a chai latte and sat at a table to dig through her bag until she found Strenge's card. A cheerful voice that didn't belong to Strenge answered the phone, and chirped at Leighton to "please hold" when she asked for Strenge.
"Elle," Strenge said when she answered. "What can I do for you?"
"I'm at loose ends for the rest of the day, and I was wondering if I might come by and look at your jewelry. I know it's short notice, and I completely understand if you're busy."
"Not at all. I'd love to have you take a look." Strenge gave her an address that Leighton didn't remember from Narcotics' files. Then again, she couldn't remember everything, and surely they had Strenge's primary business address in there somewhere.
Leighton finished her chai in the cab, which let her off in front of a small building with a well-appointed lobby. Strenge was on the third floor. Leighton skimmed the listing of businesses while she waited for the elevator. The other occupants of the building included a therapist, an interior decorator, something whose tagline was "Arts for Children," and a couple of companies with names vague enough that they could have been anything. There was no one else in the lobby, and the elevator was similarly empty when it arrived.
Leighton had to be buzzed in, which meant they probably kept a significant amount of jewelry on the premises. Indeed, when she walked in, she was greeted with a comfortable room with display cases against the walls.
*
Saporta's alphanumerically coded files were more or less additional personnel files, the kind he wouldn't want to keep at the club. He had everything from credit reports to medical history to known associates to potential sources of blackmail on everyone who worked at the club. The more recent files also included Leighton and Victoria. Saporta didn't have anything on paper that wasn't part of their cover stories. That was a relief, at least. The last of them held a handful of deeds that weren't in the other property files. Victoria didn't recognize any of the addresses, but she started her way through them, memorizing addresses and as many of the details as she could.
She was only halfway through them when the sound of a door opening caught her attention. She put everything back, listening for Saporta's footsteps and choosing caution over speed. There were noises coming from the other end of the apartment, but he wasn't coming closer yet.
Victoria closed the drawer, reworked the lock shut, and then looked down in dismay at the paperclips in her hand. Saporta would notice them if she put them back in the drawer or tossed them in the otherwise empty wastebasket. There were windows on one wall of the office. Victoria glanced through them to make sure no one was below - she would just have to hope no one was watching her from somewhere else - then slipped one of them open, dropped the paper clips, and shut the window again. Saporta's place was so well taken care of that there wasn't even the slightest squeak of the window opening or closing.
Victoria ran her eyes over Saporta's bookshelves again before wandering out of the office and down the hall to the kitchen. If he asked, she could truthfully say she'd been investigating his reading material.
There wasn't a clear line of sight from the kitchen to the hall, so Saporta didn't even see her until she was already crossing the living room.
"You're up." He put whatever was in his hands down and came around the counter to meet her with a kiss. "I was going to bring you breakfast in bed."
"I was awake." Victoria put her arms around his neck, counting on the movement to make the robe gape and entice him into being distracted from any thoughts about what she might have been doing while awake. "I could go back, if you want me to. You did keep me up late last night."
Saporta smiled at her, a slow grin. "I did."
Victoria fought not to react too much when he squeezed her ass.
"You can if you want, or you can come watch me create a culinary masterpiece."
Victoria stepped out of his arms and raised her eyebrows. "A masterpiece?"
"So skeptical," Saporta chided. "Come with me."
*
A young woman got up from a desk at the far end of the room and came toward Leighton. "Ms. Masters, Ms. Strenge will be with you in a moment. Can I get you some coffee or tea while you wait?"
Leighton smiled at her. "No, thank you."
The woman gestured at the soft couches and chairs clustered around the room. "Please, make yourself comfortable."
Leighton forewent the seating in favor of taking herself on a tour of the display cases around the edge of the room. She'd seen enough jewelry to tell that what Strenge was selling was the kind of thing that could command a high price. It wasn't really her own style, but some of it would fit right in with Elle Masters' wardrobe.
She saw Strenge coming out of her peripheral vision and turned away from the pair of earrings she'd been bent over. "Lauren, I was just checking out some of your work."
Strenge smiled. "We do a lot of custom pieces, but we keep some stock on hand to decorate the entryway."
"It is quite decorative." Leighton glanced at the earrings again. They were sapphires set into gold, teardrops hanging from round studs with a pattern worked into the gold that seemed to draw attention to the radiance of the stones.
"Those are one of my designs." Strenge took a step back. "Would you like to come through and see the rest of the place?"
"Of course." Leighton followed Strenge through a door into a softly-lit hallway with doors off of it.
"This is my office." Strenge's office was as sumptuously appointed as the lobby. She had a carefully splayed out stack of portfolios on a table at the center of a cluster of comfortable chairs. "Have a seat." Strenge handed one of the portfolios to Leighton. "This is a sample of my work. If you're interested, we can work with you on a custom design. We can start from scratch or rework a piece you already own into something new."
Leighton flipped slowly through the portfolio. Some of the pages showed only finished pieces, beautifully lit, some on the wearer. Others showed pieces in their early stages, either as sketches or as jewelry that had been redesigned into something else, along with the finished product. It was nice. It was beautiful, even, and as far as Leighton could tell, Strenge was working with the real thing. It was not, however, the kind of beautiful that seemed as if it should command the kind of prices that would pay for the office space Strenge's business occupied. Halfway through the book, Leighton recognized one of the women.
"Whitney," she said, not even having to feign her surprise.
"Oh, you know Whitney?"
"Yes." Leighton ran her eyes over the sketches Strenge had done for Whitney's pendant and earrings. Nice, but not remarkable. "We met at the spa. She's quite a personality."
Strenge laughed. "She is. That's something I took into account when designing these for her. I like to tailor each piece to its wearer."
*
Saporta's claim of a masterpiece turned out to be only the slightest exaggeration. He was an astoundingly good cook, particularly for a man who was known to be something of a partier.
"You," Victoria said, meeting Saporta's eyes squarely and pointing at him with her fork, "are full of hidden talents."
Saporta grinned at her, then laughed. "It's all smoke and mirrors. I'm really only good at a couple of meals."
Victoria speared a bit of potato with her fork. "Well I can't cook at all, so you're one up on me." It was a lie, but a strategic one. Victoria Teague wasn't the kind of woman who would cook, and it served her purposes to have one more thing she could be demanding about to hold Saporta's interest.
"You have other talents." The intensity of Saporta's gaze left no doubt about which of her talents he was referring to.
Victoria's stomach tightened, almost rebelling against the breakfast that she had actually been enjoying. "And feeding me like this might get you the chance to enjoy more of them."
Saporta took her hand. "If I had my way, I would do nothing but." He was almost charming enough to pull it off, ridiculous as it was. If she really were Victoria Teague, she wouldn't have been able to resist. "Unfortunately, I have meetings most of the day."
Victoria wrinkled her nose. "I never knew running a club involved so many meetings."
"Real success requires real work, and in my business, half that work is networking." Saporta let go of her hand to go back to his food. "You are more than welcome to hang around here while I deal with business. I'd like to be able to think of you here waiting for me as a reward for getting through all of it."
"I don't have anything to wear here."
Saporta's smile turned wicked. "Even better."
As much as she wanted to get away from him for a while, staying would give her a chance to snoop a little more. She could read her way through Saporta's files at her own pace and see what else his apartment could tell her. Of course, it wouldn't do to let him get too sure of her.
"Maybe." Victoria smiled at him. "If you're lucky."
"You're sitting at my table wearing my robe. I think I'm already lucky." That was precisely the kind of thing most people couldn't get away with saying, and yet when Saporta said it, it seemed completely sincere. Even Victoria, who was so used to playing a role that she'd learned to tell when other people weren't being sincere, couldn't tell how much he meant it and how much of it was an act. Maybe he was one of those men who believed everything they said in the moment. Except that wasn't really Saporta; everything he'd done showed that he cared beyond the moment, enough to remember the things she liked.
*
The song and dance it took to get Strenge to start talking money was nothing short of tedious, involving all kinds of disclaimers about materials and time and design complexity. Leighton smiled at Strenge when she finally got a ballpark range, not giving anything away, but it was high, significantly higher than she would have thought. The jewelry was nice, but it wasn't that nice, even accounting for the cost of materials.
"What I'd really like to do," Leighton finally said, "is go home and pick through the stuff I have. As you can imagine, I have a lot of things from my ex. Some of it might be worth keeping in a redesign."
"Absolutely." Strenge handed over one of the brochures touting their services in remaking old jewelry into new. "Give me a call when you're ready, and we'll take a look at what you want to do."
It could just be that Strenge sold overpriced jewelry to suckers who didn't know any better, but Leighton's instincts were telling her there was more to it than that - and she didn't think it was just that she wanted to think badly of anyone connected to Saporta. Jewelry wasn't anything big enough for them to be importing anything through Strenge, and whatever she was doing had been going on a while, while the drug enterprise seemed to be new for Saporta. They could be laundering money through her somehow.
Leighton left the building without any more answers than she'd gone in with. Maybe Michael could do something with the jewelry angle. What Leighton really needed to do was get Saporta to let her in on his business dealings.
The club was the obvious next stop. If Saporta wasn't there, she could at least hang around and talk to the staff. She knew most of them by now, and she could always use the excuse that she wanted to get to know how the business worked to ask them questions about what went on there.
Her phone rang when the cab was halfway there, and a glance at her phone showed Saporta's name.
"Gabe, I was just on my way to the club."
"Can you change direction? I have an off-site meeting, and I could use your skills."
Well, think of the devil and he shall appear. "Of course," Leighton said. "Where are you?"
Saporta gave her an address she relayed to the cab driver.
The address was an innocuous looking office building, with Saporta lounging in the lobby waiting for her.
"Who are we meeting?" Leighton asked when Saporta guided her toward the elevators. None of the names on the plaques looked familiar.
"A potential supplier." Saporta pushed the up button and stepped back. "Someone who can make the expansion a little easier if he chooses." He looked at her without even the hint of a smile. "Don't make him choose not to."
*
Victoria really wasn't going to spend the whole day at Saporta's, playing housewife or whatever it was he had in mind for her. She was going to take advantage of him being gone, though. It gave her a chance to poke through the kitchen and the living room, which mostly taught her that the cooking wasn't just something he did to impress women and that he had a fondness for eighties movies.
The office it was, then. Victoria bent a second pair of paperclips out of shape and jimmied the lock again. She couldn't risk taking notes, but maybe if she spent a little time reading more carefully, she might find something she'd missed in her initial look. If nothing else, it would give her time to memorize details she could give to Mike to look into.
Half an hour later, she had enough addresses memorized that she could give Mike a good start. What she didn't have was any idea what Saporta was doing with so much property. He had to own several million dollars worth of real estate. It certainly wasn't inherited - Narcotics' file said he was the son of poor immigrants - which meant he'd made enough money to buy several million dollars worth of real estate, all without compromising his high standard of living. Some of the purchases pre-dated the club by years, which meant the club wasn't the source of all of it. The more she knew about him, the more of a mystery he was. There wasn't even anything else in the files to suggest a prior source of income. Unless the personal files were a clue. Blackmail, maybe. But how would he have gotten enough information, before the club, to blackmail anyone?
Victoria skimmed through all of the files again, with that in mind, but they remained stubbornly unhelpful and she relocked the drawer without any answers.
The exercise was enough to put her out of temper. That was the part of police work she hated: the tedious sorting through of information. She'd rather be gathering direct evidence and putting criminal assholes like Saporta behind bars.
The reminder of what she'd had to do to get that direct evidence - she was still wearing nothing but Saporta's bathrobe - was enough to propel Victoria out of the office and back to the bedroom. She tossed the paperclips into a pocket in her purse - there would be somewhere she could throw it out on the way back to her apartment - and pulled on her clothes from last night. She wasn't staying. Saporta could find her later, if that was what he wanted.
She left the bathrobe on the chair where her clothes had been, checked to make sure she hadn't forgotten anything, and made sure the door locked behind her.
The doorman smiled at her as if there were nothing unusual about her rumpled dress and lack of makeup. Maybe, in Saporta's life, there wasn't. "Have a good day, Miss Teague."
Victoria gave him a smile she didn't feel. "Thank you."
*
"Gabe!" The potential supplier wasn't anyone Leighton recognized. Dark hair slanting over his forehead, stubble, clothes far too casual for what the rent on his office had to be.
"Rob!" Saporta met him in the middle of the office with the handshake-hug thing men did. "I'd like you to meet my business partner, Elle Masters. Elle, this is Rob Hitt."
The name didn't mean anything to her. He could be new on the scene, or it could just be that no one thought he would get involved with Saporta so his files hadn't been included in the briefing for this op.
"Nice to meet you," Leighton said.
"Nice," Hitt said to Saporta. "Better than the goons you usually travel with."
Saporta took a chair without being invited. "I don't think they'd like that characterization."
Leighton followed his lead and took the other chair in front of Hitt's desk.
Hitt waved his concern away and sat behind the desk. "You know what I mean." To Leighton he said, "Gabe and I go way back. As long as I've known him, he's had sidekicks traveling along with him. No one as lovely as you, though."
Leighton kept her smile cool. "I've met some of his associates. Some of them are quite decorative."
Saporta smirked, and Hitt laughed.
"Okay, you bastard, you still find the best women. She really a business partner?"
"Contracts and everything," Saporta said.
"You're not banging her too?"
Leighton sucked in a breath to retort, but Saporta just chuckled.
"Victoria would have my head."
"Victoria? New girl?"
Saporta smiled, exactly the way someone who got to be with Victoria should smile. Leighton wanted to rip his throat out.
"New and amazing."
"Better than Bianca?"
Saporta's smile disappeared, to be replaced by a flash of anger and what seemed to be genuine unhappiness. The smile reappeared quickly enough. "Different. Bianca is in the past."
Leighton did a quick calculation: the chance of Saporta being annoyed with her was worth the chance that throwing him off-balance might cause him to reveal more than he intended. "Not quite the past. She introduced us."
Saporta held onto his smile, but the strain of it showed around the edges.
Hitt turned his attention - his real attention, not just the casual looking over of before - on Leighton. "How do you know Bianca?"
"Oh, you know how it is," Leighton said. "I met some friends of hers when I was having a spa day, they introduced me, we got to talking." She spread her hands out, encompassing the entire situation. "And the rest is history."
Hitt relaxed and dismissed her from his attention. He had to be a player with that kind of careful attention to how people got to him. Leighton would have to tread carefully, and make sure anything she tried to find out about him didn't turn up the wrong kind of red flags. Business interest she could get away with, but that would only take her so far, and the delay it would take to get files from Michael might be too long.
*
Victoria surprised herself by crying in the shower. She was tough. She'd been on tough undercover assignments before and gotten through them. She'd even slept with suspects before. It shouldn't be bothering her this much, department shrinks and their mandatory sessions - complete with warnings about what kind of aftereffects this kind of assignment could leave - be damned.
Still, there she was sobbing under the spray and wanting nothing so much as Leighton's arms around her. Fuck, Saporta was messing with her head.
It took a long time to cry herself out, and longer than that to lie on the bed with a cool washcloth over her eyes trying to make sure they weren't red enough for anyone to figure it out once she left the apartment.
Fuck, she just wanted out of this life for a little bit, and that was the very last thing she could do right now. There was a second-best option, though, and even Victoria Teague, film school graduate, could go see crappy Hollywood blockbusters if she wanted.
Just having a plan for the rest of the day was a relief, and Victoria started feeling better even as she pulled on a skirt and top that were far more casual than anything else she'd worn for this assignment - with the possible exception of Saporta's bathrobe.
Victoria Teague would never, no matter how casually dressed, go out without her makeup, but it didn't have to be particularly elaborate, nothing like the carefully constructed looks she'd been wearing to catch and hold Saporta's interest. This only had to be good enough for strangers at the movie theater.
She felt lighter, leaving the house. Knowing the extensive nature of Saporta's files, she wouldn't be at all surprised if someone was keeping tabs on her, but there was nothing suspicious about Victoria Teague going to the movies. Nothing at all.
That thought kept her going all the way into the dark theater. Then she could just relax and let her mind slip into someone else's world for a while. She didn't even have to worry about being watched; it was a movie, and any reactions she showed could be in response to it.
It didn't work out quite that way. She found herself a seat in the middle of an empty row with no one in front of her and no one behind. Just before the previews started, a chattering group of women came in and sat in front of her. Even that would have been fine, except that one of them looked familiar. It took Victoria a long moment - too long; she was really not in the right frame of mind - to realize that she was recognizing her from the files: Bianca Dueñas.
Fuck, she couldn't get away from Saporta even when she was trying to. On the bright side, there was a good chance Dueñas wouldn't know who the hell she was.
*
"Now that all that shit is out of the way, let's talk business." Hitt's friendliness took on an edge. "You want to move product through your club."
Saporta leaned back in his chair, the very picture of studied relaxation. "I do. It's a club; there's plenty of product moving through it anyway. I don't see any reason I- we," he nodded briefly at Leighton, "shouldn't get a cut of that."
"You have the infrastructure for that?"
"We have a well-trained and extremely loyal staff. You know I have plenty of experience in dealing with large sums of money."
"Yes," Hitt said, "I do."
Leighton couldn't tell if that meant Hitt knew how much money flowed through the club or if that meant he and Saporta had done business before. If they had, it was old enough - or well-hidden enough - not to be in any of the files on Saporta.
"What do I get out of the deal?"
Saporta spread his hands out. "Come on, Rob. My club is a very happening place to be right now. You get in on that action, your profits only go up."
Hitt smiled, his lip curling up a little on one side. "How do you know I'm not already in on that action?"
Saporta remained cool as a cucumber. "All of the product moving through the club already is strictly small-time, and none of it traces back to you."
Of course he knew that. Saporta knew everything that happened in that place, and Hitt was a fool if he thought otherwise.
Leighton leaned forward, letting her blouse drape a little more at the front. If Hitt was as smart as he seemed, it wouldn't affect him, but it couldn't hurt to try.
"Our clientele," she said, "is the type that likes to party. That's why they come to us. They also like to know they're getting a quality experience. That's also why they come to us. We don't just want a cut of the profits. We want to protect our brand." Hitt might not go for it, but it was part of what Saporta was doing, and it was precisely the kind of thing the dilettante uptown divorcée could get away with saying.
Hitt shook his head and dismissed her with, "You read too many marketing blogs."
So much for that gambit. Leighton sat back in her chair. "Gabe, I don't see why we're going with some guy who's going to ignore everything we say."
Saporta shrugged a little and said to Hitt, "She might read too many marketing blogs, but she's right about the club. Why let the freelancers pass cheap product when we can provide a much better experience for not too much more money?"
"You sure you're not sleeping with her?"
Fuck, Hitt was an asshole. He was also going to give her enough evidence to take him down, as soon as he and Saporta gave up posturing to talk numbers. It was too bad Leighton would have to stick with Saporta and couldn't be there to make that arrest herself.
Part 5
Victoria kicked off her shoes and threw herself down onto her bed. Victoria Asher was supposed to be tough, but Victoria Teague had just had a fight with her boyfriend and Victoria herself had to storm out of there past the one person she most wanted to be with. She let herself cry into her pillow - and doing it without Gizmo there to curl up against her and lick her face only made her cry more - until she ran out of tears. She turned onto her side, pulled her knees up toward her chest, and stared at the room that wasn't really hers until her eyelids kept dropping shut, when she gave in and fell asleep.
She woke up later to an insistent buzzing. It took her a long moment to realize it was someone buzzing up. They were still waiting when she made her way from the bedroom to the door and asked who it was.
"Delivery for Victoria Teague."
Victoria buzzed her up and glanced at her reflection in the mirror in the entryway. Her eyeliner and mascara had run all down her cheeks. She scrubbed briefly at it with a Kleenex from the box on the table below the mirror, but it didn't do much good. It was only a delivery anyway.
The uniformed delivery woman was carrying a vase with a single red rose and a card holder. She smiled sympathetically at Victoria when she handed it over. Victoria signed for it, thanked her, and took the vase into the apartment. She put it carefully down on the kitchen counter before she took the envelope from its holder and sat on the couch to read the note.My dear Victoria,
You're right. I've been neglecting you. Let me make it up to you?
It was signed with a scrawling G.
Victoria rubbed the last of the sleepiness out of her eyes and got up to rummage through her purse for her phone.
"Victoria," Saporta said softly when he picked up.
"What did you have in mind?"
"Dinner," he answered promptly. "Just you and me. Tonight?"
Victoria looked at the flower on her counter. She wanted to say no and spend the evening eating the ice cream she was sure was still in the freezer and watching bad television. But Victoria Teague was willing to be coaxed.
"Phone off?"
"Yes." His voice curled around her, too comfortable. "Just us."
Victoria glanced across the room at the clock on the microwave and did a quick time calculation. She would need to shower, or at least wash her face and redo her makeup, and change, and it would be good to make him wait a little.
"You can pick me up at eight."
"On the dot with bells on. You won't regret this."
She couldn't, not when it was her job, not when it was going to get Saporta off the fucking street, but he would.
*
The club was a good time, but the volume of the music was starting to give Leighton a headache. The hell with it. Saporta didn't always party there; there was no reason Leighton had to stay.
Just the silence of the stairway was a relief, and the deli was quiet enough, a few people on their way in and Novarro behind the counter.
Leighton's stomach rumbled, but she didn't want to eat at the deli. She'd had enough of sandwiches. She couldn't go anywhere she and Victoria usually went, and she didn't really want to deal with the hassle of one of the more upscale places Elle Masters favored. But there was the tapas bar, where she'd made the connection that led to all of this. There was a good chance she'd run into Dueñas, but that could work in her favor.
The place was packed. Leighton worked her way to an empty space at the bar next to a man who appeared to be alone. He smiled at her, and she smiled back while she waited for Antonio the hot bartender to bring her a menu and take her order for a glass of sangria.
He leaned toward her. "Hi. Come here often?"
"No, actually, this is only my second time. You?"
"Recently, yeah." He shifted closer to her. "Food's good, and the sangria does the job."
Leighton laughed a little and turned her attention away when Antonio came back with her sangria and took her order for the tortilla Española.
"It is good."
"Elle?"
Leighton turned at the question. She was right to think she might run into Dueñas.
"Bianca!" Leighton stepped down from her barstool so she could hug Dueñas. "It's good to see you."
"You too." Dueñas glanced at the man Leighton had been talking to and squeezed into the space between him and Leighton. "Did you ever talk to Gabe?"
Leighton scooted her barstool down to give Dueñas a little more room. "I did better than that. I'm investing in the club."
That actually seemed to leave Dueñas speechless for a moment. "I didn't think he'd ever take on a partner."
Leighton shrugged. "He needs the capital to expand and it seems like a good investment." She sipped her sangria casually but caught the way Dueñas's eyes flicked up and down Leighton's body.
"Just an investment?"
Leighton held up her hands. "Bad divorce, remember? I'm not getting involved with anyone." Dueñas seemed like a nice woman, questionable taste in ex-boyfriends aside, and Leighton didn't want to hurt her. On the other hand, Dueñas would do well to stay as far away from Saporta as possible. "Besides," she added, "he has a new girlfriend."
Going by her sharp inhalation, Dueñas wasn't over Saporta, dating the hot bartender or not.
Leighton put her hand on Dueñas's arm. "Sorry."
Dueñas smiled, but not all the way to her eyes. "No, no, it's fine. We've both moved on."
*
The buzzer rang at eight o'clock precisely. Victoria threw on her coat and went downstairs to meet Saporta.
His smile when she stepped through the door was soft, and he came forward to take her hands. "Hi." He raised one of her hands to his lips. "My phone is off, and I'm yours for the evening."
Victoria stepped closer, close enough that his arms slid around her and she could press her face into his shoulder. "Promise?"
Saporta kissed her, a soft brush of his lips on hers. He really was a romantic. "Promise."
Saporta held her hand in the car, but didn't try to talk. Victoria expected something like their first date: expensive and trendy. Instead, the car left them at a small, cozy Italian restaurant. There was a place like it in their neighborhood that she and Leighton liked to go to.
After they'd ordered, Saporta took her hand across the table. "I'm sorry I neglected you."
"You should be."
Saporta's mouth twisted into something rueful. "I promise you I am. I also promise you that Elle is nothing more than a business associate." He squeezed her hand. "You're the only girl for me."
He seemed to really mean it, and in truth Victoria hadn't seen him being more than casually friendly to another woman. She nodded a little. "Okay."
Saporta's smile took over his whole face. "Good." He leaned across the table to catch her lips in a light kiss. "You look lovely."
"Thank you. This is a nice place."
Saporta shrugged a little. "I know it's not one of the trendy places we usually go, but the food's good, and it's quiet enough to talk."
"I like it. It's comfortable."
Their waiter came back with the wine, and their dinner came just after that. The food was good. Not that Victoria expected anything different; criminal he might be, but Saporta had good taste in restaurants.
"Good?"
"Very." Victoria had ordered their fettuccine Alfredo without the optional shrimp, so she held out a forkful of it. "Want to try?" Saporta wasn't the only one who could use sharing food as a way to build intimacy.
Saporta offered her a bit of his lasagna in return. From the outside they probably looked like a couple in the first stages of love. While they'd never been quite so cutesy in public, Victoria remembered what that stage was like with Leighton; it wasn't that hard to fake it with Saporta.
They lingered over coffee and a shared order of Tiramisu.
Saporta took her arm, pulling her close as they left the restaurant. Victoria went easily, tipping her head onto his shoulder.
"Thank you for dinner."
"Thank you for letting me make it up to you."
When she glanced up, Victoria could see Saporta's smile. She looked at him for a long moment. He was being genuinely sweet, and she'd been working on maintaining his interest for a while now.
"I'm glad I did." She leaned up to kiss his cheek. "Would you like to come back to my place and keep making it up me?"
Saporta looked surprised for the briefest moment before a slow smile spread across his face. "I'd love to."
*
Dueñas chatted briefly with Leighton for a few more minutes before excusing herself with the excuse that she'd seen someone else she knew. While she did stop to talk to someone else across the room, Leighton was pretty sure it was mostly because she didn't want the reminder Leighton presented that Saporta had moved on. Leighton could sympathize. The last thing she wanted was to think about Saporta with Victoria.
That was the part of this operation she hadn't thought through very well. Or maybe she just hadn't let herself think about it. She and Victoria both knew what being undercover meant, and they'd both done things they would have preferred not to in the course of an investigation. Usually, though, they were together, or close enough that they could come home from that and be together. This time, Victoria was stuck seducing Saporta alone and all Leighton could do was watch from afar and hate every minute Saporta got to touch Victoria.
Leighton shook her head to shake it off. She had to concentrate. There was no time off in undercover work, and she should be using this time to either build her cover or figure out how she could get Saporta to share the details about the drugs with her. It was definitely drugs; she'd seen a couple of women coming out of the bathroom glassy-eyed and sniffling, and she'd witnessed at least three of Saporta's employees selling to club patrons. But without the links, without proof that Saporta was involved and without names of his suppliers, they couldn't bring him down. Saporta was more than smart enough to stay clean enough to sidestep casual investigation. What she really needed was to get him to include her in a meeting with a supplier.
As soon as she'd paid for her dinner and drinks, Leighton slid off her barstool and headed for the door. What she needed was a plan, and Saporta had entrusted her with copies of the paperwork on one of his other suppliers. There had to be a way to make that work for her. It would be better if she could get Smith to look it over, but she'd prepped this case long enough to know what to look for, and she'd call him in the morning.
She hailed a cab outside the bar and made herself use the ride back to her apartment to calm down. There was nothing she could do, right this minute, to get Victoria back from Saporta. It was going to take time.
It was hard to remember that, though, when she got home to an empty apartment, no Gizmo there to welcome her home, no Victoria, not even a trace of them in the life she had to lead until they could get enough to put Saporta away for good.
*
Victoria woke up confused. There was another body next to hers, but she and Leighton were working different parts of their case. It was that thought that made her remember: the case, and Saporta. She didn't want to open her eyes, but keeping them closed wouldn't change the fact that Saporta was in her bed.
Saporta was already awake, watching her as she turned toward him and opened her eyes. "Good morning."
"Morning." Victoria scrunched her eyes shut, then opened them again. Saporta was smiling softly at her. "What?"
"Just thinking how beautiful you are." His hand came to rest on her hip, slid up to the edge of her breast.
Victoria stretched, making his hand slide down a little, away from her breast. "You're already in my bed. You don't have to flatter me."
"Does it count as flattery if it's the truth?"
Victoria rolled her eyes. "You can get out of my bed if you're just going to bullshit me." She wanted him out of her bed. She wanted to burn the fucking sheets.
Saporta laughed, but only dipped in for the slightest brush of his lips to hers. "I'd rather not get out of your bed, but I have a meeting and I should go home and change first."
"Mmmm, okay." Victoria ran her hand down his arm to tangle their fingers together. "If I come by the club tonight, are you going to have time for me?"
Saporta raised their hands to his lips and kissed each of her fingers in turn before kissing the back of her hand. "I think I can pencil you in." He turned her hand over, placed a kiss in the center of her palm, and curled her fingers around it.
Victoria pulled the blankets tighter around her after Saporta got out of bed. Anyone else would have had to rummage for their clothes, but Saporta had laid his carefully over the back of the chair in the corner.
"You can find your way out, right? I'm going back to sleep."
Saporta leaned over her to kiss her forehead. "I think I can manage it." He ran the back of his hand over her cheek. "You rest. I'll see you tonight."
Victoria managed a sleepy smile for him that she only let drop entirely when she heard the door to the apartment shut behind him. This was the part she fucking hated about undercover work.
The bed was still warm from the heat of both their bodies, but Victoria was shivering. She bunched the blankets up around her and made herself stay there for long enough that she could be sure Saporta wasn't coming back. Then she went to the bathroom without looking back and took the hottest shower she could stand.
This was the shittiest part of undercover work, but the shower washed away the worst of the feeling and sleeping with him would make him trust her, which could only help them close this case faster.
*
Saporta rolled into the club looking self-satisfied, freshly showered, and vaguely surprised to see Leighton waiting for him at the bar.
"I hope you don't mind," she said. "I thought I would tag along, see if I could make myself useful."
Saporta's eyes narrowed at her.
"Relax," she laughed. "I'm not trying to take over. I'm just looking to do my part to protect our investment."
Saporta looked her over - she'd dressed professionally, in a skirt suit and low heels - and said, "All right. Let's see what you can do."
Leighton did her best not to smirk as she followed him to his office. It was only a small victory, and someone was likely to notice her doing it.
"I'm sure you've looked over the numbers," Saporta said as he took his place behind his desk.
"And the counteroffers from other suppliers." Leighton took one of the chairs in front of the desk, the one farther from the door. "We should be able to use those as leverage."
Saporta pinned her with a look. "I believe in loyalty. We don't want to break off our relationship completely, just get a reasonable deal."
"Understood." Leighton made herself look suitably chastised.
"Good." Saporta unlocked the file cabinet and drew out a file, probably the one with the supplier offers in it.
No sooner were he and Leighton settled than Suarez opened the door and ushered in a man slightly less well dressed than any of them. Narcotics' files on him said that he was Tyler Rann, and that he was one of the principal liquor suppliers for the city's underground clubs.
"Tyler." Saporta stood and came around the desk to grip Rann's hand in a vigorous handshake. "I don't believe you've met my latest investor. Elle, this is Tyler Rann, one of our suppliers. Tyler, Elle Masters."
Leighton stood to shake his hand.
"Nice to meet you," Rann said.
"Likewise." Leighton sat down again, and Saporta waved Rann into the other chair.
"I have to tell you the truth," Saporta said. "I've had other offers." He tapped the folder on the table. "We've been doing business a long time, and I don't want to ruin our relationship, but Elle is an investor and I have to look out for the best interests of both her and the club."
Rann glanced at Leighton, then seemed to dismiss her from the conversation. "Gabe, come on, we're running at razor-thin margins already."
"Really?" Leighton said. If Saporta was going to put her in the role of bad cop, she could play that role. "Our other offers seem to disagree with that assessment of the market."
Rann turned to her. "Do your other offers include insurance? Yes, my price might be a little higher than theirs, but I'm not going to get picked up by the cops two weeks from now and leave you making emergency runs to Costco while you scramble to find a new supplier."
"We don't doubt your reliability," Saporta said. "But let's see if we can shave a few cents off here and there."
Leighton had no doubt that a few cents was all Saporta had ever wanted to shave off.
*
As much as she wanted to, Victoria didn't wash the sheets. If there was a chance that Saporta would come home with her again, she didn't want there to be anything that might make him start to ask questions about her life. She was careful about her choice of clothes, too: short skirt, cleavage-baring top, and heels, just like any other day.
She knew she had it right when she got to the club and Novarro's eyes ran down her body in a quick, appreciative glance before he dialed it back and greeted her with a wave.
Victoria waved back and headed down the stairs. The most important thing to remember was that Victoria Teague was confident in her hold on Saporta.
She strode through the club to the bar. She wanted a drink, plus there was a good chance that was where Saporta would be. She was in luck on both counts; Saporta was at the far end of the bar, and she gestured to the bartender, who had a drink waiting for her by the time she got there.
Victoria ignored the crowd around Saporta - Leighton was there, and she wasn't sure she'd be able to hold her cover quite so strongly if she looked at her - and went right up to him. She twined her arms around his neck as she kissed him, deeply enough to stake her claim to both him and the other people around him.
She stopped kissing him and whispered, "Hi," into his ear.
"Hi," he murmured back, pressing a kiss behind her ear. He waited for her to pick up her drink before he turned her around, arms still around her, and said, "Everyone, this is Victoria. Victoria, you know Elle. These are some of our patrons."
Victoria smiled at the group, mostly women, surrounding Saporta. "Nice to meet you." She sipped at her drink and leaned back against Saporta's chest. Leighton, standing next to them, didn't look very impressed, and struck up a conversation with the woman on her other side.
People moved away after a while, and others came to bask in Saporta's attention. Victoria, both as herself and as Victoria Teague, quickly became bored with it. Nothing of consequence was happening or, she judged from the increasing noise level, going to happen.
Victoria turned in Saporta's arms to capture his attention. "Are we going to stand here all night? I want to dance."
Saporta brushed his lips over her cheek. "There are still people I want to talk to." He glanced to the side, toward Leighton. "Why don't you go dance with Elle? You can get to know each other better."
The twist to Leighton's lips said she found the whole thing very amusing. Victoria looked her over, blatant enough that everyone around them would catch it. She downed her drink and reached past Saporta to put it on the bar.
*
"Come on," Victoria said, or Leighton thought she did. Victoria's hand had closed around her wrist with the words, and it was hard to focus on anything but her touch, the almost electrical tingle it sparked.
She caught the tone, if not the words of whatever Victoria said after that, something flirtatious directed at her.
It was smart. If Saporta was like most of the men they investigated, he would get off on the idea that Victoria might be sexually attracted to her, and it would give them an excuse to be a little closer on the dance floor than they might be otherwise.
Leighton put her glass down. "Don't worry," she said for their audience's benefit as Victoria pulled her to the dance floor, "I'm not trying to steal your man."
"You couldn't anyway." Victoria sounded completely sure of herself, so sure Leighton wasn't sure if she was sure or if she was playing at being sure to scare off Elle. Being undercover got messy that way.
And then they were dancing. It was both familiar and not. She and Victoria had danced together in clubs so many times, but this time they weren't themselves. They couldn't twine around each other, ignore the rest of the world and let go. At the end of the night, they weren't going to go home together.
Leighton had to focus to remember that. If she let go, if she just danced, she would forget that she was Elle Masters dancing with Victoria Teague and just be Leighton dancing with Victoria. She wanted that back.
Victoria was keeping a careful distance between them, just a few inches. It put them close enough that to anyone watching, it would look like they were just a couple of girls dancing together, but it kept them far enough apart to be a reminder.
"You're good at this," Victoria said, almost shouting over the music.
Leighton laughed. "I've been learning how to party, since the divorce." She shimmied closer to Victoria and used the pretense of turning them on the floor to try to catch a glimpse of Saporta's reaction. There were too many people in the way for her to see him clearly, but Blackinton was in the crowd, and he raised his eyebrows at her. She grinned back at him and turned them again. It could have been happenstance that he was in the crowd at that moment, or it could have been Saporta keeping an eye on one or the other of them. There was no way to tell, and it made doing anything other than dancing for Saporta's pleasure too dangerous.
Victoria dipped closer to say, "It's a little loud to get to know each other."
"Yes," Leighton said. "I'm not sure this was Gabe's best plan."
"I think he likes it." Victoria nudged Leighton's arm, and she turned her head in that direction to see Saporta coming through the crowd toward them.
*
Victoria stayed where she was instead of going to meet Saporta. Sleeping with him should have made him sure of her, and the look on his face showed that he had something of an appreciation for the picture she and Leighton made together.
Saporta slid into place behind her, his arms coming between her and Leighton. "Vicky-T, you are an enticing creature."
Victoria turned in his arms. "I should hope so, since this was your idea."
"That it was, but you're neglecting Elle." Saporta turned her around so she was facing Leighton again.
Leighton was watching them with a cool gaze. Victoria wanted there to be more there, some feeling about Victoria's closeness to Saporta, but if Leighton was feeling something about it, it didn't make it onto her face.
Victoria moved toward Leighton, Saporta coming with her, keeping the contact between their bodies. In a crowd, it was easier not to think about that contact, about how well Saporta knew her body now. One of his hands gripped her hip while the other settled over her stomach.
Leighton laughed - Victoria could see the motion, even if it was quiet enough not to be heard over the music - and moved closer to them. "Don't worry," she said to Saporta over Victoria's shoulder. "I'm not trying to steal your girl."
Saporta pulled Victoria closer, his whole body pressed to her back. "I wouldn't blame you if you were. She is a lovely thing."
It took every last bit of Victoria's willpower not to jam an elbow into his groin. "So I'm just a thing?" she asked lightly.
"Oh, more than that," Saporta said. "You're a most interesting woman." Victoria wasn't sure if she should believe it or if he was just saying it because he knew it was what she wanted to hear.
"I'm sure she is," Leighton said, drawing their attention back to her. "And I'd love to get to know her sometime when we can hear each other without shouting."
Saporta laughed hard enough to shake them both. "I'm sure she'd like that."
Victoria put her hand over the one of his on her stomach. "I would. Another time." She turned, dismissing Leighton, and hooked one arm around Saporta's neck. "Tonight I just want to dance with you."
Saporta smiled that charming, open smile at her, then made some kind of face, complete with shoulder shrug, at Leighton over her shoulder. Victoria could hear Leighton's laugh for a moment before it was swallowed up by the crowd and Saporta reclaimed her attention again.
"She's my business partner. Play nice." One of Saporta's hands was still on her hip, the other roaming over her back.
"I was playing plenty nice." Victoria kissed the corner of his jaw. "I wanted to dance with you more."
"Flattery will get you everywhere, Miss Teague."
Victoria smirked at him. "I've already been there."
Saporta threw back his head and laughed.
*
Blackinton slid into a space next to Leighton at the bar. "Making nice with the boss's girl?"
Leighton gestured at the bartender to make it two. "No reason for us not to get along." She nodded her thanks to the bartender and handed the second shot glass to Blackinton. "Cheers."
Blackinton tapped his glass to hers. "Cheers. What are we drinking to?"
Leighton ordered a second pair of shots. She couldn't afford to actually get drunk, at least not in public, but watching Victoria with Saporta had her more unsettled than she would like and the application of a mental numbing agent held a certain appeal.
"Do we really need a reason?"
"I have no problem furthering my hard-drinking reputation," Blackinton answered. "Yours seems to be of a different sort."
Leighton took the second pair of shots from the bartender. "The club is full and we're all having a good time." She gave Blackinton one of them. "And this is my last one."
Blackinton held up his glass. "To the last drink, then."
"To the last drink." Leighton threw back the shot and put the glass on the bar. "It's not the last dance, though. Care to join me?"
Blackinton followed suit with his drink and gestured her to the floor. "I'm not sure I can keep up with you."
Leighton laughed. "I think Victoria was just making me look good."
Blackinton jerked his chin at the crowd, toward Victoria and Saporta. "She does do that."
Leighton took them in, dancing close, Saporta's hands on Victoria and her attention on him, and then resolutely shifted her focus to keeping up with Blackinton. "She does. Think you can make me look good?"
Blackinton raised an eyebrow at her. "Get a couple of drinks in you and you become downright flirtatious. What happened to not interested in a relationship?"
"Still not interested. Just having a good time." And better if she could cement relationships with people in the organization other than just Saporta. The more contacts she had, the more information she could get. Blackinton was cagey enough not to let anything drop to a stranger, but she wasn't sure how he would be in the company of a known entity. He and Suarez were Saporta's lieutenants; they had to know about everything that was happening in the club. Besides, he was a good dancer, and he really could make her look good enough that she could follow his lead and split her attention between him and the rest of the room.
As much as she tried not to, Leighton couldn't help looking at Victoria and Saporta every once in a while. They never, as far as she could tell, moved apart, and Victoria was flirting up at him the whole time. Once, she saw them kissing. It only made her more determined to get the evidence they needed - and quickly - and get Victoria away from him.
*
Victoria woke up in Saporta's bed feeling like she hadn't gotten any sleep at all. She sat up and rubbed her eyes. She was alone, for the moment at least, and she glanced around the room until her eyes fell on the note on the nightstand.I'm unfortunately not prepared to entertain a lady of your caliber. Went out to buy you a suitable breakfast.
xoxo
It finished with the scrawled G that was becoming familiar.
Victoria dropped the note back onto the table. Part of her wanted to just lie in bed, but she was alone in Saporta's apartment. It was too good a chance for at least preliminary snooping to pass up.
Saporta had left a bathrobe draped over the foot of the bed. Everything else about the room was so precise - even her clothes had been draped over the back of the chair in the corner, with her shoes placed precisely under it - that Saporta had to have left it for her. Victoria put it on and made sure it was open low on her chest before she belted it. It was, like every other textile in Saporta's place, expensive and extremely high-quality.
Someone as compulsively organized as Saporta seemed to be wasn't likely to keep business papers in the bedroom. Victoria gave it a cursory once-over - opening each of the dresser drawers and peeking into the closet - before leaving in favor of more productive spaces.
Victoria hadn't seen much of the apartment the night before - Saporta had been intent on taking her straight to bed - but she could see the kitchen and living room from the bedroom door. There were two more doors along the short hallway beyond the bedroom. The first one she tried led to a bathroom smaller than the one off the bedroom. The other led to what was probably intended as a second bedroom but seemed to serve as Saporta's home office.
The room held a desk, two bookshelves, and a pair of comfortable-looking chairs. The center drawer of the desk held only the sort of thing she would expect to find in the center drawer of any desk: paperclips, pens, a couple of Post-It pads. There were two drawers to either side of the center. The top ones held only envelopes and stamps. The file drawer on the right had neatly labeled hanging files containing Saporta's personal files: co-op association paperwork, copies of bank statements, tax returns. The drawer on the left was locked.
After checking to make sure the key itself wasn't in the center drawer, Victoria took a pair of paperclips from it instead. Once they were unbent, it was easy enough to jimmy the lock on the drawer.
She didn't expect to find much - most of the records were probably at the club - but the drawer had to be locked for a reason. Every file was neatly labeled in Saporta's writing. Victoria skipped the obvious ones - copies of the deeds to the building the club was in and several other properties, club maintenance records - and skipped to the ones labeled only with alphanumeric codes of some sort.
*
"Tell me you've found something." Leighton paced the length of Smith's office.
"There's nothing about drugs in here." Smith was maddeningly calm. "He has to be laundering money somewhere, but only some of it's going through the deli. If you can get me records, we can get him on that if nothing else."
"Fuck." Leighton stopped and turned to face him. "What about Strenge's jewelry business?"
Smith shrugged. "Carden and Chislett are trying to get something on it, but there's no pretext for getting the records. All we have so far are the tax records, and they look totally legit."
"Okay." Leighton started pacing again. She could get access to the jewelry business they didn't have. If nothing else, she could check it out and see if the business seemed to match the tax records. "I'll check that out."
Smith nodded. "You want me to pass on any messages?"
Smith would tell Mike and Michael she'd been by. She could use that to get more of a message to them than her obvious frustration with the case, but it was only a few days until her next meet with Michael, and there wasn't anything she was willing to channel to Victoria through Smith.
"No." Leighton gathered up her purse.
"That club has to be raking in a lot of money," Smith said, "and it has to go somewhere."
Leighton smiled tightly at him. "Thanks to my cover, some of it's coming to us. I'll let you know what else I find."
There was a Starbucks two blocks from Smith's office. Leighton ordered herself a chai latte and sat at a table to dig through her bag until she found Strenge's card. A cheerful voice that didn't belong to Strenge answered the phone, and chirped at Leighton to "please hold" when she asked for Strenge.
"Elle," Strenge said when she answered. "What can I do for you?"
"I'm at loose ends for the rest of the day, and I was wondering if I might come by and look at your jewelry. I know it's short notice, and I completely understand if you're busy."
"Not at all. I'd love to have you take a look." Strenge gave her an address that Leighton didn't remember from Narcotics' files. Then again, she couldn't remember everything, and surely they had Strenge's primary business address in there somewhere.
Leighton finished her chai in the cab, which let her off in front of a small building with a well-appointed lobby. Strenge was on the third floor. Leighton skimmed the listing of businesses while she waited for the elevator. The other occupants of the building included a therapist, an interior decorator, something whose tagline was "Arts for Children," and a couple of companies with names vague enough that they could have been anything. There was no one else in the lobby, and the elevator was similarly empty when it arrived.
Leighton had to be buzzed in, which meant they probably kept a significant amount of jewelry on the premises. Indeed, when she walked in, she was greeted with a comfortable room with display cases against the walls.
*
Saporta's alphanumerically coded files were more or less additional personnel files, the kind he wouldn't want to keep at the club. He had everything from credit reports to medical history to known associates to potential sources of blackmail on everyone who worked at the club. The more recent files also included Leighton and Victoria. Saporta didn't have anything on paper that wasn't part of their cover stories. That was a relief, at least. The last of them held a handful of deeds that weren't in the other property files. Victoria didn't recognize any of the addresses, but she started her way through them, memorizing addresses and as many of the details as she could.
She was only halfway through them when the sound of a door opening caught her attention. She put everything back, listening for Saporta's footsteps and choosing caution over speed. There were noises coming from the other end of the apartment, but he wasn't coming closer yet.
Victoria closed the drawer, reworked the lock shut, and then looked down in dismay at the paperclips in her hand. Saporta would notice them if she put them back in the drawer or tossed them in the otherwise empty wastebasket. There were windows on one wall of the office. Victoria glanced through them to make sure no one was below - she would just have to hope no one was watching her from somewhere else - then slipped one of them open, dropped the paper clips, and shut the window again. Saporta's place was so well taken care of that there wasn't even the slightest squeak of the window opening or closing.
Victoria ran her eyes over Saporta's bookshelves again before wandering out of the office and down the hall to the kitchen. If he asked, she could truthfully say she'd been investigating his reading material.
There wasn't a clear line of sight from the kitchen to the hall, so Saporta didn't even see her until she was already crossing the living room.
"You're up." He put whatever was in his hands down and came around the counter to meet her with a kiss. "I was going to bring you breakfast in bed."
"I was awake." Victoria put her arms around his neck, counting on the movement to make the robe gape and entice him into being distracted from any thoughts about what she might have been doing while awake. "I could go back, if you want me to. You did keep me up late last night."
Saporta smiled at her, a slow grin. "I did."
Victoria fought not to react too much when he squeezed her ass.
"You can if you want, or you can come watch me create a culinary masterpiece."
Victoria stepped out of his arms and raised her eyebrows. "A masterpiece?"
"So skeptical," Saporta chided. "Come with me."
*
A young woman got up from a desk at the far end of the room and came toward Leighton. "Ms. Masters, Ms. Strenge will be with you in a moment. Can I get you some coffee or tea while you wait?"
Leighton smiled at her. "No, thank you."
The woman gestured at the soft couches and chairs clustered around the room. "Please, make yourself comfortable."
Leighton forewent the seating in favor of taking herself on a tour of the display cases around the edge of the room. She'd seen enough jewelry to tell that what Strenge was selling was the kind of thing that could command a high price. It wasn't really her own style, but some of it would fit right in with Elle Masters' wardrobe.
She saw Strenge coming out of her peripheral vision and turned away from the pair of earrings she'd been bent over. "Lauren, I was just checking out some of your work."
Strenge smiled. "We do a lot of custom pieces, but we keep some stock on hand to decorate the entryway."
"It is quite decorative." Leighton glanced at the earrings again. They were sapphires set into gold, teardrops hanging from round studs with a pattern worked into the gold that seemed to draw attention to the radiance of the stones.
"Those are one of my designs." Strenge took a step back. "Would you like to come through and see the rest of the place?"
"Of course." Leighton followed Strenge through a door into a softly-lit hallway with doors off of it.
"This is my office." Strenge's office was as sumptuously appointed as the lobby. She had a carefully splayed out stack of portfolios on a table at the center of a cluster of comfortable chairs. "Have a seat." Strenge handed one of the portfolios to Leighton. "This is a sample of my work. If you're interested, we can work with you on a custom design. We can start from scratch or rework a piece you already own into something new."
Leighton flipped slowly through the portfolio. Some of the pages showed only finished pieces, beautifully lit, some on the wearer. Others showed pieces in their early stages, either as sketches or as jewelry that had been redesigned into something else, along with the finished product. It was nice. It was beautiful, even, and as far as Leighton could tell, Strenge was working with the real thing. It was not, however, the kind of beautiful that seemed as if it should command the kind of prices that would pay for the office space Strenge's business occupied. Halfway through the book, Leighton recognized one of the women.
"Whitney," she said, not even having to feign her surprise.
"Oh, you know Whitney?"
"Yes." Leighton ran her eyes over the sketches Strenge had done for Whitney's pendant and earrings. Nice, but not remarkable. "We met at the spa. She's quite a personality."
Strenge laughed. "She is. That's something I took into account when designing these for her. I like to tailor each piece to its wearer."
*
Saporta's claim of a masterpiece turned out to be only the slightest exaggeration. He was an astoundingly good cook, particularly for a man who was known to be something of a partier.
"You," Victoria said, meeting Saporta's eyes squarely and pointing at him with her fork, "are full of hidden talents."
Saporta grinned at her, then laughed. "It's all smoke and mirrors. I'm really only good at a couple of meals."
Victoria speared a bit of potato with her fork. "Well I can't cook at all, so you're one up on me." It was a lie, but a strategic one. Victoria Teague wasn't the kind of woman who would cook, and it served her purposes to have one more thing she could be demanding about to hold Saporta's interest.
"You have other talents." The intensity of Saporta's gaze left no doubt about which of her talents he was referring to.
Victoria's stomach tightened, almost rebelling against the breakfast that she had actually been enjoying. "And feeding me like this might get you the chance to enjoy more of them."
Saporta took her hand. "If I had my way, I would do nothing but." He was almost charming enough to pull it off, ridiculous as it was. If she really were Victoria Teague, she wouldn't have been able to resist. "Unfortunately, I have meetings most of the day."
Victoria wrinkled her nose. "I never knew running a club involved so many meetings."
"Real success requires real work, and in my business, half that work is networking." Saporta let go of her hand to go back to his food. "You are more than welcome to hang around here while I deal with business. I'd like to be able to think of you here waiting for me as a reward for getting through all of it."
"I don't have anything to wear here."
Saporta's smile turned wicked. "Even better."
As much as she wanted to get away from him for a while, staying would give her a chance to snoop a little more. She could read her way through Saporta's files at her own pace and see what else his apartment could tell her. Of course, it wouldn't do to let him get too sure of her.
"Maybe." Victoria smiled at him. "If you're lucky."
"You're sitting at my table wearing my robe. I think I'm already lucky." That was precisely the kind of thing most people couldn't get away with saying, and yet when Saporta said it, it seemed completely sincere. Even Victoria, who was so used to playing a role that she'd learned to tell when other people weren't being sincere, couldn't tell how much he meant it and how much of it was an act. Maybe he was one of those men who believed everything they said in the moment. Except that wasn't really Saporta; everything he'd done showed that he cared beyond the moment, enough to remember the things she liked.
*
The song and dance it took to get Strenge to start talking money was nothing short of tedious, involving all kinds of disclaimers about materials and time and design complexity. Leighton smiled at Strenge when she finally got a ballpark range, not giving anything away, but it was high, significantly higher than she would have thought. The jewelry was nice, but it wasn't that nice, even accounting for the cost of materials.
"What I'd really like to do," Leighton finally said, "is go home and pick through the stuff I have. As you can imagine, I have a lot of things from my ex. Some of it might be worth keeping in a redesign."
"Absolutely." Strenge handed over one of the brochures touting their services in remaking old jewelry into new. "Give me a call when you're ready, and we'll take a look at what you want to do."
It could just be that Strenge sold overpriced jewelry to suckers who didn't know any better, but Leighton's instincts were telling her there was more to it than that - and she didn't think it was just that she wanted to think badly of anyone connected to Saporta. Jewelry wasn't anything big enough for them to be importing anything through Strenge, and whatever she was doing had been going on a while, while the drug enterprise seemed to be new for Saporta. They could be laundering money through her somehow.
Leighton left the building without any more answers than she'd gone in with. Maybe Michael could do something with the jewelry angle. What Leighton really needed to do was get Saporta to let her in on his business dealings.
The club was the obvious next stop. If Saporta wasn't there, she could at least hang around and talk to the staff. She knew most of them by now, and she could always use the excuse that she wanted to get to know how the business worked to ask them questions about what went on there.
Her phone rang when the cab was halfway there, and a glance at her phone showed Saporta's name.
"Gabe, I was just on my way to the club."
"Can you change direction? I have an off-site meeting, and I could use your skills."
Well, think of the devil and he shall appear. "Of course," Leighton said. "Where are you?"
Saporta gave her an address she relayed to the cab driver.
The address was an innocuous looking office building, with Saporta lounging in the lobby waiting for her.
"Who are we meeting?" Leighton asked when Saporta guided her toward the elevators. None of the names on the plaques looked familiar.
"A potential supplier." Saporta pushed the up button and stepped back. "Someone who can make the expansion a little easier if he chooses." He looked at her without even the hint of a smile. "Don't make him choose not to."
*
Victoria really wasn't going to spend the whole day at Saporta's, playing housewife or whatever it was he had in mind for her. She was going to take advantage of him being gone, though. It gave her a chance to poke through the kitchen and the living room, which mostly taught her that the cooking wasn't just something he did to impress women and that he had a fondness for eighties movies.
The office it was, then. Victoria bent a second pair of paperclips out of shape and jimmied the lock again. She couldn't risk taking notes, but maybe if she spent a little time reading more carefully, she might find something she'd missed in her initial look. If nothing else, it would give her time to memorize details she could give to Mike to look into.
Half an hour later, she had enough addresses memorized that she could give Mike a good start. What she didn't have was any idea what Saporta was doing with so much property. He had to own several million dollars worth of real estate. It certainly wasn't inherited - Narcotics' file said he was the son of poor immigrants - which meant he'd made enough money to buy several million dollars worth of real estate, all without compromising his high standard of living. Some of the purchases pre-dated the club by years, which meant the club wasn't the source of all of it. The more she knew about him, the more of a mystery he was. There wasn't even anything else in the files to suggest a prior source of income. Unless the personal files were a clue. Blackmail, maybe. But how would he have gotten enough information, before the club, to blackmail anyone?
Victoria skimmed through all of the files again, with that in mind, but they remained stubbornly unhelpful and she relocked the drawer without any answers.
The exercise was enough to put her out of temper. That was the part of police work she hated: the tedious sorting through of information. She'd rather be gathering direct evidence and putting criminal assholes like Saporta behind bars.
The reminder of what she'd had to do to get that direct evidence - she was still wearing nothing but Saporta's bathrobe - was enough to propel Victoria out of the office and back to the bedroom. She tossed the paperclips into a pocket in her purse - there would be somewhere she could throw it out on the way back to her apartment - and pulled on her clothes from last night. She wasn't staying. Saporta could find her later, if that was what he wanted.
She left the bathrobe on the chair where her clothes had been, checked to make sure she hadn't forgotten anything, and made sure the door locked behind her.
The doorman smiled at her as if there were nothing unusual about her rumpled dress and lack of makeup. Maybe, in Saporta's life, there wasn't. "Have a good day, Miss Teague."
Victoria gave him a smile she didn't feel. "Thank you."
*
"Gabe!" The potential supplier wasn't anyone Leighton recognized. Dark hair slanting over his forehead, stubble, clothes far too casual for what the rent on his office had to be.
"Rob!" Saporta met him in the middle of the office with the handshake-hug thing men did. "I'd like you to meet my business partner, Elle Masters. Elle, this is Rob Hitt."
The name didn't mean anything to her. He could be new on the scene, or it could just be that no one thought he would get involved with Saporta so his files hadn't been included in the briefing for this op.
"Nice to meet you," Leighton said.
"Nice," Hitt said to Saporta. "Better than the goons you usually travel with."
Saporta took a chair without being invited. "I don't think they'd like that characterization."
Leighton followed his lead and took the other chair in front of Hitt's desk.
Hitt waved his concern away and sat behind the desk. "You know what I mean." To Leighton he said, "Gabe and I go way back. As long as I've known him, he's had sidekicks traveling along with him. No one as lovely as you, though."
Leighton kept her smile cool. "I've met some of his associates. Some of them are quite decorative."
Saporta smirked, and Hitt laughed.
"Okay, you bastard, you still find the best women. She really a business partner?"
"Contracts and everything," Saporta said.
"You're not banging her too?"
Leighton sucked in a breath to retort, but Saporta just chuckled.
"Victoria would have my head."
"Victoria? New girl?"
Saporta smiled, exactly the way someone who got to be with Victoria should smile. Leighton wanted to rip his throat out.
"New and amazing."
"Better than Bianca?"
Saporta's smile disappeared, to be replaced by a flash of anger and what seemed to be genuine unhappiness. The smile reappeared quickly enough. "Different. Bianca is in the past."
Leighton did a quick calculation: the chance of Saporta being annoyed with her was worth the chance that throwing him off-balance might cause him to reveal more than he intended. "Not quite the past. She introduced us."
Saporta held onto his smile, but the strain of it showed around the edges.
Hitt turned his attention - his real attention, not just the casual looking over of before - on Leighton. "How do you know Bianca?"
"Oh, you know how it is," Leighton said. "I met some friends of hers when I was having a spa day, they introduced me, we got to talking." She spread her hands out, encompassing the entire situation. "And the rest is history."
Hitt relaxed and dismissed her from his attention. He had to be a player with that kind of careful attention to how people got to him. Leighton would have to tread carefully, and make sure anything she tried to find out about him didn't turn up the wrong kind of red flags. Business interest she could get away with, but that would only take her so far, and the delay it would take to get files from Michael might be too long.
*
Victoria surprised herself by crying in the shower. She was tough. She'd been on tough undercover assignments before and gotten through them. She'd even slept with suspects before. It shouldn't be bothering her this much, department shrinks and their mandatory sessions - complete with warnings about what kind of aftereffects this kind of assignment could leave - be damned.
Still, there she was sobbing under the spray and wanting nothing so much as Leighton's arms around her. Fuck, Saporta was messing with her head.
It took a long time to cry herself out, and longer than that to lie on the bed with a cool washcloth over her eyes trying to make sure they weren't red enough for anyone to figure it out once she left the apartment.
Fuck, she just wanted out of this life for a little bit, and that was the very last thing she could do right now. There was a second-best option, though, and even Victoria Teague, film school graduate, could go see crappy Hollywood blockbusters if she wanted.
Just having a plan for the rest of the day was a relief, and Victoria started feeling better even as she pulled on a skirt and top that were far more casual than anything else she'd worn for this assignment - with the possible exception of Saporta's bathrobe.
Victoria Teague would never, no matter how casually dressed, go out without her makeup, but it didn't have to be particularly elaborate, nothing like the carefully constructed looks she'd been wearing to catch and hold Saporta's interest. This only had to be good enough for strangers at the movie theater.
She felt lighter, leaving the house. Knowing the extensive nature of Saporta's files, she wouldn't be at all surprised if someone was keeping tabs on her, but there was nothing suspicious about Victoria Teague going to the movies. Nothing at all.
That thought kept her going all the way into the dark theater. Then she could just relax and let her mind slip into someone else's world for a while. She didn't even have to worry about being watched; it was a movie, and any reactions she showed could be in response to it.
It didn't work out quite that way. She found herself a seat in the middle of an empty row with no one in front of her and no one behind. Just before the previews started, a chattering group of women came in and sat in front of her. Even that would have been fine, except that one of them looked familiar. It took Victoria a long moment - too long; she was really not in the right frame of mind - to realize that she was recognizing her from the files: Bianca Dueñas.
Fuck, she couldn't get away from Saporta even when she was trying to. On the bright side, there was a good chance Dueñas wouldn't know who the hell she was.
*
"Now that all that shit is out of the way, let's talk business." Hitt's friendliness took on an edge. "You want to move product through your club."
Saporta leaned back in his chair, the very picture of studied relaxation. "I do. It's a club; there's plenty of product moving through it anyway. I don't see any reason I- we," he nodded briefly at Leighton, "shouldn't get a cut of that."
"You have the infrastructure for that?"
"We have a well-trained and extremely loyal staff. You know I have plenty of experience in dealing with large sums of money."
"Yes," Hitt said, "I do."
Leighton couldn't tell if that meant Hitt knew how much money flowed through the club or if that meant he and Saporta had done business before. If they had, it was old enough - or well-hidden enough - not to be in any of the files on Saporta.
"What do I get out of the deal?"
Saporta spread his hands out. "Come on, Rob. My club is a very happening place to be right now. You get in on that action, your profits only go up."
Hitt smiled, his lip curling up a little on one side. "How do you know I'm not already in on that action?"
Saporta remained cool as a cucumber. "All of the product moving through the club already is strictly small-time, and none of it traces back to you."
Of course he knew that. Saporta knew everything that happened in that place, and Hitt was a fool if he thought otherwise.
Leighton leaned forward, letting her blouse drape a little more at the front. If Hitt was as smart as he seemed, it wouldn't affect him, but it couldn't hurt to try.
"Our clientele," she said, "is the type that likes to party. That's why they come to us. They also like to know they're getting a quality experience. That's also why they come to us. We don't just want a cut of the profits. We want to protect our brand." Hitt might not go for it, but it was part of what Saporta was doing, and it was precisely the kind of thing the dilettante uptown divorcée could get away with saying.
Hitt shook his head and dismissed her with, "You read too many marketing blogs."
So much for that gambit. Leighton sat back in her chair. "Gabe, I don't see why we're going with some guy who's going to ignore everything we say."
Saporta shrugged a little and said to Hitt, "She might read too many marketing blogs, but she's right about the club. Why let the freelancers pass cheap product when we can provide a much better experience for not too much more money?"
"You sure you're not sleeping with her?"
Fuck, Hitt was an asshole. He was also going to give her enough evidence to take him down, as soon as he and Saporta gave up posturing to talk numbers. It was too bad Leighton would have to stick with Saporta and couldn't be there to make that arrest herself.
Part 5