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  sex.lies.murder.fame.

  LOLITA FILES

  To the four wise men: Big L., for your constant encouragement and support; Bryonn Bain, for the African violets; Bill Hobi, for inspiring me, cheering me on, and keeping me uplifted as I made my way toward the finish line; and Eric Jerome Dickey, for always being available in cyberspace whenever I need to have a writer’s rant.

  To the five wise women: the superb Jennifer Pooley, for being my dream editor and a great new friend; Team Amistad (Dawn Davis, Rockelle Henderson, and Gilda Squire) for totally getting me and my book; and my agent, Elaine Koster, because it’s high time I thanked her, by name, in print.

  And to Michael DeLorenzo, a truly talented renaissance man with a heart of pure gold. For looking out for me. For everything. For just being you. You are my brother. You are my friend.

  Contents

  I.

  actions

  There’s something

  …about the echo created by steps across a parquet floor.

  Romanticism:

  She was

  …late!

  Realism:

  Four in

  …the morning and Miles Tate was almost out the door.

  Naturalism:

  Killer Klowns

  …from Outer Space.

  Adam stood

  …next to Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, Jason Epstein, and Salman…

  He had

  …a hard time keeping his resentment in check after discovering…

  Existentialism:

  So what

  …do you think the problem is?”

  Oops!!

  Sharlyn’s mouth hung open, her bagel with a schmear poised…

  His place…

  …was nice, she’d said.

  Gregor Balzac

  …awakened with a start. His head was throbbing and he…

  II.

  consequences

  Coke would

  …never go out of style.

  Penn was

  …deep in thought, rubbing Kiehl’s on his lips with his…

  Brookie had

  …brought her a pig’s foot, one of those fuschia-tinted kind…

  Beryl was

  …exultant.

  A deal

  …was a deal, and Penn finally had his.

  Sharlyn’s creativity

  …was back. She was satisfied and sunny, full of…

  Miles nibbled

  …on Brookie’s neck.

  Fiyah made

  …the video.

  Throughout all

  …the affairs and intrigue going on between Penn and Beryl…

  Nihilism:

  One week

  …before the official release date, news came that Book would…

  She’s not

  …breathing.”

  You’ve been

  …doing what?!”

  Splitsville

  “So what are you going to do?” Penn asked. He…

  The right

  …kind of investigator sat at his desk, eyeing a gunky…

  Murder!

  Ripkin was eating his morning crumpet when he saw the…

  They’d been

  …at the Hotel Plaza Athénée for the past three days.

  Deus Ex Machina:

  Metafiction:

  Deus Ex Meta

  Penn was dozing in the upper-class suite of Virgin…

  About the Author

  Other Books by Lolita Files

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I.

  actions

  You can always count on a murderer

  for a fancy prose style.

  —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

  There’s something

  …about the echo created by steps across a parquet floor. It’s not like the sound of typical hardwood. Parquet resonates a bit deeper. Perhaps it’s the arrangement of the interlocking wood.

  Sound is everything. Intangible power.

  Funny thing about sound. The same sound in the same space, all things being unchanged, can seem totally different based upon one important factor: the distribution of light, or the absence of it. A hundred-watt bulb. Looming shadows. The arbitrary flickering of a candle. Each creates a dramatically diverse effect that determines how sound is registered.

  It’s pure perception. A whisper in the daytime might be missed altogether. That same whisper, uttered the same way in the same space, in the dark, can inspire immeasurable fear.

  This was Penn’s only thought as he hefted the sack of thigh higher across his shoulder: the perfection of sound in accordance with light. The apartment and the moment were both fairly dark and required a pitch with the appropriate degree of gravitas. He adjusted his walk into a half-dance—stepstepstepstepstepstep. The cadence filled the entire hallway. He stopped. It wasn’t right. The rhythm—anapestic dimeter, to be precise—wasn’t ominous enough. He started again, this time losing one beat to make it iambic. Stepstepstepstep. That was better. That was more literary.

  He wanted this to be a literary moment. And in the world of literature, when it came to beats and measures, the iamb was king. Anyone with half a functioning brain knew that. One of his professors at Columbia had said that dactylic hexameter was the most important of the classical meters because it was what Homer and Virgil had used. Bullshit. Most people wouldn’t know a dactylic hexameter if it bit them in the ass, but everyone had heard of iambic pentameter—and therefore the iamb—even if they didn’t know what it was. The iamb was a critical part of Shakespeare’s meter of choice, and Shakespeare was the ruling god of literature. Not Homer. Not Virgil. Shakespeare. End of subject.

  The sack of thigh, a black trash bag stuffed to capacity with meat, slapped against his back.

  Hmmm.

  Step slap step slap. Step slap step slap.

  Yes.

  He began a light whistle. “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” It was the fourth movement from Suite no. 1, op. 46, of Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt, incidental music written for Ibsen’s eponymous play. Whistling it now, of course, was not very original, but the tune had proven a sturdy classic for moments like this. So what if it had been done to death since Peter Lorre’s turn as a murderous pedophile in M?

  Ha. Done to death. He laughed aloud and lost his beat.

  “Quit fuckin’ around,” yelled an out-of-view Mercury. “I’m just washing up, then I’m gonna run downstairs. Give me about five minutes, then start throwing them in. And don’t fuckin’ dawdle. We need to get this done. You hear me?”

  “Of course,” Penn mumbled, regulating his pace back to something close to normal, although there was nothing normal about any of this. He dropped the sack by the front door alongside four other sacks, each one a trash bag stuffed with a pillowcase filled with rinsed flesh. He wondered how he’d ultimately remember tonight. The objective was for all knowledge of the events transpiring to evaporate like the wind, but Penn had always been a lover of mythologies, and this was clearly the creation of one. How would tonight, this night, go down? Would it become a rumored part of his legend, or an indelible stain on an unfulfilled dream?

  He realized the Grieg tune had been a bad choice. It was tacky, clichéd. Penn was a Wagner man, after all. It occurred to him that he knew the right piece, had known it all along, one in line with the tenor of his actions. “Träume,” from the Wesendonck-Lieder, that masterful five-part nod to illicit love.

  He smiled and began to whistle again. Quick bursts of air this time, blown with gusto.

  Ahhh.

  Everything was perfect now.

  Romanticism:

  A literary and philosophical movement emphasizing a belief in the overall goodness of humanity
, where emotions are valued over reason and intellect.

  Love, that is all I asked, a little love,

  daily, twice daily,

  fifty years of twice daily…

  —Samuel Beckett, All That Fall

  She was

  …late!

  Late! Late! Late!

  Beryl Unger was never late.

  Not ever. Not for anything. She was a stickler for time, order, and precision. Every moment counted in life, none of it to be wasted. But through no fault of her own, she had wasted time, and now she was stuck in the gridlock of crosstown traffic. Her knee was shaking. She peered out the window.

  “Let me out here,” she squawked at the cabbie. “I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  “But it’s just around the—”

  “I don’t have time!”

  The cabbie closed out the meter.

  “Four-eighty,” he said as the receipt printed out.

  She flung a fiver at him and jumped out. The cabbie had barely uttered the words “fucking bitch” when she opened the door again and handed him two dollars.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Have a nice day.”

  She slammed the door. Her pulse was racing, brow sweating, as she beat it down the street.

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” she said, checking her watch. Five fifty-seven. “Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God.”

  This was Messier’s fault. The bloviating blowhard had sat in her office, babbling on about himself as the minutes ticked by. She’d had no choice but to indulge him. He was one of her top authors, after all, and he’d dropped in unexpectedly, wanting to be coddled for no reason in particular. With every word that fell from his lips, her leg—the right one, the nerve barometer—shook a little faster, her mind raced a little more, and the tiny pits of sweat forming beneath her arms began to widen and drip as her eyes kept being drawn to the clock over his shoulder.

  She rounded the corner now and raced up the stoop, tripping over herself, scuffing the left heel of a new pair of Alexandra Neels. She scrambled up the stairs to the tenant listings and hit the buzzer. She pressed pressed pressed, the buzzer zinging furiously. Someone zapped the door and let her in.

  Beryl rushed to the elevator, checking her watch. Six-oh-two. She pressed the button. Pressed pressed pressed. Pressed pressed pressed.

  “Oh God,” she said, her whole body shaking.

  She kept pressing as she watched the descending numbers above the elevator light up as the lift came down. The doors flew open. She rushed in, bodychecking the girl who was getting off.

  “Sorry,” Beryl said, her entire face sweaty with panic.

  “It’s okay,” the girl said, regaining her balance. “Relax. He’s running behind. I was supposed to let you know that he had to step out for a minor emergency. He’ll be here at six-fifteen. I was coming downstairs to wait for you on the stoop.”

  “So I’m not late?” Beryl asked, panting.

  “Of course not, Miss Unger,” the girl said, a big smile on her face as she held the door open. “You’re never late.”

  Ten minutes later, she was a bit more refreshed. She’d stopped in the bathroom and had cooled herself down with a splash of water to the face and a light retouch of her makeup. She had freshened her underarms, which were damp with panic. Thank goodness she’d worn a sleeveless chemise beneath a light jacket. It was late September. The weather would be growing colder soon, but for now, she still dressed as though it were summer.

  Seven of the ten minutes in the bathroom had been spent trying to rub away the scuff in the heel of her shoe. It wouldn’t budge. She kept scrubbing until it seemed she might rub some of the color away. She put the shoe back on, turned, and examined the heel. To someone else, it might go unnoticed. To Beryl, it was glaring. The scuff made her look tacky and cheap. It took away from all the care of her appearance.

  She sat in the waiting area, the foot wearing the shoe with the scuffed heel tucked behind her other foot.

  She was annoyed.

  Ripkin was late. What if she’d had something planned immediately after? This was inexcusable.

  She checked her watch. Six-thirteen.

  She had a manuscript to read tonight. And what about dinner? Now everything had to be pushed back.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” she groaned.

  Her right knee shook impatiently. She stuck out her left foot and looked at the heel.

  “Ugh!”

  She tucked the eyesore out of the way.

  “He’s coming,” she said. “I know it, and when he gets here, I’m going to be ready.”

  She was fidgeting, always fidgeting. Even though she was lying down now, her right knee still shook like a racehorse at the gate.

  “What exactly are you readying this time, and how will you know it? We’ve long established that there seem to be some challenges here about discerning when you think something is ‘ready.’”

  “Oh, Dr. Ripkin, don’t be impertinent. You know what I mean. Spare me all your British doublespeak.”

  A rush of heat to the tips of his ears was Ripkin’s sole discernible reaction to the affront of her comment. This…this…this…woman-child…was constantly making such statements to him. Impertinent indeed.

  He would never become accustomed to her casual barbs. After sixteen years of variations on the same drill, Dr. Ripkin—Edgar Eugene Ripkin, M.D., fifty-eight, Old Etonian, Oxford-degreed, to the Dorset manner born, of excellent Saxon parentage, premier Upper East Side psychiatrist—realized he was aggravated by Beryl Unger’s cheery informality above everything else. Her words and tone perturbed him. She should be more respectful of him as an elder, he believed, but he remained the essence of patience and restraint, a stark antithesis to her high-strung bearing. He knew her tone was harmless. Still.

  Ripkin abhorred the way Americans referred to him as “British.” He preferred the term “English,” for he was an Englishman to his core, English in the most old-fashioned sense. He took full tea at exactly four o’clock each afternoon, alone, always with the same items consumed in the same order: first came the savories (four very thin sandwiches, crusts cut off, one cucumber and cream cheese, two watercress, one salmon with dill), followed by two buttermilk scones with lemon curd, strawberry jam, and clotted cream (Devonshire), served along with his tea, Earl Grey (two scoops of loose leaves, one for him and one for the pot), and no milk (never milk). Then came one shortbread, followed by a fruit tartlet (mixed berry). His receptionist prepared this afternoon minifeast Monday through Friday, although she was never invited to participate. Solitude, Ripkin explained, was critical. This was a time to clear himself and relax. After that necessary break, he would resume seeing patients until seven. To compensate for not including the receptionist in his precious tea ceremony, he allowed her to leave an hour early each day, at six, after the arrival of the final appointment.

  Ripkin was a traditionalist who favored ascots, bowler hats, and crossed the big pond annually for the yacht races during Cowes Week on the Isle of Wight. He was fond of silk slippers and sweet Black Cavendish tobacco smoked from a Becker & Musico dublin beside a roaring hearth. He liked rich things. More importantly, he believed rich people should be like steak tartare—rare. But that wasn’t the case so much anymore.

  And while Beryl, his last patient of the day, was in no way representative of the worst he had to deal with, Ripkin loathed her kind, that generation of American excess: self-serving, arrogant fast-trackers with no regard for time-acquired wisdom, credentials, and position. Theirs was a generation of Madison Avenue gluttony, reality TV, tabloid celebrity, hip-hop hedonism, and pseudoheiresses. New Age carpetbaggers and scallywags, the lot. People who would have never been admired an age ago, during his grandfather’s day. There had once been a time when social standing couldn’t be bought. It was a thing afforded only by good breeding and refinement, and was cultivated and passed on with guarded dignity. Now the cretins melded with the cultured in a nasty wash he feared would drown civilization. Vulgarians
everywhere, and he was part and parcel of it.

  These vain young turks were ill-equipped to handle material excess and the access that came with it. Neuroses, psychoses, and full-blown dementia were the natural offspring of their success, which accounted for Ripkin’s expanding practice. They were filled with moxie, these kids, and it was driving them all mad, even though that very moxie was making him quite rich. Richer. He’d always been rich. Perhaps, he thought, it was time for him to retire.

  Beryl, the size-zero bag of issues stretched out on his couch, typified the bunch, although Ripkin, to his own surprise, had developed a tender, paternal fondness for her over the years that he did his best to keep under wraps. She was his second chance. He had a daughter from his first marriage who didn’t know him at all. It was a source of deep regret. When Beryl came into his life, lost, alone, helpless, he found himself connecting with her beyond a professional level. He was hard on her because he’d come to want a lot for her, the best, if she would just let herself have it. But Beryl tended to get lost in fantasy. Ridiculous pointless fantasy. Things she believed were practical, but were in no way grounded in logic or common sense.

  She was considered one of the most successful up-and-coming editors in the publishing world, an industry where the prestige factor often took precedence over salary. The business was notorious for its low pay, but many considered the chance to work with some of the greatest minds in the world and be a part of shaping the literary landscape a compensation that far outweighed anything monetary. The ones who came in at entry level, were identified as having editorial potential, and were willing to stick it out ultimately saw the promise of greater financial stability.