Crashing the A-List Read online

  I snort. “Girl, these are over twenty years old. I can’t even fathom what that guy looks like now.” I make a face. “Oh god. I just fathomed...”

  “Then there’s this gal,” she says, showing me the photo of a woman with more obviously permed hair than she has face. “She will only accept clientele who are willing to perform all sexual acts in a water-based environment.”

  I blink at her. “What...what does that even mean? Like, a bathtub, or the Hudson? There’s a wide margin for weird there.”

  CiCi giggles and keeps sorting.

  “Oh, here’s a Google-able name!” I say. “Caspian Tiddleswich. He’s not a Third, but that’s still pretty fancy-pants.”

  She laughs. “That’s a badass name. I bet he never got beaten up in kindergarten at all.”

  I look at his picture. He’s all floppy curly hair, pale blue eyes, and long limbs. He’s more clothed than most of the other people in the pictures, and he looks really young and uncomfortable. I think he was aiming for a steely, sexy gaze, but it’s coming off more terrified and angry.

  “Aww,” I say. “Poor thing is nineteen. He’s still got a baby face and everything.”

  “Hey, some people are into that.”

  “Ew!”

  She frowns at me. “It’s not ‘ew.’ It’s a job, and just because everyone is all puritanical about sex workers doesn’t mean they should be. Nobody says ‘ew’ when someone works as a dentist.”

  “Okay, I do, but that’s because I hate dentists.” I contemplate that and nod. “But you’re right—I need to dial back my prude.”

  I glance back down at the photo in my hand. “Just look at this kid, though,” I tell her. “He looks kind of miserable. What if he was just trying to pay his way through law school or something?”

  “Then he’s probably a successful lawyer? Maybe we found the moneymaker! What was his name again?”

  I flip the résumé back over. “Caspian Tiddleswich.”

  “Wait.” She freezes. “Why does that sound familiar?”

  I stop and think for a beat. “You know what? I think I’ve heard it, too.”

  CiCi squeals at top decibel. “This is it! This is the politician! It has to be!” She yanks her phone out of her pocket and feverishly starts typing. While she waits for her results to load, I look at Caspian’s picture again.

  The wheels of my brain click to a stop, and I gasp.

  “CiCi...”

  Without looking up from her phone, she says, “What?”

  “I think I know who this is.”

  Her head pops up. “What, really? Is he a senator?”

  My jaw flops open, and I can’t answer. There’s no way this can be the same man. It just isn’t possible.

  CiCi looks at me expectantly for a moment, and then her phone finally loads and her gaze jumps back to the screen. She gasps louder than I did.

  “It can’t be,” I whisper.

  Her eyes look dangerously close to falling out of her head. “No way. Oh. My. God.”

  She holds up her phone, and I see what I already knew. There he is. I’ve seen that face a hundred times before. On television. On movie posters. In commercials for outrageously expensive German cars. Flying across the screen in that comic-book flick I saw on my last real date an age and a half ago.

  Caspian Tiddleswich. The very British, impossibly famous movie star.

  7

  A couple of hours later, we’re huddled in a booth at a Japanese restaurant in Astoria, clutching the escort résumé of one Caspian Tiddleswich, former male companion, current English actor sexy man. Every time our waitress comes by, we thrust the paper under the table, like we’ve got nuclear launch codes and she’s an enemy spy approaching.

  “This is ludicrous,” I hiss over the table. “It can’t be the same guy!”

  CiCi pounds back another shot of warm sake. “It’s not like it’s a common name, Clara!”

  I massage my temples. “Well, what the hell are we supposed to do with this?”

  “Call TMZ!” she trills.

  I grimace. “Are you kidding? This could ruin somebody! And this isn’t like some jerk-faced politician spouting about the evils of feminism and abortion ruining American family values while he goes around boffing his interns. He could be a nice person!”

  “Yes, but he’s a really famous nice person! And all those gossip places would pay a hell of a lot more for dirt on a famous actor than a politician!” She pauses for a moment, thinking. “Probably. I actually don’t know what the going rates are.”

  Our waitress comes over and sets plates of tempura rolls, crab rolls, and sashimi on our table. We both smile stiffly at her, looking like cats that ate a flock of canaries. She smiles back, but looks a bit unnerved as she hurries away.

  I pop a piece of crab roll in my mouth and chew. “Jeez,” I say through a mouthful of rice. “I just remembered I sometimes watch that show Poirot he does for the BBC. It’s really good.”

  “Oh, yeah!” she says happily, picking up a bite with her chopsticks. “I’ve seen that! He’s really good in it. All sexy in a weird lizard man kind of way.”

  I blink at her. “What...what does that even mean?”

  She shrugs and eats her sushi. “I don’t know. It’s weird. He’s kind of odd-looking, but he’s really hot. I don’t get it. Wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers, though.”

  Disbelief is the kindest emotion I am capable of giving her. “Okay, well, all I can see now is this pitiful little nineteen-year-old kid. Come on. We can’t sell that kid out to a tabloid.”

  She thinks on that and swallows. “But he’s not a nineteen-year-old kid anymore. He’s got to be almost forty and stupidly rich with private jets and shit.”

  “No more sake for you,” I say, and push the bottle away from her. “You always add ‘and shit’ to things when you start to get tipsy.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” she huffs, taking a nibble of pickled ginger. “You’ve got to admit this is really cool. And he’s famous! Famous people are used to this sort of thing coming out! And it’s not like he doesn’t know he was an escort. He’s probably been expecting this to blow up for years! We’d probably be relieving him of two decades of anxiety.”

  I gape at her. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Ever. In all of life.”

  “Maybe not my best argument,” she admits. “You could seriously sell this, though. So much money! A pretty new apartment! Your real bed that isn’t a hideous corduroy couch!”

  I’m stricken with a bite of tempura halfway to my mouth. My bed. God, how I miss beds. I can’t think of many things I wouldn’t be willing to do for the joyful comfort of my real, live mattress.

  But could I live with myself if I ruined another person’s life just to better my own? Probably not.

  Okay, really not. I just couldn’t do it.

  Still, CiCi is right. He’s a big-shot actor. They’re used to this sort of thing, right? Or at least they expect it. It’s part of the gig.

  I grimace at my disgusting line of thinking and set my chopsticks down.

  “You look like you’re going to be sick,” she says, nonchalantly edging the sake bottle back her way.

  “This is making me feel icky.”

  “The sushi? Tastes fine to me.”

  I blow out a frustrated gust of air. “No, the potential destruction of another human being, CiCi.”

  Pouring me another helping of sake so as to distract me from noticing her filling up her own glass, she says, “Think about it. He probably did this escort thing because he needed the money back then. It’s not something he’s particularly proud of, considering he’s never mentioned it publicly that I’ve found online, but he did what he had to do.” She points her chopsticks at me. “That’s what you’re doing. You’re in a bad way. You’re just taking care of yourself. You don’t have to feel good about it, but you’re looking out for you.”

  I scowl. “You know, I’d bet actual money that’s what drug dealers say when they recruit new drug dealers. If I had any money to bet, anyway.”

  “I think your knowledge of the underbelly of the world is somewhat limited.”

  “Yes! And let’s keep it that way! I don’t want to be a part of any underbellies!”

  Sighing, she takes a sip of sake. “Well, what if it turns out Mr. Tiddleswich is actually a huge twat-wagon? What if he’s one of those actors who’s a complete prick to other people and makes everyone around him miserable? Like a reptilian-looking Jared Leto.”

  “He doesn’t look like a reptile.”

  “A little bit, he does,” she insists. “But seriously. Think about it—what if he’s a holy terror, and this coming out and knocking him down a couple of pegs is exactly what hundreds of poor crew men and women have been waiting years for? It wasn’t a terrible idea when it was a jerk politician. A jerk actor doesn’t seem like that big a leap.”

  I prop my elbow up on the table and plop my chin into my hand. “It’s possibly the exhaustion, or more possibly the sake, but that actually made some sense to me.”

  “YES!” she says. “So, should I email places? There have to be lots of gossipy sites that would eat this up.”

  “NO.” I snatch the sake bottle away from her. “No emailing. But how about this—we do some research on him. The internet is full of creepy insider stuff on famous people. If he turns out to be some super-jerk, we can maybe reevaluate the possibility of selling this.”

  Her eyelids are moving a bit slower than they should be. “I guess that sounds okay.”

  “Promise me,” I insist. “No tellin
g anyone anywhere that we have this. Or that we know anything at all about it.”

  Sloshing her glass a bit, she juts her pinkie finger out at me. “Promise.”

  8

  Another night on Gertrude has me waking up feeling a lot less humane about ruining Caspian Tiddleswich’s reputation.

  I also might need to cool it on the copious drinks with CiCi on the nights before I hit the bricks at E-Z Storage.

  It’s outlandishly cold outside today. I immediately regret my choice to dress like a normal person, thinking movement would keep me warm. Turns out sitting on my ass in a storage unit sorting through papers doesn’t do much for raising one’s body temperature. I pull my green gas station work gloves—acquired during my last visit to the mini-mart in a futile attempt to win over Rufus—over my fingerless ones and suck back the last dregs of my now-frigid bodega coffee.

  It’s just a loose estimate, but I’m figuring there are seven billion boxes left in this godforsaken unit. And thanks to our discovery of Sir Tiddleswich last night, I open each new box with the same comforting feeling I assume bomb disposal officers feel when they get an unexpected UPS delivery at home.

  When you add in my depressingly empty inbox with no news whatsoever on any potential job that could get me out of this soul-sucking freezer where dreams go to perish... I’m not feeling my most chipper today.

  Maybe I’ll go see if Rufus is working again. Who knows—he could be the missing sunshine in my crappy day. I think I’m wearing him down.

  “How’s it going?” a man’s voice sounds out.

  I scream and instinctively fling my empty coffee cup toward the door of the unit.

  It lands with a pathetic thlump at the feet of Charlie.

  “Oh my god, you scared the heck out of me,” I wheeze, clutching at my heart.

  “Thank goodness you were armed,” he says, nudging my fallen cup with the toe of his boot. “Rough neighborhood and all.”

  I force out a little laugh. I’m not sure what to think about Charlie. He looks like someone’s friendly old grandpa, but I’ve been getting some serious undercover mob boss vibes from him since we met. Between his Storage King status, the fancy car, and the weirdly confident and unflappable posture he throws off—Charlie just has an air about him I can’t quite place.

  He definitely strikes me as someone who sits with his back to the wall in a restaurant.

  “Next time I’ll be packing Red Bull. You’ve been warned,” I say.

  He snorts. “Just wanted to see how it’s comin’ along. The boys at the lot said you’ve been bringing by good loads every night.”

  I smile. The landfill guys think I’m doing an okay job, at least. “Yep, I was on a roll until I hit this unit. It’s all papers. But I’m looking through them really carefully, just like you asked.”

  He peers around me. “Finding anything good?”

  My stomach lurches. He told me to look for anything that seemed valuable, but did he mean things like the escort receipts? Does he know what’s in here? What if he knows what I’ve got?

  I left Caspian’s résumé tucked in the very bottom of one of my closet suitcases back at Tom’s apartment, but I feel like that damn thing is pasted on my forehead right now. A scarlet letter of extortion. I swallow a little too hard.

  “Not so much.” I shrug, trying to sound casual. “Just a ridiculous amount of receipts so far. It’s kind of a paper-hoarding situation. But I’m flipping through everything just to be sure.”

  He smiles, and his big gray walrus mustache pulls up at the ends. It makes him look like the Quaker oatmeal man. “Makes me glad I’m not paying you by the hour.”

  I laugh because, honestly, what the hell else am I going to do?

  Very really going to do a quick internet search on Charlie tonight, just to see if he’s ever been connected to people sleeping with the fishes in any way.

  “I’ll let you get back to it,” he says. “I just stopped by to pick up this week’s payments from the deposit box at the gate and wanted to see how it’s going. Keep up the good work.”

  “Thank you. I’ll sure try.”

  Charlie taps the empty coffee cup with his toe once more, then turns around and heads back to his Lexus. I can’t decide if I’ve just now noticed how potentially scary he is, or if it’s the guilt of what CiCi and I have been doing in this unit that’s got me so on edge.

  Suddenly I’m not in the mood to mess with Rufus, either.

  I sit back down on a box in the middle of the unit and get back to filtering through invoices. CiCi has been texting me all morning demanding I look out for other fancy names, because she thinks it will be more fun to catch someone who isn’t an actor. And by more fun, she thinks I’ll actually agree to sell the person out.

  Despite my insistence on morality, if I found, say, a belligerent Secretary of State on an invoice, I’d be really damn tempted. There isn’t much I wouldn’t do right now to get the feeling back into my legs. It is wicked cold.

  I wonder how it would work. Would CiCi email TMZ, and then we’d have a check in a week? Because if I could get out of here... I’m pretty close to selling out my own mother.

  That’s horrible. I wouldn’t. Probably.

  And I don’t think I would be able to just walk away without finishing the job I signed up for with Charlie. I made a promise, and I stick with my promises.

  Even if that promise is horrible and freezing and slowly trampling my will to live.

  Picking up a sorted box, I waddle over to Brutus and hoist it inside. If I did make a lot of money from selling out Tiddleswich, my first priority is securing a place to put my mattress and sleeping on it for days and days.

  I wriggle back into the middle of the unit and pick a new box. I fight a quiet, but very real, urge to set it on fire just to get myself warm.

  This box isn’t invoices. Nor is it résumés. Thank everything. I want to get back to all the boring, unidentifiable paperwork.

  I pick up a page and start reading.

  #1 STANDARD ESCORT FEE: $50/hour

  #2 ALL-INCLUSIVE MASSAGE: $100 for 60 minutes

  #3 SNUGGLING: $100 for 60 minutes

  #4 GIRLFRIEND/BOYFRIEND EXPERIENCE—An evening with the escort of your choice doing those things couples do: $350

  #5 THREE IS NEVER A CROWD—You and your significant other with the escort of your mutual choosing: $500

  #6 ROLE-PLAYING—Act out your deepest fantasies with the escort of your choice: $400

  “Oooooooooh my god,” I whisper to no one. It just keeps going and getting more and more frighteningly specific.

  I quickly take my phone out and ignore the fifteen new texts from CiCi, take a picture of the escort services, and send it her way.

  Not three seconds later, she texts back: DON’T. FUCKING. MOVE. I WILL BE RIGHT THERE.

  And right here, she is. In less than the usual twenty minutes, even. Somehow, her enthusiasm has managed to bend the laws of space and time.

  “Gimme, gimme, gimme!” she squeals, glomping into the unit. I’ve already moved on to another box, but I point to the stack of menus and she dives right in. “Oh my god. This is amazing. Wait—people pay for cuddling?”

  “Sometimes you just really need a hug, I guess,” I say, shrugging.

  She looks up at me. “Do you need a hug? Am I being a bad friend?”

  “Do I have to pay you a hundred bucks an hour for a hug?”

  She scoffs. “Two hundred. I’m high-end, cupcake.”

  Laughing, I drag another box off to throw into Brutus. “You know, I’m actually making progress in here today. I might get this unit done before my hair goes gray.”

  “See? That’s the right attitude,” she says, barely paying attention to anything but the paper in her hands. “Wait. You can hire an escort for role-playing? Role-playing what?”

  My face squinches up. “Naughty nurse? Sexy maid? I’m thinking any of the usual Halloween costumes they sell for women would work.”

  CiCi slaps the paper down on her lap. “You know, that’s a good point. Why are all of our costumes things like ‘Slutty Supreme Court Justice,’ but all the guy costumes are frickin’ Captain America with extra muscles sewn in?”