JAMIE'S OFFICE WAS YET ANOTHER SPACIOUSroom in the mansion, this one tucked toward the back of the house. It had warm cherry paneling, abundant overhead lighting, and wall outlets of all varieties. So far, there was only a desk in the middle of the hardwood floor. Temporary, he'd said, until he could find the one he really wanted. The framed picture of his family with Mickey Mouse down in Orlando was one I also had at home. The heavy clay paperweight that looked to be some kind of hedgehog was from Sean. It said so right on the bottom. "To Daddy from Sean." Only then was really tiny because he'd run out of space.

I had checked it all out while my laptop made its scratchy way to the Internet. I was in now and checking the unread messages in my box. It was mostly spam. One had a blank space where the address should have been, which usually meant spam, but it also had a subject heading that could be from only one person.

all men are pigs When I saw that a video file was attached, my mouth went dry. I clicked on the download icon, and my jaw started to quiver, but nothing else happened. My clicker finger, stiff and jerky with adrenaline, would not work right. I concentrated, tried again, and got it started.

It was a big file, so I had plenty of time to sit and wonder what Angel would send me and why. She had a reason for everything she did, and as the seconds ticked away and the file loaded, I found that I couldn't stay in my seat. It was taking a long time, but there was no speeding it up. I watched the progress monitor as the file built. Ten percent. Twenty-five. It seemed to stick for a while around forty percent. When it got to ninety-eight percent loaded, I took my seat. When it was all finally there, I scanned for viruses, pulled up the media player, and waited again. I could barely stand all the waiting. But then I started to dread what was coming, and by the time the image hit the screen, I was almost afraid to watch.

Something bad was coming.

The picture was high-resolution and in color. There was no doubt about what was on the screen: a man and a woman, naked on a bed, having sex. The woman was on top doing all the work. I didn't have to see her face to know it was Angel. Besides her bleach job and her wide, muscular shoulders, I could have recognized her from the way she devoured her partner.

Angel was a hooker. This was what she did, which meant she was showing me the man. But all I could see of him were his fingers splayed across her butt. His gold wedding band gleamed against the pale pillows of flesh, and a sick, shaky premonition wormed up through my gut and tried to find a place to break through.

The two of them ground out the familiar rhythm, complete with a guttural sound track of maximum sexual exertion. He tilted his knees slightly, the better to thrust. She leaned forward and braced her hands, palms down, on either side of him, and they started chugging, faster and faster, muscle on muscle, flesh slapping flesh-as they climbed toward the pinnacle of mutual carnal satisfaction. I couldn't turn away for any reason, and I couldn't bear to watch, because I knew it was coming, this thing that was bad.

They burst together upon the summit of completion with a throaty chorus of groans and cries that could spring only from the thing they were doing. They rolled across the pinnacle and down the other side, losing momentum slowly until they were finally still, the man clearly exhausted, Angel still draped across him like a tablecloth.

She was the first to move. Rolling back up to a sitting position, she dropped her head back. The way her hair swept across the bare skin of her back reminded me of the backless evening gown she had worn that first night when I had taken her picture in Pittsburgh, when she had turned in my direction, and I had seen in her face that look of a predator's pure bloodlust.

On the screen, she reached one of her long arms down to the side of the bed and pulled a pillow from the floor to tuck under her partner's head. She dismounted, turned full on toward the camera and, with her partner's face revealed, smiled at me.

His favorite pie was custard. He liked green apples but not red. He was allergic to cats. The large bone in his right forearm was softly curved from the time he pitched off his skateboard and broke it.

These were some of the things I knew about my brother. I knew in the way we always know things about our families. Some of them are hardwired into our genes. Some are absorbed over the years of living under the same roof, folding each other's underwear, and eating from the same ice cream carton. There were enough details to let me believe I knew him, when in fact what I knew about him, the things I remembered, made up an infinitesimal slice of whatever it was that made him who he was.

One of the things that fell squarely on the side of stuff I didn't know about my brother was how he could be in bed with a prostitute.

CHAPTER.

37.

JAMIE HAD GONE INTO THE DEN TO WATCHTV, only he'd never turned it on. He sat stiffly on the couch, staring at a blank screen. When he noticed me in the doorway, it must have been in my face, because he knew. His face looked the same as it had the day I'd showed up at his school unexpectedly.

He had known that day, too.

"She passed." That's what the counselors and teachers had whispered to each other about my mother that day, as if she'd been a car in the next lane or a horse coming up on the backstretch. Passed what? Passed go? Passed counterfeit bills? To this day, I hated that gutless euphemism. She died. She'd been dying for a long time, her breath rattling around in her chest, sounding as if she were trying to breathe underwater. Sometimes lucid, sometimes not, but always dying. Jamie was eight, but he knew that, and he knew there was only one reason I would show up at his school in the middle of the morning, and when he walked into the room and took in the scene, he immediately erupted, crying hard and heavy just from the sheer terror of what I might say. He cried so hard it scared me. The counselor tried to move in, but I shoved her aside and put my arms around him. We sank into a pile on the floor, and it smelled like bananas in that room, because some kid had left one in his desk, and the rain outside poured as it often does in Seattle in March, as if it were falling from tipped buckets, and I said it in his ear so they wouldn't all hear.

"I'msorryI'msorryI'msorry."

Bananas and rain and Jamie crying with so much anguish I would have done anything to make the thing that was hurting him stop.

But we weren't in a classroom. We were in his house in Westchester, and it seemed to me he knew now, just as he had known then, that his world was about to crash down, and I was the one wielding the ax.

"I need you to see something."

I could barely make myself move, but I turned and went back down to his office. When he showed up, I closed the door. I walked over and clicked the start button, and the show began. Jamie watched, blinking a lot, looking as if he'd awakened from a deep sleep and opened his eyes into the glare of a bright light.

His face turned ashen. His lips parted just enough to let all the air exit his body. When he tried to grab the mouse, he knocked it off the desk. It swung by its cord until he captured it with both hands and returned it to its pad. By then, his motor control was so far off he couldn't manipulate the cursor. He tried and tried, but he couldn't get it, and his fumbling failure was like a key that opened a door inside me. My eyes filled, and I tried to stop the tears with the heels of my hands, but they slipped out anyway and ran down my face. I took the mouse away from him and stopped the video.

He lowered himself into his desk chair as a man recovering from malaria might do it. There was another chair in the room, but the wheels on it scared me. I stood. I waited. Eventually, Jamie, staring at the frozen image, squeezed out a thought. "She taped it. Why would she tape it?" That thought led him to his next. His perspective seemed to widen from the screen to include the computer, the room, and ultimately me. "How did you get this?"

"Can we get the larger issues out of the way first, like since when did you start patronizing hookers?"

"Hookers?"

"Yes."

He gestured weakly at the screen with his palm up. "Alex, why do you have this?"

"Angel sent it to me. Will you answer my question?" I needed to know. I really needed to know if he was one of those cocks with wallets Angel had talked about or if this was a onetime thing. Please let it be that.

"Who is Angel?" He answered my question with his own, and I felt what Monica must have felt in her moment of crisis: boiling rage.

"She's the woman you are screwing in this video for all the world to see, and if we don't get our shit together right now, all the world will see it."

He went from stunned to bewildered to defeated in record time, all of it showing right on his face. Then he closed his eyes. His shoulders gave up. With wrists together, his hands dropped into his lap. Then he did the last thing I expected.

He laughed.

"Is this funny?" I was stunned, and I was angry. "I'm thinking of Gina and Sean and Maddie, and I'm thinking this is not quite so hilarious as you seem to find it."

He slouched down into the seat, let his head roll back, covered his eyes with his hands, and laughed some more. He sounded almost loony. "Thisis hilarious. Fucking hysterical. Don't you find it hysterical?" He looked at me from under the visor of his hand. "You're right. It's not funny. It's...ironic. That's a better word.Ironic."

"What is ironic about this?"

He looked at me as if I were a simpleton. "I haven't seen you or talked to you in almost a year. I run into you completely by chance. Then I do something so goddamned stupid I want to kill myself, and before I can even turn around, you're on it. You areon it. I mean...what...how-"

"You're upset that I found out your secret? That's what is bothering you?"

"Don't play high and mighty with me." He got up from his chair but once on his feet didn't seem to know where to put himself. That seemed to get him more and more wound up, and when he got near a wall, he punched it with his fist. Then he turned on me with his jaw tight and his finger jabbing the air in front of my face. "This is my house. What gives you the right to come intomy house, drag me in here, and start making accusations about things that are not even close to being any of your business?"

"So, you're telling me there is some innocent explanation for this?" I pointed to the monitor. "That somehow I got the wrong impression from watching you screw this woman? Why don't you set me straight, Jamie? Let's hear it."

"What do you want to hear? That I fucked up? I did. I fucked up. Does that make you happy?"

"No, it doesn't, and what I need to hear is whether this is a one-time fuckup or if you are a regular customer of this hooker ring."

"Hooker ring? Is that what you think of me?"

"I don't know what to think of you."

His hand dropped to his side. Now he looked stunned. "I make one stupid mistake with one woman, so that means I frequent prostitutes?" He went off on another flight of sour amusement. "She's a marketing consultant."

"She is? How many marketing consultants do you know who make secret sex videos and use them for blackmail?"

"Blackmail?" That stumped him but only briefly. "If this is blackmail, why did she send it to you?"

"Because she wants-" Oh, man. This was getting too complicated. We had to step back and look at this thing piece by piece, and Jamie needed to know the truth if he was going to tell me the truth.

"Jamie, sit down."

Not only did he ignore me, he raised his foot to the chair on wheels and gave it a wicked shove across the floor. It went skittering into the wall and tipped over on its side. I knew that rolling chair was a bad idea. He stared after it, with dull eyes. "I'm fucked. It's hard to believe how fucked I am."

"Jamie, would you please sit down before Gina hears us and comes in here."

That idea seemed to break through. He dragged himself back to his desk and sank into the chair that was still upright. I picked up the other one and pulled it over so we could look at each other face-to-face.

"Listen to me," I said. "That woman you were with is not a marketing consultant. She's a prostitute. Her name is Angel Velesco. She works with me as a flight attendant, and she's a hooker."

He wanted to argue, but deep down, he knew I wouldn't lie to him that way, and even though he shook his head no, he said nothing. He looked scared.

"We will fix this," I said, not at all sure that we could. "I promise. But I need to know some things. Are you saying you didn't know this woman was a hooker and you didn't approach her for sex?"

"No."

"How did you meet her?"

"She was on the flight yesterday morning to LA."

"Yesterday? This happened...last night?" I tried to put the pieces together, fit the events to the timeline I understood. The night before, I had been with Stewart, Harvey had been on his way to Orange County, and nothing had happened yet.

"Was she working the trip?"

"I told you she's not-"

"Would you please just answer my questions?"

"She was in the seat next to mine. We started talking, and she asked me if I would be her guinea pig for a survey she was putting together. She wanted to see ifI...if her questions made sense. She told me her name was Marilyn."

Guinea pig. Marketing survey. The seat next to his. She'd sought him out. Why? How had she known? She must have heard rumblings. She must have been tipped off somehow. But how did she know about Jamie? Did I ever...I had never mentioned him to Angel, had I?Had I? A palpable feeling of dread began to take over the function of my heart, because even though I didn't know how, I knew I was responsible.

"She asked you personal questions?"

"Demographic stuff," he said. "Age. Zip code. Family. Occupation. The product she was flacking was some kind of a combination cell phonePDA. She had questions about how I kept track of my life."

"About your family?"

"Yes."

"Place of business?"

"All of that."

Business...business...businesscard. I stood up. I walked to the back wall of the office, which was the point in the room farthest from him. Jamie's business card, the card he had given me on the flight to LA. I had lost it. I thought I had, but I hadn't. I remembered where I put it. At the hotel before leaving for the party, I took it out of the pocket of my uniform. For reasons I didn't understand then or now, I slipped it into the pocket of my sweater, the one I had worn to the party, the one Angel had returned to me at the spa. Jamie's business card with his home phone number on the back.

He said something. I turned to look at him. "What?"

"She was nice. She was easy to talk to, so I talked to her. It turned out she was..." He was starting to get it. "She was staying at my hotel."

Of course she was. Easy enough. She could have checked his reservation record and found out in advance where he was booked. I didn't want to hear the rest, but the more he told, the more he seemed to want to tell. His chance to unburden had calmed him down considerably.

"She asked me to meet her for drinks that night. I said no, but I came in late from a client dinner, and I stopped by the bar, and...and I looked in. I don't even know why I did it. If I'd gone straight up to my room..." He sat there, quietly staring down the road not taken.

I could see her sitting in the bar waiting for him, dressed up to look like a professional woman, being whatever woman she needed to be to lure him into her trap. "I can make any pig come to the trough," she'd said. She must have had a good time doing it to Jamie, knowing he was my brother.

"We had a couple of cocktails. We showed each other pictures of our kids."

It seemed hot in the office. "She said she had kids?"

"One. A boy Sean's age."

I thought maybe my blood had turned to kerosene and I would burst into flame at any moment. "What else?"

"She asked me to her room. I told her no, but..."

"But then you went with her anyway."

"No." He was firm, the way Sean had been firm in his insistence that Zachary Zalinsky's name was not Zach. "I went up to my own room. I brushed my teeth. I got in bed. I called Gina. Then here comes the knock on the door." He might have been sweating, too. He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead. "She had a bottle of champagne and a couple of glasses. I stood there with my hand on the knob looking through the peephole. She had this sheer blouse thing on." He did an awkward, incomplete demonstration with his hands. "I could see right through it, and this tight little skirt. I knew when I turned that knob I was dead. I knew it, and I did it." His voice got very small. "I did it."

"Why?"

"She was there. I was there. I didn't think about how it would feel afterward. I wasn't thinking about Gina. She came in. She poured the champagne. We had a couple of glasses, and...we did it, and she left." He rubbed his hands on his knees. "Now it's like I have her fingerprints all over me. I can't even look at Gina. I think she knows somehow."

"I don't think so, Jamie."

"I keep thinking...I keep thinking I can't fix this one."

"Fix what?"

"This mistake. I'm always making mistakes. I go too fast...I do things, but I can always go back and slow down and figure out how to fix them. But this one, I think this one can't ever be fixed."

And gravy boats can't be put back together. "Angel is masterful at this stuff. She knows what she's doing, and she does it all the time."

"How much does she want?"

"What?"

He swallowed hard and looked right at me. "You said this was blackmail. How much does she want?"

Everything felt in a knot in my sternum, and I couldn't think, and it was possible I was having a heart attack. Chest tight. Pulse racing. Breath short. I had to make this right. I had to fix this thing. But first I had to tell him.