Cooper is past the EMTs like a gunshot, shoving Christopher roughly out of the doorway. “Jordan?” he says in a tone of disbelief.
I don’t blame him. Cooper’s little brother Jordan is one of the last people I’d expect to find in a New York College residence hall, even in the president’s cushy apartment, and especially one in which roofies and blood are apparently present. Cooper and Jordan have never exactly been close, and not only because Cooper, unlike Jordan, refused to become a member of Easy Street when their father, Grant Cartwright, CEO of Cartwright Records, thought it up. There’s also the fact that Cooper’s extremely wealthy—and equally eccentric—grandfather, Arthur Cartwright, left Cooper his pink townhouse in the West Village, now estimated to be worth in the high seven figures.
The way Jordan broke up with me could also be a contributing factor to Cooper’s dislike of him, but I don’t want to make assumptions.
Still, Cooper practically flattens Christopher in his effort to come to what he believes is his brother’s aid. It’s touching, really, although not everyone finds it so.
“Do you mind?” Christopher calls testily after Cooper, adjusting his lapels. “This suit is Armani. And this is private property. I could call the cops.”
“Go ahead,” I say to Christopher as I lead the EMTs past him. “I’ll tell them you’re trespassing. Your parents aren’t here, are they?”
“They’re in the Hamptons,” Christopher replies sullenly. “But seriously, you guys are disrupting a very important scene. They can check her afterward. She’s feeling better now anyway.”
“Scene?” I echo, my heart sinking. An unconscious woman, blood, and cameras? Has Christopher talked Jordan into making a porno? The sad part is, it wouldn’t surprise me.
As I turn the corner from the penthouse’s elegant foyer, I see exactly what Christopher means by scene, however, and also why Cooper has stopped short so abruptly in front of me that I run right into him.
“Cooper?” Jordan Cartwright is sitting on an overstuffed couch clutching the hand of his new—and extremely pretty—young wife, best-selling recording artist of the year Tania Trace. Jordan looks even more astonished to see us than we are to see him, and that’s saying a lot. “What on earth are you doing here?”
“What am I doing here?” Cooper stares at his brother, then broadens his gaze to include the group gathered around his brother and the couch on which his brother is sitting under the glow of two enormous lights set on tripods. “I think the more appropriate question is, what are you doing here? And why are you covered in blood?”
“Am I?” Jordan looks down at himself, surprised. He’s dressed similarly to Christopher, only his suit is a pale beige, and his shirt is pink. Like Christopher, he’s sweating profusely. And like Christopher, there are droplets of blood flecked all over him. “Oh shit, I didn’t notice. Why didn’t you guys tell me?” Jordan glares at the film crew, all of whom are dressed in cargo shorts and T-shirts with various band logos emblazoned across them, though Easy Street is not one of them. Even though the air conditioning is on full blast, the lights make it blazingly hot in the room, so they’re all sweating too.
“The blood’s good. It makes it more real, man,” a guy with a pair of headphones, holding a boom—one of those long microphones with a fuzzy thing over the end—assures Jordan.
The guy holding the camera says, peering through the lens, “Blood’s barely tracking because it’s so dark in here. Could somebody adjust that scrim like I asked, or am I talking to myself here?”
A young woman with her hair tucked into tiny braids to keep it off her neck hurries over to one of the tripods and pulls a mesh screen from in front of the light bank. A second later, the white-hot glare on Jordan and Tania increases about a hundredfold and the temperature in the Allingtons’ living room seems to go up another ten degrees.
“Perfect,” the cameraman says in a satisfied voice. “Now I can see the blood.”
Tania, who’s wearing a metallic gold minidress—and I use the word “mini” loosely, since the dress is barely large enough to cover her nipples and lower extremities—lifts a limp brown arm over her eyes, turning her exquisitely featured face away from the searing light.
“I can’t do this,” she murmurs weakly.
“Sure you can, Tania honey,” says a woman I haven’t noticed before. She’s standing off to the side in the shadows, but not deep enough into the shadows that I can’t see her Louboutins or the glint of gold around her wrist. It’s the woman I’ve noticed so often lately exiting the elevator in the morning with Christopher. “Put your arm down and tell us how it felt when you saw a man get shot right in front of you.”
“I don’t want to.” Tania keeps her arm where it is. From what little I can see of it, her face seems to have gone as olive green as the walls in the hallway outside the elevator.
“Keep it together, baby,” Jordan says, putting his own arm around his wife’s diminutive frame and looking down at her tenderly, though the only part of her he can possibly see from where he’s sitting is her elbow and maybe her knees. “I know what we went through tonight was ugly. But you heard what they said at the ER. With time and our prayers, Bear’s going to be all right. And until then, I’ll protect you. And the baby too, when she comes. I’ll never let anything happen to either of you, I swear it. Not while there’s a breath left in my body.”
I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. Someone named Bear was shot in front of Tania? And they’re making her talk about it on camera, in the penthouse of Fischer Hall? Why?
“That’s good, Jordan,” Gold Rolex says, from the shadows. I can see by the glint of her watch that she’s holding a cell phone to her ear. “But can you do it again, and this time, Tania, can you take your arm down and look at Jordan?”
The bulbs in both tripods go out, plunging the room into darkness. Someone screams.
The room isn’t plunged into total darkness. Numerous Tiffany lamps belonging to Mrs. Allington continue to blaze on side tables, and there are fairy lights sparkling outside on the terrace, so there is some light to see by.
But the sudden contrast in lighting is startling, and it takes a moment for everyone’s vision to adjust.