had Lock in the car.”
Again, the laugh, one key off-tune. “You’re crazy, baby.”
Siobhan huffed. This was insane! She would know Claire in a dark cave with a paper bag over her head. “So you’re denying that you were at Tupancy today?”
“Tupancy?” Like Siobhan was crazy. “I haven’t been to Tupancy since the dog died.”
She was denying it! But why? Claire could have come up with any number of plausible stories. Claire could have told Siobhan anything and Siobhan would have decided to believe it—but to deny ever having been there when she had nearly crashed into Siobhan was an insult to the friendship, and stupid besides. It could only mean one thing: Claire and Lock were having a torrid affair. This was betrayal at its most exquisite.
But no, Siobhan thought. It just wasn’t possible. Claire was too much the choir girl. She had been born with a nagging conscience. She felt guilty when she missed a week of church, when she killed a housefly; she felt guilty when it rained. Having an affair was not something Claire was capable of.
So what, then, was going on? Siobhan meant to find out.
When he was younger, he used to pinch himself all the time. The money came rolling in, but it wasn’t the money that was exciting; it was the girls, so many girls, and guys, too, for that matter, and limousines and rooms at the Four Seasons with their fluffy towels, their waffled robes, the Veuve Clicquot chilling in a silver bucket, the bouquets of roses, a garden’s worth of roses thrown onto the stage. It was the deference, the respect shown to him by everyone from record execs to heads of state to Julia Roberts—she and her husband were fans and owned every album. Of Max West’s, Matthew Westfield’s, a kid from Wildwood Crest, a scruffy beach town in New Jersey. Down the shore, that was where Matthew had grown up, with a father who took off when Matthew was five, and a sainted mother who worked as the church secretary and who got most of her information about life outside Wildwood from the magazines she picked up at the grocery store checkout. What was he, Matthew Westfield, doing onstage with seventy thousand people waving their arms in front of him? They were worshipping him; he was no longer a punk kid from New Jersey, but a god. He could have whatever he wanted—women, drugs, guns, an audience with the pope (he went once and tried to persuade his mother to join him, but she wouldn’t travel to Italy, not even for the Holy Father).
He was in Thailand now, in Bangkok, hunkering down at the Oriental Hotel. Outside his room were two butlers (they had these for every guest) and two armed guards (these were only for him, since he had cavalierly suggested that a Muslim girl in the crowd in Jakarta rip off her hijab for him, inciting Muslim rage and necessitating a quick exodus from the country). It was winter in America but hotter than Hades here in Thailand. It was too hot to do anything but sit in the air-conditioning, drink the chilled champagne, smoke the delightful Indo weed they took as a parting gift from Java, and just generally seek oblivion. Because wasn’t it the sad truth that Max West, a person who could have whatever he wanted, wanted only oblivion. Some time in the great black box. A poor man’s peace.
They had sent some girls up, a group skinny and giggling, wearing short skirts and noisy earrings and makeup meant for white women. They were all beautiful, but very young, a couple of them maybe only fourteen, maybe not even menstruating yet. They clung to one another like schoolgirls, and this made Matthew melancholy. He gave the girls a wad of baht and sent them away. The butler looked at him questioningly, and Matthew said, “Too young.” Less than an hour later, there was a knock at the door and a lone girl stood there glowering at him. She was older—twenty or twenty-one—and she had a knowing, Western look: jeans, a black T-shirt, silver hoop earrings. Flip-flops, toenails painted and embedded with rhinestones. She looked smart, and bored with him already; she was a college girl, maybe, looking for some extra cash. Matthew liked her right away.
“Sawadee krup,” he said, and he grinned. It was his rule to know how to say “hello” and “thank you” in every country he visited.
“Can I come in?” the girl