Jake & Mimi

by Frank Baldwin

Genres: Marriage & Divorce; Suspense

Synopsis

Mimi Lessing's attraction to a seduction artist has thrown her marriage plans into chaos. She never imagined that the pleasures of sex could so overwhelm her imagination. Jake Teller's attraction to Mimi Lessing is causing him to rethink his greatest pleasures: the art of the chase, the gleam of submission, the thrill of giving women greater pleasure than they ever dreamed of. A man who secretly watches Mimi sees her with Jake and is filled with rage. Soon the women who Jake has slept with begin being murdered, focusing investigators straight at Jake. Then Mimi herself disappears. Jake & Mimi is a relentlessly plotted and powerfully written thriller and a breathtaking exploration of the pleasures and limits of sex.

Release date: September 9, 2009

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 330

Sample

Mimi Lessing stirs her hot cocoa with a spoon and then lifts the cup to her lips. She sits at a small table in Liaison, a
café and consignment gallery in the West Village. She came from work, through the storm, and drops of rain still shine in
her hair. But her table is near the fireplace, and the fire and the hot cocoa have warmed her. She wears a white silk wrap
blouse, open at the neck to reveal a thin gold necklace with a single pearl at its center. When she is nervous, like now,
she touches the pearl for comfort.


“You must have some questions, Mimi.”

She looks into her cup and then lifts her eyes. “No, you’ve really thought of everything. Thank you.”

The woman across from her is fifty, French, and elegant, with touches of silver in her cropped hair and a red scarf tied expertly
at her neck.


“No questions?” she asks.

Mimi shakes her head, so the older woman starts to gather up her papers from the table. She slides contracts and song lists
and seating charts into a lavender binder, raises the binder to her chest, and then lays it down again on the table. She looks
across at Mimi.


“I was your mother’s idea, wasn’t I?” she says.

Mimi puts down her cocoa. “It isn’t that,” she says quickly. “I’m grateful, really. You’ve done a wonderful job.”

“What is it, then?”

Mimi’s fingers find the pearl and press it into the soft well of her neck.

“It’s just… I don’t want the magic of the day to get lost… in all the details.”

The woman reaches across the table and touches Mimi’s cheek. “To be twenty-five,” she says, smiling. “You’ll have magic, Mimi,
I promise.” She rises from her chair, her long legs elegant in a black pantsuit. “Do you know the key to magic?” she asks,
gathering a red shawl around her shoulders.


“No,” says Mimi.

“Preparation,” she says. “I’ll call you next week.”

Mimi watches her make her way through the quiet café, then sighs and finishes her cocoa. The ceiling lights are dim and far
apart, but the glow of the fire plays over her pure complexion.


She looks out across the room, at the three paintings that hang on the far wall. Her eyes are soon drawn to the last of them,
a Spanish hilltop wedding scene. It is beautiful in its simplicity. A single table for the wedding party and guests, with
the bride and groom at its head. Their hands are clasped together, their eyes joyous. Mimi smiles wistfully. No seating charts
or song lists, no wedding planner.


“Can I get you something else?”

The waiter’s voice breaks her reverie. “No,” she says. “Thank you.” She looks again at the painting, then stands and puts
on the beige fitted jacket of her work suit. She lifts her purse off the chair and walks to the front of the café, where she
pauses for a moment in the doorway, looking out at the driving rain. She readies her umbrella and steps out the door.


The café is nearly empty now. Soft piano mixes with the murmur of the few scattered patrons and the occasional hiss of the
steamer from behind the counter.


Through the streaked glass of the front window I can still see her. I take a sip of cappuccino and watch her red umbrella
disappear into the night. I look into my cup and then back at the painting on the far wall. I study the eyes of the Spanish
bride. The artist has captured them perfectly, captured the moment when a young woman passes from innocence. I take another
sip and lay the porcelain cup on its saucer.


Soon Miss Lessing will pass from innocence. I take a dollar bill from my wallet and place it on the counter, and stand and
pull my raincoat around me. It took me nearly fifty years to find her, and six weeks is all the time we have left alone together.
Enough time, I hope, for her innocence to restore my own.


Some of us guys who put no stock in the next world like to lean pretty hard into this one. I lean hardest on the weekends.

Most Fridays I set aside for the gang, but thanks to Pardo, I’m on my own tonight. Pardo had pitched Sid’s bachelor party
as a “low-key affair.” Nobody told that to the girls. They turned out to be a lot friendlier than anyone bargained for, and
when Jeremy, wrecked from shots and still reeling from the show, staggered home to find Cindy waiting up for him in a teddy,
offering a little late-night relief in exchange for some honest reporting, the guy stuck his neck right in the noose.


By eight the next morning the bride was on the warpath, crying on the phone to her bridesmaids and threatening to call the
whole thing off. “Don’t tempt me,” said Sid through his hangover. By evening it was all back on schedule, of course, but now
everyone in the gang is pulling wife or girlfriend duty for the next two weekends at least.


Everyone but me.

I’m single and free, and if tonight goes the way I want it to, I won’t miss the guys at all. Beer, poker, camaraderie — I’ll
take them nine Fridays out of ten. Tonight, though, I’ve got a shot at the water of life.


All day at my desk it’s been building in me. I could hardly keep my mind on the new account. It’s a tough one, too. Art Jensen,
a Queens beauty shop maven with a Mafia don’s regard for our Tax Code. By rights he’ll owe a couple of hundred grand, minimum,
but if I can’t figure a way to tell him “refund” come April 15, he’ll be calling our senior partners at home. That’s what
I get for being the new guy.


I left the office at six, changed quickly at my place, then ran the sixty-hour work week right out of me. Started into the
park in the last soft light of day, ran east to the water and then down along it, past the heliport, the ballfields, clear
to the Brooklyn Bridge, touching the base of her and turning for home as the lights of the city came on and the cool spring
night came down to meet me. After a long shower I poured a tall, bracing glass of Absolut and now I’m sipping it out here
on the fire escape in shorts, looking down on the street below and thinking of the night ahead.


She’ll be a tough one, all right. The toughest yet. But what a payoff. I change into a soft shirt and slacks, lock the door
behind me, and step out of my walkup and into the Manhattan night.


Broadway is no misnomer. Thank you, Spring. The women have put away their heavy coats and are out in blouses and shawls and
hose. They are everywhere, stepping sensuously from cabs, gliding from the mouths of the subway. Alone, in pairs, on the arms
of men. Even the billboards have caught the spirit. Angelina Jolie, wearing almost nothing, looks down from a movie marquee,
and Drew Barrymore, in not much more, flashes by on the side of a bus. I turn onto Eighty-first Street, primed.


Her name is Melissa Clay.

Last Sunday I saw her for the first time in twelve years, the first time since I was a kid of fourteen and she, at eighteen,
the hottest girl in our small American school in Tokyo. She was the eldest of three sisters, spaced two years apart, meaning
that from the day I found out what my pecker was for until the day I left for college, there wasn’t a two-hour stretch when
one of them wasn’t setting me off. Shana and Beth were star material, too, but Melissa was already a budding young woman,
and to a kid of fourteen she was as magical — and as out of reach — as a princess.


The Clays were missionaries and summered, as we did, in a modest international resort community on a lake in the Japanese
Alps. There were about a hundred of us families, most from the church but a few stray businessmen, too, like Dad, who rented
the small log cabins from June through August each year for a couple of months of rustic living. There were no televisions,
no telephones, even, and you hauled your drinking water from a well. They were simple summers, full of sun, exercise, and
good country food. The missionaries came for the big church down by the lake, for their prayer groups and hymnals, and for
the feeling of community they got from being with their own kind. The secular types, like my folks, came to beat the killer
Tokyo heat, and when the religion in the air got too thick for them, they countered with the easy porch life of cards and
afternoon drinks. As for us kids, we had the lake and, especially, the Boat-house.


The Boathouse was an old wooden wonder built onto the docks of the swimming area. It was open to the air, with low benches
for lounging, a Ping-Pong table that worked on the challenge system, and a stereo in the corner, complete with a pile of last
year’s rock records from the States. I was a crack Ping-Pong player, true, and a music hound, but I wasn’t thinking table
tennis or the Clash when I grabbed my towel from the porch each morning, took lunch money from Mom, and promised her I wouldn’t
be late for dinner. No, I hurried to the Boathouse because from there you could see the whole swimming area, which meant that
morning to sundown, every day but the Sabbath, you could see Melissa Clay.


Jesus, she was something. Close my eyes today and I can still see her in that black two-piece, sunning on her towel on the
docks. Two, sometimes three times an hour I’d walk by her, feigning interest in a Jet Skier or parasailer out on the lake.
She’d be on her back, her eyes closed against the sun, and I’d get in a good two-second stare. Twenty minutes later, back
in the Boathouse, I’d see her turn over, see Beth or Shana drip lotion onto her smooth back and rub it in, and I’d start down
the dock again, gazing out at the mountains that rimmed the lake as if I’d just noticed they were there and needed to walk
to the end of the dock for a closer look. The strings of her bikini top would be undone now, lying loose on the towel beside
her, and if I timed it right, she would raise up on her elbows to read just as I passed and I’d get the barest hot glimpse
at those magic breasts.


Once or twice a summer I’d hit the mother lode. I’d be horsing around with a buddy out on the raft and we’d look in and see
her rise from her towel, walk to the diving board, dive gracefully into the cold lake, and start our way. As she moved smoothly
through the water, her gorgeous face breaking the surface closer and closer with each breast stroke, even I — the smart-ass
atheist — felt a bit of the divine spirit in the air. My buddy and I would lie down (on our stomachs, of course) and watch
her through half-closed eyes, pretending to be jolted awake by the dip of the raft as she pulled herself up the short wooden
ladder, dripping wet, her nipples hard as tacks through that black top. She’d smile beautifully at us and then, just as innocently
as you like, tug casually at her suit bottom where it had bunched up under her sweet ass. Then she’d sit down, just inches
away, squeeze the water from her blond hair, and ease onto her back, one golden leg straight out, the other knee pointed up
at her grateful creator.


Gott in Himmel, as the German Lutherans used to say on bingo night, when Divine Providence delivered them the winning number. A half hour
later she’d still be there, on her stomach now maybe, and we’d still be there, too, stealing looks up her legs, our hard-ons
pressed into the raft, wondering idly what it’s like to die of sunburn, because there sure wasn’t a chance in hell that we
could even turn over, let alone stand up, while Melissa Clay lay wet and perfect beside us.


One Saturday a month the teenagers were allowed a dance in the Boathouse. Man, the charge those nights used to give me. If
the Mets go to the Series this year, and the Series goes seven games, and on the morning of the seventh game our firm’s senior
partner, Abe Stein, hands me two primo tickets and his granddaughter and warns me not to bring her home a virgin, then I might
feel again the rush that would hit me as I walked down the quiet lake road, a kid of fourteen, to the Boathouse on the night
of a dance. And not because I had any dance moves to try out or any real prospect at action, even. No, simply because I knew
that Melissa Clay would be there and that she would come, as she always did, in a T-shirt and no bra.


I’m not saying she was a loose girl. Not at all. She was a sweet, healthy missionary kid who everybody loved — the pious adults,
especially, because she never missed a Sunday service and always stopped to smile and talk when she passed them on the path.
I’d bet all I have that she left for college in the States that fall with her cherry. She was a free spirit, that’s all, and
so innocent that if she didn’t feel like putting on a bra under her tie-dyed T-shirt, well, she didn’t and that was that.
No one made anything of it.


Except us horny teens. We were a raw bunch. Across the pond, my American cousins were getting drunk at thirteen, high at fourteen,
and into girls — literally — a year later. Over in Tokyo, meanwhile, we were still learning grammar and algebra, of all things,
instead of backseat moves and self-defense, and making it through to graduation without ever catching a whiff of a joint.
Sex? It was a rumor, and a distant one.


That last dance of the summer, in her last summer at the lake, Melissa Clay looked as good as a girl can look. Dancing barefoot
on the wooden planks of the Boathouse, the strobe light freezing her in magic pose after magic pose, she had me at the breaking
point even before Tim Crockett asked her for a dance — or rather, took her hand and coolly pulled her out onto the floor,
because Tim didn’t have to ask any girl. He was nineteen, in college, drank beer, smoked cigarettes, bought his clothes in the States, and, the word was,
“knew what to do with it,” whatever that meant.


In the corner, all of us kids started elbowing one another, and, sure enough, Tim wasted no time putting his hands right on
her. Put them on her hips as they danced, and sweet Melissa smiled and moved in close, turning innocently in his hands even,
letting him drink in her taut ass, then moving away just as his hands slipped down to it. Seconds later he was in close again,
and when this time he started his hands up her belly, she let them climb up to within a couple of inches of her carefree breasts
and then, still smiling, took his wrists in her hands and moved them back down, then danced off a few steps and came back
to him, taking his surprised hands in hers now and placing them on her belt, smiling like an angel as he lifted them, lifted them, lifted them to the very base of her
perfect pair before she laughed, pulled them down, and danced away again.


No matador ever worked a bull as well. Or left one in worse shape. When the song set ended and Tim, trying hard to keep his
college cool, stood in close and whispered a question to her, she laughed and shook her head sweetly. Ten minutes later we
could see Tim sitting alone at the end of the dock, slugging back a can of beer that he was using, I’m sure, to ice himself
down with between sips.


We kids were about at our limit, too, and when ten o’clock came and the social chairman strolled in, switched on the lights,
locked the stereo cabinet, and announced that the dance was over, we huddled in a pack on the lake road, calling good-bye
to Melissa Clay as she disappeared around the bend with Beth and Shana, her laughing “bye!” still in our ears and the thought
of those sweet breasts still in our heads as we synchronized our watches, nodded that we’d all follow through on it, and then
raced home to our respective cabins to whack off, in unison, at precisely 10:17.


Damn. It all comes back like a movie. And then to see her again last week — unbelievable. I’d met Pardo at the Howling Wolf
for a quick Sunday night drink and was walking home up Amsterdam, passing one of the tiny, one-woman Benetton shops that dot
the avenues and stay open each night until ten. I glanced in the window and stopped dead. I walked to the glass. Twelve years,
but I knew her instantly. Knew those quick, blue eyes. That angel’s face, the long, blond hair swept back now with a hairband.
It was Melissa Clay.


I reached for the door but then checked myself. I watched her as she talked to a customer, standing as only a woman can, one
small foot pointing in front of her and the other off to the side. Her legs were still thin and fine, but now they led up
to a woman’s ass. I saw her customer laugh and turn with her bags toward the door, and I ducked quickly into a doorway before
Melissa’s eyes could follow her and see me through the glass. I stayed in the doorway as the customer walked to the curb,
waved down a taxi, climbed in, and sped away. I stayed another thirty seconds and then, not risking a last look in the window,
started slowly up Amsterdam again, my mind already working a week ahead.


I had another prospect, true. Debbie Collins, a sassy dance major I’d known up at school and had run in to again at an alumni
mixer two weeks back. She’d been a hot little number on the Hill and had lost nothing in the four years since, and I’d lain
awake just the night before working out a plan of attack. As I turned onto Eighty-second Street, though, and made for home,
I knew that Debbie Collins would have to wait. She was a treat, yes, but this city was full of treats. It held only one Melissa
Clay.


And now it’s time. I turn onto Amsterdam at 9:55. She will be closing up in minutes. I stop in front of the bookstore next
door, pretending to look at the same five fiction titles that have sat in the window all year. I take a breath.


She won’t recognize me, probably, but when I say my name, it will land deep. Ours was a small community, and the ties strong
and lasting. The Clays, I knew, had retired to a small Baptist town in the South years ago, so Melissa would have been cut
off from the country where she was raised.


Through the glass I see her in the back, folding blouses at a small counter. She wears a sparse white dress, the impossibly
thin straps just visible under her open red sweater. I walk inside and she looks up at the sound of the bell.


“Hi,” she says.

“Hi. I need scarves,” I say, walking to a rack of them, “and I’ve got no eye for them. Can you help?”

“Sure.” She smiles and comes from behind the counter. Her dress comes just to her knees, and her legs are bare — bare — underneath. She wears a thin anklet and clogs. “You must have done a good deed today — we’re having a sale.”


She steps into the light, and I see her full for the first time. She’s all I’d hoped. Beautiful, still, but working at it
now. Aerobics, probably, and eye cream, and even so, just months, maybe weeks from the start of the long, gentle slide.


“Melissa? Melissa Clay?”

She looks into my face, startled. Smiling still, but caught between her store manner, her natural friendliness, and the reserve
this city gives every woman.


“Yes. Do I?…”

“Japan. The American School. I’m Jake Teller.”

“My God.”

She puts her soft, white hand quickly on my shoulder. I see the ring.

“I was Shana’s year,” I say.

She steps back and laughs, quiet and friendly, the kind you don’t hear often in this city.

“This is New York,” she says. “It had to happen, right? I can’t believe it. Teller… the lake, too, right?” I nod. “You weren’t
church?”


“IBM. They let a few of us heathens in, remember?”

She laughs. “I remember. We envied you — you could swim on Sundays. Jake Teller. You were…”

“Fourteen when you were eighteen.”

She looks me over.

“Yes. You never left the Boathouse.”

I laugh. “That was me.”

“And you recognized me?”

“You stood out, Melissa. Still do.”

She smiles easily and touches my shoulder again.

“Thanks. Jake Teller — all grown up, and a charmer. I’ll tell Shana. She’s in North Carolina now.”

“Doing well?”

“Yes. Two kids.”

“Wow.” I shake my head. “Have you been back? To Japan?”

“Not once. You know us missionary kids: When we leave, it’s for good. You?”

“I was back last summer. And I made it to the lake.”

“Last summer! Jake, what is it like? The same families, still?”

“A lot of them. It’s… hey, do you want to… how about a drink? I’ll fill you in.”

She pauses just a fraction of a second, looks down, then back up at me.

“I’d love to.”

“When do you close?”

“Two minutes ago. Let me get my things.”

She walks to the back counter and takes her purse and a light coat from a chair. I help her into a sleeve.

“Well, thank you, Jake. Across the street is P. J. Clarke’s. Is that all right?”

“They’ll let us in? You’re wearing a ring and I’m not bald.”

“Is it like that?” She laughs. “I’ve never been.”

“We’ll be fine.”

She locks the door behind us, and we cross the street and step into P. J. Clarke’s, a dark, upscale singles bar, all mahogany
and mood music. I’ve seen a few last calls here. I walk her to a seat in the corner, where the bar meets the window and you
can see out into the street, see the shops and the walkers and, a block up, the green entrance to the park. A big ex-athlete
in a pressed white shirt slides two coasters in front of us and smiles.


“Absolut, straight,” I say.

“A sea breeze, please,” says Melissa. She laughs at the look I give her and touches my shoulder again. “Since college,” she
says.


“I thought even caffeine was a no-no. Do the folks know?”

“I broke it to them at the reception. What could they say?” She offers her left hand and I take it, raise it, and give her
ring a long look.


“Congratulations.”

“Thank you. It’s been a year.”

Our drinks come, I clink mine against hers, and we take our sips. Her sweater is only pulled round her, and I can see the
tops of her golden breasts.


“So, the lake,” she says. “Tell me it’s the same?”

“You didn’t hear?”

“What?” Her blue eyes crinkle with worry.

“The Boathouse.”

She puts her hand on my chest.

“No.”

“It’s coming down. This summer or next.”

“It can’t.”

“The prefecture wants to build a boardwalk. With shops.”

“How awful. They must be fighting it.”

“Trying to, but it doesn’t look good. It is their country.”


“But the Boathouse…”

Her soft eyes look down at the bar for a moment, and she sips from her drink. I motion with my eyes at her ring.

“Is he one of us?”

She shakes her head.

“A New Yorker, believe it or not.”

“Will you take…”

“Steve.”

“… Steve over? To see it?”

She pauses. “I don’t know. Someday…” She looks for words and I wait. “It’s… hard, you know?”

I nod.

“You belong, but you don’t,” I say. “Just like over here.”

“Yes.” She looks at me quickly, a little more in her eyes now. “It’s hard to explain to people, isn’t it? The community. The…”

“Innocence.”

“Yes.”

The bartender stands before us.

“One more?” I ask her. She pauses, then nods. “Should you call Steve?” I ask. She hesitates.

“It’s okay. Some nights I do inventory.”

Our drinks come; I raise mine, she raises hers and waits.

“To the Boathouse,” I say.

“Amen.” She looks at me and shakes her head. “Jake, you’ve been a shock. I haven’t thought of those days in…” She looks into
her glass and, maybe, back through the years. “Do you remember the dances?”


“You used to dance with Tim Crockett.”

She puts her drink on the bar and looks at me, amazed. Her hand goes to my shoulder again, this time with a little pressure.

“Tim Crockett… there was a randy one.”

“He kept moving his hands up your shirt, and you kept moving them down.”

“Yes, and I wasn’t…” She looks over, sees me blush, and laughs. “It’s true what they say about junior-high boys, isn’t it?”

“All of it,” I say.

I finish my drink and she does the same, struggling with the last long sip.

“Do you miss it?” I ask.

“When I think of it. They were special days.”

I stand and reach for my wallet. I look at her.

“The crossover?” I say. “You made it okay?”

She looks at me, then down, pauses, and lifts her purse and jacket from the chair. The crossover is what we ex-pat kids call
the move back to the States. Most aren’t ready when it comes, and some — girls, especially — it marks for good.


“Pretty well, Jake,” she says. She fingers her ring and smiles. “But this is my second.”


I pay the bill, and we w. . .