The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian Page B

Kristin often placed a vase with flowers. Resting atop it now were yet more open liquor bottles, dirty glasses, and a bowl of old guacamole that looked like baby poop. Someone had extinguished a cigarette in it. Spencer, he guessed. When he looked a little more closely, he saw there were actually a couple of cigarette butts in it.
    “What did you do when you saw the girl had a knife?”
    “It happened so fast, there really was nothing to do. One second she was stabbing him, and the next she was in the hallway.”
    “She. The blond one?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then what.”
    “As I told your associates at the police station, we heard the gunshots.”
    “Two?”
    “That’s right. Seriously, I’ve answered all these questions.”
    “I appreciate that. We all do,” she said. “Thank you.”
    “You’re welcome.”
    “You’re doing me personally a solid by answering a few more. Making my life a little easier.” She smiled. “So one of the girls stabbed the first pimp, and the other girl shot the second one.”
    “I don’t know that for sure. The blonde left the living room and was with her…friend…in the hallway when we heard the shots. So it could have been either girl, I guess. But I think it was the blonde.”
    “Why?”
    “She seemed a little more…wild.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “I mean, I guess it could have been either.”
    “Gotcha. Now I’m not a prosecutor, Mr. Chapman, but two people were murdered in your house. You and your friends and your brother were engaging in sex with girls who—”
    Reflexively he cut her off. “I didn’t.”
    “I was told you went upstairs with one.”
    “But we didn’t have sex.”
    “Fine. But this”—and she waved her arm across the carnage as if she were a game show host—“will be all over the Internet. In the newspapers. On TV. Franklin McCoy? It seems to me you have a reputation to protect. And based on whose bodies are in the morgue right now and the statements of some of your guests, there is a chance that the little eye candy you had dancing around your living room were not prostitutes. They were underage sex slaves. Big difference.”
    He wasn’t sure whether it was the word
underage
or the term
sex slaves
that caused his legs to buckle, but suddenly he had collapsed onto the faux antique divan. It was supposed to look French. Think a king named Louis and some roman numerals. It was from the Ethan Allen showroom in Hartsdale. He remembered the day when he and Kristin had bought it. It was a Sunday, maybe a week after they had moved out to Bronxville. Melissa had been a toddler on a play date. He and Kristin had had a lovely, intimate brunch, their world alive with promise. He closed his eyes, and the day came back to him, even the sun on his face when he’d climbed into the car and they’d started back to their new home. They were young, and he felt impossibly rich for a guy in his early thirties. He would soon be a managing director. Someday, if he stayed on this track, he would be a managing director and head of mergers and acquisitions. He felt—and this was a word too saccharine in his opinion to figure with any regularity in his mind—blessed.
    When he finally opened his eyes and looked up, Patricia was handing him a glass of water.
    “I thought we might lose you there for a minute,” she said.
    He took a sip. “They were in their twenties,” he told her adamantly, though he honestly wasn’t sure. The one in his bedroom? Alexandra? She might have been sixteen or seventeen. It was possible. She was just so…so tiny. He thought of the goose bumps on her thighs. The pink nail polish. “Maybe early twenties,” he added. “But they weren’t children.”
    “Well, we’ll find out when we catch them.”
    He knew the basics of their getaway: the girls had taken the black Escalade that belonged to one of the Russians and driven to the Bronxville train station. There they had dumped the vehicle and—at least this was what everyone seemed to