“That’s it. You ordered Red Thread at the bar tonight. That, my dear, is the first bottle of Red Thread ever distilled, ever bottled, ever-ever.”
“How did you come by this bottle?”
“Private sale. One million dollars. The provenance is perfect. Virginia Maddox herself sold it shortly before she died to pay her medical bills. One of a kind.”
“No wonder you won’t sell it,” she said.
“Not for all the money in the world. This is the holy grail of bourbon. You don’t sell the holy grail.”
“Unholy grail,” she said under her breath, but not so far under he didn’t hear it.
Her eyes softened as she touched the red ribbon tied around the bottle’s neck. It was a tattered old thing.
“It’s a miracle that thing has stayed on there,” McQueen said. “Piece of ribbon from the 1860s.”
“Slave cloth,” Paris said.
“What?”
“The ribbon was cut from slave cloth. Thick wool. Slave cloth was made to last a long time. Slaves didn’t get new clothes very often. What they had had to last, had to hold up to hard work and many years. The girl who wore this ribbon? This was probably the only nice thing she had, the only thing she thought of as hers.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know that ribbon... I didn’t know that part of the story, that the ribbon came from a Maddox slave.”
“Now you know.”
“You ordered Red Thread at The Rickhouse. But you would have been a baby when Red Thread burned down. What exactly is your interest in it?”
“It interests me for many reasons. But here, you can’t trust me with that bottle. I might drop it. Wouldn’t that be a shame?”
She passed the bottle back to McQueen. He put it carefully back into the cabinet. When he turned around, Paris was halfway to the door.
“You aren’t leaving, are you?” he asked.
“Leaving for the bedroom,” she said.
“So I did impress you?”
“You have a fine collection,” she said. “I only wish it were mine.”
McQueen followed her to the concealed door and started to open it for her. With his hand on the knob he looked her up and down and into her eyes.
“Who are you really?” he asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Why not?”
“I told you why. The truth is like bourbon—it’ll burn going down.”
“I want to burn.”
She kissed him, hard enough McQueen forgot about finding out anything else about her except how to make her come again. And after he’d solved that mystery, he fell fast asleep, one arm over her naked stomach, one leg over her leg, his favorite way to fall asleep.
* * *
When McQueen woke up, he was alone, and Paris had left nothing behind but the scent of her skin on his sheets and her red hair ribbon on his pillow.
Red ribbon?
Hell on earth, he was a first-rate fool.
McQueen pulled on his pants and shirt and ran to the room behind the bookcase.
Too late. She was gone.
So was his million-dollar bottle of Red Thread.
McQueen slammed his hand down onto the intercom button and ordered his night shift security guard to lock the gates.
“Already done,” James answered. “Someone tried to get out without the gate code. She’s in my office. I was about to come wake you up, boss.”
He should have been relieved, but he seethed instead, his shoulders tense with his fury, and he nearly wrenched the door off the hinges when he entered the security guard’s small shed. Paris sat primly on a small folding chair, her legs crossed at the ankles, her black Birkin bag in her lap.
“Give us a minute,” McQueen said to the guard.
“Do I need to call the cops?”
“Not yet. I want to hear her story first. Then we’ll call them.”
James left him alone in the shed with Paris. She looked up at him placidly.
“Are all your servants black?” she asked, nodding at the door that James had closed behind him.
“They’re not servants. They’re employees. And no. My housekeeper is white. The security guard who works the day shift is from Mexico.”
“The United Colors of Yes-Men.”
“And yes-women,” McQueen said. He crossed his arms and leaned back against the door. “You’re good. You wore me out, and when I slept...”
“I’m not good. You’re easy.”
“Am I?”
“Interview in the June 2014 Architectural Digest with billionaire investor Cooper McQueen. ‘What do you like to read, Mr. McQueen?’ the fawning interviewer asked you. ‘What keeps Cooper McQueen up all night?’ And you replied—”
“Raymond Chandler.”
“Because, as you said in the interview, ‘I’m a sucker for a femme fatale. Give me a girl with a black heart in a red dress and I’m a goner.’”
“You thought you could seduce me because I read Chandler?”
“And your last girlfriend was a dark-skinned Knicks City Dancer from Puerto Rico, so I knew I had a very good shot at you. I’m your type, aren’t I?”
“I don’t have a fetish for dark-skinned women, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“I wasn’t implying anything, but you immediately seemed to think it was what I was implying. Methinks the billionaire doth protest too much.”
“Of all the bars in all the world...you walked into mine to steal my bourbon. You know, stealing something worth a million dollars is a felony.”
“I know. But I won’t call the police on you if you don’t call the police on me.”
“I didn’t steal it.”
“You bought stolen goods. Also a felony.”
“That bottle wasn’t stolen.”
“I know it was.”
“I told you, Virginia Maddox sold it—”
“It didn’t belong to Virginia Maddox. You can’t sell what you don’t own. And I was happy to buy it from you and avoid an unpleasant legal battle, but as you refused to sell it, I had no choice but to repossess it,” she said with the slightest sinister hiss.
“How do you know all this? How do you know everything you think you know about Red Thread?”
“I am Red Thread,” Paris said with the slightest sigh like she was admitting to a bad habit.
“Red Thread is dead.”
“A nice rhyme. You should have been a poet.” She raised her chin toward the filing cabinet. On top of it sat the bottle. “Look at it. Read the label. Tell me what it says.”
McQueen knew what the label said, but he took the bottle anyway and held it label side up toward the light.
The label was faded and