CHAPTER 14

NOT ONLY HAD JESS heard of Pulse, he was pretty sure he knew someone who worked there. He scrolled through his cell phone directory until he came to the name he was looking for.

“Here she is. Vanessa.”

“Vanessa Hutchinson?” Ellie asked.

“I don’t do last names. I met her a few weeks ago at a bar in Williamsburg. She’s a friend of Kate. You met her once. She came with me to Johnny’s about a year ago.”

“The lawyer?”

“No, that was Rose. Kate’s in marketing or something. Short brown hair? Really tiny?”

Jess was proving once again the vast reach of his impressive social network, yet another difference between them. Ellie would love to be one of those women with a tight circle of best friends, but a good portion of her life was dominated by a job that made her an outsider to most women, and those same women certainly didn’t want her cozying up to their husbands and boyfriends. Between work, serial monogamy, and part-time caregiving to the rest of the Hatcher family, she had enough on her plate anyway.

Her brother, in contrast, had a way of meeting people once and forging lasting friendships with them, even if he didn’t run into them again for a year. And, more curiously, many of his social supporters were former girlfriends and past hookups who never seemed to begrudge Jess his refusal to commit to one woman (or one job, for that matter, or one mailing address) for more than a month at a time. Ellie’s best guess was that he had a way of attracting women who at least appreciated that, with Jess, what you saw was what you got: a fun guy and a good man who chose to remain in a perpetual state of adolescence.

“Who’s the Vanessa Hutchinson you know?” Jess asked.

“A bartender at Pulse. Mid-twenties, as I recall. No priors.”

Jess gave her a perplexed look, and Ellie explained her newfound interest in the club, as well as the list she’d been given of all of the club’s current employees.

“I should’ve known you had an ulterior motive for checking out a Grade A meat market.”

“I figured it wouldn’t hurt to get a firsthand glimpse of the scene, see if anyone remembers seeing Chelsea.”

“I guess hanging out with the yuppies one night isn’t going to kill me.”

“Now I’m having second thoughts,” she said.

“You’re killing me, El. I was just getting my brain into club mode.” He bounced his shoulders and mimicked the ubiquitous and repetitive uhnn-chk, uhnn-chk beat of techno music.

“I’m not even sure we could get in.”

“What good is that handy dandy badge for, if not pushing your way past a behemoth of a doorman?”

“That would defeat the whole purpose. I was thinking I’d just go and hang out. Watch people. Talk a little. Be stealthy. But the club manager will recognize me. I was just there this afternoon-”

“Yeah, looking like, well, the way you look when you’re working.”

Ellie gave him an insulted look.

“Sorry, but you know you can do better. Get yourself all slutted up, and you’ll blend in with the rest of the chicks. Besides, the manager of a club that big and that crowded is not going to pay attention to the likes of us.”

She remembered Scott Bell, the club manager, speaking almost identical words that afternoon: When you spend enough time in clubs, everyone looks the same.

Fifteen minutes later, Ellie emerged from her bedroom. Clothes? On. Makeup? Slathered. Hair? Fluffed, thanks to some backcombing and a few spritzes of spray.

“Let’s get a move on before I change my mind.”

Jess looked up from the black Hefty bag that he was digging around in on the living room floor. She recognized it as the bag of belongings from his last semi-permanent address, which he had snuck behind her television while she was in Kansas.

He took a look at the outfit she had chosen: a black turtleneck sweater, her best jeans, and a pair of short black boots.

“That’s what I thought,” he said, continuing his rummaging. “Aha. I knew there was something in here that did not belong to me.”

He pulled out a purple baby doll dress with a halter neckline.

“Seriously?”

ELLIE OFFERED to splurge for a cab to the Meatpacking District. With her bare legs popping out of her tiny new dress and her feet covered in nothing but her one pair of high-heeled sandals, a few bucks for a heated car struck her as a bargain.

She made sure to keep her knees together as she swung herself out of the taxi. “Jesus. I don’t know what kind of woman lent you this dress, but I’m having a hard time not pulling a Britney here.”

“Hey, you were the one who said you wanted to blend. Plus, I got news for you. The very attractive woman who left that dress behind is five inches taller than you.”

Ellie was relieved to see fewer than twenty people waiting behind the red velvet rope erected outside the club entrance. She could tolerate a line of that length. Noticing that most of the other patrons were dressed at least somewhat appropriately for an early March night, she punched Jess in the bicep. “I was fine in what I had on.”

“Those are the people who are waiting outside when it’s not even eleven o’clock yet.” Jess grabbed Ellie by the wrist and marched along the velvet rope to the muscled doorman posted at the club’s double doors. He was dressed entirely in black, all the way down to the cord spiraling from the earpiece he wore in his right ear.

“Jess Hatcher. I’m on the list.”

The man eyeballed Jess first. With his usual scruffy dark hair, three days’ beard, and long sleeved black T-shirt and skinny jeans, he could have been anything from a bicycle messenger to the lead singer of any one of the current postpunk bands that she found so interchangeable. Then the man’s gaze turned to Ellie.

The Hatchers apparently passed with enough credibility for him to check the list. A frown started to form on his face as he browsed the clipboard. Then he flipped to a second page.

“You’re good,” he said, stamping their hands with a rubber triangle sopped in red ink. When he stepped aside so they could enter, Ellie heard a few exasperated huffs from the dejected souls behind the velvet rope and realized she had never been so appreciative of special treatment. Down with egalitarianism. She was too freezing to care about the masses.

“I called Vanessa while you were changing,” Jess explained. “And, you were right, her last name is indeed Hutchinson.”

Once they were inside the club, Ellie had to concede that Jess had been right about her wardrobe choice. What had been a dimly lit empty warehouse just a few hours ago was now brimming with activity-primarily of the dancing, drinking, and flirting varieties, and almost entirely by young, fashion-forward, beautiful people. Not a single Gap sweater in the house.

Jess led the way, forging a circuitous path around the dance floor, past the runway, and through the three-person-deep huddle encircling the bar. He raised a hand toward a tall, thin waitress with long blond hair, heavy bangs, and a lot of black mascara. In the middle of a vigorous rattling of a silver martini shaker over her shoulder, the woman caught Jess’s eye and flashed him a bright wide smile. Vanessa Hutchinson was beautiful.

She pulled the lid off the shaker and poured something bright blue into a martini glass, then handed the glass and a bottle of beer to a guy across the counter. He handed her forty dollars and told her to keep the change. Ellie wondered if she’d just witnessed a big tip to Vanessa, a big rip-off of the customer, or both.

Vanessa ignored the many patrons who were eagerly competing for her eye contact and instead beelined toward Jess. “Hey, man. How are you?” She couldn’t manage a hug with the bar between them, but she did raise her arm high for some quick hand-squeezing contact.

“Good. Pretty good. Thanks for taking care of us on short notice. This is my sister, Ellie.”