The Kingmaker (33 page)

She lifted her glass and took another sip. She said, “Bill and I haven’t had sex in over two years.”

“Gee, two years. That’s a long time,” I replied awkwardly, because if you had to pick the most hazardous topic in the world for us to be discussing as we sat all alone in this big house, well, here it was. I added, “If it’s any consolation, he isn’t having any sex these days, either.”

She stared into her glass and said, “I know about him. What about you?”

“What?”

She stopped staring at the glass and looked at me. “Are you involved . . . with Katrina, maybe?”

“Uh, no. Our relationship’s professional . . . or it was . . . she quit today.”

“That’s too bad. She seemed very nice.”

Which part was too bad? That I wasn’t involved with her or that she was no longer on the team?

She leaned against the arm of the couch and put her feet up on the seat, stretching those tantalizing legs toward me. She chuckled. “Do you remember that week my father was gone and we stayed here?”

“In this old mausoleum? We did that?”

She gave me a light kick in the ribs. “Don’t play the fool with me.”

“I remember.”

“And I hid your clothes and made you walk around naked for two whole days?”

“I wasn’t naked. I wore a towel.”

“A facecloth as I recall.”

“Same principle.”

“Not when you’re wearing it on your head.”

“Well, I’m modest.”

“And on the second morning we were sitting in this very same room, on this very same couch, and Consuela the maid walked in?”

Like I could forget that, either.

Mary’s foot landed in my lap and she started giggling. “You were racing around this room looking for a pillow to hide your private parts.”

“Your father should keep bigger pillows around.”

She laughed and then we sat and stared at the fire some more. Mary was obviously using this opportunity to convey a message. Or maybe two messages, one subtle and one not. That divorce thing was clearly the unsubtle news. The more opaque message was that she might need the services of a rebounder when it happened, and I’d already pushed the ball through the net a few times, so to speak, so I stood in good stead. I pondered all this for a while.

My dear friend Mr. Pudley pondered it as well. He shifted into position, feet in the sprinter’s blocks, and waited for my other brain to catch up.

I finally asked, “Have you been interviewed yet?”

“What?”

“Have you been interviewed, Mary? Has the CIA asked you to sit down with an interrogator to go over your story?”

“No,” she said, sounding off-balance, like, Hey, dope, you’re spoiling the moment here.

“Have you found a lawyer?”

“I haven’t settled on one yet.”

I tore my eyes from the fire. “Mary? Why haven’t they interviewed you yet?”

“I don’t know. I suppose they’ve been busy cleaning up everything else.”

“Uh-huh. Why hasn’t your name hit the news yet? I mean, it’s irresistible. You’d think somebody would leak it.”

She stared at my face. In the firelight she was as beautiful as I’d ever seen her, the light from the flames playing across her sculpted features, occasionally sparking a glint in her blue eyes. Mr. Pudley was getting very upset with me.

She replied, “I’ve been expecting it. I pick up a paper on my way into the office, dreading the headlines. I guess I’ve been lucky.”

“Bullshit,” I said. Softly, but I said it.

“What?”

“You helped snare him.”

She didn’t even flinch. “What makes you think that?”

The important thing to note from her response was that she didn’t say, “No, that’s not true.” I put my glass on the table. “Have you been asked to testify?”

It was her turn to look away and stare at the fire.

“Have you?” I asked, more harshly. “I’ll eventually get a witness list from Golden. I’ll know . . . eventually. Tell me now.”

“Yes . . . I’m going to testify.”

“Are you one of Eddie’s witnesses?”

“Yes.”

My lips popped open and shut a few times, like a grounded fish, but no sound came out. She finally stopped staring at the fire and faced me. Her voice turned pleading. “I had no choice. Sean, please, you have to believe me. Imagine how you’d feel if you learned your husband was a traitor. I put up with his affairs,
but treason? That bastard used me. He soaked up everything I knew, undermined me, made me part of his treachery.”

My lips were still popping open and shut as I tried to think of something to say, only nothing remotely intelligent was working its way to the surface.

She stood and walked to the mantel. She stared at the flames and began speaking to herself, or the burning logs, or posterity. “I didn’t cause this. He did. And it’s not revenge, it’s self-defense. If I didn’t work with them, I would’ve been ruined. When they were tipped off by their source, they approached me and said it was my choice. I was his wife, for Godsakes. I’d shared everything with him. I would’ve faced professional ruin, disgrace, maybe even prison. I’ve got children, Sean. They didn’t threaten me, but we all knew the stakes.”

That last comment showed she’d been professionally coached. I could picture Eddie saying, “Okay Mary, now listen closely. Since you’re his wife, you’re going to be asked if you’re testifying under duress, if you’re doing this because you were threatened. Wink, wink . . . you weren’t, right? You’re just doing your patriotic duty. You’re responding like a loyal American to your husband’s infidelity to his country, your country.”

My voice grew cold. “Did you help catch him?”

She paused for a moment, then said, “Sean, I didn’t want it to be true. I thought at first I might be able to prove they were wrong, that their source was lying.” She spun around and faced me. “Think about what this feels like. They’re showing you reports on your husband’s movements, his phone calls, his trips to hotels with strange women. His watchers were standing in my office, shuffling their feet, avoiding my eyes, giving me the names of the women he was screwing, showing me pictures of his latest affair. He was sealing his own fate.”

Her face looked stricken, her body tense, coiled. She was too emotionally immersed to realize how they’d strung her along, how she’d been played. Of course they’d showed her those pictures and let her overhear her husband’s voice making dates
with his floozies. If I had to guess, that was Eddie’s idea also. It was definitely his style.

I abruptly stood up. “I have to go.”

She came over and took my arm. “Sean, please, I didn’t have a choice.”

“I don’t either. Now that I know you’re a prosecution witness, I’m required to avoid you. It’s one of those odd little quirks us lawyers are required to live with. I can be accused of witness tampering.”

I left her by the fire and I slammed the front door on my way out, because, like I said earlier, I’m not like Katrina. When somebody pisses me off, I share my anger.

If Homer’s Porsche had been parked in the drive, I would’ve firebombed the frigging thing.

M
y apartment building in South Arlington is called the Coat of Arms and was built sometime in the late fifties, a big red-brick monstrosity filled with tiny one-bedroom apartments with your proverbial cramped porches off the living rooms, and broom closets for kitchens and bathrooms. When the Coat of Arms was built, kitchens were considered utility rooms instead of stadiums, and bathrooms were where you went to deposit your waste, not luxuriate in expansive, candlelit elegance.

The Coat of Arms has three things going for it: It’s cheap, it’s cheap, and it’s only five minutes from my office. The neighborhood ain’t great, but neither is it a crime-infested ghetto. It is a semisuburban place, halfway on life’s journey between a slum and a modest home with a lawn that has to be cut and a basketball hoop your kids never use in the driveway.

I slept in till seven, then made my way to the outdoor parking lot and my car. I was preoccupied, and I don’t mean by Mary’s confession the night before, or even by regrets about letting Katrina go. Those were niggling issues compared to
something Mary had blurted out in her confession. She’d mentioned she’d been recruited to entrap her husband after a source tipped off the Agency about his treachery. A moment later, she’d admitted that she only joined the investigation to prove the tipster was wrong.

I had a new threat to consider, a fresh and unexpected turn, as they say in thriller novels. There was a tipster out there somewhere.

Somehow, in all of Eddie’s materials, there’d been nothing about any source tipping off the CIA and the molehunters about Morrison—no small oversight, if you think about it. In other words, Morrison hadn’t been caught by the brilliant detective work of the molehunters, or even by Mary turning him in. He’d been betrayed by someone, presumably somebody with direct knowledge. And if Mary was telling the truth, Eddie had the kind of witness I most dreaded—a guy who came over from the other side to testify firsthand to Morrison’s acts.

I was pondering this as I opened my car door and two guys appeared behind me. I’m normally fairly observant—recent evidence to the contrary—and they appeared out of nowhere. No noise, no chatter, no footsteps; I actually smelled them before I saw them—personal hygiene wasn’t their shtick. One was Latino, the other black, and they were dressed identically: baggy jeans with crotches that drooped to their knees, muscle shirts, and doo-rags on their heads. Both were also big and muscular, with that street look that told you they weren’t collecting for UNICEF. Particularly impressive was the .38 street special in the Latino’s hand, which looked considerably more threatening than the six-inch blade the other hood was holding.

“Hey Patrón,” said the Latino, his tone familiar and coaxing like we knew each other, “just relax, and this’ll go down easy. You gotta wallet, right, man? Keep this low-maintenance, huh? You hand over that wallet, we let you drive off to work, we all part amigos.”

He’d stopped moving toward me, while his partner kept
coming, his knife held low, his grip tight. The police, who study these things, say the wisest thing in situations like this is to simply hand over your wallet. Something like 95 percent of the time, the crooks intend you no harm, so long as you pacify them by handing over whatever they ask for. Don’t challenge them. Don’t taunt them. Don’t try to fight. Play the odds and the worst you’ll get out of it’s the inconvenience of having to cancel your charge cards and replace your driver’s license. Even in those 5 percent of cases where the victims get hurt, fairly often the victim precipitates it, by choosing the wrong moment to act courageous, or failing to act respectful and subservient to the thugs.

On any ordinary day, I’d do exactly as the police advise. I mean, it’s not like I have a lot of money in my wallet. I’m an Army guy, right?

Something, however, didn’t look ordinary about this. Why did one have a gun and the other a knife? Why did the guy with the gun stand back, while the one with the knife kept moving toward me, his arm tense?

I studied their faces, and they only made one mistake. I immediately stepped to the right, putting the guy with the knife between me and the shooter. At the same instant I swung my briefcase up into his face while my right foot lashed out for his groin. It’s the oldest trick in the book: Threaten the target with two simultaneous chances of bodily injury. It was a fifty-fifty shot, and he took the 50 percent most advantageous to me. Instead of a broken nose, he got his testicles driven into his stomach.

Before he could even lurch over, I rushed him, ramming his body with all my strength, shoving him toward the shooter, using him as a screen. Which turned out to be a damned good idea, because the shooter let loose two shots at my human shield before we came into him full force.

The shooter sprawled on his ass, the pistol still in his right hand, his partner’s dying body still on top of him. I reached for his pistol hand and pinned it to the pavement. With my other
hand, I tried to chop him across the nose but knowing the instant I struck that I’d hit something too hard, like his forehead.

I could feel his gun hand moving up, trying to redirect the pistol at my head. I let loose of his wrist and grabbed the gun barrel, trying to keep it pointed away from me. We stayed like this for a few seconds, me lying on the dying knifer’s body, the gunman trapped underneath it, both of us grunting and cursing.

He was a strong man, though. I could feel the gun barrel slipping from my grip, when the strangest damned thing happened. The dying man trapped between us screamed, “Bastard!” and furiously bashed his forehead into his partner’s face. That act of dying fury saved me. I felt his grip loosen and I turned the barrel toward his own head. In the process I must’ve cramped his trigger finger, because there was a sharp bang and blood and brain matter sprayed all over my face.

I lay still a moment to be sure he was dead. I couldn’t actually open my eyes to check, because my face was covered with goo. When he didn’t move, I finally rolled off, dragging the pistol out of his hand, just in the event I was wrong and there was a little life-juice left in him.

I stood up and wiped my face. Then I bent over and began searching their pockets, looking for identification. The black guy’s pockets contained nothing but a few reefers. The Latino had more reefers and a thick wad of money. I pulled it out and counted; five thousand dollars in used hundred-dollar bills.

A moment later I heard a siren and I nearly stuffed the bills back in his pocket, realizing as I started to do so that if the police fingerprinted the money, I’d have some explaining to do. Instead, I opened my car door and put the money under the front seat.

Then I sat on the seat and tried to look like I was shaken, which, frankly, required very little acting. The police car screeched to a halt and two officers rushed out, gripping their guns and screaming for me to put my hands where they could see them and stay perfectly still. It’s an old, overused line, but I
didn’t argue. I always try to be good-mannered in situations like this. They looked down at the two bodies, saw they were street hoods, saw my Army uniform, and the younger of the two officers told me to sit back down and relax.