The Syndrome (28 page)

Glancing around, Duran saw that the apartment was not for living. The wooden floor was bare of rugs, the walls empty. The only furniture was a matte-black Aeron chair and a cantilevered desk lamp with a Halogen bulb. A telephone. And that was it.

Except for the objects that Adrienne was staring at: two padlocked steamer trunks, side by side in the far corner of the room. Feeling Duran’s gaze, she turned to him, and shivered. “It’s freezing in here.” And so it was.

“He’s got the air-conditioning on,” Duran told her, crossing the room to her side, dumbbell in hand.

For a moment, they stood next to one another, gazing at the steamer trunks.

“I want to go,” Adrienne announced. “I want to go right now.” She tugged at his sleeve, but Duran was unmoving. And then, without a word, he stepped back and swung the dumbbell in an arc, smashing it into the lock on one of the trunks. Adrienne’s knees buckled as he threw open the lid. Reflexively, she laid a hand against the wall for support, and
looked away. Silence hung in the air between them. Finally, she asked, “Is it … Eddie?”

Duran didn’t answer at first, just shook his head from side to side, more in wonderment than reply. “I don’t know,” he told her. “But it’s somebody.”

They left the Towers at a racewalk, uncertain what to do or where to go. Adrienne was convinced they should go to the police, but Duran was skeptical.

“All right,” he said, playing the devil’s advocate, “so what if we go there? What do we tell them?”

“About the trunks.”

“Okay. And then what?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean, what do you think they’ll do? Do you think they’ll go to the apartment and search it?”

Adrienne thought about it for a long moment. Finally, she sighed. “No. They’d probably just charge us with breaking and entering.”

“Right,” Duran told her. “That’s what
I
think.”

“Then let’s go to my place,” she said. “At least we can get my car.”

Once again, he shook his head. “You might as well shoot yourself,” he told her. “There isn’t a chance in the world they aren’t watching it.”

“But I need stuff,” she said. “I need clothes. Makeup.
Things!”

“Then you’ll have to buy them,” he told her. “Until the police start looking for Bonilla … I don’t think you want to go home.”

So they took the Metro to National Airport and rented a car, then drove to the Pentagon City mall, where Adrienne bought an overnight bag, some makeup and lingerie, and two dresses from Nordstrom’s. As they left the mall, Duran made a call to 911, saying, “I want to get something on the record—whether you do anything about it or not is up to
you …” Then he told them, succinctly, exactly what he’d seen in Barbera’s apartment, gave them the address and rang off.

On the way back to the Comfort Inn, it began to rain, just a few slanting specks against the windshield and then—before Duran could figure out how the wipers worked—an obliterating downpour that had him frantically pushing buttons and moving levers as he peered through the pearlized windshield.

When he finally located the knob that activated the windshield wipers, he turned to Adrienne and said, “I was thinking …”

Adrienne kept her eyes on the road. He was a more aggressive driver than she was used to. “About what?”

“All that electronics stuff.”

“Unh-huh …” He didn’t say anything, so she prodded him.
“And?”

“Well, I was thinking—maybe it had something to do with me.”

She just looked at him.

While Duran lay on the bed, lost in thought, Adrienne stood in the shower, relishing the hot water pounding down against the back of her neck and shoulders. She was thinking about Bill Fellowes, the intern from Howard University.

Like most interns, Fellowes spent a lot of his time doing shit work, but he was clearly going places. She’d gotten to know him when he’d been assigned to the Amalgamated case, helping her compile a database for the documents and work product. She remembered feeling guilty. Here was a guy who was law review and all that—and she was spending day in and day out, handing him papers to number and date-stamp. Then she remembered that
she
was law review, and what she was doing wasn’t any more interesting than what he’d been assigned. On the contrary, they were doing it together.

But the thing about Fellowes was, he’d assisted on a case in the spring that was actually pretty interesting (compared to the Amalgamated matter). Adrienne didn’t remember the details, but it had something to do with “recovered memory”—at
least, she thought it had. In any case, there was an expert witness who’d testified on behalf of the firm’s client. She was certain of that because Bill was a gifted mimic, and she could remember the look on his sunny brown face as he reenacted parts of the trial over tequilas at Chief Ike’s Mambo Room. The doctor had been impressive—very cool and basso profundo.

She lathered her hair, squeezed her eyes shut and turned her face to the showerhead. She’d get the doctor’s name from Bill. Maybe the doctor would look at Duran and, even if he wouldn’t, he might be able to point her in the right direction—a colleague, or
something.

After a minute or two, she rinsed the soap from her hair, stepped from the shower and wrapped herself in a towel. The bathroom was small and steamy, the mirror a gray cloud. Using a hand towel, she cleared enough of its surface to see herself, then yanked the hotel’s plastic comb through the tangles in her hair. It didn’t do much good. But it was the weekend—and it was all she had.

Finally, she pulled on her new panty hose and stepped into the navy-blue dress she’d bought. With her earrings in place, she emerged from the bathroom, transformed.

Duran looked up from the
TV
, and did a double take. “Hey,” he said, “you look … nice.”

“Thanks,” she replied, stepping into her shoes. “I’ll be back late, so don’t wait up. On the other hand—don’t get lost, either.”

“But … where are you going?” he asked, as suspicious as he was concerned.

“To work.”

“‘Work’? Are you crazy? We’re in
hiding
, for Christ’s sake! And it’s Sunday—you can’t go to work.”

“Got to.”

Duran snapped off the
TV
, sat up and looked directly into her eyes. “People are trying to kill you! Whenever that happens, you’re supposed to take a day off.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to.”

“I won’t.”

“And what if they follow you?” he demanded.

“From
here
?”

He shook his head. “
To
here. From your office.”

“They won’t do that. They’d have to watch the office all day, just to see if I show up—and my apartment, too—because, when you think about it, I’m more likely to go there than to the office. Especially on Sunday, so … I’ll be
okay.
It isn’t like the KGB is after us.”

Duran fell back on the bed. “How do you know?”

She smiled. “Very funny.”

“You won’t change your mind?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Then I want you to call me,” Duran told her, “when you get there, and when you leave. Okay?”

She agreed.

The rental car was a metallic-green Dodge Stratus. It had that new car smell in spades, and kept fogging up as Adrienne headed north on Shirley Highway past the Army-Navy Country Club. The rain was lighter now, but the humidity was terrific and there wasn’t anything in the car to clear the windshield. So every half mile or so, she brushed the fingertips of her right hand back and forth across the glass, smearing it.

Not that it mattered. Her mind was elsewhere. She was thinking that Duran was right about going to work. The safest thing to do would be to stay away for a few days, and call in sick. But she couldn’t do that. Slough wouldn’t understand. And if she tried to explain it—if she told him what had happened—well, that would be even worse. Lawyers at Slough, Hawley did not get shot at. Or, if they did, they did not make partner.

And, anyway, she wasn’t afraid. On the contrary, she was all tapped out on the fear front, and had been for a very long time.

The thing about fear was that it was exhausting. She’d
known that ever since she was a child. For years she’d lived in a state of almost constant anxiety. After Gram died, there was the fear that there would be no one to take care of her. Then, after a series of foster homes, and interim periods in “care,” there was the fear of getting hit, yelled at, humiliated, ignored, or bullied. Even the social workers scared her, the creepy way they held her hand and asked loaded questions whose significance and consequences she couldn’t guess. That she didn’t know the right answers was clear from the little twitches of disappointment in their eyes, the reflexive smiles, the rephrased questions. Once, she’d overheard them talking about a family’s interest in adopting “the younger child”—her—and she’d been scared to death. For weeks she wouldn’t let Nikki out of her sight, terrified that they’d be separated.

But those were the acute fears, the ones that rose and fell on an almost daily basis, like the tides. There was another fear, though, that was chronic and unchanging, an adrenal drain fueled by the worry that whatever sanctuary she and Nikki had found, it would soon disappear.

Not surprising then, that after a while, her capacity for being afraid dwindled toward zero—so that by the time she and Nikki were placed with Deck and Marlena, Adrienne’s demeanor had changed from a condition of alert vigilance to a kind of numbed docility. (The famous “automaton” of Mrs. Dunkirk’s pronouncement.) Years later, while a second-year law student, she’d obtained her files under the Freedom of Information Act. There, she’d read a raft of speculation about what was “wrong with her”: attachment disorder, borderline personality, lack of affect. The diagnosis changed from caseworker to caseworker. But the truth was, she was none of those things: what was “wrong” with her was simple. She had combat fatigue.

Turning off M Street, she headed downhill toward the river, and swung left in the direction of Harbor Place. Georgetown had an abandoned, rainy day feeling to it. Cruising slowly along K Street, she studied the parked cars
that she passed. But there was nothing unusual about any of them. So she parked on the street, avoiding the underground garage, which charged twelve dollars for the first three hours.

It was only a block to the office but, even so, she was wet when she got there. Stopping in the ladies’ room, she blotted her dripping hair with paper towels. Her dress was more than damp, as well, but there was nothing she could do about it—and, anyway, the color hid the rain.

She passed Bette’s cubicle, and saw that she was hard at work, clacking away at the keyboard, printer humming, talking on the phone. Adrienne tapped the door as she walked by and Bette turned and raised a hand in greeting, eyebrows up and mouthing a silent “Hi!”

Adrienne hung up her jacket, then sat down at the desk, and pressed the space bar on her keyboard. While she waited for the icons to appear on her monitor, she pulled open the top file drawer—where she kept an electric kettle and a jar of instant coffee for emergencies. Going to the water fountain to fill the kettle, she found Bette waiting for her when she got back.

“Where
were
you, Scout?”

“What do you mean?” Adrienne asked, plugging in the kettle.

“Yesterday! Dream team’s here, poring over the wonders of asphalt curing times and you were—what? You took off for lunch, and … now it’s Sunday?
What happened?”

She thought about what to say, and what not to say. It was tricky and awful, all at once, because she couldn’t really tell Bette about Bonilla and Duran—or she’d seem like a lunatic. But she couldn’t lie about it, either, because the truth would eventually come out. It had to. She
wanted
it to. Until then … “Things are real complicated, right now.”

Bette’s jaw dropped.

“You want some coffee?” Adrienne asked.

Bette blinked, milking the moment. Finally, she said, “Okaaaaay … so, when did Slough get you?”

Adrienne levered two paper cups off the stack, separated them, and spooned out the shiny crystals of coffee. “‘Get me’?”

Bette blanched. “You mean—you haven’t
talked
to him yet? Oh my God. You haven’t been home?”

Adrienne frowned. “Not exactly.”

“Well, I hope he was worth it,” Bette said, “whoever he was, because … you didn’t even check your messages?”

Adrienne shook her head for the second time.

Bette raised her eyes to the ceiling, and sighed. “Well, he left,
we
left—a lot of messages for you.”

Shit.
Adrienne’s heart stalled for a moment, and she didn’t know quite what to say. Finally, she blurted, “So … what’s going on?”

Bette giggled—nervously—at what she thought was Adrienne’s indifference. “Well, there’s been some kind of meltdown in San Diego. Slough was flaps up hours ago. And, basically—you-the-man!”

“What do you mean, I’m the man.”

“You’re deposing McEligot.”

“What?! When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“But—” Adrienne began, “I’ve never deposed
anybody.
I’m
not prepared.
I don’t know—Jesus, Bette!”

“Well, some of us are actually jealous. I mean—”

A quiet, high-pitched moan from Adrienne. The kettle shrilled. She picked it up and poured water into the cups, then stirred each one.

“He said he was sending you his prep work,” Bette told her in a reassuring voice. “So you should check your e-mail. On the other hand, he was really in a hurry, so … who knows?” She sipped her coffee and headed for the door. “Delicious. Anyway … lucky you!”

“Wait a second,” Adrienne asked, groaning inwardly at the prospect of another all-nighter. “Have you seen Bill around?”

“Bill who? You mean Fellowes?”

“Unh-huh.”

“Not for a couple of days. He’s in Detroit. I don’t think he’s back until Tuesday.”

When Bette had gone, Adrienne called Bill Fellowes’s number at home, and left a message on his machine, asking him to call her.

That done, she logged onto the Internet and checked her e-mail. There were eight messages: two jokes, forwarded by friends; a couple of come-ons from AOL and E*Trade; and four bulletins from Slough, which boiled down to: 1) Call me. 2) Where
are
you? 3) You’re deposing McEligot. And 4) Here’s my prep work. (You’ll have to flesh it out a little.) Go get ’em!