I avoid the highway and take Independence home because I don’t trust myself to drive my bike at a high speed right now. I keep my motorcycle steady and don’t try to pass anybody. I’m looking through cloudy, tear-soaked eyes, and my hands are trembling so feverishly I can hardly keep my grip.
Independence is a slightly more direct route—4.44 miles door-to-door, to be precise, compared to 4.8 miles on the highway—but it’s slightly longer, 15.8 minutes compared to 13.2. This time of night, with traffic more sparse, the gap should narrow. Over the last nine months, the Independence route has varied from twenty-two minutes and eighteen seconds to eleven minutes and five seconds, but I’ve never been able to compare the routes during rush hour because Constitution and Independence have turn restrictions those times of day, so I have to adjust the route, and that obviously throws the comparisons out the window. Like apples to oranges. Oranges to apples.
Apple geraniums.
Fiona Apple should be a bigger star. She should be as popular as Amy Winehouse was. They remind me of each other, those throaty, soulful voices, but Fiona never seemed to take off after “Criminal.” Not that Amy fared much better, ultimately.
Yeah, the way my mind wanders? It gets worse when I get stressed. Dr. Vance had a fancy phrase for it—
adrenaline-induced emotional sanctuary
—but I always thought he was just trying to justify all the money my father was paying him to “fix” me. It took me a long time before I figured out that I suffered from “Pater Crudelis” disorder.
I take Pennsylvania within a block of the White House and, like everything, like a song or a tree or oxygen, it makes me think of Diana.
He’s so talented,
she’d said of the president.
He understands what we’re trying to do like nobody before him.
Oh, Diana. Intelligent, caring, idealistic Diana. Did you do this to yourself? Did somebody kill you? Neither possibility makes sense.
But I’m going to figure it out. It’s what I do for a living, right?
An oncoming SUV honks at me as it passes me in the other direction on Constitution. Only two presidents signed the Constitution, Washington and Madison. Madison was also the shortest president. And the first to have previously served in the United States Cong—
I swerve to avoid the Mazda RX-7 in front of me, gripping the brakes with all the strength my hands can muster. I end up sideways, perpendicular to the cars at my front and rear. Red light means stop, Ben. Focus! You can do this.
Benjamin, the sooner you learn your limitations, the better.
You’re not like everyone else, Benjamin. You never were. Even before—well, even before everything happened with your mother.
You’ll have plenty of time to make friends when you grow up.
Diana was my friend. And she could have been much more. She
would
have been.
I can do this. I just need to take some medicine. I just need to get home.
Light turns green. I right the bike and move forward.
Diana Marie Hotchkiss. Marie was her aunt’s name; Diana was her grandmother’s name. Born January 11, 1978, in Madison, Wisconsin, played volleyball and softball, won the award for outstanding Spanish student from Edgewood High School of the Sacred Heart, from which she graduated in 1995—
Honking; someone’s honking at me for something I did; what did I do?
“Shut up and leave me alone!” I yell, not that I expect a response from the car behind me—or that they’ll even hear me.
“Pull your motorcycle over and kill the engine!”
booms a voice through a loudspeaker.
I look in my rearview mirror and notice for the first time the flashing lights. It’s not an angry motorist.
It’s a cop.
This should be interesting.
I pull my motorcycle to the side of Constitution and kill the engine.
The first reported murder of a cop was in 1792 in New York in what is now the South Bronx. The perpetrator was a guy named Ryer, from a prominent farming family, who was involved in a drunken brawl at the time. Want to hear the funny part?
“How we doing tonight?” says the cop, walking over to me. I’m illuminated by the searchlight from his car, which he’s trained on me.
The funny part is that one of the police precincts in the Bronx is located on Ryer Avenue, named after that same family.
I give him my license and registration. He probably already traced my plates. He already knows who I am.
“You wanna take off your helmet, sir?”
Actually, no, I don’t. But I do it anyway. He takes a long look in my eyes. It can’t be a pretty sight.
“Do you know why I pulled you over, Mr. Casper?”
Because you can? Because you have the power to stop, frisk, search, seize, and arrest pretty much whoever you want whenever the mood strikes you? Because you’re a constipated, impotent, Napoleonic transvestite?
“I lost control back there a bit,” I concede.
“You just about caused an accident,” he says. He has a handlebar mustache. Is this cop on loan from the Village People?
I don’t favor facial hair, but even if I did, I wouldn’t shape it like a handlebar. I’d probably go with the two-day stubble Don Johnson wore in
Miami Vice
. That would be cool.
“You crossed the centerline three times in one block,” he says.
I decide to exercise my right against self-incrimination. And pray that he doesn’t ask me what’s in my bag—like night-vision goggles or a used smoke alarm or some rudimentary tools. Or the body frosting I took from Diana’s closet.
I need to get home. I need time to think, to figure this out.
“Have you been drinking tonight, sir?”
He’s standing pretty close to me. One of the hazards of pulling over a motorcyclist. I could reach over in jest and grab his baton or the handcuffs on his belt, maybe his holstered weapon, before he could say
doughnut
. He probably wouldn’t think it’s funny.
But if he gets too inquisitive, I might not be joking. I may have mentioned that sometimes I don’t trust myself.
“Sober as a priest,” I answer. Actually, my priest when I was growing up, Father Calvin, was a raging alcoholic.
“Something upsetting you tonight?” he asks.
Well, the night started off okay, when I successfully planted surveillance equipment in the home of the woman I love. It took a turn for the worse when she later plummeted to her death.
HOW DOES THAT SOUND, COP?
“Fight with my girlfriend,” I explain. “Sorry about my riding. I was just a little worked up. I’m totally sober and I’ll drive home carefully. I’m on the Hill, just five minutes away.”
I can play normal when I have to. He looks me over for a while, watches my eyes, and then tells me to sit tight. He takes my license and registration back to his vehicle. He isn’t going to find anything interesting. I don’t have a criminal record—not one that he’d find, anyway.
Ulysses S. Grant was once stopped for speeding on his horse. The fine was twenty dollars and he insisted on paying it. Franklin Pierce was once arrested for hitting an old lady with his horse, but the charges were dropped.
“You’re a reporter,” the cop informs me when he returns. “The
Capital Beat
. I’ve read your stuff before. Thought I recognized the name.”
Actually, I’m the White House correspondent, and I also own the company. The benefits of having a wealthy grandfather. Does that mean he won’t write me a ticket?
Nope. He cites me for reckless driving and crossing the centerline. It seems duplicative to me, but now is not the time to engage in a debate about logic. I just want him to let me go, which he’s going to do, albeit with tickets for moving violations. That’s the good news. The other good news is that, in a bizarre way, this cop has calmed me down, forced me somewhere toward normal.
The bad news is that now I’ve been placed near Diana’s building within an hour of her death.
I don’t sleep but I dream: of a gun on a bathroom floor; of a woman prone on a sidewalk; of blood spatter on a shower curtain; of vacant, lifeless eyes; of a scream nobody can hear; of a blood droplet in free fall, taking the shape of a sphere before striking a surface without a sound.
“Diana,” I say aloud. My head pops up. I get up from the second-floor landing and rush downstairs. Did I hear her voice?
“Diana?”
I check the kitchen, the family room, the bathroom.
Outside, the darkness is gently dissolving. Dawn. Seven hours have passed in what felt like seven decades, torturous, agonizing. My body is covered in sweat and my pulse is just starting to slow. My limbs ache and I’m breathing as if someone is standing on my chest.
I race to the front door and look through the keyhole: a white panel truck is parked directly outside my town house. Coincidence? A couple of joggers are running through Garfield Park, across the street. My neighbor’s giant schnauzer, Oscar, is urinating on my brick walkway. Giant schnauzers freak me out. People should only have the small kind. They don’t make sense being that tall. They remind me of Wilford Brimley for some reason. That guy’s been sixty years old my entire life.
President Johnson had at least three dogs, mostly beagles, including two he named Him and Her. George Washington kept foxhounds, but he loved all dogs. During the Battle of Germantown, his troops came upon a terrier that belonged to British general Howe, his sworn enemy. His troops wanted to keep it as a trophy, but Washington bathed it, fed it, and then called a cease-fire so that one of his men could return the pooch to his owner across enemy lines under a flag of truce. FDR had a dog he took every—
Just then, a kid appears out of nowhere and hurls a newspaper at my front door.
I duck down, which makes no sense, then silently curse Paper Boy—he’ll get his, one day soon—and then decide that I should probably have taken my medicine last night. But no time for that now. I need to get out of here.
First I need to shower, because I stink with sweat and that vanilla body frosting from Diana’s closet. I think you’re supposed to have somebody else in the room when you use it. Calvin Coolidge liked to have Vaseline rubbed on his head while he ate breakfast in bed. “Vasoline” is second only to “Interstate Love Song” as the Stone Temple Pilots’ best song. I probably should have taken a pill last night, but I don’t like the side effects, which include mild nausea, ringing in the ears, and, oh yeah, impotence.
It keeps you from getting down, and it keeps you from getting it up.
Not that impotence is my number one problem right now. You need another person in the room for that endeavor, too, last I checked. I’ve had sex with eight women a total of ninety-nine times. The shortest encounter, from foreplay to climax, was three minutes and roughly fourteen seconds. I say
roughly
because sometimes it’s a little awkward to go straight to the stopwatch afterward, so you estimate: it takes five seconds to withdraw and between five and ten seconds to pay her a compliment before checking your wrist discreetly.
The longest encounter, if you’re wondering, was forty-seven minutes and roughly thirty seconds. Taking all my encounters together, and using round numbers, the mean duration is twenty-one minutes, the median is eighteen minutes, and the mode is seventeen. My math tutor, Miss Greenlee, would be proud. Because every time with her was over thirty minutes.
I’ve never had a long-term girlfriend, though. For some reason, most of them thought I wasn’t romantic.
Until Diana. We connected. We’re all puzzle pieces on a huge board, and she and I, well, our jagged edges just fit together. Even if she hadn’t figured it out yet.
I turn on the shower water but whip my head back around. What was that?
I throw a towel around my waist and rush to the bedroom window, overlooking F Street. The white panel truck is still parked directly across from my town house. My quaint little tree-lined street is blossoming as the city awakens. More dogs are running around now in Garfield Park, but not that giant schnauzer.
I walk to my staircase and remain still, listening for anything on the two floors below.
Nothing.
Satisfied, I return to the bedroom. A blast of music erupts, thrashing guitars, thumping bass, almost knocking me to the carpet. “Fine Again,” by Seether. I take a moment to recover from what could have been a coronary. It must be 6:30 a.m. I have my clock radio alarm set to DC101.
I turn the shower water past hot and let the scalding water punish my neck. My eyelids are heavy and my legs are rubbery. Staying up all night has handicapped me now, when I need to focus more than ever.
Because now I’m going back to Diana’s apartment.
I take my motorcycle back the same way I came last night. The streets are relatively quiet, as it’s not quite seven in the morning, plus Congress isn’t in session, which means its coattails—staffers, interest groups, lobbyists, even reporters—have thinned out considerably. We’re still packed into the city like sardines, but everything’s relative. I can feel the heat index rise as I move down Constitution again. It’s going to be hotter than yesterday.
There’s so much I don’t know at this point. I don’t know what Diana was doing yesterday, either in the daytime or in the evening. I just know that my instruction was to be out of her apartment by ten o’clock.
Ten o’clock was Calvin Coolidge’s typical bedtime. He usually slept until somewhere between seven and nine the next morning, plus he took an afternoon nap. He used to joke,
When I’m asleep, I can’t make any bad decisions
. President Arthur rarely went to bed before two in the morning. President Polk routinely worked late into the night and rose early, but then he died from exhaustion three months after completing his one term. He did purchase California, though, which some people consider a plus.
What happened after I slipped out of her apartment a couple minutes before ten? The elevator door I heard opening—was that Diana? Was she alone? And why was it so important that I be gone by ten?
I feel my pulse ratchet up as I cruise along K Street, driving along the Georgetown Waterfront Park, watching some kayakers on the Potomac, approaching 33rd. Truman was our thirty-third president but the thirty-second to hold the office, as Grover Cleveland was elected to two nonconsecutive terms, losing his reelection bid to Benjamin Harrison in 1888 even though he won the popular vote. But then he thwarted Harrison’s reelection bid and won a second term four years after his first, when Harrison was unable to campaign because of his wife’s illness.
Maybe I should have taken my medication.
I take a right onto 33rd and ride north toward the canal and Diana’s apartment building. I park my ride a block short and walk up the street, sweating from the humidity—already—and probably some nerves, too.
I feel like Bruce Willis in
Pulp Fiction
,
returning to his apartment after he killed his boxing opponent and betrayed a mobster. If John Travolta were waiting for me inside, I’d ask him why he did
Battlefield Earth
. If I had a Bruce Willis film festival, I would watch
The Sixth Sense,
Die Hard
,
Unbreakable
,
and
Pulp.
And probably
Ocean’s Twelve
,
even though he just played himself. Hey, it’s my film festival, my rules.
This could be risky. I have to be careful about being seen. I have a key to her place, but some people might recognize me. I wish I had one of those realistic masks like they wore in the
Mission: Impossible
movies, the ones they dramatically rip off to reveal their true identities. But it’s just lonely old Benjamin. I don’t particularly stand out. I’ve become good at blending into the woodwork. People used to tell me I look like my father, which they meant as a compliment, even though I welcomed it like a tetanus shot. Diana said I looked like Johnny Depp. Maybe I should be disguised as a pirate. Or John Dillinger. Or Willy Wonka.
As I get closer, I feel my chest constricting, my throat and mouth drying up, my limbs becoming unsteady. This is where Diana’s life ended last night. It hasn’t really sunk in yet. I’ve been punched, but the bruise hasn’t yet formed. My brain knows it, and my body is physically responding, but somehow it doesn’t seem real yet.
And then it does. Then it crystallizes. The image of her falling comes into focus and I want to rewind time, like Superman did to save Lois Lane, and find out what was happening with Diana that I didn’t know, what caused someone to kill her or prompted her to take her own life.
Tell me, Diana, give me something, tell me how I can figure
—
A man in civilian clothes is standing very close to the spot where Diana landed, looking up at the balcony. Unless he’s an architect or a real estate agent or a big fan of balconies, he’s probably one of DC’s finest. He looks over at me and I see the mustache, which seals it. This guy’s a cop, investigating Diana’s death.
And having lost myself in my thoughts, I’ve made a terrible blunder. I’m only ten feet from him, and now I’ve seen him and come to a complete, dead stop in response, in the middle of the sidewalk. Which, of course, makes me stick out to him. He turns and looks at me. I stare back. Neither of us says a word. This is getting worse with every second that passes. This is what Uma Thurman in
Pulp Fiction
called an uncomfortable silence. I wonder if he can hear the throbbing of my pulse.
It’s way too late to start up again and walk past him casually. Headlong flight is an option, and, looking the guy over, I see that I could probably take him in a footrace, but all in all that seems like a last-resort idea, and maybe he saw me park my bike, so even if I got away clean, it would take him one call on his radio to know all about me—including the fact that I was in the neighborhood last night, driving erratically and acting upset.
Oh, this is really going well, Ben. Nice idea, coming here.
He takes a step toward me. He folds a stick of gum into his mouth and nods to me.
“Morning,” he says with a practiced calm. But I can tell. He can see it in my eyes. He’s better than handlebar-mustache patrol guy from last night. His antennae are up. He knows.
He knows
.
What now, smart guy?
“You live around here?” he asks, like it’s just idle curiosity, like he’s about to ask me for directions to the Washington Monument.
I don’t answer. Instead, my left hand reaches around behind my back. I move casually, with a smile on my face to keep his threat radar low.
In one seasoned, fluid motion, he disengages the cover on his hip holster and eases his hand over the revolver.