Paramour (12 page)

Powers left his car and hurried across the street. From there he had a clear view of the beauty shop window. Inside, Marilyn spoke briefly with a tall, platinum-haired female hairdresser wearing skintight black pants and an equally restrictive pink top. Then she sat down in a beauty chair near a sink. The hairdresser moved behind the chair and adjusted the chair back to rest Marilyn's neck on the edge of the sink, turned the water on, and began to wash Marilyn's hair.

The apartment was finally empty! Powers jogged
across to his car and sped back to Scott Circle. Parking around the corner from Marilyn's building, he opened his briefcase and took out the screwdriver and gloves. Shoving one glove in each pocket of his sport jacket, he slid the screwdriver up the left sleeve and left the car. Walking around the comer to the apartment house, he held the screwdriver in place with his closed palm.

At the front entrance, he looked around quickly, then allowed the screwdriver to drop into his hand. Slipping its tip between the jamb and the door, he gave a firm pull to the left. The lock snapped open. Without looking back, he slipped the screwdriver back up his sleeve and moved rapidly across the lobby. Inside the elevator, he pressed the button for 7.

At the seventh floor, he got off the elevator and counted doors down a hallway to Marilyn's apartment. He looked both ways, then got out the screwdriver.

From his right came the sound of a door opening. With his breathing at full stop, Powers shoved the screwdriver back up his sleeve and, without turning his head, knocked casually on Marilyn's door as a visitor would.

A short gray-haired woman carrying a large leather purse came out of the apartment next door and headed toward the elevator. Powers smiled as she walked past. Seemingly unalarmed, she smiled back. The woman stepped onto an elevator and turned to face the front. The doors closed.

Allowing himself to breathe again, Powers used the screwdriver to force the lock. The door wouldn't budge. He tried again, applying more power. There was a creaking sound. He stopped. He could hear himself breathing. Again he tried, applying even greater force. The doorjamb creaked loudly, and the lock snapped open. Powers pushed on the door and stepped inside.

He closed the door behind him gently so as not to make noise. With the feeling that his heart was beating uncontrollably in his throat, he put his ear to the door and listened for a moment to determine if he'd alerted any neighbors. There was no sound in the hallway. He took a deep breath, let it out, and turned to face the room. There was a faint smell of perfume ... a perfume, unless he was mistaken, different from the brand he'd smelled when Marilyn had walked into La Serre.

The living room was furnished neatly with a plaid sofa and sectional, a wall lamp, and a tall bookcase. On the walls were landscape prints: a waterfall gushing into a lake, a forest near a stream. The furnishings were the opposite of what he had expected. Perhaps because of the trendy way she dressed, her confident recherché gait, he would have guessed she would choose Art Deco or Danish Modern rather than such traditional furnishings. But, after knowing Senator Victor Garland Danforth, a nattily dressed conservative former Republican presidential candidate Powers had once been assigned to protect, he had learned that image didn't always fit with digs. Danforth lived in a filthy three-bedroom house in Silver Springs, Maryland, with a sloppy alcoholic wife and at least twenty ringwormy cats and dogs.

Powers pulled the gloves from his pockets and put them on.

In the bedroom, the fragrance of perfume was stronger. On the facing wall, a large framed print of Gainsborough's
Blue Boy
was hanging over a queen-sized bed covered with a flowered print bedspread. The walnut dresser was Queen Anne style and had a tall oval-shaped mirror. Women's toiletries were scattered across the top of the dresser, including two small black glass bottles of Passion perfume sitting in a small porcelain tray.

At the closet, he slid the door open. It was bursting with women's clothes. On the floor, extending from one side of the closet to the other, was a neat line of paired women's shoes.

Moving quickly, he opened dresser drawers. The top right-hand drawer was filled with scraps of paper: laundry and credit card receipts, canceled checks, telephone bills bearing Marilyn's name, pens and pencils, and other miscellany. He checked the other drawers and the rest of the room and found nothing out of the ordinary.

In the living room, he removed the sofa cushions and checked them carefully, then turned the sofa upside down and checked underneath by running his gloved hand along the frame from end to end. There were no places where the covering had been altered. Turning the sofa upright again, he replaced the cushions. He checked the rest of the furniture in the room the same way.

Most of the books in the bookcase were on foreign affairs and international relations, though there were a few Raymond Carver short story collections. He began lifting books from the shelves one by one and flipping them open. Starting from the top, he completed the first, second, and third rows, replacing each book precisely where he had taken it. From the second-to-last row, he took out a Raymond Carver book titled
Fires
and fanned its pages quickly. Something heavy fell to the carpet. He knelt down and picked up a Minox miniature camera the size of a cigarette lighter. The pages of the book had been hollowed out to fit it. His breathing quickened as he checked the frame counter window. There was no film in the camera.

Replacing the camera in the hollowed portion of the book, he set the book back on the shelf from where he'd taken it and checked the rest of the books on the shelves thoroughly. There was nothing in them except a few bookmarks from DC bookstores. His hands were sweating inside the gloves.

He checked the kitchen quickly, opening and closing drawers. There was little in the refrigerator: some soup in a Tupperware bowl, lunchmeat in butcher paper, assorted jars of pickles and preserves. The freezer section was filled with stacks of TV dinners. Powers carefully opened a few of the packages at random-nothing. To cover the torn package ends, he restacked them facing the rear of the freezer.

On the kitchen table was a week-old
Washington Post
, a sealed box of shredded wheat, a
Vanity Fair
magazine, and a photograph of Marilyn standing alone in front of the domed colonnade of the Jefferson Memorial. It appeared to be dusk in the photo, and the looming statue behind her was lighted. Her arms were crossed and she was wearing a conservatively cut black business suit with a red scarf. Her expression - rather than playful or carefree, as in a shot taken by a friend or relative on holiday - was anxious, as if she might have been impatient with posing.

Also on the table was a
New York Times
newspaper clipping with a photo of an abstract brass sculpture that looked like a twisted leg. The article, about a West German art show, was entitled DOCUMENTA: A SENSE
OF THE ABSTRACT.

In the cupboard below the sink, behind some containers of dishwashing soap, scouring powder, and other kitchen supplies, was a cardboard box. Reaching inside, he lifted the box out of the cupboard and set it on the floor. Inside were a plastic photo developer pan, some bottles of developer solution, a light exposure meter, and two tiny film rolls for what he guessed was the miniature camera. The film magazines were empty. He lifted the box and set it back in the cupboard.

He tugged his sleeve and glanced at his wristwatch. He'd been inside the apartment for over twenty minutes. Other than tearing out the walls and ripping up the furniture piece by piece, there was nothing else to check.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway.

Electrified with fear, Powers moved to the front door. There was movement outside, a rattling of keys. He ripped off the gloves and dropped them on the floor.

Suddenly there was the sound of a baby crying. A door opened and closed and the baby's crying became muffled. Powers felt himself breathing normally again. He grabbed the gloves and shoved one in his pocket. Using the other one to cover the doorknob, he turned it slowly, opened the door a couple of feet, and stepped into the hallway. Discreetly, he shoved the remaining glove into a pocket, then checked the lock carefully. Though there was a small indentation in the doorjamb from the screwdriver, it wasn't clearly obvious. Using a handkerchief, he wiped the doorknob, closed the door gently, hurried to the elevator, and stepped on.

As the elevator door closed, he had the feeling he'd forgotten something-
the
screwdriver!
He
grabbed his sleeve. It was there.

Downstairs, he crossed the lobby and went out the front door.

From a pay phone at the Gramercy Park, he phoned Sullivan's private number. Sullivan answered on the first ring.

"It's done."

"Already?"

"She went to the beauty shop, so I figured it was as good a time as any," Powers said.

"Was there anything..."

"She keeps a Minox camera in a hollowed book. I checked. There's no film in it."

"Anything else?"

"The makings of a photo developing kit with a couple of empty Minox cartridges."

"What kind of a place is it, Jack?"

"Well kept, no expensive clothes or furniture. Nothing to show she's living over her head. If anything, the place was drab. Your average DC apartment."

"Any evidence of others living there?"

"None."

"Amateur photographers don't use miniature cameras. The Minox has to mean something."

"There's something else. The place didn't have the personal touch. I found only one photograph in the entire apartment, and there were no scrapbooks or diaries or letters ... things women usually have."

"She works for the CIA. They don't allow people to keep diaries."

"It's not just that. There was nothing male in the place. No keepsake from a boyfriend, nothing. That's strange for a good-looking woman like her. There has to be someone."

"There is."

"I mean from before. Something didn't seem right to me."

"Frankly, I don't find this as strange as you do. She's a professional career type, not a bimbo. Did you have any problems getting in or out of the place?"

"None."

"Way to go, Jack. I owe you one. I mean that."

"A Minox would have been perfect to bring with her to ... the camp," Powers said. Even over a secure line, he didn't want to risk mentioning Camp David.

"I agree. But, unfortunately, the fact that she owns a miniature camera doesn't add up to much. We need her to make some unmistakable move. You'd better stay on her."

"If I sit here on Scott Circle much longer, someone is going to get wise."

"For now, continue to march."

"You're the boss."

The phone clicked.

Powers set the receiver back on the hook and headed across the lobby to the entrance. He pulled open a glass door and exited.

A taxi had pulled up in front of the apartment house. Marilyn got out of the back seat and walked to the front door. Thank God he hadn't stayed inside the apartment any longer!

The rest of the day went by slowly, and Powers listened to talk radio: the
Brad Crocker Show.
The topic for the evening was Crocker's proposal for Congress to allocate a portion of the New Mexico desert as a national penal colony to solve the DC prison shortage. Because Crocker selected which callers to put on the air, they all agreed with him.

Shortly after 10 P.M. a man wearing a suit walked across the street toward the apartment house from the direction of the Gramercy Hotel. As he crossed under the streetlight, Powers recognized him: CIA agent Bob Miller.

Miller walked past the front door of the apartment house and continued about fifty yards down the block. He stopped, returned to the entrance, and loitered about in front for a minute or so. Finally, he moved to the door and took a key ring from his pocket. He opened the door, entered the lobby, and stepped into an elevator.