Authors: Dale Wiley
“I lost my hat and wig,” I said.
“Are you okay?”
“Well, my shoulder hurts even more, and now I’m sore as hell
all over, but, other than that, I’m okay.”
“You’re alive.”
“Don’t remind me.”
After being carried by an adrenaline rush which had
practically flown us to the car, Tabitha managed to calm herself enough to
drive the car fairly well, which was a great deal more than I could’ve done. I
was so high and exhausted that I didn’t have a headache, but every other nerve
in my body was sending messages to my brain that I didn’t want to get: dull
pain, sharp pain, scratches from the branches, a strawberry on my knee, which
peeked out from under the new tear in jeans that weren’t even mine, and a big
mother splinter in my right hand—through the surgical gloves,
nonetheless—courtesy of the doghouse. I tried to lay back and do the yoga stuff
I had learned in a short, George Harrison-inspired attempt at Eastern inner
peace, but I was sure even nirvana still couldn’t do much to cure a shoulder
separation. So I bit my lip and felt sorry for myself and waited for us to get
back to the Watergate.
Tabitha parked the car in the garage, and we took the same
secretive route back to the room. Our room was on the opposite end of the floor,
and we took the distance like two veteran cops on a drug raid. Tabitha would
move quickly down the hall to a nook where I could hide and then motion me to
follow. I would get there, and she would move on. We covered the ground in four
short bursts, and no one saw us.
It was nearly one o’clock now, and, when we got inside the
door, I headed straight for the bathroom and washed the yellow gunk off of my
eyebrows. Then I went to the mini-bar and grabbed one of those teensy bottles
of Jack Daniels. I downed it in one long draw and got a long look from Tabitha.
“We have work to do.”
“I’m in pain.”
“You’re in trouble, too,” she said as she grabbed the zip
disk out of the backpack and put it in the computer. “No more whiskey. Order us
some room service.” I did what I was told and then returned to watch her work.
“I got two kinds of files,” she said. “Word processing files
and Quicken accounting files. There was a good bit of stuff on there, but I
have no idea if it’s worth anything or not. How much do you know about
computers?”
I explained to her that the extent of my expertise was
plugging in—and this was often a struggle—turning on, turning off, pointing,
clicking, and typing. I had literally no idea what a zip disk was. She told me
it could hold almost a hundred megatons of information, and I nodded my head. I
knew this was a lot. I nodded some more.
“I’m gonna print out all the word processing documents, and
you can start looking through them while I’m looking at the accounting stuff,”
she said. I knew at that moment that I was no longer in control of my destiny,
that the shots were now being called by a legal secretary-turned-prostitute.
Oddly enough, this made me feel a little better.
She started printing and explained that she found the novel
and that it was almost three hundred pages long, so she would print it last. I
started into the first pile she handed me.
It was about twenty pages, and it was all poetry. Mark
considered himself somewhat of a bard, evidently, and wrote volumes, none of it
very good. He wrote the kind of poetry that made you wish that rhyming and
meter had never gone out of style, because he just dragged on about emptiness
and blackness,
and divided
his lines
like this.
I had many friends who considered bad poetry to be a crime,
but I was hoping to get something a little more concrete. The second batch
contained more bad poetry, copies of the letters to agents regarding the novel,
a personal essay about a break-up, which wasn’t half bad, and a resume, which
left no clues that I could see but did allow me to know he had gone to all the
right schools and had won more awards than Mother Teresa.
This was depressing. Tabitha ordered more paper from the
concierge, and it came about the same time the food did. I hid in the closet
when both arrived and took a break from my Helper research to eat. By this
time, the whiskey was rolling around in my stomach, giving me a slight buzz
which didn’t make any of my pain go away, like it does in country songs, but at
least sent my mind in other directions—to Stephanie.
God, I still liked her, and I wanted her to know all of
this. I liked her brain, her body, and I felt great when I was around her. And
she hated me. Literally, hated me. This thought weighed almost as heavily on me
as the more serious things I was facing.
Tabitha at least believed in me enough to help. Still, it
wasn’t Tabitha’s ex-boyfriend who was dead. And even assuming we could find
anything criminal and end up with someone else in the slammer, I still wasn’t
sure I would ever be able to pass muster again with her. This was just all too
strange.
“Found anything?” Tabitha asked finally.
“Just some bad poetry.”
“How bad?”
I turned up my nose. “Jim Morrison bad.”
“I’m not much on poetry anyway. More of a fiction gal,
myself.”
“Really?” I asked, kicking myself when I did.
Her eyes narrowed and she sneered. “Yeah. Not all whores are
illiterate.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” I said softly and meant it.
She paused. “I know. Yeah, that’s actually why Stephanie and
I became friends at the law firm. I was the only girl who could out-read her.”
“What do you like to read?”
“Mysteries. I think that’s partly why I helped.”
I nodded. “Well, Sherlock, found anything?”
She made a curdled milk face. “I’ve found a couple of
things,” she said between bites. “Helper’s financial situation got appreciably
better about a year and a half ago.”
I made some calculations. That wouldn’t have been long after
he came to the NEA; he wouldn’t have had enough time to get a raise.
“Can you tell where the money was coming from?”
“A trust account. We did a decent amount of estates and
trusts work at the firm, so I know a little about that stuff. There’s not much
info on the computer on it, but it mentions ‘Aunt Kat’ in a memo line.”
“Was he getting a steady payment from it?”
“No, different amounts. That’s the weird thing. I’ve got
some more places to check after we get done.”
Through our entire lunch, the printer continued to spit out
sections of Helper’s novel. Occasionally, I gathered them up and set them on
the table, so they wouldn’t end up scattering everywhere, making a point not to
read any of it. That was going to be a real joy, along with the last batch of
other crap.
I put my plate on the same tray that hers was on and handed
it to her to place in the hall. The printer was now done spitting out Helper’s
masterpiece, and I jogged the pages into one pile and put it aside. I took the
last pile of other documents and examined them.
There were various letters to family members, irate
editorials, and the same stack of letters to editors I had seen in his desk.
Nothing which would help me, though. I put everything but the novel in a pile
and began that arduous task.
There were no ways out. That’s what Jess said. And on the
languid, long summer nights, when the heat stayed down, oppressive, close like
a phantom floating just above the soggy red earth, I kind of believed him. It
took years to get that place out of my head, years and thousands of psychic
miles, rolling down the highway towards the dawn.
Ugh.
Intolerable. I decided immediately to do the high school
book report thing and just read the first sentence of every paragraph, but the
thesaurus-inspired adjectives and adverbs were enough to make me gag anyway. I
hoped Tabitha would be done soon and ready to concoct a concrete plan to save
me.
I was on page twenty-five, reading about how backwards
everyone was except him, when she finally looked up. “The trust is the only
thing I can find that’s at all fishy,” she said. “He bought his house
afterward, bought his new car, everything.”
“And it could be legit,” I frowned.
“And I would say it was if all your evidence didn’t point to
him leading an international conspiracy against you.”
“So what do we need to do?”
“We need to find out from his bank about the trust. This
will not be easy. And then we need to find out where the money is coming from
and if anyone’s helping him at the other organizations.”
“We can get financial records of Regionarts from the web,” I
said, trying to be helpful. “I imagine the other two will be a little harder.”
Tabitha proposed to start with McHolland, since it was in
DC. I figured that there would be info on some kind of intranet, reachable if
you just had the right phone number. We didn’t have the right phone numbers.
She suggested going down there, getting into the system operator’s office and
getting the number. “That wouldn’t be too dangerous.”
“And what am I going to do?”
“Stay here and hide.”
I shook my head. “I have to be a part of any action.”
She bristled and talked to me like I was in preschool. “Sit
down and cut out that macho bullshit. I see way too much macho. This is not a
complex task. I’ll take a cab and go get the number and be back here,” she
looked at her watch, “in an hour or so.” It was about two-thirty.
I frowned, knowing she was right. She dressed
conservatively, in the secretary outfit, and headed out after getting some of
the money which was rightfully the Senator’s. I managed to make it a whole
twenty minutes before I was itching for something to do.
Nineteen
B
elieve me, it wasn’t easy. I wanted
so bad to go with her that I could almost taste it. And I have no idea why,
because I was an absolute target on the street. I think that when you’re on the
run you develop an indescribable desire to have a hand in your own survival,
but that may be too highbrow; it may be that I was just antsy.
So I took yet another nice, long, soapy, hot, relaxing,
wonderful, stress-relieving bath and then pulled on my boxers and my T-shirt
and fell into bed under the new sheets the maid had put on while we were
breaking and entering. I turned on the TV to see what stunt I had pulled now.
They reported finding my car at the airport—so much for the old license plate
switcheroo—and said they were checking videotapes of passengers boarding
flights. I wondered if the police weren’t saying that as a smoke screen and
began to worry about the cabbie. Would he remember me, and would he rat if he
did? He didn’t look at me much. He was in his own world. And, for the time
being, I was hoping he would stay there. But I didn’t occupy as much of the
news as I had the day before. I even worried about that for a minute.
I turned off the TV, reluctantly got out of bed, and grabbed
the
Post
, which I hadn’t even read in all our hurry that morning. You
get the
Post
, as my mom says, free gratis when you stay at the
Watergate, which is not all that good a deal since the paper only costs a
quarter. It had my picture as the lead suspect on the front page.
They had now taken the picture of me in my chunky days—why
didn’t anyone else give them a better picture? Maybe my friends were loyal;
maybe the press didn’t know who to ask—and turned it into a police drawing of
what I would look like a few years older and with shorter hair. I guess someone
had told them that I had lost weight, so this new picture was gaunt, and really
didn’t resemble me as much as Tony Danza on diet pills. The artist gave me
these crazy bug eyes, which just proclaimed Congressman Killer. I really needed
to get a scrapbook.
On page three, there was an account of my life, which, like
the page one article, had been written by none other than Gerald Greer, the
famed skirt-chaser and arts writer. He mentioned that I drank in high school,
left out the parts about me being in Student Council and National Honor Society,
and talked again about how much of a loner I was in college.
I wanted to sue them for printing that loner shit; I had
lots of friends. But I realized if they were reading any of the information
they saw in the papers, they weren’t exactly ready to run to the phone and
contradict the reporters; it looked like I was pretty damn guilty. And they
were probably thinking—as I would have in the exact same situation—that it just
showed how little we knew about people and yadda, yadda, yadda.
And this was one of the better papers! I picked up the phone
and put on the clam chowdah accent and called the concierge. I told him to
bring me a copy of
USA Today
and a copy of the
New York Post
.
Within minutes, someone was there with the papers, and, after telling him to
leave them on my door and waiting until he left, I collected the papers and
went inside. I pulled back out the
Washington Post
and started doing a
comparison.
The Washington Post
“Timmons’ Alleged Slayer Kept to Himself”
by Gerald Greer
The alleged assassin of Gregory Timmons was a personable loner,
his sources and friends said after hearing his name mentioned in connection
with a variety of crimes. Trent Norris, an intern at the National Endowment for
the Arts, who hasn’t been seen since Wednesday morning, found more time for
books than socializing during college …
My professors and parents would not have agreed.
… and was known for a virulent …
Thesaurus, anyone?
… opposition to authority.
I will admit that I have never, ever really liked to be told
what to do.
Norris went to college in Atlanta at Emory University, a
respected and expensive liberal arts school. There he majored in English but
spent most of his time writing for the student paper …