by Dale Wiley
“Which one?” she answered, and I nearly lost it.
“The one,” I said, taking a chance.
“Oh. Mr. Stanky! We haven’t heard from you in a while. How can I help you?”
“I need a guhl. It’s for my nephew.”
“Same nephew as last time?”
“Different one.”
“The one from California?”
I didn’t want to drag this on, so I said yes.
“Does he still like all those … nursery rhymes?”
Believe me, she actually spoke those words in italics.
“Oh, my gosh. Loves ‘em. But he needs a new guhl. Give him the newest guhl you’ve got. He’s at the Watergate, Room 857. Put it on my tab.”
“No one for you? The twins are available …”
I hadn’t anticipated this. “Um … no. I’ve got an … actress to accompany me tonight.” Lame, I thought. Lame.
The voice at the other end practically purred. “I’ll send our newest companion out there immediately. Her name is Desiree.”
That figured. I thanked her and hung up. No matter where she was coming from or how ready she was, I was sure I would have twenty minutes. I put on jeans and my T-shirt—better to be casual—and decided how I was going to handle her entrance.
At first, I thought about standing behind the door and knocking her out or something of the sort, but then I could imagine what the headlines would look like if she were to get away. No, there needed to be no more violence. But I wanted to at least get her in the room before I showed myself; that way I could force her to stay a minute and listen to what I had to say. I finally decided to leave the door open just a crack and wait in the bathroom.
She arrived 23 minutes later. She knocked gently, and I said come in, and then told her I was in the bathroom and to make herself comfortable on the bed.
“I brought some costumes,” she said in a lilting, southern tone.
“Great,” I said, rolling my eyes. In about three seconds, I thought, she would go from thinking I was a weirdo to knowing I was a criminal. I took a deep breath, looked at myself in the mirror to try to give me some resolve, and walked out into the main part of the suite.
And there, on the bed, sat Tabitha.
Stephanie’s best friend.
Chapter
* * *
Fourteen
I don’t know who was more surprised. She looked at me like I was having kittens, and my mouth rested gently on the floor. I had no idea what I would say or do, but I realized she didn’t either. As far as she knew, she was now confronted with a homicidal maniac who had managed to track her down. Her eyes glazed, and she went pale. I could feel my face turning red, despite the fact I was in charge. I wondered when she would notice I wasn’t brandishing a gun.
What do you say to the best friend of someone who you have dated, who you now know to be a lady of the evening, and who believes you have killed her best friend’s boyfriend? What is the correct opening line? I moved, so I was standing between her and the door.
She was wearing another black silk designer dress—even more expensive than the one she had sported the other night—and earrings that were sparkly and heavy. As she saw me appraising her, Tabitha glared at me and began to move back toward the head of the bed, eyeing the phone but not moving toward it. She still didn’t know what I would do. “You can’t get away with this …” she began.
“I’m not …”
“How did you find me?”
“I didn’t …”
“What are you going to do to me?” She looked me dead in the eyes, and I could see she was terrified. I wanted to comfort her, but I knew that would only make her scream.
“Look,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “Look. I just want you to listen. Can you do that?”
She nodded, relaxing a fraction but still terribly wary.
I didn’t know where to start. I moved toward her, and she sprang back, quickly searching for any exit. I grabbed the phone and placed it on the bed by her.
“If at any time you want to call,” I said, “you can call anyone you want. I just want you to listen, though. Will you do that?” She nodded again.
I knew the moment she started to call someone I probably would’ve jumped on top of her and tickled her until she quit, but I wasn’t about to let her know that. I wanted her to feel as safe as you can in the presence of someone you believe to be a spree murderer.
She pulled her knees against her chest and sat there, tense and uncomfortable. I pulled up a chair—still positioning it between her and the door, and tried to tell her the story from beginning to end, but I jumped around a lot, forgetting many things and adding them in as I went along. I told her everything: how I thought Roger had been murdered, the stupid note I wrote, my shoulder separation, and the ol’ license plate switcheroo. And, when I got done, I had no idea whether she believed a single word that I had said. She had listened to everything without a bit of emotion.
I decided to be bold. I walked over and asked her if I could take the phone away. She stared at it longingly, then nodded. I put it back on the table and sat back down. She looked at me in that woman’s intuition way which men hate.
“That’s really far-fetched,” she said, still curled-up and apprehensive.
“It’s just as far-fetched to believe I did it. The only expertise I have with guns is that I once shot a neighbor’s car window out with a BB gun, and I didn’t even mean to do that.”
She smiled. “Get in trouble?”
“I had to pick up walnuts for the rest of the fall.”
She relaxed somewhat, moving to a more comfortable sitting position but still keeping her arms crossed. I wanted very much to ask her exactly how she got into a line of work which involved dressing up like Little Miss Muffet, and I still wanted to know if Stephanie was employed in the same vocation, but I figured I would be pressing my luck.
We sat there, staring and looking away, for too long. She finally spoke. “Why in God’s name did you hire a hooker?”
“I didn’t hire a hooker,” I said. “I hired an assistant.”
“What?” she said, springing up. “Oh no! I’m not getting involved in all of this.”
“You already are, peripherally,” I pointed out.
“No, Stephanie’s involved. Not me. Where’s that phone?” She scrambled toward it, and I was about to have to jump on top of her and stop it. But I tried a sigh and a dejected look instead, glancing at her, and then staring at the floor.
She grabbed the receiver, eyed the keypad, and then finally put it down.
“God damn,” she said quietly.
After another long and painful silence, I moved to the foot of the bed. “Look,” I said. “I had no idea it would be you. You are actually the last—well, the next to last—person in the world I wanted to see—no offense. I just had Stanky’s black book, and I figured there would be as much chance of finding a hooker who would believe me and help me than there was of getting the right cop. At least I could pay a hooker.”
“Stanky could pay …”
I shrugged, trying to look more confident than I felt.
“And what are you going to do about that little situation? Do you realize what you did in Stanky’s office was probably a federal crime?”
Actually, strangely enough, until that moment I hadn’t considered the federal nature of that offense. It seemed so minor in comparison. “I’ll worry about it after the capital crimes against me are dropped.” I tried to say it confidently.
Tabitha waited before speaking, and I let her. She eyed me warily, and I was careful not to make eye contact. I didn’t want to rush her. She got up and walked to the window, and after what seemed like two decades turned around.
“Stephanie liked you,” she said. “She told me.”
“Really?” I tried not to look too jubilant. Then I realized the one woman who liked me and who I liked back now thought I was homicidal. That was my luck.
“Really. She
liked you. She wasn’t head-over-heels, but she was definitely looking forward to seeing you some more.”
This was just one more interesting tidbit. “Then why was Roger over there last night?”
“Roger came over on his own. She didn’t even know he was coming. She had told him on the phone that she was kinda seeing you.”
“When did she tell you?”
“Couple of hours ago.”
“How is she?”
Tabitha wrinkled her nose like she intended to say something snide but then softened. “She’s crazy right now. She doesn’t know whether to be scared of you, or howling mad at you, or both, and she found out that Roger’s parents don’t want her to be at all involved in wrapping up his affairs.”
“Why did Stephanie have to come pick you up the other night?”
She snarled, “Stephanie’s not a hooker, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I was relieved, but I tried to act indignant. “That wasn’t what I meant. What happened to you?”
“You remember that guy I was with? He stiffed me. Pointed a gun at me and took what I had in my purse. You’re supposed to keep an extra twenty hidden just in case something like that happens, but he found that too.”
“Did you have enough money to make it worth his while?”
“That wasn’t the point. He just wanted to make me feel cheap.”
I was going to say more, but she brushed me off. We sat there silent for a long time again, Tabitha staring at the window, me picking at the tag on one of the pillows.
“You didn’t do it, did you?” she finally said.
I smiled and shook my head. “But if you don’t want to be a part of this …” My voice trailed off. I was going to tell her that I understood, beg her not to turn me in, and request she send another hooker, but I wanted to see what she’d say.
She sat on the bed, arms locked just beneath her breasts, staring at me, obviously thinking about my story, about Stephanie, and everything else that had happened. I tried not to meet her gaze, looking at the bedspread, the coffee table, and the ceiling. She finally spoke.
“I’ll help, if I haven’t decided you’re a lunatic by morning. I think it’s useless, and I think you oughta turn yourself in. But it’s not my ass they’re after.”
She was still very cautious, and I wondered if she would help me because she thought it was best to play along with a murderous nut case. I hoped she actually believed me but realized I’d accept her help no matter what her motivations were.
We both began to guess about what had happened. At first, I did practically all the talking, but she gradually opened up a little. I told her I thought Helper had found out about the assassination and maybe was even surprised—maybe his buddies had promised to tell him before they tried anything. He went back to the office, found the notes, called his buddies, found out what had been done, called his secretary, and figured out very quickly what had happened from there. Once all of this had been done, he knew I would be hiding, so it was very easy to start putting the frame on me while working to make sure I was pushing up daisies at the same time.
If they had needed fingerprints, they could have found a ton at my house, and they could’ve transferred these to whatever evidence they needed to. I was speculating on this last bit of information more than on the others, because I had no idea if they—or anybody for that matter—had the technology to do such a thing. But with my luck, they did, so I might as well plan on it.
Tabitha filled in the gaps. Stephanie came home around midnight from studying and found Roger’s body on her couch. The following morning when she saw the news report about me, she called the police just to let them know about our relationship. They had thanked her and called back when they found out about the parking incident, and, the next thing anyone knew, the reporters were saying I was a suspect in Roger’s murder.
I wanted to ask her more about this, but when she stopped talking, I didn’t press. I realized I still had no real plan of attack, so I told her to make herself comfortable—wasn’t that a laugh—and I would take a shower. I now had a pretty good feeling that Tabitha wasn’t going to leave, and I knew I needed to let her know I trusted her, so I figured I could close the door. Still, I listened very closely for any sounds which might tip me off that she was splitting.
I do my best thinking in the tub. After taking off my jeans and painfully removing my shirt, I turned the shower to almost scalding and got in. It felt great, especially on my injured shoulder, and I lathered and did some serious thinking.
When you are involved in an international intrigue and you hire a hooker with someone else’s money to come and help you clear your name, you hope for someone who will believe you, quickly fall in love and in bed with you, and get you out of the mess in a flash, deserting her profession forever and staying only with you. You do not expect, or even want, someone who is friends with someone you have dated and who believed for any amount of time that you killed her friend’s boyfriend. This was, I must admit, a bit of a damper. But I had learned a great deal in the past twenty-four hours about playing the hand I was dealt, so I decided to quit worrying about it and figure out what I needed to do next.
First, we needed to know what Helper and his cronies had done. The guy worked for the NEA for crying out loud; normally, this is not a job which requires killing elected officials and unpaid lackeys. I was betting on the motive being money. Every murder, someone once said, is about either love or money, and I was guessing Mark was not in love with Timmons, although with Timmons’ conservative bona fides that would have also made one helluva story.
So what did Helper do, and what did he know? I thought of three places to start: Helper’s office, his home, and the headquarters of the McHolland Foundation, where the strange message had originated. We were helped by one major factor; all of the players would have to continue like everything was normal. Helper had no outward reason to be particularly broken up over the Timmons murder or my plight—except that he would have to find another intern to deal with the Regionarts quagmire—so I was guessing that he would stick as close to his routine as he possibly could. I thought the logical place to start would be his house, and we could go there in the morning, when he would be attending meetings and explaining to irate arts people about the demise of Regionarts.
I was so proud of myself! I was becoming resourceful in the face of all this adversity. I turned off the water and toweled off, put back on my half-stinky clothes, and rejoined Tabitha. I was still a mite concerned that by now an entire SWAT team would be camped by the mini-bar, but instead I found her watching the same CNN report I had seen earlier.
My first tendency in almost any situation is to joke. This generally works, but my first idea of an opening line—“Come here often?”—probably wouldn’t have been well-received by my current audience. I chose the more conservative, “Still here, I see,” as I plopped down on the bed and hurt my shoulder again in the process.
“I guess,” she sighed, looking as if she regretted the decision. “Now I need to tell you my story.”
Chapter
* * *
Fifteen
Tabitha spoke in an accent softer than Stephanie’s but just as southern. Stephanie hadn’t mentioned where her best friend was from, but I was betting it wasn’t far away, most likely Virginia or maybe Tennessee. She waited for me to sit down and then began.
“I paid for every bit of my college with loans, which is hardly news. Not student loans, though, regular bank loans. I’m from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, not too far from Nashville, and my dad was one of the few people there in the horse-racing business, and, no matter where you are, that business is always either feast or famine, and I guess he made too much money to qualify for the student loans and never had enough to pay for my school. He co-signed with me, and I didn’t figure there would be any problem once I got out because female engineers are always in demand.
“So I got out of college, moved to DC and looked for a job. I couldn’t
find one in engineering, but I got a decent-paying one working for the law firm where Stephanie worked, doing something boring, and when I had been working for a couple of months, I went to try to get a car loan. And that’s when the trouble began.
“They said no which was totally bizarre. They said I had $42,000 in credit card debt, which was absolutely ridiculous. I had one credit card, and that was it. And then it dawned on me. My dad had been getting credit card applications with my name on them at home and applying for them. I found out that if I ever wanted to apply for a loan or do anything, I’d have to sue him. I asked him to pay for the debts himself and keep me out of trouble, but he said he couldn’t. And then he filed for bankruptcy.”
She talked about all of this with very little emotion, like she was giving a physics lecture. Her day had probably been almost as wild as mine, and she was simply drained. “I had been sending him money since I got out of college to help pay for my college loans, but I found out that he had been using all of it to cover his other debts. So my little loans—the ones I had actually signed for—were in default too.
“I thought about going through bankruptcy too, but I think I didn’t want to screw everybody like he had done me, and I definitely didn’t want to be financially fucked up for the next decade. The bank helped me out, giving me really good rates and payment schedules, but I had no chance of paying everything on my salary. So I just started dancing at a club up in Baltimore, on The Block, a couple of nights a week.”
I had heard of The Block. It was a raunchy, anything-goes neighborhood in downtown Baltimore. You would occasionally see the clubs on the evening news, getting raided
“My neighbor at the time was a really cute girl, and she drove a really nice car, and I finally asked her one day where she worked. She said The Block. I couldn’t believe it—I had a totally different image of dancers than someone like her. So she took me up there one night, and I waitressed first and then started dancing. And then one night, right at the first of the month when everything was about to come due, a guy offered me two thousand bucks to have sex. I had done some pretty bad things already—everybody who’s worked on The Block has—so I guess I was primed for it. I thought about it a long time, thought about what my mom would’ve said if she was alive, but then I thought of everything I owed. And I just couldn’t turn it down.
