by Iain Levison
And she had slept with him.
Everyone in the conference room was looking at her, and she became aware she was emitting a low groaning noise. She heard Carver ask if she was all right, but she was already standing and pushing and shoving people out the way to get to the door as a wave of nausea hit her, and she squeezed past Carver, pushing his ample gut into the table with enough force to make him gasp as she opened the conference room door and ran down the hall to the women’s room. She slammed the heavy pressed wood door open, and thanked God that both stalls were empty, no secretaries in here fixing their make-up. Just her and the plumbing.
Alone, she felt the nausea ebbing away, being replaced by anger at herself. She had allowed herself to be taken, violated. Elias must have planned it from the beginning, must have imagined a one-night stand with her from the moment they met. He had even asked about Dixon, mentioning that he knew about the bank robbery, as a hint to let her know how smart he was.
Of course, there was nothing she could do now. If she sent the locals to arrest him, the first words out his mouth would be that he had slept with the FBI agent sent to investigate the robbery. She could imagine the jokes already. “There’s a guy who’s harboring a fugitive in Queens,” Carver would say at the conference table, introducing some future investigation. “Let’s send Denise out to fuck him.” They would slam their coffee mugs on the table in riotous enjoyment of the joke. Her credibility would be ruined.
She leaned over the sink and splashed cool water in her face, dried herself with a paper towel. When she went back into the conference room, there would be concern and questions. She had to have an answer ready. Something I had for breakfast. That’d do. She wasn’t going to make it easier for them by saying woman troubles.
Jenny Hingston pulled up a chair in Elias’s cramped office, putting the first draft of her term paper on the corner of the table and leaning over as if studying it, letting Elias catch a whiff of her perfume. She looked at him expectantly.
“So did you and Miss Police Officer have a nice time after you left?”
Elias nodded. “We did,” he said, aware that, to Jenny, his leaving with Denise had increased his value rather than diminished it. “How’s the paper coming along?”
Jenny shrugged. “Almost finished,” she said, and in a rare moment of honesty, she added, “I’m really sick of this.”
“Of what?”
“Of school. I’ve got two weeks left before I graduate. It’s like . . . I feel like I’ve already graduated, you know? I don’t want to do anymore work.” She giggled, and stared at him.
“What are you doing over the summer?” Elias asked.
Jenny shrugged again, as if bored. “I dunno. Going back to Concord. Watch TV, go to the gym. What are you doing?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I was thinking about going to the Bahamas. Just flying down there for a week or two.” Oh yes, and perhaps opening an offshore bank account, and dumping $241,300 in a Bahamian safe deposit box.
“Oh, that sounds like fun,” Jenny said wistfully. “Are you going by yourself?”
“I dunno.” Elias picked up Jenny’s term paper and looked at it, flipped through the pages. It was four pages long so far, six fewer than the minimum requirement. He read a few paragraphs while she waited. The topic was the collapse of the post World War One German economy, and Jenny had taken the one fact she had retained from class – that the German currency had become so devalued in the late 1920s that the people had been reduced to buying ordinary household items with wheelbarrows full of money – and more or less repeated it for four pages. Every paragraph Elias skimmed contained a reference to a wheelbarrow.
He put the paper down. “I’d like to take someone,” he said. “But I can’t take a student. It would be against the rules.”
“I’m not going to be a student anymore in two weeks,” she said breathily.
Elias nodded, and handed the paper back to her. “You don’t need to do anymore work on that,” he said. “It looks fine just the way it is.”
Melissa Covington walked out of Willard’s Coffee Shop with her best friend Emily, having spent eight of the ten dollars her father had given her that morning for her weekly lunch allowance on two chocolate milkshakes, which had been marketed as frozen fudge mocha cappuccinos.
“You’ve got to see them, they are so cute,” Melissa said. She was returning to an argument they had been having all day, trying to get Emily to come over to see her cat’s new litter of kittens. Emily wanted to, but protested that she had to return home to babysit her younger brother.
“How about tomorrow?” Emily asked. “Tomorrow I could actually stay for a while. My little retard of a brother has baseball practice . . .”
But Melissa wasn’t listening. She had stopped walking, and was staring, as if frozen, her drink held to her lips. Emily, who had been walking just behind, almost bumped into her.
“Shit, I almost spilled this all over your back. What’re you looking at?”
“Ohmigod, I know this guy,” Melissa said, grabbing Emily’s arm. She pointed at the wanted poster on the bulletin board directly outside the police station. “He was at my neighbor’s house yesterday.”
“Oh, bullshit,” said Emily.
“No, really, I swear. I was talking to him. I showed him one of the kittens.” Melissa read the poster. Wanted for Armed Robbery. Philip Turner Dixon. “That’s him,” she said, her voice rising with excitement. “His name was Phil.”
“You’re on crack,” said Emily, but she was getting excited, too. They read the poster together. “Ohmigod, he’s like, armed and dangerous. He could have killed you.”
“He seemed like a nice guy,” Melissa said. “He liked the kitten.”
“He’s armed and dangerous and he likes kittens,” said Emily, and they both giggled. “Where did you see him?”
“He was at Elias’s house. Sitting on the back porch.”
“Oh, Elias,” Emily said. “It’s Elias now, is it.”
“Shut up,” Melissa squealed. “He’s just my neighbor.”
“Whatever. You hooked up with him, didn’t you?”
“He got me drunk,” said Melissa, and they both giggled.
“Whatever.”
“Whatever yourself.”
“That’s not him,” said Emily definitively, looking at the picture. “It can’t be him. No one like that comes here.”
“Nah, it’s probably not him,” Melissa agreed. “This guy’s from Texas. The guy I met was from Kentucky.” She stared at the poster for a few more seconds. “It really looks like him, though.”
“You’re on crack,” said Emily again.
Melissa’s attention was drawn to the movement in the building next door to the police station, where a guy working in The Tiburn Bakery was putting a fresh sheet of chocolate chip cookies in the display case.
“Ohmigod,” she said, as if she had just solved a mystery. She grabbed Emily’s arm. “Let’s get some cookies.”
“COOOOKIES,” Emily growled, doing her best impression of the Cookie Monster.
They both burst into giggles and ran off into the bakery.
Epilogue
Elias was practicing his speech at his desk when Alice came in. He didn’t like the speech at all; he thought it was boring, nothing like one he would have written himself. It was all about testing water tables and improving air quality and finding funding for a local pumping station, all of which he was promising to do. He would rather be talking about intangibles, like hope and dreams, things for which he could not be held accountable if they failed to materialize. And if you talked about hope and dreams, you could talk like Martin Luther King and get a reputation as a great orator, which, deep down, Elias knew he was. He doubted very much that children would be reciting King’s speeches decades later if The Dream had been to decrease property taxes by six percent over the next three years.
Elias’s entry into politics had come as a direct result of his relationship with Jen
ny Hingston, whose father ran a luxury auto dealership in Concord. Prior to taking her to the Caribbean, Jenny had insisted on introducing him to her parents, despite Elias’s unease, and Geoff Hingston had been instantly taken with the idea of entering Elias into a political race. It turned out that when not selling overpriced vehicles, Geoff Hingston spent his time in the governor’s office, selecting candidates for the state senate. Elias’s youthful appearance, his charisma, and his learned and stable background would appeal to New Hampshire voters, Hingston insisted. Elias made him insist because he liked hearing it, all the while knowing that this, rather than teaching, was his true calling. As for being a thirty-five-year-old college professor who was sleeping with his twenty-one-year-old daughter, Geoff Hingston didn’t seem fazed one bit.
State senate. Young as he was, he could do two or three terms before moving up to national politics. How long was a state senate term, anyway? He would need to find out. In the meantime, he had to learn about water tables. What the fuck was an aquifer, anyway? Didn’t water come from streams? Why was half his speech about water? He would need to bring it up with his handlers, and he wasn’t entirely sure that they knew what they were doing. He didn’t want to start out his political career boring people to death.
Alice saw that he was working and quietly slid the mail on his desk, then closed the door softly. He nodded thanks to her as he looked at the mail, glad for the distraction. On top of a pile of the usual crap was a large manila envelope from a prominent university in California. Hmmmm. Elias picked it up and examined it. Could they have heard about his Nazism article? Did they want to publish it? In California? Doubtful. It wasn’t going to happen now, anyway. That was the type of thing that could ruin a political career. After talking with a number of people at scholarly publications, Elias had decided that his article had just been too explosive, too raw, for the establishment to handle, and after talking with Jenny Hingston’s dad, had figured it was just the type of thing that needed to be buried forever if he was to have any type of career in politics. Still, it was nice to get a call back.
He opened the envelope and realized right away that it was not about the article. It was a stack of forms with a cover letter.
Dear Professor White:
We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected as a referee by an applicant for a teaching position at our university. As we have a highly selective screening process, we would appreciate your taking the utmost care in filling out the enclosed papers, and returning them to this address by March 31. Thank you in advance for your time and consideration,
Sincerely,
Dean Evelyn Wister
Elias stared at it, confused. Who the hell was citing him as a referee? You would think a recommendation for one of his students might be a little more heartfelt if he knew who they were. He flipped the cover letter and looked at the forms beneath, and saw the name in small point type at the top of the first page: reference list for Denise Lupo.
Denise Lupo. Well I’ll be damned. The FBI girl. She was applying for a teaching job and had picked him as her academic reference.
He wondered what to do about it. What could he honestly say in a reference? That she was good in bed? He doubted that was the information the university was after. He put the reference papers on the desk and looked at his other mail. Some letters from concerned parents, something from the local chapter of the Police Athletic League (he was a regular contributor) and, at the bottom of the pile, a letter with an FBI motif with a New York City postmark. Oh boy.
He opened the FBI letter. It was, as he suspected, from Denise. It was typed and very official-looking, no perfume.
Dear Professor White
I wanted to thank you for your hospitality during my stay in Tiburn. As it turns out, I have applied to a number of colleges for teaching positions and have listed you as a referee. Please make sure to mention that we have known each other for over two years. I think it’s been about that long, hasn’t it? I lose track of time.
Thanks so much,
Agent Denise Lupo
Two years, Elias thought. The whole episode had been barely five months ago. At the bottom were two other notes, also typed.
PS We never did find that bank robber, but I have a very strong theory about where he is. Oh well. As soon as I get a teaching job, it will all just be water under the bridge.
PPS. Please do try to get the references finished by March 31. Thanks so much.
And a smiley face. She had drawn a fucking smiley face. Elias shook his head as he tossed the letter onto the desk.
A very strong theory about where he is . . .
He looked at the reference forms again. It wouldn’t be so bad. An hour or two at most, he could write a reference that would get Denise a teaching job at any Ivy League school in the country.
There was a knock on the door and Jenny Hingston came in without waiting for a response. Alice never stopped her anymore. She was a graduate student now, on her way to a master’s in history, and Elias was, of course, her personal advisor. Alice was no fool.
“Ready for lunch?” she asked.
“Ready. Let me get my coat.”
Elias got up and looked at the reference forms again. That would be fine. He would get her a nice teaching job somewhere, and everyone would be happy. What a great country we live in, he thought.
Everything has worked out well for everybody.
