This Enemy Town

by Marcia Talley

  I could have used one of those sedatives just then. Maybe a dozen. Maybe someone could wake me when it was all over.

  With another officer and Paul observing, Agent Crisp removed my handcuffs just long enough for me to take off my bathrobe and step out of my slippers. Through my nightgown, she felt around my waist, then ran the backs of her hands along both sides of my legs, my upper body and arms. Finally, she checked my head. Some criminals hid weapons in their hairdos, I supposed, but considering my short bob, that additional step seemed rather ridiculous.

  “You’ll need to dress,” Agent Crisp said. She tucked a wayward swath of bangs behind her left ear.

  Still sobbing, I nodded.

  “Where are you taking my wife?” Paul demanded.

  “To the FBI Resident Agency here in Annapolis for processing, then up to the courthouse in Baltimore, where she’ll be arraigned.”

  “On what charge?”

  “The charge is murder, sir.”

  “But I didn’t kill anybody!” I choked back fresh tears. “Why isn’t anybody listening to me?”

  Agent Crisp reached into her pocket and handed Paul a card that she’d already prepared. “Here’s the name and number of the Assistant U.S. Attorney in charge of the case. Have your lawyer contact him.”

  “When can she come home?”

  “That’ll be up to the judge.”

  And with my hands still cuffed behind me, she marched me upstairs.

  How many times had I stood in front of that very closet, trying to decide on an appropriate outfit for a wedding, or a funeral, or to dress the part of a trophy wife in order to trap a crooked insurance broker? What did I own that was suitable for going to jail?

  Agent Crisp had planted me in the center of the bedroom, removed my handcuffs, and slid open my closet door. I felt ridiculously embarrassed by the mess inside. The clothes I’d worn the night—no, years!—before were heaped in a corner, and shoes I kicked off in a hurry lay scattered everywhere.

  I realized Agent Crisp was waiting for me to say something. “What should I wear?” I asked, feeling helpless.

  “Nothing expensive or tight,” she suggested.

  From five feet away I stared into the closet.

  My jeans? Too tight.

  My green wool skirt? Too new.

  My black wool slacks from Talbots? Too expensive. They’d be ruined.

  “That long skirt,” I decided at last, pointing. “The one with the gored panels.”

  Crisp located the skirt and eased it off its hanger. Made by Ahni Salway, an Annapolis designer with a genius for fabric and color, the skirt was one of my favorites. Falling at mid-calf, it was smart but comfortable. Colorful geometric shapes swirled over one panel; Japanese courtesans lounged on another; ripe apples decorated a third. Usually it made me smile, but not that morning. “And a black sweater,” I added. “I don’t care which.”

  As Agent Crisp rummaged through my closet looking for a sweater, I tried to gather my wits. They think I murdered Jennifer Goodall. But I hadn’t, of course, so what possible evidence could they have against me? The fight alone wouldn’t have been enough to sustain an arrest warrant.

  Maybe I was being framed!

  Oh, God. What was going to happen to me? Would they lock me away forever? Send me to the electric chair?

  Crisp interrupted my panic attack. “Where’s your underwear?”

  I gaped at her. My God, I wasn’t even going to be trusted with a pair of underpants! “Top drawer,” I told her, struggling to maintain control.

  Agent Crisp opened the drawer I’d indicated and ran her hand around inside, checking, I supposed, for guns in my drawers. (Ha, ha!)

  I asked for my black tights, but that wasn’t allowed. Were they afraid I might hang myself with them? I would have to wear ankle socks instead.

  Agent Crisp added the ankle socks to the neat pile she had made on top of my dresser. I knew I was supposed to get dressed, but I wasn’t sure how. All the usual protocols had suddenly, drastically, changed.

  I’d dressed in locker rooms before, of course, at summer camp and in college, but that was long before my mastectomy. It had taken me months after the surgery to gain enough confidence to show my body again, even to Paul. And Agent Crisp was a total stranger.

  I stood there shivering in my nightgown, arms dangling at my sides, doing nothing.

  Crisp seemed to sense my discomfort. She lifted the bra and panties from the top of the pile and held them out. “You can turn around, if you like,” she suggested. “But don’t go near any of the furniture.”

  I took the underwear from her outstretched hand, slipped the underpants on under my nightgown and then turned away. I eased my gown over my head and let it fall to the carpet. I fumbled for and dropped the bra. When I bent to retrieve it, I noticed Crisp flinch as she caught sight of my reconstructed breast. It wasn’t bad, as reconstructed breasts go—the plastic surgeon had done a terrific job—but the nipple had migrated a little left of center. Clearly, it wasn’t the breast I was originally issued.

  I flushed, picked up the bra and put it on as quickly as I could, my back to her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this must be difficult.”

  “I didn’t do it, you know,” I said as I struggled with the hooks. “I won’t pretend that I’m sorry Jennifer Goodall’s dead, but I didn’t have anything to do with her ending up that way.”

  Agent Crisp slipped a sweater off its hanger, felt it over carefully, then handed it to me.

  “And I can’t be the only person in the world who hated her guts,” I added as my head emerged from the neck of the sweater.

  “I couldn’t possibly comment on that, Mrs. Ives.” Was it my imagination, or had Agent Crisp just suppressed a smile?

  “My first name’s Hannah,” I told her, as if she didn’t know. “What’s yours?”

  “Amanda,” she said. “Amanda Crisp.” She nodded toward her colleague, who at one point or another had joined us in the bedroom and now lounged tall against the door frame. “And that’s Special Agent Elizabeth Taylor.”

  Taylor was a solid, sour-faced woman whose muscular arms and broad shoulders seemed custom-designed for blocking any attempt on my part to escape. She wore her dark hair in a ponytail tied low at the nape of her neck and not a speck of jewelry. Somehow I didn’t find the knowledge that she shared a name—and little else—with a famous movie star reassuring. If we got into a Good Cop/Bad Cop situation, I knew which one of them would be the first to aim a five-thousand-watt klieg light in my face.

  I touched my ears, then pointed at the dresser where my jewelry box sat. “Earrings?”

  Amanda Crisp shook her head. “We don’t recommend you wear jewelry.”

  I glanced at my engagement ring. The young Paul Ives had slaved all summer to earn the money for that ring, sweating from sunup to sundown in a South County tobacco field. It was only a third of a carat, but more precious to me than the Hope diamond.

  Crisp noticed. “And you’d better leave that at home, too, Mrs. Ives. They’re just going to take it away from you.”

  “They?” I croaked. “Who’s they?”

  “The U.S. Marshals at the Federal Courthouse in Baltimore. That’s where you’ll be arraigned.”

  I swayed on my feet, suddenly dizzy. “I need to sit down.”

  Crisp held up a hand, palm out. “Just a minute.” While Agent Taylor kept her eagle eyes trained on me, Agent Crisp shook out the bedding and laid it aside. Using both hands, she tipped up the mattress and looked underneath, checking (I supposed) for any handguns I might have hidden in the box springs. Then she peered under the bed. “Okay. You can sit.”

  I plopped down on the edge of the mattress, inhaled deeply, and held my breath, as if by not breathing, I could stop time. It didn’t work. I wrapped my right hand around my ring finger and considered what she’d just told me. “No,” I said after a few minutes. “I’m not going to take my ring off. And if anybody tries to take it from me, I�
��m going to fight them for it!” I waved my hand in the air. “How can I possibly hurt myself with this?”

  Crisp shrugged. “Your choice, but I think you’re going to find that the U.S. Marshals are not particularly good ‘people people,’ if you know what I mean. They’ll want to take it from you and put it in an envelope with your personal effects. Trust me. It’ll be much safer with your husband.”

  Personal effects. They were talking about me as if I’d died.

  Maybe I had, and instead of going to heaven, I’d ended up in hell. Maybe that’s why my bladder was giving me fits all of a sudden. “Can I use the bathroom?” I asked.

  Agent Crisp nodded. She gestured to Agent Taylor, who pushed herself away from the door frame and ambled into the bathroom. Taylor opened the medicine cabinet, ran her fingers over the items inside, removing a brown prescription bottle. I had no idea what it contained. She peered into the cabinet under the sink, lifted each towel. She peeked inside the toilet tank, too, checking for weapons there, also, I presumed.

  Satisfied, she motioned me inside, then assumed a watchful position near the open bathroom door.

  I stood by the toilet, waiting for her to leave, but she didn’t move a single one of her oh-so-solid muscles. I needed to pee, but there was no way I could do it, not while Taylor was watching me. So I brushed my teeth. Made a production of washing and drying my face and my hands, anything to delay the inevitable.

  Then I finished dressing and they escorted me downstairs.

  “Where’s your coat?” Crisp inquired when we reached the entrance hall.

  Coat. I’d forgotten about a coat. It was February. It was cold outside. Why was I so hot?

  Without any direction from me, Crisp located the closet, selected a black corduroy car coat with a fake leopard collar that used to belong to my daughter, and held it out. I was too exhausted to correct her.

  Crisp patted down the pockets of Emily’s coat before helping me into it. I was allowed to fasten the buttons, then we began what would become a ritual over the next several hours: coat on, handcuffs on, handcuffs off, coat off, handcuffs on. This time, though, the handcuffs went on in front.

  While all this was going on, Paul stared at me forlornly from the chair in the entrance hall. “Hannah, Hannah,” he crooned as the cuffs tightened around my wrists.

  With a firm hand on my back, Crisp guided me toward the front door.

  “Call your lawyer! Call Murray Simon,” I yelled to Paul over my shoulder. “But please, don’t tell Emily!”

  Paul shot from the chair. “Don’t worry, Hannah. Murray and I’ll get you out of there. You’ll be home for dinner. I promise.”

  “I know you will. And Paul? Don’t you worry. I beat cancer, and I can beat this, too.”

  On the narrow one-way street outside our house an unmarked Ford Taurus idled, blocking traffic. Behind it, an irate motorist began backing up. I recognized the driver as one of my neighbors, Ray Flynt. As I watched Ray turn his car around near the William Paca House and drive the wrong way down Prince George Street, I prayed that he didn’t recognize me, that none of my other neighbors were awake and peering out their windows.

  Crisp opened the rear door on the passenger side of the Taurus and guided me inside with a gentle hand on my head, just like on TV. After I sat, she leaned inside the car and wove the seat belt through my handcuffs before inserting the buckle in the clip and clicking it shut. Then she slammed the door, walked around the other side of the car and climbed in next to me. With Agent Taylor behind the wheel, we rolled quietly away.

  With tears streaming down my cheeks, I twisted in my seat to look over my shoulder. Paul stood framed in our doorway, barefoot, his bathrobe flapping open in the wind. Light snow had started to fall, each flake a sparkling diamond in the light from our porch lamp. Mother would have grabbed my hand, squeezed and said “Look, Hannah, it’s a Winter Wonderland!”

  Some Wonderland.

  My husband standing half naked in a February snow-storm. And even in the lamplight, I could see he was crying.

  CHAPTER 13

  “What time is it?” I asked Amanda Crisp as Agent Taylor steered the Taurus through Annapolis’s narrow streets, avoided the ever-present construction on Rowe Boulevard, and eased into the commuter traffic heading west on Route 50.

  Agent Crisp stared straight ahead. “Seven.”

  Back in my cozy kitchen, the coffeepot would just be kicking into automatic, gurgling cheerfully, in the mistaken assumption that it was going to be just an ordinary day. At that moment I could have killed for a cup of coffee.

  Except for the crackle of the police radio, it was quiet inside the car. I wanted to fill the silence with shouting: I’m innocent! You’re making a big mistake! As if the FBI didn’t hear those words twenty times every day.

  Instead of heading north on I-97 to Baltimore, Taylor took the Riva Road exit, and I began to panic. “Where are you taking me?”

  “The FBI Resident Agency.”

  “Oh, right.” I remembered now. That’s where they’d “process” me. Whatever the hell that meant.

  “What happens there?” I asked.

  “We have an automated booking process,” she explained. “JABS. Saves having to do it up in Baltimore.”

  I remembered what Crisp had said earlier about the U.S. Marshals not being “people people” and began to relax.

  We turned right on Truman Parkway. Just opposite the Farmers Market, Agent Taylor turned into the underground parking garage of an unremarkable brick office building I’d passed a hundred times before. My brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders, especially without my usual shot of caffeine, but some questions were beginning to float to the surface.

  “Why the FBI?” I asked as Crisp unbuckled my seat belt.

  “Lieutenant Goodall was murdered on federal property,” she explained. “That’s where we come in.”

  “But it’s a naval base,” I said. “I thought the NCIS had jurisdiction.”

  Crisp stood outside the open car door, looking in. “They do, but we get involved, too, particularly whenever a civilian enters the equation.”

  Civilian. I thought for a moment. That would be me.

  They marched me to the elevator.

  A few minutes later I was seated in an ordinary office with ordinary desks and ordinary chairs arranged in ordinary cubicles, just like at Whitworth and Sullivan in Washington, D.C., and every other office where I’d ever worked. Ringing phones and clacking keyboards surrounded me with a familiar and strangely comforting cacophony. There were no bars on the windows to remind me that I was, after all, a prisoner.

  But it was false security, I knew. The pounding in my head continued relentlessly.

  Agent Crisp removed my handcuffs. I massaged my wrists and stared thirstily at a cup of coffee steaming on an adjoining desk.

  Crisp noticed. “Would you like something to eat or drink?”

  “Coffee, please.”

  “Special Agent Taylor?”

  Agent Taylor grunted, and took off to fetch me a cup.

  “Cream and sugar!” I called after her. “Please.”

  Meanwhile, Amanda Crisp began tapping at her keyboard. I couldn’t see the monitor, but by the number of times she hit the Tab key, I figured she was filling out some sort of form.

  “Okay,” I said when she lifted her fingers from the keyboard for a moment. “I understand that you’re only doing your job, but what possible evidence can you have against me?”

  “After your lawyer talks to the Assistant U.S. Attorney assigned to your case, he’ll have more information for you, Mrs. Ives. You should be able to see your lawyer later today.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me any questions?” I asked, gratefully sipping at the coffee Elizabeth Taylor had brought me.

  “No, I’m not. You’ve asked for your attorney, and we’re scrupulous about that.”

  Agent Crisp finished typing, then took me off to be fingerprinted. I’d expected them to smear ink all over my
fingers, but the JABS system was fully automated.

  “What’s JABS stand for?” I asked as the technician helped me roll each finger on a glass plate.

  “Joint Automated Booking System,” he replied, his green eyes bright and serious behind his eyeglasses. “It eliminates the repetitive booking of offenders. All federal law enforcement agencies tap into it. We can collect up to seventy-five data elements about a case,” he said, smiling with pride, as if he’d invented the system himself. “Mug shots, crime scene descriptions, photos of evidence, like that.”

  I watched as a bar of light panned across the glass plate like a miniature Xerox machine and he clicked on the button that would send digitized images of my fingertips off to AFIS. I knew what AFIS was: the FBI’s automated fingerprint identification system. Then he scanned the four fingers of each of my hands together and sent those images off, too.

  When the technician had finished, Amanda Crisp came to collect me. By then my digestive system had processed the coffee and my bladder was sending out urgent messages. Privacy or no privacy, I knew I couldn’t keep my legs crossed forever. “I need to pee,” I told her.

  Crisp grinned. “I’m taking Mrs. Ives to the restroom,” she told Agent Taylor as we passed her desk. Together we walked down a long hall. “We don’t have a private bathroom,” Crisp explained. “Give me a minute.” While I leaned against the wall, Crisp opened the door to the ladies’ room and yelled, “I’m coming in with a prisoner!”

  A chorus of toilets flushed in unison and Crisp stepped aside as three secretary types scurried out. I guess they didn’t want to share the bathroom with a criminal.

  Crisp checked the stalls, then nodded that it was okay for me to go in. She stood sideways holding the stall door open but not looking directly at me while I relieved myself.

  My eyes filled with tears. Would I ever again be able to use the bathroom without an audience?

  Of course you will, I told myself. Murray will move heaven and earth to get you out. Paul will call in all his IOUs. Dennis will pull strings. They knew I had nothing to do with Jennifer’s death.

  “We better hurry.” Agent Taylor barged into the ladies’ room. With a stubby finger she tapped her watch. “Shit, Amanda, we don’t have time to get her up there for the ten o’clock arraignment.”