Carly Bishop - No Baby But Mine

by No Baby But Mine(Lit)

  He must have introduced himself. She saw his lips move but she didn't hear anything. Could there be a roar of silence?

  He frowned. She watched the furrows develop. She thought, apropos of nothing, how she'd made a couple of minor mistakes. That there was a vertical crease between his eyebrows above that compelling, sternly aquiline nose that she hadn't gotten quite right.

  "Kirsten?" He shrugged out of his canvas jacket. Beneath it was a teal and beige-colored plaid, and beneath that, a gray T-shirt where, below that, nestled in thick black chest hairs straying upward to e ward his Adam's apple, he'd worn the antique bronze charm Christo now coveted for his medicine bag.

  He pulled up a pant leg at the thigh and sat half on, half off the table in the interview room, not so near as to be threatening, near enough to be just familiar.

  "It's all right if I call you Kirsten?"

  She shrugged, half nodding, numb.

  "Fine."

  "Are you all right?"

  Would she ever be? She felt stupidly melodramatic, out of sync, out of control.

  "Fine."

  "You don't look so fine." He was, she thought, legitimately caring.

  "Have we met? Is it me?"

  She had to cope, had to pull herself together. She would have to tell him. She would tell him. Fate had conspired to make unnecessary any search for him. But. not now.

  "I... it's only that I haven't eaten, I think."

  Without looking away from her, he said, "Somebody get some decent food in here, huh?" She had the sense of someone moving to comply. Then, to her, softly, "I'm sorry you've had to wait. And that I had to come in here looking like this" -He gestured at the work boots and Levi's with cement dust ingrained.

  "Do you think you could tell me what happened last night?"

  She swallowed.

  "I've already told the others" -- "I know. I need to hear it from the beginning."

  "And I have to pick up my son from day care. We're going to feed the ducks" -She broke off. His smile over the ducks was too tender to bear.

  "Please. I've already been through this. I told Detective Calder everything I know, everything I heard. That's all there is!"

  Christo's father looked steadily at her, as if he knew there was not only a great deal more to tell, but that she knew she was in a position to know that herself. She knew it was all her raw feelings.

  That there was absolutely no way he knew what she knew, or what it meant to him.

  "Kirsten."

  "Yes."

  "Let me ask you this." He waited while one of the guys who had come in with him interrupted to put a deli-wrapped ham-and-cheese sandwich in front of her. Produced, as if by magic, at his request.

  "You worked for the U.S. Attorney's office four years ago. Is that right?"

  "Yes." But what did that have to do with anything? She took a small bit of ham out of the sandwich and ate it.

  "You were assigned to the Truth Sayers task force?"

  "Mr....I'm sorry. I missed your name."

  "Weisz. Garrett Weisz. Your waiter today," he said, indicating the medium-built Latinlover-type man who'd put the food in front of her, "is Matt Guiliani. Guili, we call him. That's J. D. Thorne, otherwise known as the thorn in my side." A strong, silent type.

  "You've met Detective Vorees."

  She began to recover her wits. She could, if asked, recite back their names now, even his, Christo's father's name.

  "Well, Mr. Weisz, you obviously already know everything but my blood type" -"I think that's somewhere in your employment records, too," he interrupted, deadpan. But she must have looked as benumbed as she felt.

  "That was supposed to be a joke. Just to lighten things up a little."

  -No, you're a laugh a minute, bro," Guiliani razzed. He looked at Kirsten and winked.

  "Weisz- acre, that's what we call him."

  Kirsten smiled uncertainly. Confusion piled on the numbness. She had barely the time to register Christo's father sitting here cross- examining her. She didn't know what to do with Guiliani's obvious fondness for Garrett Weisz. There was a powerful bond between them.

  "So." She breathed deeply, and focused on a point between the eyes of the father of her son.

  "You know where I've been, what I've done, and none of it has anything to do with what I heard last night."

  "There's a strong possibility that you're mistaken in that, Kirsten.

  That's the problem. That's why Detective Vorees took the case out of the hands of Ann Calder, that's why I'm in on this thing. That's why we have to start at the beginning. "

  "No... listen, really." An uneasiness began to congeal inside her, separate from the shock of being confronted with Christo's father. To do now with the anxiety Vorees had originally incited in her.

  "This was just some weird, random thing..." Maybe he would believe her if she said it one more time.

  "If you insist, I'll give you my statement again so you can hear all the details for yourselves, but then I really need to go."

  Garrett picked up Ann Calder's notes.

  "Is this a direct quote: " No, well. string of events here. he'd better order a hit now'? This is accurate? "

  "Yes."

  "Do you know what worm is being talked about?"

  "How would I know that, Mr. Weisz? I have never" -She broke off as Weisz lowered his head and gnawed on the inside of his lower lip. She read a steep resistance to say anything more into his body language. A sensation of panic rose inside her. Something dreadfully certain that her expectation of things going terribly wrong here had been dead-on accurate.

  Christo's father looked at her again, as if he should know her, which was no comfort at all.

  "Would you have an idea of the identity of the worm if I told you String is a code name, a personal handle--an alias--used by Chet Loehman?"

  She felt the heat drain out of her body.

  "You must be mistaken."

  "About String? I'm not."

  "I never heard that."

  "You wouldn't have. His organization has evolved, Kirsten, since you were a part of the task force."

  "That doesn't mean that 'string' in what I heard has any connection to Loehman."

  "Do you think it's a coincidence, Kirsten?" Thorne put in from her immediate left.

  "Some wildly improbable fluke, that you happened to have been number one on Loehman's playbill, and now this is going on around you?"

  Loehman's playbill. Twice inside twelve hours. Guiliani glared.

  "Give it a rest, Thorne. How'd you like it if somebody flapped some deadly coincidence from your past in your face?"

  "What is this?" Kirsten demanded, latching on to a scrap of anger from the heap of confusion.

  "Some good cop, bad cop routine? What do you want from me that you're not getting?"

  "Kirsten" -She ignored Garrett's attempt to stop her.

  "No! Am I seriously supposed to believe that all these years later some unwitting idiot in the employ of Chet Loehman chose my house and my child's monitor to tap into and tip me off to an incriminating solicitation for murder?

  What sense does that make? "

  Garrett rose from where he'd been sitting on the table and pulled a chair out on its casters. He sat before her and eased the angle of swivel in her chair so that they were face-to-face, knees almost as close as they had been that night beneath the booth in the Mercury Club. She couldn't escape that heat, the brush of denim, the wash of memories, the tug of attraction real and with her right now.

  "Kirsten, I understand what you're saying. You've got great instincts" -- "I have lousy instincts, Mr. Weisz," she snapped.

  "That's why Loehman is still free. But I'm not stupid, and neither is he. I was neutralized, so far as he is concerned, years ago. So" Garrett Weisz held up a hand to interrupt her.

  "Kirsten, I know on the face of it this scenario is a reach. We all know Loehman doesn't suffer fools,

  and the likelihood of something like this happening to you is abou
t fifty million to one. "

  "If you know that, then play the odds, Mr. Weisz. Assume a fluke. Take the monitor. You're welcome to it."

  He shook his head.

  "Kirsten, it's just not that easy."

  Chapter Three

  She stared at him.

  "Nothing ever is, is it?"

  "We're not saying," he went on, insistent but kind, "that there's any proof the 'string' in what you heard is necessarily Loehman." She could see that he believed it was, though, with every fiber in him.

  "All I'm asking, here, Kirsten, is for you to just open up a space in your thinking and see if something about what happened last night with the" -He broke off, looking abashed.

  "Baby monitor," Ann Calder supplied.

  "The baby monitor," he went on.

  "About all that somehow making perfect sense when you know that String is an alias that Loehman uses." She felt herself getting a little beyond the panic.

  "Where were you five years ago?"

  "During the first task force investigation, you mean?"

  She nodded, though strobelike images deep in her memory conjured the booth in the seventies disco, the touch of his lips to her fingers, his tongue to her wrist, the brush of him against her flat belly, the desperate stolen kiss in the dark of her hotel room.

  "Winding up a tour of duty in the navy." He cracked a grin.

  "Commonly referred to by the oxymoron 'military intelligence."

  " She smiled, tricked by the self-deprecating humor, in spite of everything. In spite of the visceral, heated memory.

  "That explains it."

  "Whoa," Guiliani cracked.

  "Better watch your step, pais an

  "I am not your pais an Garrett retorted.

  "Budapest has got it all over Palermo."

  "Says you. Whatever. The lady's got your number."

  Garrett sent a rude look at Guiliani, then turned back to Kirsten.

  "Don't mind the comic relief here, Kirsten. Just try to think what might make any of this make sense. Is there anything?"

  She was still back on the reference to Budapest. Her baby's father was Hungarian, then. And the castle on Christo's charm, a castle that was different from any she had ever seen, must be in Budapest.

  She wrenched her thoughts away from dangerous details to search for some meaning in what she had heard over the monitor.

  "I haven't kept up on the case at all. It's not my job or my concern anymore."

  Weisz only nodded, waiting for her to go on. Did he think if she just kept talking she would devise some scenario to suit his request?

  "I... I'm a teacher now."

  "Really." She could tell he already knew that.

  "Are you missing classes right now?"

  "No. I have this quarter off."

  "What do you teach?"

  "Graphic arts, photography, videography--at a private high-school academy. I don't have any interest in any of this--which is exactly what I told" -She broke off, as suddenly everything became sickeningly clear and the space Garrett Weisz had asked for cracked open in her mind.

  Burton Rawlings had been phoning her on and off for four or five months. And last night he'd been in her home for several hours, staying even after Ginny and Sam left, with Loehman's playbill on his mind.

  "Kirsten?" Garrett's voice deepened. The tension around the room grew thick enough to spread with a trowel.

  Her hands fisted. She tucked each under the other arm below her breasts. If she could only get through this, maybe they would leave her alone.

  "Last night I had a farewell dinner for friends of mine. Ginny and Sam Wilder. Ginny is... was the principal at the academy where I teach. An attorney I used to know from my work in John Grenallo's office stopped by. He'd been calling me. Somehow, he just... he stayed for dinner, waiting for the chance to talk privately."

  "What's his name?" J. D. asked.

  "Rawlings. Burton Rawlings."

  "What'd he want?" Guiliani this time. Garrett sat watching her intently. Kindly.

  "He said he'd run into a couple of guys that he believed are involved with Chet Loehman. He said they were getting suspicious of him, and he somehow thought I could ease the problem."

  "So, he was thinking he had an entree of sorts to Loehman's inner circle?"

  "Yes."

  "And he wanted you in?"

  "Yes. He assumed I would still jump at a chance to set things right with Grenallo's office. Burt had been burned, too. I don't think he'll ever get over it. But he felt bad about the way things happened when the investigation fell apart five years ago" -- "So bad, he was offering you the chance to redeem yourself?" Guiliani demanded.

  "The guy must be some bricks short of a load. You've got a little kid-" "Pipe down and let the lady talk," Garrett commanded, his voice low, strained.

  She started to say something, but then shrugged.

  "To be fair, I don't think Burton even knew about Christo" -She broke off, swallowing hard. It felt dangerous to her even to say Christo's name in front of Garrett Weisz.

  "At least not before he came to the house last night.

  He understands now. Do you. are you thinking this guy whose voice I heard may have followed Burton to my house? "

  "It's possible." Garrett leaned forward, his forearms on his thighs, hands dangling between them. The posture put him nearer eye-to-eye with her. She'd forgotten how tall he was, how broad his shoulders were. He seemed now to create a space around them from which the others were excluded. He met her eyes. For the first time she saw that his were not blue at all, but gray, rimmed with a deep sea-green at the outer edge of his irises.

  "Not very likely, though."

  "Why? Doesn't it make sense that that's why the guy was anywhere near my house when that call was made?"

  "How long was it between the time that Rawlings left and you heard what you heard?"

  "A while." Her nails combed a path through her hair, pulled back in her customary chignon. She knew exactly where this was leading, exactly where it wasn't. Burton was long gone by the time she heard anything.

  "Two cars could have followed Burton to my house. Or one followed him, and another one came after, so they could follow him when he left and still leave someone behind to make sure that I didn't leave later as well." Her teeth clenched.

  "They were following him.

  Not me. He won't be coming back, so there isn't a problem. "

  Garrett Weisz lowered his head. She could see, though his full head of shiny coal-black hair was creased by the band of a hard hat, the same cowlick as Christo's.

  He looked back up at her.

  "You don't believe that, Kirsten. You know better. It's pointless" "I don't. You watch. One more night or two, take the baby monitor.

  You'll see. They'll see I'm not involved. "

  "Are you saying, Kirsten, that Rawlings just turned up after all this time? Are you sure you hadn't heard from him, one way or another, before last night. Had he called you at all? See, if he'd called you, and his phone calls were being intercepted somehow, then" -- "I know how it works." Burton had called her, and it was impossible to miss the meaning or the consequence. Someone could have been watching her house since the first time, back in June or July, that Burton phoned her.

  She couldn't sit there any longer. She had to leave now, go pick up Christo and drive as far away as she could get before exhaustion set in, then five hundred miles more. She stood, pulling the strap of her bag up onto her shoulder.

  "I have to go."

  She began to dig into her purse for her keys, to hand over the keys to her house. The cold inside her now grew so severe, she burned with it.

  She fell to babbling, offering her keys, her house, the offending monitor, the dregs of her life.

  "I'm going to get Christo now, and leave." Her hands shook. It was her car key that fell from the chain.

  Weisz picked it up off the carpeted floor and sat there, turning it over and over in his hands.

 
; "That was my father's name." His voice deepened, went guttural with emotion and inflection.

  "Kryztov."

  She froze.

  "I agree with you, Kirsten," he said.