13
Cold sweat, the kind that reeked of fear, had coated Willa’s skin two minutes after she left Dichter sitting at his desk.
The meeting with him had given her nothing, had highlighted nothing more than Harold’s love of gossip and his perpetually dreary demeanor which, upon his initial greeting, she thought had shifted from overcast to partly cloudy when he’d looked up from his peanut butter and jelly sandwich—if only for a fleeting moment.
The flattened line of Harold Dichter’s mouth was often mistaken for a grimace of pain, and when he smiled, his bottom teeth showed, giving the impression he had an underbite. Good-looking in a preppy sort of way, Dichter wore stylish glasses, but his fashion sense was pure James Spader in Pretty in Pink. His pale brown hair had been highlighted and blown back, feathering at the sides. A tennis sweater was tied around his neck in a jaunty way. The collar of his baby-blue Izod polo was turned up. He wore no socks with the scuffed taupe loafers that peeked out beneath his pale chinos.
The scent of peanut butter and Ralph Lauren’s Polo cologne wafted towards her when he rose, book in his hand, and gave her his grunt-smile. “Hi, Willa,” he sighed. Every word he said was a sigh, of resignation. He slid the book back onto a bookcase.
“Hello, Harold.” She looked over his shoulder, to the large window behind his desk. Sun streamed into the room. “It’s a pretty day, isn’t it?”
He shrugged. “You know it won’t last.” When he’d first started working at the Lab, Willa thought he seemed like the glum character from the ‘70s Pebbles and Bamm Bamm cartoons. “It never lasts,” he said, in pitch-perfect Schleprock.
“I’m trying to enjoy it while it’s here. I had lunch outside.”
“I ate at my desk, alone. As usual.” He inhaled deeply, readying his next sigh. “So, you’re back working at the lab and you got the Reines Fellowship. Wow. I always wanted to try for something like that, but I know I’d never get chosen. I never win anything, so, you know, why bother to toss my hat in the ring?”
Willa smiled brightly. “Well, it’s like they say about the lottery; you’ve got to play to win.”
“I bought a couple of those instant scratch-and-win tickets once. It was a waste of two bucks. The Reines Fellowship. Wow.”
“It’s not as much fun as you think. You look well, Harold.”
“That’s surprising, considering I have a hernia. I go in for surgery next Wednesday, and I passed a kidney stone last month. I’m still recovering from that. Have you ever passed a stone?”
“No,” Willa shook her head.
Not that Harold noticed. His eyes had closed and his face contorted as he described passing a chunk of calcified oxalate. “It was agonizing,” he shuddered, “like peeing razorblades.”
”I’ll have to take your word for it.” Willa leaned against the edge of Dichter’s tidy desk. “I’ve just settled in and wanted to stop by and have a chat to see if you might have time to assist me with some research, a few weeks down the line, perhaps be part of my research team.”
“Is it in Quantum Computation?”
Willa nodded.
“Meh.” Harold shrugged. “I’ll have to think about it when I’m recovering from my surgery. It’s really not my area of interest these days. I’m focusing on Quantum Cryptography now.” His mouth pursed. “Hey, did you see Jackie Grafton got arrested?” Harold cracked a grimace-grin. More teeth showed than usual. Willa thought he looked a little evil.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s a shame. She was a nice woman.”
“Yeah,” he said, “she was a nice woman who got arrested for drugs. You know she and I dated for a while.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. She was like all the women I wind up with, a user. Women all want something,” he snorted. “Women take and take and squeeze yo—” Harold shook his head. He may have been a dismal cynic, but he was socially aware enough to realize his words were a little insulting. “I don’t mean you. You never wanted anything. You were always straight. What you see is what you get.”
Willa glanced away, not offended, but his ‘What you see is what you get’ had an impact, and heat bristled along her spine.
Harold continued, “Sorry. What I meant was, my girlfriends and Jackie, after a while they all wanted someone to,” he made quotation marks in the air, “pay for dinner, and other stuff, you know. That’s all I ever was—a cash cow. That’s all I ever am. Money’s a curse; growing up wealthy sucked, having a trust fund sucked, and coming into it sucked. Do know what Jackie did after she got arrested? She sent her current boyfriend to my house to ask me for money for bail. Can you believe that? What do you bet she hit up Brennan too? She always had a thing for him. All the gals who worked in P Division did. Well, except for you.”
“Which one of you guys decided that meant I had to be a lesbian?”
Harold let out a big, beefy laugh. “Dave Alexandre.”
“Who?”
“Dave. The little guy, the summer intern lab assistant from Stanford, with the one eyebrow and a baseball cap he never took off. He thought it was funny to call me Dickstar.”
“Oh, him, the frat-boy.”
“Yeah. The frat-boy. He did some great work considering he was always hung over. He and Jackie were real big partiers. It’s hard to believe he’s a professor out at Cal-Tech now.” Harold sighed slowly, shoulders slumping. For a moment he’d been infused with an air of light, optimism, and a sense of bitchy humor, but the cloud of misery gathered back over his head. “I heard last week his wife has ALS. It’s painful to watch someone you love waste away like that. It would be better to go quickly and not have to watch, don’t you think.”
The man had a valid point. “Watching anyone die is painful.”
Harold closed his eyes, his face contorting. “It was torture when Mrs Mustela passed. I held her as she died. And then it was a battle to get out of bed in the morning. I don’t know how I made it to work. Now I know how hard it must have been for you when you lost your husband. I felt so awful for you. When I lost Mrs Mustela, it was the most awful day of my life too. Awful. Just awful. She loved me unconditionally, didn’t care about my money, never tried to change me. You’d know what that’s like. You never forget your first love, do you?” He opened his eyes, untied the sweater around his neck and pulled it into his hands.
Willa pressed her molars together. “No, you don’t.”
“She had beautiful white hair, just like yours, only shorter of course.”
“I’m so sorry I never had the chance to meet Mrs Mustela.”
“Oh, but you did. You met her about a month after she arrived. She was so tiny. I suppose,” Dichter said, kneading the pullover in his fingers, “I should be grateful we had twelve years together. Most ferrets live between seven and ten years.”
A ferret? Had he said his beloved Mrs Mustela was a ferret?
Willa understood the love for a companion animal and how it could be a vital part of a family, but … but … a ferret? She had no idea how she maintained her features in a mask of sympathy, but it was good she had because in the next moment Dichter was sobbing.
A second later, he’d dropped his sweater and reached for her.
Immediately after they’d parted, Willa had believed the meeting had offered nothing, no insight into anything, except maybe the weather because, as Harold had predicted, rain had moved in to spoil the sunny day. For a moment or two she considered their encounter as time wasted because, unlike Chandra, there was little Harold Dichter kept secret. Through his tears he’d confessed that—despite his pessimistic demeanor—he had no trouble acquiring female company and dated as often as he wanted to, but he found most women were only interested in his money. The unconditional love he’d craved had come from a companion pet, an animal he’d cared for deeply, a ferret that had become his family.
And Dichter’s talk of family had been a reminder of Jackie Grafton’s comments about her family, about her ne’er-do-well brother, which led to something Agen
t Adams had mentioned about Rory Grafton. Then Willa saw a connection she’d overlooked. There was another direction to take, another suspect to examine more closely, alongside Chandra. She wasn’t sure how to pull it together, but the hairs on the back of her neck had prickled and her perspiration turned to ice water.
Late in the afternoon, the day turned as gloomy as Dichter. A light drizzle fell and the cold sweat Willa felt continued as she ran on the treadmill in the Ridge Park fitness room. After a few minutes, she’d come up with a game plan. Then heavier perspiration streamed down her neck, coursed alongside her ears and slid between her breasts, adding another tinge of odor and body heat until she was, quite literally, hot and cold, and as wet as the rain outside.
A chubby man was sweating it out near the exit. He gave her a little nod as he lifted weights, grunting and sweating, just like she was, only his sweat was honest. His exertion was true, while she was just on the exercise equipment to escape, to cover up the fact she was about to take advantage of a situation, of a man who deserved better.
Use. Dominic had said it the other day. Dichter had said it this afternoon. Willa didn’t like the word. It was dirty, obscene, sickening. She bristled at this part of the plan. It wouldn’t incite any sort of suspicion, and would fit with the FBI investigation, without any silly spy novel antics. The secluded back deck at John’s townhouse was the perfect place to discuss classified data and give Dominic some very specific instructions.
Willa wanted to scream.
Cartoons. She wanted something screwball, something weird and wacky. Tex Avery’s animation came to mind. The breakneck-paced lunacy of Avery’s cartoons was something Willa related to. She was spinning faster than the world was, her eyes were bugging out of her head, and her heart was a harried cuckoo that kept popping out of her mouth.
There was a screwball chunk inside her that wanted to tell John everything, to trust him and be as honest as he’d been about his jealousy.
Gee, I’m really very interested in you, John, in fact I really want to sleep with you, but right now I’m going to use you for another reason. I’ll be committing a felony in your home, which may make you an unwitting accessory to a federal crime, but that’s okay since I work for the FBI.
Yeah. That worked so well. Telling him she worked undercover for the FBI solved everything.
Willa laughed. She laughed at the extreme recklessness of the situation before she increased the treadmill’s speed, and then she laughed some more.
She was already damned, but not everyone had to follow her to hell. Swallowing the sick lump in her throat, Willa turned up the treadmill’s speed even higher. She needed her brain to disconnect from her heart. She needed to get to a blank center so she could think clearly again.
The chubby man grunted and huffed as he lifted free weights, his face going red as he forgot to breathe into the lift, veins and tendons bulging in his temples and neck. If he kept training that way he’d blow a blood vessel.
She and the plump guy weren’t so different. Willa ran flat out, sprinting, looking to lose herself, to blank out everything. She kept up her pace, gasping, throat raw and dry, mind still fueled by unease, and when she powered down the treadmill and stepped off, she was freezing, drenched and puffing in time with the sweat-soaked man.
He was in the middle of a squat, a barbell close to his chest. With a slight nod, he gave her a weary, red-faced, open-mouthed smile. “I’ve got …” he panted, “this fat ass … to work off. … What the hell … are you … running from?”
Bent over, hands on her thighs, Willa shook her head. “God…” she puffed, “…zilla.”
Lesley had cooked up a storm in John’s kitchen. She’d filled his townhouse with the mouth-watering aroma of basil, tomato, and baked cheese. The fragrance of good food added a warm, relaxed note to the evening—something Willa was grateful for.
Part of her twisted with nervous tension about the discussion she and Dominic were going to have after dinner. Then there was the other sort of tension, the simmering sexual kind, the free-floating kind that zapped her with a static jolt anytime she merely glanced at John. On top of that was fatigue. Willa knew she sported dark circled under her eyes, just above the bags. Sleep evaded her, her mind too active, too searching to allow for a total shutdown.
Undoubtedly, her anxiety was palpable to others on some level. Lesley kept grinning at her as she prepared a salad to go with the lasagne she’d made. The smile was knowing and a little mischievous. She tore lettuce leaves and dropped them into a plastic bowl shaped like a football. “I think you came along at just the right time, Willa.”
“The right time for what?” Willa glanced at Lesley and pretended to concentrate on pouring a cup of balsamic vinegar for salad dressing into a small bottle.
Lesley jerked her chin to the two men sitting in the dining room. “For John. He needs someone to fall in love with. I pick you.”
“You pick me? We’ve only known each other a few days.”
Lesley waved a skinned cucumber in the air. “You think that matters at our age? By now we can cut through all that dancing around. The game playing ends and you can just be, well, grown up about it and what you want.” She gave a little chuckle as she added cucumber slices to the football bowl. “Of course you realize I’m completely full of shit.”
“Hey, I’m starving!” Dominic blustered from the other room. “Quit futzing around with the salad and get your asses out here so we can eat!”
Lesley ignored the order. “The length of time you know someone doesn’t matter. It’s not an indication of how well acquainted you are with each other or how well suited you’ll be. Take me and ‘Dr Demanding’ in there. We’ve known one another for twenty years, but we never really got to know each other until last year.”
“We’re cutting this lasagne!” Dominic hollered.
Calmly, Lesley sectioned and seeded a fat red tomato. “When I was with his brother, I think Dominic and I had three or four conversations. You know Terry, don’t you? Yeah, sure you do.” The tomato joined the cucumber in the football bowl. Lesley said, “All that Terry crap got in the way of how Dominic and I saw each other. I thought he was an egotistical ass with a God complex. He thought I was a lesbian who ruined his brother’s life. Then we fell in love.”
Willa chuckled and dug into a drawer for a spoon. “You might not remember, I almost didn’t, but we met once before. A long time ago, at Kyle’s christening.”
Lesley shrugged apologetically. “I barely remember that day. To tell you the truth, I’ve wiped the time with Terry out of my head.”
“Is he on to wife number nine yet?”
Lesley snickered. “Five. Can you hand me that basil there?”
“Tell me,” Willa handed Lesley a bunch of fresh basil leaves, “how do you get on with Mrs Brennan?”
“I don’t. She’s always hated me and she still does. How about you?”
“Peggy likes me fine, but that’s only because I was never a threat to her power. I take it she hasn’t mellowed with age then?”
“Ever had a preserved lemon? Peggy’s just like that.”
“Want me to kick her ass?” Willa scooped mustard from the jar and added it to the vinegar.
“John’s aunt already did.”
“I heard about that.”
“Lesley, JT is dishin’ it out and we’re eating. Right now!”
A bottle of olive oil in hand, Willa looked to her right to see John at the dining table.
He cut into the lasagne Lesley had baked and plopped a big slice onto Dominic’s plate then licked tomato sauce from the V between two fingers, which had a rather odd effect on Willa. Her thoughts turned pornographic. “Lesley,” she managed to keep the squeak out of her voice, “I think he must be really hungry.”
Lesley smiled. It made her eyes sparkle. “I like you. I can see why Dominic does too. Yeah. You’re great for John. Just perfect.”
“Perfect? Uh, Lesley, we only met on Monday.”
“Di
d you hear what I said a couple of minutes ago?”
”Please. We barely know each other. We’ve barely spoken. It’s all … it’s all … barely there.” It might have been barely there, but Willa understood she’d passed through some kind of eye of a needle. Fear, the feeling that had driven her to Los Alamos, the feeling that had spurred her to react, had morphed into feelings, feelings about John that were unexpected, confusing, exciting, and made about as much sense as arbitrary, scientifically unrelated classified documents stolen from the Lab. “It’s all barely there,” she said again.
“Like I said—so? All week long, whenever I talked to him it’s been Queenie this and Queenie that. Why does he call you Queenie anyway?”
“It’s easier than ‘Your Majesty’.”
Lesley’s eyebrows arched. She tossed some crumbled feta cheese into the salad bowl. “I’ve never seen him this way.”
“What way?”
“Idiotically happy. He’s got this big-ass grin all the time. Look at the guy. He’s gorgeous, he’s smart, he’s funny as hell, and he can’t keep his eyes off you.” She moved to rinse bits of feta from her hands. “And another thing. I know about you and my husband.”
The giddy little bubble in Willa’s mind suddenly popped, although she masked her surprise. “What do you mean?” Please don’t say Dominic told you about the investigation…
Lesley shook water from her fingers. “You go back a long way. He’s talked about you from time to time, but I haven’t always paid attention to details like I should. I know you’ve been friends since college. I know you and Fabian are Kyle’s godparents. I’m fine with all that, and I don’t have an issue with him having a close female friend, in case you were worried and … hell, how neurotic do I sound? You can you tell I don’t have a lot of girlfriends, can’t you?”
Thank, God. “It’s okay. Neither do I.” Willa laughed again and shook pepper into the dressing mix.
Lesley sighed. “If this was kindergarten, I’d ask you if you wanted to be friends.”
For Your Eyes Only Page 23
