Mistress (13 page)

“Still nothing on Operation Delano?” asks Ashley Brook Clark over the phone. “I haven’t pulled out all the stops. You still want me to hold off?”

“Could be dangerous,” I say into my cell. I have a limp after the bike wipeout and I’m working on almost no sleep, but it warms me up to talk to a friend and colleague. Ashley Brook’s been with me since I started the
Beat
five years ago.

“Danger’s my middle name,” she says. “Hey, Ben—tell me this much. How did Operation Delano come up?”

“Jonathan Liu mentioned it to me the other day.”

“The lobbyist Jonathan Liu? The one they just found dead in his house?”

“That one, yes.” By yesterday evening, a few hundred media outlets were reporting the news. Gunshot wound, apparently self-inflicted, according to the reports, but nothing else from the MPD.

“And I got confirmation from one of Diana’s best friends, Anne Brennan. She heard Diana mention it once. Delano, not Operation Delano.”

“Same difference,” says Ashley Brook.

I’ve never really understood what the phrase
same difference
means. I mean, I get Ashley Brook’s meaning, which at the end of the day is the point of communication—to convey a thought—but
same difference
never made sense to me.

Anyway. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

“So what is this about the Russians?” Ashley Brook asks. “You said when you called that this Delano thing ties into the Russians.”

I pass a couple making out on a park bench and experience intense jealousy toward anyone who (a) doesn’t have someone trying to kill them and (b) has someone they can make out with on a park bench.

“FDR normalized relations with the Russians,” I say. “He officially recognized them and he gave them a lot at Yalta, when he, Churchill, and Stalin were divvying up the spoils after World War II. He caught a lot of heat for that. It’s something, at least.”

“Not really, boss. It’s pretty thin.”

“That’s why I pay you princely sums to uncover information, Ms. Clark.”

“You pay me princely sums? I must not be reading my paycheck right.”

Everyone’s a comedian.

“Okay, well, I’ll look for a Russian angle,” she says. “Hey, boss? Are you still living out of a gym bag? A different hotel every night?”

“It beats being dead. By the way, if anyone shows up at the office with a submachine gun, tell them I’ve moved to Antarctica.”

“Will do. I’ll tell them you’re studying penguin mating habits. But seriously, Ben—be careful, okay?”

“Careful’s my middle name.”

“I thought Martin was your middle name.”

Don’t remind me. “I’m off to see Ellis Burk again,” I tell her. “We’ve got a date with Alexander Kutuzov’s attorney.”

“That should be fruitful. Lawyers are usually very forthcoming and helpful.”

“I know. I’m going to brush up on my Latin.”

“Okay, well,
stare incolumem
.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s been a while since high school,” Ashley Brook says. “But I think it means ‘stay alive.’”

Two hours later, Ellis Burk and I are driving to the law firm of Griffin and Weaver, one of those swinging-dick firms with all kinds of connected lawyers and former politicians who represent major players before courts and legislatures and steamroll the rest of us on a daily basis. But that’s not why Ellis is troubled. He’s been troubled ever since he learned, along with the rest of the world last night, that Jonathan Liu is no longer breathing.

“This is against my better judgment, taking you along,” he says.

“We’re, like, a team,” I say. I mention
Castle
to him but he doesn’t respond. Most cops I know don’t like cop shows. But team or not, I admit I feel more comfortable in the escort of a DC police detective. Who’s going to shoot at me while I’m hanging with a cop?

Traffic is light today, late morning. The sky is cloudless and the temperatures will hit one hundred today. The dog days of summer. It makes me think of that giant schnauzer waiting for me back at my town house, probably lifting his leg on my walkway as we speak—

I hear a sound that reminds me of thunder, which makes no sense, and before my brain can register anything the glass on the rear window has shattered, and Ellis lets out a wail and his shoulder is spouting blood and he falls forward, his jaw crashing into the steering wheel, and I start to reach for him but a torrent of gunfire tears across the dashboard and then Ellis pounds his foot on the accelerator and we burst forward, heading into the intersection against the light and cars are screeching to a halt and Ellis is shouting but I can’t make out any words. He’s using his left hand to steer and we’re both crouched down and rocking back and forth with the zigzag of the car and then his gun drops onto the seat cushion and he says, “Use it, use…it!” So I pick it up and have no idea how to fire this thing and then the gunfire starts again and glass is shattering everywhere and the body of the car is taking hit after hit
whump-whump-whump
along the passenger side and—

“Are you okay?” I shout.

“Shoot!” Ellis yells.

—and I lift my head up high enough to see out the window just barely and there’s a black SUV and I see the muzzle of some machine gun and I point my gun and shoot one, two, three times, blasting out my own window, and then the return fire comes, bullets buzzing over my head, and then something warm sprays onto my neck and hands and I turn and see Ellis’s face, or what’s left of it—

—and then we veer sharply to the left and something smacks my face and snaps my head back and all I’m thinking, the only thing I’m thinking before everything goes dark, is
Please, not Ellis, please not him, too
.

The paramedic completes her tests on me and announces that I’m going to be okay, whatever that means. I’m seated in the back of an open ambulance in the middle of 12th Street, which has been shut down following the shooting.

“Probably just a concussion from the impact when the air bag deployed, Mr. Casper. You’re lucky.”

Luckier than my friend Ellis Burk.

“You might want to spend a night in the hospital,” she says. “I know these police officers are eager to talk to you, but we can have you put under observation if you’d like—”

“That’s okay,” I say. “They need to talk to me.”

She looks over her shoulder. There are probably a dozen squad cars and some unmarked vehicles as well. “Yeah, it’s bad. Y’know, losing one of their own. That’s a pretty big deal.”

I figured out the pretty-big-deal part all by myself. News vans are lining the police perimeter, and copters are flying overhead. It’s not every day there’s a shoot-out at a populated intersection in the middle of the nation’s capital, at least on this side of town. It’s not every day a cop is murdered.

I close my eyes and try to wish this whole thing away. Ellis was my friend, someone who was trying to help me beyond what his job required. And look what it got him.

“Mr. Casper, Detective Liz Larkin.”

I open my eyes. Detective Liz Larkin is my height, over six feet tall, and wider than me. She has a towering presence on a bad day, and judging from her expression, this is one of those days.

“Get down off that ambulance, turn around, and place your hands behind your back,” she says.

I comply. “You’re…cuffing me?”

“Give the man a prize.” She places the cuffs over my wrists about as gently as she would rope a steer.

“I’m under arrest?”

“You’re two for two.”

“What’s the charge?”

“I’ll think of something,” she says. She leads me to a car, pushes down on my head, and shoves me into the backseat.

Turns out Liz Larkin is not as warm and fuzzy as she appeared at first blush.

I’ve been in this tiny room at the First District station going on three hours now. My head is ringing and I’m getting incredibly tired from answering the same questions over and over again and repeating my story several times.

I want to help them. I want them to figure out who did this, because Ellis deserves that. But Liz Larkin, I can see, is not treating this conversation similarly. This is no mutual information hunt.

“Let me see if I got all this.” Larkin places her hands on the table in front of me and leans on her arms. She’s within a couple feet of me, which I can live with, but I’d really prefer she use a breath mint.

“Your friend Diana Hotchkiss falls from a balcony. There’s reason to believe she was pushed. You think maybe it wasn’t Diana at all. It was someone else, a body double, because of a missing tattoo above her ankle.”

Right. But really, a Tic Tac, a stick of gum—something.

“
Then
,
” she continues, “after that mysterious death, someone sabotages your fancy little airplane and you have to crash it—but miraculously survive.”

I don’t know if I’d go with
miraculous
. I like to think it was good flying—

“Then someone shoots up your cottage on Lake Anna with so many bullet holes it looks like the O.K. Corral—but again, you miraculously survive.”

Only because I saw them coming first. It’s called the element of surprise—

“Then someone jumps you in an airport bathroom, threatens you, orders you to stop poking your nose around, but for some reason
doesn’t
kill you—another miraculous survival.”

Yeah, that one doesn’t make sense to me yet. They could have killed me but didn’t want to—

“And then an associate of Diana Hotchkiss, this highfalutin Chinese lobbyist Jonathan Liu, is found dead in his house from a gunshot wound. You had nothing to do with that, either.” She leans into me. “I have all that right?”

Basically.

“And this is all the work of some grand government conspiracy like the ones you see on the History channel? Reaching all the way to the White House itself?”

Close enough.

“Wow.” She scratches her head. “Sounds like you’ve really stumbled onto something big here.”

Her dead eyes and sarcastic tone tell me that I haven’t sold her yet. I guess I can’t really blame her. It’s pretty hard even for me to believe.

“You know what, Benjamin? Four hours ago, I wouldn’t have given a flying fuck about Diana Hotchkiss or Jonathan Liu because they’re the feds’ problem. But now all the shit you’re in has gotten one of our detectives killed. Someone I’ve known for over fifteen years. Someone with two daughters at Cornell. So now, Benjamin, now I do give a shit. I give a shit very, very much.”

She swears a lot. My father always said that swearing was a sign of laziness. Of course, he was a shit-eating fucking asshole.

Holly Hunter in
Copycat
nailed the female cop role, in my opinion. She didn’t try to be something she wasn’t. She was courteous and pleasant, but tough when necessary. Anyone who thinks Harry Connick Jr. is just a singer needs to see that flick.

“So now that I give a shit, I want to figure this thing out. You know what we cops do, Ben? When we’re trying to figure something out?”

Consult a Ouija board? Flip a coin?

“We start with the easy explanation,” she says, answering her own question. “So in that spirit, let me ask you a couple of questions that might make this whole thing a little simpler. Is that okay with you, Ben? I mean, since we’re on the same team here and all.”

Angie Dickinson was pretty hot in that old TV show
Police Woman
. Even more so playing the role of the sex-starved wife in that Brian De Palma flick
Dressed to Kill
and that TV mini-series
Pearl
. She was good at playing sex-starved. If she were married to me, she wouldn’t be sex-starved.

Calm down and focus, you idiot. This cop is trying to corner you.

“The first question, Ben: Were you in Diana Hotchkiss’s apartment around the time she was murdered?”

That one stops me. I show a sudden interest in my fingernails.

“Ah, cat’s got your tongue on that one. Okay, Ben, then question number two: Were you in Jonathan Liu’s town house in the last forty-eight hours?”

I look away. I can almost feel the walls closing in on me.

“See, I’ve got a different theory, Benjamin Casper. And it doesn’t involve cover-ups and dark alleys and conspiracies. Wanna hear my theory, Ben?”

I need a lawyer. This is exactly what I was afraid of the moment I saw Jonathan Liu dead in his bedroom.

“I’m all ears,” I say.

One of my favorite interrogation scenes in a movie is in
L.A. Confidential
,
when that detective had two different suspects in different rooms and he could play the audio from one room into the next with the flip of a switch, so whenever one of them said something incriminating, the other would hear it. The best one is
The Usual Suspects
,
which was one gigantic interrogation scene. Those are two of my favorite Kevin Spacey flicks, but you have to include
American Beauty
and
Seven
in any serious discussion of his work.

“You seem nervous, Ben,” says Larkin. “Like you got a lot of thoughts rolling around in your head.”

You don’t know the half of it.

“I can’t blame you,” she says. “I mean, you have Diana Hotchkiss, a death that looks like a suicide. Then Jonathan Liu, a death that looks like a suicide. And
then
…”

I look away while she delivers the punch line.

“Then we have your own mother,” Larkin says. “A murder that looked like a suicide. You learned that trick at a young age, didn’t you? That’s what we call a modus operandi, Benjamin. You skated on a murder charge as a boy, but you never forgot that little trick, did you? You saved it up in case you needed it again—”

“You don’t know anything about my life,” I say.

“Oh, I know
all
about your life.” She picks up a file from the table. “Your father was some distinguished history scholar at American U who specialized in American presidents. You apparently have come to learn quite a bit of presidential trivia yourself, which I guess is your way of, what, bonding with Daddy?”

“Don’t talk about my father.”

“Your mother, she was killed when you were eight. You walked on the charge because the juvenile court judge said he couldn’t rule out suicide. But they found your fingerprints on the gun, which was conveniently placed in your mother’s hand afterwards. You killed her and made it look like a suicide, Ben.”

“No.”

“Then you were basically homebound the next ten years. You had fancy private tutors and a lot of therapy. Then Daddy let you out of the house long enough to get a journalism degree from American U, where he could keep an eye on you. And now, even though you have enough money to never work a day in your life, you run some shitty Internet newspaper that nobody reads, which would be out of business if it weren’t for you subsidizing it with your personal fortune.”

“We get ten thousand hits a day,” I protest.

Larkin drops her hands on the table again, shaking the whole table in the process. “You’re going to get ten thousand and
one
hits today if you don’t stop interrupting me.” She reviews the file again. “Coworkers and friends describe you as nice and friendly on the surface, but nobody really knows you.
Insular
is the word that keeps coming up. You live in a world of your own. Never a really close friend, never a girlfriend that lasted more than a fling. You’re fucked up, Benjamin. You spent the first eighteen years of your life looking out a window, and now that you’re outside, you don’t have a clue how to operate.”

“No.”

“But then along comes Diana Hotchkiss. You fall for her. Big-time. She understands you like nobody else ever did, she’s easy on the eyes, she fucks you like you’ve never been fucked—the whole nine yards. Your dream has come true. But then that dream is shattered. You discover she has another guy in her life. A rich lobbyist type. Jonathan Liu. So you have Diana killed. You don’t do the dirty work yourself. In fact, you make sure that some people at the street level are chatting with you, so they can remember you later. A good alibi. But you make sure you’re there, right? You’re a sick fuck who wants to see her body splatter on the sidewalk. But then you get the hell out of there before the police come. You drive away so fast that a patrolman tickets you for erratic driving on Constitution Avenue.”

I knew that ticket was going to come back to haunt me.

“You try to create a story with this bullshit about your airplane being sabotaged, you shoot up your own cottage—and then, once you’ve created this story, you kill Jonathan Liu, too. You do it just like you did with Mommy. Gunshot, staged as a suicide.”

“No.”

“Then you run to Ellis Burk and tell him your sob story, and to make it look real, you even have your friends shoot at you in Ellis’s presence so he can corroborate your story. I mean, you have more money than God, Ben. You can hire whoever you want for whatever you want.”

She walks over to me. “The problem is, you killed Detective Burk in the process. And I’m not letting you walk away from that.”

“I didn’t kill anybody.”

“Sure you did, Ben. And you killed Jonathan Liu, too.”

“No.”

She looks at me like she knows something I don’t. I have a feeling I know what that is.

Larkin says, “Why did we find your fingerprint on the computer mouse in Jonathan Liu’s bedroom?”

I place my hands flat on the table as the room begins to spin. I should have seen this coming.

We interrupt this program to bring you a breaking report. Benjamin Casper has been set up!

They knew I’d be at Diana’s place when they killed her. They knew I’d go looking for Jonathan Liu, so they made sure I found him dead. And they killed him the same way as my mother was killed.

And then I made it easier for them. I made myself visible at Diana’s. And I rooted around Jonathan Liu’s bedroom and left a print on his computer mouse, of all things.

I’ve been playing into their hands all along. And I don’t even know who “they” are.

Liz Larkin moves in on me, a predator approaching its wounded prey. “It’s just a matter of time before I can prove all this,” she says to me. “And then I’m going to hand you over to the feds, who’ll hit you with a federal murder charge and stick a paralyzing agent through your veins. Your days are numbered, my friend.”

Her words echo in a room that shrinks by the second. Whoever they are, they’re doing their utmost to kill me. And now, even if I survive, it will just prove that I’m guilty.

They’ve got me either way.