The Bubble Gum Thief (25 page)

“Water?”

His voice startled her. “Thank you,” she said, taking the glass of ice water from Rowanhouse.

He was wearing long white flannel pants, cuffed to his knees, and a striped, unbuttoned shirt. He pushed his sunglasses on top of his head and sat down in the sand next to Dagny.

“Twenty years ago, my wife was shopping in Manhattan, carrying her bags, going from one store to the next.” He spoke slowly and softly as he looked out toward the horizon. “A drunk driver—
in the middle of the day
—drove up onto the sidewalk and killed her. Not instantly. She suffered. Spent a week in the hospital. I never felt more helpless in my life, sleeping on the chair in that room as she slowly died, knowing there was nothing I could do
about it.” He sighed. “I moved here because New York felt like an ugly place, and I needed something beautiful.”

“What happened to the driver?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “It didn’t matter to me, Agent Gray. Whatever happened to him wasn’t going to bring Susan back.” He said it innocently—without hidden meaning or duplicity, without subtle reference to Dagny’s own situation, and without bias for his client. She knew, from this, that he didn’t know about her relationship with Mike.

“You know who Michael Brodsky is, right?”

“I read that he was killed as part of this crime you are investigating. I was very sorry to read that. He was a very talented artist. I’ve sold some of his work.”

“You know that he and I were lovers, don’t you?” Lovers? “Dating” sounded trivial, but “lovers” sounded scandalous. There wasn’t a good word for what they were.

He seemed genuinely surprised. “I did not know that, Agent Gray. I am very sorry for your loss.” Rowanhouse grabbed a fistful of sand and let it fall between his fingers. “I did not know that,” he muttered again.

“Then maybe you don’t know your client as well as you think you do.” She stood up, brushed the sand from her legs, and walked back to the house to collect her things.

“What movie did you watch?”

Victor set down the
SkyMall
magazine he’d been perusing and looked up, surprised by her interest. “
Deathplane
.”

“That a Jana film?”

“Third billing,” he smiled.

“Who’s this fiancée you mentioned? And why haven’t I heard of her before?”

“Her name is Jennifer, and she’s a nurse out in Herndon. You haven’t heard of her because, well, I guess we haven’t really talked about anything other than the case.”

He was right. Dagny didn’t know anything about Victor’s personal life. “When did you meet her?”

“Two years ago. I went in for an appendectomy.”

“And it started up just like that?”

“Yep.” He picked up the
SkyMall
.

He wasn’t getting off that easy. “How’d you woo her? Use that silly fake Southern accent?”

“Nope,” he replied.

“What then?”

“Just old-fashioned charm.”

“So you have a date for the wedding?”

“August fifteenth. If she doesn’t leave me.”

“Why would she leave you?”

“She liked it better when I was just an accountant.”

“I imagine she’s pretty upset that you’re gone, working this case?”

“Yeah.”

It hadn’t occurred to her that she’d disrupt Victor’s life by bringing him into the investigation. “I’m sorry I pulled you into this. I should have asked if it was something you could afford to do.”

“No, Dag, it’s great,” he said, and he sounded sincere. “I mean, I didn’t ever think I’d be doing something like this, but I’m enjoying it. Is that wrong? To enjoy it?”

“You have to enjoy it, or you won’t last long.” Dagny wondered whether she enjoyed the work. She couldn’t remember how she felt before Mike was killed.

“It doesn’t make Jennifer feel any better when I tell her I’m having fun doing this. It actually seems to make things worse.”

“Well, if things fall apart with Jennifer, you’ve always got Jana.”

March 29—Washington, DC

When the director said that Dagny could work the case, he’d forbidden her to investigate the Whitman murder.

He hadn’t said anything about the
Brodsky
murder, though.

Still, as Dagny walked the sidewalks of Foggy Bottom, she knew full well that she wasn’t supposed to be doing what she was going to do, and it wasn’t just because of the Director. After Bermuda, the Professor had ordered Dagny and Victor to rest for the next couple of days. “Neither of you looks well,” he explained. “I would swear that your cumulative weight has stayed the same, it’s just shifted.” He was resigned to the fact that they needed another murder if they were going to get anywhere. The earlier crimes were too stale. A fresh murder would bring new evidence.

Although the Professor had called a break, none of them had actually stopped working. The Professor was still gathering information on released inmates from Coleman who had served time with Regina Berry. Victor was ferreting out more details about Rowanhouse and Flust, and their financial dealings. And Dagny had spent the previous day reading Candice Whitman’s essays,
trying to understand why someone would want to kill her, and why Mike had loved her. It wasn’t hard to see both.

In her early work, Candice was thoughtful and eloquent, ruminating lyrically on esoteric topics like the romance of the common law. Over time, her tone shifted from sublime to sarcastic, from soft to hard. Early essays advocated tougher sentences for white-collar criminals; later diatribes embraced the rough justice of prison rape. Though Candice had begun as an advocate for the judicial system, she had slowly morphed into an advocate only for the victims of crime, and then finally, an advocate only for herself.

Gloria Benton’s office was on the first floor of a burgundy brick row house. Dagny rang the bell and waited. When there was no reply, she rang it again. She’d turned to leave when the door finally opened.

“I’m with a client,” Benton said, narrowing her brow. Her kinky blonde hair was disheveled and her bright-red glasses were askew.

“Are you almost finished?” Dagny asked, flashing her credentials to replace the question mark with a period.

“Whitman?” she asked. Her expression changed from anger to sadness.

Dagny nodded.

“Hold on a second.” Benton disappeared. She returned a couple minutes later with her client, a large man dressed in a muumuu. She dispatched him with a half hug and an air-kiss.

“Okay,” she said to Dagny. “Come on in.”

Dagny followed her to a small, dark office and took a seat next to a standing ashtray, where a cigarette butt burned its final ember. Benton sat behind a cluttered desk. There were no books on the shelves behind Benton, just framed pictures of the publicist with various men and women—presumably her clients. Aside
from a picture of Benton with Candice Whitman, Dagny didn’t recognize anyone.

“Winston doesn’t like the sun,” Benton explained, rising from her chair to open the blinds. When she sat back down, the sunlight was shining directly into her eyes. Benton squinted but made no move to adjust the blinds again. “I’ve already talked to you guys for what seemed like days. What else can I tell you?”

“We don’t always do a very good job at the Bureau of sharing information. Forgive me if you’ve answered some of these questions already.”

Benton sighed. “It’s okay. I don’t have another appointment for a couple of hours.”

“How long had you been Ms. Whitman’s publicist?”

“Fourteen years, I think. Thereabouts.”

“How did she come to you?”

“You know, I don’t even remember. Maybe through someone at the
Post
. I couldn’t really say.”

“What was she like? Was she always...”

Benton lowered her head and peered over her glasses at Dagny, “Are you asking if she’d really become a bitch, or if she just played one?”

“Yes.”

“Everyone changes when they become famous. And very few become nicer. But I always liked her. If she were a man, they’d have called her ‘confident’ and ‘strong.’”

“Her latest book—”

“
The Ides of March
.”

Dagny nodded. “Did you plan her book tour?”

“I did.”

“Including the launch in Georgetown?”

“Yes.”

“When was it announced?”

“Last fall, I think.” Benton opened a drawer and sifted through some papers, retrieving a black appointment book. “People think it’s a mess in here, but I know where everything is.” She flipped through the pages. “No, when we announced in September, it was going to be at Long Beach. And then”—she flipped through a couple more pages—“Okay, yes. We moved it to DC in December.”

“Long Beach?”

“She was going to launch it at a writer’s conference in Long Beach, California, but they canceled the conference, so we moved it back here to DC. I guess you want to know when the Bubble Gum Thief might have planned the murder.”

The newspaper’s awful moniker seemed to be sticking. “Something like that.”

When Benton closed her calendar, the paper cut her index finger. “Dammit!” She dug through her purse and found a Band-Aid. “I cut myself all the time,” she said, wrapping it around her finger.

“Did Ms. Whitman have enemies?” Dagny continued.

Benton laughed in a loud, halting manner. “Have you ever read her work? Of course she had enemies.”

“Had she received death threats?”

“Hundreds of them. Thousands, probably. You should have them already.”

“Do you know why Michael Brodsky was with her when she was killed?” Nothing Dagny had asked before this had mattered much to her. This question was the reason she’d come to see Benton.

Benton tilted her head and flashed an anguished frown. “You loved him, I guess?”

“Why would you say that?” There was no way she could have known.

“Because you’re crying.” Benton handed her a box of tissues. Dagny took a few and wiped her eyes. When she looked down at the tissues, they were soaked with teardrops.

No use pretending. “I loved him very much.”

“Then you must be in awful pain right now.”

“You have no idea.”

“I think I do.” Benton opened another drawer and pulled out a photograph and handed it to Dagny. It showed a young Candice Whitman holding hands with a young Michael Brodsky. They stood to the side of a stage in a television studio. “Candice loved him, too.”

Dagny stared at the photograph. His hair was longer then. Stubble on the face. Eyes the same. “When—”

“It was her first time on television. She was nervous as could be. Could hardly speak a sentence. But he calmed her. He was
always
a rock, for her. Helped her gain confidence. She had been timid, fragile. But he gave her...” She didn’t complete the thought. “When they drifted apart, I told her it was a big mistake. That she was letting something wonderful slip away. She would nod in agreement, but she didn’t really hear me. Didn’t hear anybody. Everybody was telling her that it was a mistake. And yet I helped her do it.” Benton grabbed a tissue and dabbed her eyes. “I helped her climb further and further away. Got her jobs in New York, sent her all over the world, always traveling, always chasing something bigger. But that’s what she wanted. And it was my job to make it happen.”

“Why was he at the book signing with her?”

“We had dinner, the night before. Candice and I. I could tell she wasn’t happy, and I pressed her on it. She was almost always up, up, up, so it was strange to see her so down. I asked her what was wrong, and she looked at me and her face started to crinkle real tight, which isn’t easy to do with all that Botox, and I realized that she was holding in tears, forcing herself not to cry. And she said, ‘What have I been doing?’ It was the first time I heard her doubt herself. The first time ever. She shook her head, and just kept shaking it. I thought she was trying to shake herself out of
it, shake off the pain. I don’t really know what she was trying to do. And then she said, ‘I miss him so much.’” Benton grabbed another tissue.

“And then?” Dagny whispered.

“The next morning, I called Michael. Asked him to meet her, talk to her, just to check up on her. He was as close as anyone had ever been to her. Wanted to see if I should really be worried for her, or if it was just a fleeting sadness. So it was my fault he was there. It was my fault he was killed. It was my fault she was killed, too, because I put her there as well.” Benton started to sob.

Dagny waited for Benton to regain her composure, and then grabbed a couple of tissues in case she lost hers. “What did Michael tell you when you talked to him? Did he say he was single? That he was still interested in Candice?”

“Oh, no, no, no. Honey, no. That wasn’t why he went. When I asked him to come, he said that he had fallen in love, that he’d found ‘the one,’ and that Candice was someone from his past. That he and Candice were over, but he still cared about her and that he would show up and check on her. But that was as far as it could go because...well, I guess, because of you.”

Dagny finally had an answer to the question that had troubled her most, and even though it was the answer she wanted, it left her feeling hollow, empty, and mostly, ashamed. Ashamed that she had doubted Mike, and ashamed that she had used the investigation to mollify her insecurities.