The Intern: Chasing Murderers, Hookers, and Senators Across DC Wasn't In The Job Description (11 page)

“Stanky could pay …”

I shrugged, trying to look more confident than I felt.

“And what are you going to do about that little situation?
Do you realize what you did in Stanky’s office was probably a federal crime?”

Actually, strangely enough, until that moment I hadn’t considered
the federal nature of that offense. It seemed so minor in comparison. “I’ll
worry about it after the capital crimes against me are dropped.” I tried to say
it confidently.

Tabitha waited before speaking, and I let her. She eyed me
warily, and I was careful not to make eye contact. I didn’t want to rush her.
She got up and walked to the window, and after what seemed like two decades
turned around.

“Stephanie liked you,” she said. “She told me.”

“Really?” I tried not to look too jubilant. Then I realized
the one woman who liked me and who I liked back now thought I was homicidal.
That was my luck.

“Really. She liked you. She wasn’t head-over-heels, but she
was definitely looking forward to seeing you some more.”

This was just one more interesting tidbit. “Then why was
Roger over there last night?”

“Roger came over on his own. She didn’t even know he was
coming. She had told him on the phone that she was kinda seeing you.”

“When did she tell you?”

“Couple of hours ago.”

“How is she?”

Tabitha wrinkled her nose like she intended to say something
snide but then softened. “She’s crazy right now. She doesn’t know whether to be
scared of you, or howling mad at you, or both, and she found out that Roger’s
parents don’t want her to be at all involved in wrapping up his affairs.”

“Why did Stephanie have to come pick you up the other
night?”

She snarled, “Stephanie’s not a hooker, if that’s what
you’re asking.”

I was relieved, but I tried to act indignant. “That wasn’t
what I meant. What happened to you?”

“You remember that guy I was with? He stiffed me. Pointed a
gun at me and took what I had in my purse. You’re supposed to keep an extra
twenty hidden just in case something like that happens, but he found that too.”

“Did you have enough money to make it worth his while?”

“That wasn’t the point. He just wanted to make me feel
cheap.”

I was going to say more, but she brushed me off. We sat
there silent for a long time again, Tabitha staring at the window, me picking
at the tag on one of the pillows.

“You didn’t do it, did you?” she finally said.

I smiled and shook my head. “But if you don’t want to be a
part of this …” My voice trailed off. I was going to tell her that I
understood, beg her not to turn me in, and request she send another hooker, but
I wanted to see what she’d say.

She sat on the bed, arms locked just beneath her breasts,
staring at me, obviously thinking about my story, about Stephanie, and
everything else that had happened. I tried not to meet her gaze, looking at the
bedspread, the coffee table, and the ceiling. She finally spoke.

“I’ll help, if I haven’t decided you’re a lunatic by
morning. I think it’s useless, and I think you oughta turn yourself in. But
it’s not my ass they’re after.”

She was still very cautious, and I wondered if she would help
me because she thought it was best to play along with a murderous nut case. I
hoped she actually believed me but realized I’d accept her help no matter what
her motivations were.

We both began to guess about what had happened. At first, I
did practically all the talking, but she gradually opened up a little. I told
her I thought Helper had found out about the assassination and maybe was even
surprised—maybe his buddies had promised to tell him before they tried
anything. He went back to the office, found the notes, called his buddies,
found out what had been done, called his secretary, and figured out very
quickly what had happened from there. Once all of this had been done, he knew I
would be hiding, so it was very easy to start putting the frame on me while
working to make sure I was pushing up daisies at the same time.

If they had needed fingerprints, they could have found a ton
at my house, and they could’ve transferred these to whatever evidence they
needed to. I was speculating on this last bit of information more than on the
others, because I had no idea if they—or anybody for that matter—had the
technology to do such a thing. But with my luck, they did, so I might as well
plan on it.

Tabitha filled in the gaps. Stephanie came home around
midnight from studying and found Roger’s body on her couch. The following
morning when she saw the news report about me, she called the police just to
let them know about our relationship. They had thanked her and called back when
they found out about the parking incident, and, the next thing anyone knew, the
reporters were saying I was a suspect in Roger’s murder.

I wanted to ask her more about this, but when she stopped
talking, I didn’t press. I realized I still had no real plan of attack, so I
told her to make herself comfortable—wasn’t that a laugh—and I would take a
shower. I now had a pretty good feeling that Tabitha wasn’t going to leave, and
I knew I needed to let her know I trusted her, so I figured I could close the
door. Still, I listened very closely for any sounds which might tip me off that
she was splitting.

I do my best thinking in the tub. After taking off my jeans
and painfully removing my shirt, I turned the shower to almost scalding and got
in. It felt great, especially on my injured shoulder, and I lathered and did
some serious thinking.

When you are involved in an international intrigue and you
hire a hooker with someone else’s money to come and help you clear your name,
you hope for someone who will believe you, quickly fall in love and in bed with
you, and get you out of the mess in a flash, deserting her profession forever
and staying only with you. You do not expect, or even want, someone who is
friends with someone you have dated and who believed for any amount of time
that you killed her friend’s boyfriend. This was, I must admit, a bit of a
damper. But I had learned a great deal in the past twenty-four hours about
playing the hand I was dealt, so I decided to quit worrying about it and figure
out what I needed to do next.

First, we needed to know what Helper and his cronies had
done. The guy worked for the NEA for crying out loud; normally, this is not a
job which requires killing elected officials and unpaid lackeys. I was betting
on the motive being money. Every murder, someone once said, is about either
love or money, and I was guessing Mark was not in love with Timmons, although
with Timmons’ conservative bona fides that would have also made one helluva
story.

So what did Helper do, and what did he know? I thought of
three places to start: Helper’s office, his home, and the headquarters of the
McHolland Foundation, where the strange message had originated. We were helped
by one major factor; all of the players would have to continue like everything
was normal. Helper had no outward reason to be particularly broken up over the
Timmons murder or my plight—except that he would have to find another intern to
deal with the Regionarts quagmire—so I was guessing that he would stick as
close to his routine as he possibly could. I thought the logical place to start
would be his house, and we could go there in the morning, when he would be
attending meetings and explaining to irate arts people about the demise of
Regionarts.

I was so proud of myself! I was becoming resourceful in the
face of all this adversity. I turned off the water and toweled off, put back on
my half-stinky clothes, and rejoined Tabitha. I was still a mite concerned that
by now an entire SWAT team would be camped by the mini-bar, but instead I found
her watching the same CNN report I had seen earlier.

My first tendency in almost any situation is to joke. This
generally works, but my first idea of an opening line—“Come here
often?”—probably wouldn’t have been well-received by my current audience. I
chose the more conservative, “Still here, I see,” as I plopped down on the bed
and hurt my shoulder again in the process.

“I guess,” she sighed, looking as if she regretted the
decision. “Now I need to tell you my story.”

Fifteen

T
abitha spoke in an accent softer than
Stephanie’s but just as southern. Stephanie hadn’t mentioned where her best
friend was from, but I was betting it wasn’t far away, most likely Virginia or
maybe Tennessee. She waited for me to sit down and then began.

“I paid for every bit of my college with loans, which is
hardly news. Not student loans, though, regular bank loans. I’m from
Murfreesboro, Tennessee, not too far from Nashville, and my dad was one of the
few people there in the horse-racing business, and, no matter where you are,
that business is always either feast or famine, and I guess he made too much
money to qualify for the student loans and never had enough to pay for my
school. He co-signed with me, and I didn’t figure there would be any problem
once I got out because female engineers are always in demand.

“So I got out of college, moved to DC and looked for a job.
I couldn’t find one in engineering, but I got a decent-paying one working for
the law firm where Stephanie worked, doing something boring, and when I had
been working for a couple of months, I went to try to get a car loan. And
that’s when the trouble began.

“They said no which was totally bizarre. They said I had
$42,000 in credit card debt, which was absolutely ridiculous. I had one credit
card, and that was it. And then it dawned on me. My dad had been getting credit
card applications with my name on them at home and applying for them. I found
out that if I ever wanted to apply for a loan or do anything, I’d have to sue
him. I asked him to pay for the debts himself and keep me out of trouble, but
he said he couldn’t. And then he filed for bankruptcy.”

She talked about all of this with very little emotion, like
she was giving a physics lecture. Her day had probably been almost as wild as
mine, and she was simply drained. “I had been sending him money since I got out
of college to help pay for my college loans, but I found out that he had been
using all of it to cover his other debts. So my little loans—the ones I had
actually signed for—were in default too.

“I thought about going through bankruptcy too, but I think I
didn’t want to screw everybody like he had done me, and I definitely didn’t
want to be financially fucked up for the next decade. The bank helped me out,
giving me really good rates and payment schedules, but I had no chance of paying
everything on my salary. So I just started dancing at a club up in Baltimore,
on The Block, a couple of nights a week.”

I had heard of The Block. It was a raunchy, anything-goes
neighborhood in downtown Baltimore. You would occasionally see the clubs on the
evening news, getting raided

“My neighbor at the time was a really cute girl, and she
drove a really nice car, and I finally asked her one day where she worked. She
said The Block. I couldn’t believe it—I had a totally different image of
dancers than someone like her. So she took me up there one night, and I
waitressed first and then started dancing. And then one night, right at the
first of the month when everything was about to come due, a guy offered me two
thousand bucks to have sex. I had done some pretty bad things already—everybody
who’s worked on The Block has—so I guess I was primed for it. I thought about
it a long time, thought about what my mom would’ve said if she was alive, but
then I thought of everything I owed. And I just couldn’t turn it down.

“But I knew if I would do that, it wasn’t going to be on The
Block. I knew I was attractive enough to make it in DC, and I got hired by one
of the agencies here. And then a friend of a friend told me about Discreet
Companions, and here I am, in the major leagues of sex.”

Tabitha watched me carefully, trying to gauge my reaction. I
looked back at her. “What are you thinking?” she finally asked.

I drummed my fingers on my knee. “I can understand your
reasons.”

“A lot of guys get really uptight and stupid when you tell
them.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. I think I’m just beginning to
learn what it’s like when people assume everything about you.”

She shook her head and smiled. “Nothing had surprised me in
a very long time—until tonight.”

“Well, stick around,” I said. “It’ll only get worse.”

Tabitha got ready for bed, and I watched the news. They were
discussing unimportant things like the balanced budget when she emerged,
wearing a sweatshirt and shorts.

“Most of your clients ask for something more revealing than
that, don’t they?” I asked, smiling. For a second, I could tell that she
thought I was telling her I expected sex as part of the deal because her mouth
twitched, but then she relaxed.

“Yeah. But I keep this around just in case. Sometimes they pass
out, and I climb out of the crotchless panties into something more
comfortable.” She jumped in bed, and I went off to brush my teeth. When I
returned, my face was once again in the middle of the television screen. They
were citing new evidence in my case.

“In the days leading up to the shooting, sources close to
the police say Trent Norris shared his plans with others. Norris wrote a note
to one friend, saying he would soon shoot someone.” They cut to a picture of
the Pavilion and then to a shot of one of the panelists—one I had barely even
noticed—talking about my strange behavior.

Tabitha looked at me, waiting to see my response. I just
shook my head. I told her about the note I wrote to Ann. She had probably felt
that she should tell the police, or maybe they found it sitting on my desk. I
wasn’t mad at her; I was mad at the people who were trying to put me in the gas
chamber before they even had a flattering picture.