Washington Deceased (15 page)

With infinite caution, Wendy lifted her left arm. Cox stirred. Wendy froze, holding her arm still fifteen inches above the pillow.

Cox's regular breathing resumed. His eyes stayed closed. Wendy inched herself toward her edge of the rug, gradually pulling her body out from between the sheet and blanket.

There. She was out on the carpet. Keeping her eyes on Cox, she came up to a crouch. She got ready to back away, toward the card table.

“Wendy?” Cox mumbled.

She froze again. Cox's left arm reached over to where Wendy had been lying. His eyes half opened.

For a split second guilty fear paralyzed her. She fought the fear down, choked off the suddenly rising nausea, willed her voice to sound sultry and seductive again.

“Just looking for my gloves, tiger,” she said.

“Gloves?”

She patted the area around her and came up with one of them. No matter how peremptorily she ordered herself to be calm, she couldn't take her eyes off him.

“Here we go,” she said.

She climbed back under the blanket and whisked the glove back and forth across his nose and mouth. His eyes opened all the way.

“C'mere you insatiable minx,” he murmured.

***

“You're quite certain she said nothing to indicate where she might be going?” Michaelson was asking Marjorie at 8:42.

“Naturally I am certain, Richard, or I wouldn't have spoken as I did.” Marjorie was beginning to be vexed with her companion. They were in Michaelson's Omni, outside Hartnett Hall where they had just now discovered no evidence of Wendy Gardner.

“It's my fault,” Michaelson muttered.

“We are in complete agreement.”

“Marjorie, I realize that my behavior must be exasperating. Please attribute that to my acute anxiety.”

“Very well. Consider it attributed.”

“And please humor me by allowing me to go over what we know that is pertinent to Ms. Gardner's whereabouts. She was sitting at a table reading.”

“Correct.”

“You came over to talk to her.”

“Right.”

“What did you talk about?”

“You.”

“Me?” Michaelson said. “Nothing true, I trust?”

“Do stay to the point, Richard. She said you weren't very nice. I defended you ably and effectively without, however, imputing niceness to you. At the conclusion of this conversation, she seemed quite noncommittal.”

“Very well. You were then called to the phone to talk with me.”

“Correct.”

“The conversation lasted only a short time as I recall.”

“A relatively short time.”

“And when you looked back she had gone and appeared to have departed in some haste.”

“Correct again.”

“Is there any chance that anyone could have talked to her during the interval between the time you left her and the time you noticed she was gone?”

“I consider that very unlikely. The store was practically empty. Anyone coming in would certainly have attracted my attention and Carrie's.”

“So,” Michaelson mused, more to himself than to Marjorie, “she thought of something. Heard something. Overheard something. Read something.”

“Scratch heard and overheard. The only conversation during the interval was the one I was having with you over the telephone, and Wendy couldn't have heard any part of that.”

“And scratch thought of something, too,” Richard said.

“Why?”

“Because we can't do anything useful with it. That leaves the possibility that she read something while you were on the phone—read something rather galvanic. You said she was reading while she was sitting at the table. What was she reading?”

“
D.C. After Dark
, that semi-underground newspaper.”

“You're certain of that?”

“Richard, someday you are going to ask that question once too often. I have it with me because I gathered up what she left at the table, and the timing of this little improvised evening out with you was so tight that I barely had time to change clothes and just had to dump the contents of one handbag into another when I exchanged purses.”

“May I see the tabloid in question, Marjorie?”

“Certainly, Richard.”

She dug the paper out of her purse and barely restrained herself from dropping it in his lap. He turned on the car's dome light.

“Something in here set her off on whatever it is she went off on.”

“So it would appear,” Marjorie agreed.

“I suppose there's nothing to do but look through it ourselves and see if we can figure out whatever it was.”

“You read the left hand pages,” Marjorie said, “and I'll read the right hand pages.”

***

It looks like that one did it, Wendy thought. Cox was snoring like a water buffalo in the depths of hibernation. It was 9:01.

She slipped out from under the blanket. The sonorous rumbling from Cox's nose and throat continued. Wendy found her shirt and panties and picked them up. Those she could put back on without taking the boots off. Removing the boots seemed like a noisy, time-consuming procedure that she couldn't allow herself. At the same time, she didn't intend to go buck naked through Cox's files.

Pantied, shirted and still shod, she crept over to the card table. Every three seconds or so, she glanced backward over her shoulder at Cox's sleeping, snoring form. The snores were deep and reassuring.

Kneeling at the card table, she delicately opened the top drawer of the filing cabinet. She did this by inches. Each inch produced a grating squeak and at every other squeak she glanced over her shoulder. But the snores continued.

She got the drawer open to about half its length. She found the first document inside and pulled it up to where she could read it in the half light: VCR Owner's Manual. She let it drop, found the next item and lifted it up: bank statement from two months ago. Her spirits sinking a bit, she started to go through the drawer's contents more quickly: student loan papers; copies of income tax returns; warranty cards; lease; more owner's manuals; copy of the promissory note on his current car loan; drafts of two articles he had written, with rejection letters from
The New Republic, The Atlantic
, and
The American Spectator;
more bank statements; a box of cancelled checks; a box of check pads.

That was it for the first drawer. Wendy chewed contemplatively on her lip. She glanced at her coital partner, still obliviously snoring.

Wendy didn't see how she could possibly be wrong. Something had to be here. She sighed, slipped the first drawer shut, and began to open the second.

***

Average reading speed for high-level officials in Washington is one thousand words per minute. The average for bookstore owners in that impatient city is somewhat higher. Michaelson and Marjorie had gotten through four pages of concert listings, night spot reviews, record reviews, restaurant reviews and columns of bilious opinion without spending very much time at it but also without picking up any hint as to where Wendy Gardner might be.

Michaelson turned the page. This brought to view the first two pages of a very long article titled, “Half-Staff Blues: Woes of a Part-time Congressional Staffer in Lotus Land East.”

“This looks more promising,” Michaelson said. He and Marjorie set to reading it with renewed avidity. Michaelson's assessment, however, proved optimistic, for the article turned out to be nothing more exciting than the selfabsorbed chronicles of a a highly libidinous aide who found it frustrating that what the taxpayers paid him to do so often interfered with his bedding of a platoon of young women who, according to him, desired him more than anything except a grade-and-step pay increase.

“I don't see anything very helpful there,” Marjorie said.

“Nor do I.”

He turned the page. Michaelson made short work of a profile of a local heavy metal group that was trying to find a label, which Michaelson learned meant a recording company; while Marjorie quickly digested an article on people who ripped off videotape sellers by bootlegging unauthorized copies.

“Serves them right for discouraging reading,” she sniffed.

Michaelson turned the page again. He came to a two-page spread continuing and concluding the Half-Staff Blues article. They read speedily and fruitlessly through that.

Michaelson turned the page again. And groaned slightly. The reviews and articles had given way to classified advertisements in tiny type.

“We seem to have reached the personals, as lonely hearts ads are called these days,” Marjorie said. “Any ideas?”

“Only one,” Michaelson answered, sighing. “Let's read them.”

***

Wendy finished her inventory of the second file drawer. For the most part, it was more of what she'd found in the first drawer, plus some blank stationery, legal pads and ballpoint pens.

She did find a letter-size envelope with twenty-three one hundred dollar bills in it, and remembering that inmate Lanier had also had a large amount of cash on hand she spent a few seconds pondering the hypothesis that Cox sold dope. She concluded that this didn't really get her anywhere by itself and besides, it wasn't really what she was looking for. She needed something more.

She sat gingerly on the carpet. She was baffled. There wasn't anyplace else in the apartment to look. Not for what she was seeking. There wasn't any bedroom, she'd already been in the bathroom and there wasn't anyplace in there to keep it anyway, she couldn't imagine it being in the closet that he had casually opened in her presence. The only possible place was here, in the filing cabinet under the computer.

Computer.

She raised her eyes to the personal computer on the card table. She thumped her forehead with the heel of her right hand.

Schmuch, she said to herself, cheerfully ignorant of the actual meaning of this word.

She rose, sat down on the chair in front of the card table, and began to look through the software. The chore absorbed her. She was sure that it wouldn't be long now.

Wendy turned on the computer and the monitor. This produced a disconcerting beep and Wendy jumped, glancing anxiously over her shoulder as she did so. Cox snored reassuringly on.

Among the software, Wendy had found a boxed three-ring binder labeled Office Manager. She booted the FileIt disk and ordered the computer to list its contents. After an interval of whirring and clicking the screen showed:

List Files on Disk in Drive One

“Shit,” she breathed. “He didn't even bother to code it.”

She told the computer to retrieve file 6. Whirrs and clicks. Then the screen filled with type. At the top of the screen, flush left and all caps, was the heading DESMOND S. GARDNER.

***

“SWM,” Michaelson read. “Forgive my obtuseness, but this isn't really my area. What does SWM mean?”

“Single white male,” Marjorie translated. “B/D means bondage and discipline, S/M means slave and master, golden shower refers to a sexual fetish I'd just as soon not discuss, thank you very much, generous means the advertiser expects to pay or to be paid by the respondent, depending on which party the adjective refers to, no pros means the opposite.”

“All right. Thank you. ‘Single white male seeks WF'—that would be white female, I take it?”

“You take it correctly.”

“Good. ‘—seeks white female for cool whip/mayonnaise party.' Cool whip/mayonnaise is obviously jargon. What does it mean?”

“I'm not certain, but I suspect that part is literal.”

“You mean this fellow wants someone who will allow him to cover her with….”

“Yes.”

“Hm. ‘Non-smokers only.' Remarkably fastidious under the circumstances.”

Once you knew the code, Michaelson reflected, you could read these things very quickly indeed. He sped through four columns of them in no time and was starting the fifth when Marjorie identified the essential problem.

“The more of these I read,” she said, “the clearer it becomes to me that I don't have the faintest idea of what I'm looking for.”

“I share your perplexity. I can only hope that whatever it is will be so obvious that we'll know it the moment we see it.”

“That seems unlikely.”

“Bingo,” Michaelson said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you stand refuted by experience. Immediate experience in this case.” He pointed to an ad three quarters of the way down the fifth column.

“Wanna horse around?” Marjorie read. “‘I have just what it takes to spur you on. WF will give free rein to your most unbridled fantasies—and your bridled ones too. If you're ready to pony up, write Diana at Box 3096. Photo $5/SASE.' She even expects you to pay your own postage. Frankly, Richard, this is a side of you I hadn't suspected.”

“Three oh nine six is the numeral written beneath the picture of a fetching young woman in riding costume that was found—I refer, of course, to the picture, not the young woman herself—in Sweet Tony Martinelli's quarters the afternoon he was shot to death.”

“I see. In other words, working on your assumption that the number underneath the picture was part of a telephone number, Wendy may well have spent the better part of today running down a blind alley.”

“Correct,” Michaelson said.

“Then she saw the number in here, put it together with what the picture actually showed, and leaped to the conclusion that the number had an entirely different significance.”

“Correct.”

“Causing her to go racing off to—where?”