Mistress Read online

  Chapter 48

  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.

  Chapter 49

  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.

  Chapter 50

  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.

  Chapter 51

  The bar is dark and hazy, just the way I want it. Just the way I need it. I’m tucked in a corner booth of a swanky lounge, but I’d rather not say which one; I’d rather not say where. For all I know, whoever’s chasing me hasn’t just tapped into my cell phone—they’re reading my thoughts, too.

  I mean, they’ve managed to predict my movements, and they’ve managed to be in several places at once. And I think there’s more than one “they.” There’s the “they” who have unloaded assault weapons at me on three different occasions and sabotaged my plane. And there’s the “they” who accosted me in the Wisconsin airport bathroom, who—as Liz Larkin so eloquently pointed out—could have easily killed me instead of kneeing me in the balls and leaving me with a stern warning.

  I take a sip of the Scotch and let the hot, bitter medicine warm my throat. I’m too sleep-deprived to drink very much without passing out, but my nerves are jangling and I need a brief respite. I look around at the crowd in this place—mostly people my age, dressed fashionably, worried about little in the world at the moment except enjoying the soft jazz and getting in someone’s pants later—and then look up at the television screen mounted over the bar.

  On the screen are President Blake Francis, First Lady Libby Rose Francis, and Bono, the singer from U2. They are behind a podium somewhere, and though the sound is turned down, I imagine they’re talking about world debt or world peace or some global assistance initiative. President Francis has never been the most generous president in terms of third-world philanthropy, but it’s good optics to share a stage with Bono, and the president has always been about good optics.

  Same for his wife, Libby Rose Francis, who seems to relish the spotlight a lot more than she relishes her husband. I always made their marriage as one of convenience; she was a wealthy heiress who wanted to marry a future president, and he was a future president who wanted to be bankrolled by a wealthy heiress. They’re affectionate enough in public, and everyone’s so plastic on camera that you can never really tell, but I never made them for lovebirds. Ron and Nancy they ain’t.

  Snowflake, the Secret Service calls her. I don’t know why they make their code names public, but they do. The president is Spider. That name kind of suits him. But Snowflake for the First Lady? Well, they have the temperature about right. I’d go with Icicle for a more accurate description.

  Woodrow Wilson’s wife championed improved urban housing while she was First Lady. Rosalynn Carter made mental health her cause. Nancy Reagan told us to “just say no.” Libby Rose Francis’s thing is “stay in school.” Hard to be against that, but seeing this bejeweled, silver-spoon elitist among inner-city dropouts is like watching Donald Trump milk a cow.

  Now Bono, he’s a cool one. He’s reinvented himself musically twenty times over, fronted probably the best rock band of my generation, and now tries to feed the hungry and heal the sick. I wonder if I could have accomplished what he did. I think so. All I’d need is a mountain of musical talent, ambition, and balls. And a pair of those tinted glasses.

  Maybe in the next life. I wonder how qu
ickly my next life will come. Judging by the odds, my time in this life is waning.

  My cell phone rings. I’m not used to it. I just bought it today at a convenience store. It has one hundred minutes on it.

  “Sorry I missed your call earlier,” says Ashley Brook Clark. “Caller ID didn’t show up.”

  “I’m not using my personal cell phone anymore. That thing’s dead to me now.”

  “I can barely hear you. Your phone’s dead?”

  “They’ve tapped it,” I say a bit more loudly, but trying not to draw attention. “I can’t use it. I’m using a prepaid phone.”

  “They’ve tapped your phone? Are you sure, Ben?”

  A waitress passes me who is prettier than any girl I ever dated in my life. A moment of longing courses through me, then back to the point.

  “I’m not sure of anything anymore,” I say.

  On the TV, Bono and the president raise their clenched fists in triumph. I would love to be so happy about something that I threw my fists into the air in triumph. In fact, screw happy—I’d settle for mildly content right now.

  “So how are you doing?” she asks me.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” I say.

  “Yeah? Where are you? It sounds like you’re in a club. I hear jazz music.”

  “I’m at a place called Vertigo.”

  “Don’t know it. Where’s that? Over on U Street?”

  “Where the streets have no name.”

  “Where the—okay, whatever, you don’t want to tell me. How are you doing on your search for Operation Delano?”

  “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”

  The door to the club opens. An Asian couple enters, young and handsome, looking over the whole place with blank expressions. They could be assassins. Why not? I shrink in my seat.

  “I think you’re nervous,” Ashley Brook says. “You’re scared.”

  “Why do you say that?”