“How we doing tonight?” says the cop, walking over to me. I’m illuminated by the searchlight from his car, which he’s trained on me.
The funny part is that one of the police precincts in the Bronx is located on Ryer Avenue, named after that same family.
I give him my license and registration. He probably already traced my plates. He already knows who I am.
“You wanna take off your helmet, sir?”
Actually, no, I don’t. But I do it anyway. He takes a long look in my eyes. It can’t be a pretty sight.
“Do you know why I pulled you over, Mr. Casper?”
Because you can? Because you have the power to stop, frisk, search, seize, and arrest pretty much whoever you want whenever the mood strikes you? Because you’re a constipated, impotent, Napoleonic transvestite?
“I lost control back there a bit,” I concede.
“You just about caused an accident,” he says. He has a handlebar mustache. Is this cop on loan from the Village People?
I don’t favor facial hair, but even if I did, I wouldn’t shape it like a handlebar. I’d probably go with the two-day stubble Don Johnson wore in Miami Vice. That would be cool.
“You crossed the centerline three times in one block,” he says.
I decide to exercise my right against self-incrimination. And pray that he doesn’t ask me what’s in my bag—like night-vision goggles or a used smoke alarm or some rudimentary tools. Or the body frosting I took from Diana’s closet.
I need to get home. I need time to think, to figure this out.
“Have you been drinking tonight, sir?”
He’s standing pretty close to me. One of the hazards of pulling over a motorcyclist. I could reach over in jest and grab his baton or the handcuffs on his belt, maybe his holstered weapon, before he could say doughnut. He probably wouldn’t think it’s funny.
But if he gets too inquisitive, I might not be joking. I may have mentioned that sometimes I don’t trust myself.
“Sober as a priest,” I answer. Actually, my priest when I was growing up, Father Calvin, was a raging alcoholic.
“Something upsetting you tonight?” he asks.
Well, the night started off okay, when I successfully planted surveillance equipment in the home of the woman I love. It took a turn for the worse when she later plummeted to her death. HOW DOES THAT SOUND, COP?
“Fight with my girlfriend,” I explain. “Sorry about my riding. I was just a little worked up. I’m totally sober and I’ll drive home carefully. I’m on the Hill, just five minutes away.”
I can play normal when I have to. He looks me over for a while, watches my eyes, and then tells me to sit tight. He takes my license and registration back to his vehicle. He isn’t going to find anything interesting. I don’t have a criminal record—not one that he’d find, anyway.
Ulysses S. Grant was once stopped for speeding on his horse. The fine was twenty dollars and he insisted on paying it. Franklin Pierce was once arrested for hitting an old lady with his horse, but the charges were dropped.
“You’re a reporter,” the cop informs me when he returns. “The Capital Beat. I’ve read your stuff before. Thought I recognized the name.”
Actually, I’m the White House correspondent, and I also own the company. The benefits of having a wealthy grandfather. Does that mean he won’t write me a ticket?
Nope. He cites me for reckless driving and crossing the centerline. It seems duplicative to me, but now is not the time to engage in a debate about logic. I just want him to let me go, which he’s going to do, albeit with tickets for moving violations. That’s the good news. The other good news is that, in a bizarre way, this cop has calmed me down, forced me somewhere toward normal.
The bad news is that now I’ve been placed near Diana’s building within an hour of her death.
Chapter 6
I don’t sleep but I dream: of a gun on a bathroom floor; of a woman prone on a sidewalk; of blood spatter on a shower curtain; of vacant, lifeless eyes; of a scream nobody can hear; of a blood droplet in free fall, taking the shape of a sphere before striking a surface without a sound.
“Diana,” I say aloud. My head pops up. I get up from the second-floor landing and rush downstairs. Did I hear her voice?
“Diana?”
I check the kitchen, the family room, the bathroom.
Outside, the darkness is gently dissolving. Dawn. Seven hours have passed in what felt like seven decades, torturous, agonizing. My body is covered in sweat and my pulse is just starting to slow. My limbs ache and I’m breathing as if someone is standing on my chest.
I race to the front door and look through the keyhole: a white panel truck is parked directly outside my town house. Coincidence? A couple of joggers are running through Garfield Park, across the street. My neighbor’s giant schnauzer, Oscar, is urinating on my brick walkway. Giant schnauzers freak me out. People should only have the small kind. They don’t make sense being that tall. They remind me of Wilford Brimley for some reason. That guy’s been sixty years old my entire life.
President Johnson had at least three dogs, mostly beagles, including two he named Him and Her. George Washington kept foxhounds, but he loved all dogs. During the Battle of Germantown, his troops came upon a terrier that belonged to British general Howe, his sworn enemy. His troops wanted to keep it as a trophy, but Washington bathed it, fed it, and then called a cease-fire so that one of his men could return the pooch to his owner across enemy lines under a flag of truce. FDR had a dog he took every—
Just then, a kid appears out of nowhere and hurls a newspaper at my front door.
I duck down, which makes no sense, then silently curse Paper Boy—he’ll get his, one day soon—and then decide that I should probably have taken my medicine last night. But no time for that now. I need to get out of here.
First I need to shower, because I stink with sweat and that vanilla body frosting from Diana’s closet. I think you’re supposed to have somebody else in the room when you use it. Calvin Coolidge liked to have Vaseline rubbed on his head while he ate breakfast in bed. “Vasoline” is second only to “Interstate Love Song” as the Stone Temple Pilots’ best song. I probably should have taken a pill last night, but I don’t like the side effects, which include mild nausea, ringing in the ears, and, oh yeah, impotence. It keeps you from getting down, and it keeps you from getting it up.
Not that impotence is my number one problem right now. You need another person in the room for that endeavor, too, last I checked. I’ve had sex with eight women a total of ninety-nine times. The shortest encounter, from foreplay to climax, was three minutes and roughly fourteen seconds. I say roughly because sometimes it’s a little awkward to go straight to the stopwatch afterward, so you estimate: it takes five seconds to withdraw and between five and ten seconds to pay her a compliment before checking your wrist discreetly.
The longest encounter, if you’re wondering, was forty-seven minutes and roughly thirty seconds. Taking all my encounters together, and using round numbers, the mean duration is twenty-one minutes, the median is eighteen minutes, and the mode is seventeen. My math tutor, Miss Greenlee, would be proud. Because every time with her was over thirty minutes.
I’ve never had a long-term girlfriend, though. For some reason, most of them thought I wasn’t romantic.
Until Diana. We connected. We’re all puzzle pieces on a huge board, and she and I, well, our jagged edges just fit together. Even if she hadn’t figured it out yet.
I turn on the shower water but whip my head back around. What was that?
I throw a towel around my waist and rush to the bedroom window, overlooking F Street. The white panel truck is still parked directly across from my town house. My quaint little tree-lined street is blossoming as the city awakens. More dogs are running around now in Garfield Park, but not that giant schnauzer.
I walk to my staircase and remain still, listening for anything on the two floors below.
Nothing.
Satisfied, I return to the bedroom. A blast of music erupts, thrashing guitars, thumping bass, almost knocking me to the carpet. “Fine Again,” by Seether. I take a moment to recover from what could have been a coronary. It must be 6:30 a.m. I have my clock radio alarm set to DC101.
I turn the shower water past hot and let the scalding water punish my neck. My eyelids are heavy and my legs are rubbery. Staying up all night has handicapped me now, when I need to focus more than ever.
Because now I’m going back to Diana’s apartment.
Chapter 7
I take my motorcycle back the same way I came last night. The streets are relatively quiet, as it’s not quite seven in the morning, plus Congress isn’t in session, which means its coattails—staffers, interest groups, lobbyists, even reporters—have thinned out considerably. We’re still packed into the city like sardines, but everything’s relative. I can feel the heat index rise as I move down Constitution again. It’s going to be hotter than yesterday.
There’s so much I don’t know at this point. I don’t know what Diana was doing yesterday, either in the daytime or in the evening. I just know that my instruction was to be out of her apartment by ten o’clock.
Ten o’clock was Calvin Coolidge’s typical bedtime. He usually slept until somewhere between seven and nine the next morning, plus he took an afternoon nap. He used to joke, When I’m asleep, I can’t make any bad decisions. President Arthur rarely went to bed before two in the morning. President Polk routinely worked late into the night and rose early, but then he died from exhaustion three months after completing his one term. He did purchase California, though, which some people consider a plus.
What happened after I slipped out of her apartment a couple minutes before ten? The elevator door I heard opening—was that Diana? Was she alone? And why was it so important that I be gone by ten?
I feel my pulse ratchet up as I cruise along K Street, driving along the Georgetown Waterfront Park, watching some kayakers on the Potomac, approaching 33rd. Truman was our thirty-third president but the thirty-second to hold the office, as Grover Cleveland was elected to two nonconsecutive terms, losing his reelection bid to Benjamin Harrison in 1888 even though he won the popular vote. But then he thwarted Harrison’s reelection bid and won a second term four years after his first, when Harrison was unable to campaign because of his wife’s illness.
Maybe I should have taken my medication.
I take a right onto 33rd and ride north toward the canal and Diana’s apartment building. I park my ride a block short and walk up the street, sweating from the humidity—already—and probably some nerves, too.
I feel like Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction, returning to his apartment after he killed his boxing opponent and betrayed a mobster. If John Travolta were waiting for me inside, I’d ask him why he did Battlefield Earth. If I had a Bruce Willis film festival, I would watch The Sixth Sense, Die Hard, Unbreakable, and Pulp. And probably Ocean’s Twelve, even though he just played himself. Hey, it’s my film festival, my rules.
This could be risky. I have to be careful about being seen. I have a key to her place, but some people might recognize me. I wish I had one of those realistic masks like they wore in the Mission: Impossible movies, the ones they dramatically rip off to reveal their true identities. But it’s just lonely old Benjamin. I don’t particularly stand out. I’ve become good at blending into the woodwork. People used to tell me I look like my father, which they meant as a compliment, even though I welcomed it like a tetanus shot. Diana said I looked like Johnny Depp. Maybe I should be disguised as a pirate. Or John Dillinger. Or Willy Wonka.
As I get closer, I feel my chest constricting, my throat and mouth drying up, my limbs becoming unsteady. This is where Diana’s life ended last night. It hasn’t really sunk in yet. I’ve been punched, but the bruise hasn’t yet formed. My brain knows it, and my body is physically responding, but somehow it doesn’t seem real yet.
And then it does. Then it crystallizes. The image of her falling comes into focus and I want to rewind time, like Superman did to save Lois Lane, and find out what was happening with Diana that I didn’t know, what caused someone to kill her or prompted her to take her own life. Tell me, Diana, give me something, tell me how I can figure—
A man in civilian clothes is standing very close to the spot where Diana landed, looking up at the balcony. Unless he’s an architect or a real estate agent or a big fan of balconies, he’s probably one of DC’s finest. He looks over at me and I see the mustache, which seals it. This guy’s a cop, investigating Diana’s death.
And having lost myself in my thoughts, I’ve made a terrible blunder. I’m only ten feet from him, and now I’ve seen him and come to a complete, dead stop in response, in the middle of the sidewalk. Which, of course, makes me stick out to him. He turns and looks at me. I stare back. Neither of us says a word. This is getting worse with every second that passes. This is what Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction called an uncomfortable silence. I wonder if he can hear the throbbing of my pulse.
It’s way too late to start up again and walk past him casually. Headlong flight is an option, and, looking the guy over, I see that I could probably take him in a footrace, but all in all that seems like a last-resort idea, and maybe he saw me park my bike, so even if I got away clean, it would take him one call on his radio to know all about me—including the fact that I was in the neighborhood last night, driving erratically and acting upset.
Oh, this is really going well, Ben. Nice idea, coming here.
He takes a step toward me. He folds a stick of gum into his mouth and nods to me.
“Morning,” he says with a practiced calm. But I can tell. He can see it in my eyes. He’s better than handlebar-mustache patrol guy from last night. His antennae are up. He knows. He knows.
What now, smart guy?
“You live around here?” he asks, like it’s just idle curiosity, like he’s about to ask me for directions to the Washington Monument.
I don’t answer. Instead, my left hand reaches around behind my back. I move casually, with a smile on my face to keep his threat radar low.
In one seasoned, fluid motion, he disengages the cover on his hip holster and eases his hand over the revolver.
Chapter 8
Turns out this cop’s a lefty. I guess the holster on his left hip should have been a clue. President Garfield was a lefty. So was Truman. In the modern era—
I brandish my MPD press pass, which was folded up in my back pocket. “Capital Beat.”
The cop takes a breath and decelerates, releasing his grip on his sidearm. “Jesus Christ,” he says.
“No. Just a reporter.”
Actually, Garfield was ambidextrous. He could write ancient Greek with one hand while writing Latin with the other. Lefty was Al Pacino’s character in Donnie Brasco. In my opinion, it was his finest acting job, restrained and despairing.
The cop does a quick read of my credentials. They’re issued annually by the Metropolitan Police Department. “Benjamin Casper,” he reads. “Well, you sure as shit gave me a nervous moment there, Benjamin Casper.”
Great. He said my name twice, quadrupling the likelihood that he’ll remember it later.
President Buchanan often cocked his head to the left because one eye was nearsighted and one was farsighted.
“You’re supposed to keep your credentials in plain sight, pal.”
“Guilty as charged.” I nod in the direction of Diana’s building. “Jumper last night?”
He looks me over again. “PIO will release something later. Still working on identification.”
That’s a dodge if I ever heard one, and White House correspondents hear them every day. Most detectives or uniforms will feed you the basics even before the public information officer releases an official statement, especially if you promise to spell their names correctly in the story. That tells me something: this case is being treated differently.
The area where Diana landed is roped off with yellow t
ape. Pieces of the clay pot and some soil from the apple geraniums still remain. There is the bloodstain, which is amassed primarily on the sidewalk, with traces beyond it onto the curb.
Once blood has left the body, it behaves as a fluid, and all physical laws, including gravity, apply.
“Help me out, Detective,” I say. “No leads at all?”
He’s already begun to tune me out. Now that he makes me for a reporter, I’m about as welcome as a flatulent cockroach.
But my question gets his attention. He turns to me. “Leads on what? On a lady jumping from her balcony?”
“Have it your way,” I say, sounding like a reporter getting the stiff-arm.
“Sorry, Benjamin Casper. This is dark for now.”
What’s with repeating my damn name?
I decide to cut my losses and beat it. This was a net loss, all told. I didn’t get into Diana’s apartment, and one of the investigating detectives said my name three times, virtually guaranteeing it would be burned into his memory. But at least I used my reporter angle to avoid a catastrophic misstep.
And the trip wasn’t a total waste. I came away with three things I didn’t previously know. First, the Metropolitan Police Department is treating Diana’s death as a homicide investigation. Second, they’re acting like they’re not, for some reason.
And third, there are two guys wearing sunglasses, parked down the street in a Lexus sedan, who seem awfully interested in me and this cop.
Chapter 9
I kick the Triumph to life, throw on my shades, and turn in the direction of the Lexus with the two guys just to get a quick look. Each of them is Caucasian, steel-jawed, muscular, and constipated. Okay, constipated is just a guess. I don’t know their deal, but now is not the time to find out—not when I lack the element of surprise, they’re two and I’m one, and they’re in a car and I’m on a bike. Besides, I’ve aroused enough suspicion for one morning.