Neal finished off his scotch and stood up. “Yeah, Rich, get Mr. Kitteredge on the phone. Tell him the Senator wants Strom Thurmond or somebody.”
“Let’s just everybody sit down, shall we?”
Neal looked at the woman who had just spoken, and couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed her standing in the doorway. She was a lovely woman and she stood framed in the doorway just a second longer than necessary to let Neal realize that she was a lovely woman. She’s made such entrances into this room before, Neal thought. She used the door frame like Bacall used a movie screen, but she was small. Her long blond hair was pulled tightly back, almost prim. Brown eyes flecked with green smiled at him. She wore a black jersey and jeans. She was barefoot. She walked over to her husband, took a sip of his drink, made a face, and moved behind the bar, where she poured grapefruit juice over crushed ice. Then she sat down on the opposite end of the sofa from Neal and pulled her legs up under her. Nobody said a word during all this. Nobody was expected to.
“Neal Carey is twenty-three,” she said to the room at large in a voice that whistled “Dixie.”
“How do you know?” Chase asked.
“I inquired.”
“And you don’t think he’s too young?”
“Of course I do, John. I think they’re all too young. But what you and I think hasn’t worked out all that well, has it?”
She fixed her husband with those brown eyes. The issue was settled.
Then she turned them on Neal. “I’ll bet you have some questions for us.”
It was all pretty much as Rich Lombardi had described. Alison Chase was a brat of the first order, a spoiled baby turned spoiled kid, turned spoiled teenager, and on the fast track toward turning ruined adult. Bored by age ten, jaded by thirteen, hopeless by the time she celebrated sweet sixteen, Alison was the classic case of too much too soon and too little too late.
Child Allie had garnered all kinds of attention from the doting parents who hauled her out to perform for dinner guests and hauled her back in when the evening’s supply of cute had been played out. She made the usual adolescent progression from ballet to horses to tennis, and had littered New England and Washington with the tattered detritus of dance teachers, horse masters, and court coaches. The proud parents made all the recitals, most of the field trials, and quite a few of the tennis matches until Allie started losing and the fun went out of it.
As Allie grew up, John Chase’s political career thrived and the demands of the young congressman’s time increased, especially when he made the giant step to Senator. Likewise, the politician’s wife made her obeisance to the Junior League and the torturous committees of Washington wives who devoted their afternoons and evenings to worthy causes such as saving other people’s children.
Nothing was too good for Allie, however, so off she went to the very best schools, first to day schools in D.C., and later to those New England boarding schools whose role it is to prepare young women for the next generation of committees. And as Allie had learned young that she had to perform to get attention, perform she did-badly. Because while nothing was too good for Allie, Allie was never good enough for Mom and Dad. Not the tentative jete, the imperfect seat, the lazy backhand that sliced out, certainly not the grades that started with B’s and made a steady slide to F’s as desperate but futile stabs at perfection gave way to sullen indifference and then determined screwups. If she could not be the perfect success, she would be the perfect failure. If she could not be the ideal princess, she would be the ideal dragon. She would turn her beauty around to be the beast. And nobody had intended that to happen: not Mom or Dad, not the coaches or the teachers-not even Allie.
What in most girls was adolescent rebellion settled into a protracted war: Allie against her folks, Allie against her teachers, Allie against the world, Allie against Allie. She had no real friends, just a series of temporary allies and co-conspirators. She did most of her talking to shrinks, then stopped talking to them altogether, unless to exercise her blossoming talent for sarcasm and disdain.
Allie discovered early on that the pretty bottles in the household bars and liquor cabinets gave her a powerful weapon in her war against life as she knew it. Surreptitious sips from guests’ glasses soon became nighttime raids to snatch half-full bottles, bottles that gave her a breezy high to chase boredom away, smoothed the anxieties, and placed her parents at the far end of a telescope when looked in at the wrong end.
She met the challenge when Mom and Dad took to locking the liquor cabinets, as willing cohorts at school taught her that credit cards opened doors in more than the symbolic sense, and that your basic manicure tools, when handled with panache in a manner never described in Seventeen, will open most of the locks installed to prevent the servants from pilfering.
Later on, she discovered the potential hidden in Mom’s medicine cabinet. How when you drop a Valium in a glass of scotch, your afternoon is pretty much taken care of. She drifted through entire days and nights without a hassle in sight or a care in the world except how to restock the chemical larder. An unusually cooperative shrink bought her story about anxiety attacks and prescribed the stuff for her, in nifty five and ten mils, and Allie became known in the hallways of academia as a girl who could actually give pharmaceutical change. Then Allie went to another doctor and claimed to be really, really depressed, whereupon the good doctor referred to his PDR and discovered that the treatment for depression was an antidepressant and wrote scrip for it. So Allie had an unlimited and legally sanctioned supply of speed. Allie had her dawns and dusks, and could swap and trade with her friends.
Teenage boys, their hormones bouncing around like Ping-Pong balls in a vacuum, sniffed her out as an easy mark. Allie discovered sex, which wasn’t so bad except she didn’t discover birth control with it, and she got pregnant. Scared enough to confide in her mother. Allie then made the discreet visit to the discreet office. (“Dad is going to have you killed,” she told the doctor and nurse, “to keep you from talking.”) After that, teenage boys became too immature for Allie, who made the important transition from prey to predator and found any number of older men willing to be stalked and brought down.
And it was pathetically easy; boring, really. Allie had inherited her mother’s hair, and from somewhere a pair of blue eyes that shone with life even in the photographs. The genetic sculptor had fashioned a classically chiseled face and a form that embodied the current American ideal. “How could a girl as pretty as you…” was a refrain that Allie heard over and over again after spectacular screwups or misbehavior. She was expected to be the prom queen and the sweetheart, and she responded to these expectations with an almost savage perversity. Sex was a weapon. Sex was revenge.
So by age seventeen, she had done it alclass="underline" all the drinks, all the drugs, all the boys, and all the men. And she was so tired of it all. So one fine day, she looked out her window at the big ocean and decided that the other side might offer something new, and she whipped out the old credit card one more time to open the airplane door and flew to Paris. That was three months ago, and nobody had heard from her or seen her until three weeks ago, when some kid had spotted her in London.
The description of Allie’s youth had taken some time, and a working lunch had been served by a staff quite used to serving working lunches. Chicken sandwiches, fruit salad, wheat crackers, and cheeses had been laid out quietly and consumed with no great enthusiasm. Allie’s story had a way of sapping an appetite-except Neal’s. He ate it and enjoyed. Surveillance work had taught him that whenever food appeared, you ate and appreciated it.
“Why did you wait three weeks to tell anyone that Allie had been spotted?” The more interesting question, Neal thought, was why they had waited three months to do anything at all, but he knew better than to ask. That was a question for later, if at all.