“You could have been the Venus de Milo, it wouldn’t have mattered. She prefers men.”
“Clearly. She’s a cougar. She’s also as crazy as a box of weasels.”
“She’s a complicated woman.”
“I’ll say. She’s a racist. She doesn’t like Gideon Parnell because he’s black.”
“Maybe. Or maybe because he marched. She doesn’t like troublemakers unless it’s her brand of troublemaker.”
“I’ll still take her money.”
I smiled. “You did say yes awfully fast.”
“Busted.” She shrugged. “What can I say, I have a mortgage.”
“Why did Slander Sheet never go after Gideon, anyway? Was it because they couldn’t find any dirt on him?”
“Because there was nothing interesting to report... I was working on a story on him before the Claflin thing came in. There was nothing there.”
“Did Julian tell you to do it?”
“He suggested it.”
“Because his boss, the owner, wanted Gideon Parnell taken down.”
She shrugged. “That was above my pay grade. But Claflin’s a much bigger target.”
My phone rang.
“Gideon,” she predicted.
I took it out of my jacket and answered without looking at it first, because I was driving. “Nick Heller.”
“Mr. Heller, this is Detective Balakian from MPD homicide.”
“Yes, detective.”
“I’d like to speak with you at your earliest convenience.”
“What about?” Mandy was watching my face.
“Kayla Pitts.”
“Is there a problem?”
“I just have some questions for you.”
“I’m out of town and won’t be back in Washington until late. How’s tomorrow morning?”
A beat. “Nine o’clock at homicide branch, 101 M Street.” It was an order, not a suggestion.
“I’ll be there.”
He disconnected the call.
“What does he want?” Mandy said.
“He wants this case to go away, but it’s not happening anytime soon. He wants to talk to me.”
“For what?”
“Just says he has questions.”
“I wonder if he’s getting pressure from above. All this conspiracy talk out there.”
I thought for a minute. “Maybe. Maybe that’s all it is.”
61
We didn’t get back to DC until late, almost eleven. I drove Mandy to her apartment, which was on Kalorama near Columbia, in Adams Morgan.
“As long as you’re here, why don’t you come up?” she said, touching my knee lightly. “You can pick up my Claflin files.”
To my surprise, I felt my cheeks warm, and I was glad she couldn’t see me in the dark. It was like that Shirley MacLaine line in Terms of Endearment, when she invites potential suitors to come up and look at her Renoir — a welcome invitation that confirmed the vibe that I’d wondered about between us. Apparently I hadn’t just been imagining it.
“Sure,” I said. “That’d be great.”
“Thanks.”
Her condo was on the third floor of a brownstone whose lobby smelled of curry from the Indian restaurant next door. She had three locks on the door.
“Apologies for the mess.”
The place was small but smartly furnished, in IKEA simplicity. An open-plan kitchen with an island. It looked more spacious than it should have. Nothing was out of place. There was no mess. “Slovenly,” I said.
She laughed. “Well, you know. Something to drink?”
“That would be nice.”
“Coke or diet? Or seltzer? Or I can make coffee. Actually, mind getting yourself something from the fridge while I change out of these clothes?”
I located a couple of glasses and clanked in a few ice cubes from the freezer and poured us both some Diet Coke. I felt like having a real drink, but that wasn’t going to happen. I didn’t want to be the only one drinking anyway.
She emerged ten minutes later wearing skinny jeans and a black silk camisole with spaghetti straps. She was barefoot. She looked great. I had a fairly good idea she had the same thing in mind as I did. She retrieved her phone from the kitchen table and a minute later I could hear Art Pepper’s silky smooth alto saxophone doing “My Funny Valentine.”
“Nice,” I said, handing her the glass of Diet Coke.
“You sound surprised.”
“I love Art Pepper.”
“You’re not a big jazz snob, are you? You know, like, it’s no good if it’s not Django Reinhardt, or Thelonious Monk at the Blackhawk, nineteen sixty?”
“Not a jazz snob. That’s not me. I mean, I don’t know what mouthpiece Art is using, if that’s what you mean.”
I set down my glass on the kitchen island and excused myself to use her bathroom. When I came back, she was sitting in an armchair covered in a slouchy slipcover placed at a right angle to the couch. She’d moved my Diet Coke to the end table between the chair and the couch. I sat on the couch next to the end table, where she’d put a brown accordion file. She waved at it. “My Slander Sheet files.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s the paper ‘What If’ file. The stuff I never got anywhere with. Rumors about everyone in Washington who counts.” She’d put on perfume, something light and floral, maybe jasmine.
“Like who?”
“Your old boss, Jay Stoddard, for one.”
“Whatever you have on him, no matter how kinky or disgusting, it’s true.”
“A lot of those leads never checked out. Never amounted to anything. Like ninety percent of them are just urban legends. But I never throw anything away. You never know when an old rumor turns out to be true.”
“Thanks for trusting me with it.”
“Before the Kayla debacle I was working on a story about a DC homicide that was allegedly covered up. A cold case involving some Washington bigwig.”
“Who?”
“I never got that far. A retired police detective in Southeast, an old guy who’s on his deathbed or close to it, supposedly covered it up and now he wants to talk.”
“You have a working theory who the killer was?”
“Theory? Your friend Senator Brennan.”
“Come on.”
“A drunk-driving incident, maybe.”
“You think?”
She shook her head. “I never got anywhere with it.”
“Well, I’m not going to bring it up with him.”
She stretched her legs. “You sure you don’t miss living in DC? All the intrigue?”
“Not at all. You like living in Adams Morgan?”
“Where I am now, yeah. I used to live on Columbia and had to sleep with earplugs.”
“The bar traffic.”
“The drunken arguments, the smashed bottles, the sirens. The woo girls and the frat bros. But that was mostly Friday and Saturday nights.”
“Any crime here?”
“I had a break-in a couple of weeks back, in fact.”
“Were you home?”
“Nope.”
“Get ripped off?”
“I don’t know. The place was ransacked, but I haven’t figured out what they took. They climbed in through the fire escape. I’ve changed the locks on the windows.”
“When was this, exactly?”
She shook her head. “About a month ago.”
“When you started working on the Kayla story?”
“Before that. Oh, hey.” She got up suddenly and went over to the kitchen. I turned to watch. She wasn’t skinny; she was curvy. Maybe voluptuous was the right word. Her legs were long and toned, like she cycled. She opened a cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Jameson. “I forgot, I keep some around for guests. If you want something harder than Coke.”
“Not for me, thanks.” As much as I wanted a drink, I also didn’t want her to feel uncomfortable. “You can keep that stuff in the house?”