“It took a while. Now I’m okay with it. I really don’t mind if you have some.”
I hesitated, but not for long. “Then okay, I’ll have a little. On the rocks.”
She fixed the drink and brought it to me. I clinked with her Diet Coke and took a swig, felt the whiskey burn the back of my throat.
There was a moment of silence. She said, “So can I ask you something? When you were in Iraq...”
I waited for the inevitable question. Did you ever kill anyone? And What was it like? What does it feel like to kill another human being?
“Yeah?”
“Well, how did a rich kid like you end up in the army?”
“I wasn’t a rich kid.”
“You didn’t grow up rich? Your father—”
“Yeah, till I was a teenager. Then my dad went on the lam.”
“He got arrested?”
“Yes, but that was after a few years. He was a fugitive.”
“I remember reading about him. What’d they end up getting him for?”
“Insider trading. Fraud. A bunch of things.”
“Was he guilty?”
“Of that and more.”
“Not a nice guy?”
I chuckled. “I wouldn’t say so, no.”
“But you still visit him in prison.”
“He’s extremely smart. He still knows people. Sometimes he helps, but it costs me.”
“Costs you?”
“It’s hard to explain. I don’t visit him out of love or filial duty.”
“How about your mom?”
“She lives outside of Boston. She’s some kind of saint.”
“Any brothers or sisters?”
I shook my head. Too complicated to explain about my brother Roger. “How about you?”
“Three older brothers.”
“You were the baby.”
She smiled. “I was.”
“Little princess.”
“Actually, I was a tomboy, until I discovered boys.” She cleared her throat. “But you never answered my question. Why’d you enlist?”
“I didn’t want to work for McKinsey.”
“The consulting firm?”
“Yeah. I worked for them a couple of summers.”
“Sort of an extreme way to avoid working for McKinsey, don’t you think?”
“I really didn’t want to work for McKinsey.”
She laughed a little.
“I enlisted because I believed in it. Maybe I needed something like that, at that time in my life. I wanted to not be Victor Heller’s son. I wanted to be my own man.”
“I think I get it.”
It was late and I was tired of talking. I stood up.
“Can I get you another Jameson?” she said, standing up as well.
“I’m good.” I went to give her a hug, and her face turned toward mine, and somehow our lips met. Her hands came around to my back and pulled me in toward her. I could taste her lipstick and the Diet Coke. My tongue found hers. Our mouths melted into each other’s. I slid my hands under her camisole and came around slowly to the front, felt the silky-smooth skin, her breasts.
She pulled back to take a breath and said, “God.”
“Mm,” I said.
“Heller, is this going to be a problem?”
“Hmm?” I’d gone from Nick to Heller. Interesting. Using just my last name connoted greater intimacy.
“You and me...?”
“No problem,” I said, and I kissed her again, my hands on her butt. Then I removed her cami and gazed at her full breasts, her nipples erect and pointed, and I sucked in a breath between my teeth.
Voluptuous. Yes.
I liked voluptuous.
62
I spent the night.
You never know the etiquette, after you sleep with a woman. If you leave right away, you’re no better than a dog. But not all women want to wake up with a man in their bed.
We snuggled together, and I fell asleep, and I awoke sometime later to discover that it was early morning, though still dark. I got up quietly so as not to wake her and padded into her living room area where she kept the accordion file of her sources, her story leads.
The file was filled with tantalizing rumors. I pored through it. At one point I made coffee — she had a complicated Swedish coffee machine that took some figuring out — and when I was searching her cabinets for a cup, Mandy appeared. She was wearing the lacy panties she’d had on the night before, and a white tank top.
“Mmm. Could you pour me some, too?”
“Of course.”
“The mugs are in the cabinet to the right of the stove.”
“Good morning,” I said, taking down two mugs. I took the one that had The Washington Post logo on it, in case it spurred bad memories, and gave her the one with the WAMU logo on it, the local NPR affiliate. The coffee was delicious. She got some milk from the refrigerator, offered it to me, and when I demurred she poured some into her mug. She took a sip.
“I enjoyed that,” she said after a while. I knew she didn’t mean the coffee.
“So did I.”
“I hope you don’t mind my asking: Are you involved with someone?”
I shook my head.
“Back home in Boston, I mean. Are you sure?”
“As far as I know.”
“I was actually engaged.”
“To who?”
“A lawyer at WilmerHale.”
“It is Washington, after all. The odds are good you’d end up with a lawyer.”
“We broke up around the time I got fired from the Post. That was another thing my drinking screwed up.”
“Maybe it was just as well.”
“He was a really nice guy.”
“Then I’m sorry.”
“He wasn’t very interesting. But he put up with me, which is no minor consideration.”
There was a long pause. Maybe she wanted to trade ex-girlfriend/ex-boyfriend stories. But I didn’t do that. I patted the accordion file. “Thanks for this.”
“Find anything?”
“You’re a really good reporter.”
“Is there a ‘but’?”
“You were working for a shitty website. But you’re a reporter of an extremely high caliber.”
“You already got into my pants, Heller. You don’t have to be so nice.”
I didn’t laugh. Quietly, I said: “I think you were targeted.”
“Targeted how?”
“I think you were given that Claflin story deliberately.”
“I don’t... follow.”
“You were given a big story that was guaranteed to self-destruct. Just solid enough to withstand fact-checking by a smart journalist, like you. But with hidden fissures so that a high-powered investigator, with enough resources, would be able to take it down. Someone really determined.”
“Like you.”
“Like me.”
“Meaning I got played.”
“Maybe we both got played.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I think you played your role and I played mine.”
“Both of us? Why?”
“Because someone wanted you to stumble and fall.”
“Who in the world cares enough about me to try to destroy me? That doesn’t make sense, Heller. I’m just a journalist. Who’d been fired from The Washington Post. Working for a bottom-feeding website. Who would even bother?”
“You knew something. You had something. You had to be discredited. You and Slander Sheet both. The Claflin story was a booby-trap. A butterfly mine. You pick it up, and it blows up in your hands.”
“Well, it worked, didn’t it?”