Catgate
Senator Jim Rawson, Democrat, Iowa, 45 years of age, pulled the sleek red sports car over along the edge of the gravel road. Virginia farmland, washed in moonlight, surrounded him, a fertile and yet desolate landscape, serene in its isolation. Not a farmhouse in sight; certainly not a car. And the only other human being present was a dead one.
Vicki.
The busty young woman wore a pink T-shirt and jeans and running shoes — though she was in her late twenties, she might have been a college girl. Her features were cute — big long-lashed eyes (shut now), pert nose, pouty puffy lips. She was slumped against the other window of the Jaguar. He’d have to move her.
Leaving the driver’s side door open, Rawson — in University of Iowa yellow-and-black sweatshirt and black jeans and black leather gloves — came around and carried her from the rider’s side of the vehicle. It was as if he were carrying a bride across the threshold, although the only threshold Vicki Petersen had crossed was death’s, and she’d done that several hours ago.
Rawson — tall, raw-boned, with blonde-brown hair touched at the temples by distinguished gray — had a Marlboro man look that bode well with his conservative constituency. Iowans rarely voted Democrats to the Senate. Rawson had maintained the office for three terms (with dead-certain re-election coming up next year) by balancing his own slightly left-of-center politics with country charm.
As he gently conveyed the shapely and very dead body of the woman who had been his mistress for three years, he was bitterly aware of his own reputation as a champion of women’s rights, a battler for ERA, a vocal defender of Anita Hill. This irony left a bitter taste in his being as he arranged the corpse behind the wheel of the sports car, which had been purchased by him, in cash, with PAC money a little more than a year before.
“I loved you, Vicki,” he said, and could hear his voice waver; tears were blurring his vision, if not his mission. “But you betrayed me.”
Could she have really believed he would marry her? A Catholic in a predominantly Protestant state, Rawson knew the good people of Iowa would never stand for him divorcing, childless marriage or not, particularly not with a wife who was bedridden back home, wasting away with MS.
And then to threaten him with exposure — “How would you like to see our story on ‘A Current Affair,’ or maybe ‘Hard Copy’? Maybe I could play myself in the TV movie!” — truly contemptible.
You little bitchy he thought, and raised a hand as if to slap her, but the beautiful, eternally slumbering woman behind the wheel was past feeling any such sting, and he immediately felt a flush of shame.
He sighed. A summer breeze riffled a nearby field of wheat, and his own wheat-colored, dead-dry hair. The moon was like a hole punched in a black starless sky, letting in too much light. He looked at his watch, shut the girl’s car door with a thunk that echoed across the world. Where was Edward, anyway?
It was highly unlikely this dead girl would ever come back to haunt him. He knew that. The only nervousness he felt was immediate — once Edward had arrived, and he was back safely in his townhouse on P Street in Georgetown, Jim Rawson would be secure, with his best and only true friend — the big gray mixed-breed cat, Tricky Dick — settled on his lap.
He wondered if Dick would mourn the missing Vicki — the cat and the girl had taken to each other from the start....
A little over ten years ago, Vicki Petersen had been a cheerleader at the University of Iowa, a small-town girl with a big future — until she flunked out in her sophomore year, and found her way to New York, where an acting career seemed to beckon. Naturally top-heavy, her high, soft yet firm silicone-free breasts became tickets to stardom on the strip club circuit.
This had been prior to the more recent influx of upscale topless nightclubs, venues in which she might have made some real money. But a few years ago, stripping was less lucrative, and when Rawson met her in a D.C. bar called the Gentleman’s Club, she was at a low ebb.
He had encouraged her to quit her job as a stripper and get back to pursuing her acting career; as a senator, he’d met and maintained personal relationships with any number of Hollywood celebrities and could certainly help her make some connections.
She had been drawn to him immediately, he could tell — after all, not only was he a senator, and as handsome as Robert Redford, but a superstar celebrity back in her home state. Their affair had begun that first night.
Rawson didn’t like risking motels — you never knew when some sleazeball reporter was lurking in the bushes, waiting to make Gary Hart out of you — so early on in the relationship he had ensconced the girl in a suite at the Watergate. Irony was second-nature to Rawson, and he relished having his mistress spirited comfortably (and handily) away in the hotel and apartment complex where a break-in had once led to that sleazeball Richard Nixon’s downfall.
Vicki had been a private person. Her family back in Iowa — farm folk — had been kept in the dark about her stripping career. She would hardly have told them about an affair she was having.
Nor did she have any girlfriends among the strippers on the topless circuit — her aspirations toward acting had made her a snob toward them. They were sluts, tramps, low-lifes; she, on the other hand, was an actress reluctantly taking on this demeaning “role” on her way to a real career on stage or screen.
He knew she had made a few friends with other single women tenants at the Watergate — secretaries and such. But he had been adamant about her not sharing any secrets with them — after all (as he had drilled into her), these were women who swam in the same dirty Washington waters as he, working for this lobbying firm or that Political Action Committee; the wrong word to the right one of them, and he’d be sunk. And, so, he felt confident she’d protected him.
Even if she had mentioned him to a girl friend (and he doubted it), he knew they had never been seen together; no photographs of them, as a couple, existed to become a nasty surprise on the Enquirer cover.
She invariably would be picked up by Edward in the limo with its dark windows and brought into the townhouse from a garage in the alley that connected with an underground passageway that connected all of the homes on this block. Only Rawson knew about it, however, and that allowed Edward to bring Miss Petersen into (and out of) the P Street townhouse undetected.
“If people see us together,” he would tell her, “it will taint our eventual marriage. When Marge passes away, we’ll ‘meet’ for the ‘first time,’ and you’ll be a Senator’s wife with all the respect and attention you deserve.”
He could see how much she liked the sound of that, and knew she wouldn’t risk such a future. But she had grown impatient of late, saying, “That woman is never going to die! Divorce her! No one will blame you.”
She didn’t understand that she was asking him to commit political suicide.
And now, thanks to the cocktail she’d sipped at the town-house, laced with a deadly, tasteless and thankfully painless poison, she had committed literal suicide.
Not intentionally, of course, but the world wouldn’t know that. They would find a frustrated would-be actress, and ex-stripper, an empty pill bottle beside her lifeless form, a poor dead girl who wound up along the country roadside in a Jaguar purchased her by some unknown gentleman friend who had, perhaps, dumped her, sending her into this fit of final despair.
If this sort of tragedy was not unknown to Washington, neither was it unique to that city.
For this once, he had invited her to drive directly to him; Edward was off tonight, he told her, so there would be no chauffeured limo ride from the Watergate.