Ginter looked at Natasha and held her gaze for a fraction of a second longer than necessary. She seemed to nod imperceptibly just before Ginter broke off eye contact to answer Paul’s question. Natasha slumped down next to Paul and squeezed his hand reassuringly.
“I didn’t say no squisher had come back,” Ginter said. “I think we’ve been joined in our recent journey by either a squisher or a pathological liar—from Portland.”
This time when Ginter turned toward Pamela three other sets of eyes moved with his.
“What, what, do you mean?” Pamela stammered.
“Eckleburg didn’t miss much. I never knew him to screw up. Why would he send someone who knew nothing about explosives to check out a bomb project?”
“Yeah, so?” Pamela said, regaining a bit of her composure. “Maybe someone else screwed up?”
“Or maybe he didn’t screw up. Maybe he thought you were a bomb expert because you are one.”
“That’s ridiculous!” she exclaimed defiantly. “I told you, Arthur was the bomb expert.”
“Whose bombs always failed. Didn’t they, Pamela?” Ginter asked. “The civil administrator in Portland, the CA recruiting center in Bangor? All failures. There wouldn’t have been enough C-4 to sink any ship in Portland Harbor. You designed those bombs, not Pomeroy. And when they did go off no one was ever injured because they had been tipped off.”
“So, Arthur wasn’t that good at it,” Rhodes challenged defiantly. “He was a drunk. You’re connecting dots that aren’t related.”
“Am I?” Ginter challenged. “Tell us all what you told me about how you met Arthur. You said that you had spent a weekend at your brother’s one-week time-share in New Hampshire and you met Arthur at a bar. You had driven up on a Friday and back on Sunday?”
Pamela had a disgusted look on her face. “Yeah, so?”
“I told you my niece had a time share at Loon Mountain. Hated it. Bad investment. A one-week time-share runs from Saturday to Saturday. You wouldn’t have been up there for a full weekend.”
Pamela looked incredulously from one to another. “Are you believing this? You’re talking six years ago, Lewis! How the hell am I supposed to remember how long I was in some lousy condo in New Hampshire? Do you forget that I was engaged to a resister? Did you forget that? Or do you believe that I was responsible for the cops showing up early at that Chase job?”
“You ever been to a wake, Pamela?”
“Huh?”
“You ever been to anyone’s wake in Maine?”
“Of course I’ve been to a wake,” she answered indignantly. “What are you talking about?”
Ginter discerned concern creeping into her expression.
“Did you ever notice that when someone dies and everyone is standing around the funeral home people will say stuff based not on how close they were to the dearly departed but rather based on the angle of their relationship?”
Ginter could tell that no one around him knew what he was talking about. He pressed on. “Let’s take a professor at MIT. Colleagues, even those that knew him for 20 years will stand around the casket and talk about his research skills. Former students will tell about stuff that happened in his classes. His adult nephew will talk about how as a kid he’d walk over to his uncle’s house every Saturday morning to ride on his pony. The professor’s girlfriend will tell about how he liked to swim naked on Saturday mornings.”
“So?” Pamela asked. But Ginter could see the look of alarm growing.
“What people say about the deceased depends, you see, on the angle they knew him from, not necessarily on how close they were to him. But your description of your fiancé sounded like a freakin’ obituary, right out of a file. ‘He was my fiancé and he was an environmental lawyer who once settled a big case.’ That’s what you say about a boyfriend you loved?” Lewis asked incredulously.
Tears welled up in her eyes. “Maybe, just maybe, it’s just too painful to think of him any other way,” Pamela protested.
Lewis was undeterred. “Was it so painful that you didn’t even refer to him by name? I’ve known lots of people who have lost spouses, boyfriends, lovers, and they always refer to them by name. ‘I was engaged to Joe, who was great.’ But you never made it personal. You told us this tearful story and never even mentioned his name.”
“I know his name!” Pamela roared.
“Oh sure, you remember it from the file. But you didn’t use it. And you should have known his age. When I asked you how old he was, you nearly gagged on the question. You never figured that issue coming up when you reviewed the CA file for your cover, did you?”
“What, what do you mean?” Pamela stammered. “I told you he was my age.”
“Correction, after you fumbled the question, I suggested that he was your age and you grabbed at it.”
“Well, he was my age,” Pamela insisted.
“Really?” Ginter asked. “Unfortunately for you, I knew Curt. Not close but well enough. When he was killed three years ago, he was in his mid-fifties. You’re what, 35? If I know how old he was, why didn’t you?”
Pamela sucked in a deep breath. “I was embarrassed,” she said. “Curt was older than me and that was always an issue—”
“Why didn’t you know his nickname?” Ginter continued. “On the drive south after we passed New York you said you always loved the Apple and wanted to stop off and paint the town red. The same city where your fiancé supposedly was killed? C’mon! And when I worked his nickname into the next sentence you never reacted. As you stand here today, you still don’t know his nickname,” Ginter challenged.
“And by the way,” he added. “Curt played baseball, not football.”
Pamela dropped her eyes and nodded. “O.K., O.K., so I lied about being engaged to him. I never even met him. I had heard a lot about him from a girlfriend in Portland whose boss knew him. I just thought that if I told you that, you might accept me easier.” She looked up at them all. “You’ve all sacrificed so much and I just wanted to fit in.”
Paul and Amanda looked back at Lewis Ginter. He sensed doubt in their faces. To his left, however, he could tell that Natasha was not taking her eyes off the Portland woman.
“The punch,” he said simply. “When we were leaving Cambridge you dropped Igor with an open palm karate chop to the face. Pretty professional for a pamphleteer.”
“I learned that at the Portland YWCA,” Pamela said, her voice almost a whisper.
“They teach that one at the Academy,” Natasha said, still sitting on the ground to Ginter’s left. “I know; I had to learn it. You never told me she had dropped Igor with a flat punch. He’ll be out for over an hour.”
Ginter sensed Natasha starting to stir and saw out of the corner of his eye that her right hand was no longer in view.
“I never learned that at any Academy,” Pamela wailed. “I told you, I learned it in a women’s self-defense class.”
“And is that also where you learned what Ralph Collinson looked like?” Ginter asked.
“Huh?” Pamela asked, but her eyes held the wild look of a hunted animal.
“You told us you came down to Boston July fourth weekend. Collinson disappeared, when?” Ginter asked, turning to Paul.
“Before June 22,” deVere answered slowly.
Ginter turned back to the woman. “Yet when I asked you for a description of Collinson you gave it to me. Exactly where in custody did you see him?”
“But it was at that meeting in April, you saw me there,” Pamela protested.
“Collinson wasn’t at that meeting,” Ginter answered evenly. “Remember?”
Ginter took a step to his right. “You were at Dealey Plaza. You must have broken into my room at the motel and seen the plan. The sketch referred to Oswald as a patsy.” He waved his hand. “A bit impertinent, I know. Before he got shot by Ruby, Oswald was on TV, saying that he was just a patsy. Where’d he learn that from? From you?” Ginter demanded.