I could see textbooks lying around. There was one girl on a couch who looked as if she'd come out of a Turkish harem;
she was there with her laptop, tapping away at her thesis.
Twenty minutes later the door burst open and a girl carrying a black sports bag ran in like a thing possessed, out of breath, hair everywhere.
"Sorry I'm late, girls. I wasn't on first, was I?"
She started to take her shoes off, catching her breath.
The policewoman called over, "Sherry, this guy wants to know where Pat is. Have you seen him lately?"
I stood up.
"I've been trying to find him for ages. You know what he's like, he's all over the place."
"Tell me about it." She started to take her jeans off in front of me as casually as if we'd been married ten years.
"He's been away for a while. I saw him about a month ago when he got back." She shot a glance at Kelly and back at me.
"You a friend of his?"
"We go way back."
"I guess he won't mind. I've got his number here, if I can find it."
Dressed now only in her bra and panties, she rummaged through her bag as she talked. She looked up at one of the other girls and said, "What number am I?"
"Four."
"Christ! Can somebody go ahead of me? Can I go number six? I've got no makeup on yet."
There was a grunt from behind the laptop. It seemed the Turkish harem girl was going on fourth now.
Sherry tipped out an Aladdin's cave of a handbag.
"Here we are."
She handed me a restaurant card with an address and telephone number scribbled on the back. I recognized the writing.
"Is this local?" I asked.
"Riverwood? About fifteen minutes by car, over the bridge."
"I'll give him a buzz--thank you!"
"Remind him I'm alive, will you?" She smiled with weary hope.
I went over to Kelly and said, "We've got to go now, Josie!"
She stuck out her lower lip.
"Aww." Maybe it was being in the company of other females, but she looked more relaxed than at any point since we'd driven away from the house.
"Do we have to?" she pleaded with big round eyes that were covered in makeup. So were her lips.
"I'm afraid we must," I said, starting to wipe it off.
The Indian maiden said, "Can't we keep her here? We'll look after her. We'll show her how to dance."
"I'd like that. Nick!"
"Sorry, Josie, you have to be much older to work here, isn't that right, ladies?"
They helped Kelly get all her feathers off. One of them said, "You work real hard at school, honey. Then you can work here with us."
They pointed to a quicker way out, through the service exit at the back. As we were leaving, Kelly looked up and said, "What do they do, anyway?"
"They're dancers."
"They dance in bikinis? With all those feathers? How come?"
"I don't know," I said.
"Some people like watching that sort of thing."
Just as we got to the exit I heard Sherry shout, "Pat's daughter? The lying bastard!" We walked back down the hill, looking for somewhere to sit out of the rain. A place that looked more like a house than a restaurant had a sign calling itself the Georgetown Diner. We went in.
We sat in the three-quarters-empty cafe, me with a coffee, she with a Coke, both deep in thought--me about how to make contact with Pat, she most probably about growing up and going to college, dressed like Pocahontas. Our table was by a rack of greeting cards and local drawings for sale. It was more like an art gallery than a coffee shop.
"We can't just turn up at Pat's address because we might compromise him," I thought aloud to her.
"And I can't phone him because they might have made the connection between us, and there could be a tap on his phone and a trigger on the house."
Kelly nodded knowingly, not understanding a word I was saying but pleased to be part of grown-up stuff instead of being abandoned or dragged around.
"It's so annoying because he's only fifteen minutes away," I went on.
"What can I do?"
She gave a little shrug, then pointed at the rack behind me and said, "Maybe send him a card?"
"Good idea, but it would take too long" Then I had a brainstorm.
"Well done, Kelly!"
She grinned from ear to ear as I got up and bought a birthday card showing a velvet rabbit holding a rose. I asked for a pen and went back to the table. I wrote: "Pat--I'm in deep shit. Kev is dead and Kelly is with me. I need help. IT WAS NOT ME. Call me from a public phone ASAP. Nick." I wrote down the number.
I sealed the envelope and wrote down Pat's address, then asked to borrow the cafe's Yellow Pages. I found what I was looking for; it was on the same street, seemingly within walking distance. We put on our coats and left. It had stopped raining, but the sidewalk was still wet. I checked the street numbers; we had to go downhill toward M Street.
The courier office was next door to a weird and wonderful New Age shop with a windowful of healing crystals that could change your life. I wondered which one they'd suggest if I went in and described my circumstances. Kelly wanted to stay outside and look in the window, but I wanted her with me; people might look twice at a child on her own outside a store and something might register. There was also the risk of someone in the shop identifying her, but it was a question of balance between exposing her and making best use other as cover.
"Can you get this to my friend after four o'clock today?" I said to the guy at the desk.
"We're in real big trouble because we forgot to send his birthday card, aren't we, Josie?"
I paid the fifteen-dollar fee in cash, and they promised to bike it around just after 4 p.m. I needed the intervening two hours to prepare for a meeting.
We went into the Latham Hotel. I'd guessed my accent wouldn't stick out in here, and I was right; the large reception area was full of foreign tourists. I sat Kelly in a corner and went to the information desk.
"I'm looking for a mall that would have a Fun Zone or a Kids Have Fun," I said.
It turned out there were about half a dozen of them in and around the D.C. area; it was just a matter of looking up all the different addresses in the city guide I'd been given. There was one at the Landside Mall, not far from the Roadies Inn. I hailed a taxi; this time the driver knew where he was going.
The idea of Kids Have Fun is that you drop your kids off for a few hours while you go off on your big shopping frenzy. I'd gone once with Marsha to pick up Kelly and Aida from one.
The children get a name tag on their wrist that they can't re move, and the adult is given an ID card that means they're the only person who can collect the child. The girls had been acting up the morning I went, and I remembered that as we approached the center Marsha had grinned at the travel agent's across the way and said, "I always think that's brilliant positioning the number of times I've been tempted to drop the kids off and pop in for a one-way ticket to Rio!"
The mall was shaped like a large cross, with a different department store Sears, Hecht's, JCPenney, Nordstrom at the end of each spur. There were three floors, with escalators moving people up and down from the central hub. The food court was on the third floor. It was as busy as it was massive, and the heat was nearly tropical probably on purpose, to send you to the drink counters.
I spotted Kids Have Fun on the Hecht's spur. I turned to Kelly.
"Hey, do you want to go in there later? There's videos and all sorts of stuff."
"I know. But I want to stay with you."
"Let's go in and have a look anyway." I didn't want to put her in there yet because I didn't even know if we were going to get the phone call or not, but I'd still have to do the recon.
I went up to the desk.