"Thanks," I said. "My wife and I bought and renovated it a couple of years back."
"I know," she said. I shot her a quizzical look, and she smiled and shrugged. "Homework."
Finally, as the dog began snoring on the floor, I summoned the confidence to ask a question of my own.
"Do you mind if I ask something?" I said, adopting my reporter voice-confident and reassuring at the same time. "Can you guide me on the militia role in the shooting? There seems to be some discrepancy in public accounts on whether this was a militia-sponsored assassination attempt."
Stevens opened her mouth and began to pronounce the first syllable of what I expect was going to be an answer when Drinker firmly cut her off.
"We're not getting into these games," he said, looking at her, then at me. "Call our spokesman. You know who he is."
As they were leaving, as if on cue, Drinker again turned around in the doorway. "I don't mean to belabor the point," he said, his voice softer now, "but that telephone call yesterday in the hospital. You said it was a friend. But that came in on a direct-dial line. That friend couldn't have been transferred from the hospital switchboard.
For someone to have called you, you would have had to have given your number out. The telephone records show that you hadn't made any calls to anyone, because you get charged by the call, so they keep careful records. And the nurses at your station said you hadn't had any other visitors the night before, except for the Record's Washington bureau chief, Peter Martin. He's the only guy that would have known what number to call, because the hospital switchboard operator had orders from the FBI not to give your telephone number out to anyone who called on the main line. And Martin was in the room, so it wasn't him."
This all sounded confusing, but I think I knew what he was getting at.
Basically, I was cornered and screwed. He left the obvious question dangling as to who was on the telephone. I wasn't sure why he was so concerned about it, but I marveled at his ability to ferret out something amiss, the only fib I had told throughout this entire episode. I had nothing to lose, so I gave it my final, best shot at staving him off, at least for now.
"Last I checked, I'm a witness, not a suspect," I said. "My calls are my business. I'm more interested in what your concern is."
Neither agent said anything, so I added, "I guess Martin must have given out my number. You've put a lot more thought into this than I have. It was just a call from an old friend."
He didn't push the issue this time, much to my considerable relief. He bade me farewell, and behind him, Stevens threw me what I took to be a cool parting look without so much as a verbal goodbye. So that was that, and I stood there wondering what it meant, all of it, the questions, the persistence, and more than any of that, this intriguing agent with the beautiful hair.
Nightfall brought Baker's evening walk. I grabbed a tennis ball, which he quickly scooped up in his mouth, and some money, which I hoped to spend on dinner if I could find an outdoor table at a Georgetown restaurant early on a Saturday evening. We walked and walked, the fresh air and exercise acting like an intoxicant after a day spent indoors. We stopped at our usual park, down on K Street, on the Potomac River, to toss and fetch. With my ribs taped up, I couldn't throw nearly as well as Baker could retrieve, and he didn't do well feigning his disappointment. Eventually, he settled into the grass and chewed on sticks.
For dinner, I took a place at a patio table at a small French restaurant on Thirty-first Street, Caf'e la Ruche. I leaned down to tie Baker's leash to the bottom of my chair, fumbling with it because of the growing soreness in my chest. I looked up into the blue eyes of a fairly stunning waitress, who presented me a menu and cooed at Baker.
"Dining alone?" she asked in a way that was inexplicably flirty.
"No, actually," I said, rising to the opportunity, "I'm dining with my dog."
She smiled a big smile, and I thought that I still had it, whatever it actually is. We chatted about what was good and what wasn't. She left and brought me back a Miller, took my order, and left me with my beer and my thoughts.
When she brought my food about fifteen minutes later, she reached into her apron and pulled out an envelope, handing it to me. It was blank, but sealed.
"A gentleman asked me to pass this along to you a few minutes ago," she said, quite casually.
I looked around curiously, first at the other diners, to see if there was anyone I knew, perhaps a colleague from the paper or a friend or someone who may have seen me on television and was passing along a note of support or disdain. Nothing. I looked out along the sidewalk and down the street-again, nothing. Before I put my fork into my swordfish, I carefully tore the envelope open to see what was inside.
It was a typewritten, or rather computer-generated note, short to the point of abrupt.
"Meet me alone, at the Newseum, Sunday, 5:30 P.m."
Well, it provided the where, what, and when you hear so much about in journalism school, but it lacked the all-important who and why. I'd find that out, to be sure. I felt like I had stumbled onto the set of some James Bond movie. Again I looked around for the letter writer, but saw nobody that looked even remotely suspicious. I waved to my waitress, and she came bouncing right over.
"Can you help me out here?" I asked, attempting to sound casual, but my voice almost cracking from nerves. "I'm trying to figure out who this envelope came from. Are they still here?"
She put her finger up to her bee-stung lower lip and looked around thoughtfully. "I don't see him," she said.
"Was he a diner here? Where did he give you the envelope?"
"I was on my way into the kitchen, in a rush, and he just came up behind me and asked if I'd give this envelope to the guy outside with the dog. Tell you the truth, I didn't even bother to get a good look at him."
I was walking a delicate line here. I wanted to prod her further, but I didn't want to sound any alarms, though I'm not sure why not.
"Older, younger? Do you recall what he was wearing? Any idea at all what he looked like?"
She was starting to lose interest and was looking across the patio at another table, where a woman was waving her hand at her to take care of some dining calamity. "I really don't," she said, walking away. "I'm sorry."
Over the dozen years that comprise my reporting career, I have had countless numbers of anonymous callers. You try to read into their voices, get a mental picture of what they look like, where they're calling from, and why. It's nothing so glamorous as the famous Deep Throat of Watergate fame. No, I picture my callers as lonely people that life has left behind, semi-intelligent beings who wait with urgency for their morning newspaper, pore over every word of every story, and concoct terrifying scenarios in their own minds of what is happening to their world and to their own lives.
I had one caller leave messages on my voice mail at work for three months after TWA Flight 800 exploded in the sky. He told me, in the same detail night after night, that the CIA shot a heat-seeking missile at the plane from a rubber raft in Long Island Sound because an Iraqi spy was on board with a stolen briefcase filled with the intricate design details of the U.s. $100 bill. If the spy got away, the caller told me, he could have kicked the entire national and even international financial system on its side, so the CIA justified the deaths of a few hundred passengers because they were, in effect, saving the world as we know it.
Another time, an elderly-sounding man who told me he was from Cape Cod warned me that all Massachusetts State Police troopers were out to kill him because he once beat a speeding ticket in 1963 by proving that an officer parked on the side of the road had no basis on which to estimate his speed. From there on in, officers were required to follow speeding drivers to clock their speed-a decision that infuriated them, the caller told me. The spooky part about him was that an elderly gentleman had walked into a McDonald's restaurant in Hyannis during lunch hour one afternoon and pulled a gun. The man fired a wild shot, striking a blow-up Ronald McDonald doll in the head, causing it to explode and raising screams from dozens of children and their mothers eating lunch. Ironically, or maybe not, a State Police trooper buying lunch pulled his gun and shot the man dead. I never heard from my caller from that day on, and always had a nagging feeling that it was him who was killed that day.