Guilt by Association (45 page)

“That’s okay,” Karen replied with a smile. “Contrary to popular opinion, I can handle an evening on my own.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. In fact, if they ask you to join them for dinner after the meeting, go ahead. A little hobnobbing with the politically lofty can’t hurt.”

“Okay,” Ted replied with a smile. Ever since she had gone to work for the Willmont campaign—a decision he wasn’t entirely easy about—the ins and outs of politics seemed always on her mind.

Karen spent a long time in the shower, washing her hair, applying a deep conditioner and pampering her body with
rich moisturizing lotion. When she came out of the bathroom, snuggled inside a thick terry-cloth robe, she spent a long time in front of the big picture window that offered an ever-changing panorama of the Pacific Ocean right from her own peach-and-aqua bedroom, and gave her a whole new perspective on water.

She did busy work in her office for an hour. Nancy had already made two trips to San Francisco and had planned her last for late July. Once the photographs for their new book,
Reflections,
were selected, Karen would be swamped, but until then, there really wasn’t much to do, and she went upstairs with plenty of time to prepare for her afternoon in the Willmont camp.

Left to her own devices, she would have whiled away the rest of the day in front of the picture window, watching the freighters and tankers go by, watching the seabirds swoop down around the fishing boats, watching the undulating water stretching all the way out to the horizon. But, she conceded with some reluctance, she had other things to do.

She hung her robe on the back of the bathroom door, peered into her closet, and pulled out a simple navy silk pleated dress with long sleeves and white trim. She added low-heeled navy pumps and transferred her wallet and keys and makeup case into a navy handbag.

It was one more magnificent Bay Area afternoon as she backed the Volvo out of the driveway and headed downtown. The sky was radiant blue, the breeze was soft, and the temperature was in the high sixties. She parked in a garage half a block from the campaign headquarters and stopped at a little coffee shop on the corner for a container of fresh orange juice, which she sipped on the way up in the elevator.

“Am I glad you’re here,” Mary Catherine greeted her the moment the doors slid open at the twelfth floor. “The senator wants a press reception set up for tomorrow afternoon, complete with promotional stuff. Randy sent over some notes. Can you work them up?”

“I’ll get on it right away,” Karen promised. “What’s the topic?”

“A woman in San Jose asked the senator why we burn crops, leave grain to rot in silos, and pay farmers not to farm when there are millions of people starving in America.”

“That sounds like a reasonable question to me,” Karen observed.

“That’s what
he
said—so now he’s hell-bent to make a campaign issue out of it.”

It was seven-thirty by the time Karen had selected the appropriate boilerplate and reworked Randy’s notes into readable prose with the help of the user-friendly Macintosh on her desk. The rest of the volunteer staff had long since disappeared. If nothing else, she mused, her experience here had banished the dread of computers that had kept her clinging to a pad and pen all her life. She typed the final period, printed out a fresh copy, and headed for the Xerox machine.

“How are you doing?” Mary Catherine asked.

“Almost done,” Karen told her.

The administrative assistant glanced through the copy. “Say, this is good,” she praised. “Very good. I think you’ve just created your first position paper.”

Karen chuckled “And I thought that political pundits had to ponder those things forever.”

“You’d be surprised,” Mary Catherine retorted. “Can I help you finish up?”

Karen shook her head. “There’s not that much left to do. Besides, my family has deserted me for the evening, so there’s no reason why I can’t stay and get it done.”

Mary Catherine smiled. “I really don’t know what we’d do without you,” she said.

By the time Karen finished the Xeroxing and turned to the collating machine, it was almost eight.

“I thought the senator might stop in,” Mary Catherine said, purse in hand. “But I guess he decided not to. So I’m going to go find myself a Scotch and sandwich. Care to join me?”

“No, thanks,” Karen replied. “I’ve a few more things left to do here and then I think I’ll just head on home.”

“In that case, I’ll see you tomorrow. Just close the door when you leave. It locks automatically.”

The clatter of the collator was too loud, some twenty minutes later, for Karen to hear the outer door open and close, so the senator took her completely by surprise.

“Do I pay you enough to work these hours?” he asked.

“Probably not,” she replied, noting that he was alone, with neither Randy Neuburg nor the private security detail following in his wake.

“Where’s everyone?” he inquired, looking around.

“Gone home.”

“Except you.”

“Except me, for about five more minutes. Mary Catherine decided you weren’t going to come in this evening.”

“I wasn’t,” he said. “It was a last-minute idea. I thought of it after I gave my shadows the night off.” He grinned. “But I guess I’m safe enough for one evening. Anyway, all that constant scrutiny tends to get to you after a while.” He peered over her shoulder. “Is that the stuff for tomorrow?”

“Yes,” she replied, inching a step away.

“Good. I wanted to get a look at it.”

“Help yourself,” she murmured.

He leaned against the collator and flashed his famous smile down at her.

“You know, I’ve been meaning to find the opportunity to tell you how much we appreciate your dedication to the campaign. How much
I
appreciate it.”

“It’s for a worthy cause, isn’t it?” she said obliquely.

“Look,” he said, checking his wristwatch, “why don’t you let me buy you a drink or something, to thank you for all your time and effort.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“I know, but I’d like to do it anyway,” he pressed. “Besides, there’s your unique perspective on America that we were going to talk about, remember?”

Karen snapped off the collator and began to staple the press packets together.

“Thanks,” she said, “but I really have to get home.”

She finished the stapling and carried the kits over to the long worktable beside Mary Catherine’s desk, knowing he
was watching her every move. She was out of the building, into the parking garage and behind the wheel of the Volvo before she could banish the sensation of his eyes on her body.

She shook her head, impatient at her foolishness, and twisted her key in the ignition. Nothing happened. She tried again,
and again nothing happened. The engine refused to turn over.

“Just what I need,” she groaned, popping the hood and climbing out of the station wagon, although she knew next to nothing about cars and realized it was highly unlikely that she would recognize any kind of problem.

“What’s the matter?” Robert asked.

She couldn’t believe he was standing there and wondered if he had followed her.

“My car won’t start.”

“Let me see.”

Before she could protest, he had slipped into the Volvo and was turning the key. There was no response. He tried wiggling and thrusting and pumping, but his efforts were in vain.

“It’s not the battery,” he said with assurance. “But it might be the starter.”

“What does that mean?”

“If it’s the starter, it means you’ll have to leave the car here until morning and then get it towed.”

“Damn,” she muttered.

“Can your husband come get you?”

Karen checked her watch. “He won’t be home yet,” she sighed. “He’s at a dinner meeting.”

“Well, don’t worry about it,” he said with a reassuring smile. “I can drive you home.”

“Oh, that’s not necessary,” she declared. “I can take a taxi.”

“Nonsense,” said Robert firmly. “I won’t hear of it. After all the hours you’ve put in on my behalf, it’s the very least I can do.”

Karen looked at him for a long moment with an expression he couldn’t define.

“Well, all right,” she said finally, “if you’re sure it won’t be an inconvenience.”

“Not at all,” he replied with a smile. “Maybe we can even stop on the way and have that drink. I really do have a lot of questions to ask you.”

She couldn’t think of a polite way to decline. “We could go across the street,” she suggested, referring to a popular bar on the corner that she felt certain would still be busy at this hour.

“Done,” he said.

Over three Scotches, a bucket of steamed clams, and the constant interruption of political supporters glad to find him unencumbered by a wall of security, he encouraged her to talk about her books and experiences, inserting a question every now and then.
Karen found herself describing the special characteristics of New York, Atlanta, Houston and Tucson without even realizing she had noticed them.

It was ten-thirty by the time they returned to the garage. They tried the Volvo again but it was useless. So they moved on to Robert’s black Mercedes, parked just a few spaces away.

He opened the passenger door for her, making sure the pleats of her navy blue dress were safely tucked in before he closed it again with a firm click and went around to the driver’s side.

Despite the three Scotches, which usually had a numbing effect on her, Karen’s heart began to flutter as he steered the Mercedes out of the garage and she realized she was now more alone with him than she had ever been before. Part of her couldn’t believe she was here, even as she knew that in the peculiar twists and turns of fate it was inevitable. It was a testimony to how far she had come that she was able to sit there without dissolving into a cowering, mewling blob.

They spoke little. At that hour, traffic was light and he took advantage of it. He drove with speedy assurance straight up California Street, veering around whatever vehicles they encountered, left and right and left again, before taking the Presidio Transverse into Golden Gate Park, the most direct way to St. Francis Wood ever since the Embarcadero Freeway had been damaged by the earthquake two and a half years ago.

It might have been his driving, or the Scotch, or the real
ization of what she was doing, but suddenly her stomach began to churn with ominous intent.

“Please,” she gasped. “I think you’d better pull over. I’m not feeling very well.”

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I think I’m going to be sick.”

I
t was halfway between dark and dawn when Arthur Gertztrotted down the steps of his house, jogged across LincolnWay, and entered Golden Gate Park.

Streetlights cast a faint yellow beacon into the mist as the solid night sky began its slow dissolve into the distinguishable gray shades of morning. The phosphorescent digits on his sports watch told him it was not quite five o’clock.

It certainly wasn’t Arthur’s idea of fun to get up an hour early every morning and go running around the city like some health nut. He had just gotten tired of listening to Essie’s nonstop nagging.

“You’re fifty-six years old, Arthur,” his wife had harassed him for a year. “You’re overweight and out of shape. Overweight,
out-of-shape men drop dead of heart attacks at fifty-six.”

For his fifty-seventh birthday, she gave him a warm-up suit.

“What’s this for?” he asked.

“So you should live to be fifty-eight.”

But it was rising before five in the morning that was going to kill him sooner than anything else, he grumbled to himself as he jogged along.

Arthur was a certified public accountant in one of those big firms that merged so often he sometimes didn’t know the latest company name. He had spent his adult years organizing his life into neat sections—his job, his family, his stamp collection,
his Tuesday-night bridge game, his Robert Ludlum novels. Jogging didn’t fit into any of those categories, and Arthur was not a man who took easily to change.

But Essie left him no choice. She stopped serving red meat at home, eliminated dairy products from their diet, and bullied him into beginning a program of sensible exercise. To shut her up, he carved an hour out of the section of his life marked
“sleep” and plotted a daily route through the morning mists of Golden Gate Park that would take him exactly fifty-two minutes to complete, and he never deviated from that course by so much as one yard.

On this particular Wednesday morning, however, he was looking to shorten his route by seven minutes. Last night at the bridge table, he had made a stupid mistake that cost him the rubber. He agitated over it so much afterward that it took him an extra twenty minutes to fall asleep. As a result, he awakened twenty minutes late.

He made up one minute by selecting the jogging shoes that fastened with Velcro. Then he calculated he could make up four minutes by not washing his hair, three minutes if he didn’t floss when he brushed his teeth, and five minutes by refusing a second helping of oat bran and skipping the obituary section in the morning newspaper. That left seven minutes, and it explained why, on this particular day, Arthur Gertz took a detour.

Instead of his usual run along Martin Luther King, Jr., Drive, around the Arboretum and down past the old Kezar Stadium, he opted for the shorter route up to Stow Lake and around Strawberry Hill.

Afterward, he couldn’t remember what caught his eye, what turned his head in that direction, what made him take a second look,
and then a third. He was only glad that he did.

She was lying half-concealed beneath a clump of bushes, bits of her clothing scattered around her. Even in the early
light, he could see that her face was cut and battered, her lip split and bleeding, one eye blackened. He noticed an angry trail of bruises down her body.

She was slender but not young. He wondered how she had gotten there, what persuasion had drawn her into the park at such an early hour. Arthur could pretty much guess what had happened to her. He was sure she was dead. She lay so still and her skin was so pale that he actually jumped when she moved. It wasn’t a big move, more of a shudder, really, and then he heard a low moan.