Murder on Capitol Hill (23 page)

“It’s nice to hear from you,” Lydia said. “I was just looking at my mail and see that I have something from you—”

“Miss James, I—” She started to cry.

“Miss Jones, are you all right?”

“Yes… no, I’m not all right. I hate to bother you, and I know this isn’t your problem, but I have to talk to someone…”

“I’m happy to talk to you. What’s wrong? Has it anything to do with the envelope I just received from you?”

“Yes, that and more. Could we meet tonight?”

Lydia was due at Clarence’s apartment in an hour. She’d been very much looking forward to it. Still, how to ignore the urgency in Christa’s voice… she’d call Clarence, tell him she’d be an hour late… She asked Christa whether what she had to say had anything to do with the Caldwell case.

A hesitation, no immediate response. Only background noise that indicated a public booth. When
Christa still didn’t answer, Lydia repeated the question.

“Yes… in a way it does.”

“Where are you?”

“In the bus station, downtown.”

“All right, it will have to be quick, though. Can I meet you now?”

“Yes,
please
. I’m leaving very shortly.”

Lydia placed a quick call to Clarence, calmed him as best she could, slipped into her shoes, ran a brush through her hair and headed into the center of Washington.

The bus depot was teeming, complete with the usual assortment of derelicts and prostitutes mingling with a wide variety of citizens about to catch buses. She walked through the terminal, trying to spot Christa Jones. After one complete tour of the place proved unsuccessful, she went to the main door. Should she try again, she wondered? Which was when she did spot Christa coming out of a rest room, carrying a piece of molded Samsonite luggage. She was wearing a long, quilted, apricot down coat. Her hair was in disarray, her face reflected the upset that had been in her voice over the phone.

“I was about to give up,” Lydia said as Christa came up to her.

“I’m sorry. I was in there.” She half turned and pointed toward the rest room.

“Well, here we are. Where can we talk?”

They surveyed the main passenger area. Most seats were taken, and those that weren’t were singles or next to other people.

“How was the ladies’ room?” Lydia asked.

“Almost empty.”

“Let’s go,” Lydia said.

Two women were in the rest room but soon left. Lydia and Christa were alone.

Lydia pulled an envelope from her bag. It had been inside the larger envelope Christa had sent her. The flap had been sealed and covered with Scotch tape. Written on the front was “To be opened 3 days from receipt.”

“What’s this?” Lydia asked.

“Something I want you to have in case anything happens to me.”

Lydia frowned and ran her fingertips over the envelope. There appeared to be papers in it, and a hard object… maybe a key? “Christa, why do you think something might happen to you?”

“I can’t go into it now.” She looked at her watch. “I have to catch my bus soon. Please don’t open it for three days. I need time. I hope I’ll be back by then. If I am, we’ll open it together. If not… well, open it, and the rest is up to you…”

“Why me, Christa?”

“Because I have no one else, Miss James.”

Two women came in, and Lydia and Christa put their conversation on hold. Other women arrived, and Lydia suggested they leave the room and continue the conversation outside.

They stood next to a row of vending machines. When Lydia was certain no one was within earshot she asked again, “Why do you think something might happen to you? Who would want to hurt you?”

Christa, who’d appeared to have calmed down in the rest room, was now visibly anxious. She fiddled
with the buttons on her coat, pushed a discarded cigarette butt around the floor with her foot and glanced nervously at everything except Lydia.

“Christa,” Lydia said, placing her hand on her arm, “you’ve chosen to include me in whatever is happening to you. It isn’t fair, it doesn’t make sense to drop hints and then cut me off.”

“I know, I know. I didn’t mean to include you… Let me have the envelope back… I’m sorry, I’ve been very upset and I’m not thinking too clearly—”

“Christa, I’m not suggesting that I don’t want to be involved. What I’m saying is that if I am I’d like you to be honest with me. I asked you when you called whether this had to do with the Caldwell murder. You said it did. What?”

Christa slumped against the side of one of the machines. “Oh, my God, why did this have to happen?”

“Why did
what
happen?”

“The whole thing… Jimmye McNab, Quentin… it was all so unnecessary. I told him that he was making a terrible mistake, that she was no good for him—”

“Quentin Hughes and Jimmye McNab?”

“Yes.” Her face hardened now. “Yes,
them
. He said he loved her more than any other woman… he did that to me, talked about other women… God, how it hurt…”

“And yet you loved him, didn’t you?”

She closed her eyes. “Yes, and the disgusting thing is, I still do.” She opened her eyes. There was fear in them. “She was the worst, Miss James.”

“Who?”

“Jimmye McNab. She was so cruel, but he couldn’t
see it, or didn’t care. Or maybe he liked it… She used people like nobody I’ve ever met, and I’ve met some in my day, believe me. Ironic, Quentin is a user, too. Maybe it’s like what they say about salesmen… They’re the easiest to sell. Anyway,
I
knew what she was up to, what she was doing to him.”

Lydia knew she was running out of time, Christa had said she was catching a bus. How much stock to put in what she’d been told… Christa Jones was obviously a very disturbed woman. No time for subtleties… “Christa… did Quentin Hughes kill Senator Caldwell? Or Jimmye—?”

It was as though her question had covered Christa in a sheet of ice. She seemed to freeze, her mouth set.

“Is that what you want to tell me?” Lydia pressed. “Are you telling me that Quentin Hughes killed out of jealousy—?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“She deserved to die, Miss James. I hated her with every cell in my body—”

“
You?
”

Christa seemed confused.

“Did you… kill Jimmye McNab?”

“I would have loved to.”

Before Lydia could ask any more questions, Christa said she had to go to her bus.

“I’ll come with you,” Lydia said. She really wanted to escape the bus terminal, escape to the quiet and comfort of Foster-Sims’s apartment. But she was also afraid to lose Christa, to lose the lead she represented… disturbed or not, Christa was also convincing.
Her fear and anger seemed increasingly genuine as she talked.

“No, I want to go alone. I’ll be back in three days. If I’m not, open the envelope. Please, Miss James, not before then. I need these three days to think, to figure out whether I’m doing the right thing. I have a good friend I can stay with.”

She squeezed Lydia’s hand and was suddenly swallowed by a crowd.

Lydia pushed through that same crowd and watched the back of the apricot coat go up to a waiting bus that said
NEW YORK
. Christa never looked back, simply handed her ticket to the driver standing at the open door and disappeared inside.

In her car Lydia tried to sort out her jumbled thoughts. She was annoyed to have been enticed by Christa to the bus terminal on the promise of learning something of importance to the Caldwell case. That hadn’t, so far as she could tell, happened. Of course she was sorry for Christa Jones, a rejected woman afraid for her life. But damn it, the frustrations were getting to her.

She started the engine, about to head for Clarence’s apartment, when she happened to look down at the seat next to her and saw Christa’s envelope. She touched it, felt the hard object inside, shut off the ignition, tore open the envelope and removed a locker key. There was a long letter she didn’t read all of because what seemed to matter most were the words: “
You’ll find a videotape in a locker at the bus station. The key is to that locker. It explains so much…
”

Well, she’d gone this far… She went back to the terminal, found and opened the locker. Inside was a package wrapped in brown paper that she removed, tucked under her coat, then went to her car and drove too fast to Clarence’s apartment.

***

“What do you make of it,” Clarence said as they sat at the dining room table, about to dig into his dinner of rock Cornish hens, baked potatoes, string beans and a tomato-and-onion salad with Italian dressing. Clarence, Lydia thought—and warmly—the complete man.

“She seemed to want to tell me that she or Hughes killed Jimmye McNab. When she called me she said she had something to say about the Caldwell murder, but then she never mentioned Caldwell… Well, she’s obviously been crazy—and I use the term advisedly—in love with Quentin Hughes for years, apparently since she first met him. I know it’s hard to understand, Clarence, especially for a man—but there are women, unfortunately, who fall in love with a man and stay with him no matter what happens, no matter how much abuse he heaps on them. That’s even part of the attraction, I’m afraid. Think of the battered wives who keep coming back for more. And I couldn’t help but think of the Jean Harris case in New York. The doctor she killed was a Quentin Hughes of sorts, a womanizer who for fourteen years shoved his affairs under her nose. Still, she hung in with him. I hate to admit it but it seems a female failing at times, this need to love a man no matter what he is or what he does.”

“Could be… by the way, do you know where Christa was going?”

“Yes, to New York, to stay with some friends.”

“And she claims the videotape has the answers to this mess… or some of them… Let’s see the letter again… All right, so she accuses Quentin Hughes of murdering Jimmye McNab and Senator Caldwell, with no evidence.”

“She says the tape will explain things, although like you I’m not sure exactly what.” She hesitated, knowing what he was thinking and not wanting to face the next step… “Clarence, I felt I had to betray a confidence to the extent of opening the letter, but the tape…?”

“Well, look, you can’t do anything about it tonight. And to see the tape you’d need special equipment. Let’s leave it alone for now.”

It was, of course, what she wanted to hear.

“You know, Lydia, I can accept the fact that she stayed with Hughes despite, or even because of, the s.o.b. he is. But it’s also logical to assume that Christa Jones killed Jimmye McNab out of jealousy—”

“But what about Hughes?”

“Why, if he was so crazy about her?”

“Remember, Christa also said that Jimmye was as bad as Hughes, a user… she could have provoked him to murder… except how does all this relate to Senator Caldwell’s murder?”

“Eat before it gets cold. We’ll solve this over coffee and dessert.” He smiled when he said it.

But when they were finished he had a better idea. “You know, murder will out but it can also wait… how about coffee in bed?”

Lydia looked up at him. “Best offer I’ve had all day.”

***

John Conegli sat in his car outside Clarence’s apartment building and leaned close to the speaker that picked up some of the dialogue between Lydia and Clarence. He’d heard Lydia say that Christa had gone to New York, and he’d picked up the reference to the tape. From what he heard he assumed Christa had taken the tape with her, but of course he couldn’t be sure. He also heard that Lydia had opened some letter from Christa, and wasn’t feeling too good about it…

The sound of the television set and the rustle of the bedclothes now took center stage. He sat back and bit his lip. He wanted to stay and keep listening, but knew he had a much more pressing obligation. He got out of the car and went to a phone booth on the corner, pulled out a little black book from his pocket and thumbed through it until finding the name he was looking for. He dialed the New York City area code, then a number. To his relief, it was answered by the person he wanted to reach.

“Johnny, how the hell are you?” the voice from New York said.

“Not so good, Hal. Look, I don’t have much time. I’m working on a big case down here and I need your help.”

“I’m busy.”

“Just tonight, Hal. There’s a woman arriving on a bus from Washington any minute now. I don’t know exactly how long it takes buses to get up there but I figure it should be pulling in about now. Her name is
Christa Jones. She’s kind of a wacky-looking broad, tall, lots of gray streaks in black hair, doesn’t wear makeup, as I remember. The point is she’s getting off the bus and visiting a friend. All I want you to do is meet the bus, if it’s not too late, follow her and find out where she’s going to be for the next three days.”

“Hey, Johnny, I got a date and—”

“This client of mine pays good, Hal. I’ll take care of you. Besides, you owe me a couple.”

Hal yawned. “All right, all right, I’ll do it. I wish I had a better description.”

“Just do your best and let me know.”

Conegli went back to his car and took up his listening again. He heard sounds, which he matched to his fantasies.

Eventually, no sound from the bedroom. The television set was turned off. Conegli looked at his pad, reviewed what he’d written. Obviously the most important piece of information was the mention of an envelope that Lydia James had been given, and that she was to open if this Christa Jones didn’t come back to Washington.

Home and a few hours sleep, but first he needed to stop at a luncheonette in Maryland, where he met with a young man with long black hair, who wore a fringed suede jacket over a red-and-blue cowboy shirt, dungarees and cowboy boots. “I got a job for you, Billy,” Conegli told him as they had coffee at the counter.

“Can use some work.”

“This one’s important.”

“They all are, ain’t they? Lay it on me.”

Boris Slevokian, noted violinist, had spent the afternoon at Foster-Sims’s rehearsing pieces he’d perform on a tour of the Far East. It had taken considerable arm-twisting to convince Clarence to work with him, and Clarence was even more surprised than Boris that he’d agreed to do it.

It had been the first time he’d touched a piano in so many years, the Steinway seemed a formidable enemy.