Murder on Capitol Hill (27 page)

“Fine, except I really don’t mind waiting for you—”

“No, nothing worse than sitting around listening to lovebirds on the phone, especially when it gets a little gushy. Go ahead, grab a cab and settle in. I’ll be there before you know it.”

Actually Christa was relieved to be able to be on her own for a while. The day had started okay but as the afternoon wore on she felt increasingly anxious. A walk would do her good, and maybe get her to the restaurant about the same time as Amy. She double-checked Antolotti’s address, picked up her suitcase and left the apartment.

Darkness had fallen on the city, and a cold wave
that had moved in during the afternoon had dropped the temperature considerably. Christa set down her suitcase and buttoned her coat. She hadn’t brought many clothes with her, in fact owned very few. She allowed a twinge of optimism and decided she’d buy a new wardrobe soon, one that was in style, for a change. She picked up the suitcase and walked briskly along the street toward a main avenue. As she approached it, she decided to take a bus. She liked buses, and trains, enjoyed watching the people.

She crossed the avenue, went to where a large group of people waited at a bus shelter, asked someone whether a bus that stopped there would go up as far as Forty-Ninth Street and was told it would. She settled into line and waited until a blue-and-silver bus fought its way through the intersection and stopped six feet from the curb. Christa noticed on the side of the bus that exact change was necessary. She fumbled through her purse in search of the right combination of coins, and luckily came up with them just as it was her turn to deposit her fare in the meter. For a moment she had an image of herself being lined up in front of a bare wall and shot for the high crime of insufficient coins…

She navigated the crush of passengers and moved toward the rear of the bus, spurred on by the driver’s command, “Move to the rear.” Or be shot down… The last passenger boarded, and the driver pulled away from the curb, which jolted Christa into another passenger. “I’m sorry,” she said. The man didn’t even seem aware of her, kept his nose buried in his newspaper.

As the bus slowly proceeded north, Christa
crouched down in an attempt to read the street signs. No one else on the bus seemed to be doing that, which made her feel very much the tourist.

After what seemed forever, the bus arrived at the corner of Forty-Ninth. Christa went through the rear exit door behind three other passengers, not noticing that other passengers had left through the front door, including a man who’d been the last to board at the corner where Christa had caught the bus.

She waited for a large group of people to pass, then crossed the sidewalk and stopped to look in a store window. The man stood just out of her sight, behind a bus shelter.

She looked up at the street sign to make sure she was in the right place, then turned the corner and began walking east on Forty-Ninth. The man quickly left the shelter, peered around the corner and followed her. If
he
had turned to look behind him, he might have noticed another man who’d ridden the same bus, and who’d waited until Christa had turned the corner before falling in step with her.

East Forty-Ninth Street was relatively free of people. A few office workers who’d returned home were walking their dogs. One of them carried an elaborate device for scooping up the dog’s droppings. Unbelievable. An old woman with two dachshunds carried a piece of newspaper and a small plastic bag to accomplish the same thing.

Christa came up now to a fenced parking lot that served a small commercial building. She looked through the fence and admired a silver Rolls-Royce. She put her suitcase down to give her hand a rest, then looked up the street and saw a sign on a canopy:
ANTOLOTTI’S
. It looked mighty inviting an oasis. She picked up her suitcase and was about to move toward the restaurant when a man came up behind her.

The suitcase dropped out of her hand. She turned and looked into his face. God… Quentin Hughes… She wanted to scream but nothing came out of her throat. He grabbed her arm and put her up against the fence. “Where is it, Christa?”

She felt frozen to her spot.

“What are you doing here?” was all she managed to get out.

“The tape, Christa,
give me that tape
.” He looked down at the suitcase. “Is it in there?” He decided not to wait for an answer, took the purse from her shoulder, picked up the bag and started to leave… when the man who’d been following him suddenly came up.

“What do you think you’re doing, friend?”

“Who the hell are you?”

“I’m saying leave the lady alone.”

Hughes tried to push by him, which was a poor idea. The man leaned his bulk into Hughes, then slammed him against the fence. Hughes lost his grip on the suitcase. The man yanked away Christa’s purse from Hughes’s other hand and dropped it to the sidewalk, then rammed his hand up against Hughes’s throat and held a cocked fist inches from his face. Hughes tried to bring his right knee up into the man’s groin. Another bad move. “You do that again, mister, and you’re dead.”

Christa grabbed up her suitcase and purse and ran up the street toward the restaurant. She stopped in
front of it, turned to look back at the parking lot fence. As far as she could tell, neither man had realized she’d left, too busy with each other… she hoped. She darted into the restaurant and said to the first person she saw, a man in a tuxedo, “Could I use your phone?”

“Of course—”

And it occurred to Christa that if Hughes got away from his attacker he might well look for her in the closest place, which happened to be this restaurant. “I was supposed to meet someone here,” she said to the tuxedoed maître d’. “Her name is Amy Upshur. My plans have changed and I’ve got to leave. Would you tell her that…?”

“Miss Upshur called. Are you sure you can’t wait for her?”

Christa shook her head. “
No
, I have to go right now. Tell her I’m sorry, I’ll write her.”

Christa started to leave, turned. “Are you Joe?”

“Yes.”

She kissed his cheek. “That’s from Amy.” Also from herself now.

***

The Eastern Airlines shuttle to Washington was full, and a second section had to be put on. Christa sat back in her seat on the 727 and tried to collect her thoughts. Having Quentin Hughes come up to her on the street in New York was still like a bad dream. She had no idea how he’d learned that she was in New York. It didn’t matter. What did was that he clearly was not about to accept the loss of that damned tape. Of course he won’t, she thought as the plane pushed
away from the gate and the pilot increased engine power to begin his taxi toward the active runway. That tape is worth too much to him…

Unlike her mood—her life—the flight to Washington’s National Airport was easy and smooth. Christa went directly to a bank of public telephones, where she dialed several numbers, all in the hope of reaching Lydia James. Each one produced nothing but a long succession of unanswered rings. She clenched her teeth, swore silently, then she rummaged through her purse until she came up with a scrap of paper another telephone number was written on. She dialed it, and Ginger Johnson answered.

“This is Christa Jones, Miss Johnson… Quentin Hughes’s producer. I’m sorry to bother you but—”

“That’s okay,” Ginger said, “I know that Miss James was anxious to hear from you. What can I do for you?”

“Do you know where Miss James is?”

“Matter of fact I do. She told me she and Mr. Foster-Sims are attending a concert at the Caldwell Center—”

“They’re there now?”

“I suppose so. I’m not sure what time the concert started but I’d think it’s any minute now. Can I help you, Miss Jones? Lydia and I work together very closely and—”

The sound of a receiver being clicked into place.

“Who was that?” Harold asked.

“Somebody the committee’s been involved with.”

“I’ll be glad when you’re through with that damned committee.”

Ginger, who was wearing a thigh-length blue terry-cloth
robe, plopped down on the couch next to him. She ran her fingertip around the outline of his ear. “I wasn’t thinking about any committees, Harold. Care to fool around?”

He said he did.

John Conegli arrived home too late for dinner, ducked Marie’s plaints, changed his shirt, slipped into his overcoat and was about to leave the house when the phone rang. He heard his wife ask who was calling, then her irritated: “It’s for you, your highness, some guy calling from New York. Hal.”

Conegli took the phone, and cupped the mouthpiece with his hand. “Hal, what’s up?”

Standing in a phone booth on the corner of Forty-Ninth Street and Third Avenue, collar up against the cold, Hal said, “Damndest thing happened—”

“You got the package from her?”

“No. I’ve been tailing her ever since I picked her up at Port Authority, like you told me. I never seen her with any package like you described. Every time she came out of that apartment she wasn’t carrying any package, and I figured her purse wasn’t big enough… anyway, tonight she comes out of the apartment carrying her purse and a suitcase, the same one she had with her from the bus station. So I follow her. She gets on an uptown bus. She comes up to Forty-Ninth Street, gets out of the bus and looks in a store window. Then she starts walking east on Forty-Ninth.
I followed her, too. How do I know? That’s my job… right?… to know these things. She gets halfway down the street, stops and looks through a fence into a parking lot. Before I know it this other guy comes up behind her and starts to mug her.”

“Mug her? I don’t believe it—”

“In New York, you don’t believe it? This guy, he’s tall, a headful of sort of gray hair, pins her up against the fence. I thought about just grabbing her suitcase and taking off… but what the hell, I’m a lover, right? So I decide to pull the guy off. Which I did. I saved the broad—”

Johnny looked at his watch. He had to leave. “Look, what about the suitcase?”

“Well, while this character and I are mixing it up, she picks up the suitcase and takes off.”

“Where did she go?”

“Beats me.”

Conegli hung up and left. He drove quickly to the Caldwell Performing Arts Center… he knew Lydia and Clarence had planned to go to some concert there and had decided to follow them after it was over on the off chance that Lydia James might lead him to the package. He found Clarence’s car, parked near it in a space that gave him an unrestricted view of the center’s front entrance.

He settled back to wait.

To wait. The story of his life. Well, at least it gave him a chance to let his fantasies take over. Right now the lady was coming out of the water… like the one in the TV commercial. Dripping wet and all for him. And she didn’t look anything like Marie. What self-respecting fantasy would…?

Quentin Hughes still felt shaken as he boarded an Eastern Airlines flight to Washington at New York’s LaGuardia Airport.

He wasn’t certain where Christa had gone, but felt it a reasonable assumption she would go back to Washington. Anyway, he had to return to do his show.

He thought about what had just happened on Forty-Ninth Street, how the man had pulled a revolver from a small holster beneath his armpit and shoved it into his stomach. Obviously he was some kind of a professional, and Hughes had come up with the best story he could… that this was his girlfriend and she’d run out of their apartment and stolen things of his… The man with the gun didn’t seem much interested one way or another in his story, but had let him off, almost as though he were an afterthought. By then, of course, Christa was gone.

Finding Christa had been a hopeless job until a phone call that morning from Amy Upshur. He and Amy had been close in Des Moines for a brief time, something Christa never knew about. After some initial
chitchat Amy told Hughes that Christa was at her place and acting strangely. He’d asked her what she meant and she’d said, “Well… it’s crazy, but she claims you were somehow mixed up in the death of Senator Caldwell and that journalist… what was her name?… Jimmye something…”

“Like you say, that’s crazy—”

“Well, that’s why I finally decided to call you. For her own sake too, I thought you ought to know about it. Christa is a wonderful person, I’d never do anything to hurt her but I’m worried that in her present state of mind she’ll hurt herself, and other people too…”

Hughes had caught the first flight to New York. He’d not wanted just to arrive at Amy’s apartment, so he sat in a café across the street and hoped that Christa would show up. His timing had been right; he’d had to wait only an hour before she came out of the apartment carrying her suitcase…

Now back in Washington, he drove to Christa’s apartment. He rang the bell. No answer. He decided to go to the studio and call her apartment from there during the night until he got her.

He told his new producer, a long-legged young woman with a degree in communications, and with such other requisites as long red hair, green eyes and a Scottish burr, that he wanted a rerun ready to go at a moment’s notice should he suddenly have to leave in the middle of the show.

“Why?” she asked.

“Just do what I tell you.” He went into an empty office to try Christa’s number.

“I don’t like to be talked to that way,” she said.

“Shut up.”

“I quit.”

Hughes couldn’t hear her—or, at the moment, care.

Lydia and Clarence waited for the program to begin—it featured an up-and-coming cellist named Vittorio Pelini accompanied by an established Washington pianist, Marshall Gottlieb. Also, and which pleased Clarence, in addition to sonatas by Beethoven, Schubert and Debussy, was String Quartet No. 2 by Alexander von Zemlinsky, “a pretty adventuresome item,” said Clarence.

His lecture went on with the information that Zemlinsky had been a teacher of Mahler and that his music often threatened to cross over into atonality but never quite did. Lydia smiled to herself, happy to hear Clarence being so happy in his element, but frankly not much able to concentrate on music. A videotape was too much on her mind.