Past Perfect (27 page)

“Ocean and pool,” Javiero told me, doing an Australian crawl stroke with his arms.

“It sounds wonderful!” I said.

“You, the husband, Nicky?”

“Nicky’s in camp.” I did one stroke of the crawl and hit a baseball.

“Great!” Javiero said. “I know ‘camp.’” His smile was gorgeous, as was the rest of him. Blond hair, brown eyes, sun-kissed skin: it was like having a conversation with a golden idol. “You and the husband?”

“We’ll play it by ear” didn’t seem to be an idiom Javiero knew and explaining it was beyond my ability, so I said, “No somos seguros. We don’t want to leave the U.S. because of Nicky.”

“I know. Nervous.”

I laughed while simultaneously straining to think of how to keep the conversation going until his coach came back from the bathroom. Just then, my cell phone started to play the Spy Guys theme song. “It can wait,” I told him. “Sorry, I forgot to turn it off.”

“No, please. Talk.” He tapped the face of his watch. “Three o’clock.”

As I waved good-bye and slipped out the door, I opened my cell. A good thing. “Hello. Maria Schneider returning your call.”

“Oh, thank you so much. I really appreciate your calling back.” I might have run off at the mouth more, but I stopped walking down the hall and leaned against a wall.

“You are looking for Lisa?” she asked.

“Yes. I worked with her years ago. She called me a few weeks ago after … well, after a really long time. I happened to remember your name from way back when, and …” I felt like such a fool, trying to make my phoning Maria, recalling her name and enough information to locate her, appear a matter of memory. “I know this is a long shot, and that you might not remember much about her—”

“No, no, we kept in touch. Lisa even told me her true name. Obviously. Back then I knew her as Ann Mc … something. She is a great character. What an introduction to the States she was! I couldn’t bear to let her disappear, and she said that she had never hit it off so well with anyone before me.” Lisa could have gotten into major trouble for getting along so well, but my guess was that after a lifetime of telling lies and getting away with it, she wouldn’t worry about an Agency rule or two. “We don’t speak so often,” Maria went on. “Life has a way, you know. Everyone is so busy.”

“Do you happen to remember when was the last time you spoke to her?”

“I’m not sure,” she said slowly. “It has been some time. Is there a problem? I don’t mean to be too curious, but is it that you don’t have a number for her or that you suspect something is wrong?”

“Well, I would appreciate any number you have. But from what I gather, she seems to have disappeared from Washington and when she called me, she was very disturbed about something.”

“What was it?” Maria blurted. She sounded upset.

“That’s the problem. I don’t know. She said she would call me back, but never did. I’ve tried everything I could think of to track her down, but so far nothing’s come of it.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “Lisa may not return a call the next day or even the next week, but she wouldn’t call someone to say there is trouble and not call again. And she is such an easy person. It is difficult to imagine her saying she has a problem. I’m worried.”

“I am too,” I said. “Is there any friend of hers I could call? Maybe she’s been in contact with other people. I promise you, I wouldn’t bother them. I would just give them my name and contact numbers so that if they can locate her, or if she calls them, they can say I’ve been reaching out for her.”

“I’m sure you would be no bother,” Maria said. “I really don’t know her friends’ names. The best one to call would be Ben.”

“Ben?”

“Yes. Benton Mattingly. You know him?”

“Of course,” I managed to say. “I just didn’t realize she and he had, you know, stayed in touch.”

Maria laughed. “They’ve been together how many years now? Fifteen? Twenty? More a marriage than a marriage, as she says. Call Ben. If anyone would know, he would.”

BEN AND LISA just didn’t make sense. Yet I’d seen enough of life, or at least read enough about it, that short of Timmy and Lassie, no coupling would astound me. Home from work, marinating chicken breasts, I told myself, Here is a man, Benton Mattingly, who has shown himself incapable of keeping his pants zipped. Here is a woman, Lisa Golding, whose lies indicate she is desperate for attention. They work for the same company. They got together. So? This is not the stuff of a banner headline.

But if it were true, it wasn’t true to type. As far as I could see, Ben had had only one long-term connection in his life, and that was to Deedee, or, if not to her, to her money. All the rest of his women were limited engagements, tops six months. Well, there was always the possibility that Maria was wrong, that if Ben and Lisa had something together, it was a friendship or some sort of mutually beneficial connection. Except what was it she’d quoted Lisa as saying? That it was more a marriage than a marriage? Of course, Lisa could have been lying. That would be in character.

And speaking of connections, what was the Lisa-Maria friendship about? I could see it from Maria’s point of view; as a shrewd operator, she would want to cultivate anyone in or near power. But was she such an appealing person that Lisa broke Agency rules and gave out her real name just to keep the friendship going? Maybe. Over the years, Lisa’s work—coaching people to live a lie, staying close to them for a few weeks, then leaving—might have gotten to her. It wasn’t as if she had a family at home to act as a ballast. Just, it seemed, a very married lover.

I was pondering whether to make rice pilaf or just stick to vegetables when the phone rang. Adam, the caller ID told me, probably telling me he was leaving the zoo.

But he wasn’t. “You know Blossom, the Sumatran rhino?’

“Sure. Is anything wrong?”

He sighed, a sign his soul was troubled. “I don’t know. The keeper thought she was out of sorts and her vet wants some test run. With Sumatran rhinos, what can present as hemolytic disease can be iron overload syndrome.”

“Is it serious?”

“Don’t ask. Their blood cells are lacking in antioxidant capacity. Sumatran and black rhinos can wind up with iron pigments deposited in their tissue.”

“I hope she’s all right,” I said.

“So do I.”

“You’re not coming home for dinner?”

“I need to get things started here.” I was about to tell him I’d probably catch up with all the Queer Eye episodes I’d TiVo-ed, when he said, “I was going to talk to you tonight.”

My heart lurched: that was a sentence that could mean anything from I need you to help me look for my left tennis sneaker to I’ve fallen in love with a twenty-nine-year-old chimpanzee researcher. “What about?”

“You’re still not yourself.”

“What do you mean?” I knew what he meant.

“You can’t get that Agency thing off your mind.”

“I guess I wasn’t hiding it as well as I thought.”

“No.” Adam sighed again, and I realized it wasn’t just Blossom the rhino that was weighing on him. “So this is what I thought.” I waited long enough to swallow a couple of times—with some difficulty. What was he going to suggest? Trial separation for the summer? And there were a hundred worse alternatives that lay just beyond that one. “I want to help you get past this, Katie. Let’s get a lawyer on this. Go public. Now that you’re writing about the Agency for TV, you can say you don’t want them having something to manipulate you with. Ask them to release whatever it is.”

“Someone could have made up something horrible about me.”

“Then we’ll fight it. I’ll be with you. You don’t have to do this alone.”

“Adam, thank you.” I rested my hand over my heart, then remembered that was what they were doing now in commercials — “our pledge to you”—thereby debasing the most deeply felt of gestures. “You could make me believe in reincarnation. How else would I deserve someone as good as you if I didn’t do something great in another life?”

His silence told me his instinct was to run to a microscope and look at rhinoceros cells, because he felt obliged to come up with something flowery. Finally he said, “Me too.” Eloquent enough.

The next morning, when push came to shove, which it always seemed to, I told Adam I wanted to hold off until I decided what we should do. This was because I didn’t want “we.” This was all “me.” Adam wanted to help me with a problem, yet for whatever reason, I had my arms close around it, clutching it against me as if he were trying to pull away my most cherished possession. Don’t you dare try to help! What did this say about me? That in a world where character ought to count, mine was nowhere near as upright as my husband’s. I could talk the devoted spouse talk, but if there were indeed reincarnation, in my next life I’d be married to a crooked accountant with a pencil mustache.

I called Ben at Euro-fone’s Prague office and left a message with the secretary: Mr. Mattingly and I had spoken recently and, since then, I’d come up with some information about a mutual friend. When my cell rang late that afternoon, caller ID had nothing to tell me. Still, I knew it was Ben. As I said hello, I was calculating what time it was in England and the Czech Republic when he informed me he was in Washington. He asked what information I had come up with and I countered with “I’m glad you’re in the States. It would be much better if we talked in person.”

“Katie, as much as I’d like to, I’m pressed for time.”

“I understand that. So am I. But here’s the deal: I’ll fly down to Washington tomorrow. Guaranteed I won’t keep you too long because I have so many things piled up here in New York.”

I heard him setting down something—a glass or a cup. I pictured him doing it impatiently, the corners of his mouth puckered with disgust, That bitch is milking the situation for all it’s worth. On the other hand, if he was tied as tightly to Lisa as Maria Schneider claimed, he couldn’t afford to blow me off.

I can’t say I wasn’t wary. If Ben had suggested a meeting on a path in Rock Creek Park or even in an obscure restaurant, I might have said no. But he asked that I meet him in his office. Even though I’d seen Charade enough times to know how the bad guy put one over on Audrey Hepburn officewise, I agreed. Ten o’clock, which would give me time to drive to La Guardia for the shuttle and get home in time for a late lunch. It was only after I’d hung up that I made a second association with the word office.

It was in his own office that Bernard Ritter had been stabbed to death.

I’d pictured some flat, anonymous office building with blue-tinted windows, but Ben Mattingly’s Washington office was a town house not far from Dupont Circle. The street had once been residential, but now law firms, lobbying groups, and well-heeled nonprofits had replaced the families so completely that at ten in the morning, the street was lifeless; it might have been taken over by vampires who were incommunicado after a night on the prowl.

Three names were listed on a panel that had a slot for an electronic key card: Euro-fone USA, Mattingly Associates, and B. Mattingly. I pressed the buzzer for B. and checked out the doorway. Neat paint job: no drippies or uneven surfaces. Brass doorknob polished to a refined dull gleam. I was about to reach up and feel how my hair was doing in the Washington humidity when I glanced up and saw a camera. When I realized how grateful I was that I hadn’t made that I-have-to-look-just-right gesture, it dawned on me how much this meant to me, and how many years I’d imagined it. Our meeting seemed inevitable; never, not even for a second, had it occurred to me that I wouldn’t see Ben again.

I’d put such energy into appearing casual. Liner, lipstick, gloss then blot. I did this three times and refused even the bottle of water on the shuttle. I took out a magnifying mirror to recheck four times on my ride from the airport. That mandated two more applications of Barely Strawberry Glossimer lip shine. Same effort into supposedly au naturel eyes, lashes, skin, shoes, clothes.

Despite having warned myself earlier not to meet Ben in a lonely place, I really wasn’t frightened. Anxiety? Only my normal quotient, which had nothing to do with any unusual sense of danger. My apprehension was predictable girl stuff: fretting over my appearance; nervous about the first moment that he laid eyes on me, praying he would think, She looks fantastic, rather than, I can’t believe I ever slept with that.

Unfortunately, walking the few yards from taxi to door had caused my camisole, whose lace was meant to peek naughtily through my white silk blouse, to ride up above what was supposed to have been a non-noticeable midriff bulge. Now, no doubt, it would look as if I’d put on a pink bicycle tire along with my underwear; I couldn’t make the necessary adjustment because of the damned camera’s bulging eye.

Then I heard his voice saying, “I’ll buzz you in. One flight up, door to the right.” No electronic buzz or echo on Benton Mattingly’s sound system. Clarity the New York Philharmonic would have died for. As I stepped inside, I did a frantic sweep to see if I could spot a camera. None. I pulled out my blouse, unrolled the camisole, and tucked everything back by the time I hit the third stair. When I reached the top, I was nearly panting—not from exertion, but from nerves and sucking in my gut in order to prevent a repeat camisole crisis.

Sometimes you picture what’s about to happen without realizing that your mind is a step ahead of you. That must have occurred because I was startled to find Ben’s door closed. He wasn’t there, waiting for me, clearly on edge despite his restrained (yet still cordial) “Good to see you.”

When I knocked, I heard what sounded like a file drawer being shut. A few seconds later a woman carrying some manila folders opened the door. She was easily in her fifties, old enough so that the herpes sore on her lip seemed as age-inappropriate as would low-rise jeans. She held the door open and I entered a room that might have been a parlor in its youth and a doctor’s waiting room in middle age. Now it was empty except for a U-shaped desk, chair, and two walls’ worth of filing cabinets. The last were mostly beige, along with a couple of those battered old steel-color ones; they looked like dead teeth in a mouth that didn’t know from dental hygiene.