Goodnight Nobody (22 page)

Twenty-Nine

"Hi, Kate!" Ben's assistant was a willowy young thing with shoulder-length auburn ringlets, four holes in each ear, and a master's in public policy from Georgetown.

"Melissa! It's great to see you!" Young Melissa was looking lovely in a short, forest green suede jacket, mini-kilt with black tights, and kitten-heeled pumps. "I was just in town doing some shopping and I thought I'd stop by to see if Ben was free for coffee."

"Oh, sorry," said Melissa, apparently failing to notice my lack of shopping bags, or failing to realize that the offices of B Squared Consulting were in the financial district, a good sixty blocks away from the department stores and the boutiques on Fifth Avenue. She bounded back behind her desk and tapped the control pad of her PowerBook. "He's at the Civil Liberties luncheon. He should be back by four."

"Oh, no." I feigned disappointment, knowing, of course, that Ben wouldn't be in. I'd consulted his schedule before I'd left that morning. "Listen, don't tell Ben, but I've been thinking of...thinking of..."

Melissa leaned forward, her revoltingly dewy skin aglow with anticipation.

"Redecorating!" I said. "He's had that carpet forever!"

Her smooth brow furrowed. "Actually, I think it was replaced last year."

"Oh, right, of course. Not the carpet. The desk!" I said, trying my damndest to remember exactly what kind of furniture Ben had in his office. "That old thing!"

Melissa looked puzzled. "I think it's an antique."

Oh, God, could I please catch a break?
"Exactly! Which is why it would work so much better at the house in Connecticut than here!" I responded, edging backward toward Ben's office. "I'm just going to take a quick look and, um, maybe some measurements..." I started rummaging in the butter-colored Marc Jacobs satchel Janie had lent me, as if I were searching for a tape measure or fabric swatches. "I'm going to use the executive washroom too." I gave her a sheepish, just-us-girls smile. "I don't think my sushi's agreeing with me."

Dear Lord,
I thought as I bolted for Ben's office and locked the door behind me. Why did I doubt that in all of her adventures Miss Marple had never once obtained an important clue by pretending to have the shits?

"Call if you need anything!" Melissa said sweetly.

"Will do!" I replied, seating myself on Ben's Aeron chair and adjusting it so the armrests weren't cutting into my sides. I tapped the mouse, praying that Ben hadn't logged out before he'd left for lunch. He hadn't.

I started a search for any files that contained the words
Ted Fitch.
Then I held my breath while the flashlight wagged back and forth and Cheerful Melissa answered the phone on the other side of the door. My cell phone's zippy disco ring tone startled me so badly I almost fell off the chair.

"Hello?"

"Kate?" Janie's voice was small and worried. "Listen. Quick question. Your kids are toilet trained, right?"

"Yes," I said. "Mostly. Almost entirely. Why?"

"No reason!" she said. "Everything's fine. Gotta go."

"Ten files found," the helpful Microsoft paper clip finally announced.

"Wait, Janie. If you're out and the boys have to go, you can take them into the bathroom with you. It's no big deal."

"Perfect!" she said. "No worries! See you soon!"

I put down the phone and clicked on the first file.

"Fitch bio." I hit print. "Fitch position papers." I printed them too. "Schedule Sept." "Schedule Oct." "Schedule Nov.-Dec." Why not? And finally, pay dirt. "Fitch oppo." Which, as I knew from watching
The War Room
(which Ben, of course, owned on a bootlegged DVD, complete with James Carville's barely comprehensible audio commentary), stood for opposition research--everything Ben's team had dug up on their candidate so they could be prepared when the other side found it. Thirty-seven pages. Yikes.
Print.

I heard knocking above the printer's whir. "Kate?" Melissa caroled. "Is everything all right in there?"

"Just printing out some measurements!" I called back merrily. I saw the doorknob turn back and forth.

"The door's locked," Melissa noted.
Fabulous,
I thought, scooping pages out of the laser printer. It's a wonder, I thought, what a Georgetown degree can do for a girl's powers of observation.

"Yeah, just hold on...I'm, um, temporarily indisposed."

Melissa was sounding worried. "Please don't touch anything, 'kay? Ben hates it when people move things on his desk."

"Oh, don't worry," I called. "I've got printer privileges!" Jesus. Printer privileges. Who had I become?

Melissa was working the doorknob so hard I was surprised it didn't spin off in her hand.

"Let me just finish up in here!" I flung open the door to Ben's bathroom, flushed the toilet, and sprayed Ben's can of cinnamon-stick air freshener vigorously around the room. "Printing complete," said the computer. As it spat out the final page, I scooted behind Ben's desk, closed all the files, shoved the printed pages into my purse, flung open the door, and almost ran smack into Melissa.

"Whew. Sorry about that."

She stared at me with her nose wrinkled. I couldn't blame her. The place smelled like a potpourri bomb had exploded. "Is everything all right?"

"Fine!" I said, clutching my purse to my chest and sidling rapidly toward the elevators in the manner of a constipated crab. "You just might not want to go in there for a little while."

"Did you get what you needed?"

Oh, God,
I thought as the blood drained from my face and pooled in my extremities. So much for Miss Marple. She's onto me. She knows. "Excuse me?" I said.

"The measurements," Melissa said, staring at me as if I'd been hitting the crack pipe, or the air freshener were affecting my brain.

"Yes! I'll be able to find something just perfect for that space!" I said, grinning like an idiot. "Do me a favor and don't mention this to Ben. I want it to be a surprise."

She nodded dubiously, and not wanting to push my luck, I scurried down the corporate gray and ivory halls, down the elevator and out the revolving front door to the sidewalk, where I hailed a cab and made my way to Grand Central Station to catch the four-fifteen train home. Once I'd purchased my ticket and curled up in a corner on the rattling Metro-North train, I pulled out the sheaf of Fitch papers. The first paragraph was dry as dust. The next two pages could have cured insomnia. Speeding tickets. A fifty-dollar fine for leaving his Christmas tree on the curb. Be still my heart. But on page four I hit pay dirt, and it was better--and worse--than I could ever have imagined.

Thirty

The house was quiet when Ben's car pulled into the driveway at seven o'clock that night. I'd sent Janie and the kids to dinner and a movie, and arranged myself in the living room, awaiting his return. I was still neatly dressed in my blue suit left over from my reporter days. My hair was pulled back from my face, and I had a stack of damning Ted Fitch papers in my lap.

"Can I have a word with you?" I called politely to my husband as he was hanging up his coat. My heart sank as I got a good look at what he had in his hand.

"Upchurch Woman Remembered by Friends," read the
Gazette'
s headline. And there was a picture of me at the podium, with my jaw hanging open and my hair a frizzy corona around my head, looking about the size of one of Jupiter's moons.

"I ran into Stan Bergeron at the gas station," Ben said. My heart sank even further. "He wanted to know if you'd recovered from all of the excitement the other night. So I asked him what excitement he was talking about--"

I swallowed hard. "I was going to tell you--"

"Which is how I came to find out that someone's been making threats on your life."

"--but you're hardly ever home and I just couldn't figure out how."

We both paused to take a breath and glare at each other. Ben pinched the bridge of his nose and started rubbing the reddened skin there. He'd acquired a bit of a belly since we'd moved, and it pushed at his black leather belt as he breathed. "Okay. Let's start at the beginning." He waved the newspaper at me. "You were at Kitty Cavanaugh's memorial service--no, excuse me. I beg your pardon. You
spoke
at Kitty Cavanaugh's memorial service."

"That was kind of inadvertent," I mumbled.

His black eyebrows drew down. "Did somebody put a gun to your head and say, 'Give a speech or I'll shoot'?"

"Pretty much. Except for the gun part."

"You're going around asking people questions--"

My neck tensed as I glared at him. "I used to be a reporter, remember? That was what I did for a living!"

"Asking questions about whether rock stars had genital warts," Ben said. "It's not exactly the same thing."

I lifted my chin. "It was never about the genital warts," I said, with as much dignity as I could muster. "It was occasionally about the herpes. And that's beside the point. Whatever you think of my subject matter, I used to be a reporter."

"But you're not anymore!" Ben shouted. "For God's sake, Kate, you're not a journalist, you're not a detective, you're not a private eye, you're just a housewife!"

I slammed the stack of pages onto the table and stalked into the kitchen, where I started pulling food out of the refrigerator: a carton of eggs, a can of black beans, a bunch of grapes. Ben followed me.

"I didn't mean it like that."

I ignored him. "Do you want dinner?" I asked, pulling out mustard, mayonnaise, turkey, and cheese, before realizing that we were out of bread and the sandwich I'd formerly been craving wasn't going to happen.

"I just want you to be safe. That's why we moved here, remember? You can't do things that put your safety in jeopardy. You can't do things that put our children in danger."

I whirled around, flushed with indignation and sick with shame, knowing, deep down, that he was right, and that I couldn't admit it, because once I did, my investigation, and the way it made me feel alive, after seven years and three kids--alive the way I'd been when I was still holding on to the possibility that someday Evan McKenna would love me--would be over. I'd be right back to my life, my grindingly boring little life, where I didn't fit in, where I had no friends, where the time between now and the day when the kids would spend full days in school stretched out interminably, and I didn't think I could take it.

So I said, "Do you honestly think I'd do anything--anything ever--that would hurt the children?"

"Well, let's see," Ben said, with his voice getting louder and his lips getting pale. He raised one finger. "You've got a friend who crushes up illegal drugs in people's drinks--"

"Oh, that is so unfair," I fumed.

He raised another finger; a prosecutor giving a devastating summation. "You're running around town asking people questions about something that's none of your business."

"A friend of mine was murdered," I said, pointing to a spot in front of my own refrigerator. "Stabbed to death, in her kitchen, in our town. Doesn't that make it my business?"

"She wasn't your friend!" Ben yelled. "You barely even knew her! I don't know why you won't just stay out of it! Take care of the kids. Take care of yourself. Find a hobby if you need something to do with your time."

A red fog descended in front of my eyes. "Something to do with my time?" I repeated. "Do you have any idea what I do all day? Do you have any idea what your kids do all day? Any idea at all?"

He stuck out his jaw and glared at me. I pushed past him, pulled a frying pan out of the island in the center of the kitchen, flicked a blob of butter into its center, and turned the stove on high.

"While you're thinking that over, here's another question," I said, cracking two eggs and sliding them onto the bubbling butter. "Why are you working for a rapist?"

Ben's face twitched. "What are you talking about?"

"You know what I'm talking about. And if you don't, take a look at those pages I printed out." I reached for a spatula. "They should refresh your memory."

Ben went to the living room and came back with the pages in his hand. I slid my eggs on a plate and plopped down at the table. He sat down across from me and flipped through the sheets, then stared at me, shaking his head. I hadn't seen him look this outraged since the fourth night of our honeymoon, when I'd had six vodka and cranberry juices and taken his suggestion that we try something new in bed as an invitation to stick my pinkie up his ass. (As it turned out, he'd been thinking more along the lines of me on top.)

"This is proprietary information," he finally said, with his thumb and index finger working at the bridge of his nose.

"Ben. I always thought you were..." I groped for the right words. "I thought you had integrity."

"He said it was consensual," Ben said wearily. When he shut his eyes, the skin of his eyelids looked bruised.

"He choked her!" I said. "How consensual could that have been?"

"That's her story, which was never corroborated. There was no police investigation. No doctor's report."

"You think this woman"--I glanced at the name on the pages to make sure I got it right--"this Sandra Willis made it up? You think she was lying?"

Ben tilted his face up and stared at the ceiling, as if the crown molding had suddenly developed the capacity for conversation. "I think that whatever happened, happened a long time ago. I think that there's such a thing as a youthful indiscretion."

I stared at him, stunned. "Are you kidding me? A youthful indiscretion is when Sam leaves his Legos out. A youthful indiscretion is not raping a Vassar coed when you're twenty years old, then getting your father to pay everyone off so that it never hits the paper."

"Stop!" he boomed. "Stop right now, Kate. You don't know the whole story."

"What don't I know? What else is there? A sequel?"

His lips had gone so white they were almost invisible, and his voice was clipped. "Edward Fitch is a war hero. His work as attorney general has been unimpeachable, and when he's elected senator, he's going to serve the people of New York with distinction."

"Sure," I said, stabbing at my eggs. "Just keep him away from Poughkeepsie. Does his wife know about this?"

"I have no idea. Why? Are you planning on calling to enlighten her?" He picked up the portable phone and tossed it into my lap. "Why not?" He raised his voice to a savage, lisping Valley Girlish uptalk. "Hi, you don't know me? But my name is Kate Klein, and my husband works for your husband? Anyhow, I was in the city shopping? And I happened to stop by my husband's office?" He lowered his voice. "Which, by the way, I'm amazed you managed to find."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

He raked his fingers through his hair. "Let's just say you haven't been the most attentive spouse when it comes to my professional life."

"That is so not what this conversation is about."

"The other wives stop by," Ben persisted. "They take an interest. Al's wife even brings him dinner when he's working late."

"Al lives in TriBeCa. And his wife's had so many face-lifts that she's practically got eyes in the back of her head."

"That's beside the point," Ben snapped. "She brings him dinner."

"Well, forgive me for not zipping into Manhattan to bring you a freakin' pot pie!" I stood up from the table, dumped my plate into the sink, and turned on the water.

"So, assuming that you weren't bringing me that pot pie, what were you doing in my office? Why the sudden interest in Ted Fitch?" Ben asked.

I set the frying pan, still unwashed, on the drying rack. "Ted Fitch and Kitty Cavanaugh knew each other."

Ben pushed himself away from the table. "Oh, great," he said, his voice rich with contempt. "Just great. It's not bad enough that you're running around investigating our neighbors, but now you're harassing my clients too?"

I felt like he'd punched me in the solar plexus, but my voice sounded steady. "Sukie Sutherland saw them talking in a bar before she was murdered. Kitty was crying." I waved the stack of papers in his face. "And I bet I know why."

Ben's face was pale, and his voice was calm, but I saw his knuckles whiten as he gripped the edge of the counter. "Kate," he said, "you can't be serious."

"Does he have an alibi?" I shot back.

He lifted his chin. "I'm not even going to dignify that with a response."

"Fine," I said, and kicked the dishwasher shut. "I'll find out for myself." I grabbed the phone and raised my voice to the mocking falsetto he'd deployed so effectively. "Hi, this is Kate Klein? And given your history of choking women who don't want to have sex with you? I was just wondering if you could tell me where you were the day Kitty Cavanaugh was killed?"

His fingers dug into the flesh above my elbow. "If you say one word to my client," he snarled, "one word, other than 'Hello,' 'Goodbye,' and 'Congratulations, Senator--' "

"You'll what?" I wrenched my arm away. "Rape me?"

He let go of me, looking horrified. "Kate."

I grabbed the papers and shoved them into my borrowed purse. "Sleep in the guest room," I said.

Upstairs, I slammed our bedroom door, yanked off my clothes, pulled on my nightgown, and dove under the covers with my stack of printouts on the fascinating life and times of Edward Jeffords Fitch, fifty-seven-year-old graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School, winner of the Bronze Star in Vietnam, assistant district attorney, district attorney, state's attorney general, and, if my husband had his way, the next Democratic senator from the great state of New York.
Had he done it?
I wondered, staring at the camera-ready visage that accompanied the story the
Times
had run when he'd announced his candidacy. Had he been the one to bury that knife in Kitty Cavanaugh's back? Would Ben try to find out? Did Ben even care what the answer was, as long as it didn't impinge on Ted Fitch's electability?

I pulled the covers up to my ears and listened as the car door and then the side door slammed and my husband and best friend fumbled through the kids' bedtime routine. "Mommy," Sophie kept saying. "I want the mommy."

At nine o'clock, after the final request for a glass of water and another story was denied, Janie tapped gently at the door.

"Everything okay?" she whispered.

I opened the door and flopped back on the bed with my face in a pillow. "Yes. No. I don't know."

"Okay," said Janie, flopping down beside me. Her streaky hair was gathered in a ponytail, and she'd borrowed a pair of my cargo pants that hung loosely around her waist. "Glad we're clear on that."

I handed her the Fitch file, then gave her the fifteen-second synopsis. Janie's eyes got wider and wider. "Wow," she said, and "Whoa," and, finally, an astonished and extremely gratifying "Oh...my...God."

"So what now?"

"We find out if Ted Fitch has an alibi." I flung myself onto my back, thinking,
Then I figure out how I wound up married to someone who'd work for a man like that.