The Intern: Chasing Murderers, Hookers, and Senators Across DC Wasn't In The Job Description (19 page)

“That’s kind of weak, isn’t it?” Tabitha asked. I hoped she
wasn’t overplaying her hand.

“I think so too,” said Greer. “I just think he snapped.
Another fruitcake.” I wanted to pistol-whip him.

“One more question,” Tabitha said, flirting by touching
Greer’s nose with her finger. “Do you think they’re close to getting this
idiot?”

“I don’t know. We’re not hearing much, which probably means
they don’t have anything substantial. They need an arrest in this case, and any
kind of lead at all would lead to tons of leaks.”

She didn’t’ have anything to say to this, and in a moment
she moved closer to Greer. She snuggled close, and he was loving every minute.
Tabitha kissed him and they fell back on the bed. Soon she had the turtleneck
off and was planting kisses all over his furry, droopy chest.

All of a sudden, Tabitha sprang up. “Let’s have some real
fun,” she said. She went to the bag laying on the counter and pulled out one
pair of handcuffs. She glided over to Greer and secured his left wrist to the
bedpost.

“A wild one,” Greer sneered lamely as she secured his right
as well. I thought about how few men were truly immune to the powers of a woman
who looked and moved like Tabitha.

Tabitha smiled and licked her lips. She quickly glanced over
at my hiding place and put the keys on the dresser. She knocked them on the
floor and then exclaimed, “Goodness me,” which by that point seemed
over-theatrical.

I emerged, and my new prisoner turned ghost white.

Twenty-Four

“A
re you going to kill me?”

Worry lines deepened into furrows as he stared at the short,
silver barrel pointed at his forehead. When I didn’t respond, he struggled to
break free from the handcuffs chaining him to the bed.

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, and he
froze. His eyes darted around the room, and his mouth opened.

Waving the gun, I regained his attention. “I wouldn’t if I
were you.”

He blanched until the color of his face matched the white
hair on his head, and beads of sweat popped out on his brow.

To be perfectly honest, he could have yelled his head off
and no one would have come. Fancy hotels, with rooms the size of a bus depot,
thick yellow drapes and deep pile carpet designed to suck every sound out of
the air, along with the constant air conditioning hum, ensured cries of passion
or lover’s quarrels went unheard.

And since he thought I was a killer, he wasn’t going to
scream. He didn’t have to know there were no bullets in the gun. After all my
misadventures, I didn’t carry a loaded gun when killing wasn’t on the menu.

I didn’t like pointing a gun at anyone, even an empty one.
It didn’t make me feel strong. It didn’t give me a rush of power. It almost
reinforced the futility of my position. But I wanted the illusion of power. He
needed to be still and listen to me.

Because I needed his help.

I let him squirm for a moment, the trembling of his lips
getting lost in the scruff of his beard, before I shook my head.

He breathed long and slow, easing down from panic into fear.
After checking the wrist shackled behind him by the tight-clamped cuffs, he
looked at me, eyes wide, trying for sympathy, and asked, “Then, why am I here?
What do you want?”

Relief shuddered through me. The question I had been waiting
for.

“That’s simple,” I said. I set the gun on the dresser and
leaned against it. My eyes bore into his. “I want to tell you my story.”

He wasn’t going to argue. Once again, I laid everything out.
I was getting pretty good by now, embellishing the shoulder injury and the fall
out of Helper’s house. Greer had gained control of himself and listened with
pursed lips.

“I don’t believe you,” he said, when I had barely finished.

I hadn’t really expected him to believe it the first time he
heard it; it was a lot for me to believe, and I had been there. And we knew so
little of what Helper and his cronies were doing that my villain looked rather
unconvincing when compared with the villain Greer had been helping to create in
the public eye.

Still, it’s never easy to hear someone say he doesn’t
believe something you desperately need him to. I glanced at Tabitha to see if
she had any ideas, but she shook her head and sighed. Greer had returned to his
pre-handcuff smugness. This was not going well.

“Well,” I said, “think about it. Because I feel pretty safe
here, and I can wait until you get ready. And to show you what a great guy I
am, I’ll give you a pretty fair deal. If you don’t scream, we won’t gag you.
But if you’re bad, Tabitha will stick one of these rubber balls in your trap.”

“Trap?” Tabitha mouthed.

I shrugged. I couldn’t believe I had said it either.

After my success with Tabitha, perhaps I did expect Greer to
jump on the side of truth and righteousness immediately. And despite my
rationalization, when I realized he wasn’t going to do so any time soon, I
found my neck tensing up and my shoulder throbbing. I needed to talk to Tabitha
now, so I brought her over to the couch, where we whispered to each other.
Despite it being the only way to keep Greer from hearing while keeping an eye
on him—even though I really didn’t think he was going anywhere—I thought it
might also be good to keep him feeling like he was a step behind.

“What do you think?” I whispered.

“I don’t know. I was trying to watch him the whole time you
were telling the story. He seems like he’s going to be pretty hard to
convince.”

“They’re going to miss me,” Greer said loudly, the
whispering getting to him already.

“What?” I asked.

“They’re going to miss me at the paper in the morning. When
I’m not there.”

“Don’t worry about that,” I said, although I hadn’t covered
this base yet. “We’ve already got that taken care of.” I smiled and nodded at
the red rubber ball. “Your trap …” I reminded gently.

“We need to get Helper here … to have him spill his guts,” I
said, resuming my whisper.

“And how are we going to do that? Do you have any sexual
info on him?” Tabitha said in a tone I couldn’t read. I shook my head. We sat
there, saying nothing, watching Greer watching us, watching Tabitha stare idly
at the dresser. I was beginning to develop a blister low on my back where I had
been carrying the gun.

“The novel,” I whispered.

“What?”

“The novel. It’s perfect!” Tabitha wasn’t getting it.
“Helper’s looking for an agent for his book. I read parts of that sucker, and
it’s just not gonna happen. When we were at his house, he had written
“rejected” on a couple of copies of letters he had sent to agents, but most
haven’t had the time to reject him yet.”

Tabitha nodded.

“I have the letters here from the disk. We’ll call in the
morning and pretend you’re one of the agents in DC for business. You’ll act so
impressed and get him to think he’s the next Updike. Then you’ll bring him over
here and get him to talk while the two of us are in the closet.” If I couldn’t
get him with sex, I’d get him with ego. Come to think of it, those two were
very closely connected.

She smiled admiringly. I let her. “It’ll work,” she finally
said.

“Of course it will,” I said, not feeling quite that
confident. The thought of our plan going awry and ending up with another
hostage was extremely unsavory. “And one more thing. Do you sleep with any
doctors?”

She glared at me. “Please don’t call it ‘sleeping with.’ Say
‘clients.’”

“Do you have any clients who are doctors?”

“A cardiologist and a psychiatrist.”

“The cardiologist will be perfect. Think up a story to tell
him, but have him call from the hospital or his office and tell the
Post
Mr. Greer is going to be out of commission for a couple of days.”

She beamed, and we both turned to look at Greer, who was
livid at being the butt of a joke. He looked away, pretending he wasn’t
interested. We laughed, and I got up.

“Time for bed. We’ll have another long day tomorrow.”

Until that very moment, I hadn’t considered the logistics of
keeping a hostage. We really needed to get him away from the bed, if we had any
hope of getting a good night’s rest, but I didn’t want to do anything that
would help him escape. Greer, despite weighing forty pounds more than me, was
cooperative, partly because he probably still thought I was a killer and prone
to slapping guys like him around. I wanted to collapse after only doing that
and my shoulder was killing me, but we hadn’t addressed the next question.

How do you make a hostage go to sleep? You hate to make him
sleep upright, but you can’t let him have his own bed. You could tip him on his
back, but his hands would get smooshed, and all the blood would run to his
head. After a brief conference with Tabitha, and accepting any suggestions that
Greer had to offer, we decided to back him up against a wall, which would give
his neck some support.

We also decided we would take turns sleeping—two-hour
shifts—so we could watch him. About the only thing I thought he could do was
bang his head against the wall, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. I
agreed to take the first shift, and Tabitha nodded off fairly quickly. I
wondered what she was dreaming about.

Greer glared at me but lost interest when I wouldn’t glare
back and ultimately dozed off, his head resting against the wall. I watched TV
with the sound down and closed-captioning on.

I flipped through the channels until I saw fabled southern
segregationist senator, Kenneth North, pontificating on the highlights on
C-SPAN. I would’ve kept flipping, but I saw the word “Timmons,” so I stopped.

He was speaking at some sort of stump political rally, and
there were only a smattering of cameras watching. He was in a flannel shirt,
which looked ten years old, and he had several nervous tics as he spoke. He was
nearly eighty-five. “To think our brother was killed by one of those loonies
from that god-forsaken institution which our government funds is
unconscionable. The young man himself should be tarred and feathered, and the
NEA should be disbanded.”

I let the sentences, disconnected as they were by the
white-on-black print of closed-captioning, roll around in my head for a second
before I realized Senator North had just convicted me on national TV. Of
course, the media had been doing this since the beginning, but they were at
least kind and judicious enough to use “alleged” and “purported” and all of those
other fudge words. No fudge words here. I went to the table, grabbed a piece of
the Watergate stationery, and wrote,
Things To Do Once I Clear My Name
.
The first—and only—item on the list was,
Sue Kenneth North for slander
.

Saturday

Twenty-Five

N
either Tabitha nor I slept very well,
but I’m sure we did better than Greer. He looked like a postcard from the dead
when we all quit trying to sleep about six. Tabitha took our orders for
breakfast and called room service. Tabitha fed Greer, and he was hungry enough
he actually ate something. Afterward, we let him go to the bathroom, with me
standing guard, freeing up his legs and handcuffing one arm to the towel rack
while he went. I let Greer know I had no compunction about hitting him, even if
I didn’t believe at this moment I’d pull the trigger. Of course, I knew I
really could never pull the trigger, but I thought it was a nice hedge.

I had to give Greer a sixth-grade teacher look to get him to
sit back down, but he finally did without my having to slap him around, and,
for this, I was grateful; after all, I really did want to kiss up to him and
get him to come around to our side. I had Tabitha call her cardiologist friend.
She had come up with a story about how he was actually doing Greer a favor,
because he wanted to spend the whole day with her rather than going to work,
and the man readily agreed. She gave him all the details and phone numbers he
would need, and Greer gave a sly smile, at least a bit impressed.

In another whispering conference, Tabitha and I decided we
would wait until nine or ten to call Helper; we didn’t want to overplay our
hand. She went off to take a shower while I watched the silent captive. Then it
was my turn to shower while she stood guard.

Afterward, Tabitha told me CNN was reporting Timmons’
funeral was that afternoon, with the burial to take place at Arlington National
Cemetery. This hit me hard. I thought of the can of worms I had opened when I
got that call. Of course, there was no guarantee Helper would’ve found the
message, made the call—or even had the gumption or desire to stop the
assassination anyway—but it’s hard to remind yourself of those kind of details
when you believe you really did play a part in someone’s death. Tabitha walked
by and touched my nose, and that made me smile.

It still wasn’t even 7:30, and we both knew we couldn’t make
any inquiries about agents until nine.

I had only quickly glanced at the stack, so all I knew for
sure was one agent had rejected the novel. We were on our own when it came to
the rest. “Do we really want to play hit or miss?” Tabitha asked.

“I can’t think of a better way …” I said, but as soon as the
words came out of my mouth I had an idea. I called New York information for the
number of the Theresa Ramon Literary Agency. I did this for five other
agents—all female—then hung up, satisfied. “When it gets to be nine, I’ll just
call and pretend like I’m Helper and be annoying. I’ll ask if they’ve read my
manuscript yet. If they say yes, we rejected it, I’ll say, ‘sorry, I didn’t get
the letter,’ and, if they haven’t read it, we’ve got our mark. Tabitha nodded.

We waited. And waited. And waited. We watched TV, read the
morning’s
Post
—I was rating lower placement on page one as police seemed
to have nothing new—and stared at the clock, trying to will it to nine o’clock.
Finally, at five after nine, I called the Theresa Ramon Literary Agency and got
the cold shoulder from a receptionist. Ms. Ramon would contact me when she had
read the manuscript, and she could not comment further. I got similar responses
from the next two. And then I called the Patricia Mickelson Agency, where the
secretary informed me Ms. Mickelson—who was the only agent in the firm—had been
out of town on “family business” for a week and was extremely backed-up in her
slush-pile reading.