The Intern: Chasing Murderers, Hookers, and Senators Across DC Wasn't In The Job Description (6 page)

I thought it might be a little presumptuous, walking up to
the door with the clothes, so I decided I’d leave them in the car until she
said yes. I could tell her I was going to have to stay some place either way,
either with her or at a hotel, which was the truth. I went out, making sure my
other two locks worked, and headed to my car—more cautious than ever.

I checked my rear view mirror constantly, wondering if I
could spot a tail if there were one. I thought about the numerous mistakes I
had made that day, chief among them was leaving a note for Helper broadcasting
that I knew—or thought I knew—what he was doing. That was just brilliant.

About a block before I got to her house, I started looking
for a parking space, which could still be akin to a quest for the Holy Grail
even late at night. I finally found a spot, which was actually bigger than my
car, pulled in and out three times, and got out. It was over a block past her
house, and I tried to be as nonchalant as possible, while I constantly looked
over my shoulder for conspirators. I was so preoccupied that when I walked up
the stairs leading into her building, it took me a minute to see the next shock
of the evening.

After ascending the last step, I stood in front of her door
and looked quickly in the window. Unfortunately, the shade was up, just like
the night before, and, as I glanced in, I could see no one resembling my dear
Stephanie, but there was someone sitting there who looked like me. I froze for
a moment, my eyes stuck on him, and prayed he wouldn’t see. He was engrossed in
a book. I realized it wouldn’t take long to be spotted, so I darted back down
the stairs and practically sprinted down the block.

Roger
, I thought. That was Roger—just like the
pictures I’d seen: same height, same weight, same hair. He was probably enough
like me that I would hate him. I was a stand-in, but I wasn’t needed now that
the original was back. I was barely breathing by the time I approached my car.
But as I got closer, I saw a man silhouetted against the streetlights, standing
over my vehicle.

I stopped cold. For an instant, I thought someone had
followed me, but then I understood. And then I got pissed.

“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted, not really
thinking about the time. I knew damn well what the man was doing. I looked
farther down the block and saw his car parked in the street, hazard lights on,
the thing still running. The DC Parking Gestapo, handing out tickets like
politicians did pork, was the only thing in Washington you saw more than a fat
man in a polyester suit. They were not my favorites in any situation, but this
was war.

“Ain’t ever no parking here,” he said, as he spoke into a
walkie talkie. “You’re parked in front of a hydrant.”

“Oh, come on,” I said, moving toward the driver’s side, my
head spinning.

“Sir, I’m gonna have to ask you to stay here. You have seven
unpaid tickets, and they’re coming with The Boot,”

Oh shit. The Boot. A big orange contraption they lock on the
wheel until you pay your fines. In DC, it meant almost certainly getting your
windows smashed in addition to being without transportation and having to pay
all your tickets to get the stupid thing off.

I walked back around to try to reason with the guy. “I was here
less than three minutes. You can’t …”

“Sir, step away from the car.” He didn’t look at me.

I wanted to try to reason some more, but no words came. I
just stood there, eyes half-closed, about to explode. Although I had read the
warning on parking tickets which said assaults on parking personnel would be
prosecuted, it just didn’t seem to mean much right then. I noticed that I was
much bigger than he was. When I saw he had gone back to writing my latest fine,
I moved in quick and hit him hard on the jaw with a solid right, the first one
I had thrown since the third grade. I yelled, “Come on!” and motioned like you
see in the movies. The man stumbled and  looked at me like I was blowing fire
out of my nose, thought for just a second about responding, and then turned and
ran, grabbing his walkie-talkie and trying hard to speak as he did. I jumped
into my car and felt my hand begin to throb, but that mattered little. I was
the winner by a first-round knockout.

I gunned the Toyota and threw it into reverse, nudging the
car behind me. I had to eek back and forth twice before getting out of the
space, knowing that a cop would probably be coming at any moment. I screamed
down the block, barely even noticing the stop sign, realizing that, counting my
grade school fights, I was now 3-0 in my boxing career and wondering what in
the hell I was going to do for the rest of the night.

Six

I
t was, I admit, a rather strange
decision, one born of the strange existence I was beginning to lead. I chose it
because my friends were out of town or incommunicado, I had no way of getting
the numbers of my co-workers, my apartment had been broken into, and I was
involved in some sort of deadly game. Most importantly, I was probably now a
wanted fugitive, and I knew being hauled into jail was absolutely the last
thing I needed.

So I went to the Watergate. It seemed the thing to do when
one was just getting embroiled in some amazing Washington scandal. You don’t
hide out at the Hampton Inn; you go straight to the source, the same place
Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy did.

There were other reasons for choosing the Watergate as well.
I didn’t want to drive far and increase the chance of being pulled over and
found out. Even if I had wanted to drive, I didn’t know the suburbs that well,
and the hotels probably weren’t that much cheaper anyway. I knew of hotels I
assumed to be cheaper in the city, but they were in such wonderful
neighborhoods that I didn’t want to take the chance of avoiding my pursuers
only to succumb to some random mugging. I also knew right where it was and
could get there without wasting a minute of time. I had been to the Watergate
once before, to drink with my college friend Susan, so, along with remembering
their overpriced gin and tonics, I knew it had a parking garage the size of
Philadelphia, which would probably keep my car from being discovered during the
night. And, most importantly, I thought it would be really cool to stay at the
Watergate.

However, I was no dummy. Careful to avoid the pitfalls made
both by Nixon’s plumbers and by the various characters in John Grisham novels,
I withdrew a good bit of my money—most of what was left of my graduation funds,
$350—from an ATM and decided I would check in under an assumed name. I got the
money out of the machine, some three blocks from the hotel, and was scared to
death I’d be mugged.

I got back into my car unscathed and drove the remaining
distance. I took a ticket from a silly-looking machine, found a suitable spot
in a dark corner, and proceeded to the front desk, my heart still pounding. I
merited a couple of looks—I wasn’t dressed well, and Lord knows what expression
was on my face.

I asked the desk clerk how much a room was. She had short
red hair and a stern face, and she stared at my left elbow. She said $150. I
asked her if she could rent me one of those that she knew she wasn’t going to
rent for the night, the kind that would really be a shame if it had to go
without someone to sleep in it, and handed her a twenty while doing so. There
was no one else around. She smiled. “Oh. That kind of room. That kind is $100.”
This was at least a little more reasonable, or it seemed so at the time. I
nodded, not wanting to press my luck.

I checked in as Benjamin Braddock. The woman wanted to see
some ID, but I flipped her another five and said I didn’t have any. This
satisfied her. It nearly killed me to give anyone any of my money, let alone
twenty-five bucks, but it had to be done. And, despite her dour expression, she
genuinely seemed to enjoy being bribed.

The woman showed me on a map where my room was, and I
glanced around at the hotel before making my way up. It was still swank, in a
very 70s meets the 1800s kind of way, with lots of burled wood and brass. The
ghosts of Haldeman and Ehrlichman probably still came for cocktails once in a
while, but I imagined that politicians from any era could walk in and know this
was where they were supposed to do business. Most of the hotels I had been in
had room keys firmly attached to red plastic key chains with “postage guaranteed”
stamped on them, so all this luxury was a little foreign. Nice, but foreign
just the same.

My room was on the fourth floor, adorned with curious lime
green and white striped wallpaper, a bed bigger than my apartment, and
furniture that cost more than my college education. Everything was sturdy and
shiny, and the value of the mini-bar probably would’ve been enough to make me
nervous. The bathroom was big and well-lit, and the closet was the approximate
size of a conference room. There was a really natty white terry cloth robe with
the Watergate logo embroidered on the breast that just had “secret agent”
written all over it, and I practically danced out of my clothes in order to get
into it.

I lay down on the bed and watched the news. The lead story
was, naturally, the Timmons murder. The brunette reporter, who couldn’t keep
from constantly flipping her hair, described the packed rally and how the
killer had thrown some firecrackers into the crowd as a diversion and then
fired at Timmons as everyone else looked the other way. The constipated
analysts, who were all famous for some minor thing or another, discussed
whether this would strengthen or weaken the gun lobby and talked about the
irony of a gun lobbyist being killed by a gun.

They talked about the Second Amendment and the Brady Bill.
Then the network did a biographical piece on Timmons, mentioning his political
ambition—big surprise there—and the tough re-election campaign that had led him
to offer promises of a scandal that would rock the “liberal establishment.” But
Timmons would never have the chance. He was now vastly more famous in death
than in life, and I noticed how handsome he was when they showed his picture as
they went to a commercial.

There were no mysterious goings-on during the rest of the
night. After modeling my robe and doing my best James Bond faces, I took a long
shower and tried to wash everything off of my body and sat in a tub of insanely
hot water, pondering my next move. By the time I got out, I looked like a prune
and fell straight into bed, tired, and very scared—and jumpy.

Even though my body could barely keep itself from falling
into drug-like sleep, I would start to drift away only to find myself kicking
or flailing at the pillow like a bad-ass Kung-Fu demon. This happened four or
five times, enough to make me consider raiding the mini-bar for all of its
over-priced alcohol, but I finally found some solace between frequent
nightmares.

Well, they weren’t actually nightmares. My mind just kept
playing my day back accurately—from the message-taking, to the note-writing, to
the burglary, to that idiot ticketing my car, and my idiotic ass assaulting the
damn parking guy. How dumb was that? And every time, when it would start to get
too unbearable, I would realize it was only a dream. Then, unfortunately, I
would remember that I was dreaming about real life.

Wednesday

Seven

I
 woke up several times during the
night, too hot for the covers and too cold without them, painfully helping the
moments float by, and I could not go back to sleep at seven. I stared at the
ceiling for a good ten minutes, just trying to decide what to do.

Everything does seem better in the morning. Despite my past
experiences, there was a chance that this simply was a coincidence, and, even
if it wasn’t, I now knew what I was going to do. There was a police station
just a few blocks from the NEA headquarters. I was going to go to work and tell
them I’d be back later. I’d then march to the police station and spill my guts
after I bargained like a mob informant and got them to drop the whole
assaulting a parking officer thing. Maybe I’d make them throw in the parking
tickets too. And even if they kept me on the hook for those things, I’d still
help bring the killer to justice and hope for leniency later.

I turned on the TV while I was getting ready. I didn’t have
my contacts on, so I could only hear and make out vague, impressionistic
pictures, but I didn’t need much else. When they returned from commercial, the
anchor started out with my favorite story. “Police and FBI officials are
beginning to compile a list of suspects in the Gregory Timmons assassination
according to sources in both offices.” I moved close enough to the TV so I
could see an image of Timmons; he looked meek and unremarkable behind the
anchor’s well-coiffed hair. “Several terrorist groups have claimed
responsibility for the attack, but the FBI seems to discount these admissions.
At a press conference half an hour ago, FBI Press Secretary, Sally Hunt, said
the Bureau is looking for a lone assassin.”

There was a cut to a well-lit, grave-looking young woman
standing behind a podium. “We believe this is the work of someone working
alone. We’re not ruling anything out at this point, but all indications are
pointing that way.” A man asked her if she could name any suspects. “We have
suspects,” she said, “but we’re not releasing those names.”

The police, I thought, would soon know there was more than
one person involved, thanks to me. I turned off the TV as the newscast moved on
to a report about reptile cloning, and I headed for the shower. During all that
wonderful steam-filled bliss, I decided I’d put on the suit and tie I planned
to impress Stephanie with—even thinking of her made me sick—and make a nice
impression on everyone. I thought about just calling the NEA and telling them
I’d be late, but I was hoping that I’d walk in and find out from the office
gossips that Helper had already been caught.