Washington Deceased (14 page)

“You'll have to excuse me, Charlie. I've just become unaccountably anxious about the whereabouts of a young woman I met recently.”

Chapter Twenty

Wendy was six feet from Randy Cox when she stepped into the doorway of the Palm Restaurant's taproom. She stood still for a moment, highlighted by the late sunlight that streamed through the doorway behind her. It was just after seven.

Wendy raised her hands to chin level and began, one finger at a time, to pull off the tight-fitting, black leather gloves she was wearing. She was in the midst of doing this when Cox turned from the bar toward the doorway and noticed her.

She heard his sharp intake of breath the moment he glimpsed her. He didn't try to conceal the impression she made on him. He stared, fascinated, almost reverent, unabashedly appraising and admiring her as he looked her over systematically from foot to head.

He began at her knee-length, black, saddle leather boots, moved up her legs to the close-fitting, British-Army-pipeclay-white slacks tucked into the boots, proceeded to the bright yellow men's cotton broadcloth button down shirt that deployed nicely around the gentle bulge of her breasts, noticed the gloves she was taking off and the black silk scarf around her neck, saw the gold pin—a pair of miniature spurs, joined together—highlighting the knot in the scarf, and finished by taking in her cool, fresh, naive, unspoiled, hard-as-marble, soft-as-silk nineteen-year-old face, framed by carefully combed blond hair.

“Well,” Cox said, his voice slightly uncertain, “this is a Wendy I haven't seen before.”

She strolled over to the bar, smiled briefly at Cox, and laid the now-removed gloves down on the mahogany.

“What are you drinking?” he asked.

“Seven and seven,” Wendy said. Just like that. Like she came into bars and ordered uptown cocktails every night.

Cox nodded at the bartender, who glided away to fetch the drink. Cox took a sip from the gin and tonic in front of him.

“Don't be insulted,” he said, “but I sort of thought of you as more the cheerleader type.”

“I'm not insulted. I am a cheerleader. Or at least I was for a semester of my freshman year.”

“No shit?”

“Well, a majorette, actually. If you watched the Badger game you probably saw me.”

“Uh, ‘badger game?' ”

“My school's football game against the University of Wisconsin,” Wendy explained, her eyes suggesting playfully that Cox could scarcely be trusted in the inner sanctum of Congress if he couldn't even keep the Big 10 straight. “It was on ESPN.”

“Right,” Cox said. “I must've been working that Saturday.”

“Bull
shit
,” Wendy said with a smile, coming down hard on the second syllable as she showed her teeth.

“Right again. So how's it going? What you're looking into I mean.”

“I don't know.” Wendy lowered her eyes briefly to show that she accepted the transition from banter to serious matters. “I don't really feel very comfortable with anything that's happened.”

“That I can understand.”

“I haven't been able to reach dad by phone. I think I'll drive out tomorrow and try to see him.”

“With Michaelson?”

“I haven't decided about that part yet.”

The bartender put Wendy's drink in front of her. Cox pushed some money at him. He took it and went away.

“Michaelson turned anything up yet?” Cox asked.

“It's hard to say. He seems to think he has.”

“Seems to think?”

“It's all kind of hazy. He says he's found some things out, but when he explains what they are none of it makes much sense to me.”

“There could be a reason for that.”

“There could be a couple of reasons, I guess.”

“There could at that,” Cox said, pausing again to drink.

Wendy considered for a moment asking Cox for a cigarette. She decided not to. Clichés are one thing, she told herself, and pure cornpone is something else. She was trying to figure out some more satisfactory way to move things along, but she needn't have bothered. Cox was moving all by himself.

“Look,” he said as he half turned to face her. “Tell me if I'm misreading the vibes here, but I don't think I am. Are you interested in me or am I just kidding myself? 'Cause I'm as interested as hell in you.”

“Yeah,” Wendy said. “
Interested
is the word all right.”

“Okay,” Cox said. “Okay.” She noticed with satisfaction that he was nervous. “I have Seagram's Seven Crown in my apartment. I have Seven-Up in my apartment. I have everything required for safe sex in my apartment. Why don't we go there? Right now?”

“Ready when you are.”

***

On 14th Street just beyond P in northwest Washington, someone in the mid sixties had built an eight-story apartment building of elephant-gray concrete. Had the building been conceived as a monument to European workers' housing it couldn't have been any more devoid of interest. It sat there, an oblong hulk with the shape and features of a grossly metastasized shoebox.

In the seventies, someone had affixed charcoal-gray brick facing—not brick, just brick facing—to the concrete on the street side of the building. This well meaning but misbegotten effort had changed the building from drab to ugly.

In the eighties, someone had attached gold-colored, perforated metal work to the middle third of the brick facing. This had changed the building from ugly to hideous.

It was on the eighth floor of this building that Randy Cox lived. As Wendy stepped into the elevator with him, she felt a little pang inside, a little blip behind her eyes, something that was half panic and half reality check.

One day during the summer she was fourteen, Wendy had stolen her mother's car keys, snuck out of the house, slipped behind the wheel of the sedan her mother had left parked on the street, put the key in the ignition, turned it, and heard the engine roar into life. Shifting the car into drive and taking her foot off the brake, she'd noted not without awe that she, all 103 pounds of her, was moving a couple of tons of machinery down the street. And that had been when she'd felt the little pang she felt again just now, compounded of equal parts “hey, this is really happening, it's not just something I'm dreaming about” and “what do I do now?”.

No way around it, she was scared. No longer was she imagining it, no longer was she planning it, now she was doing it, and it frightened her. She gulped the fear back and went ahead.

The elevator door opened. Wendy and Cox stepped onto the eighth floor. The corridor was long and narrow. All of the doors were painted red. Cox used two keys to unlock a door about a quarter of the way down the hall. He stepped aside and she walked into his efficiency apartment.

On the wall above the convertible sofa, next to a Redskins pennant, she saw a poster of someone Spanish whom she didn't recognize (it was Che Guevara) being hit in the face with a custard pie. The poster's caption read, “Is Nothing Sacred?” She didn't get it.

Along the wall on the other side was the door to what Wendy surmised was the bathroom, followed by what looked like enough video and audio toys to account for one month's foreign trade deficit, including everything from a large-screen television to a compact disc player, all framed by two large speakers. The sleek, obviously expensive electronics contrasted sharply with the napkin-and-tumbler-littered coffee table shoved against one end of the sofa and the old-fashioned, round-topped refrigerator dominating nine square feet of linoleum masquerading as flagstones in the kitchen area.

A few feet from the door a personal computer precariously shared a card table with software, magazines and what looked to be at least two days' mail. A two-drawer mini-filing cabinet stood underneath the card table and seemed at first glance to be holding it up.

Wendy looked carefully around the room while Cox came in and walked over to a drink trolley near the card table. There was something missing and she couldn't put her finger on it. Telephone on the coffee table.
Washington Post
s piled up underneath the coffee table. Same for several days' editions of the
Washington Times
. Same for
Washington Monthly
. Same for three Sundays' worth of the
New York Times
. What wasn't there?

Books. She couldn't see a book in the place. Not even a handful of course books left over from college. Cox obviously read. He read voraciously. Like everyone in Washington, he was an information junkie. But he didn't read books. Last week's cover story and tomorrow morning's headline defined his horizons.

“It was seven and seven, wasn't it?” Cox asked as he lifted a decanter.

“Actually, I could use a chaser right now. Do you have a beer?”

“Possible, possible, Cox hummed, the soul of good humor.”

He walked over to the refrigerator and opened it. From across the apartment it looked nearly empty. Crouching, he reached far in the back and emerged triumphantly with a can of Miller Lite.

He strolled back in her direction and handed her the can. Only at this point did it seem to occur to him that a glass might be called for. Rather than walk all the way back to the kitchenette, he scrounged a cocktail glass from the drink trolley and tendered this to Wendy.

“What are you majoring in?” he asked as he mixed a gin and tonic for himself.

“Primary Education.” And my sign's capricorn, she thought. Get real.

“Gonna teach little kids, huh?”

“Maybe. I'm actually thinking more of administration, consulting, grant applications, that kind of thing.”

He finished mixing his drink and smiled at her.

“The apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, I guess,” he said.

“What's that mean?”

“Just that you're your father's daughter. And that's a compliment. Tunes?”

“Fine with me.”

Cox walked over to the electronic array dominating the left wall. He turned on the preamp and the amplifier. He began to sort through the collection of compact discs.

I wonder what he'll pick? Wendy thought. Something classical to show me how sophisticated he is,
Bolero
or one of the other three things that people who never really listen to classical music have? Or some kind of rock, to show me how cool he is, even though he's almost twice my age?

Cox put a disc in the player. A moment later Wendy heard Christie Hynde singing “The Adultress.” The Pretenders on compact disc. Like if you were listening to The Pretenders it would be this incredible tragedy to miss all these tonal nuances that you couldn't quite capture on a conventional record.

Cox had put down his drink to start the music. Now he took off his jacket and dropped it on one of the beanbags. He turned toward her. He loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. Wendy wondered if she was supposed to find this unbelievably sexy. She guessed she was.

But then again, maybe not. Cox didn't really seem to think that the drinks or the music or the chat or the manner were sharpening her desire or creating an erotic mood or otherwise contributing to the business at hand. He seemed to be doing it more out of deference to social convention, the way you ask casual acquaintances how they are when you meet them.

“I went with someone in primary education for a few months last year,” Cox said. Casually, making polite and innocuous conversation.

“No kidding.” Wendy sipped the beer and with some effort avoided making a face. She could just barely stand Lite beer.

“Yeah. She was the educational psychologist at a K-4 school in Bethesda.”

“
K-4
. She taught you the jargon, anyway.”

Cox with what he took to be infinite finesse had in the course of this exchange moved to within twenty-two inches of Wendy.

“I thought the jargon was fabulous,” he said. “You know what my favorite term from her was?”

“Tell me,” Wendy said, shaking her head.

“Initiate play. Big problem in K-4 is kids who don't know how to initiate play in an appropriate way. I think maybe she wrote her Masters thesis on it.”

“Initiating play in an appropriate way,” Wendy repeated, looking directly into Cox's eyes and trying her damndest to seem fascinated. “It can be a problem even after fourth grade.”

“I suppose it can,” Cox said, smiling broadly. He took a long swig from his drink. “I have a question for you,” he said then.

“What's that?”

“Do you do it with the lights on or off?”

“Yes,” she said without blinking.

***

Wendy's legs were warm. Uncomfortably warm. Warm and sweaty and sticky.

It was the boots. She was naked except for the boots. Cox had asked her to put the boots back on after they'd both undressed, and she'd done it. Everything else made her feel tawdry, cheap, degraded, used, soiled—the boots made her feel ridiculous.

She lay quite still in the subdued lighting. She was lying underneath a baby blue blanket on a sheet and pillow that Cox had put down on the shag rug in front of his sofa. She had wondered when he was doing it why he didn't just open the couch out into a bed. Trying to imagine Bruce Willis or Beau Bridges doing that in a movie, though, she'd guessed she understood why Cox had regarded it as inappropriate to the occasion.

Next to her, Cox was breathing deeply and regularly, his eyes closed. She wondered if she dared.

By bending her neck at an uncomfortable angle, she could just see the digital clock next to the telephone. It was 8:42.

Prostituted himself. The phrase came back to her. At her father's sentencing hearing, the government lawyer had said that two or three times: Senator Gardner prostituted himself, he violated his sacred trust.

That lawyer knew what he was doing, she reflected. Those words cut. They sliced right through the skin, right down to the soul. She told herself that what she was doing wasn't the same thing, but that didn't make her feel okay about it.