I nodded. I shifted in my seat so she wouldn’t see my semi-erect bulge. I should have been completely horrified, of course, but I was sure Izzie had enjoyed being used by the men.
“Oh, she enjoyed it,” Marie said. “At least, the parts she remembers.”
“What happened?”
“They partied on and on, drank more and more. Izzie was being careful not to drink too much to lose track of things, but the guys were just knocking it back.”
“Okay…”
“And there were drugs.”
I felt my insides grow cold. Izzie never got involved in drugs. She’d written enough about their pitfalls during her earlier journalistic career.
“Izzie did that?”
“Hard for her to avoid it.”
Jesus fucking Christ.
I felt the bile rise up at that. The thought that Izzie would willingly risk her health taking… well, whatever it was she’d taken. I didn’t feel like giving Billingford or his goons the benefit of the doubt. But I remembered getting back from Toronto, I remembered greeting Izzie that night. She’d been just as turned on by her recent encounter, which I’d assumed had been with C, as any other time. She’d practically jumped me before I’d even got inside the door that night. Had she really been high on coke that night?
“She had bruises all over,” I said. “I just thought she’d had her usual rough night with the Senator.”
“They were kinda rough. But I think she enjoyed it. I don’t think you could threaten Billingford with anything.”
“No, even if there was something cast iron.”
I thought of the cop car that had approached me while I’d waited for Izzie outside C’s townhouse in Georgetown. Which cop in this town would do anything against a senior US Senator? I sighed. I felt a touch of nausea. What could I do if Izzie refused to stop seeing Billingford? I could hardly lock her in the attic like Mr Rochester’s mad wife.
I stood up, the anger searing hot inside me. “This is not acceptable. Even if she is working undercover. And as for a US Senator loaning out my wife to his friends…”
“Oscar, Oscar, Oscar…” Marie said. “Let’s not lose track here: she’s gone, right? We don’t know where she is. There’s no point getting pissed at what happened before.”
“No.”
“If Billingford even suspects that Izzie might be a threat, might be in danger of leaking anything about their relationship or his sexual tendencies… or those of Goolden…”
“I know, he’d destroy her,” I said, trying to be calm about this. At the very least, I didn’t want to spill my coffee.
“He’d probably have her killed.”
“I’m not being overdramatic, Oscar,” Marie stressed.
“No.”
“I know this isn’t Hollywood, but sometimes real life goes further than Hollywood, you know?” she said.
“We need to call the cops.”
“She’s not been gone long enough for a missing person’s report.”
“If they fed her drugs and then had sex with her…”
“There’s no proof anyone forced her,” Marie pointed out.
I groaned. We had nothing to go on.
Marie pulled herself up to her feet. “Come on. We’ll go check out her desk at the Messenger. Perhaps there’s a clue there.”
*
In the car I asked her about the article Izzie — and now she — had been working on.
“I guess it’s about the women that he sees. Billingford.”
“When this all started, I thought Izzie was the only one he was seeing,” I said, tapping my fingers on the steering wheel with simmering anger.
“Oh, she’s his favorite, there’s no doubt about that,” Marie said. “The only one he screws without… you know… protection. And it’s been rare that he allows others to play with her.”
“But not that rare.”
Marie shrugged. “So anyway… Billingford is very… influential. That’s where the story starts. He has a big network of donors and supporters, and what Izzie found out was that some of his most loyal supporters get… certain benefits…”
“Women?”
She nodded. “And not just any women, either. Married women.”
That made me raise my eyebrows. I said, “And these married women… they’re like Izzie? I mean, their husbands know about it all?”
“No, not at all. Well, you know that Billingford has no idea that you know about him and Izzie. None of the husbands know about their wives being involved in this. I don’t know. Some of the women are volunteers when Billingford or his friends go out campaigning, I’m sure their husbands know about that. But not about the extra-marital stuff.”
“Jesus. So they just cheat on their husbands…”
“There’s lots of under appreciated wives out there,” Marie said. “Wives eager for a little adventure in their lives, a few naughty secrets.”
“And this is in Washington, or all over?”
“All over, as far as we’ve seen. It’s a network.”
“A network that procures women for Billingford’s cronies.”
“They seem to like the whole taboo of using married women. And Billingford makes sure the women are in such a position that they’d never want a whiff of public scandal — and they’d never want to damage their marriages.”
“Still,” I said, horrified. “He couldn’t imagine he’d get away with such a thing?”
“Powerful men sometimes think they’re unimpeachable,” Marie said.
“But Izzie’s a reporter, for God’s sake. He had to think she was a bit of a risk?”
She shook her head. “He ran enough checks on her to feel confident she’d never want the truth known about sleeping with him or his friends. About what they got up to behind closed doors. A respected professional woman with a loving husband she could not do without.”
“Still a risk — she writes for the Messenger, for goodness’ sake.”
Marie said, “Izzie says Billingford just took a shine to her. And when the opportunity to have an affair with her presented itself, he couldn’t resist. Only then she slowly found out more and more about his world… No, it seems that you were the big weakness in all of his plans, Oscar.”
“Okay.”
“Izzie could live without her job, even if it is a good one. She couldn’t live without her husband — Billingford knew that, even if she was sleeping with him. But what the Senator didn’t know was that Izzie had her husband’s approval to sleep with him, or whoever else she wanted.”
I sighed. My anger had settled into a sustained feeling of deep unease by now.
We were getting close to the Messenger building.
“Where is she with the story?” I asked Marie. “Is she close to completing?”
Marie said, “It kind of stalled, a while ago. She just can’t get any of the other women to go on the record, to put their names to their testimony.”
“Problem,” I nodded.
“She can’t blame them — she doesn’t want to expose herself as one of the women, either.”
“Right.”
“The thing is,” Marie said, “None of the other women actually want it to stop.”
“He’s clever,” I sighed again. “Billingford. The women are motivated to keep quiet about it all, and the biggest reason is because they actively want to take part.”
Marie nodded. “So where’s the crime? It’s just sordid. If it was all exposed, Billingford and his cronies would all see their reputations ruined — but there wouldn’t be any action against them.”
“Surely there has to be something to get them for? Some kind of corruption, abusing the political donations system…”
She shook her head. “That’s the difficult part of the whole story.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
We parked in a visitor’s spot in the Messenger building’s subterranean lot, and got into the building itself with no problem. The building security staff all knew me well enough,
and a quick call to Marty was enough to get us through and up in the newsroom. Even so, I could see why Marie thought Messenger security was a little puny. I could have been writing for any newspaper by then, and there I was with a New York Times reporter finding our way to Izzie’s desk to sift through her things in the hunt for her whereabouts.
Izzie’s boss, Theo, told me that he’d been trying to contact Izzie all day as well, with no luck. He knew she was busy with various assignments, however, so he hadn’t been too concerned about it.
“Did she have any assignments that would have taken up the previous evening?” I asked him.
“She was dressed up,” he said. “Like she was attending some kind of event.”
Another of Izzie’s co-workers confirmed that she had, at the last minute, been invited to a charity fundraiser down at the Capitol Skyline Hotel. It surprised me that she hadn’t sent me a text message to let me know. On our way back down to the parking lot, Marie suggested that Izzie may have been simply late for the event, and hadn’t had a chance to think about texting home.
“She could have texted me after the event started.”
“Not if there was no phone reception. You know how some of those hotels are, especially their event rooms.”
“She could have slipped out of the entrance for a minute or two.”
“Maybe she was just busy.”
“Busy?”
“I don’t know,” Marie sighed. “If there were any of Billingford’s… you know… women… at the event.”
“With their husbands, or with some of Billingford’s friends?”
Marie shrugged. “She might have thought she could have one last chance at persuading them to go on the record.”
At the hotel, we did get confirmation that Izzie had attended the charity fundraiser, even managed to catch a little CCTV footage of her enjoying herself at the event, thanks to a sympathetic security manager.
We watched the view outside the hotel’s front entrance, as Izzie had slipped out into the night, catching a taxi God knew where, disappearing into the night. Nobody at the hotel could say where she might have gone to.
As we left the hotel, we noticed an unmarked black Mercedes following us. I was the one who noticed it first, and immediately put it down to the general air of paranoia that had surrounded us. A few blocks away, the vehicle was still there, always three or four cars back, as though attempting to remain hidden from us.
What made me feel a little queasy was the faint sense that I’d seen the same car driving behind us as we’d driven to the Messenger building.
“If they’re following us, they’re doing a poor job of keeping hidden,” Marie said as I mentioned it to her. I was trying to play down my paranoia, and embrace the idea that coincidence could happen, and that the chances of someone — Billingford, for example — going as far as to put a tail on us had to be slim.
Our next stop was at the offices of the charity that had put on the fundraiser. We were able to get in to see the event manager only after assuring them we weren’t investigating the charity or its event. The event manager, a fifty something woman called Stevie, who seemed very pleasant but looked like cast member from the Dallas or Dynasty TV shows, eventually agreed to show us delegate lists for the fundraiser once she accepted the story about Izzie going missing.
Marie recognized a few names of Billingford allies present at the event.
“Here,” she said, and the note of excitement in her voice gave me the first faintly optimistic feeling I’d had since calling Marie in the first place.
“Mr and Mrs Chandler Morgan… Mr and Mrs John Haughton… Mr and Mrs Vincent Marshall…”
“They’re all Billingford’s friends?” I asked her.
“The wives,” she said. “Daisy Morgan, Gillian Haughton, Sally Marshall. All part of the network. Izzie must have thought she could get to them…”
We looked at Stevie and her magnificent hair, and decided that our conversation about Billingford would be better held somewhere else. Thanking her for her trouble, we quietly left, and were soon back in the car headed back to my house.
The black Mercedes, we both noted, was still on our tail. It was chilling to see it there, maintaining its three-or-four car distance from us.
“You think they’re sending us a message?” Marie asked. “They’re being too obvious to be simply surveillance.”
“Should I try to lose them?”
She shook her head. “They’ll only re-group, probably park outside your house. And perhaps we want to avoid seeming… you know… suspicious.”
It was late into the night after Izzie’s disappearance as Marie and I ended up back at my house in Silver Spring, exhausted. When we’d turned into my street, the black Mercedes had continued on past. Either the guys in the Mercedes felt sure they’d intimidated us enough for now, or they had some hiding place in mind, where they might catch up with us in the morning.
Inside, I fixed us some dinner while Marie started ringing round anyone she could think of that might be able to locate the three wives from the delegate list. Marie had tried to talk with two of the women before, as part of her attempts to get wives to go on the record about Billingford’s activities. As she made the attempt to reconnect with them, and the other wife, her body language was anything but positive.
“I’m hearing the same thing from all of the friends and families,” she said as she perched on a stool at our kitchen island.
“And that is?”
“Nobody knows where they are.”
“Izzie? Or the wives.”
“The wives. All three are missing. Have been since the fundraiser.”
There was that feeling of my stomach dropping again, like a heavy stone being dropped into a dark lake. “Shit. All of them?”
“Uh-huh. No sign of them anywhere. People are getting worried about them — the police are on the case for some of them.”
“Jesus.”
“Maybe that’s our next call, huh? It’s been twenty-four hours, now.”
“I guess so,” I said, running my hands through my hair, feeling the sweat cold in my locks. It was easy to think that going to the police was the obvious answer, but the elephant was still present in the room — the fear that Izzie’s adultery, even if it was consensual, would be publicly exposed in a police investigation.
“You think something might have happened to them because you were talking to them, because Izzie was talking to them?” I asked Marie.
“Maybe. Look, I guess we’d probably have to be careful what we said to the cops.”
“If Billingford’s done anything to her, I’m taking the whole thing public,” I said, feeling the hot anger coursing through my veins.
After a bite to eat, we did some more research into the missing wives, but there wasn’t a lot more we could do. A last check on Izzie’s email and her social media also came up with nothing.
Marie slept the rest of the night in our spare bedroom. In the morning, we woke to the feeling that we hadn’t gotten anywhere with our search. I called the local police force and attempted to file a missing person’s report, before being told the person had to be missing at least 48-hours.
“There’s only one thing left for us to do,” I told Marie as we grabbed a hurried breakfast.
“You think it’s worth trying?”
“It’s the only option.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
“Uh… but you haven’t made an appointment?”
“We sent him an email to let him know we were coming.”
“An email? All his emails come through me, Mr… And I haven’t seen anything that would lead me to believe that he would have changed his schedule for today…”
“I’ll see them now, thank you, Sheila.”
Senator Billingford’s personal assistant was considerably surprised as the man himself ducked his head out of his office door, and gave the consent for her to send Marie and I into his office.
“Can I get you anything?” B
illingford said as we entered the room, appearing calm, completely unflustered as he returned to his large mahogany desk.
It felt strange to see him in this environment — the man who had been sleeping with my wife. Billingford had a nice office in the Russell Senate Office Building. High ceilings, lavish decor, paintings on the walls that were probably worth millions. I guess it would have been easy to be intimidated by it all — the whole Capitol Hill thing, the grand office, the fact that this man Billingford was so senior in the establishment, so powerful he could probably have gone all the way to the White House. I tried to embrace my own status as a Messenger reporter, to feel that my status meant I was also Somebody, even if was way down the significance scale. A Messenger reporter shouldn’t be intimidated on Capitol Hill.
And yet, the very grandiose nature of our surroundings made me feel safe. While we were here, no black Mercedes could follow; a Senator nor anyone else could have us quietly bumped off.
“Water, or coffee, or something?” he prompted.
“No, thank you,” I said. Marie shook her head.
Billingford nodded, sat, calmly taking in the two reporters sitting in front of him.
“So what can I do for you, Mr MacDonald?” he said.
I said, “You’ve had a very… close… relationship with my wife for some time.”
“Isabella,” Billingford said, nodding gently again. “She’s a very… interesting… young woman.”
I could see him subtly trying to work out how much I knew — how much we both knew — about what he’d been doing with Izzie. I felt like blurting out everything, and at the same time, wanted to tell him nothing in case we weakened our hand.
“She’s gone missing,” I said. “She didn’t come home after the fundraiser for Leukemia at the Capitol Skyline.”
The Senator nodded gently again, giving little away himself. “Missing, you say. And you’ve contacted the police?”
“We have,” I said.
“And did you tell them… any of your concerns?”
He was digging, digging into the reasons that had brought us to his office — digging for how much we knew about what Izzie had done in his company.
The Game (A Hotwife Adventure) Page 27