Worst Case Scenario

by Michael Bowen

  Three years, Marjorie thought. No, more like four. Almost four years had passed since the last time Michaelson had talked to Marjorie about losing his wife. When he’d brought it up before, it had almost always been in settings like this, and she wondered if he was about to allude to it again.

  She supposed she was the only one he ever talked to about “losing” Charlotte Michaelson. Most people would have taken him to mean that his wife had died. He didn’t mean that, she knew. He meant that he’d lost her the way you lose a train of thought or lose track of what you’re doing, through lapse of concentration and inattention. She didn’t agree with him and had told him so, but she’d given up arguing about it with him.

  An aphorism describes the ideal foreign service officer as “faithful, skillful, and exact, but above all not excessively zealous.” Marjorie figured that Talleyrand had gotten it right when he’d turned that phrase a couple of centuries back. Excessive zeal got in the way of being skillful and exact. The first job of any foreign service officer is to get the facts right and analyze them with perfect dispassion, untinctured by comforting illusions or emotional revulsion or what the big guy down the street wanted to hear. The Pakistanis might be fine chaps whom President Nixon admired and the Indians might be insufferable hypocrites whom he despised, but that didn’t mean Pakistan could stand up to India when the tanks rolled. Those are the facts, Mr. President. That’s what the numbers on the ground say. Sorry you’re disappointed, but making you feel good isn’t in my job description.

  Back then in the early seventies, the careerists said that Michaelson (along with several colleagues) had made the mistake of being right too early, leaving his career maimed if not destroyed. Cynics—in whose number Marjorie emphatically counted herself at the time—opined that that was why Charlotte Michaelson had left, figuring she’d never be an ambassador’s wife.

  Marjorie realized now that she’d been wrong. Charlotte had left because she couldn’t face the thought of careening into her forties with a man who was faithful, skillful, and exact, but not excessively zealous. Who’d look at her without illusion or self-deception, who’d see her as she saw herself at two in the morning: a matron whose charm had turned brittle with the approach of middle age, whose once-lancing curiosity had atrophied in the dreary days after Washington went from Camelot to California east, who now treated The New York Times Book Review as Cliff Notes for cocktail party conversation. She’d left Richard not because of his weakness but because of his greatest strength and her icy fear that she was unequal to it.

  And Michaelson had blamed himself, Marjorie knew. He’d felt that he should have sensed the unspoken anguish, should have found a way to restore his wife’s disintegrating spirit, to show her that he loved her as a woman and not a credential or an ornament. Nixon he could forgive; himself, for many years, he couldn’t.

  Marjorie understood what searing pain the divorce had produced, and if she’d been granted some fairy-tale power to spare Michaelson that yawning ache, she would have. At the same time, though, she wondered what he’d be like now if he hadn’t gone through it, if he hadn’t experienced that single transcendent failure and that long black night of self-doubt. Would he have turned into a slightly less obnoxious version of Pilkington, with intelligence a mile wide and an inch deep, clever but not wise, bright but not thoughtful, recycling prefabricated quips, trading on carefully rehearsed spontaneity, confusing power with strength, knowledge with judgment, verbal facility with vision?

  She didn’t know. She did know that the end result of Michaelson’s trauma was someone whose instincts she trusted. She would have trusted him in a situation room, making decisions while lieutenant colonels moved model ships around a map board. And she trusted him in a hotel lobby, letting her know he was there but not jumping on her the moment she walked in and signaling to every bellhop in the vicinity that she’d come to a tryst.

  Michaelson held the door open for Marjorie as they reached the Radisson, and was still a step or two behind her when they began to cross the lobby. He was startled when a man even taller than he and far huskier suddenly loomed in front of him.

  “Excuse me, sir,” the man said in something just north of a drawl, with a very slight slurring on the two s’. “I would appreciate a word with you, please.”

  Michaelson checked his first instinct, which was to say, “Certainly. How about sometime when you’re sober?” The abruptness of the man’s approach and the almost exaggerated politeness of his diction couldn’t hide the keening anguish wrapped around his words, his tone, the expression on his face. He might be drunk or close to it, but he deserved better than dinner party repartee.

  “This is Marjorie Randolph,” Michaelson said, gesturing toward his companion, who had turned back and was looking questioningly at the scene. “I’m Richard Michaelson, as you presumably know. I’m afraid I can’t carry the introductions any further than that.”

  “My apologies, ma’am,” the man said to Marjorie with apparently deep sincerity. “I didn’t realize you were with this gentleman, or I wouldn’t have intruded this way.”

  “That’s quite all right,” Marjorie said. Michaelson noticed with some amusement that Marjorie’s own tidewater accent slipped a couple of degrees toward Tara. “And I have the pleasure of being introduced to whom, please?”

  “Todd Gallagher, ma’am.” The man bowed slightly.

  Michaelson considered offering to go for mint juleps.

  “If you’ll excuse me for interrupting,” he said instead, “the word you’d like to have with me concerns Sharon Bedford, correct?”

  “Yessir,” Gallagher confirmed, wheeling back to face Michaelson. “Once the cops got through with me, I greased the hired help enough to find out that you’re about the only one here for the conference that hadn’t hightailed it out of town.”

  “Relative?” Michaelson asked. “Friend? Associate?”

  “Friend,” Gallagher said. The syllable was almost a moan, Gallagher’s voice throbbing with pain as he spoke it.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” Michaelson said. “I don’t know that I can offer much consolation. I only met Ms. Bedford in passing. But if you think it would help to talk to someone who was here this weekend, I’m happy to do it. If you’re staying over, perhaps tomorrow morning would be a good time.”

  “Excuse me for interrupting,” Marjorie said, “but it occurs to me that if I weren’t here, you two would be having your talk immediately, and I think that that’s what ought to happen.”

  “No, no,” Gallagher said almost shyly. “I know three’s a crowd. I just—”

  “Not a bit of it,” Marjorie said, her voice a model of brook-no-nonsense feminine firmness. “I’ve had Richard’s undivided attention for the last four hours, and I can certainly share him for the next ninety minutes or so.” She glanced at her watch. “Just give me a chance to comb my hair. Richard, I’ll knock on your door in seven minutes.”

  With that she strode toward the elevators, exuding a regal confidence so complete that footmen trailing in her wake would have seemed superfluous.

  His head spinning a bit from the delicate finesse that had turned his intended confrontation of Michaelson into a three-party conversation without his ever quite realizing what was happening, Gallagher stood with Michaelson for over a minute, waiting to no purpose he could discern. He couldn’t have been expected to know that by “combing my hair” Marjorie had meant closing the connecting doors between the adjoining rooms that she and Michaelson had. The weighty suitcase that had caught Pilkington’s attention when Marjorie checked in lay open on the bed in Marjorie’s room, its load of thirty-two brand-new hardcover books displayed for random perusal. The clear implication was that Marjorie wouldn’t be using that bed herself. She didn’t really think that this would scandalize Gallagher, but she saw no reason to take any chances.

  ***

  “Why did she break the first tw
o off?” Marjorie asked Gallagher once they were well into the conference in Michaelson’s room that they’d arranged improvisationally in the lobby. Michaelson realized that this was a question he wouldn’t have considered asking. He was surprised and intrigued when it pulled a smile from Gallagher.

  “She thought I was too good for her,” he said. “Swear to God. Buried one wife, six kids going from a Sunday-school teacher to a fighter pilot to a bouncer in a roadhouse, just a big old salesman who got lucky, and she acted like I was a combination of Joe Willie Namath and Robert E. Lee.”

  “Most women I know,” Marjorie said carefully, “would have found a way to deal with that.”

  “Most women aren’t Sharon.” Gallagher took a long drink from a bottle of Budweiser. “She saw a picture of me from ’Nam in my ranger outfit and she couldn’t get over it. Like I was a Green Beret or something. I told her I was nothing special, maybe half a step above an MP, but it was just exactly like talking to that wall over there. There wasn’t any way I was gonna make myself into a normal human being in her eyes, so I had to hope she’d get herself up into the same kind of category she was putting me in.”

  “Which meant a job back on the inside,” Michaelson said.

  “Yessir. She never really got over losing her NSC job. She had decent enough jobs after that, but she couldn’t stay interested in something where the most important thing you did was clear your desk by Friday afternoon.”

  “Where was she working most recently?” Marjorie asked.

  “Self-employed. Summarizing depositions for shorthanded law firms, mostly. Some technical writing, putting stuff written by propeller heads in language ordinary people could understand.”

  Gallagher settled back on his perch at the windowsill and drank more beer. Two Buds after confronting Michaelson in the lobby, Gallagher seemed considerably more sober now than he had then. He also appeared calmer, meeting Bedford’s death no longer with shock but with a deep, gradual, sorrowing acceptance.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t been able to provide much consolation,” Michaelson said apologetically.

  “That’s okay.” Rising, Gallagher dropped the now-empty bottle into a wastebasket and stretched his long arms and legs a bit. “Just talking about Sharon has helped a lot. I really appreciate your putting up with me.”

  “That’s entirely all right,” Michaelson said. “I do have one bit of information for you, and one piece of advice that you can take for whatever you think it’s worth.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Ms. Bedford looked me up yesterday evening. She wanted my help in going after one of the jobs she was interested in. She had a very definite idea about what I could do for her, and she wanted to see me after I got back to Washington.”

  “Doesn’t sound despondent to me,” Gallagher said.

  “I agree. When a physically healthy young woman dies alone in a locked room, you can’t help thinking of suicide, but I’d require a great deal of convincing to accept that hypothesis in this case.”

  “Thank you,” Gallagher said. “That helps. It truly does.”

  “You may find my advice less appealing,” Michaelson said. “I suggest that you wait—that you give the police a few days to investigate Ms. Bedford’s death before you jump in.”

  “Jump in how?”

  “Hiring a private investigator. Tracking down a witness or two and bracing them. Peddling a conspiracy theory to the press.”

  Gallagher chuckled and eased his hips comfortably back against the wall. Raising his left hand, he idly stroked a fringe of overlong whisker-stubble at the back of his jaw.

  “What in the world makes you think I have anything like that in mind?” he asked in the kind of voice people use to ask how fast they were going, Officer.

  “Wild guess,” Michaelson said, smiling.

  “You’ll have to do better than that if you expect me to pay attention.”

  “You’ve spent most of fifty years going hard after whatever really mattered to you. I think Sharon Bedford was the most important thing in your life for the last year or so, and to have her ripped away from you so brutally has to be devastating. You need to believe there’s something you can do about that. You can do something about a murderer, but you can’t do anything about an embolism that popped up in the wrong place or some other random absurdity. Right now there’s only one explanation for her death that you’re psychologically capable of accepting—and that’s a bad frame of mind to be in when you’re making tactical decisions.”

  “I want to show you something,” Gallagher said, pulling out his wallet. “Sharon mailed it to my home address Thursday—the day she left for the conference here.”

  He handed Michaelson a roughly hand-sized piece of paper that he extracted from the wallet. Marjorie leaned over as Michaelson held the paper in the light so that they could both read the blue ink notations on it:

  101248

  152237

  KISSINGER

  4939

  HIGHWAYS TO INDIANS

  2612

  “Do you have any idea what this is?” Michaelson asked.

  “It’s a paper she generally kept posted on her refrigerator door with a little ladybug magnet,” Gallagher said, his voice catching for a fraction of a second at the end. “I recognize most of the things on there. The top number happens to be the combination to her bicycle lock. Four-nine-three-nine was her PIN number for automatic teller machines. The bottom number is the code that turns off the security system I installed at her apartment.”

  “What about ‘Kissinger’?” Marjorie asked.

  “Security system again,” Gallagher said. “It’s a disregard code. If the alarm goes off, the office calls your place pronto. If you say, ‘Everything’s okay,’ the office assumes there’s a guy standing there with a knife at your throat and calls the cops. If everything really is okay and you’d just set the alarm off by mistake, you give your disregard code and the office forgets the whole thing. Sharon picked ‘Kissinger’ for hers.”

  “The second number looks like a padlock combination, too,” Marjorie said.

  “Could be,” Gallagher agreed. “Might be a gym locker or her bin in the storage area of her building, or something else.”

  “Which leaves ‘Highways to Indians,’” Michaelson said.

  “Don’t have a clue about that one,” Gallagher said, shrugging.

  “Provocative,” Michaelson said.

  “If that means it smells funny, I agree with you,” Gallagher said. “Why would she have gone to the trouble to mail this thing off to me just before she came out to this conference?”

  “An obvious possibility is that she didn’t want it to be found if someone searched her apartment,” Michaelson said.

  “Searched it either while she was away or after something happened to her here,” Gallagher added. “It looks to me like she thought that whatever she was peddling out here was risky. And it looks to me like maybe she was right.”

  “All the more reason to take my advice,” Michaelson said.

  “Why? What’s going to change in a week?”

  “In a week the police might be in hot pursuit of a murderer, if there was a murder. You can probably sell security systems better than they can, and they can probably investigate murders better than you.”

  “Uh-huh,” Gallagher said. “And what if in a week they’ve just shrugged it off? Unexplained death of a nobody from out of town. Heart stopped beating. One a those things. Sharon Bedford becomes three pages stuck in a manila folder in some file cabinet.”

  “In that case,” Michaelson said after a delicate pause, “if you still want to go after it, I’ll help you.” Crossing the room, he handed Gallagher his business card. “Give me a call. I know my way around Washington. I have a long memory, a fat Rolodex, and a lot of chits to call in.”

  Gallagher accepted the ca
rd and pressed one corner thoughtfully against the dimple in his chin.

  “Why are you offering to do something like that?” he asked.

  “I’m not really sure,” Michaelson said with a brief shrug. “Maybe I had a few more beers than usual because of a woman once.”

  “The offer’s good only if I take your advice, is that it?”

  “Quid pro quo, as we used to say in the foreign service.”

  “All right,” Gallagher said decisively, holding out his hand, “you got yourself a deal. Three hours ago I’d’a bet next month’s paycheck there wasn’t a better salesman than me in Charleston tonight, and son of a gun if I wouldn’t have lost.”

  They shook hands. Gallagher touched Michaelson’s card just above his right eyebrow by way of taking his leave of Marjorie, and left the room. Marjorie waited for five seconds after the door had closed behind him before she spoke.

  “You’ve abused subordinates, the English language, yours truly, and a lot of other things over a woman,” she piped then reproachfully, “but alcohol isn’t one of them. That had to be the most transparent lie you’ve ever told.”

  “Actually,” Michaelson said, “I believe I told a slightly more transparent lie to the Saudi oil minister in 1978. He didn’t believe me, though, so perhaps it doesn’t count.”

  “What are you looking for?” she asked as he began rummaging through an attaché case that sat open on the bed.

  “Scott Pilkington’s number at work. I want to leave a message on his voice mail so that he’ll get it first thing tomorrow. Mention that a cowboy’s about to ride through his little patch with a very large amount of money and a very small amount of discretion.”

  “Do you anticipate adding something to the effect that where this particular cowboy’s concerned you have the last ticket to the ball, so if Pilkington wants to come he’ll have to dance with you?”

  “That might come up,” Michaelson said. “If I can find that blessed number.”

  “Here,” Marjorie said, offering him a palm-sized computer.