Collateral Damage

by Michael Bowen

  “So you decided to screw him,” Janos said.

  “No, I decided to use him. There’s a difference. I offered to let him work with me, and I offered him a generous cut if we brought it off. I didn’t tell him what the deal was, because he didn’t have to know. He was doing his part.”

  “Yes,” Janos said evenly, nodding. “I should say he was doing his part. I should say he contributed, wouldn’t you?”

  “Precisely my point,” Phillips said. “When he died, Preston Demarest was my soldier, doing my dirty work. I may be a cold-blooded, hard-nosed bastard, but I don’t leave my people stranded on the embassy roof after the last helicopter takes off.”

  Janos puffed on the cigar without taking it out of his mouth, affecting diffidence. But Michaelson could see that his eyes changed.

  “So what?” he said.

  “So I want to know who killed him,” Phillips said. “He had some assets in this little adventure that he didn’t get from me. They weren’t at his apartment. Finding them is the next step.”

  “If you think you’re searching this desk,” Janos said, “you’re loco. You’ll have to kill me first.”

  “It isn’t in the desk. If it were, he wouldn’t have walked out of here a few days before he died leaving my friend Michaelson standing unattended right next to the desk.”

  “Where are these mysterious assets, then?”

  Phillips grinned at Janos’ question. The bait was taken, the hook set.

  “You’re looking a little flaccid, Janos,” Phillips said. “You need a workout. Let’s go.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  When Marjorie debriefed Michaelson about his excursion with Phillips and Janos to Bodies by Design, he attributed the success of their expedition to an important difference between the genders: Men look less dangerous naked than clothed.

  Taking up most of the space in the men’s locker room at Bodies by Design were full-sized lockers to store your street clothes in while you worked out. These were locked by keys. Janos had gotten a key to one for himself by showing his membership card, and keys for Phillips and Michaelson by asking for guest passes for them.

  Lining the walls were six tiers of small, rectangular kit lockers, each one assigned to a member by name. Members used their kit lockers to hold their gym clothes, shoes, and toiletries between workouts. When a member finished running or pumping iron, he put his sweaty workout clothes into a mesh bag marked with the number of his kit locker. He threw this bag into a laundry bin. Over the next twenty-four hours, the mesh bags in the bins were supposed to go through a washer and a dryer before being returned to the appropriate kit lockers. Each kit locker had a combination lock, for the member assigned to it, and a key lock, for the attendants.

  Which was why Michaelson, Phillips, and Janos found themselves standing in their birthday suits near the column of kit lockers that included, second from the bottom, one with the nameplate preston demarest. A white-shirted attendant a few yards off was working his way toward them, dumping bins at the head of each group of full-sized lockers into a large, wheeled laundry cart.

  “Excuse me,” Janos called to him. “My kit bag didn’t make it back into my locker after my last time. Can we check some of these and see if it got in one of them by mistake?”

  “Sure.”

  The attendant sidled toward Janos and opened the top locker on the Demarest column. Janos hoisted himself a bit to paw through the contents, accompanying his search with occasional grunts. The attendant paid desultory attention. What was Janos going to steal? A can of shaving cream? A jock strap?

  “Nope,” Janos said apologetically after several seconds.

  They repeated the process with each of the kit lockers in the column, finally reaching Demarest’s. With each iteration the attendant’s impatience increased as his vigilance diminished. While Janos was going through Demarest’s kit locker, Michaelson heard amidst the grunts something that sounded like “benes.” The next thing he heard was Phillips’ voice.

  “Are you number thirteen thirty-seven?” Phillips called from two rows away.

  “Sure am,” Janos answered as both he and the attendant turned in Phillips’ direction.

  “They stuck it in mine,” Phillips said, waving a mesh bag stuffed with gym clothes.

  “What are the odds?” Janos commented to the attendant as he rose. “Thanks. Sorry for the trouble.”

  “No sweat,” the attendant said.

  He relocked Demarest’s kit locker and returned to his laundry cart. Janos sauntered toward his full-sized locker, cradling the three-and-a-half-inch computer disk he had palmed from Demarest’s kit locker.

  “Nicely done,” Phillips said in a low voice. “Now let’s get dressed and back to the club so we can read the thing.”

  Michaelson reopened his locker and took out his underpants.

  “Did you know it was a disk?” he asked.

  “Couldn’t be sure,” Phillips answered.

  “What if it had been an overstuffed, full-sized manila file folder?”

  “The same basic trick would have worked. Might have needed a more aggressive diversion. But Janos is good at sleight of hand. Aren’t you, you bitchy little peasant?”

  This last comment was apparently intended to be good-natured. Janos greeted it with a dry laugh.

  “Pending our actual look at the disk,” Michaelson said then, “would you mind telling me what the thing is?”

  “Unless Demarest was bluffing,” Phillips said, “it’s a complete patient history prepared by Catherine Shepherd’s shrink.”

  ***

  “Looking back, it seems so frivolous to say that I met my fiancé because of something like the Stuart Restoration Society,” Catherine said to Marjorie around six-fifteen that evening. “Schoolgirlish. I’ll never forget the Restoration Day high tea they had here. Serious with a capital s.”

  “I can imagine,” Marjorie said after swallowing a silent spoonful of still-warm cream of celery soup.

  “I remember one of the ladies—she must have been about seventy. She declaimed in perfect deadpan: ‘Whigs stand for two principles: patriotism, by which they mean collaborating with a foreign invader; and religious liberty, by which they mean oppressing Catholics and Dissenters.’ Everyone nodded, murmured approval, and sipped tea. It was absolutely priceless.”

  “It has been quite some time since I got very exercised about Whigs,” Marjorie said. “But to be honest, I can see the appeal of a group like the Stuart Restoration Society. I have a friend who’s a lobbyist for some outfit with ‘hydraulic’ in its name. Well into middle age, for no practical reason at all, he decided to become an expert on the Peloponnesian Wars. He said he just enjoyed reading about ‘the forties’ in books where that meant the period between 450 and 439 b.c.”

  “There was something like that about SRS,” Catherine said. “Not just romantic, but romantically remote. But that’s not why I fell for Preston; it was just what brought us together. Preston seemed to be there for me at exactly the moment I needed him, with exactly what I needed to have. This is delicious soup, by the way. Thank you so much for bringing it.”

  “You’re very welcome. I had this silly image of you prostrate on a couch, wasting away from Victorian Women’s Disease. I certainly wasn’t prepared to find you hip-deep in estimates from contractors and applications for permits to repair the damage the smoke did to Calvert Manor.”

  “Intense activity has always been the best therapy for me. That’s what brought me out of it…before.” Catherine gave a few moments to an eye-clouded pause, then quickly resumed, her reflective tone giving way to bright chatter that sounded more forced with each sentence. “But I was telling you about Preston. I remember once, just after we met, Cindy got it into her head to try to have baked Virginia ham ready for us when we got back from a matinee at the Kennedy Center. The minute we got in the house we co
uld hear her in the kitchen, cussing up a storm. She had the ham out of the oven, The Joy of Cooking open on the counter, and she was standing over this ceramic bowl of something that looked like soggy bird feed.”

  “I can see where that might evoke some choice language,” Marjorie said.

  “And she was almost spitting at the bowl. ‘This is supposed to be glaze, goddammit,’ she was saying.” Catherine’s voice lowered to a whisper on the blasphemy, as if she were embarrassed at having the unladylike language pass her lips. “‘Bread crumbs, dry mustard, and cooking wine, just like this worthless book says, measured exactly right, and look at it.’ And Preston said, very gently, ‘I think it will make a marvelous glaze if you put it in a saucepan and heat it up for a few minutes.’”

  Catherine threatened for a moment to dissolve in teary laughter at the image. After a couple of hiccups and eye dabs she continued.

  “So Cindy goes, ‘But it doesn’t say anything about heating the stuff.’ And Preston says, ‘I know. That book is written by idiots.’ After he heated it up, of course, the glaze was fine and the ham was delicious. I can’t really say why, but that kind of thing just seemed very special to me.”

  The last comment brought real tears, streaming down Catherine’s cheeks in anguish rather than laughter. Marjorie kept her mouth shut, limiting herself to a squeeze on Catherine’s arm while the minisobs ran their course. She wasn’t in any hurry. She wasn’t here to pump Catherine about what “before” was all about. She already knew. While she drove to Calvert Manor Michaelson had called her and hit the highlights of the shrink’s report—including the intriguing fact that Catherine hadn’t started seeing the psychiatrist after her father’s suicide but several years before her father had died.

  “I can certainly understand why Preston appealed to you,” Marjorie said gently when Catherine had herself back under control. “He’d appeal to most healthy young women. In the short time since I met you, in fact, I haven’t been able to figure out why Cindy treated him so disdainfully.”

  “Cindy has a tendency to behave as if she wants Alicia Silverstone to star in the movie version of her life. You know, rebellious brat from central casting. That’s part of it. But also, I think she really felt Preston wasn’t right for me.”

  “As a fully emancipated adult legally entitled to own property, sign contracts, and consume alcoholic beverages in public,” Marjorie said, “wouldn’t that be sort of your business?”

  “Try explaining that to Cindy,” Catherine said. “Ever since Mom dropped out of the picture, Cindy has treated me like she was the big sister. I mean, she was smoking in eighth grade, but when I started flirting with Marlboro Lights my senior year in high school, she suddenly got religion and turned into the surgeon general on me. You know, stealing packs from my purse to throw them away and that kind of thing. That’s what that health Nazi crack I made the first time we met was all about. And when someone offered me a joint at a party one night she went absolutely postal. Gave him an elbow right in the kidneys. She was an interscholastic gymnast, so that elbow had to mean some serious pain.”

  “It seems a little fanatical,” Marjorie said.

  “It also seems a little ironic, given the controlled substances C-Sharp is into,” Catherine said dryly. “I remember once Dad was out of town, which he was a lot, and I was planning on going to a kegger that weekend. I mean, I was seventeen. Cindy found out there weren’t going to be any adults there. So that night she faked these horrible stomach cramps and fever so I’d have to stay home with her instead of going. And the next morning I found out the cops raided the party and busted almost everyone there for beer and pot.”

  “She sounds extremely protective,” Marjorie said. Carefully.

  “She sounds controlling,” Catherine said. “And I guess she has been. It would have been nice to make my own mistakes. But she means well. She felt I needed that kind of protection because of…some things that happened.”

  Several seconds of silence followed while Catherine appeared to concentrate intensely on her soup.

  “I’m sorry about these vague allusions I keep making,” she said then vacantly. “It’s terribly impolite. And I’m making it sound so gothic, like I spent my junior high years decapitating house cats or something, when it’s nothing like that at all.”

  Marjorie choked back an instant’s panic as she saw Catherine shaking her head quickly and snatching with her right hand at imaginary specks on her cheek.

  “What I’ve always found, actually,” Marjorie said, using a conversational tone as if she were discussing the merits of different china patterns, “is that what we’re most reluctant to discuss isn’t the conventionally or traditionally shocking things. The things we have the most terrible need to keep private are those that are awful for reasons only we fully understand.”

  Catherine’s head stopped shaking and her eyes fixed on Marjorie’s as an intrigued expression slipped over her face.

  “I’m not sure I understand what you mean,” she prompted.

  “I’ll give you an example,” Marjorie said after a deep breath. “I’m going to tell you something only two other people in the world know: the reason I divorced my husband.”

  Catherine demurred, but the guiltily fascinated glint in her eyes said that the protest was mostly for form.

  “I divorced him after thirteen years of marriage because he slapped me in public. Not because he slapped me, but because he slapped me over Amaretto after a formal dinner party in the home of a family that had known mine for three generations.”

  “Oh, my word,” Catherine gasped, ingenuously covering her mouth with her right hand.

  “He was very clever with words, and quite aggressive verbally. He made his living being that way. That particular night he apparently felt like offending everyone in the room. He said you could either elect Democrats and have incompetents in office or elect Republicans and have criminals. I’d had about enough of his mood, so I said, ‘Yes, or we could elect the guy you backed last time and have both.’”

  “Oops,” Catherine said.

  “‘Oops’ is right. He didn’t lash out in anger. He looked at me quite coolly for two full seconds. Then he lifted his arm and gave me a sharp little palm smack right across the chops.”

  “How awful,” Catherine said, shaking her head deliberately.

  “He’d slapped me a couple of times before,” Marjorie said, “as I had him, to be fair. But those had been at home, when we were by ourselves, having the kind of fights well-bred couples have now and then. Not that that’s okay, but it happens. This was different.”

  “Of course,” Catherine said.

  “When he slapped me in front of people we both knew,” Marjorie continued, “he was degrading me. Literally. He was lowering my rank in the only world that was important to me then. He was trashing things that gave meaning and value to my way of life—the standards and values that define a particular kind of life. He wasn’t just hitting me, he was rejecting me, and demanding that I reject myself. And he knew it.”

  Catherine reached out tentatively to touch Marjorie’s hand.

  “Aside from me and now you,” Marjorie said, “the only people who know that that’s why I divorced him are the ex himself and Richard Michaelson. Most people I know would be appalled to think that I’d view a public slap as fatal to our marriage when I’d shrugged off occasional private ones—that appearances and public status were so essential to me. So I’ve mostly kept it to myself. Until now.”

  Catherine withdrew her hand and gazed searchingly at Marjorie.

  “You told me this to show me you understand, I see that,” she said. “And I think you do understand. But you’re doing more than that, aren’t you? You’re giving me permission. Permission to dump my own past on you.”

  “Or not, as you like,” Marjorie said. “After all, isn’t permission what you were seeking with those vague allu
sions you reproached yourself for?”

  “I’m sorry,” Catherine said a bit petulantly as she snapped her head away from Marjorie. “I’m not used to being so transparent.”

  “I’m not Cindy,” Marjorie said. “I’m not going to make decisions for your own good and cram them down your throat. If you want to talk, I’m here. If you’d rather not, there’s no one in the world who’d understand better than I.”

  Catherine sat quite still for a second or so. Then she pushed the soup bowl aside and began rummaging with frantic intensity through papers and notes spread over the dining-room table. When she spoke again the words came tumbling out, rapid-fire at first and then accelerating.

  “Darn it, I knew I’d left one of the estimates upstairs. I’m being a terrible hostess. Could-you-excuse-me-one-minute-please?”

  Without waiting for a response, she bolted from the dining-room table and raced upstairs. Marjorie stayed where she was. A woman is entitled to cry in private if she wants to.

  She wasn’t sure, later, how long she sat there. Five minutes in a strange, silent house can be an eon, ten minutes an eternity. When she eventually did move, it wasn’t because she lost patience. At some point her gut just told her that something was wrong. She rose deliberately from the table and began quietly climbing the stairs toward the dark hallway above her.

  She found Catherine in the first place she looked: the guest room where Demarest had died. Catherine sat on the floor in the dark bedroom, staring at fireplace stones that glinted in pale winter moonlight.

  “It’s funny,” Catherine said without turning around as soon as she’d had some time to sense Marjorie’s presence. “I feel that I know you as well as I know anyone, even though I’d never met you until a short time ago. I’ve felt you understood things from the first time we met. About this house, and my father. And me. I’ve felt I could talk to you about things, the way I wish I could talk to my mother. I suppose a shrink would say that’s why I was asking permission, as you put it, dropping all those soap opera hints, subconsciously hoping that you’d draw me out so I could unload on you.”