Damage Control

by Robert Dugoni

  “I thought you knew,” the agent said.

  “Of course I knew,” Meyers hissed. But he had not. Even as a child, he had never mingled with the staff. He descended the staircase to a door, opened it, and emerged at the back of the pantry. The door was concealed on the opposite side by shelving stocked with food items. Meyers walked into the kitchen, where, moments before, he had sat eating apple pie. The servants’ locker room was to his immediate right, as was the servants’ entrance to and from the kitchen.

  “Call the front gate. I want to know if she leaves the grounds.” Meyers spoke to the agents through clenched teeth. His chest heaved in a single gasp of air. She was such a child. Such a goddamned child.

  “Mrs. Meyers’s car is still here, Senator,” the agent reported. “No one has left except the maid.”

  “Search the upstairs. Be sure she’s not in one of the other rooms.”

  The two agents went back up the stairs. Meyers started from the kitchen, then stopped. In the sink, unwashed, was his nearly empty glass of milk and crumb-specked plate. It was not like Carmen to leave the plates out, unclean. She would not have done so unless she had been in a hurry. He pressed the crumbs with his finger, then turned back to reconsider the hidden stairway.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  57

  SHE STOOD AT the windows, looking out into the garden patio, a silhouette in the silver glow of the moonlight through the glass panes. She could have been a ghost. Thick black hair cascaded to a tip between her shoulder blades, nearly undistinguishable against the black leather jacket that extended to the back of her thighs. Tall and slender, she wore dark jeans and flat leather shoes.

  As Dana stepped into the room, the shadow at the window did not turn.

  “James loved this view.” Elizabeth spoke to the glass panes. “In the spring, when the tulips bloomed and the cherry trees blossomed, he liked to sit here at night with the lights off and watch the way the moonlight reflected on the petals. We sat on the couch and let the minutes tick by. Even when our time together was limited, he refused to rush. There was never a sense of urgency. He said it was something he had to relearn after practicing law. He said law had taught him to count the minutes but not to appreciate them.”

  The movers had not yet removed the furniture or throw rugs, but the African masks and tapestries no longer adorned the walls. The room felt empty without them. Fallow ground.

  Elizabeth turned. The light reflected on her moistened cheek. “Your brother learned to appreciate the minutes, Dana. He really loved his life.”

  Without the jewelry and designer suits, Elizabeth looked even younger than forty. She could have been any of the mothers Dana saw rushing to pick up their children from day care. It made Dana think of Michael Logan’s astonished reaction when she’d told him that James and Elizabeth had had an affair. Logan saw the wife of a billionaire senator, the wife of a potential president. He did not see the eighteen-year-old college freshman Dana’s brother had fallen in love with.

  “I wondered why he faced the couch toward the window,” Dana said. “The brother I knew would have watched SportsCenter.”

  Elizabeth hung her head and started to cry. “I’m so sorry. This is my fault,” she said, her voice fading. “It’s all my fault.”

  Dana went to her, now drawn by a common bond—two women who had met only briefly years before but who would forever be linked by tragedy and sorrow. She wrapped her arms around Elizabeth’s shoulders, holding her, letting her cry. “What happened here was not your fault. It was not your doing.”

  Elizabeth stepped back and pressed her palms against her eyes, wiping the tears from her cheeks. Dana had mistaken the discolored welt near her right eye as mascara, but she now saw the ugly markings on her neck as well. Her lip was swollen. Dana thought of ?William Welles’s description of Elizabeth being a prisoner.

  “It is,” Elizabeth said. “I never should have pursued it. I never should have put James in harm’s way. I knew it couldn’t work out. I knew it but—” Her breath caught.

  Dana realized that she and Elizabeth were also similar in that neither had yet had time to grieve for a man they loved, and as much as Dana had loved her brother, she had loved him as a sister. Elizabeth had clearly loved him as a soul mate. She had a right to know what had happened to James. “They found him behind the couch,” Dana said. “The two men who killed him are both dead. We think a security agent who worked for your husband hired them, then killed them.”

  “Peter Boutaire.” Elizabeth spoke the name as if uttering a profanity. “He and Robert grew up together. He is a terrible man; he has no conscience.”

  “He won’t be bothering anyone anymore, either.”

  Elizabeth’s chest heaved, as if in relief.

  “One of the men was found with cash in his pockets. We think they were paid to break in and given a list of things to get, the earrings obviously foremost on the list. Somehow your husband knew you had left them here. When James surprised them, they must have dropped one and didn’t have time to retrieve it. I found it under the bed. How could that have happened?”

  Elizabeth stood shaking her head. “I usually put all my jewelry in my purse, but that night… That was our last night together. We didn’t take much time to talk or to undress. I put them on the windowsill above his bed, behind the blinds. I left in the middle of the night, not wanting to wake him. I was so upset, I wasn’t thinking about anything except that I would never see him again. I must have assumed I put them in my purse, which I normally did. The next time I needed them, they weren’t in my dresser. I panicked, but I found both in my purse. Robert must have put the match there along with the earring they found.” Elizabeth used both hands to wipe the tears freely flowing down her cheeks. “I’m not sure how he found out, but there was little I could do without him knowing. Boutaire likely followed me, realized I wasn’t wearing the earrings, and later determined I didn’t have them.” She found her way to a simple upholstered chair and slumped into it. “I suspected something when I heard the news, but I didn’t want to believe…” The words stopped in her throat. “Oh God, it hurt. It hurt so bad to know he was gone and I couldn’t tell anyone or let anyone know. I wanted to go to the funeral, but I couldn’t. I’ve been so blind. I’ve been so afraid.”

  Dana sat on the black leather couch. “How long has it been like this?”

  “When hasn’t it been like this?” Elizabeth thought for a moment. “Robert was always so in control. I liked it when I was eighteen years old and a long way from home; it gave me a sense of comfort to have someone take care of me. I didn’t have to do anything. He bought me clothes because he said he liked to and his family could afford it. He told me which perfume to wear, how to cut my hair, everything. When you’re eighteen, it can be intoxicating to have someone care so much about you. I’m not going to lie to you, Dana. I had never been around so much money. Everything was taken care of. All I had to do was get up in the morning.” Elizabeth shook her head. “At the end of my freshman year, I stayed the summer because Robert said he wanted me near him. He rented an apartment for me in the University District so I wouldn’t have to work. He said I should relax. He even developed a schedule for me. He said it would make me more disciplined.” She smiled at a recollection. “James came to my apartment, took one look at the schedule on the wall, and burst out laughing. He asked me if I had lost my mind. I was too embarrassed to tell him Robert had made it. James took a black marker and wrote ‘Gone Fishing’ across it. Then he said we were going to the Kingdome to see a baseball game because I’d never seen one before.” She laughed. “I was so excited. I changed into cutoff jeans, a tank top, and sandals.” The smile faded from her face. “Robert hated those clothes. He said they made me look cheap.” She bent forward and clasped her hands against her stomach as if fighting a stomachache. “James’s car started to overheat, and I remember thinking how disappointed I would be if we didn’t make it, but he told me we’d walk if we had to. He said no life was compl
ete without seeing a baseball game in person. He was right, too. I ate everything I wasn’t supposed to, and James taught me how to boo and whistle between my fingers and yell at the umpires. After the game, we went to one of the local bars near the stadium and had a few more beers.” She turned her attention back to the patio garden. “On the drive home, I had this haunting feeling, like when I was a kid and we’d have to leave Lake Tahoe at the end of the summer. I knew it couldn’t last forever, but just the same, I wanted it to.”

  “So what happened when you got home?” Dana asked, knowing that Elizabeth was building toward something.

  “Robert was waiting at the apartment. That was the first time he hit me.” She felt the corner of her lip with her fingertips. “He said he’d spent all afternoon and evening trying to find me. He held the schedule in front of me like a report card and yelled, ‘Is this supposed to be funny? Is this the thanks I get for trying to help you?’ He said what good was a schedule if it wasn’t followed. He said I didn’t appreciate all of the things he’d done for me.”

  She turned to Dana. “I knew what he did was wrong, but it all seemed so surreal to me. He kept saying how much he loved me and not to spoil what we could have together. I didn’t know what to do. My mother and father adored him, or at least the thought of him, and I didn’t think it would be this bad. I thought he just lost his temper. Two weeks later, he had a ring and asked me to marry him at the end of the summer. I was supposed to finish college in Massachusetts. But I never did.”

  Dana sat listening to the hum of the refrigerator. A pipe in the walls creaked.

  “Isn’t it every little girl’s fantasy to marry a prince and live happily ever after?” Elizabeth asked. “I remember when the stories first broke about Princess Diana’s depression and bulimia. Part of me refused to believe it. She was a princess. And how could it go on? Where were her parents? Where were her friends? How could we not know such a public figure had such a horrible life?” She let the question hang in the stillness of the room.

  “We do it for a lot of reasons,” Dana said. “We do it because we’re young and naive and we think things will change for the better. We do it for our parents and friends. Then we do it for our children because we don’t want them to grow up in a broken home. But in the end, we come to realize that things aren’t going to change. Our parents and friends aren’t the ones who have to live with him, and it’s our children who suffer the most.”

  Elizabeth shifted uncomfortably.

  “But we’re the only ones who can change it, Elizabeth. We’re the only ones who can make it different. The question is whether you are prepared to do so.”

  58

  CARMEN DUPREE LIVED in a predominantly black neighborhood in Seattle’s Central District. It was a tough neighborhood, like the neighborhood in Baltimore where she had been raised. It was hard living. People scratched out an existence whatever way they could. Good people lived there—-honest, God-fearing people who never got any recognition because the drug dealers and thugs got all the news. Carmen worked hard. It was in her blood. Her mother had been a maid for fifty years and her grandmother before that. The Duprees were descended from slaves and took no shame in it. Cleaning homes was an honest living. It put food on the table and clothes on her four son’s backs. But the legacy of the Dupree women had always been their recipe for apple pie, a recipe passed from generation to generation, starting at a South Carolina plantation where her ancestors picked cotton. It was passed by word of mouth along with the rest of the family history. The secret ingredients would not be found on even the smallest scrap of paper. They would also likely die with Carmen. The good Lord had not blessed her with a daughter, and her sons showed only an interest in eating the pie, not in baking it. It was a shame. Apple pie had gotten her a job working for one of the richest families in Washington. She had been hired to clean the house and bake apple pie. Then, when Robert Meyers III was born, she took to caring for him along with doing the cleaning. But the child was different from his father; he had a mean streak, and she sensed a propensity for evil in him. It didn’t help that they spoiled him, made him think he could do as he pleased, then allowed him to do just that. Carmen had swatted his behind once, after finding him torturing a cat with matches. He had lied and said she made up the story, and he was convincing enough that his parents chose to believe him. He had that ability to lie and look like he was telling you the honest truth. A born politician. They told Carmen to never again lay a hand on him, and they demanded that she apologize. She would have told them all to kindly depart this world for Hades, but she had four babies of her own to feed and no husband to help pay the bills. So she had swallowed her pride and apologized. From that moment on, Robert Meyers had done as he pleased.

  She parked her Impala along the dimly lit street. She had switched to working nights to avoid Meyers as much as possible, mostly cleaning and tending to things in the kitchen. It was how she had come to know Elizabeth. The poor woman stalked the hallways at night like a ghost in a haunted mansion, and it didn’t take a Ph.D. to know why. A woman who’d rather walk the halls alone than share her husband’s bed had a bad marriage. Her heart was heavy, like her husband’s hand. Carmen had taken to bringing her a slice of pie in her study at night, and their meetings had become conversations and their conversations a friendship. Elizabeth became the daughter Carmen never bore. They talked on about every subject a mother and daughter could—children, men, sex, cooking. It took some time before Elizabeth confided in her about the beatings. Such things were not unfamiliar to Carmen. Her husband had hit her, too, once. Then she woke him from a dead sleep with a cooking knife pressed to his throat and made it clear that he would never hit her again if he hoped to ever have another untroubled night’s sleep. He never did. He left.

  Carmen crossed the street in the sporadic light of burned-out streetlamps, some of which had been broken for nearly a year. Despite the late hour, young men stood in the concrete park across from the apartment complex, their talk loud and animated. Carmen detected the sweet aroma of marijuana, but the young men never bothered her. She knew their mothers, and she was not adverse to giving each of them a tongue lashing if they disrespected her.

  When Elizabeth Meyers came to her the first time, Carmen never hesitated. It wasn’t any of her business what the young woman chose to do or not do, or who she chose to do it with. All Carmen knew was that it had brought a sad soul to life, and for her, that was worth the risk. Everyone was entitled to a bit of happiness in life. Her mother liked to say that life was a blink of an eye. There were no second chances. Carmen knew it.

  As she reached the door to her low-income town home, Carmen heard the sound of car engines revving and tires squealing. She watched the cars turn the corner onto her street and approach the concrete playground at high speed. The young men scattered like a flock of birds taken to flight. Visits from the police were frequent. But the men who emerged from the cars and rushed across the park and through the chain-link fence were dressed in suits. They were not policemen. Carmen had expected them at some point. She never flinched.

  Lights came on in the windows of the other homes. The faces in the windows would look out, wondering if this time it would be their brother or father who would be taken to jail. But the faces in the windows did not look down upon a young black man surrounded by white police officers. This time they saw Carmen staring at the outstretched barrels of weapons in the hands of ?four white men wearing dark suits—men Carmen knew but who stood yelling at her just the same to get down on the ground and keep her hands where they could see them.

  “Gentlemen,” Carmen said, crossing her arms, “I have no intention of getting on that cold ground. And if you intend to shoot me, then do it here in front of God and everyone else. As for my job, you can tell Mr. Meyers I’ve never liked him much, and I’d as soon see him in hell than to continue working for him.” She started for her door, then turned back to the men. “Oh, and tell him he can make his own damn pie.”

 
; 59

  IKNEW THE moment I saw him that day at the law school.” Elizabeth Meyers sat in the chair near the window. “Just seeing James again brought a smile to my face and a joy I hadn’t felt in a long time. He was still so full of life. After the conference, I made an excuse to call him. Like I said, a part of me knew it couldn’t work, but I wanted to talk to him. He always took my calls, so I suspected he felt the same. Ten-minute conversations became an hour. An hour became two hours. I began to worry about the phone bills and the repeating number. I’m sure Robert had the calls screened. Then, during one conversation, James and I discussed meeting. Robert was traveling to D.C. quite a bit, and I’m sure he never suspected I would dare do anything like that. It was his arrogance that gave me the opportunity.”

  “But how could you get out of the compound without people seeing you? I’ve read that it has a state-of-the-art security system and that he employs his own private security force.”

  “Initially, I had my driver take me to the school. No one knew James worked there. I told them it was to visit a college girlfriend. When that became suspicious, I began locking myself in my office and used a stairwell to get to the servants’ locker room. A dear friend drove me out under a pile of coats in the back of her car. I kept a wig and sunglasses and a coat in a locker there. I also had access to the maids’ uniforms. She picked me up in the morning, and I made my way back.”

  Dana looked at her in amazement.

  Elizabeth started to cry again. “I would have held on to the bottom of the car to see him. We both knew it couldn’t last, but we couldn’t stand the pain of not seeing each other, and I began to hope that maybe, somehow… I don’t know. It was naive, but some days it was the only reason I could even get out of bed in the morning. James gave me hope. Then he said he would find a way.”