Once on the parkway itself, the tail was a lot easier.
He assumed they were headed for town, maybe even for Georgetown, since that’s where the lady had first appeared. As they headed north up the parkway past the airport, Malachi tried to remember the possible approaches into Georgetown.
He had spotted the cab about a block away from his vantage point at the bottom of Prince. It had proceeded slowly down Prince, the driver obviously reading house numbers. He had relaxed when it passed 128, but then it had stopped and backed up, causing him to jump up, his dinner unfinished, drop two twenties on the table, and sprint for the car park.
He started up the F-250 before the attendant even knew he was there and drove back to the corner of Prince and Union, scattering some tourists as he came out of the lot. He had stopped at the corner before he realized that he was pointed the wrong way on a one-way street. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the waiter counting his money at the table and looking around. Up the street, the cab was still there, waiting. A car honked at him from across the street, but he ignored it.
The car honked again, the driver pointing to the one-way sign, but he concentrated on watching as Collins and the woman came out of a small side gate, the woman getting in the cab and Collins going back in through the gate. Solly, Cholly, he thought; you’re in a nooky-free zone. Boy wonder strikes out. The cabbie had come down Prince, stopping almost face-to-face with Malachi’s truck, and then turned in front of Malachi to head north on Union toward the airport and the Potomac River bridges.
After following them up the parkway past the Pentagon, it became clear that the cabbie had opted for the Key Bridge, which would be direct, although jammed with traffic on a Friday night. Malachi settled in for the ride, staying three cars back and making sure he matched the cab’s lane once they got on the Key Bridge. There were two choices at the Washington end of the bridge. He knew that the tough part would be if she lived in one of those small blocks between Wisconsin and the university—it would be impossible to follow the cab into that rabbit warren without being noticed.
At the end of the bridge, the cab turned right onto M Street, then really slowed down amid the world-class congestion of a Friday night in Georgetown. It took them ten minutes to make the two blocks to 33rd Street, and then another ten to make the left turn onto 33rd, which Malachi did through a red light, to the accompaniment of a lot of horns.
But he got stuck behind a bus at that juncture and could only watch as the cab disappeared around the bus. But the cabbie had his left turn signal on, so they were close. Three minutes later, he took a shot and made a turn onto N Street off 33rd, but there were no cabs up ahead, just quiet residential streets packed with parked cars. Cursing, he drove all the way to 37th Street and the edge of Georgetown University, looking down into each of the side streets, but there was no cab.
Trapped in the labyrinth of alternating one-way streets of the Cloisters area, he decided to spend a few minutes driving down each one, crisscrossing the neighborhood, looking for any sign of the cab. But after twenty minutes, he realized that she had to be out of the cab and in her house by now, so he gave it up and turned for home. He still did not know for sure whether the woman with Collins tonight had been Snow, but he would have liked to have found out.
Back to the trusty telephone, he thought as he turned off M onto Pennsylvania Avenue.
The cabbie grunted in appreciation at the tip she gave him. Grace was used to taking cabs in this city, where they were relatively inexpensive, and she tipped well as long as the driver did not try to fiddle the city’s curious fare-zone system. The driver turned around as she was preparing to get out, or at least he turned his head; his body appeared to be much too big to move without a small crane.
“That guy you was with tonight, over in Old Town— that dude married?”
Grace held the right-rear door open and looked at him in surprise. “Why, no,” she replied. “He was married once, but his wife died. Why on earth do you ask?”
” ‘Cause we picked up a tail when we was leavin’.
Guy stayed on us all the way to M Street, when I ditched his ass behind that bus. White guy in a big ole
&
white pickup. Figured maybe some jealous wife, gone an’ hired one a them private eyes, you know?”
Grace shook her head. “No, it’s nothing like that. We worked together on a … project, for the past two weeks. Are you sure someone was following us?”
“Yeah, I am. No fool gonna bring a F-two fifty pickup truck into Georgetown on a Friday night, less’n he has to. You be careful, now.
That dude was follerin’ you, sure enough.”
Grace got out of the cab and automatically looked up and down the street, but there was no traffic, nor any darkened cars parked suspiciously in alleys or driveways.
The cab took off in a cloud of smelly exhaust, listing visibly to port, as she went up to her door. Looking through the narrow windows on one side of the door, nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but when she went inside and closed the door, she did not turn on any more lights; instead she stood beside the curtained living room window and watched the street for a few minutes. Two cars came by during her vigil. One she recognized as a neighbor’s, and the other was a cop car, cruising the neighborhood.
That driver must have been dreaming; why would anyone follow her back to Georgetown? In a pickup truck? Feeling foolish, she went back into the dining room and checked her answering machine. There were no calls.
She went into the kitchen and poked around in the refrigerator for something to eat, then decided to have some ice cream and call it a day.
She took her ice cream to the desk, pushed aside some papers, and sat down.
She had thought that perhaps Dan Collins might have called; she had had the sense that he was disappointed in the way the evening ended. But perhaps that was just wishful thinking. He’s a very nice man, and I’m comfortable in his company, she thought. At times, Dan seemed interested in her as a woman, and yet at other times he seemed to revert back to his role of widower, more or less permanently detached from life with women. So why did she care? She didn’t know if she really did, and after the trauma of marriage to Rennie, she had some empathy for Dan’s attitude.
She finished her ice cream, checked all the locks, put out the downstairs lights, and was about to go upstairs for an evening with a good book when she heard a vehicle coming slowly up her street. The engine did not sound like the usual purring motors one would associate with her neighborhood. Standing in the darkened hallway, she peeked through the window curtains at the door and saw a very large white pickup truck moving slowly up the street toward the university campus.
She caught only a glimpse of the shape and color of the driver’s face as the truck passed under a cone of streetlight, barely enough to make out his features. For just a second, she thought she had seen that face before. The truck cruised past her house, the driver looking straight ahead, stopped at the stop sign on 35th Street, and continued on out of sight into the next block.
Grace stood there wondering. The cabbie had said they were followed by a white pickup truck, and here was a white pickup truck cruising the narrow streets of the Cloisters neighborhood in the early evening. Going slow, so he was looking for—what? Or whom? And where had she seen that face? Then she remembered: She had seen the truck today, when they had come out of the boathouse onto Water Street: the pickup truck with the big, fearsome-looking man in it, parked under Key Bridge, scanning a map. She remembered that Dan had swerved to avoid it. She walked back to the study and picked up the phone to call Dan. She got his answering machine and left a message asking him to call, preferably before 11:00 p.m. Then she checked all the locks again and went upstairs.
Dan called at 10:45, apologizing for the late hour.
“I went down to Mcdonald’s for a greaseburger.
What’s up? You sounded worried.” She told him about the pickup truck.
“And you think
this guy followed you from Old Town?”
“I never saw him, but the cabdriver says he did. He even described it as a white F-two fifty, whatever that is.
You do remember that truck you had to steer around at the boathouse when we came out?”
“No. Oh, yes, I do. So maybe this guy was on your tail even before Old Town? I wonder—”
“What?”
“Well, right after you left, and while I was still up by the garden gate, I heard what sounded like a fairly large vehicle screech through a turn down the block. But I never actually saw it.”
“He could have been parked somewhere, then hurried to catch up with my cab,” she said.
“Yeah, if you admit the possibility you were being followed. Any ideas as to why?”
“No. That’s what kind of scares me. I mean, the cabbie says he lost the truck behind a Metro bus, and I know there was no one on the street when I got out of the cab or for some time afterward—I sort of watched.
But then I did see a white pickup truck coming up my street a short while later, and I think it was the same man that was at the boathouse.”
Dan was silent on the other end for a moment. “I just don’t know what to tell you, unless it’s connected to NTS in some fashion, and that doesn’t make much sense. They wouldn’t be following someone that … that didn’t even work there anymore.”
She smiled at the way he phrased it. “And not in a pickup truck, I shouldn’t think. NIS tends to dark four door sedans with aerials on the trunk that no one in a million years would suspect are cop cars.”
“Yeah, right.” He laughed. “I think cops use them to avoid parking tickets more than anything else. Which brings up the logical next question: You call the cops?”
“And tell them what, that I think I’m being followed?”
“Well, you do think you’re being followed. The tough part will come when they ask for possible reasons or suspects, and then it comes out that you’ve just resigned from NIS. This being Washington, they’re automatically going to assume there’s some problem there, and they probably won’t be very helpful.”
“I guess you’re right,” she said with a sigh.
“Just what you want to find out at eleven o’clock at night, isn’t it?
Some guy in a pickup is starting to follow you around. By the way, I’m sorry our evening together ended so abruptly.”
That had come out of nowhere, but she felt a flash of —what, relief?
“I am, too,” she said carefully. “Perhaps I need to sort this NIS business out, and then we can try again.
After my divorce in New York, I haven’t … well, dated, or really seen anyone. I’m afraid I’ve lost my touch, if I ever had one.”
“Well, I know I’ve lost mine. Since Claire’s death, I’ve lived in a kind of emotional Thermos bottle for a long time, and I’m afraid I’ve gotten used to it. It’s more comfortable than people might imagine.”
“Cocoons do have some advantages,” she said.
“And there are drawbacks: You can’t see out of them very well. So when something valuable comes by, you might miss it.”
She was silent for a moment. He apparently felt compelled to fill the silence.
“Which is why I guess I didn’t want just to shake hands and say goodbye. And despite my concerns about stepping in something over the Hardin case, I have to admit that I’m not comfortable with just saying forget about that, either. It’s just that I’m a straight stick, tin-can sailor and I don’t know the first thing about how you would proceed.”
“I don’t know, either. First I’m going to try to get clear of NIS with my resume intact. But then I think I’ll go back and see Detective Captain Vann. I have the impression that he might have a personal stake in the Hardin business beyond just knowing the family. Maybe he can point me somewhere that I can do some good, especially when I tell him NIS is going to put it in the too-hard basket.”
“Okay. And on reflection, you probably should make that call to the cops. Get this thing on record; that way, if any more pickup trucks show up, you’re not starting from scratch. They have these stalker laws now, too, so I don’t think they can just brush you off.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Okay. And Fli call you Tuesday evening.”
“Good.” They said goodbye and Grace put the phone down gently. Better, she thought. Much better.
on monday, grace talked to her father’s attorney in Philadelphia, Robert Fishbein, about the way she had been terminated at NIS. The lawyer quickly brought it down to a case of balance: “First, how much pain are you willing to endure to get back at them, and, second, do you really want to get that job back?” She knew the answer even before he was finished. This wasn’t about getting the job back; this was about the way they had gone about it. The way that damned EA, Rennselaer, had gone about it.
“Let’s do this, Bob,” she said. “Make a call for me.
Identify yourself as my lawyer and then ask for the full and correct spelling of three names: an Admiral Keeler, a Mr. Ames, and a Mr.
Englehardt. That’s the director, the deputy for Policy, and the principal assistant deputy for Policy, respectively. They may or may not give them to you, but I want to smoke out a phone call. At the very least, I want a decent piece of paper from them.”
She gave him Ames’s office phone number and hung up. She had called the District police to report the guy in the pickup. The police had been politely underwhelmed but did say that they would open a file on it.
Grace had the impression that it would not be a very big file, but the detective’s clerk had taken her name, address, and some of the particulars. She quickly discovered that the police liked to deal in facts: description of the man, description of the car, precise times when she was followed, and the exact route, only parts of which she could provide with very much accuracy.
And, no, she didn’t have any idea of who might have a reason to follow her: no jealous wives, no ex-boyfriends, no panting coworkers. There had been no phone calls, no prowlers, no hate mail, or love mail, for that matter.
And just the one instance. “Right. Okay, call us if it happens again; we’ll keep a file on it. Here’s the file number. Goodbye.” Grace had put the phone down with the feeling that she’d been told to take two aspirin and call the doctor in the morning. But she couldn’t really blame them.
She tackled the mess on her desk until noon, when Doug Englehardt called in. She picked up as he was identifying himself on the machine.
“Well, Doug. Fancy hearing from you on a Monday morning.”
“Don’t start, Grace. I only heard about it at the morning staff meeting.
I carried the message just the way you phrased it, and the damned EA said he would take care of it. I’m calling to apologize for the way they’ve behaved, and for failing in what I thought was a no-brainer, win-win for everyone. That Rennselaer guy is a piece of work.”
“And what would you suggest I do now, Doug, or are you out of the advice business?”
Englehardt paused before replying, but then he came out with it. “I think maybe you’ve already done it. I just got a medium-frantic phone call from Ames’s office, saying your lawyers in Philadelphia had called in asking for the correct spelling of some prominent names here.”
“The Post called yet?” she asked sweetly.
“The Post! Jesus Christ, Grace, what are you doing?”
“Just taking a leaf from your clever little EA’s book, Doug, and indulging in a little hardball. It strikes me that a very public discrimination lawsuit is just what the doctor ordered for the likes of Captain Rennselaer.
And we both know how much the NIS admires publicity.
I would think that there are some people over in Opnav who might enjoy it, too, don’t you think?”
“Grace, for God’s sake—”
“No. For my sake, Doug. NIS has besmirched my record of government service with a no-notice termination disguised as an acceptance of a
putative resignation. I’m think I’m going to deny I ever talked to you, in case you want to pursue the logic.”
“Grace, Grace, we can fix all that. We can—”
“Don’t say ‘we,’ Doug. You don’t speak for anyone in authority at NIS, as we’ve both found out, haven’t we?
I’ll tell you what: I’ll entertain one phone call, just one, from the admiral, and it needs to be really constructive, and made by close of business tomorrow, okay? And if that Rennselaer reptile so much as disturbs my answering machine, it’s war. ‘Bye now.”
Grace hung up and then laughed out loud. She could just imagine the phone call that had come down to En glehardt’s office from the choleric Roscoe Ames. She made a note to be home at around four the next afternoon, then went to make a sandwich. After lunch, she would call Captain Vann.
on monday, malachi made some calls to the NIS.
Since he might end up going down there, he used his own voice. The Defense Department phone book had given him the number of the Criminal Investigations Division, where he told the lady answering the phone that he needed to speak to someone about the Hardin case. The woman passed him off to another woman, who in turn gave him yet another number. He played this game for twenty minutes before getting an actual NIS agent on the line. Malachi described himself as a private investigator by the name of Costas who needed a couple of minutes of face time with the agent working the Wesley Hardin case. The agent told him that, per NIS policy, investigating officers did not discuss their cases with outside civilians. Malachi told him that he understood perfectly, that he was a retired Army MP, and that he wouldn’t dream of asking questions about the case. He simply needed to get face-to-face with the investigating officer to confirm that the Hardin who had been in the news was indeed It. (jg) Wesley Hardin, of Washington, D. C., and that he was indeed deceased.
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