Hot Start

by David Freed

  I drove on for another 200 meters before doubling back and parking alongside the road where I could maintain eyes-on the mouth of the driveway without looking obvious. Buzz called me while I waited. He wanted to know if I’d made contact with Walton, and whether I’d conveyed the White House’s demand that he resign.

  “Yes, I made contact and, no, he’s not resigning.”

  “Did he understand who you represent?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “And he said no?”

  “He did.”

  “Well, clearly, Logan, you weren’t persuasive enough.”

  While Buzz vented about how much flak he was going to take because I hadn’t done my job, Walton’s car pulled out of the driveway and zoomed back in the direction of downtown, narrowly avoiding an oncoming UPS truck whose driver laid on his horn.

  “Gotta go, Buzz. I’ll let you know as soon as I get anything else.”

  “Wait, Logan, you can’t—”

  I tapped the off button and tossed the phone on the passenger seat. I didn’t know what I hoped to find at the house to which Walton had driven so urgently. Sometimes a mission requires less thinking than it does simply doing. That was my mindset as I turned into the gravel driveway.

  A redhead with shoulder-length tresses and babe-next-door appeal was pacing in front of the house, smoking and talking agitatedly on her phone. Late twenties. A sleeveless flower-print summer dress. Barefoot. Absorbed in conversation, she scarcely glanced over at me as I stepped from my truck.

  “No, no, no,” she kept shouting into the phone in a decidedly Eastern European accent. “You’re not listening to me.”

  I recognized the small anchor dangling from the gold chain around her neck, as well as her comely face. I’d seen both in the photograph Kang had shown me—the same woman who’d been having sex with Congressman Walton in the cabin of Roy Hollister’s jet.

  “If I wanted to see you again, I would,” she said into the phone. “I don’t. It’s over. Do you understand? I’m hanging up now.”

  Her face and jewelry weren’t the only things about her that were familiar. That gravelly smoker’s voice. I’d heard it the night she’d called to tell me that Roy Hollister’s death had nothing to do with his safari business.

  “Mary?”

  She sucked down the last of her cigarette and exhaled, sliding the phone into her tank top. I couldn’t decide if her eyes conveyed surprise or relief.

  “I’ve been wondering,” she said, “when you’d find me.”

  FIFTEEN

  Her living room decor, a crowded, mismatched jumble of eclectic yet comfortable, spoke of someone who frequented rummage sales. She brought in two tumblers of iced tea with sprigs of fresh mint, then settled onto a chintz-covered couch opposite the chair on which I sat.

  “You don’t much look like a Mary.”

  “My name is Nina,” she said, curling one bare leg under the other.

  “What a coincidence,” I said. “I met a gentleman recently in Prague—Emil Sokol. He was in love with a prostitute who ran out on him. Her name was Nina too, only she was blonde.”

  Nina sipped her tea. “Amazing,” she said, “how much fun a girl can have with a six-dollar box of Revlon.”

  I asked her why she’d called to tell me about Hollister’s involvement in Sokol’s Czech-based prostitution operation.

  “Sokol is no gentleman, as you put it. He is a monster. He feels nothing for others. I had to tell someone. I was high. I saw you on TV. You seemed genuine.”

  “Did Sokol kill the Hollisters?”

  “He would never kill anyone himself. He would pay to have someone do it for him.”

  “Who?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Nina, when you called me, you said Roy Hollister’s death had nothing to do with his hunting big game. You told me somebody shut him up before he could start naming names. You implied the FBI was covering everything up. ‘Sheepdogs and wolves.’ Remember?”

  She shrugged, avoiding my eyes.

  “Why were Roy and his wife killed?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Where does Congressman Walton fit in with all of this?”

  “Who says he was?”

  “Nina, you knew Roy Hollister was in trouble with the feds. Now either he told you that himself, or somebody close to him did. It had to have been Walton.”

  Her eyes flashed with anger. “Pierce Walton is a friend,” she said tersely, then corrected herself. “Was a friend. I haven’t seen him in months.”

  “Really? That’s weird, because he was just here ten minutes ago.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “I’d be happy to show you the video I took,” I said, bluffing. “I want to know why he was here?”

  She sighed and lit another cigarette. Through her patio doors, past the honeysuckle bushes of her unkempt, overgrown backyard, I could see two hang gliders wheeling languidly along the ridges of the coastal range.

  “Walton is afraid,” Nina said.

  “Of what? The taxpayers finding out they’re paying for his hooker habit?”

  She shrugged, sucking the smoke deep into her lungs, too afraid herself to meet my eyes.

  “Who took the picture, Nina?”

  “What picture?”

  “The one of Roy getting his ashes hauled by two babes in the back of his plane, while Walton was doing you. You looked like you were phoning it in. Must be tougher on some nights than others, maintaining the necessary enthusiasm.”

  Tears came to her eyes. I’d shamed her.

  “I’m sorry, Nina. That was out of line.”

  “Forget it. I’ve heard worse.”

  She asked who’d shown me the photo. I told her a Korean shopkeeper had a copy in his storeroom. She looked at me blankly. Again I asked her who took the picture. “A friend,” is all she would tell me at first. After considerable badgering, she confided that the friend was a former European fashion model who, like her, had worked for Sokol before fleeing his clutches and relocating with Nina’s help to California. That’s as far as she was willing to go.

  What I couldn’t understand was why a politician like Pierce Walton would knowingly allow so potentially compromising a picture to be taken of himself.

  Nina stubbed out her smoke in a glass ashtray filled with lipstick-stained butts. “He’s into that,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Into what?”

  “Souvenirs.”

  “You’re telling me Walton wanted your friend to take that picture?”

  Another shrug. “You never know,” she said, “what turns a man on.”

  “You must know him pretty well.”

  “Enough to know he didn’t kill those people.”

  “And you know that how?”

  “Because he wasn’t in California at the time.”

  Nina claimed that Walton was in Washington the night the Hollisters were murdered. He’d planned to fly out to Rancho Bonita—she’d cleared her entire evening for him—but then he canceled, telling her his presence was needed for some last-minute vote on the House floor. Nina said she found out later that he’d lied; there was no vote. Walton’s wife had surprised him with tickets to a concert at the Kennedy Center. His cancellation had cost Nina a cool $2,000 in potential income. She was still simmering over it.

  “The ‘devoted family man.’ Pierce is a self-absorbed little bastard. He always lies about everything. But I know he didn’t shoot anyone. He doesn’t have that in him.”

  “I’m not saying he shot anybody directly. But the fact that he was in DC that night doesn’t rule out the possibility he paid somebody to do it for him. If he felt pushed into a corner? If he knew the Feds had turned Hollister, if he thought that it meant the end of his political career?”

  “Maybe,” she said. She reached under the sofa and pulled out a glass bong made of green glass. “Wanna get high?”

  “Not my thing.”

  She smiled suggestively. “What is
your thing?”

  “You’re way out of my price range, Nina.”

  “You haven’t even asked me what my price range is.”

  I set my glass down on the coffee table. “Thanks for the tea. And your time.”

  She walked me outside.

  “If you happen to talk to your friend who took that picture,” I said, pausing beside my truck, “tell her I’d very much like to talk to her. And if you decide you want to tell me the truth about why you called me that night, I’m all ears.”

  “Should you change your mind,” Nina said, “I’ll be here.”

  I TELEPHONED Buzz en route to the hospital to check on Mrs. Schmulowitz. I told him that I’d found “Mary,” the mystery caller, and filled him in on her ties to Walton. Buzz’s concern that the story of Walton’s transgressions might break at any moment, thus potentially embarrassing our commander-in-chief, had reached DEFCON Five intensity since we’d last talked. So had his disappointment at my failure at persuading Congressman Walton to resign.

  “You might as well just go on home for all the good you’ve done me, Logan,” he said.

  MRS. SCHMULOWITZ’S condition remained critical. The duty nurses in the cardiac unit—a new crew since I’d been in last— still wouldn’t let me see her.

  “Not to pull rank,” I said. “I probably should have told you this before: I’m a physician.”

  One of the nurses, a formidable Filipina, wasn’t buying it. “And, pray tell, what kind of physician would you be, Doctor?”

  “Consulting cardiologist, board certified, and I need to get in to see the patient, STAT.”

  The nurse looked me up and down with one hand on her hip. “Nice try,” she said. The name tag pinned to her scrubs identified her as Rosa Uribe, RN. “Now, unless you want me to call hospital security . . .”

  “That won’t be necessary,” I said. “I shall return.”

  “You ain’t no Douglas MacArthur, either,” Rosa said.

  Her knowledge of military history, I had to admit, was impressive. I retreated to the elevators and jabbed the down button, trying not to think about Mrs. Schmulowitz. Instead my focus turned to the Hollisters. I had no personal stock in finding out who’d murdered them. The fate of the prime suspect, Dino Birch, meant about as much to me as did Congressman Pierce Walton’s. However ineffective I’d been, I’d done what my former father-in-law, Gil Carlisle, had asked of me, and what my battle buddy, Buzz, had required of me. In the process, I’d left a man dead on the streets of Prague. One never walks away from taking a life that way, minus an official license, without there being consequences. Anxiety lingers. The fear of capture, of your government turning its back on you, pretending you never existed, is always there.

  Alas, what I could’ve used was a drink, only I didn’t drink. Short of that, what I needed was a nap, only my apartment was still too steamy. What I didn’t need was newshound Danika Quinn, leaning against my truck waiting for me.

  “Can’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said.

  With unbridled relish, like that little know-it-all tattletale in your third-grade class, she explained how, after covering the VA groundbreaking ceremony, she’d gone into investigative reporter mode, sat down at her computer, and had uncovered what she described as several “peculiarities” regarding me.

  Quinn had established that my former father-in-law was oil tycoon Gil Carlisle, which meant that I was tied, however tenuously, to Carlisle’s nephew, animal rights activist Dino Birch, the man who now sat in the Rancho Bonita County Jail awaiting formal arraignment in the murders of Roy and Toni Hollister. She’d also determined that I was no mere flight instructor. Though she’d yet to nail down any damaging revelations, she was aware, based on two-year-old news reports stemming from Savannah’s death, that I’d served in the air force, and that I’d worked in some hush-hush capacity as a government intelligence officer—all of which brought her back to Congressman Pierce Walton.

  “My sources tell me you met with Walton in his office,” Quinn said, propping her sunglasses up onto the top of her head. “What did you talk about? What did he say? Anything good?”

  Far off, I heard the tinny, tinkling rendition of “Turkey in the Straw” as played over the loudspeaker of one of those dilapidated former mail delivery vans-turned-ice cream trucks that roam American cities on scorching summer days, trolling for children with money to spend. How the driver didn’t go berserk, listening to the same tune for hours on end was beyond me. I was already in a bad mood. “Turkey in the Straw” only made it worse.

  “Please remove yourself from my vehicle,” I said to Quinn.

  “Did your meeting have anything to do with the Hollisters?” she asked like she hadn’t heard me. “You can tell me, Logan. On background.”

  “I won’t ask you again.”

  She stepped aside as I unlocked the driver’s side door. “C’mon, Logan, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. You tell me what you know about the Hollister investigation, I tell you what I know, and what I know is damned juicy.”

  “What makes you think I know anything?”

  “Because I’m a journalist,” Quinn said, “and I’m good at what I do.”

  “You know the difference between journalist and liar, do you? The spelling.”

  “Most of us take our work very seriously.”

  “Good for you.”

  I stepped into the truck. The escaping air felt like a furnace in a steel mill.

  “I was sorry to hear about your landlady—Mrs. Schmulowitz, is it? I really hope she makes it.”

  “You can quit trying to pretend like you’re a real human being, Quinn. I’m still not talking to you.”

  “Look, despite what you may think of me, I got in to this business because I care about people. I care about their right to know. I care about being fair and accurate in my reporting. A lot of people are skeptical about the news media. I don’t blame them. They have good reason to be. I would be too. But that’s not me, OK?”

  “Fair and accurate? Quinn, one minute you’re secretly recording me, the next minute, you’re threatening to go public with every dirty little secret you can find out about me. And you expect me to trust you? You’ve got some cojones.”

  She hung her head. “I know I shouldn’t have done any of that. It’s just that, it’s sweeps week and we’re all under a huge amount of pressure to come up with big stories. I wouldn’t blame you for hating me. If you want to know the truth, I hate myself. I don’t really know what I was thinking. I’m so sorry.”

  “You should be.”

  For a fleeting moment, I thought I saw a flicker of humility behind her mascara-heavy lashes.

  “Again my apologies. You take care, Logan.”

  She donned her sunglasses, pivoted on stiletto heels, in her pencil skirt, and started walking away. Maybe it was her speech, or maybe it was the skirt. Or, hell, maybe I’m just getting soft in the autumn of my years. Whatever the reason, she sold me.

  “Hey.”

  She stopped and turned.

  “OK, we’ll do it your way. Let’s trade info.”

  “Seriously?”

  I nodded.

  “Great,” Quinn said, rubbing the back of her neck and glancing up at the sun. “But not out here. I’m melting.”

  “For once, we agree on something.”

  Looking back, I probably should’ve taken Buzz’s suggestion and just gone home.

  SIXTEEN

  The hospital cafeteria was air-conditioned, the thermostat set to Antarctica. I wasn’t complaining. I’ll take cold over heat any day. I bought Quinn a Diet Pepsi and splurged on fresh lemonade for myself. We sat in the back, where diners drop off their dirty dishes on a conveyer belt looped into the kitchen. At the table nearest ours, one balding man was trying to persuade another to buy his used Tesla.

  Quinn looked over to make sure they couldn’t overhear us, then leaned in, her elbows on the table, and said, barely above a whisper, “Toni Hollister was having an affair when
she and Roy were murdered.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Are you serious?” Quinn sat back and looked at me with her mouth open. “It potentially turns this case on its ear, that’s what it’s got to do with. For crying out loud, Logan, I thought you were some sort of secret agent or something.”

  “What’re you suggesting?”

  “That there was another possible motive for the murders, that Dino Birch didn’t do it,” Quinn said. Again she looked both ways and lowered her voice. “What if Roy Hollister wasn’t the target? What if he was collateral damage?”

  “And the real target was Toni and her cheatin’ heart? Is that what you’re proposing here?”

  “Think about it,” Quinn said. “Toni’s getting it on with some other guy. The guy’s wife finds out, and hires a gunman to take Toni out. He takes out Roy Hollister too, because he’s a possible witness. Weirder things have happened, right?”

  “You got any proof to back up this theory of yours?” I asked her.

  “No, but I’m working on it.”

  I had to admit, the idea that Toni had been targeted and not Roy sounded more than a little far-fetched in light of the circumstantial evidence mounting against Dino Birch. Then again, few creatures are as prone to homicidal rage as a spurned or jealous spouse. I wasn’t willing to disregard the working theory that Birch was a murderer, but I wasn’t ready to throw him under the bus either.

  Two young nurse’s aides walked over with their food trays and stopped beside our table. “Excuse me,” one of them said shyly, “but aren’t you one of those news ladies?”

  “News lady.” Quinn winked, looking in my direction. “That’s me.”

  “Could we get a picture?” the first aide asked.“That would be awesome,” the second one said.

  “It would be my pleasure,” Quinn said. She took her star turn while they snapped selfies with her.