Dresden closed the book and then his eyes. Some things hadn’t changed at all since he’d left Westchester. He supposed they never would. George Calendiari may have been of one of the wealthiest families in California, but he was Catholic, an Italian, the grandson of an immigrant, and worse, a politician. Maddy, more aristocrat than any woman he had ever known, was the daughter of a car dealer.
Charley brought the book to the desk, shaking his head.
“I don’t understand,” he said to the woman. “I’m trying to find an old friend. He’s quite well known here in Washington, yet there’s no listing for him.”
“If he’s prominent, here in Washington, then you shouldn’t be looking him up in the Social Register. You should try the Green Book.”
“The Green Book?”
“Yes, the Washington Green Book. It’s much more important than the Social Register. In Washington, at least.”
It was, in any event, much more useful. Among all the diplomats, cabinet officers, remittance men, and distant cousins of prominent New York, Boston, and Philadelphia society names, he found the Calendiaris very quickly, complete with McLean phone number and address. He wanted to thank the librarian profusely, but she had seen enough of his face as it was.
Back in his room he dialed the number. The woman who answered spoke with a heavy Spanish accent. Mrs. Calendiari was not home.
He turned on the TV news, watched the sports and weather, and called again. Mrs. Calendiari still was not home. She was going to a reception and then to a dinner party. She would not be home until late. Was there a message?
There was not. Apologizing in Spanish for the intrusion, Dresden hung up. He went to the dresser for a whiskey, but halted suddenly before he reached it. The president was on television again. He was no longer in a robe and pajamas, but a turtleneck sweater, tweed jacket, and raincoat. His shaving cut was gone and his skin no longer sallow, but slightly flushed, as though from the crisp weather. He was speaking outside, though in such a closeup shot it was impossible to tell from where. His voice, his inflection, was still perfect, but still hoarse. He was remarking on a sudden and welcome upturn in his condition, probably brought on by the interlude of warm sunshine. He waved and smiled and said all was well. Dresden looked hard at the screen, burning the clothes and face into his memory before the president’s image abruptly vanished and a coffee commercial took his place. Now Dresden would need another tape. He would have to keep pace with these people.
After dinner, he tried Maddy’s number again. There was an answer after just two rings, and this time there was no Spanish accent. The voice was full of sleepiness and some uncertainty, but it was the dearest sound he had heard in days. He hung up after she repeated the word “hello” three times. He did so regretfully, with shame and guilt, but with purpose. He would hear that voice again. But he would have to wait.
16
Dresden slept badly, awakening shortly after four A.M. He went to the window, pulling the drawn curtains aside. Nothing moved in the street. He went to his bag and took out the Magnum. He’d now have to walk about the streets of the nation’s capital with that huge cannon stuck in his belt. As the episode at the newspaper box attested, a firearm was likely more liability than help. But he did not want to leave it in his room, at risk of it being found or stolen. It was now his only weapon. He had no hope of acquiring another without the possibility of bringing serious trouble upon himself, and he still felt a certainty that before this was done he would have need of a gun.
Dresden turned on the television set. A program advertised as an all-night news show was on, but the news set was composed of couches and ferns, and the person being interviewed was a motion picture actor who had written a book confessing his homosexuality. Charley slumped into a chair and drank and watched, the large pistol on the table beside him. He was glad when the actor was replaced by a motion picture actress who confessed to nothing more than her next film.
At length, the all-night talk was replaced by an early-morning network news show. There was a report of famine in Southeast Asia. There was more rioting in Manila. The vice president of the United States was meeting with the prime minister of Canada about Central America. There were unconfirmed reports that Secretary of State Crosby was going to announce the breaking of diplomatic relations with Nicaragua and El Salvador over La Puño and the refusal of those two governments to admit to its existence and their connection with it. A new rise in the prime rate had driven stock prices down.
Dresden dozed. When he awoke the main morning news program had come on the screen, and with it, the same actor with the same book confessing his same homosexuality. Charley stared bleakly. The weatherman talked of bad storms on the Pacific Coast and unseasonal cold in the Midwest. Dresden thought of Tracy Bakersfield huddled in her beach house, great gray waves crashing along the pier. Where was Tracy? On impulse, he dialed her number again. He let it ring a dozen times or more. There was no answer. Was he to take comfort in that?
Dresden slept. When he awoke again the morning news show was in its last minutes. Over news film including footage of the starvation in Cambodia, there was a slow roll of credits. At the fifth name, Dresden almost leaped out of his chair. It was that of a one-time protégé of his, a man he had hired as a production assistant in Santa Linda who was now a network producer. The man had been so grateful to Charley for his first chance and start in television that, after joining the network and hearing of Charley’s decline, he had twice called to offer him a job. Had Charley wished to leave California for New York, he might have taken it, but at that time, as in all times, leaving his life in Tiburcio was too great a price.
But now this man’s gratitude could be of real use. He snapped off the set and opened the curtains. It was snowing, a faint, wet snow falling from a bleak gray sky. It was December. He was in Washington. He was looking at the morning of a joyless day.
Perhaps. He gave his producer friend time enough to have concluded what Dresden expected would be obligatory after-show postmortems, and then called the network number in New York. He had to go through three people, but he reached his friend.
“This is you, Charley?” said the man. “Charley Dresden? I haven’t talked to you in five years.”
“It’s been too long,” Dresden said. “I just caught your show and it reminded me, so I thought I’d call. I’m on the road.”
“You’re here? Here in New York?”
“No. I’m down in Washington.” The instant he said that he regretted it. Until that moment, no one had the faintest idea where he was. Now his secret was shared by an important executive of the most-watched television network in the country.
“You left California?”
“For the time being. I—I need a favor. I’m putting together a news special and I need some videotape footage, some file footage.”
“You’re doing a special for Channel Three? Or are you with someone else?”
“It’s an independent production. I need some file footage of some old presidential White House talks. Stock stuff. Your network owns one of the television stations down here. I wondered if you might possibly—if you don’t mind, and I’d sure appreciate it—if you might ask your people here if they’d loan me some of that stuff. I mean, to make a copy. I’ll buy my own tape. I’m just in a jam, and I don’t know where to turn. The government’s no help. We’ve got a real deadline. And I really need it. I’d really, really appreciate it.”
“I’m sorry, Charley. But I can’t do that. There’s a policy against that. Everything is strictly in-house. You’re right. The station there is one of our owned and operated, but their tape files are theirs. We use our own.”
“You’re sure you couldn’t get them to bend the rules? I really am in a jam.”
“Charley. No.”
“Well, I expect to be in New York in a day or two. Is there any chance you might be able to help me out with your files up there?”
There was a long pause.
“Charley. I
better tell you this. I get the Santa Linda paper. My mother sends it to me. Charley, I saw your picture on the front page. I read the story. Charley, I …”
Dresden hung up immediately, furious with himself. He could trust no one. He must do all this himself.
The black man behind the counter looked at him with an expression composed of equal parts of shrewdness, incredulity, and fear.
“Mister,” he said, “the best car I’ve got available is a 1983 Chevette. Are you sure you’ve come to the right place, I mean, the place you thought you were coming to?”
“I’m just in town on business,” said Dresden, smiling, but looking a little apprehensive, deliberately apprehensive. “I saw your ad in the phone book. Your rates seem quite reasonable. I’m not a man to waste money.”
“You’re gonna pay with a credit card?”
“No, with cash.” He would carry on with this feigned parsimony as long as it served to explain his presence in such a place. “I don’t believe in paying interest to credit card companies.”
“And you’ll bring the car back? This ain’t some scam?”
“Name your deposit.”
“A hundred bucks.”
Charley took out his wallet, peeked into its recesses, and slowly pulled out a hundred dollar bill, as though it amounted to his grandmother’s entire fortune. He shoved his wallet quickly back into his suit coat’s breast pocket. If the car rental agent was worried about the anomaly that was Dresden, Charley was infinitely more worried about the neighborhood and what might await him in it.
The agent stuck the money into a pocket, not a cash register. Charley wondered if he’d get it back. But that, of course, didn’t matter.
“No mileage charge,” the agent said. “But you buy all the gas.”
“Understood,” Dresden said.
“The car runs,” the agent said.
“I certainly hope so.”
“And you’ll bring it back?”
“Yes. But I don’t think it’ll be after dark.”
“You got that right, my man.” The agent handed him a key with a dirty plastic tag attached to it. “It’s the red one out in back. It’s a stick shift and it slips out of second sometimes, but otherwise she be dynamite.”
He had planned to head north immediately. Instead, he bought a street directory and drove to McLean. It was just up the George Washington Parkway on the Virginia side of the Potomac. Nearing the town, he passed the CIA and turned onto Georgetown Pike, following that to a road called Sandra Court, a cul-de-sac. It looked dangerous. Though their rear yards were well wooded and spacious, the houses were close together where they fronted the street. In this old, bright red, and certainly cheap-looking car with District of Columbia plates, he was noticeable to half a dozen houses, including the Calendiaris’. He rounded the circle of the cul-de-sac hurriedly, hastening to where Sandra Court interesected with Georgetown Pike. He found a place on the shoulder of the road where he had a distant but clear view of the Calendiaris’ big house. Slumping down behind the wheel, he waited, more than an hour.
Maddy’s garage door opened automatically, a bright yellow Mercedes-Benz roadster with a black top backing out as soon as the door was fully retracted, and the door sliding down again the instant the car had cleared the garage. She wore a blue kerchief and trenchcoat and paid him no attention as she wheeled onto Georgetown Pike at the first interruption in traffic. He waited for two other cars to take up the interval, then followed. She took two more turnings, and led him into what he took to be the village of McLean. Mercedes, Volvos, and expensive Japanese cars seemed to be the rule.
She pulled into a dry cleaners. That certainly didn’t suit his purpose. Neither did the Crown bookstore she visited afterward. Bookstores were very quiet places, and he half expected her to scream upon seeing him. Then she went to what appeared to be a gourmet supermarket. That would do.
The store was crowded with very wealthy-looking people shopping for the holidays. He waited for Maddy to take a number at the meat counter, then moved up beside her. He was about to touch her arm, but thought better of it. Instead he pretended to be just another customer, and spoke quietly.
“Is there a place we can talk? Maddy, I’ve got to talk to you. I’m quite desperate.”
She stared at him, her expression frozen—not in contempt, not in fear, but far from anything remotely friendly. He might have just said something obscene to her, or admitted poisoning her pet dog.
“Charley, you promised you’d never see me again.”
“Yes, I did. And I stuck to that. Even though it tore me up. I fell in love with you all over again, Maddy. I almost called you several times. I always hung up. But now I’m in trouble.”
“You called me last night, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Get away from me, Charley. Get out of here and leave me alone. Forever.”
“Maddy. It’s me. Charley. The other love in your life. Your dear friend. And I’m in the biggest trouble of my life.”
“We get the California papers. They say you’re a murderer.”
“Maddy. Let me talk to you, please. For fifteen minutes. For five minutes.”
She dropped her ticket into a plastic box atop the meat counter.
“All right,” she said. “Outside. In the parking lot. Don’t give me any problems. There’s a county police station just down the road and the firehouse is right across the street.”
“Maddy, I wouldn’t harm a hair on your head.”
Grim-faced, she preceded him past the checkout counters and out the door, which opened for them automatically. She kept walking, back toward where she had parked the Mercedes.
“Is there a bar nearby?”
“A bar? No.”
“A restaurant?”
“Several, but none where I wouldn’t be likely to run into friends. George is away. This is most inopportune.”
“I know.”
She stopped at the side of her car. “You said five minutes.”
“Whatever you can spare me. Maddy, I didn’t kill that woman. She was a dear, dear friend. I didn’t kill that man. He was a friend, a good friend.”
Her expression softened, though not into friendliness. Not into warmth. There were the faintest tears in her eyes.
“We didn’t think that you had, Charley. Not George. Not me. But I don’t want any part of this, your trouble, or any part of you. We have all kinds of problems as it is. We don’t need more.”
“The whole country has a problem. That’s why my friends were killed.”
She looked down at the pavement. The snow was still melting as it touched the blacktop, but it was now falling more thickly. She unlocked the door on the passenger side.
“Get in, Charley.”
He did. As she sat behind the wheel, he said, “I thought you didn’t want to go to a restaurant.”
“We’re not,” she said, turning on the engine with a sudden roar. She backed up. “We’re going to a place where we won’t be bothered. I’m going to trust you, once again, Charles Dresden. Trust doubtless misplaced.”
She drove rapidly out of the village, following a road called Old Dominion Drive.
“Explain it to me,” she said. “Who killed your friends?”
“I can’t say anything for a fact; nothing in court. But I’m convinced it’s the people behind the assassination, someone involved in the fraud they’re perpetrating at Camp David. Probably someone working for the president. The late president.”
“The same sort of nonsense you were telling me back in California?”
“But it isn’t nonsense. That’s why I’ve come here. To get back at them. They killed Charlene and Danny Hill. They tried to kill the vice president and they got his wife.”
“George is a good friend of the vice president.”
“I know.”
“Is that why you’re bothering me? You want to make contact with the vice president?”
“Not yet. I have almost all the proof I n
eed. But not enough, not yet.”
They drove without speaking, till the highway began to switch back and forth in sharp curves in rolling, hilly countryside, horse fences on either side.
“All right, Charley, say it.”
“What?”
“You want me to help you. To get you out of this.”
“I can’t get ‘out’ of this. But I need your help. Desperately.”
“You’ve no one else.”
“No one. All my friends are in California. Out there, I’m a dead man.”
“All right. Don’t speak. I want to think.”
He didn’t. At length they came to a traffic light, and a brown and white sign that announced GREAT FALLS PARK. She followed the access road past a closed National Park Service ticket booth and into a parking lot that held only one other car. The elevation was higher here and the temperature colder. The snow was adhering to the ground.
As he stepped out of the roadster, he heard a vague roaring sound. He glanced at her.
“It’s the waterfall,” she said. “You’re not carrying any liquor, are you? There’s a ranger on duty in the visitor center and they’re very strict about liquor here. You could get yourself into trouble you don’t need.”
“I’ve nothing with me, Maddy.”
She led them down a lane that seemed to parallel the river. They kept on until he could hear the falls at full, crashing volume. In a moment they could see them. They were the most spectacular sight he had seen since Niagara, years before, a mad rush of blue-green water tumbling tumultuously around and over great boulders, falling in huge steps to a wide, deceptively serene-looking pool amidst steep, granite walls. She took his arm as they descended a stony path to rocks at the water’s edge.
“I brought you here because this is the place where I come to make decisions. I made one a few days ago. Now that you’re here, now that you’ve brought all this dreadful mess with you, I’ve got to reconsider it.”
He stared at her, unspeaking. The cold had brought a flush to her cheeks. She had never looked more beautiful.
By Order of the President Page 31