“But what’s happening?” I persist.
“What’s happening is that someone’s mixed you up with your sister.”
“He must be from Mars,” I say obliquely so Amelia won’t know I’m criticizing her grandmother.
“There’s probably more than just one Martian,” Lieutenant Culver says dryly. “I’ll bet it was some of Jerry Russo’s friends from Columbia Road. He must’ve told them Shay stole the Fawn Hall papers and they should shake her up a little.”
“I don’t think I can handle this,” I say in a small, precise voice.
Lieutenant Culver gives me a strange look. It is sort of a blank look. No. A black look. It’s to remind me what a sweet simple white life I’ve led up until now. It’s a look that challenges me to get tough. But I resist being mau-maued. That’s too retro. I am not responsible for the violence in the black community. I abhor violence. It is not my fault that D.C. has become a shooting gallery.
“This is really a wild thing Shay’s done,” I say, profoundly exasperated. “Those damn papers are going to get someone murdered.”
Lieutenant Culver doesn’t look all that happy about what’s happening either. He looks like he would rather be doing something other than chasing criminals in a completely corrupt city. He looks like he’d rather be out in the countryside somewhere, maybe skimming along some sleek highway to a friend’s farm in a four-wheel drive listening to his favorite tapes, not digging bullets out of some stranger’s ceiling.
Turning around, he looks into the den.
“Where is it your husband went?”
“Atlanta.”
“Your sister?”
“She’s there too.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“They’re both covering the Democratic Convention.”
“Tell me about it,” he complains. “I’m starting to think you and your sister are thick as thieves.”
“Listen,” I say. “Shay went down there with her boyfriend. Also her second husband’s there. Not to worry.”
“I’m not worried about your sister.” His mouth slides into a half-smile. “You’re the one I’m worried about.”
“Oh, shit. Just what I needed.” Now hysteria begins pinching me as it scales the ladder of my spine. “Why do you wanna think everybody in my family is doing everybody else? As far as I know, nobody’s gotten laid around here in a long, long time.”
At first I can’t believe I said that. I am stunned. I have never said anything like that in my entire life. I feel like a puppet, as if someone else is pulling my strings, jerking my chain. I clutch Amelia’s hand, hoping she hasn’t caught on to anything I’m saying. I look sorrowfully at Lieutenant Culver.
“Well, okay. Let’s start over,” he suggests kindly.
“Not right now. First I have to put Amelia to bed.’
Then I make another big mistake.
Bending over solicitiously, I ask Amelia if she would like to sleep in the guest room near the kitchen where Shaysie sometimes sleeps.
Never offer a child a choice.
My mistake leads into a lengthy negotiation, ending with my promising to read The Five Hundred Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins—the War and Peace of children’s literature—to Amelia before she goes to sleep. By the time I bed her down, read the book and rejoin Leiutenant Culver in the den, I am exhausted.
“Look,” he begins again. “I know it’s hard to believe something like this, but you’re in some big trouble here.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, what should I do?” I ask.
“You asking me what I think?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Take the little girl and get out of here. Go to a hotel or move into some friend’s house. This place just became a practice range.”
“You mean right now, tonight?”
“Well, by tomorrow morning. I can provide you with protection for the night. But I expect you’ll be hearing from the complainant again. Real soon. He wants you to know you should keep your mouth shut. The truth is, you’re probably going to bring a lot of rats out of their holes. That’s good for the D.C.P.D., but not so hot for you.”
Suddenly I feel compelled to say everything I’m feeling. I tell him how vulnerable my family is, how unprepared we are to defend ourselves against armed criminals. I tell him that we’re inexperienced and untrained. That we own no guns. That I’ve never even touched a gun. That we’re different.
I don’t say from whom.
He hears me, but he doesn’t offer any real consolation. Indeed, he says rather gently that there’s no way for him to avert what’s going to come down upon me, that he can’t guarantee my safety.
“Listen,” he says, leaning against the arm of the sofa. “This shooting puts a lot of pressure on me because it puts you in a real precarious place. I’ve got to find whoever did it before he finds you again. And if it was Jerry Russo who sicced those guys on you, they’ll be back. I can put some surveillance on you for a while, a couple days or so, but not forever. And these guys don’t go away. That I can promise.”
Now I become his confidante. His partner. He begins talking to me the way Eli does when he’s on a story, strategizing aloud, using me as a sounding board. Men love to bounce their ideas off women. It empowers them to proceed. I go into automatic pilot and make confirmational nods and noises.
“Did Jerry Russo know Shay would be staying here?”
I shrug my ignorance.
“Well, who else knew about Fawn Hall’s testimony? Your husband, your sister’s two husbands …”
He pronounces “husbands” so it sounds like “has-beens.”
“And her boyfriend,” I say. “That’s it. I think that’s all.”
“Well, someone wants to keep Shay quiet. It might even be someone from the White House. Someone who knows you all want to discredit Ollie North and hurt the administration. Or it could be one of the contra capitans. Or one of the dealers Fawn mentioned in her interview. Or the FBI or CIA or DEA. It could be a lot of folks. It could be all of them. Anyway, it’s clear people think Shay’s staying at your house. Or else they think you’re Shay.”
I shake my head at the irony. “Look, Lieutenant—”
“Call me Bo,” he says. “Here’s what probably happened. Someone came over here to get the papers and couldn’t get inside so they decided to put you on notice. Shooting up your windows was a warning for you to keep your mouth shut. To show they mean business.” He sighs heavily. “Still, you’re gonna need some protection. I’ll leave my man here with you for the night. But that’s clearly not a permanent solution.”
“Listen,” I say more to myself than to him. “I’m going to call Shay and tell her to get back up here. I said I’d be a baby-sitter, not a sitting duck. She got us into all this and now she doesn’t even want to release the damn interview anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s no longer politically expedient,” I say, sticking burrs of bitterness into my words. “The Duke wants to run on competence, not ideology.”
“Can’t your husband do it?”
“I don’t know. A few days ago he said he wasn’t interested. He’s sort of disillusioned, my husband. Actually, he’s gotten kinda cynical. Politically, I mean.”
“As long as it isn’t personal,” Bo mumbles.
I flush. This man puts a little English on everything he says, a spin that makes his words sound super-suggestive.
“Now I want to check out the house,” he says, moving down the hallway to the kitchen.
I watch him walk away.
He’s a come-on kind of guy.
He looks like the kind of man who prefers nooners to nocturnal sex. He looks like the kind of man who doesn’t bother to rest his weight on his elbows or wait for his partner on the first go-round. He looks like the kind of guy who says exactly what he’s doing right while he’s doing it. He looks like the kind of guy who’s done it in a sleeping bag and on a sandy beach without a bl
anket.
As for me, it suddenly seems I’m going to guest-star in a rerun of Charlie’s Angels. Or better yet, Mod Squad. That was more my speed. My biggest problem at the moment is making myself believe that this kind of melodrama is real. I’ve got to reprogram myself to remember drug smuggling and semiautomatic weapons and cops and robbers are not just TV pap, but play on the big screen of real life as well.
A few minutes later Barney arrives. He gives me a quick hug, asks about Amelia and then runs upstairs to my bedroom. When he returns, he looks shaken.
“This is wild,” he says, shaking his head in disbelief. “I think you and Amelia should come stay over at our place.”
I say no so definitively that he looks insulted.
“Well, then, I’ll stay here with you. That’s probably better than waking Amelia up and moving her in the middle of the night.”
“I’m too freaked out to leave right now,” I explain apologetically. “But it’d be great if you stayed here.”
Then, to distract him, I repeat Bo’s theory about Jerry Russo’s friends being responsible for the shooting.
When Bo returns to the den I introduce the two men and right away they start exchanging Jerry Russo stories.
“Natalie said you think Russo sets this up,” Barney begins. “He’s a real lowlife, but I don’t think he’d go this far, shooting up someone’s house. He’s a front man. I know he’s totally corrupt, maybe ninety percent of his clients are illegal, but I don’t think he’d do anything like this.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” Bo counters. “He might not actually do it himself, but he wouldn’t have any qualms about sending out someone else to do it. Don’t forget, that interview could get him in a world of trouble. It was careless of him to leave it somewhere that it could get stolen. I don’t know how he came into possession of it but it had to be illegally. He’d be in a lot of trouble if the government traced the document back to him.”
“You know, the D.C. Bar Association started disbarment proceedings against Russo this spring for mismanagement of an estate he was handling,” Barney says.
Bo begins making departure moves. “I’d like to hear about that. Can I give you a call sometime?”
“Sure.”
“Barney’s offered to spend the night with me,” I tell Bo.
“Okay. Then I’ll just have a squad car make periodic checks on the house. That should do it, with Mr. Yellen here inside.”
But Bo doesn’t look at me as he speaks and his voice has changed noticeably. I should have known. Bo is touchy. He doesn’t like people going over his head or behind his back. He doesn’t like it that I made my own arrangements. Now he probably thinks I was afraid to stay alone with a black cop all night. Now he’s looking at me like I’m your basic White Woman, totally prejudiced, totally predictable. Totally fucked.
After Bo and the other policeman leave, I sit down with Barney in the den.
“What’d he say you should do?” Barney asks.
“He thinks I should leave town.”
“I think he’s right. It’s dangerous for Amelia and you because those guys think Shay’s here.”
“Maybe I should take Amelia out to Marge’s,” I suggest.
“Well, I can’t help out with her this week. I’m tied up with a big case that’s finally coming to trial tomorrow. But why the hell can’t Shay come back here and take care of her? Why do you have to do it? Too bad you can’t just get a divorce from her like I did. End the misery.”
I shrug. “Listen, Barney. Right before this happened I called Shay down in Atlanta, and she said she’d changed her mind about releasing the interview. She said the Dukakis people don’t want any issues like that raised right now. They don’t want any scandals; they don’t even want any ideology. No nothing. Dukakis is planning a campaign based totally on his administrative competence in order to look like the logical successor to Reagan. So Shay jumped right on the bandwagon and promised to kill her own story. The one she was ready to kill for, right?”
“That’s my girl,” Barney says, shaking his head with faux pride. “What a turkey.”
We look at each other for a while, each of us thinking about Shay. When Barney speaks again he sounds regretful.
“You know, this Fawn Hall cocaine story could hurt Ollie North a lot. It could undermine his whole Boy Scout defense. Shay’s a flake to drop it right now.”
When we both begin to fade, I go upstairs to find some clean linens. After helping Barney make up the sofa bed, I go back to the guest room and crawl in beside Amelia. Then I lie wide-eyed in the darkness, thinking about the attack on my home. My rage at Shay grows exponentially as I envision what might have happened to Amelia and me; I sleep only intermittently throughout the night.
Barney has already left when Amelia and I get up the next morning. By eight-thirty we finish breakfast. Eli still hasn’t called. I phone the Omni again; he’s not in. I leave another message saying something urgent has come up. But I feel ill. Weak. Faint. I suspect I have stumbled upon evidence of adultery.
The ache I begin to feel about my marriage starts hovering somewhere around 9.5 on a scale of 10. It would hit 8.7 on an Olympics Scoreboard and maybe 7.6 on the Richter. A mood ring would turn a serious blue; the Minnesota Multiphasic would register high levels of both depression and anxiety. If my discomfort were a movie star, it would have to be Bette Midler.
Finally I settle down enough to call the glazier company with the largest ad in the Yellow Pages. A dispatcher promises to send out repair people within two hours. At nine o’clock I telephone Shay. She answers the phone sluggishly.
“Shay, something’s happened.”
Pause.
“To Amelia?” There is panic in her voice.
“Oh, no. Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you like that. No, what happened is that after I talked to you last night I went upstairs to give Amelia a bath and while we were in the bathroom someone fired a gun through my bedroom windows.”
“What? Are you kidding?”
“No.”
“I can’t believe it. Who did it? Why?”
“Well, Bo—Bo’s the detective on our case—thinks Jerry Russo told the drug dealers you took Fawn’s interview and that you were staying here at my house. That’s his theory. But Barney says Jerry would never do anything like that. He says you guys have known Georgia for years and that—”
“I can’t believe this.” Shay sounds desperate, wild. “Really, this is too much. I just can’t believe it. Poor Amelia. Poor you.”
“So?” I prompt.
“I can’t think what to do right this second,” she says. “Give me a few minutes to talk to Mickey and I’ll call you right back.”
Five minutes later the phone rings.
“Okay,” Shay says. “How about you taking Amelia and going out to the Hamptons?”
“Oh, great. So Jerry Russo can get a better bead on me? So he won’t have to use one of those telephoto lenses to kill us? You’re nuts, Shay.”
“No. No. Listen. Mickey’s got this huge house in East Hampton. Jerry Russo lives in Southampton. But that’s not the point, Nat. They’re looking for me. You’ll be safe there. Anyway, here’s the deal. Mickey wants to return the papers to Jerry. To stop all this craziness. To put an end to the whole thing. So he’ll catch the first plane to New York and meet you out on Long Island. That way you and Amelia will be safe and you’ll even get a half-assed vacation out of it; That asshole Christopher is down here traipsing around with absolutely nothing to do. Everything would have been okay if he’d just stayed home. Have you ever been to the Hamptons, Nat? You’ll just love it out there. When I call you back with the directions, I’ll tell you who all to phone while you’re out there. You’ll have a blast—and just remind me to reimburse you for the plane tickets.”
“Yeah, fine,” I say.
I’d say “fine” to anything right now because, frankly, I don’t give a damn anymore.
“Anyway, let me just say hi to Amelia.”
“I’m a little shaky this morning,” I say. “But I’m going to take Amelia and go up to the Hamptons this afternoon to, meet my sister’s … boyfriend, Mickey Teardash. I’m going to give him the papers so he can return them to Jerry Russo. He thinks he can make some kind of deal with Russo so they’ll leave us alone.”
“Are you sure that’s what you want to do?” Bo asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’ll be throwing away a big opportunity. All that political leverage you talked about at Café au Lait. Remember?”
“Bo, they’re trying to kill us.”
“Whose decision was it? To give back the interview, I mean.”
Now I feel embarrassed because I let Shay get me into all this trouble in the first place and then let her decide how and when to end it. In fact, I’m too ashamed to admit the truth.
“We all decided,” I lie. “It’s obvious what we have to do. It’s too dangerous any other way.”
“Would you give me a chance to talk to Russo before you return the papers?”
“About what, Bo? Gee, I don’t know. Mickey and Shay want us to get them back as fast as we can.”
“Well, would you mind if I go up there with you? I can provide some security. A little show of force won’t hurt your case with Russo at all.”
“I’d like that more than I can tell you.”
I mean what I say and he knows it.
So we end up flying to Islip on USAir at one o’clock that afternoon. Before we leave I oversee the replacement of my bedroom windows, pack for me and Amelia, roll and fold the Fawn Hall papers so that they fit like a lining on the bottom and up the sides of my big shoulder bag, and close up the house.
Eli-doesn’t call. He clearly did not get the messages I left late last night or first thing this morning. He clearly did not spend the night in his own hotel room. In that closet of my consciousness where my sense of Eli resides, there rages a firestorm of anger and grief upon which I close the door.
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