Mistress

Eddie Volker parks his Mercedes sedan in the parking garage below his law office. The place is hot and sticky but also dark and private, so it’s not a bad place to wait for him when he comes off the elevator past seven o’clock tonight after a day’s work.

I show my hands when I step out from between the cars. As anyone would, he stops, retreats, and assesses, but then he relaxes when he sees it’s me.

“You’re gonna give me a heart attack, Ben.” He loosens the collar on his dress shirt and takes a couple of breaths.

“Can we talk in your car?” I ask.

Eddie joins me in his Mercedes. The passenger side is full of napkins and food wrappers and unpaid bills. It looks like the interior of my car, which I hardly ever drive.

“You need to know everything, Eddie,” I say. “Before we decide what to do, you need the full picture.”

I give it to him in fifteen minutes. It’s a lot to digest, going back to when someone jumped off Diana’s balcony to now. But he already knows much of this, and say what you want about Eddie’s personal habits and clientele, he has a sharp mind.

He lets out a nervous giggle. “I’ve had all kinds of clients,” he says. “But you may have won the prize for stepping into shit.”

“So what the hell do I do, Ed-”

“First things first, Ben. Right now, if you go online to the Beat, it says the website is under repair and maintenance and will be back soon. It’s an agreement I worked out with Justice. So okay, it’s not ideal. You’ll lose advertising revenue and readers, sure. But it’s not fatal. Nothing about the DOJ shutting you down, nothing about espionage or anything like that. The paper’s reputation is intact.”

“For now,” I say.

“For now,” he acknowledges. “If I were you, I’d focus on solving your personal problems first. Which are considerable, I’ll grant you.” He drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “So…the president is having an affair and the Russians know about it. They’re blackmailing him so he’ll keep quiet while they start rolling their tanks through the old Soviet bloc countries?”

“Basically, yeah.”

“And Diana Hotchkiss is the president’s mistress.”

“That’s my guess. It makes sense.”

“And the US government has made it a point to tell the world that Diana, not some stand-in, is dead.”

“Yeah. The president said it in a press conference. The MPD is saying it. They’ve even coerced Diana’s family into saying it. So the Russians are supposed to believe Diana’s dead. I guess this is how the CIA thinks they’ll thwart the blackmail. If there’s no ‘she’ in the he said she said, then the president can deny the affair and nobody can contradict him.”

Eddie takes all this in. Then he turns and looks at me.

“So if our government has taken care of the problem by faking Diana’s death, why are they still afraid of you, Ben?”

“Because I’m not accepting that Diana’s dead.”

He shrugs. “Yeah, but so what? You’re just some reporter without proof. The president will deny it, Diana’s parents will deny it, and that will be the end of the discussion.”

I give that some thought.

“So I ask again,” says Eddie. “Why does the US government consider you a threat?”

It’s a good question. The right question. If I were trying to cover up an affair, the first thing I’d want to do is remove the mistress from the equation. They’ve done that. They’ve made everyone believe Diana is dead. So what else could-

Oh. Oh, of course.

By George, I think I’ve got it.

But all things considered, I better keep the thought to myself for now.

“Eddie, I have to run, but listen. I wouldn’t ask-but I need some cash.”

“Cash?” Eddie thinks about that. “I’m…not sure I can help you, Ben.”

“Right, I understand-you can’t assist me in any way. I don’t want you to go to prison. I was just thinking, if you had some pocket money on you, that kind of thing. I’m not suggesting you write me a check or anything.”

Eddie is quiet for a while. “I suppose when I’m taking my keys out to start my car, some money could fall out of my pocket that I wouldn’t notice.”

“That could happen, sure.”

“It wouldn’t be more than a couple hundred bucks.”

“It would be a couple hundred bucks more than I have.”

Eddie gets out of the car. As silly as we both find it, he actually takes the cash out of his money clip and drops it to the cement floor. “Oops,” he says.

I don’t pick it up right away. I’ll wait until he drives out of here. Might as well play along with the charade. He can truthfully say he never handed me money.

But he did hand me an idea. I think I know what the US government is afraid of. And I have an idea how I can confirm it.

Chapter 79

Suddenly finding myself forced to economize, I stay at the cheapest hotel I can find. You know it’s a cheap hotel when the bathroom’s down the hall. When “air-conditioning” consists of waving your hand in front of your face. When you can hear the guy in the next room rolling over in bed. When “room service” means they loan you a flyswatter. When the telephone is in the lobby instead of on the nightstand. When there isn’t a nightstand.