That put me in a slightly better mood as I marched up to the front door and rang the bell. You’d think that since I had called, they’d be primed to answer, but two minutes passed before the door swung open. It was Mary, with that toe-curling smile.
I shuffled my feet. “Hey. How’s things?”
She leaned against the doorjamb. “Except for these damned never-ending releases about the things my husband was supposed to have done, okay. Would you like to come in?”
“I’m not in the mood to run into him. Let’s walk.”
We studied each other’s faces. One of the things about Mary was that she always could read my mind pretty well. And one of the things about me was that I always could read her face pretty well. So she knew I was troubled, and I knew she knew, if that convoluted trail of logic makes any damned sense. The point being, we were both on notice.
We strolled down the driveway without saying anything until we got to the street and were passing beneath the naked branches of the trees. The fall had been incredibly warm, but the weather was finally turning frosty, and you could smell rotting leaves and the odor of wood burning in fireplaces.
She asked, “How was Moscow?”
“You knew I was there?”
“I tried calling you at your office. Some grumpy female sergeant told me where you were.”
“Crappy, disappointing, and dangerous.”
“Why was that?”
“There was an ambush. Katrina and I got caught in the middle of it.”
She grabbed my arm. “Oh my God, Sean. What happened?”
“We were in an embassy car when a truck blocked our way. When I turned around there were three goons holding guns.”
“But you’re okay?”
“I’m fine, but an Army captain named Mel Torianski isn’t. Forever isn’t, if you get my meaning.”
Her expression turned sad. “I knew Mel. He worked for Bill. He was always very nice. God, I can’t believe he’s dead.”
“The ambush was intended for him… one of those wrong-place-at-the-wrong-moment deals for Katrina and me.”
Okay, yes, I was lying to her. Shame on me for that, but I was offering her plausible deniability. Given her employer and those lie detectors, she might need it. On a more selfish note, the fewer people who knew of Katrina’s and my little conspiracy to conceal the truth, the better. As I mentioned earlier, I’m a lawyer.
Anyway, she was shaking her head. “Poor Mel. I always liked him. I don’t get it, though. Why would anybody want to kill him?”
“I don’t know. The Russian police said it was Chechens. Some of your spook buddies were looking into it, but obviously weren’t sharing their theories with us.”
“Well, I’m just glad you’re okay.”
I drew a few breaths and wondered how to approach this next point, because frankly it was delicate, delicate, delicate. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t any way to soft-shoe into it.
“Mary, I’ve also learned a great deal about your marriage.”
She didn’t say anything, so I continued, “For example, about Janet Winters, and how you played hardball to get rid of her.”
“That was years ago,” she replied.
“Yes, it was. And I learned that Bill subsequently screwed around on you more times than I’ve brushed my teeth. I learned all about the Siberian Nights Escort Service, and all the other women he was sleeping with. You knew about them, too, didn’t you?”
“I do now,” she admitted.
“Why didn’t you warn me about this?”
She looked away and replied, “How did you learn about it?”
“Adultery is on the list of charges. Bill put us on to his former secretary, and folks in the embassy told us about the rest.”
She turned back to me with a sad, resigned smile. “I’m sorry. I know I should’ve told you. I thought about it a few times.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“No, you’re right. Which reason do you want to hear? The one that will make me sound good or the truth?”
“Start with the truth. If that’s too ugly, we’ll take a stab at the prettier one.”
She started walking. “All right, truth-Bill wasn’t the man I thought I was marrying. You’ve never heard that one before, right? When we were dating he seemed so damned perfect-kind, solicitous, witty. He can be incredibly charming when he wants to.”
“But he changed afterward?”
“Not really, no,” she said, seeming perhaps confused, or maybe troubled. “He was a good husband. Parts of him were hard to take… his vanity, his ambition. Irritating things, certainly, but in the scheme of things, not worth wrecking a marriage over.”
“And when you discovered Janet Winters?”
She looked at the ground and chuckled. “There was a bad day. I learned about her from the charge card entries. Do you believe it? I don’t know what made me madder-her or the prosaic way he let me discover it.”
“Her, would be my guess.”
She nodded. “I confronted him, of course. We’d just had Courtney a year or two before. I was shocked… heartbroken… every stereotypical thing you expect a cuckolded wife to be. And he was everything you expect a cheat to be. He swore it was the first time, that he’d been stupid, crazy, was sorry, and the rest. He promised it wouldn’t ever happen again.”
“And you believed him?”
“I wanted to. I went through the next phase every wife who’s been cheated on goes through. I wondered what I did wrong, how I wasn’t meeting his needs, the whole list of insipid questions.” She paused to chuckle again, I suspect not because she thought it was funny, but the opposite. “I went on a diet, opened an account at Victoria’s Secret, took cooking lessons. You wouldn’t have recognized me.”
“And then Moscow?”
She nodded. “The second time around you don’t get hysterical. Trust me, I’ve read every pop psychology book there is on the subject. The second time, you either divorce them, kill them, or become resigned to it. I obviously didn’t divorce or kill him, so you know the second half of this tale.”
“Did you confront him?”
“No.”
“That’s a little odd, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps. I thought my reasons were good. In every other way, our marriage was strong. The kids were happy and I didn’t want to destroy that, either. What I did was stop having sex with him.”
“He didn’t wonder why?”
“He knew why. He didn’t want the ugly confrontation either.”
“Okay, I got all that. How come you didn’t warn me?”
“We’re still on the truth?”
“Still there.”
“I was too embarrassed. I… well, I couldn’t tell you.”
“Because we used to be an item.”
“Exactly. For some odd reason, I wanted you to believe we had a perfect marriage.”
“Silly reason.”
“I guess.”
I took another deep breath. “By the way, I met Alexi Arbatov. Nice guy.”
Her face turned blank. “You… you what?”
I thought if I slipped that in damned quick, we’d get past the hard part. This falls under the old mashed-
