'Most surprises are unexpected,' she replied. Good one. I made a mental note to stop using that clich'e after all these years.
She swirled the wine around in her glass and said, 'Sorry to intrude on your sanctuary, but I need to talk to you in confidence again. May I?'
'Of course you can,' I said.
She stared down at the wine rolling around the edges of her glass as she nonchalantly twirled the stem in her hand. After a moment, she looked up at me and said, 'I'm being excluded from every major decision on a case that is supposed to be partly mine. I don't think I'm even being shown working copies of any reports. Drinker's barely speaking to me, and he seems to have carte blanche to do whatever he wants on this case, in whatever way he wants to do it. I don't even think my boss is clued in. Drinker speaks only to Callinger. I think they're the only two guys who know what's going on.'
I let that sit out there as I processed it. I was still leery of being played for the fool, and harbored suspicions that this was some sort of a setup, an attempt to get me to divulge that I was working with an anonymous source, and maybe even Ron Hancock. I reminded myself, You don't know this woman all that well.
'Do you and Drinker talk every day?'
She shrugged. 'He might stop by my office and ask me to do something like call this militia outpost or some gun store or something that seems peripherally connected, at best. He's not really one to make extensive chitchat even in the easiest of times.'
'And you're really not seeing reports? You think about going to Callinger?'
'I did,' she said. 'I said it was bothering me, the way this investigation was being handled. I said I felt cut out of the loop on it. You know what he said? He told me to just stick with it, that it would be over soon enough, and not to worry about how it's going, that there were already plenty enough people worrying for me.'
The chairman was signing 'Fly Me to the Moon' now on what must have been some double album collection. A few guys at a nearby table had sparked up some pretty expensive cigars, something mild, something Dominican, from the scent of them. There was silence between us as Carlos stopped by to pick up our empty glasses and replace them with full ones.
Stevens took a sip of her fresh wine and said, 'I'm hopeful, perhaps naively so, that if you have any information, even unsubstantiated information, about FBI wrongdoing on this case, that you might pass it on to me to investigate.'
That was a tough one. I could just tell her, No, you're wrong. But why? And more important, why brick off a potential source of valuable information? Reporting was often about negotiation, and I still hadn't figured out where I was in this particular situation. So I lied, in the name of good journalism.
'I don't have anything right now, except what I've written for tomorrow morning's paper, which is a story quoting from an internal document saying that the FBI was identifying the shooter as Tony Clawson at least as recently as yesterday afternoon.'
She just stared at me with that one, then took a sip of wine, absently lifting the glass to her lips.
'Right now,' I said, 'everything I know, my readers know. I tend to be like that. I don't keep secrets very long.'
'Well, there's no way that I'm going to just sit back and watch while this investigation spirals out of control,' she said. 'It's an embarrassment for the bureau.'
She looked me in the eyes and added, 'Let me ask you something. That story of yours today. Do you know who the federal informant is?'
An interesting question, meaning, apparently, that she didn't.
I replied, 'Yes. I agreed not to publish the identity so the informant wouldn't be killed, as could well be the case if word got out.'
She nodded, still looking at me. She asked, 'Is it Daniel Nathaniel?'
The question betrayed her profound irrelevance in this investigation, or at least I thought it did.
I didn't answer. I only looked back at her, in silence. She added,
'If it is, don't say anything.'
I didn't, and she eventually looked away.
She spread a hard gaze over my face and said, 'Then I have something else.'
Her tone had changed, as did the look in her eyes. I felt a lump form in my throat, as if something were about to happen, something of significance. My impulse was to blurt out the question, What? but I stopped myself, not wanting to appear too eager, too needy. I coolly met her gaze and said, 'Go ahead.'
'I got access to some computer files.' She hesitated and said, 'We're on background here, right?' I nodded. She went on. 'The files detail all federally paid informants, meaning, if someone's on our payroll for giving us information, they're recorded in the ledgers. Obviously, this information is sensitive, so not everyone is listed by name. Some just have descriptions, like, I don't know, 'Miami dockworker.' You know?'
She paused to collect herself. 'The point is, Drinker told me about telling you of how Daniel Nathaniel is a federal informant. Well, he gave me the information in one of his rare written reports. Anyways, this guy Nathaniel, he's not on the list, despite Drinker's assertion to you that he was. I can't find his name, and I can't find anyone who fits the description. There's not even a militia member on our ledgers from Idaho.'
I drank that in for a moment, stunned at the baldness of Drinker's lie and the fact that his colleague Stevens would call him on it, at least with me. What did it mean? If Drinker was fabricating, it meant that he worked with Nathaniel to concoct the story about the Wyoming militia, in all likelihood to hide something else. What was it they were trying to hide? That was the real question.
Much as I wanted to pursue it right there and then with Stevens, some inner voice told me not to. I think that voice was simply one of distrust. 'That's, well, more than interesting,' I said, dropping it at that.
We sat in a long stretch of silence, until she said, far more conversationally, 'You ever have a week where everything in the world is out to screw you over?' She half smiled.
'Actually,' I said, 'I've had years like that.'
She nodded sympathetically. 'So I'm in Nordstrom's last night. I'm over there buying my father a birthday present, and I'm in the men's shop. I catch sight of this guy who looks so familiar that my heart realizes who he is before my brain does. You know what I mean?
There's a woman with him, and she's holding a pair of pants up to his waist while he's pulling on a new suit jacket. They're smiling, and they're so happy. And it hits me like a club over the head, that's my ex-husband, and he's with another woman.'
'Wow,' I said, more for my own shock than in empathy with hers. I couldn't picture her with a husband, never mind an ex-husband, mostly because I had always associated her with being single and available.
This opened up an entirely new way of looking at her. So with nothing constructive to add at this point, and feeling slightly voyeuristic, I asked, 'What did you do?'
'I was going to just turn away, but he saw me. We met eyes, and he called to me, 'Hey, Sam, how are you?' I had no real choice but to go over, much as I just wanted to crawl into a hole. I walk over there, and the woman, she's still holding the fucking pants up to his waist, just kind of standing there not knowing what's going on. We talked a bit, though I'm not sure about what. My mind was just swimming. He introduced me to her, but just by name. He didn't say, 'Julia, I want you to meet my ex-wife, Samantha. Sam, I want you to meet my girlfriend, Julia.' I don't think I said more than a dozen words, and I just got out of there. I didn't even buy my father's present. I punched the dashboard of my car so hard I almost broke my hand.'
I felt myself recovering from my own surprise, at least enough to ask a couple more worthwhile questions. She was facing me with her elbows on the table, her chin resting in her hands. She looked strangely comfortable unloading to me.
'When's the last time you saw him?'
'About a year. I hadn't seen him since we walked out of divorce court last fall and shook hands goodbye.'
'You obviously miss him,' I said, thinking the statement trite just as the words left my lips.
'I don't know if that's necessarily true,' she said. 'I think I miss my old life, or what I thought my old life would become, which was happily married, looking forward to starting a family, sharing, growing old with someone. Staying in love. Or maybe just not being alone.'
