“Handle her or handle what’s happened to Jaime? What is it I’m supposed to handle in this situation where nobody wants me to handle anything at all?”
“Please don’t get defensive.” He finds a corkscrew in a drawer.
“I’m not.” I peel the skin off a sweet onion and rinse green peppers while Benton decides on a bottle of Chianti. “I’m not trying to be defensive. I’m not trying to be anything except responsible, to do what’s right and safe.” I begin to dice. “To do anything I can. I admit I feel I’ve gotten all of you into this, and I don’t know how one apologizes for such a thing.”
“You didn’t get us into anything.”
“You’re here, aren’t you? Latchkey in a hotel room in Savannah, Georgia, with someone who finds it necessary to throw her clothes away. A thousand miles from home and afraid to drink the water.”
Benton opens the wine, and we seem headed for a repeat of our last night together in Cambridge before I came to Savannah against his wishes. In the kitchen, cooking and cutting vegetables, and boiling water, and drinking wine and having heated discussions and forgetting to eat.
“I haven’t talked to Lucy all day because of where I’ve been and what I was doing,” I then say, and he silently watches me, waiting for what I’m really feeling to come out. “And I thought it best to talk to her in person,” I say next. “Not over the phone while I’m riding around in Marino’s loud van.”
Benton hands me a glass of wine, and I’m not in a mood to sip. I’m in a mood to drink, to throw back the entire glass. One swallow and I feel the effect instantly.
“I don’t know how to handle her.” I’m suddenly tearful and so tired I can barely stand. “I don’t know what she must think of me, Benton. How much does she know about what’s happened? Has she been told that Jaime was slurring her words and her eyelids were drooping when I was with her last night and I left her anyway? That I was furious and disgusted with her and just walked out?”
I begin pouring bottled water into a pot, and Benton stops me. He takes the bottle from me. He sets it down and carries the pot to the sink.
“Enough,” he says. “I seriously doubt the tap water has been poisoned, and if it has, then nothing we might do is going to save us or anyone anyway, okay?” He fills the pot and sets it on the stovetop and turns on the burner. “Do you understand your vigilance and that, while much of it is appropriate, some of it isn’t? Do you have any insight into what’s going on with you right now? Because I think it’s pretty obvious.”
“I could have done better. I could have done more.”
“Your default is to feel that way about everything, and you know why. I don’t want to get into the past, your childhood and what certain events did to you. It would sound simplistic right now, and I know you get tired of hearing me say it.”
I sprinkle salt into the water on the stovetop and open cans of crushed plum tomatoes.
“You took care of a parent who was dying and couldn’t save him after years of trying, and that was most of your childhood,” Benton says what he has said before. “Kids take things to heart in a way adults don’t. They get imprinted. When something bad happens and you didn’t stop it, you blame yourself.”
I stir fresh basil and oregano into the sauce, and my hands aren’t steady. Grief moves through me in waves, and most of all I’m disappointed in myself because I absolutely could have done better. Despite what Benton is saying, I was negligent. The hell with my childhood. I can’t blame my negligence on that. There’s no excuse.
“I should have called Lucy,” I say to Benton. “There’s no good reason for my not doing it except avoidance. I avoided it. I’ve avoided it since I saw both of you last at the apartment building.”
“It’s understandable.”
“That doesn’t make it right. I’ll go in and deal with her unless she won’t talk to me. I wouldn’t blame her.”
“And she doesn’t blame you,” he says. “She’s not happy with me, but she doesn’t blame you. I’ve had a few talks with her, and now it’s your turn.”
“I blame myself.”
“You’re going to have to stop.”
“I was incensed last night, Benton. I stormed out.”
“You’ve really got to stop this, Kay.”
“I almost hated her for what she did to Lucy.”
“You’d be more justified in hating Jaime for what she did to you,” he says. “It’s bad enough what she did to Lucy, but you don’t know the rest of it.”
“The rest of it is what we found in her apartment today. She’s dead.”
“The rest of it begins in Chinatown. Not two months ago, as Jaime’s led you to believe, as she led Marino to believe when he took the train to see her in New York. It began in March. In other words, it began not long after Dawn Kincaid tried to kill you.”
“Chinatown?” I have no idea what he’s talking about.
“She manipulated to get you down here to Savannah, to get your help, and she manipulated the FBI, and she sure as hell manipulated Marino,” Benton says. “Forlini’s. I know you remember that place, since you’ve been there with Jaime on a number of occasions.”
A popular watering hole for lawyers, judges, NYPD cops, and the FBI, Forlini’s is an Italian restaurant that names its booths after police and fire commissioners, the very sort of political officials that Jaime claimed ran her off the job.
“Obviously I don’t know all the details she might have told you last night,” Benton continues, “but what you relayed to me later over the phone was enough for me to ask some questions, to look into a few things, not the least of which was the names of the two agents who supposedly came to her apartment and interrogated her about you. Both of them are from the New York field office, and neither of them ever went to her apartment. She talked to them at Forlini’s one night in early March and chummed the water, as Jaime certainly knew how to do.”
“Chummed the water with information about me? Is that what this is leading to?” I decide on a pasta. “So she could put me in a weakened position and show me how much I needed her help?”
“I think you’re getting the picture.” Benton’s face is hard, but he’s also sad. I see his disappointment in the slant of his shoulders and the shadows of his face. He liked Jaime very much, in the old days he did, and I know what he would think of her now, alive or dead.
“That’s a pretty despicable thing to do,” I reply. “Gossip to the FBI that maybe there’s some basis for Dawn Kincaid’s defense. That I’m unstable and potentially violent or was motivated by jealousy. God only knows what she said. Why would she do that? How could she do that?”
“Increasingly desperate and unhappy. Certain that everybody was out to get her, was jealous and competitive and less deserving, when in fact she was the one,” Benton says. “We could analyze her for the rest of our days and never really know. But what she did was wrong. It was unforgivable, setting you up, placing you in harm’s way so you’d do what she wanted, and you weren’t the only person she’d been undermining of late. When I talked to a couple of agents who were around her a fair amount, I heard the stories.”
“Do you have any ideas about what’s happening? About who might have killed her? About who might be doing this? Does the FBI?”
“I’ll be very forthright, Kay. We don’t have a fucking clue.”
I crush fresh garlic and dribble olive oil into the sauce and look for the container of grated fresh Parmigiano- Reggiano. It’s in the refrigerator in a drawer, where Marino put it, and everywhere I look for food or spices or whatever I need, it’s in the wrong place and I feel I’m walking in circles and can’t think straight.
“Maybe you can help me set the table,” I suggest to Benton, as the door opens to the right of the dining area, and I stop what I’m doing. I stand perfectly still.
Lucy’s hair is wet and combed straight back. Barefoot, she’s in pajama bottoms and a gray FBI T-shirt she’s had since she went through its academy.
I want to say something to her, but I can’t.
“There’s something you need to see. Something you need to hear, too,” she says to me, as if nothing has happened, but I recognize the puffiness around her eyes and the set of her mouth.
I know when she’s been crying.
“I logged in to the security camera,” she says, and I look at Benton, and his face is unreadable but I know what he would think of what she’s done.
He wants nothing to do with it and begins to stir the tomato sauce, his back to us. “I’ll finish up here,” he
