“Driving by on your street.”
“Give me two minutes, then drive by again. I’ll jump in.”
“It’s a four-door sedan, white. Not the Benz.”
“Okay.”
He was on his stoop as I braked to a stop. He intended to get in the passenger seat. When he saw Kelly he got in the back. I had the car rolling before he could get the door closed.
“Kelly Erlanger, Willie Varner.”
She wasn’t talking to me at that point — still fuming about me tossing her telephone, I suppose — but she tossed off a “Hi” to Willie.
He grunted at her, then addressed me. “Carmellini, you idiot, what have you got your silly ass into this time?”
Keeping my eye on the rearview mirror, I told it straight, leaving nothing out. The stuff about the archivist was classified, of course, as was the existence of the CIA’s Greenbrier River safe house. Being a convicted felon, Willie Varner couldn’t have gotten a security clearance if his life depended on it. As I saw it that night, one more little felonious security breach wouldn’t blacken my character more than it already was. What the heck, the killers that morning probably didn’t have security clearances either.
When I finished my tale of woe, Willie gave a low whistle. “Jesus, Carmellini. Send you out of town for a day and all hell breaks loose. I never saw you so deep in shit before, man. Gonna need a backhoe to dig yourself out.”
“I should have let them shoot me?”
“Sounds like somebody’s gonna do you sooner or later.”
“You going to help or not?”
“Oh, sure. I’ll pop over to Langley tomorrow and ask to see the director. Get this all cleaned up.”
“Terrific.”
“Like, whaddaya want me to do?”
I held the cell phone up, offered it to him. “I took this off the guy who was driving the crashed car. There must be a bunch of telephone numbers on it. I want to know who they belong to. All of them.”
He didn’t reach for the phone. “I don’t want to go back to the joint,” he said. “I been there and I didn’t like it.”
I took my foot off the accelerator and half turned to look at him.
“Oh, all right!” He grabbed the phone. “Goddamn you, Carmellini.”
As we headed back for his house he muttered — loud enough for me to hear, naturally—“As if I didn’t have enough misery in my goddamn life… goddamn Russian assassins now.”
I could never do anything with Willie when he got pouty, so I didn’t try. Kelly Erlanger knew this mess wasn’t my fault, and she was in high dudgeon, too.
When I was braking to a stop in front of Willie’s house, he said, “They bust down my door and shoot my innocent black ass, Carmellini, I’ll torture you in hell until the end of time.”
He got out and slammed the door. As we drove away, Erlanger said, “What if he calls the police?”
“He won’t,” I assured her. “Willie Varner’s my best friend.”
She made a rude noise, which I ignored.
Erlanger was sulking, doubtlessly angry the killers didn’t wax her, when I remembered Dorsey O’Shea.
Well, why not, I asked myself.
Dorsey lived on that estate overlooking the Potomac, five hundred wooded acres complete with tennis court and swimming pool and a little three-story brick shack with fifteen or twenty rooms, five fireplaces, and a dozen commodes. And Dorsey owed me big for getting her cute little heinie out of the clutches of her porno boyfriend last spring. Surely she wouldn’t mind if Kelly Erlanger and I dropped in unannounced and hid from the law and the outlaws for a few days.
I pointed the car in Dorsey’s direction. We had been driving for fifteen or twenty minutes when Kelly asked, “Where are we going?”
“To visit a friend of mine.”
“She a plastic surgeon? You and I are going to need one if we hope to live out the year.”
“Naw. She’s a rich socialite. Never worked a day in her life, inherited a huge heaping pile when her parents had the grace to die young.”
“So how do you know her?”
“I was her boy toy for a while,” I said flippantly.
“Good Lord! She must be ancient if you were the best she could do.”
“She’s a real old prune,” I snarled. “And she’s got servants. A maid and a cook. Better keep your lip zipped and let me do the talking or we’re liable to wind up in drawers at the morgue.”
“This is your gig, hero. I’ll cling to you and look deeply into your eyes while you talk us into the house. But I want my own bedroom.”
I wasn’t about to tell Erlanger about robbing a safe deposit box for O’Shea. “You don’t know Dorsey,” I explained. “She’s a friend. She’ll be delighted to help. You’ll see.”,
Dorsey O’Shea had a long winding drive, which was cool; you couldn’t see the house from the road.
A Porsche was parked in front of the place. I didn’t think it was Dorsey’s, because she always parked in the garage around back. I parked the heap beside the Porsche and hoisted the suitcase from the trunk. Kelly climbed the stairs and crossed the formal stoop and pushed the doorbell.
I joined her on the stoop with the suitcase.
After a bit the porch light came on.
I heard someone unlocking the door, then it opened.
Dorsey was wearing a slinky black silk thing and a set of high-heeled slippers, and apparently not much else. She had a glass of wine in her hand. It was brutally obvious we had interrupted something.
“What in the name of God are you doing here, Carmellini?” she snarled.
Kelly Erlanger tittered. She leaned against the doorjamb and held her hand over her mouth, and her shoulders began to shake as the laughter went off the scale and she fought for air.
I pulled her hands down. “Hey, get a grip.”
Her whole face contorted and she lost it. Just went to pieces.
I picked her up in my arms and marched through the door, pushing Dorsey aside. “Get the suitcase,” I growled at O’Shea. “This woman’s been through hell and needs a place to sleep.”
As I strode through the living room to the grand staircase, I got a gander at Dorsey’s romantic interest, a balding twit twenty pounds overweight standing by the fireplace with his mouth open.
The guest room that I picked had a nice double bed all made up. “A glass of whiskey on the rocks would be appreciated,” I told Dorsey, who followed me up the stairs and stood twisting her hands in the doorway. She scurried away. I stripped off Erlanger’s shoes and put her between the sheets, then sat down on the edge of the bed as she tried to control her sobbing.
You keep doing that, you’re going to get the hiccups something terrible.”
Dorsey was back with the whiskey within a minute. I took a sip, just a taste test, then offered it to Kelly. She shook her head no.
“Hey, this is medicine. Settle you down.”
She grasped the glass with both hands and took a long pull as if it were milk.
The sobs stopped. She hiccupped once, then belted back another big slurp.
“How can you be so calm?” she asked.
Dorsey was still in the room. I heard her moving behind me.
“What should I be doing?”
“I don’t know.” She worked some more on the whiskey.
“The best thing we can do for those people who got murdered is to make sure their killers don’t get away with it.”
She thought about that, then nodded.
“To do that, we have to stay alive.”
“Okay.”
