Mistress

I turn to see a woman standing behind me, alone, dressed in a loose-fitting blouse and blue jeans, more casual than I might have expected for a visitation. She looks to be about Diana’s age, so I’m guessing local, a high school classmate or neighbor.

“Hi,” I manage. It comes out weak, through a full throat.

“I’m Emma.”

“Ben.”

“You’re from DC?” Emma asks. She’s a tad overweight, a round stomach, possibly pregnant, but I don’t dare ask. I’m not that stupid.

I nod. “You?”

“High school,” says Emma. “I still live in town. My husband’s a math professor at the university. Do you work at the same PR firm as Diana?”

PR firm? Diana didn’t work at a PR firm.

“Yes,” I answer. “I do.”

She shakes her head-bemusement, not admiration. “That must be something, living out there. All the fighting and spinning and talking heads.”

“Diana-Diana talked about it a lot?”

“Oh, I don’t know about ‘a lot.’ We’d lost touch. I’d see her when she came back in town, maybe once a year around holidays, that sort of thing.” She smiles absently, recalling a memory. “I remember when she graduated from UVA-”

She didn’t graduate from UVA. She didn’t even go to UVA.

“-and she took that job on the Hill.”

She didn’t take a job on the Hill after college.

Here: Diana was a sophomore at Wake Forest, a poli-sci major, when she got pregnant. The history professor who knocked her up talked her into an abortion. She complied, it tortured her, and she dropped out of school and moved to DC. She was a housekeeper at then-congressman Craig Carney’s apartment. Then, history repeating itself, she started an affair with Congressman Carney. He recognized her brains as well as her beauty, and when Carney became deputy director of the CIA he elevated her to her current position as a CIA White House liaison. He also put her up in a nice place in Georgetown. The affair ended, Diana picked up the rental payments on her own, and she kept the job with the CIA.

“That’s what she called it, the Hill. She was so excited. She said she might run for Congress someday.” Emma shakes her head, lifts her shoulders in frustration. “What-I mean, does anyone know why she would take her own life?”

I look up at the ceiling. This is an interesting development.

“Sometimes,” I say, “you just don’t know a person.”

Chapter 13

George Hotchkiss is retired, a former middle manager with Madison Gas and Electric. He was born in pre-World War II London and came to America in the 1950s to study engineering at Purdue University. There he met Bonnie Sturgis, whom he married on November 23, 1963, the day after JFK’s assassination.

He’s also a domineering, violent prick, according to Diana.

“George Hotchkiss,” he says to me with a dour expression, slowly extending his hand. He looks like he once had significant upper body strength, probably pumped iron, but now has about twenty pounds layered over that flabby muscle.

“Ben Casper, Mr. Hotchkiss. I’m very-”

“Say the name again?”

That stops me a moment. “Benjamin…Casper.”

It doesn’t register with him. “How did you know Di?”

Cognizant of Emma, whom I’d just told that I worked with Diana, I keep it vague. “I was a friend of hers in DC,” I say. “She was wonderful,” I add, to change the subject. “The best.”

He takes the measure of me. I don’t get the sense he’s coming back with a positive read. The feeling is mutual.

“She never mentioned you,” he informs me, which is sweet of him.

“Well, she loved you very much, sir.” That’s a lie. Diana couldn’t wait to get out of Madison. It had nothing to do with the town and everything to do with her parents.

Moving right along. Diana’s mother, Bonnie, is no picnic, either. She appears to be a couple of vodka martinis past the intersection of sober and appropriate. Her eyes are bloodshot and her words are a bit slurred. I’m offended for Diana’s sake. A mother should be strong for her daughter at a time like this, right?

We have to be strong today, Ben. It’s what Mother would have wanted.

Well, maybe I’m being too judgmental. Everyone grieves differently.

“I don’t remember ever hearing your name,” Bonnie tells me.

“Right, your husband mentioned.”

Next up, brother Randy. Diana had a weakness for the kid. He had a rough patch in his early twenties. He’s supposedly interning now at a local TV news station in the sports department, though as I look at him-short, rough complexion, small, liquid eyes, hair in all directions-I see that he has a face for radio.

“She talked about you all the time,” I say, which is a stretch. “All good.”

“I doubt that.”

I almost laugh. “It’s a very nice visitation.”

“Wake,” he says.

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s a wake. We’re Catholic. We call it a wake.”

Well, then. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

His eyes narrow. “You knew her how?”

“We were friends.”

“Good friends?”

I think of many ways to answer that but just say, “Yeah.”

“Hmph.” He nods slowly. “Well, if you were good friends with her, Mike-”

Ben. My name’s Ben.

“-then maybe you can tell me why she would kill herself.”