Mistress

I don’t favor facial hair, but even if I did, I wouldn’t shape it like a handlebar. I’d probably go with the two-day stubble Don Johnson wore in Miami Vice. That would be cool.

“You crossed the centerline three times in one block,” he says.

I decide to exercise my right against self-incrimination. And pray that he doesn’t ask me what’s in my bag-like night-vision goggles or a used smoke alarm or some rudimentary tools. Or the body frosting I took from Diana’s closet.

I need to get home. I need time to think, to figure this out.

“Have you been drinking tonight, sir?”

He’s standing pretty close to me. One of the hazards of pulling over a motorcyclist. I could reach over in jest and grab his baton or the handcuffs on his belt, maybe his holstered weapon, before he could say doughnut. He probably wouldn’t think it’s funny.

But if he gets too inquisitive, I might not be joking. I may have mentioned that sometimes I don’t trust myself.

“Sober as a priest,” I answer. Actually, my priest when I was growing up, Father Calvin, was a raging alcoholic.

“Something upsetting you tonight?” he asks.

Well, the night started off okay, when I successfully planted surveillance equipment in the home of the woman I love. It took a turn for the worse when she later plummeted to her death. HOW DOES THAT SOUND, COP?

“Fight with my girlfriend,” I explain. “Sorry about my riding. I was just a little worked up. I’m totally sober and I’ll drive home carefully. I’m on the Hill, just five minutes away.”

I can play normal when I have to. He looks me over for a while, watches my eyes, and then tells me to sit tight. He takes my license and registration back to his vehicle. He isn’t going to find anything interesting. I don’t have a criminal record-not one that he’d find, anyway.

Ulysses S. Grant was once stopped for speeding on his horse. The fine was twenty dollars and he insisted on paying it. Franklin Pierce was once arrested for hitting an old lady with his horse, but the charges were dropped.

“You’re a reporter,” the cop informs me when he returns. “The Capital Beat. I’ve read your stuff before. Thought I recognized the name.”

Actually, I’m the White House correspondent, and I also own the company. The benefits of having a wealthy grandfather. Does that mean he won’t write me a ticket?

Nope. He cites me for reckless driving and crossing the centerline. It seems duplicative to me, but now is not the time to engage in a debate about logic. I just want him to let me go, which he’s going to do, albeit with tickets for moving violations. That’s the good news. The other good news is that, in a bizarre way, this cop has calmed me down, forced me somewhere toward normal.

The bad news is that now I’ve been placed near Diana’s building within an hour of her death.

Chapter 6

I don’t sleep but I dream: of a gun on a bathroom floor; of a woman prone on a sidewalk; of blood spatter on a shower curtain; of vacant, lifeless eyes; of a scream nobody can hear; of a blood droplet in free fall, taking the shape of a sphere before striking a surface without a sound.

“Diana,” I say aloud. My head pops up. I get up from the second-floor landing and rush downstairs. Did I hear her voice?

“Diana?”

I check the kitchen, the family room, the bathroom.

Outside, the darkness is gently dissolving. Dawn. Seven hours have passed in what felt like seven decades, torturous, agonizing. My body is covered in sweat and my pulse is just starting to slow. My limbs ache and I’m breathing as if someone is standing on my chest.

I race to the front door and look through the keyhole: a white panel truck is parked directly outside my town house. Coincidence? A couple of joggers are running through Garfield Park, across the street. My neighbor’s giant schnauzer, Oscar, is urinating on my brick walkway. Giant schnauzers freak me out. People should only have the small kind. They don’t make sense being that tall. They remind me of Wilford Brimley for some reason. That guy’s been sixty years old my entire life.

President Johnson had at least three dogs, mostly beagles, including two he named Him and Her. George Washington kept foxhounds, but he loved all dogs. During the Battle of Germantown, his troops came upon a terrier that belonged to British general Howe, his sworn enemy. His troops wanted to keep it as a trophy, but Washington bathed it, fed it, and then called a cease-fire so that one of his men could return the pooch to his owner across enemy lines under a flag of truce. FDR had a dog he took every-

Just then, a kid appears out of nowhere and hurls a newspaper at my front door.

I duck down, which makes no sense, then silently curse Paper Boy-he’ll get his, one day soon-and then decide that I should probably have taken my medicine last night. But no time for that now. I need to get out of here.