“I know he worked for the government.”
“And my father?”
“You need to ask Al about that. I wasn’t involved.”
“What’s his story?
“It’s a long one.”
“I don’t have to be anywhere for a couple of hours,” Jake responded, kinder than he needed to be.
“He lost his wife and son a few years back.”
“How?”
“Remember the Air Egypt flight that crashed off the coast of Nantucket twenty-five minutes after take-off?”
“Sure I remember. They suspect the pilot nose-dived the plane into the sea intentionally.”
“It gives me chills just thinking about it.”
“His family was on the plane?”
“Yes,” Marilyn said fading away momentarily. “His wife was a Japanese lady named Miyuki. From the pictures I have seen, she was quite beautiful. And their son was just adorable. An eight-year-old Indiana Jones. Loved archeology. After the accident, Al moved out of his family’s house in Bethesda. There were just too many faces staring at him as he walked the halls, too many voices calling to him from the corners of the rooms. Too many memories. His brother moved into the house and Al moved into my apartment complex. I recognized him from meetings with your father years before, and we became friends. As it turns out, his move to the apartment was only a first step toward reclusion. One day he decided he had had enough. He left his apartment, fully furnished, and moved out to live on the streets. I used to come by and check on him, bring him clothes and food. So did his brother. But after a while he refused to accept things. Said he was getting by just fine and that there were plenty of others who needed help worse than he did.”
“Pretty drastic.”
“There was more to it than just a plane crash. He was supposed to be on the plane. He was called back to the office on his way to the airport. He put his wife and son on the plane by themselves and was going to catch a flight out the next morning. He was planning to take his son to see the Pyramids.”
“Jesus,” Jake said.
“Yeah, he felt responsible. Guilt does things to people that are hard to explain.” ***
Chow Ying smoked his almond-flavored cigarettes and sipped his Tsingtao beer, close enough to smell Marilyn’s Liz Claiborne perfume. He hummed a traditional Chinese song he had heard the old man who ran the hotel sing the night before. Between verses, he listened to the conversation over his shoulder. The woman cried twice, for reasons God only knew. Chow Ying couldn’t care less. He was there for one purpose, to get closer to Peter Winthrop.
“So what did Al say?” Marilyn asked as she finished her third apology in as many drinks, changing the subject back to a more comfortable and less personal topic.
“He said he would look into it. Told me to come back in a couple of days.”
“I am sure he will help.”
“We shall see,” Jake replied. “The whole thing is crazy.”
Chow Ying leaned back to hear the near-whispers of the two behind him. When the young man started ranting emphatically about helping a pregnant girl in Saipan, Chow Ying’s eyes bulged and he almost blew a load of beer on the table. The fun-loving, wise-cracking, opera-singing Chinese mountain swallowed his beer, threw his cigarette into the ashtray still lit, and flipped the switch on his mental mood to business mode. And the only business Chow Ying had on this trip to the States was filling coffins. He had everything but the price of the casket picked out for the two behind him.
The waiter handed the check to Jake who paid for drinks against Marilyn’s weak protest. Employment did have its advantages, even if it was employment for your father under growing suspicion. He folded a fifty in the leather bound receipt holder and left it in the middle of the table.
Jake walked with Marilyn until the subway station was across the street. He said good-bye at the light and raised his hand to flag a cab. Kate was supposed to meet him at his apartment at eleven after her shift of riding ambulances, a part-time job perfecting her emergency medical skills. The thought of Kate, perhaps still dressed in her doctor-like scrubs, was all the reason he needed to get home, and pronto. Their relationship was still torrid. They tore each other’s clothes off every chance they got, and he now had enough shirts and ties at her house to get to work without looking like he’d slept in the gutter.
Jake unsuccessfully tried to hail two cabs before the third one, a handicap-accessible, Red Top minivan, stopped. Chow Ying was twenty yards away, peering into the reflection of the closed window fronts. He bought time by acting as if he were making a withdrawal at the ATM. He watched Jake get into the cab, and eyed Marilyn as she stood on the corner waiting for the light to change.
They were splitting up.
The light moved from red to green as Jake shut the sliding door on the cab. Marilyn stepped off the curb and the heel on her red Nine West shoes caught in the gutter grate, snapping like a twig. Miraculously, the heel remained attached to the shoe, dangling by a strip of leather.
Jake watched out the back window of the cab as Marilyn limped her way across the street. The taxi driver cleared his throat and waited for directions from his fare. As Jake turned his head away from Marilyn and back toward the driver, he looked directly into the eyes of Chow Ying just outside the cab window. No more than ten feet away, Chow Ying stared at Jake with an intent that went beyond any casual glare. The eye lock lasted until Jake gave the driver his address and the cab pulled away from the curb and headed down the street.
Marilyn limped her way to the Metro station, trying to walk with her weight forward on the balls of her feet. Chow Ying turned his attention from the cab, looked over at Marilyn, and smiled. Women are the same everywhere, he thought. Fashion over function. Any man would have just ripped the dangling heel off. Marilyn, single and heading downhill toward fifty, wiggled her body as if she were having spasms, all in an effort to hide the broken heel. It was an act wasted on an empty sidewalk.
The McPherson Square Metro entrance disappears under the corner of a nameless glass and concrete office building with the roman letters MCXI written over the front door. Chow Ying, almost salivating, followed Marilyn across the street, closing on his prey. He looked in both directions as Marilyn approached the subway station entrance and then saw his opportunity. He took two large steps forward and as Marilyn turned to step onto the escalator, he shoved his hand under her armpit and sent her body upward and outward. Gravity did the rest. She bounced hard once on the moving steel stairs with a gruesome thud. Her body continued down in a mass of flailing arms and legs, the movement of the escalator keeping her in motion until the stairs flattened out two hundred feet below. The D.C. subway system boasts some of the longest escalators in the world, and Marilyn hit more than half of the three hundred steps on her way down. Her body lay at the bottom, the contents of her pocketbook and the dislodged broken left heel of her shoe spinning at the edge of the escalator like a boat caught in circular rapids near a dam. ***
The call to the rescue squad came two minutes after Marilyn’s body reached its resting place. It took the genius station manager behind the security glass another full minute to make his way across the tile floor and push the emergency stop button on the escalator. Marilyn’s body was a medical school extra-credit project. Gross cuts mixed with deep gashes. Blood pooled on the floor and on the stairs of the escalator, creating a shiny, sticky ooze. Marilyn would never walk again. Never breathe. Never move.
Detective Earl Wallace said goodnight to his wife on his cell phone and took his foot off the accelerator. His wife of thirty years wasn’t going to wait up, and he was in no hurry to play matchmaker between the living room sofa and his backside. One hand on the wheel of his black unmarked police cruiser, he fished in his shirt pocket for a cigarette, found his favorite vice, and shoved it between his lips.