Mistress

Chapter 49

Turns out Liz Larkin is not as warm and fuzzy as she appeared at first blush.

I’ve been in this tiny room at the First District station going on three hours now. My head is ringing and I’m getting incredibly tired from answering the same questions over and over again and repeating my story several times.

I want to help them. I want them to figure out who did this, because Ellis deserves that. But Liz Larkin, I can see, is not treating this conversation similarly. This is no mutual information hunt.

“Let me see if I got all this.” Larkin places her hands on the table in front of me and leans on her arms. She’s within a couple feet of me, which I can live with, but I’d really prefer she use a breath mint.

“Your friend Diana Hotchkiss falls from a balcony. There’s reason to believe she was pushed. You think maybe it wasn’t Diana at all. It was someone else, a body double, because of a missing tattoo above her ankle.”

Right. But really, a Tic Tac, a stick of gum-something.

“Then,” she continues, “after that mysterious death, someone sabotages your fancy little airplane and you have to crash it-but miraculously survive.”

I don’t know if I’d go with miraculous. I like to think it was good flying-

“Then someone shoots up your cottage on Lake Anna with so many bullet holes it looks like the O.K. Corral-but again, you miraculously survive.”

Only because I saw them coming first. It’s called the element of surprise-

“Then someone jumps you in an airport bathroom, threatens you, orders you to stop poking your nose around, but for some reason doesn’t kill you-another miraculous survival.”

Yeah, that one doesn’t make sense to me yet. They could have killed me but didn’t want to-

“And then an associate of Diana Hotchkiss, this highfalutin Chinese lobbyist Jonathan Liu, is found dead in his house from a gunshot wound. You had nothing to do with that, either.” She leans into me. “I have all that right?”

Basically.

“And this is all the work of some grand government conspiracy like the ones you see on the History channel? Reaching all the way to the White House itself?”

Close enough.

“Wow.” She scratches her head. “Sounds like you’ve really stumbled onto something big here.”

Her dead eyes and sarcastic tone tell me that I haven’t sold her yet. I guess I can’t really blame her. It’s pretty hard even for me to believe.

“You know what, Benjamin? Four hours ago, I wouldn’t have given a flying fuck about Diana Hotchkiss or Jonathan Liu because they’re the feds’ problem. But now all the shit you’re in has gotten one of our detectives killed. Someone I’ve known for over fifteen years. Someone with two daughters at Cornell. So now, Benjamin, now I do give a shit. I give a shit very, very much.”

She swears a lot. My father always said that swearing was a sign of laziness. Of course, he was a shit-eating fucking asshole.

Holly Hunter in Copycat nailed the female cop role, in my opinion. She didn’t try to be something she wasn’t. She was courteous and pleasant, but tough when necessary. Anyone who thinks Harry Connick Jr. is just a singer needs to see that flick.

“So now that I give a shit, I want to figure this thing out. You know what we cops do, Ben? When we’re trying to figure something out?”

Consult a Ouija board? Flip a coin?

“We start with the easy explanation,” she says, answering her own question. “So in that spirit, let me ask you a couple of questions that might make this whole thing a little simpler. Is that okay with you, Ben? I mean, since we’re on the same team here and all.”

Angie Dickinson was pretty hot in that old TV show Police Woman. Even more so playing the role of the sex-starved wife in that Brian De Palma flick Dressed to Kill and that TV mini-series Pearl. She was good at playing sex-starved. If she were married to me, she wouldn’t be sex-starved.

Calm down and focus, you idiot. This cop is trying to corner you.

“The first question, Ben: Were you in Diana Hotchkiss’s apartment around the time she was murdered?”

That one stops me. I show a sudden interest in my fingernails.

“Ah, cat’s got your tongue on that one. Okay, Ben, then question number two: Were you in Jonathan Liu’s town house in the last forty-eight hours?”

I look away. I can almost feel the walls closing in on me.

“See, I’ve got a different theory, Benjamin Casper. And it doesn’t involve cover-ups and dark alleys and conspiracies. Wanna hear my theory, Ben?”

I need a lawyer. This is exactly what I was afraid of the moment I saw Jonathan Liu dead in his bedroom.

“I’m all ears,” I say.