Oath of Office

CHAPTER 33

Darlene wore a brunet wig in addition to the same white-framed tinted glasses she had on the evening she met with Double M. The disguise worked well. In her tight-fitting jeans and studded leather jacket, Darlene blended in perfectly with the other nighthawks enjoying an early-morning meal at Chef Chen’s. No one in the eatery seemed to recognize the First Lady of the United States, seated alone in a back booth, not far from the kitchen.

Victor Ochoa, on high alert, was at a lacquered table directly across from her. He sipped absently at his tea while constantly scanning the room-especially the main entrance.

The girls weren’t going to show.

Darlene made the briefest eye contact with the man committed to protecting her at all costs, and shrugged. Her pulse had been racing since she met him by the exit in the basement below the White House pantry. Ochoa was driving his private car, and his composure kept her reasonably grounded.

“I need your help finding this girl,” she had said to him on the ride from the movie theater back to the White House. She handed him the stack of photographs that Double M had given to her.

Ochoa studied the images and set them facedown on his lap. “Is she a prostitute?” he asked.

Darlene was stunned. “How did you-?”

“Just a lucky guess. Secret Service agents like to think we’re a special breed of law enforcement, but underneath the dark suits and shades, we’re really all just cops at heart. This her fingerprint?”

“Yes. And that’s a sample of her voice. Her name may be Margo. That’s all I have.”

“That’s a lot. I’ve got a few friends working with D.C. vice. If it’s all right with you, I’ll let them look these over, and see what they come up with.”

What they came up with was the name Margo Spencer, a doe-eyed sixteen-year-old, seasoned call girl, who disappeared shortly after Russ Evans resigned, but before his case was prosecuted. In fact, without access to their star witness, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. opted not to bring the case to trial at all. Evans’s disgrace, the head of the office begrudgingly decided, would have to be punishment enough. The police and FBI could not explain why Margo had disappeared. Because of her age, she’d been spared the limelight that had shone on other women who played a part in the downfall of other well-known public figures.

“I would imagine she’s laying low until the noise surrounding Evans dies down,” Ochoa said.

“I don’t think so, Victor,” Darlene replied. “I think she’s afraid of the people who hired her.”

Ochoa’s contacts gave him the names and photographs of three women who they believed might have been friends with Margo. The three, known to vice as Jewel, MonicaBelle, and Debbi, were still holding on to their looks, and worked for various high-end escort services. They also periodically fed information to vice in exchange for being left alone. Ochoa had been tipped that they often met at Chef Chen’s after finishing an evening of work. The best he could do was to get a message to the one named Jewel that there would be easy money to be made should the three of them stop by Chen’s at two.

Darlene did not sip her wonton soup, so much as she kept stirring it with her plastic ladle. The meetings, first with Evans at the Bar None, then with Double M in the alley, had her on edge, and she had been eating very little.

Victor might be able to sneak her out of the White House once, he told her, perhaps twice more, should the girls be no-shows this morning, but each such departure carried with it increasing risks, most notably with Martin. His tension, as he stepped more and more out onto a rocky campaign trail, was becoming almost palpable, and Darlene felt increasingly uneasy around him. Kim had actually and earnestly suggested they find a way to get some counseling, but Darlene laughed off the notion, replying that trying to do so would be like asking her husband to deal with his fear of heights through a set of skydiving lessons.

She was settling herself down by playing through a number of the more wonderful memories of the early years of their marriage when, at 2:15, the front door swung open and three striking women strode into the restaurant. Darlene looked over at Ochoa, and he confirmed her suspicions with a nod.

The women did not look exactly as they did in their photographs. MonicaBelle, a redhead, was now a platinum blonde with her hair tied back. Jewel wore glasses, and Debbi had morphed from a pixie-cut brunette to shoulder length. They wore elegant stiletto-heeled boots and skintight designer jeans that Darlene put at three hundred a pair, minimum. Their gold jewelry jangled like wind chimes, and she caught the aroma of perfume mixed with the odor of cigarettes as they passed. A closer look, and she upped her initial estimate of their ages to thirty or even somewhere north of that. MonicaBelle and Debbi slid in across from Jewel two booths away. Before too much longer, Darlene found herself thinking, life was going to start getting harder for the trio.

Ochoa waited for the women to place their orders before he approached.

“Oh, handsome,” Debbi said, curling her lower lip in a pout, “I’m afraid our meters stopped running a while ago.”

The three burst out laughing. Ochoa joined in at a reduced level.

“This is easy money,” he said. “You don’t even have to get up.”

“Oooh, kinky,” Jewel said, and the trio exploded again.

Ochoa waited until their mirth had drifted off. Then he swung a chair over from the table behind him, made sure no one was watching, and slid three hundreds in front of each of them. “I’m not here for that,” he said. “I just want to talk.”

Jewel flipped the bills with the edge of her thumb. “This won’t even get us through five minutes at Nordstrom’s makeup counter,” she said.

“Sorry, I’m low budget.”

“Fed?”

“Sort of … Yes or no?”

The women took a silent poll, and nodded. Quickly, the nine hundred vanished.

“I’m not alone,” he said, motioning for Darlene to join them.

“Oh, you are a kinky one,” Debbi murmured, her accent Hispanic.

Darlene took the space next to Jewel.

“So who’s your cute friend?” MonicaBelle asked Ochoa.

“My name’s Brenda,” Darlene said.

Jewel’s pale blue eyes fixed on her, and for a moment Darlene thought her disguise had failed. Then the call girl simply smiled, nodded, and said, “How’re you doin’, Brenda?”

Ochoa was on his feet, hands on Darlene’s shoulders, ready to move out the door if necessary, but the scattered patrons in Chef Chen’s seem to be paying little, if any, attention to them.

Darlene motioned him back into his seat. “Ladies, this handsome guy is Victor. His job is to keep me safe, and thankfully, he’s very good at it.”

“He’s the one who sent that note to me at the agency, right?” Jewel asked.

“You got it,” Ochoa said.

“My kind of man,” MonicaBelle said. “Great hands. That’s how I judge a guy-by his hands.”

Darlene moved the group closer. “Listen, we need your help locating a girl whom we think you know. Can Victor show you some pictures?”

MonicaBelle appeared suspicious. “You gonna try and take back the cash if we don’t know her? Because-”

“No,” Darlene said. “The money is yours regardless.”

The girls took another quick poll, then shrugged their agreement.

“Okay,” Jewel said. “Show us what you got.”

Ochoa brought out a stack of police photographs. He and Darlene chose to avoid any of the ones Double M had taken with his cell phone. He spread the pictures across the table, arranging them so that each woman had some images to examine. Debbi and Jewel looked them over, but their expressions revealed nothing. MonicaBelle, on the other hand, connected with the girl right away.

“This is Angela,” she said.

Darlene tried to conceal her disappointment. “I’m sorry, I should have told you,” she said. “The girl’s name is Margo.”

“Yeah and my name’s Queen Latifah if the price is right,” MonicaBelle answered.

“What are you saying?” Ochoa leaned across the table to ask.

“I mean she might have said her name is Margo or Fargo or whatever,” the woman said. “But I know this girl well. We used to work for the same service. She was younger than me, so I kind of looked out for her. A real looker, in my opinion-natural, if you know what I mean. Didn’t need no makeup-at least not yet. Girl’s name was Sylvia … Sylvia Winger. But she went by Angela.”

Was.

Darlene and Ochoa exchanged tight-lipped glances.

“Well, Angela, or Margo, was coerced by somebody into framing a good friend of mine,” Darlene said. “We promise that we mean her no harm. We just want to talk to her.”

“That’s impossible,” MonicaBelle replied.

“Almost anything is possible. I’m pretty well connected.”

“You could be the pope, for all it matters, but nobody can keep Angela safe now. She’s dead.”

The words, though no longer totally unexpected, fell like hammer strikes.

“Oh, that’s terrible,” Darlene said, her voice breaking. “Do you know what happened to her?”

“She moved to Tampa to be with her mom a few months ago. I got a postcard from her.”

“Do you know how she … died?”

Without Margo, Martin would never believe Double M’s recording was real.

“She drowned,” MonicaBelle said simply. “Washed up on a beach after she’d gone missing from a party. Her mother found my number in her things and called to tell me. You can imagine how she was feeling. Angela was a baby.”

“I’m so sad. Would it upset you if Victor tried to learn the details of her death?”

“We don’t mind,” the woman said. “You really seem like a nice person.”

“So are you-all of you.” Darlene didn’t have to force the sincerity in her voice. She extended her hands, and the three escorts covered them with theirs.

Darlene nodded to Ochoa, who pulled a BlackBerry from his jacket pocket as she looked over his shoulder, watching him key the name Sylvia Winger and the word Tampa into the Google search box. Margo’s photo-possibly from high school, appeared in a search result set that included the girl’s obituary. They read through the short paragraph, and then an earlier account in the Tampa Tribune of her death.

“It says here that the toxicology was positive for alcohol. Three times the legal limit. No one seemed to know or care where she was partying.”

“Accidental drowning,” Darlene said to the women. “It makes sense the police here didn’t know about her death. It wasn’t suspicious, so the Tampa cops had no reason to publish her picture on any of the law enforcement databases.”

“I never knew her to be that heavy of a drinker,” MonicaBelle said, “but then again, I didn’t know her all that well.”

“Victor,” Darlene said, her voice strained, “I need to make a call. I’ll be in my booth. I’ll be right back, ladies. This would be a good time to have the waiter bring your food.”

Back at her booth, she retrieved the cell phone Double M had given her, accessed the preentered contact number, and then pressed Send.

Double M answered on the second ring. “You found her?” he asked excitedly.

“She’s dead,” Darlene said softly, close to tears over the hardness of the world for so many like Sylvia Winger. “We may be at a dead end, ourselves. My husband has forbidden me to discuss the Russ Evans case with him or even to mention his name. I believe you when you say the risk involved if we can’t get Russ Evans back to work is substantial, but without the girl’s testimony, there’s nothing I can do to help.”

“That’s not entirely true,” Double M said. “I think I have another idea.”