Ed Gorman - Blindside

The crew was starting to close the hotel restaurant. They did so with great and pointed clamor. I didn’t blame them. It was late and they wanted to go home.

Our hands parted. ‘Maybe some other night, Dev. It’s just all so crazy tonight.’

I wasn’t quite sure what had distressed her so much. Given all the campaigns she’d worked on she’d certainly run into moments like those of seeing Sylvia Fordham on TV. Most modern campaigns depend on bombast and calculated revelations. And this revelation had been pulled at the last minute. Maybe it was the hour, the two drinks we’d had, or the simple fact that she decided I wasn’t worth the trouble. So here I was near midnight, isolated again, even though a most fetching woman sat less than two feet from me.

She was out of the booth in seconds. ‘I just need some sleep, Dev. But I’ve really enjoyed our talk.’

‘Me, too.’

In my room I checked messages and e-mails. Tom Ward had written me an especially long message. He wanted to know if he should fly here and help out. He wouldn’t ask any questions on the computer in case we were being monitored. But he used a kind of code to let me know that he had guessed that something big was about to break and that Sylvia Fordham pulling her punch was only a temporary break. He surmised correctly that she’d be back. Sylvia had the vampire gene. You couldn’t kill her.

I wrote back, also in a kind of code, that I thought we could handle things here. Tom would just make things worse. He’d play father to Jeff’s prodigal son and that would only complicate things all the more.

I needed three shots of whiskey to get to sleep. Not anything I wanted to depend on. Thoughts of my daughter and ex-wife came as I felt myself slipping into the soothing darkness. We’d been happy for the first four years. Even now I could smell the baby powder and the baby food and the wonderful scent of our daughter sleeping as my wife and I stood by her bassinet. I had never loved a woman as much as I did my wife in those days. Just thinking about my daughter could make me cry. But somehow I’d smashed it all.

I wanted to be standing next to that bassinet again with my arm around my wife and my tiny daughter sleeping with sweet and utter bliss.

But the dream gods were not kind to me tonight. I didn’t remember the nightmares exactly, but in the morning I was depressed and frightened. I feared for beautiful Erin.

Between the hours of eight fifteen and ten o’clock the next morning I followed Mrs Burkhart from her home. She went to a pricey restaurant, presumably for breakfast, and then drove to a mall. Since tailing her wasn’t doing me much good I was ready to just go up to her in the parking lot of the mall, but there were too many people around. I could hear the news reader now: ‘Eyewitnesses said that a political consultant from Congressman Jeff Ward’s camp accosted Teresa Burkhart in a mall parking lot this morning. Teresa Burkhart is the wife of Rusty Burkhart, Congressman Ward’s opponent in the upcoming election. Police are investigating.’

I didn’t have any trouble finding her inside. The upscale stores were on the second level, east side. She was window-shopping.

She was assessing a display of winter coats. I walked up beside her. ‘I like the belted one.’

She didn’t look at me. ‘You’re stalking me.’

This morning she was dressed as a spy in her black Burberry and cute little faux fedora. She’d changed perfumes. This one had the same power of Eros as her previous one. She was worth every penny he spent on her.

She twisted around. Angry. ‘What the hell do you want from me anyway?’

She said it with crowd-pleasing fury. Shoppers slowed to see what had so displeased the lady. Everybody loves a free show.

‘Why don’t we go have a cup of coffee, Mrs Burkhart? We need to have that talk.’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Then I guess I’ll have to call the police. I think I mentioned before that the police’ll be interested in why you were taking photos of Jim Waters on the day he died. From a car. Without his permission.’

‘Have you ever stopped to consider the possibility that I had his permission?’

‘That’s so stupid it’s not worth answering. So what’s it going to be — coffee or the cops?’

‘I hate you.’

I began walking away. She was good. I got five stores down before she caught up with me. She’d shaken my confidence. I’d started to wonder if she was just going to let me walk away.

Neither of us spoke. We used the escalator. On the ground floor we found a restaurant open and went inside. The motif was medieval. I wondered if grog was on the menu.

I’d only had a piece of toast and coffee for breakfast so I ordered scrambled eggs and hash browns. The waitress kept glancing at Mrs Burkhart, who looked as if she was being held here against her will. When the waitress asked if there was anything she wanted, all Mrs Burkhart did was shake her head.

‘I hate you.’

‘I think the waitress heard you say that.’ I wasn’t joking. She’d said it when the waitress was only a few feet from our table, walking away.

‘I don’t care.’

‘If somebody recognizes who you are, you’ll care. Somebody’ll let the media know that you were seen having coffee with a strange man. And that you might have been having a spat, a lovers’ spat.’

It was bullshit but it worked.

‘What the hell do you want from me?’

‘The truth. Why you were taking photos of Waters.’ I hesitated. ‘And why you were seeing David Nolan?’

For a cunning woman, she wasn’t much good at covering her feelings. She lurched as if somebody had jammed a knife blade into her side. Those rich dark eyes showed panic.

‘I ran into him once. I thought it would be nice to sit down and talk to him. You know, to show that there were no hard feelings. Believe it or not, I like to be sociable. I get tired of all the name-calling.’

‘You saw him on at least four other occasions and I’ve got proof of that.’

‘That’s a lie.’

And so it was. But again the way she responded — eyes averted now, faint sheen of sweat on her forehead, troubled breathing — I knew that my lie had evoked the truth.

‘I need to go to the ladies’ room.’

‘No.’

‘You can’t stop me.’

‘I want you to answer my questions before you do anything else. About Waters and about Nolan.’

‘I’ll answer when I come back.’

She was out of the booth before I could do anything. And what could I do anyway? Tackle her and drag her back? Political consultant was arrested this morning for clubbing a helpless woman to prevent her from using the ladies’ room.

I tried hard to enjoy my breakfast. The eggs were delicious and the hash browns just the way I liked them. Mrs Burkhart was long gone, of course. The only thing I might have accomplished was scaring her into doing something that would reveal what was going on here.

Why had she been talking to David Nolan?

The Sandler College auditorium was a red brick building complete with a church-like steeple and a tree-lined walkway that led to campus. With the sun out and the trees blazing with autumn, I remembered how I’d imagined college life when I was small. I’d read a lot of adventure novels back then and colleges were usually depicted in the books as places where young geniuses met wise older professors who encouraged them to take on tasks that would somehow change the world — open doors to other dimensions, help create a species of super-humans, make contact with beings from other galaxies. But alas, college days, my college days anyway, were mostly about beer, girls, and studying. All of which was fine. But I still wished I’d stood on a hill one night and been contacted by another planet, the way John Carter had been in my favorite Edgar Rice Burroughs novel.