Stephen White - Cold Case

But giving7 Certainly not from Welle's side of the ledger.

I haven't met too many national politicians in my life. Seeing them on the news, especially when they are engaging in their four most public activities-raising campaign funds, making laws, and either accusing their opponents of impropriety or defending themselves against charges of impropriety-does not leave me inclined to socialize with them. But the point of my disinclination is moot: the fact that I'm not prone to donate money to their campaigns seems, somehow, to interfere with their desire to pencil me into their social calendars.

Nevertheless, my meeting with Raymond Welle had not left me running for a disinfectant shower, as I feared it would.

I was not surprised that Welle was as a smooth and polished as a river stone. I was surprised that I also found him to be affable, gracious, and personable. He was slippery enough to survive in the treacherous waters of Congress, but he wasn't, well, slimy-and the fact that he could actually talk intelligently about the profession we shared pleased me. The platitude-rich national radio program that had carried him to national prominence on a tide of poorly considered quasi-psychological advice and narrow-minded polemics had not prepared me for the possibility that the man might actually have known what he was doing as a clinician.

This new appraisal gave me caution. If I was viewing him accurately, Welle was an effective chameleon, which made him a more dangerous adversary. And despite the tacit cooperation he had offered during our meeting, Welle and his right-hand man, Phil Barrett, felt like adversaries to me.

I was walking down the road from the manse, skirting a Mercedes limousine that was sporting an American flag from each fender, when I heard my name. Loudly, a female voice called, "Dr. Gregory? Hello-o."

I turned to see a thin woman who appeared to be on the northern side of thirty approaching me from the entrance to the tennis house. I stopped and waited for her. She pulled sunglasses from her eyes and perched them on top of her head.

I decided immediately that she wasn't a native. She was dressed in a chocolate brown gabardine suit that was way too warm for a typical June day at the base of the Rockies. Her skin was so pale it seemed to glow from within her like a pearl. The purse she carried screamed "carry-on luggage" and was so large and heavy it caused her left shoulder to sag a good three inches lower than the right.

I guessed Seattle or Portland.

The wind shifted to the west and a noxious blend of good perfume and stale tobacco wafted my way. The combination smelled like an industrial-strength room deodorizer.

The woman was tall and composed, and as she got closer to me I couldn't steal my attention from her eyes. They were large and the color was the deep green hue of shallow water in the Caribbean. From ten feet away she again said, "Dr. Gregory?

It's you, right?"

Damn. I knew that voice. I'd guessed wrong about the Pacific Northwest. This lady was from Washington, D.C.

"I'm Dorothy Levin. We've talked? I'm a reporter with the Washington Post. Ring any bells?"

"Oh, yes."

"Good. Niceties are covered. I know you're a doctor. You know I'm a reporter.

And you know the story I'm working on." She stretched the collar of her blouse away from her neck with her fingers.

"Is it always this hot here? I thought I was going to be in the mountains."

"Common misconception. Summers tend to be quite warm along the Front Range."

"And dry? Shit, I swear the inside of my nose is cracking into a miniature mud flat and my contacts feel like they're made of Saran Wrap."

I was going to go into a relatively lengthy explanation about the value of good hydration in high-desert climes, but decided against it.

"Someplace we can sit and talk? Preferably someplace air-conditioned. I have maybe forty-five minutes till the fund-raiser lets out. They instituted a no-press rule. Pisses me off. Leaves me standing out here in this convection oven."

"I'm afraid I still don't have anything to tell you."

She smiled in a way that clearly communicated "Don't patronize me." Her smile was pleasant enough but I was still having difficulty getting past her brilliant eyes and the tobacco fumes.

"You were just with him, weren't you?" "Him?" I asked, feeling caught and feeling stupid.

She laughed at my lame attempt at being disingenuous, caught herself, and swallowed.

"You know whom I'm talking about. Colorado's next senator Raymond Welle? Six two. Handsome enough. Bad five o'clock shadow. Body mass index just this side of obese. You were just meeting with him, I think?"

"I don't… I don't have anything to say."

She licked her lips.

"I already know about the meeting, Doctor. I'm just trying to be polite, here, generate a little discussion. Tomorrow's editions of the Post will report the meeting you just had with Welle. My story won't say what you two discussed because I don't know yet. But the fact that you just had a private tete-a-tete with Ray Welle prior to a major fund-raising luncheon will soon be national news. The local papers here in this thriving metropolis will pick it up off the wires and then-I promise this on my mama's grave-then you'll get lots of calls from reporters who are nowhere near as pleasant to deal with as I am."

"Why on earth would you want to do that? The fact that I met with Welle isn't news."

She shifted the heavy bag from one shoulder to the other.

"Of course it's not news-yet. So I'll bury the fact somewhere in the story to smoke you out.

Eventually, you'll tell me."

I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

"Am I'm being threatened?"

She scoffed.

"You kidding me? You're being encouraged. This…" she waved her hand back and forth between us-"is encouragement. I say please, you say no. So I say pretty please. You still say no. So I try pretty-pretty please. That's what this is. This is the pretty-pretty-please phase of encouragement. Can we go somewhere? This laptop I have weighs a ton. I'm trying to get them to buy me one of those little tiny ones. You seen those? Couple of pounds. That's what I need.

Color screen, word processing and a modem. I don't need the rest of this shit.

What on earth am I going to do with a DVD or a 3-D video card?"

I wasn't press-sawy. I didn't have any way of judging whether or not she was telling me the truth. Would she really print my name in the next day's Washingon Post? If she did Locard would not be happy with me.

To buy time to think, I said, "Yes, we can go somewhere. My car's around the corner. There's a place a few blocks from here."

"I have to be back by the time this thing lets out." She pointed at the tennis house door.

"I'm not going to kidnap you, Ms. Levin."

"Can I smoke in your car?"

"Not a chance." "Shit. My friends warned me about coming to this state. And you can call me Dorothy."

I've always had an affinity for smart women with an attitude. By the time we got to the restaurant I already liked Dorothy Levin.

"I bet I can't smoke here either, can I?" she asked as she was pulling off her jacket and settling onto a chair in Cucina Leone in nearby Bonnie Brac.

"I doubt it."

A waiter approached and she ordered coffee and two chocolate chip cookies. I ordered coffee.

She said, "I never get enough calories when I'm on the road. Do you have that problem?"

"Will my answer be in your story?"

She laughed.

I said, "Let me ask you something. A journalism question. What's it called when I tell you something but you agree in advance not to use it."

She lowered her chin and batted her eyes.

"I think its called a cock tease, isn't it?"

It was my turn to laugh.