Murder at Union Station - Margaret Truman [1]
He had been at the bar with Winard Jackson, an up-and-coming tenor sax player, when another friend brought Kathryn and a female friend into the room. If there was such a thing as love at first sight, Kathryn experienced it that evening, and try as she might to appear cool and disinterested, her immediate infatuation with him was almost comically obvious. Marienthal’s black musician friend, Jackson, eventually whispered in his ear, “I think the lady’s smitten with you, man. Time for me to split.” Marienthal and Kathryn were soon alone at the bar, where they lingered over fresh, bubbly tap beers.
It became apparent to Kathryn as they drank and talked that this Richard Marienthal was different from other young men she’d met since moving to Washington six years ago to pursue a career as a librarian. First hired by the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Library of Genealogy and Local History, she later landed a plum job at the prestigious Library of Congress, where she still worked. The daughter of a plainspoken Kansas pharmacist, Kathryn found most other men with whom she’d worked or dated too slick and sure of themselves, consumed with their appearance, terminally ambitious, and always pretending to know more than they did. Like Geoff Lowe, the young man practicing putting with Rich on the grounds of the Hamilton Princess.
Marienthal was none of those things. He was big and tousled, a teddy bear type. His face was boyish, although she judged him to be in his late twenties or early thirties. His smile, too, was boyish, meaning it looked the way it probably had when he was a little kid, with a hint of mischief in it. Smiles change with age, she knew, but his hadn’t. She liked it. This night in Irish Times, he wore a gray-and-red-checked shirt, baggy chino pants, and a tan safari jacket frayed at the neck.
Slightly tipsy, they decided to have dinner together, after which he escorted her home to her apartment on the fringe of Foggy Bottom. She hoped he would kiss her good night, which he did, lightly, like a campaign promise, without commitment. She hoped he would commit to seeing her again, which he also did, saying he would call the next day. He kept his word.
“He’s so gentle and kind, and really funny,” Kathryn told her sister back in Topeka on the phone that night. “And he’s a writer, too. Very handsome in a rugged sort of way, but not macho, if you know what I mean. He’s tall. I mean, a lot taller than me. I kidded that we’d have trouble dancing together. Know what he said? He said he’d install a little microphone in one of his shirt buttons and I could talk into it.” She giggled. “Know what else he told me? He told me my glasses not only make me look smart, they make me look sexy.” Kathryn Jalick had worn big round-shaped glasses since junior high school. She had never been happy about having to wear them—until this night. She and her sister laughed. Kathryn’s sudden acceptance of her black-rimmed glasses was symbolic of her acceptance of the large young man.
Three months later, she moved into Marienthal’s apartment in the Capitol Hill district, a block from the bustling Eastern Market at Seventh and C Streets, where they’d been living since, discovering more about each other every day and liking what they learned; haunting the market in search of fresh produce and honing their cooking skills for small dinner parties with friends; lazing in front of the small fireplace when the winds blew and ice covered the streets of Washington, D.C.; and strolling the neighborhood on Sunday mornings, buying the papers and going back to bed, where they usually spent