Murder at Union Station - Margaret Truman [100]
“Looks like it. Shine ’em up good, huh. I’ve got a heavy date tonight.”
“Good for you, man. Who’s the lucky lady?”
“You wouldn’t know her. She’s foreign. Speaks a lot of different languages.”
“Uh-huh. Brainy type, huh?”
“Yup. Good-looking, too.”
“Best kind, beauty and brains. I’ve known a few of them myself. Two. Or maybe three.”
“I bet you have.”
He paid Jenks and tipped well despite the bootblack’s insistence that it was on the house. Mullin went to the Greenworks Flower Shop on the other side of the Amtrak ticket counter from Exclusive Shoe Shine and bought a small, colorful bouquet. “These won’t wilt, will they?” he asked the shopkeeper. “I mean, they’ll still look nice a couple of hours from now.”
Assured they would last, he paid and went to where he’d parked in a no-parking zone, his MPD permit displayed on the sun visor. The rain had stopped, but he’d stepped in a puddle on his way to the car and wiped off his shoes with Kleenex from the glove compartment. He still had time before picking up Sasha. He found the phone number he had for Richard Marienthal and dialed it on his cell phone. The number was busy. The hell with it, he thought. Might as well be early at the hotel and maybe have a drink at the bar before hooking up with Sasha. After checking that he had breath mints, he drove off, the fragrance of the flowers on the passenger seat filling the car.
Mullin’s attempt to call the apartment shared by Marienthal and Kathryn Jalick didn’t go unnoticed by Kathryn. While he heard a busy signal, she heard through Call Waiting that someone was trying to reach her. But she opted to not put the current caller on hold in order to answer the second call. She was on the line with Rich.
She’d intended to go to work at the Library of Congress the day after she and Marienthal left the River Inn and he’d gone off to wherever he was. But she awoke on edge after a few hours of fitful sleep, and decided to stay at home. As the day progressed, she questioned that decision. Work would have taken her mind off the situation in which she’d found herself. Being in the apartment served as a reminder of recent events and made her captive to a succession of phone calls to which she had to respond—truthfully, it turned out, because Rich had refused to tell her where he’d be staying. When she told callers she didn’t know where he was, she meant it.
Although she hadn’t kept track of the number of calls she took that day, she later estimated it to be more than twenty, many from the media.
Rich’s father had called from New York.
“Hello, Mr. Marienthal,” she’d said after he’d identified himself.
“Is Rich there?” he’d asked, ignoring her greeting.
“No, not at the moment.”
“I’ve left messages,” he said. “Why hasn’t Rich returned my calls?”
“Mr. Marienthal, I—”
“Look, Ms. Jalick, I don’t wish to be short with you, but there’s obviously something terribly wrong. Is Rich ill? Has he been in an accident?”
She tried to laugh the question away. “No, of course not,” she said. “He’s off researching another book. That’s all I know.”
Marienthal’s father’s silence loudly proclaimed that he didn’t believe her. He said, “I’m coming down to Washington. I’m sure you have a way of reaching Richard. Tell him I’ll be there and he must talk with me. This mess he’s gotten himself into goes beyond him. We’re getting calls here from the media, which is very stressful to his mother, who’s not well.”
“I—”
There was a click on the New York end.
Sam Greenleaf, Marienthal’s editor at Hobbes House, called twice.
“I’ve got to get hold of Rich,” he told Kathryn on the first call. “He’s a hot topic with the media. The Today show, CNN, Hannity & Colmes, Inside Edition. Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, frustration in her voice.
“Come on, Ms. Jalick. His book is just coming out, the media is salivating to promote