Murder at Union Station - Margaret Truman [72]
“I don’t know,” the super said in his singsong voice. “At work. They work.”
“He’s a writer. Right? He works at home. Right?”
“She works someplace else. The library. She is a nice lady.”
So Marienthal is a heterosexual, Mullin thought.
“What library?”
“I don’t know. I swear I don’t know.”
“You seen them today?”
“No. I have not seen them.”
“All right,” Mullin said. “Maybe I’ll be back. That okay with you?”
“Yes. Yes. Okay with me.”
“Good.”
He sat in his car another five minutes before deciding to head home in preparation for dinner with Sasha Levine. Had he stayed another five minutes, he would have seen Kathryn Jalick walk up the street and enter the building. And if he’d been there five minutes after that, he would have seen her exit the building, a frantic look on her face, a cell phone to her ear.
Her first thought upon entering the ransacked apartment had been to call the police. But she stopped herself and decided instead to leave the apartment and go outside, where she called Rich at the River Inn.
“Somebody trashed it?” he said.
“No. I mean, nobody damaged anything. But whoever it was went through everything, the dresser drawers, the desk, pulled stuff out of the closet.”
“They take anything?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know. I saw my jewelry still on the dresser. The TV’s there, the radios.”
“How’d they get in?”
“The door seems okay. My key worked. I checked the windows. They’re locked.”
Rich fell silent.
“I don’t want to stay here tonight,” Kathryn said.
“Yeah, I understand. You want to come here?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Go back upstairs, pack some clothes and a toothbrush, and head over. I’ll be here.”
“One for dinner?” a hostess asked when Tim Stripling entered McCormick & Schmick’s on K Street N.W.
“I’ll sit in here,” he said, walking along the 65-foot bar already crowded with after-work revelers, and found a small table in that portion of the restaurant. It was still happy hour; for $1.95 he could have ordered a giant hamburger to go with the dry Rob Roy a waitress brought him. But he wasn’t in the mood for a burger. He ordered a Crab Louis salad—“Extra Russian dressing on the side,” he said—sat back, and took in the noisy scene. Conversations drifted his way along with smoke from the bar. A young man trying to impress a leggy brunette told her how important he was to his employer, the Department of Agriculture. Another man, older and sitting erect on his stool to hold in his developing paunch, told dirty jokes to two women whose laughter was more polite than authentic. The world’s oldest game was on, Stripling thought, breaking off a piece of bread. An expensive game, all those drinks, and dinner, and maybe tickets to the Kennedy Center or Blues Alley, all in the pursuit of a warm body for the night.
His “game” was also expensive, he mused as he ordered a second drink. It was good Roper had agreed to the raise. Peck had hit him up for seven hundred at lunch, and the superintendent at Marienthal’s apartment building haggled until agreeing to accept two hundred to let Stripling into the apartment. A waste of money; there was nothing of interest in the apartment. You couldn’t hit a home run every time out. Ask the men at the bar who would empty their pockets and go home alone to lick their wounded egos.
“Dessert?”
“What’s on the ice cream menu tonight?”
“Chocolate, vanilla, strawberry.”
“Whip me up a hot fudge sundae with vanilla ice cream. Add an extra scoop, huh. My sweet tooth is aching tonight. Oh, and a couple of extra cherries, too.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
President Adam Parmele and his entourage of advisers and aides, accompanied by those members of the press corps privileged to travel with him—and whose boredom at being on yet another campaign trip was evident—sat in the massive 747 waiting for it to touch down in Miami.
The president was not his usual gregarious and available self this day. On previous campaign flights, he’d ingratiated himself with reporters, making frequent forays from his private airborne