Mistress

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Let’s see what she has in her medicine cabinet. I mean, as long as I’m here.

Careful, though. Before you turn on the light, close the bathroom door. The rest of her apartment is dark. Best to keep it that way.

What do we have here…lotions, creams, moisturizers, lip balm, ibuprofen. What about the meds? Amoxicillin for a sinus infection…lorazepam for anxiety…

Diana has anxiety? What the heck does
she
have to be anxious about? She’s the most put-together woman I know.

And what’s this? Cerazette for…birth control. She’s on the pill? Diana is on the pill? She never told me that. She isn’t having sex with me. Not yet, anyway. So who
is
she having sex with?

Diana, every time I think I have you figured out, you remind me that you’re a mystery.
A mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma
—Joe Pesci’s line from
JFK
,
though Winston Churchill first used it in a 1939 radio address to describe Russia. President Roosevelt, who grew very close to Churchill during the war, once wrote to him,
It is fun to be in the same decade with you.

Diana, it is fun to be in the same decade with you. Now excuse me while I check out your bedroom closet.

Same drill: get inside, close the door, then turn on the light. Keep the light from filtering into the remainder of the condo.

Whoa. At least a hundred pairs of shoes, meticulously lined up. Stuart Weitzman stilettos. Black knee-high Manolo Blahnik alligator-skin boots. Roger Vivier heels with a satin-rose toe. Red Jimmy Choos. Pink Escada evening sandals. Black Chanel pumps, appropriate for the boardroom or a five-star restaurant.

Woodrow Wilson favored white dress shoes with his linen suits. Lincoln had the biggest presidential shoe, a size 14, while Rutherford B. Hayes had the smallest, a size 7.

You’ll have to excuse me. Sometimes my mind wanders. Kind of like Moses through the desert. Except that he had a better excuse. And a speech impediment—unlike me, unless you count putting your foot in your mouth.

Anyway, that’s a long story, so back to our regularly scheduled programming: Lady Diana’s Closet. And what do we have here, hanging behind a row of dresses, hidden from all but the keenest of voyeurs? Hmm…

Leather vests and headgear. Chains and whips. Vibrators of various kinds and colors. One of them is purple and curved on the end (I’m not sure why). Most of them are shaped like the male organ, but some have appendages for some reason. There are some black beads on a string…what are those for? Nipple rings—I get that, I guess. Creams and lotions. A long yellow feather—

Then I hear it and see it and feel it all at once—movement across the carpet, brushing against my leg, circling me—

“Hey, Cinnamon,” I say after the momentary terror dissipates and the prickling of my spine ceases. Diana’s Abyssinian cat, three years old. The word
Abyssinian
is Ethiopian, but the origin of the breed is believed to be Egyptian. Isn’t that weird? Abyssinians have bigger ears and longer tails than most cats. Their hair is lighter at the root than at the tip; only a handful of breeds have hair like that. I told Diana she should have named her cat Caramel, because it more accurately describes the color of her coat. Plus I just like caramel more than cinnamon, especially those candy chews.

Okay, time to get to work. I turn off the closet light before I open the door—still dark in the place. I feel like Paul Newman in
Thief.

Start with the bedroom. There’s a desk on one side, near the balcony. Next to it, a pair of electrical outlets. I plug the AC adapter into the lower outlet and drag the cord behind the window curtain toward the desk. It looks just like any other AC adapter for a computer or appliance. But it’s a high-resolution, motion-activated video recorder with thirty-two hours of memory that will film the entire room in color. It can be switched to continuous recording if necessary, but motion activation is the smarter play here. I like this one because it doesn’t need a battery, as it’s plugged into the wall. And it doesn’t transmit signals—it only records them to an SD card that can be played on a computer—so it wouldn’t be detected in a bug sweep.

Keeping low, I move out of the bedroom into Diana’s main living space, which has an open floor plan that encompasses a small kitchen area and a large living and dining area. Her place is on the top floor of a condo building in Georgetown, which means she’s paying for location, not square footage.

I don’t want to use another AC adapter; if one is discovered, the other will be found. Diversify, I say. But this one will be more complicated than plugging something into a wall, so I need my night-vision goggles—like the serial killer in
The Silence of the Lambs,
except I’ve never murdered anyone, much less skinned them.

Murder can be made to look like suicide, and suicide can be made to look like murder.

Tired of worrying about house fires and home intruders? Want to spy on your party guests while you protect them from unwanted smoke inhalation? Introducing Benjamin’s functional all-in-one smoke detector and covert color camera. This easy-to-use gadget mounts to any ceiling and comes in three attractive colors to match any decor. Best of all, its 3.6-millimeter pinhole camera and audio microphone let you see and hear everything in the room. But that’s not all: if you act now, we’ll throw in a twelve-volt power adapter absolutely free!

Trust me, I’m not as normal as I seem.

Okay, all done. The kitchen looks the same as it did when I entered. I drop Diana’s old smoke detector and my night-vision goggles into my gym bag and stop for a minute to make sure I haven’t left anything behind.

I check my watch: it’s 9:57 p.m. My instructions were to be done by ten. So I made it with three minutes to spare.

I reach for the doorknob and then it hits me—I’ve made a terrible mistake.

Paul Newman didn’t star in
Thief.
It was James Caan.

How could I mix up Paul Newman and James Caan? Must be the nerves.

I lock up and move quickly down the hallway to the fire escape, accessible with a key. I pop the door open and slip into the night air just as I hear the
ding
of the elevator down the hallway.

I take the stairs down the fire escape, all six stories, at a slow pace, gripping the railing fiercely. I don’t like heights. Presidents Washington and Jefferson wanted DC to be a “low city.” I’m with them all the way.

In the 1890s, the Cairo Hotel was built on Q Street to a height of 164 feet, towering over its neighbors. In reaction to the uproar that followed, Congress passed a law called the Height of Buildings Act a few years later. But they amended the law in 1910, making it even more restrictive. Now the heights of buildings in the capital are limited to the width of the streets they face plus twenty feet. Most streets in DC are no wider than 110 feet, so most buildings are no higher than 130 feet, which usually means thirteen stories or fewer.

Still too high for me. I can’t stand near ledges. I’m not so afraid of losing my balance or slipping. I’m afraid I’ll jump.

When I reach the bottom, I walk through the parking lot and take the stairs up to the brick path that follows the C&O Canal. Diana lives on a tiny, two-block stretch of 33rd Street between the Potomac River to the south and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal to the north. Hers is the last building before the dead end at the canal, so it’s a secluded walk for me as I come around to the front of her building again.

It’s sticky-hot outside in August. The capital was built on swampland, and our humidity is unbearable this time of year. I don’t blame Congress for staying away.

Two younger guys are standing outside the loft building across the street, smoking cigarettes and checking out my bike.

“Sweet ride,” one of them says. He’s small and mangy, like Joaquin Phoenix in
To Die For
—Nicole Kidman’s breakout role, in my opinion, in which she showed for the first time she could carry a movie.

“You like it?” I ask. I do, too. It’s a 2009 Triumph America. Dual overhead cams, 865-cc, twin four-stroke engine, twin reverse cone pipes, phantom black with chrome detail. Yes, like the one Colin Farrell drove in
Daredevil
. I’m not saying I bought it for that reason. Not saying I didn’t. But yeah, it’s a pretty sweet ride.

“You get this thing out on the open road much?” the guy asks me.

Colin Farrell was terrific in
Phone Booth
. I liked that cop movie he did with Edward Norton and that futuristic movie he did with Tom Cruise,
Minority Report
. He’s underrated as an actor. He should do a movie with Nicole Kidman.

“Yeah, I try to stretch her legs when I can,” I tell the guy. I’m not supposed to be advertising my presence here, and yet here I am chatting up a couple of guys about my bike.

I look up into the darkness at Diana’s apartment, at the triangular brick balcony that juts out over 33rd Street. The balcony serves more as a garden than anything else. The ledges on the sides are all lined with potted plants and flowers, and some small trees sit on the balcony floor, all of which she treats with loving care.

A light has gone on inside her apartment, illuminating the kitchen window.

“What do you got on the front there?” the guy asks me, kicking my front wheel.

“A 110/90 ME880,” I say. “I like to ride with 880s front and back.”

Diana’s home already? That’s…interesting.

“Cool,” says the guy. “My tire guy doesn’t do Metzelers. I’ve been running Avons all these years.”

I look back at the guy. “They handle pretty well so far.”

He asks me for the name of my tire guy. I tell him while he scribbles it down on a scrap of paper. Then I jump on the bike and take one last look up at Diana’s balcony. Good night, Lady Di—

—what—

“No!” I cry.

A body is in free fall from Diana’s balcony, plunging headfirst six stories to the ground. I close my eyes and turn away, but I can’t close my ears to the sickening
whump
of a body hitting the bricks, of bones snapping and crunching.

I jump off my bike and sprint toward her. No. It can’t be. It can’t be her—

“Did you see that?”

“What happened?”

I reach her second, after two women, from a car in the circular driveway, have jumped out and knelt down beside her.

Oh, Diana
. Her body lies just short of the street, spread-eagled and facedown. Her luminous hair spills over her crushed face and onto the curb. Blood runs over the curb onto the street. I stand by the two women, looking over their shoulders at the only woman I’ve ever—

Why, Diana? Why would you do this to yourself?

“Did anyone see what happened?” someone shouts.

“That was Diana’s balcony!” someone running toward the building shouts.

A crowd has quickly gathered. Nobody can do anything but stare at her, as though she were a museum object. She is—I can’t say the word, but she isn’t breathing, her body has been crushed, she…isn’t alive.

Leave her alone,
I say in my head, maybe out loud, too.
Give her space. Let her have some dignity.

At least it’s dark, which, mercifully, shrouds her in a semblance of privacy. You can’t see her damaged face, can’t see the pain. It is, in a strange way, consistent with Diana’s fierce pride that she would hide her broken face from the public even in death.

Somebody asks about an ambulance. Then ten people at once are on their cell phones. I sit back on my haunches, helpless. There is nothing I can do for her. Then I see, to my right, between the feet of some onlookers, pieces of a broken clay pot and dirt. I even detect a whiff of cinnamon. I look up at her balcony again, not that I can see anything from this angle in the dark. Must be her apple geraniums, which she kept in pots outside during the summer, near the tip of the triangular balcony overlooking the street.

I pull back and part the growing crowd of people, moving back onto 33rd Street, suddenly unable to be part of their morbid curiosity.

I turn and vomit on the street. Before I know it, I’m on all fours on the pavement.

Diana’s hand on my cheek. Diana giggling when she spilled creamer all over herself at that new coffee shop on M Street. Diana showing me her hair a month ago, when she dyed it brown, wondering what I thought, caring about my opinion. That look she had when something was on her mind but she didn’t want to say anything. Turning and looking at me, realizing it’s me, and smiling. Smiling that carefree smile but maybe not so carefree.
She was taking lorazepam, you idiot; how did you miss that?
How did you miss the signs?

She needed my help and I wasn’t there for her. I didn’t take the steps necessary to be proactive. It never occurred to me that
suicide
could be an option.

Murder can be made to look like suicide, and suicide can be made to look like murder.

“Hey, bro—”

The apple geraniums.

“—dude’s freaking out over here!”

Run, Benjamin, run.

Sirens now, flashing lights cutting through the darkness, sucking away the air—

“Hold steady,” I coach myself. “Hold steady, Benjamin.” I take a deep breath and get to my feet.

“Okay.” I jump on my motorcycle and speed away.