ELEVEN

MARION OPENED the desk drawer and slipped out an envelope containing ten thousand dollars, the same envelope she had given me yesterday. This time she gave it to C. C. She took it like it weighed half a ton.

“I just had a terrible thought,” Marion said, turning toward me. “What if there is more than one copy of the videotape?”

“What if…” I repeated. “Let’s worry about the original first.”

C. C. put the envelope into her purse, hung the purse over her shoulder, slipped a charcoal coat over her arm and stepped into the corridor, which was now occupied by a handful of secretaries stationed at the desks outside the offices. C. C. acted like she was walking her last mile, ignoring the greetings that followed her to the elevator.

We entered the elevator and sent it to the ground floor. When the doors slid open, she took my arm and we proceeded across the lobby. Conan noted our passing with an expression of grave disapproval. No doubt he thought she could do better.

We found her car on the second floor of the capitol parking ramp, a two-door Nissan Sentra. A politician who’s not concerned about buying American, now there’s a switch, I thought. I held the driver’s door open for her, told her she would drive to my car, I would then follow her home. Only she did not get in. She turned her back to the car, turned to look at me, the door between us, her fingers brushing mine where they rested on top of the door frame. She was close enough to kiss. I stepped back, putting distance between us. She frowned.

“All this is happening because I wanted a job with the PCA,” she said.

“You should have sent a resume like everyone else.”

We found my Monza and I followed her out of St. Paul. C. C. lived in the suburbs, in the north end of her district not too far from the freeway. Her house was in the middle of a long block, on the same side of the street as the mailboxes. It was a small split-level, yellow with blue trim and shutters. The attached garage had a thirty-foot-long asphalt driveway leading to it. She signaled and pulled into the driveway. I parked on the street. She was unlocking the front door when I reached her.

“Don’t mind the mess,” she said, probably out of habit because the place was immaculate. It reminded me of a showroom in a furniture store.

“I bought it two years ago. I’ll have to sell it when I become governor and move into the mansion. Would you care for a drink?” C. C. asked as we stepped into the living room. “I have some beer.”

“No, thank you.”

“We have time.”

“No, thank you.”

She hesitated, then came to me, moving close. The perfume was lilac, her breath peppermint.

“You better change your clothes,” I told her.

I made myself comfortable in an overstuffed chair. I’m a patient man. I could have sat there all day, sat there until the snow came and went, sat there until the Minnesota Vikings actually won a Super Bowl or until hell froze over, whichever came first. I found myself smiling. This is what I do for a living and despite C. C.’s lies, I was having a good time.

C. C. surprised me by acting just as relaxed when she returned to the living room wearing sneakers, faded blue jeans and a white sweatshirt with UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA written in maroon and gold across the chest. Her hair was pulled back and tucked under the collar of a well-worn bomber jacket. I could see her in the University of St. Thomas grill discussing sex discrimination with the other underclassmen, no problem—although I doubted she would take the discussion seriously. She sat in a chair across from me, her legs folded under her, and pulled a pack of Virginia Slims from her pocket. She lit one, blew a cloud of smoke into the air above her head and then waved it away with her hand. She took another puff and coughed slightly. She was not a smoker, just an errant child breaking the rules, daring someone to catch her. I was fascinated. Carol Catherine Monroe was the least preoccupied person I had ever met.

I surprised myself by asking a stupid question: “Has anyone ever told you you should be a model?”

“When I was young,” she answered. “People told me I should model the way they tell boys who are tall that they should play basketball.” She took another drag of the cigarette. “You think I’m beautiful. That’s okay, everyone does. Especially women, women more than men. When I was a kid, all my friends were guys. They weren’t boyfriends, they were pals; I played hoops with them and baseball and even hockey sometimes. They let me play because I was a good athlete. Only the other girls didn’t see it that way. They saw the way I looked and convinced themselves I was out to steal their boyfriends. I wasn’t and I said so. It didn’t make any difference. I would get off the school bus and it would start—girls hollering names at me, girls I didn’t even know. I had my hair pulled out, I was hit in the face, I had green food coloring thrown in my hair, I was beat up … I had to change high schools three times.”

She took another pull from the cigarette, filling her lungs with smoke, exhaling slowly. “It’s not easy being me. If I wasn’t such a strong person I would have had a nervous breakdown.”

Jeezus, now she had me feeling sorry for her and I didn’t want to feel sorry for her, so I said, “I believe sooner or later we all get exactly what we deserve.”

She choked on the cigarette smoke. “You think I deserve this? I thought you were on my side.”

“To the extent that I think you are innocent of murder I am on your side. As for the rest of it … You’re a careless woman, Carol Catherine. Bad things happen to people who are careless.”

C. C. crushed her cigarette to death in an ashtray I thought was a candy dish. “You think I’m a slut.”

“I didn’t say …”

“You think I’m a slut because of what I did with Dennis Thoreau. You think I’m a whore. Well, I’m not,” she said, her voice risihg with indignation. “What do you know? You think a woman who’s young and attractive, who looks sexy”—she emphasized the word—”she’s always trying to turn herself on. Right? Well, I’m not. Yeah, I get a lot of offers; you know the kind I mean. You wouldn’t believe the offers I get. They make me sick. I dated Dennis because he was kind to me and considerate, because he made me laugh. Okay, maybe it was a stupid thing to do, making that tape. And maybe Dennis wasn’t as nice a guy as I thought he was. But I’m just like everybody else. I don’t always do what’s in my best interest.”

She leaned back in her chair, waiting to see how I would take it, waiting to see if her explanation satisfied me, softened me, perhaps. She reminded me of Amy Lamb, a woman nearly fifteen years her junior and equally mature. I flashed to a newspaper headline—GOVERNOR MONROE—and shuddered.

“I don’t know what you can help and what you can’t,” I told her firmly. “I only know this: There are some mistakes that are never forgiven, for which there is no redemption, no absolution. Only penance. So, choose your sins carefully. They’ll be with you always.”

“Who cares?” she said.

At 11:45 I was sitting at a small table beneath a white canvas with a splash of black paint reaching diagonally from one corner to the other. The typed card attached to the frame read: PATH TO INFINITY, $135.00. I ignored the painting, pretending to be engrossed in a copy of The Cities Reporter as I watched the door, a café mocha growing cold in front of me. I reached under my blue sports coat and touched the spot where my Beretta would have been if I was still carrying. I took my hand away with only a little uneasiness.

There were six other customers in LONI’S COFFEEHOUSE ESPRESSO CAPPUCCINO MOCHA WATCH FOR LIVE MUSIC AND READINGS. Two couples sitting boy-girl-boy-girl surrounded a small table in the center of the room and conspired quietly; a young woman sat alone near the far wall, nursing a lime Torani and reading a John Sandford thriller; a professor graded blue books at the table next to mine. The professor gave me a running commentary under his breath as he attacked the papers with his red pen. It went like this: “G-R-E-E-C-E, not G-R-E-A-S-E, holy mackerel … I before E except after C, my God, can’t any of these kids spell? … You’re beautiful, honey, but unfortunately you’re also as dumb as a brick … I’d flunk you out, my friend, but I’m afraid you’ll take my class again … I’ll be damned, someone actually read the material…” Meanwhile, the lunch hour crowd swelled, mostly students from the campus across the street. They were loud and undisciplined and dressed as poorly as they could afford and I wished I was one of them; they behaved like they didn’t have a care in the world.

At exactly noon by the large electric clock above the stainless-steel espresso machine, C. C. entered, clutching her purse to her chest like it was a life preserver. She found an empty table toward the back and sat facing the counter. When Loni asked her pleasure, C. C. stared at her so intently that the woman took two steps backward; she served C. C.’s cappuccino at arm’s length. A few of the college kids gave C. C. a don’t-I-know-you? glance but no one approached her.

By 1:30 the coffeehouse was nearly deserted again, except for me, C. C. and the young woman drinking the Torani, who glanced at the clock, muttered, “Uh-oh,” quickly gathered her belongings and left in a rush. That Sandford, he’s a spellbinder.

At 1:45 I rapped my knuckles on the counter, startling C. C. “You win some, you lose some and some get rained out,” I told her.

“What does that mean?”

“It’s an old baseball maxim. It means there’s no game today.”

“Why not?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t understand.”

Careful, Taylor, I told myself. Don’t give yourself away.

I smiled at the woman and told her to go back to the capitol, told her to put the money in a safe place, told her to contact me if the blackmailer called again. A short time later, sitting in my car, watching C. C.’s Nissan disappear down Cleveland Avenue, I asked myself a question aloud that I had been asking silently several times while downing Loni’s café mochas one after another: “Who was operating the camera, C. C.?”