Multiple Exposure A Sophie Medina Mystery (25 page)

Tall, dark skinned, and noble looking, with a distinct mane of wavy salt-and-pepper hair and a hawklike profile, another man unfolded himself from the backseat, laughing at something Hathaway just said. The two of them glanced in our direction before disappearing into the house, followed by their security guards.

Luke looked at me. “Was that who I think it was?”

I nodded. “The Hathaways’ houseguest for the next few days. Taras Attar.”

16

So Taras Attar was staying with the Hathaways, not at a D.C. hotel. Not only that, he’d arrived in town early; his book signing at the Library of Congress, his first public event, wasn’t scheduled until Monday. Had Napoleon Duval, who promised Attar would be well looked after during his stay in the United States, known about these arrangements when we talked this morning at St. Al’s? If he did, it must have made my story about Scott Hathaway’s involvement in a supposed plot to assassinate Attar while he was visiting the States seem even more bizarre and far-fetched considering Attar was now Hathaway’s houseguest.

Luke looked like he might have been thinking something along those lines because he gave me a puzzled look and said, “You know, it’s been a long couple of days and we’ve been under a lot of stress ever since the National Gallery gig. Why don’t we just bag work for the rest of the day and I’ll see you Monday in the studio?”

“Sure,” I said, “have a good weekend.”

“You got any plans?” he asked.

“Moving out of the Roosevelt to a duplex apartment just above Dupont Circle.”

“Nice. Need any help?”

“No, thanks. I’m good. I don’t have much to move and my landlady’s loaning me her car, so I’m all set. See you Monday.”

I followed him down the driveway and eventually down Wisconsin Avenue through Georgetown, where he turned right to head across the river to Virginia and I went left to India’s place to pick up Niles the Jaguar and on to the Roosevelt to pack my things and move out for good. Two hours later I was easing Niles back into the carriage house when Grace called to say that Ben would swing by and pick me up for dinner on his way home from the Hill. She didn’t mention the breakin at the Roosevelt yesterday or last night’s incident at Bar Humbug, hopefully because Jack had kept his word and hadn’t told her.

“I can take the Vespa,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

“Nonsense. He drives right past your street. He’ll be by around seven. By the way, I saw the story about the girl they found in the Potomac. Did you know her? They said she’d been at that National Gallery reception.”

“She was our receptionist. A really sweet kid.”

“Oh, God.” Grace sounded stricken. “I’m so sorry. What happened?”

“I don’t know any more than what they said on the news,” I said. “Do you know a detective named Bolton, by any chance? It’s his investigation.”

“I don’t, but maybe someone else here does,” she said. “I’ll ask around. If I find out anything, I’ll let you know. See you in a few hours, okay?”

After she hung up I finally called Baz. It was nearly ten o’clock in London, but he was a night owl and it was easier reaching him at this time of day than trying to catch him at the Foreign Office. His phone went straight to voice mail, so I left a message asking him to call as soon as he got a chance, though I didn’t say why.

Then I unpacked my clothes and few possessions, took a shower, and got ready for dinner at Grace’s.

*

When I was growing up, the large, rambling Lowe home was the place everyone congregated. Grace’s family was a joyous, raucous, carefree clan who lived, laughed, and loved freely, threw fabulous parties at the drop of a hat, decorated their house to the nines for every holiday, always had enough for dinner so that setting one more place at the table was no problem. As I grew older, some of the untidiness and messiness that I hadn’t known about spilled into the open—an alcoholic kid brother, an older sister who got pregnant and dropped out of college, her mom’s battle with pain pills and breast cancer—but I loved them all as fiercely as if I were one of their daughters, which is how they’d treated me.

Grace’s own home, an elegant Georgian Revival on Mint-wood Place in Adams Morgan, was as warm and open as her childhood home had been, with her own urban stamp on it. The house smelled fragrantly of baking bread when Benjamin Glass and I walked through the front door a few minutes after seven. Ben yelled, “Honey, we’re here,” and she yelled back, “In the kitchen. Be right there.”

If blond, ethereal Grace was light, air, and bright colors, then Ben was earth, things that were solid and immutable, dark, sober tones. On the surface they were an unlikely couple—country girl and city boy, Catholic and Jew, extrovert and introvert—but after nearly twenty years together their differences had become their strengths and their marriage as seamless as yin and yang, or as Grace liked to say, she and Ben went together like peanut butter and jelly.

Ben dropped his overstuffed briefcase next to his reading chair in the living room as seventeen-year-old Yale and fifteen-year-old Lily, tall and summer bronzed and perfect looking, clattered down the stairs, flinging their arms around me, hugging and kissing, as they laughed and talked and multitasked on their cell phones. Ben held a set of car keys out to Yale, a dark younger portrait of his father, and delivered the be-careful-with-your-mother’s-car speech while blond, angelic Lily showed off her clothes to her mother and swore the holes in her jeans weren’t too revealing. They were gone as swiftly as they’d come, arguing as they flew down the back stairs to the garage over whether Yale’s girlfriend or Lily’s boyfriend got picked up first. A door slammed, followed by the whining noise of a car backing out of the driveway and moving down the street.

In the poignant, echoing silence that filled the house, I wished that this could have been Nick and me saying good-bye to our kids as they left for a Friday night high school football game, this sweet tableau of family life that was so down-to-earth and Norman Rockwell American. Nick had not taken the news as hard as I had when we learned we could not have children, but if he were standing here with me now, I wondered if he, too, would feel the acute sense of loss and longing I did at this moment.

Grace, a world-class mind reader, put her arm around my shoulder and said, “Don’t be fooled. They put on that show just for you, so you’d think they’re wonderful and adorable and well behaved. We love them to pieces, but you can’t imagine the things kids get up to these days. It’s terrifying.”

I smiled and slipped my arm around her waist. “We weren’t angels, if you remember.”

“Compared to them,” she said, “we ought to be canonized. I won’t sleep a wink until they get home . . . I never do. Ben, darling, I promised Sophie you’d make us your patented margaritas. God knows, I need one.”

We ate outside sitting around their teak-and-glass table on a deck that overlooked Grace’s well-tended backyard garden. She lit candles in hurricane lamps and flipped a switch, turning on tiny white lights that outlined the porch and followed the staircase down to where Ben barbecued steaks over a gas grill. More lights sparkled in the trees; the whole scene looked like something from a child’s idea of fairyland. By seven thirty, the sun had disappeared as hard and fast as a curtain slamming down, leaving a clear cobalt-blue sky and a sudden cool breeze that hinted at autumn.

After dinner, Grace got sweaters for the two of us and we moved over to a sofa, two high-back rattan chairs, and a creaky glider grouped around a coffee table. Ben went inside to get his pipe and returned with the open bottle of Saint-Emilion as Grace brought the hurricane lamps over to where we were sitting.

“You aren’t serving yourself any wine.” I plopped in the glider and watched Ben fill my glass and Grace’s.

“I’m your designated driver,” he said. “I hit my limit a while ago.”

“Don’t be silly. I’ll take a cab home.”

“You will not,” Grace said, swinging her feet onto the sofa and stuffing a pillow behind her head.

“No, Soph, I’m driving you.” Ben pulled one of the chairs closer to the two of us and sat down. “It’s settled.”

“I told Ben you wanted to talk to him about Hathaway’s Hotties, Sophie, so ask away,” Grace said, reaching for her glass. “Thanks for the wine, darling.”

Ben opened his tobacco pouch and said, “Scott Hathaway works with beautiful, brainy women all day. What’s to know?”

Grace pretended to throw a cushion at him and he grinned and pretended to duck.

He tamped down the tobacco in his pipe and added, “You hear rumors all the time and I always figure where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But Hathaway is discreet, whatever he does. Besides, Roxanne wouldn’t stand for any fooling around—at least not in public—and he knows it.”

“Roxanne Hathaway hired Luke and me to take photos for the Save the Potomac Foundation,” I said. “Apparently she just got asked to take over as the new chairperson. We spent part of the afternoon at her home going over the project.”

“Roxanne’s a firecracker, all right,” Ben said. “She’s the reason her husband ran for the Senate. She’s the one with the political ambition.”

“Seriously?” I said.

“Don’t you remember, Soph? Roxanne’s one of the famous Lane sisters,” Grace said. “Her older sister married a prince from the House of Bourbon and her younger sister married a duke whose family owns one of the largest private banks in Switzerland. She wants Scott to be American royalty, as in running for president one day.”

“No one talks about it anymore,” Ben said, “but Roxanne and Scott’s oldest son was born six months after they were married. He’s in his late twenties, I think. Scott Junior. He stayed in New Hampshire after he graduated from Dartmouth and now he’s running for Congress next year. Roxanne’s been up there campaigning for him.”

“Scott and Roxanne must have gotten married not long after he graduated from Georgetown,” I said. “Was that where they met?”

“I don’t know,” Ben said. “She grew up in Europe, as I recall . . . Switzerland. I don’t know how they met.”

“Sophie was also wondering about David Epps and Eric Nettle,” Grace said.

“What do you mean?” Ben looked puzzled as he puffed on his pipe.

“Both of them were at the National Gallery the other night,” I said. “According to Gracie, someone from Hathaway’s staff tipped off a
Trib
reporter about the scene between Hathaway and Yuri Orlov over the book signing Hathaway’s hosting for Taras Attar on Monday. Arkady Vasiliev was adamant about no press and no outside photographs—which boomeranged right back to Luke and me, since we were the event photographers. So I was wondering who might have been upset enough to sabotage their boss.”

“Not Nettle,” Ben said at once. “He’s Hathaway’s chief of staff and protects the senator like a bulldog. I don’t think it would be Epps, either.”

“Grace said David Epps has a reputation as a gambler,” I said.

Ben waved a hand. “The Epps family owns a bunch of river-boat casinos in Louisiana. David talks and acts like a good ole Southern boy who just fell off the turnip truck, but play cards with him and he’ll take you for everything you’ve got, except he’ll leave your underwear so you’ve got something to wear home. He really likes the horses these days. Wins a lot at the track, too, or so I hear. A very sharp guy who is not to be underestimated.”

A Southerner. So it hadn’t been David Epps I’d heard, either. What other man had been at the National Gallery who worked for Scott Hathaway?

“And you know this gambling story how?” Grace sat up, arching an eyebrow.

“One hears things,” he said.

“Does one?” she asked. “Or maybe one is the voice of experience?”

Ben flashed a sheepish smile at his wife. “Remember when you took the kids to Disney World about five years ago?”

“You mean, when we came home early and you were sleeping off some epic night out with the guys and you’d spent the grocery money?” She was wide-eyed with indignation. “And to think I let you convince me I balanced the checkbook wrong.”

“One learned one’s lesson. Never again.” He turned to me, avoiding the dagger-filled looks coming at him from the sofa, and said in a bland voice, “How’d that verbal brawl get started between Hathaway and Orlov?”

I held up my wineglass. “Too much of this. Orlov had been drinking and he started in on Hathaway about his personal friendship with Taras Attar. Told him the book signing is a backhanded way of showing U.S. support for Abadistan.”

Ben relit his pipe and said, “We’re walking a fine line right now with the Russians when it comes to Abadistan. Hathaway knows that better than anyone.”

“Taras Attar is staying with the Hathaways as their houseguest this weekend,” I said. “He and the senator pulled up in an official car as Luke and I were leaving this afternoon.”

Ben looked surprised. “Well, then, I guess the rumors are true.”

“What rumors?” Grace said.

“That Hathaway is taking Attar around town over the weekend for off-the-radar meetings to talk about the unrest in Abadistan and whether the U.S. is going to speak out about Russian human rights violations,” he said. “One of their stops is the White House.” He glanced over at Grace. “And that, my precious angel, is off the record.”

“You still owe me for the gambling fiasco, buddy.”

“I bought you diamond earrings a week later. We’re even.”

She grinned, and I said, “Then what about the book signing at the Library of Congress?”

Ben shrugged. “A smokescreen, mostly. I mean, it’s true Attar is on a book tour. But apparently there are concerns about his safety when he’s in town so the event has been winched down from a talk and book signing that was open to the public to ‘by invitation only.’ ”

“I didn’t know that,” Grace said. “Has someone made a definite threat against Attar?”

I didn’t know that, either. Maybe Duval had taken me seriously after all.

“It’s probably just an overabundance of caution, as they always say,” Ben said. “But if there was something, you know as well as I do, darling, they wouldn’t be broadcasting it to the press.”

“Nick always talked about what a treacherous place Abadistan was to do business,” I said. “Over the years, Crowne Energy paid a fortune in protection money to the local mafia—the Shaika—but even that wasn’t enough. Eventually they moved in and tried to take over the operation, just because they wanted it. They started threatening workers until they were too scared to show up. Nick and Colin Crowne tried to stand up to them, and look what happened? Colin’s dead and Nick is gone.”