Oaths and Miracles Read online

  “So Miss Jefferson collapses—”

  “Ms.,” the uniform said, more insistently.

  “—and you finish the number. The stage manager tells you he’s upset with Miss Jefferson and the show’s star is going to be even more upset. Then you go find your friend in the ladies’ room—”

  “Women’s room—”

  “—and she says she has to go home to her cousin’s house in Austin right away. Why was that again?”

  “She didn’t say,” Jeanne Cassidy said, and it was lie number two.

  “So the two of you rush out of Caesars right there and drive to the airport, without Miss Jefferson packing any bags or anything. Didn’t that seem odd to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ask Miss Jefferson why she had to leave in such a rush?”

  “Of course I did!” the girl snapped. Cavanaugh poured another cup of coffee, to give her time. He didn’t want her hysterical. He held the paper cup out to her but she shook her head.

  “And when you ask Miss Jefferson why she has to go to her cousin’s so quickly, she doesn’t give you a straight answer. She just keeps repeating ‘I have to go home.’ Nothing more.”

  “Yes,” Jeanne Cassidy said, and that was the big one, lie number three. But she had stuck to it for an hour now, which also interested Cavanaugh. She didn’t look like she had that kind of tenacity. Unless it had been fused into her, and that took something extremely hot.

  “So the two of you are running toward the airport terminal, and this big black car comes racing out of nowhere, hits Miss Jefferson while you’ve gone back to your car for a feminine necessity, and disappears. You never get so much as a glimpse of the driver, the license plate, the make of car, or anything else significant.”

  “No.”

  Cavanaugh drank the coffee himself. It was probably terrible, but he couldn’t tell. He never could. Coffee was coffee. He drank it for the caffeine, and to give a weighty pause to what came next.

  “Miss Cassidy, did Miss Jefferson have a steady boyfriend?”

  “Yes,” Jeanne Cassidy said, and she didn’t even try to look surprised.

  “Who was it?”

  “Carlo Gigliotti.”

  “Did Miss Jefferson ever mention to you that Carlo Gigliotti might have connections to organized crime?”

  “No,” Jeanne said. Lie number four.

  “Never, not even as a suspicion?”

  “Never.”

  You couldn’t call her cool, she looked too frazzled and weary and scared for that. So call her stubborn. But something else was there, too, the quality Cavanaugh still couldn’t put a name to.

  He said, in a harsher voice, “Did Miss Jefferson tell you last night that Carlo Gigliotti is dead?”

  She didn’t try to fake shock. Instead she just looked at him and said in that same exhausted, stubborn, something-else voice, “No.”

  “He’s dead, Miss Cassidy. The body was found yesterday afternoon, with marks of what is almost certainly a professional job. And there’s been no retaliatory activity—that’s the kind of thing we watch for—which means his own organization probably disposed of him. It’s not surprising—Gigliotti was a loud-mouthed stupid braggart who had his position because he was family to some very powerful people. They gave him minimal trust, and he blew that minimum, and they killed him and then his girlfriend too. The only reason they’d do that, Miss Cassidy, is if they suspected Carlo had told her something, probably to impress her, that he shouldn’t have. And it’s possible they will reason that she might have told you as well, which could put you in considerable danger. We can help protect you against that danger. Now think again, Miss Cassidy—is there anything you want to tell me that you haven’t said yet?”

  “No,” Jeanne Cassidy said. “There isn’t.”

  “Miss Cassidy—”

  “Ms.,” the local said, and it was Jeanne who looked at her, with such a look of freezing contempt that the fool woman shut up and even Cavanaugh, despite himself, was secretly impressed.

  * * *

  He kept at her another hour. She wouldn’t budge, not on any of it. The report on the hit-and-run vehicle came in: a stolen Buick LeSabre, abandoned in the desert, yellow cotton fibers on the hood. Finally, because there wasn’t any other choice, Cavanaugh had Jeanne Cassidy sign a statement and let her go.

  “But, Miss Cassidy, I want you to let the department know where you are at all times. In fact, I want you to call in every twenty-four hours for the next two weeks. Use this phone number.” He handed her the laminated plastic card.

  She handed it right back to him. “I can tell you right now where I’m going to be from now on,” she said, in the strongest voice he’d heard from her yet. “I’m taking a taxi from here to my apartment. I’m packing my things. At the apartment I’m making one phone call, to Fred Kemper, to resign from Caesars Palace. Then I’m taking another taxi to the airport and waiting there until I can get a flight to East Lansing, Michigan, where my parents live. I’m enrolling at Michigan State for the fall semester, and I’m living at my parents’ house for the next four years while I get my degree. My father’s name is Thomas M. Cassidy. He’s in the book, but I’ll write it down for you. If you want me, you can call me there.”

  Cavanaugh and the female uniform stared at her. She took a piece of paper and a pen from her purse. Cavanaugh watched her print an address and phone number. He wondered if she was smart enough to have figured out that her and the Jefferson girl’s phone was probably tapped and her decision to shut up would thus be clearly communicated to the Gigliotti family. He wasn’t sure she was that smart, but he was sure she meant what she said. She wouldn’t tell anybody anything more, and she was going home, and she was going back to school.

  He knew then, what was different about her. Unlike most of the Las Vegas showgirls, she had a strong sense of self-preservation. She was getting out.

  * * *

  The Carillon was one of the small motels between the airport and the Strip, neither grand nor sleazy. Cavanaugh flicked on the light in his room, set the chain on the door, and glanced at the phone. The message light blinked. Hope surged in him. Not Felders, Felders would beep him direct. Marcy?

  He pressed 0 for the hotel operator. “This is room 116. I have a message?”

  “Yes, Mr. Cavanaugh. The message is, ‘Call in. Felders. Shall I repeat that?”

  “No,” Cavanaugh said. He hung up and pulled the state-of-the-art mobile phone from his pocket. There was no tone. He punched Felders’s number: nothing. “Shit,” he said, and called Marty Felders on the motel phone.

  “Cavanaugh? What the hell’s wrong with your mobile?”

  “Probably the same thing that was wrong with the section fax machine last week,” Cavanaugh said acidly. “There’s not a damn piece of technology in the Hoover Building you can count on.”

  “Good old pessimistic Bob,” Felders said jovially. Nobody else ever called Cavanaugh “Bob.” He was Robert, always. And he didn’t consider himself a pessimist. Why would a pessimist spend his life chasing scum? A pessimist would just assume they couldn’t be caught.

  “Listen, Bob,” Felders said. He always began that way: Listen. As if there were a chance his agents might not. “Did you learn anything useful from that showgirl?”

  “Nothing. She knows, but she isn’t saying.”

  “Well, leave your notes at the branch for Paul Garrison and catch the 6:45 A.M. United flight for Washington. Pick up the ticket at the desk. Is there anything Garrison needs to know that isn’t in your notes?”

  “No,” Cavanaugh said. Gigliotti wasn’t his case; he’d just happened to be in Vegas, finishing up a semi-important errand, when the call came. He was closest, was all. He hadn’t yet been agent-in-charge on a case of his own. Felders knew how much he wanted it.

  “Then come on in. And listen, Bob—what do you know about recombinant DNA?”

  “Nothing,” Cavanaugh said promptly.

  “Well, hope the in-flight magazine has an article about it. Really, nothing? At all? It’s a hot topic in the scientific world.”

  “Clearly we’re not in the scientific world,” Cavanaugh said acidly, “or we’d have basic technology that works.”

  “Good old pessimistic Bob. See you tomorrow.”

  “What about? What’s the interest in recombinant DNA?”

  “That’s what you’re going to find out,” Felders said. “There’s a company we should look into. See you tomorrow.”

  Cavanaugh hung up. A company we should look into meant just more routine intelligence work. Same old, same old.

  He opened the desk drawer. The Carillon Motel stationery featured, for no discernible architectural reason, a medieval bell tower. He pulled out three sheets.

  He always carried his own drawing pencils, in various colors. With the green one he sketched rapidly, easily: two birds with long fishlike tails. Their odd bodies contorted into odd poses. He added water and undersea plants and bottom-feeding slugs. He gave both fishbirds baffled, pained expressions. Above the picture he printed MERBIRDS DISCOVER OBSTACLES IN LIFE.

  On the second paper he wrote, in his small upright hand:

  * * *

  There’s a beauty to a day alone in the hotel room. You can choose to not shave over your Adam’s apple. You can wear the wrong shirt with the wrong pants. You can order room service and fake a Mexican accent. You can line up all the little soaps, mouthwashes, sewing kits, and shower caps in a line across the floor and accuse them of loitering. No one knows the satisfactions I’ve seen.

  * * *

  On the third paper he drew a military general, chest puffed out, hat at a preternaturally correct angle. Across the general’s uniform marched a row of campaign ribbons with hearts and knives and tiny beds. Cavanaugh printed BATTLE STARS FOR THE WAR OF THE SEXES.

  He put each sheet of paper in a separate envelope and addressed all three to Mrs. Marcia Cavanaugh, in Washington. In his wallet he found three stamps. He stacked the letters on the nightstand, beside the dead mobile and his regulation Smith & Wesson.

  He’d been sending Marcy notes like these for five years, from the first day they’d met. He’d sent hundreds during their first year together. The frequency had fallen off after they married but had surged again when he’d left corporate life, which he’d hated, and joined the FBI. Then another falling off, coinciding with the slow creeping chill in their marriage, like slow-motion frost that had escaped its season to settle permanently through the entire calendar.

  Then she’d left, and Cavanaugh had stopped sending the notes.

  “I want more than this, Robert,” Marcy had said.

  “More what?”

  “More everything. More travel, more laughter, more people, more experiences. More breadth to life.”

  “Maybe you only get breadth at the expense of depth,” Cavanaugh had said, not even knowing if this was true, wanting to score points.

  “No epigrams, Robert. No quips. I want to experience a much wider world than I ever could with you.”

  Cavanaugh eventually decided, after months of pain, that he’d been left for another lover: the wider world. He wished he’d thought to ask Marcy how she expected it to love her back.

  Now Cavanaugh was sending the notes again. Two, three at a time, a few days every week, from wherever he was. Even from Justice at Washington. She had loved them, once. She’d laugh and shake her head: “Who would ever suspect this side of you, Robert?” He remembered her laugh. Every night now, he remembered her laugh.

  He turned off the light and made his mind leave Marcy and return to whatever Jeanne Cassidy hadn’t been saying. The Jefferson girl falling onstage at Caesars, and then the stage manager dragging her off, and then—

  He went over it all once more, and then yet again, looking for something he might have missed. Something he could pass on to Garrison. He didn’t find it.

  Just before he fell asleep, he turned on the lamp and held the three envelopes to the light until he found the one that held the nasty crack about the war of the sexes. He tore it up.

  Cavanaugh turned off the light and settled back into bed. A minute later he turned the lamp on again and fished the fragments of torn paper from the wastebasket. Carefully, he peeled off the unused stamp.

  THREE

  “There are only four reasons in the world to do anything,” Judy O’Brien Kozinski said to her nearly naked husband. “Because you want to, because you need the money, because you gave your word, or because you want to please someone you love.”

  “And which of the first three dragged you to Las Vegas?” Ben retorted. He hung his sports coat in the hotel closet. “It sure the hell isn’t because you want to please me.”

  “Actually, that is the reason,” Judy said evenly. “There’s certainly no other reason I’d be here.”

  Ben gave her his skeptical-scientist look, its force not at all diminished by his standing there in his underwear. He had a beautiful body, Judy thought despairingly. Tapering back, sexy strong shoulders, flat belly. At forty-three. And she, despite being ten years younger, did not. Or at least, not in Ben’s class. And his face, with its Roman profile and thick blond hair, was just as gorgeous as his body. Judy hunkered down in the red plaid wing chair, the hotel’s idea of contemporary elegance.

  “You might,” Ben said, pulling on his suit pants, “just might, possibly, be here in Vegas for your job. Or weren’t you planning to do that interview at Nellis after all?”

  “Of course I’m going to do it.”

  “Then why haven’t you left yet?”

  “Because the interview isn’t until four. And because right now I’m fighting with you.”

  “I didn’t start this fight.”

  “Oh, no. You’re just an innocent babe in the academic conference woods.”

  “As a matter of fact, I am. Although of course you’ve already made up your mind otherwise.”

  She watched Ben shrug into his jacket—Armani, of course, he’d be the only scientist at the entire fucking microbiology conference in Armani, and he’d love that. “Ben—”

  “I’m changing clothes,” Ben said with great deliberation, “because I have an important presentation to do this afternoon, possibly the most important presentation of my career. Or did that fact escape your sight?”

  “Not enough escapes my sight. Certainly not your behavior at lunch.”

  “There was nothing wrong with my behavior at lunch. Will you stop picking at me?”

  “If the issue is important, it isn’t picking.”

  “The issue is not important.”

  “Maybe it is to me,” Judy said. “Or doesn’t that matter?”

  He didn’t deign to answer. I don’t blame him, Judy thought. We sound like the kind of married couple we never wanted to be.

  “Ben,” she said, fighting to sound logical, “you didn’t say one word to me at lunch. Not one. I sat there like an extra finial on the chair and you talked through the entire meal to that wretched girl from UC Berkeley. Ninety solid minutes. What do you suppose people thought?”

  “I imagine people were far too busy with thoughts of substance to notice what I was doing. This is an important conference, after all, Judy.”

  “Don’t take the moral high ground with me! I know it’s an important conference!”

  “Then act like it.” He stood in front of the mirror and fine-tuned his tie, a red-and-blue Italian silk. The blue matched his eyes.

  “Did you … did you think she was so very pretty?”

  He glanced at her swiftly, hearing the change in her voice. From anger to pleading. She heard it herself: the sound of the central fact of their marriage reasserting itself, inevitable as gravity. She wanted him more than he wanted her. She knew it, and he knew it, and she knew he knew it. God, she despised herself. She was pathetic.

  Ben crossed the room to Judy’s chair. “Is that what this is all about? Because that graduate assistant was pretty?”

  Judy looked at him, without smiling. But she couldn’t help herself. He stood there above her, in his perfectly fitting clothes, his blond hair shining in the light from the window, the strange power on him of arcane and difficult knowledge. It held a pull for her, that power. It always had, since their very first date on her twentieth birthday. On her wedding day she’d thought she’d die of happiness. Good Catholic girl that she’d been, it had seemed that the saints had answered all her prayers.

  “Oh, honey, you don’t need to be jealous,” Ben said warmly. He said warm things very well. “Anita’s just a graduate assistant. She hasn’t got a third of your brains.” He sat on the arm of the plaid chair and took Judy’s hand.

  “Truly?” she said, although of course it wasn’t true. Anita couldn’t be a graduate student in microbiology without being brainy. But Judy couldn’t stand to continue arguing. Ben’s fingers traced little whorls in her palm. He was always generous in victory, any kind of victory. Good policy. Ben believed in good policy.

  Judy looked out the hotel window at Las Vegas. The hotel wasn’t directly on the Strip, but that didn’t help much. She’d been with Ben to scientific conferences all over the world, and she thought Las Vegas was the ugliest city she’d ever seen. Garish, cold-blooded, baking in the August heat like some bloated iridescent lizard. Even Oslo had been better. In winter.

  Ben said, “I only talked to Anita for so long because she was feeling shy and out of place, a graduate assistant among the big guns.”

  “My husband the humanitarian.”

  He grinned. He liked her wry, not pathetic. She liked herself better that way, too. Didn’t he ever notice that after twelve years of jealousy, wryness wore thin?

  Probably baseless jealousy, she reminded herself. Because she had never known for sure. Because, of course, she had never really tried to find out.