Mistress(4)

Apple geraniums.

Fiona Apple should be a bigger star. She should be as popular as Amy Winehouse was. They remind me of each other, those throaty, soulful voices, but Fiona never seemed to take off after “Criminal.” Not that Amy fared much better, ultimately.

Yeah, the way my mind wanders? It gets worse when I get stressed. Dr. Vance had a fancy phrase for it—adrenaline-induced emotional sanctuary—but I always thought he was just trying to justify all the money my father was paying him to “fix” me. It took me a long time before I figured out that I suffered from “Pater Crudelis” disorder.

I take Pennsylvania within a block of the White House and, like everything, like a song or a tree or oxygen, it makes me think of Diana. He’s so talented, she’d said of the president. He understands what we’re trying to do like nobody before him.

Oh, Diana. Intelligent, caring, idealistic Diana. Did you do this to yourself? Did somebody kill you? Neither possibility makes sense.

But I’m going to figure it out. It’s what I do for a living, right?

An oncoming SUV honks at me as it passes me in the other direction on Constitution. Only two presidents signed the Constitution, Washington and Madison. Madison was also the shortest president. And the first to have previously served in the United States Cong—

I swerve to avoid the Mazda RX-7 in front of me, gripping the brakes with all the strength my hands can muster. I end up sideways, perpendicular to the cars at my front and rear. Red light means stop, Ben. Focus! You can do this.

Benjamin, the sooner you learn your limitations, the better.

You’re not like everyone else, Benjamin. You never were. Even before—well, even before everything happened with your mother.

You’ll have plenty of time to make friends when you grow up.

Diana was my friend. And she could have been much more. She would have been.

I can do this. I just need to take some medicine. I just need to get home.

Light turns green. I right the bike and move forward.

Diana Marie Hotchkiss. Marie was her aunt’s name; Diana was her grandmother’s name. Born January 11, 1978, in Madison, Wisconsin, played volleyball and softball, won the award for outstanding Spanish student from Edgewood High School of the Sacred Heart, from which she graduated in 1995—

Honking; someone’s honking at me for something I did; what did I do?

“Shut up and leave me alone!” I yell, not that I expect a response from the car behind me—or that they’ll even hear me.

“Pull your motorcycle over and kill the engine!” booms a voice through a loudspeaker.

I look in my rearview mirror and notice for the first time the flashing lights. It’s not an angry motorist.

It’s a cop.

This should be interesting.





Chapter 5



I pull my motorcycle to the side of Constitution and kill the engine.

The first reported murder of a cop was in 1792 in New York in what is now the South Bronx. The perpetrator was a guy named Ryer, from a prominent farming family, who was involved in a drunken brawl at the time. Want to hear the funny part?

“How we doing tonight?” says the cop, walking over to me. I’m illuminated by the searchlight from his car, which he’s trained on me.

The funny part is that one of the police precincts in the Bronx is located on Ryer Avenue, named after that same family.

I give him my license and registration. He probably already traced my plates. He already knows who I am.

“You wanna take off your helmet, sir?”

Actually, no, I don’t. But I do it anyway. He takes a long look in my eyes. It can’t be a pretty sight.

“Do you know why I pulled you over, Mr. Casper?”

Because you can? Because you have the power to stop, frisk, search, seize, and arrest pretty much whoever you want whenever the mood strikes you? Because you’re a constipated, impotent, Napoleonic transvestite?

“I lost control back there a bit,” I concede.

“You just about caused an accident,” he says. He has a handlebar mustache. Is this cop on loan from the Village People?

I don’t favor facial hair, but even if I did, I wouldn’t shape it like a handlebar. I’d probably go with the two-day stubble Don Johnson wore in Miami Vice. That would be cool.

“You crossed the centerline three times in one block,” he says.

I decide to exercise my right against self-incrimination. And pray that he doesn’t ask me what’s in my bag—like night-vision goggles or a used smoke alarm or some rudimentary tools. Or the body frosting I took from Diana’s closet.

I need to get home. I need time to think, to figure this out.

“Have you been drinking tonight, sir?”

He’s standing pretty close to me. One of the hazards of pulling over a motorcyclist. I could reach over in jest and grab his baton or the handcuffs on his belt, maybe his holstered weapon, before he could say doughnut. He probably wouldn’t think it’s funny.