Silenced by the Yams

CHAPTER Six

Guy’s explanation for not approaching the police was thin and convoluted. Something about “protection of the press” and not wanting to “cross a line.” It all sounded like ten tons of baloney to me, but he kept pressing, so just to shut him up, I agreed to a meeting.

Plagued with concern about Frankie and the two bizarre informant calls mixed with a longing desire to cuddle up against Howard’s warm body, I tossed and turned most of the night. I didn’t manage more than two hours of decent sleep and by morning, needed an IV infusion of caffeine to kick-start my body into action.

After promising Callie an extra dollar an hour for watching Bethany and Amber, I waved good-bye to Mama Marr as she drove away in my mother’s red Mini Cooper. Then I hit the road myself for a day of truth-seeking.

First on my to-do list was meeting Clarence at the reflecting pool near the Lincoln Memorial at noon. Next, I’d arranged to hear what Guy Mertz had to say—he said he would be at a hot dog stand on Constitution Avenue at one o’clock. This was good—I’d get an unhealthy lunch before heading to my final destination: the DC jail where they were holding Frankie. A quick check of the DC Government website had informed me that a person could only visit on certain days based on the inmate’s last name. Luckily, Tuesday was my day to visit Frankie. Otherwise, I would have to wait two days. Then, I had to wrap it all up in time to get back home and get dinner on the table before heading to my hand gun lesson with Colt at Straight Shooters Indoor Range. A few months earlier we’d been scheduled for a similar lesson, but that got interrupted by a trio of fugitive bank robbers with a different plan for my evening.

The day was typical for a DC summer—hot and swamp-muggy. The sun boiled the humid air to a thick haze. I’d pulled my hair into a pony tail, topped my head with a yellow visor, and covered my eyes with my favorite pair of Jackie O sunglasses. I was summer chic and reasonably guarded against the intense sun.

In the pocket of my shorts was a new friend: a can of mace. I’d been kidnapped two too many times and learned my lesson the hard way. These days I didn’t venture to the mailbox without my pepper spray.

By the time I reached the Memorial, my t-shirt was clinging to me like a wet rag and my throat was parched. I bought a bottle of water from a street vendor and sipped while I scanned the area near the reflecting pool for a man in a red baseball cap. The reflecting pool is a rectangular, man-made pond that stretches expansively between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. It's long and shallow, just like most political speeches. It’s lined on both sides by walking paths dotted with benches for weary tourists in need of rest and/or a possible hip replacement. Currently, a brown-haired woman reading a book occupied one bench and a young couple with a cranky toddler in a stroller sat at another, but there was no man in a red baseball cap. I looked across the pool at the benches closest to the Memorial. Not a baseball cap could be seen, red or otherwise. I checked my watch—five minutes after twelve, so I wasn’t especially late. Feeling as cranky as the screaming baby, I meandered to an empty bench and sat, wondering if the mysterious Clarence was watching me from hiding.

A male jogger passed by, dripping sweat and looking like he might keel over with his next step. Somehow, I couldn’t imagine that running in this kind of heat and humidity was going to help prolong anyone’s life. I felt certain that my own laid-back form of exercise (i.e. walking to the mailbox once a day) was far healthier in the long run—pun intended.

Another jogger appeared. He had longish blond hair and a small goatee. He wasn’t drenched in sweat and even more unusual, he wasn’t really dressed for jogging—he wore cargo shorts and a white t-shirt with a picture of Alfred Hitchcock on the front. As he ran past—far too slowly for a real jogger—he whistled some sort of sinister tune.

The couple with the cranky toddler got up and left. Hitchcock Jogger was giving me the heebie-jeebies, so I switched benches. A minute later he was back, running in the other direction and he was whistling the same tune, only louder now. As he approached, he slowed down until he was nearly jogging in place right in front of me.

I tried to ignore him by twisting around and watching a couple of ducks in the reflecting pool, but the harder I ignored, the louder his whistling grew. I was plotting a quick dash to the nearby Park Police kiosk when he stopped whistling and whispered, “Say it.”

I turned back around. Truthfully, besides the fact that he was behaving stranger than Anthony Perkins in Psycho, he actually looked fairly harmless. His face was soft and young and his eyes warm and familiar.

Against what would be considered better judgment, I responded. “Are you talking to me?”

“Say it,” he whispered again.

“Say what?”

“The code word.”

Light bulb.

“Are you Clarence?” I asked.

“Depends,” he whispered, still jogging in place, but looking around, as if he were being very clandestine. “Do you know the code word?”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” I sighed. “Casablanca. The code word is Casablanca. By the way, you’re not wearing a red baseball cap and what’s that ridiculous tune you’re whistling?”

He grabbed at his head in surprise. “Oh!” He reached into one of the pockets in his shorts, pulled out a red cap and waved it in front of me. “Sorry. Forgot the hat.” He plopped down on the bench next to me. “Man it’s hot out here. You could swim in this air.” He positioned the cap on his head, gave a suspicious Inspector Clouseau inspection survey of the area, then whispered, “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

Despite his over-the-top secretive behavior, there was something about this young guy I kind of liked. I suspected he needed a friend or two if he acted like this all of the time. “Well,” I said, “I’m not going to stick around if you continue to whisper and I am going to have to demand that you look at me while we talk. I’m pretty sure that by now, anyone following us knows that we’re having a conversation.”

He shot me a sly smile. “‘As Time Goes By.’”

“Is that another code word?”

“Come on, Miss Chick at the Flix dot com—‘As Time Goes By’—that’s the song I was whistling.”

Another light bulb.

I had to suppress a giggle. “From Casablanca, of course.” Poor Clarence was in sore need of whistling lessons. His “As Time Goes By” sounded more like a bad blues version of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

“Casablanca—one of my favorite movies,” I said.

“I know.”

“You do?”

“Your website.”

Right. I kept forgetting how much people could learn about me from my website. An uncomfortable side effect of putting yourself out there on the internet. “Listen, you seem like a nice guy and all, but we need to get to the nitty-gritty here. I have to be somewhere at one o’clock.”

Clarence nodded. “I have something . . .” He started to stand and reach for his right cargo pocket at the same time when two hands landed on his shoulders, stopping him.

“Not so fast, buddy,” said a voice behind us.

I looked up, not surprised, but very happy to see who it was. “Colt! You came.”

“Colt?” Clarence shouted, jumping so hard that he broke free of Colt’s grip and fell onto the graveled path, nearly tripping another passing jogger. After a second, he righted himself and stood, panting heavily. He looked like a guilty child terrified that he might get a spanking for breaking his dad’s new Blu-ray player.

I rose carefully from the bench, trying not to startle him. “Clarence,” I said. “This is my friend, Colt. He’s okay. You can trust him.”

“Colt?” Clarence repeated, the fearful look on his face growing.

“Dude,” Colt added, spreading his hands out to show he didn’t have any weapons, “everything’s cool so long as you keep your hands out of your pockets.”

Poor Clarence just wasn’t calming down. He paced in tiny steps and mumbled incoherently causing passers-by to take notice and eye the three of us with suspicion.

“Listen,” I continued, talking in soothing tones like I do to my kitties when rounding them up for their monthly flea treatment. “I just want to help my friend, Frankie, and you said you had information—”

“Deal over!” Clarence shouted. The terror on his face was replaced with anger. “I thought I was ready, but I’m not!” He tore off across the grass and through the trees.

I slapped Colt about a hundred times. “Look what you did!”

“You’re the one who asked me to come!”

“He wanted to show me something. He was just pulling it from his pocket.”

“What if he wanted to show you a knife or a gun?”

“I thought you had a date with Meeeeeee-gan.” I exaggerated the ee. I couldn’t help myself. The name simply begged for exaggeration.

We argued like an old married couple for a few more minutes until I realized I was now running up against the clock for my meeting with Guy Mertz. I told Colt about it, and he insisted on coming along despite my argument that he’d already scared off one informant. He promised to be discreet, so we marched off down the path toward the White House.

Twice along the way, we caught a glimpse of Clarence tailing us. Evidently Colt hadn’t scared him as badly as we thought. His attempts to be covert were weak: each time we turned around, he ducked behind a tree. He wasn’t very stealthy, to say the least.

Twenty hot, soggy minutes later we stood exhausted on the corner of 17th and Constitution looking across the street at the hot dog stand where I had agreed to meet Guy. A man wearing Guy’s signature fedora and holding an umbrella stood nearby.

“Must . . . have . . . water . . .” Colt groaned. We’d long since drained the bottle I’d bought earlier.

“I’ll bring a couple of bottles back. I think that’s Guy over there now. You stay here.”

“Make it quick. I feel seconds away from total dehydration.”

The light at the intersection turned green and the pedestrian crossing signal told me to go. I started to step off the curb, but the sound of a car’s revving engine and squealing tires stopped me dead in my tracks. The next thing I knew, Colt was shouting, “Curly!” and tackling me to the ground. Gunfire sounded around us. Screams mingled with the deafening pops that seemed to go on and on and on while Colt held my head down, shielding me with his own body. Moments after the gunfire stopped, the shrill sound of a thousand sirens filled the air. We were one block from the White House—I nearly expected an Air Force fighter to swoop by.

When I was finally able to lift my head, I realized that my Jackie O sunglasses had been crushed, my face was covered in tears and I was trembling uncontrollably.

Certain that we had just witnessed a terrorist attack firsthand, I gasped when my eyes finally landed on the hot dog stand where I had been headed. The mobile van was full of holes. The vendor inside was sprawled facedown over the counter and two bodies lay lifeless on the sidewalk. One of them, I was pretty sure, was Guy Mertz.

And when I turned my head away because it was too awful to watch, I caught sight of Clarence again, running for real this time, fast from the scene.