Morning Spy, Evening Spy by Colin MacKinnon

Author:Colin MacKinnon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

17 JUNE 1

“I Wanted to Leave Him”

“Virgin Mary.” Andrea Rodriguez, Powers’s mistress and my one illicit love of long ago, glances up affably at our perky little waitress—her name is Jenna, she has announced—who jots down our drink orders (beer for me) and sashays off to the bar, fanny wagging. It’s a late, lazy Friday afternoon. We’re in a Bennigan’s in Falls Church, at a window table, far from the bar and the other customers. We look out onto an asphalt parking lot. Across the way are the usual: a Gap, an Omaha Steaks, a Pearle Vision. Bennigan’s is Andrea’s idea of an out-of-the-way place. People don’t go there, she said, meaning People Like Us.

Andrea called me at home last night. She was in town, she said, and wanted to talk.

“About Ed and all that. Can I see you?”

That’s all she’d say on the phone. “Yes,” I said, “yes.”

She’s probably worried about federal prosecutors coming at her for some of Ed’s shadier dealings. The FBI has been paying close attention to her, Lurch tells me. They’re looking at Ed’s arms trafficking and they smell a case against Andrea.

At the entrance to Bennigan’s Andrea and I embraced, distantly and quickly, but in the feel of her right arm up on my shoulder and around my neck there was something of those afternoons in Drayton Gardens. That faint electricity between two former lovers, it never goes away. We both felt it, then broke the clinch.

“So how are you?” I ask.

“Oh, tired. I’ve been back three weeks now, would you believe, and I’m still in a daze. I’m in a town house in Falls Church. Place I own. I bought it as an investment a while back—for a rainy day.” She gives her head a rueful shake. “Well, I guess it’s a rainy day, all right. The renters were on month-to-month, so when Ed died, I wrote them to leave.”

Time has flattened her out and made her rangier, more angular. Her eyes and mouth have hardened, her features set. This is the way she’s going to be from here on in.

And yet, and yet, there’s still a hint, ten years later, of that sassy, sexy glance I remember. Born with it.

She shakes her head. “I’m such a dunce sometimes. I thought I’d get a job here in Washington, but now I’m not so sure I want to stay in the area. Too many ghosts. I shouldn’t have kicked out the renters. They were really okay—nice people, you know? And now if I leave, I’ll have to find new ones and that’ll take some time and who knows what I’ll get. And I probably will leave. My dad and mom live in L.A., and I’ve got a sister in San Diego, so I may go out there.”

“To do what?”

“Dunno. Right now I’m still trying to figure things out. Go back to school maybe. I’m out of the business—Ed’s. That’s all over. His lawyers are ‘winding it down,’ like they say. Shooting it in the head’s more like it.

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