“I hope it’s a kidnap for ransom. Because that means she’s alive, and all her dad has to do is pay money. The other possibility…”
“Yeah,” she said. “I know what the other possibility is.”
I called Diana and asked her to put a rush on her request to locate Alexa Marcus’s phone.
* * *
THIS TIME the door to Senator Armstrong’s Louisburg Square townhouse was opened by a housekeeper, a plump Filipina in a black dress with white trim and a white apron.
“The senator not here,” she said.
“I’m here to see Taylor, actually.”
“Miss Taylor … she is expecting you?”
“Please tell her it’s Nick Heller.”
She looked uncertain whether to show me in. In the end she closed the front door and asked me to wait outside.
The door opened again five minutes later.
It was Taylor. She looked dressed to go out, her small black handbag slung over her shoulder.
“What?” She said it the way you might talk to some neighborhood kid who’d rung your doorbell as a prank.
“Time for a walk,” I said.
“Is this going to take long?” she said.
“Not long at all.”
* * *
HALFWAY DOWN Mount Vernon Street I said, “The guy Alexa left Slammer with last night—what’s his name?”
“I told you, I don’t remember.”
“He never told you his name?”
“If he did, I couldn’t hear it. Anyway, he wasn’t interested in me. He was, like, hitting on Alexa the whole time.”
“So you have no idea what his name is.”
“How many times are you going to ask me? Is that what you came back for? I thought you said you found something.”
“I just wanted to be sure I understood you right. Does your daddy know you got a ride with some guy whose name you don’t even know?”
For a split second I could see the panic in her eyes, but she covered smoothly with a scowl of disbelief. “I didn’t get a ride with him. I got a cab home.”
“I’m not talking about how you got home. I’m talking about how you got to the bar in the first place.”
“I took a cab.” Then she must have remembered about things like taxicab company call records and the like, and she added, “I hailed one on Charles Street.”
“No,” I said softly, “you arrived with him in his Jaguar.”
She did the disbelief-scowl again, but before she could dig herself in deeper, I said, “It’s all on the surveillance video at the hotel. You sure you want to keep lying to me?”
The look of desperation returned to her face, and she didn’t try to conceal it. “Look, I didn’t…” She started off prickly, defiant, but seemed to crumple in front of me. Her voice was suddenly small and high and plaintive. “I swear, I was just trying to help her out.”
24.
“I met this guy at a Starbucks, okay?” Taylor said. “Yesterday afternoon. And he really, like, came on to me.”
She looked at me, waiting for a reaction, but I kept my face unreadable.
“We just started talking, and he seemed like a cool guy. He asked if I wanted to go to Slammer with him, and I … I was sort of nervous, ’cause I’d just met him, you know? I said, okay, sure, but I wanted my friend to join us. So it wouldn’t be so intense. Like not really a date, you know?”
“Alexa knew all this?”
She nodded.
“His name?”
A beat. “Lorenzo.”
“Last name?”
“He might have told me, but I don’t remember.”
“So you two came to the Graybar together, and Alexa met you—where? Upstairs in the bar? Or in front of the hotel?”
“In line, in front. There’s always a line there like a mile long.”
“I see.” I let her continue spinning her tale for a while longer. The surveillance video was fresh in my mind: Alexa joining Taylor in line, no guy with her. The guy had approached the two of them in the bar an hour later. Acting as if he’d never met either one of them before.
So: a total setup. He’d pretended to introduce himself to both girls. Taylor had been part of the arrangement.
“You got a smoke?” I said.
She shrugged, took the pack of Marlboros from her handbag.
“Light?” I said.
She shook her head in annoyance, fished around in her handbag, and pulled out the gold Dupont lighter. As I took it from her it slipped out of my hand and clattered to the cobblestones.
“Jesus!” she said.
I picked it up, lighted a cigarette, handed the lighter back. “Thank you. Now, tell me about Lorenzo.”