She'd have to nip this in the bud.
"It's Gin, Gerry. Gin." He blinked. "Got you. I don't think I ever knew your real first name. Gin it is. But I barely recognized you.
You look great." He winced and waved his hands in the space between them, as if trying to erase The words. "Wait. That didn't come out right. I didn't mean, " "It's okay, " she laughed, placing a hand on his sleeve. "I understand. I'm not half the girl I used to be. And you . . . last time I saw you, you had huge sideburns and hair over your ears. ' He rubbed his clean-shaven cheeks. "Yeah. The seventi.
Can you believe how we dressed back then? But tell me, What've you been doing with yourself? " "I just finished an internal medicine residency."
"You're a doctor? That's great! " He glanced at his watch. "Look, I've been waiting down here to meet you since you walked in. I mean, I just had to see if it was really you. But now I'm late for a meeting and I've got to run. But let's get together soon."
"That'd be nice."
"How about tomorrow night? Are you free?
She sensed he was asking about more than just time
"Tomorrow? No, I'm moonlighting Tuesday night." She started a twelve-hour shift at Lynnbrook at eight.
"Wednesday night? " '"Sorry. Moonlighting again." But she didn't want to turn him down flat. "Maybe we could get together for an early bite before I go on duty. Or wait till Friday." '"Friday's a long way off. An early bite it will be. Anyplace special you'd like to go?
" "You schoose."
"Okay. I will." He pulled a small leather folder from his pocket and gave her two cards along with a pen. "Give me your number and I'll call when I think of an appropriate place." She wrote down her number and handed back the cards. He returned the bottom card to her.
"That one's for you. Call me any time you witness a federal crime. " He waved and moved off. "I'll call you tonight or tomorrow." And then he was hurrying through the glistening marble whiteness toward the exit. Gin glanced at his card, Gerald Canney, Special Agent, Federal Bgreav of Investigation.
She smiled. Gerry was an FBI man? Amazing. She'd always imagined him going into business. Who'd have ever thought? And now the former major heartthrob of Washington-Lee High wanted to take her out. Who'd ever believe that?
She just hoped they didn't wind up at a pasta place. That wouldn't be funny.
Pasta . . . when had she picked up that name? Freshman year?
Somewhere around the time her hormones had begun to flow. Overnight she'd seemed to balloon. It was horrible.
She couldn't squeeze into her clothes. Her breasts were growing, which was fine, but so were her thighs and hips and waistline. She hadn't changed her eating habits but her body seemed to have stopped burning off the calories she'd once been able to pack away. She'd gone from slightly above average to obese in less than a year. She'd wanted to die.
Her father couldn't see a problem, "There's more of you to love! " was definitely not a solution to her misery. Mama understood, and together they started a diet, but already it was too late. The school comedians couldn't resist "Pasta" Panzella.
She changed internally as well, becoming moody and reclusive. Looking back now, from the far side of a medical education, Gin realized Pasta had sunk into a clinical depression. She'd tell people she didn't care about her weight or what anybody called her, and to prove it, she'd b inge. Especially on lonely weekend nights. Primarily on chocolate.
Pasta loved chocolate. Chocolate cake, chocolate donuts, Hershey's with almonds, and Snickers. God, she loved Snickers. And bingeing only made her fatter, which made her even more depressed.
Pasta missed the junior and senior proms, and lots of other high-school activities in her self-imposed exile. The only bright spots in those dark days had been her novels and her part-time job in Dr. Lathram's office. Her grades began to slip but not enough to keep her out of the Ivy League.
The summer before going off to college she realized that she had a chance to start all over again. The kids in Princeton had never heard her called Pasta. She vowed that none of them ever would. She began a strict diet, no bulimia, no starvation, no trading one problem for another, just low fat and calorie restriction, plus a grueling exercise program. She remembered the constant hunger, the burning lungs, the aching legs as she forced her body to jog one more mile . . .
just one more. By the time she registered at Princeton she was proud to be merely overweight. According to her charts, her weight hit the fiftieth percentile for her age, height, and sex during sophomore year, as a junior she overshot and got too thin, so she backed off. When she graduated she was the person she wanted to be, She had her BS in biology, was on her way to U. of P. med school, and she liked what she saw in the mirror.
She'd maintained that weight through four years of med school and three years of residency. Pasta Panzella was gone.
Well, almost gone. The ghost of Pasta still haunted her, and every so often she'd propel Gin to the chocolate section of a candy store, and Gin would give in and let Pasta have a Snickers. But only once in a while, and only one.
And now Gerry Canney was asking her out. Strange how things come full circle.
She frowned. Hadn't she heard somewhere along the line that Gerry was married? She wanted to get to know Gerry, she certainly hadn't known him well in high school, but she wasn't into games.
Pasta Panzella had been a vulnerable adolescent.
Gin Panzella, MD, was anything but.
'"Sorry I'm late, " Gerry said as he burst into Marvin Ketter's cramped officer on the EYE Street side of the Bureau building. He was puffing a little and he'd broken a sweat on the rush up from the parking garage.
"Took me a little longer than I planned.
Which was true. It had taken Pasta, no. . . Gina, a long time to finish her business in the Hart Building. And all the way back here his mind had been on her instead of Senator Schulz. God, she was beautiful now.
The metamorphosis from Pasta to Gin fascinated him. Reminded him of the time as a kid he'd left a caterpillar in a dry aquarium and returned after a weekend away to find a graceful butterfly fluttering against the glass. He'd let it fly around his room, watching it in awe for hours before opening the screen to let it glide out the window.
"Well, you've had all mornin' to scratch, ' Ketter said. "Find any worms? " Marvin Ketter had ten years on Gerry. His dark curly hair was just starting to gray at the temples and he wore it very very short. His eyebrows were his outstanding feature, enormous, bushy, Groucho-league tangles that were longer and thicker than the hair on his head. Give him a wide black mustache and a cigar and he could join Harpo and Chico without a hitch. Until he opened his mouth. Groucho didn't have a Georgia accent.
Ketter was SSA, supervising special agent. One notch above Gerry.
Gerry wanted his job. He didn't want to kick him out or make him look bad, he liked Ketter, but when Ketter moved up, Gerry wanted to move into his chair. Not simply as a career move or because he'd been a field agent long enough, there were other, more important reasons.
"Found a few goodies, but I don't know if they mean anything. And the more I learn about our boy, the less I like him. I mean, there didn't seem to be anything too small for this guy to steal."
"Plenty like him down here."
"So I'm beginning to see. Hell, I used to think I had few illusions about what really goes on up there on the Hill, but I'm beginning to think I've been a Pollyanna." He'd learned more than he wanted to know about Washington's honoraria industry.
Years ago the Senate had voted to cap the amount of honoraria each member could collect in a year. This did not deter senators from accepting "speaking engagements, " however. They continued to be flown to plush resorts, put up in lavish suites, wined and dined for days before and after their 'speech", usually a few after-dinner remarks to the corporate sales conference attendees, and then flown back to Washington loaded down with gifts. The thousand-dollar honorarium for speaking? That was donated, very visibly, to a charity.
The all-expense-paid vacation and gifts were enough of a haul for most of the legislators, but not enough for Senator Schulz. He accepted every speaking invitation that came along, demanded high honoraria, but graciously donated every dime to a church in his hometown where his uncle was minister. Gerry's investigation had uncovered evidence that the minister was keeping only a quarter of the donations for the church and funneling the rest back to Schulz.
But then Gerry had come across a connection between Schultz and Representative Hugo Lane. Both were cozy with one of the Japanese auto lobbies. A Japanese auto corporation had bought an $800, 000 condo in Palm Beach. It was registered in the company's name, but its use was reserved exclusively for Schulz and Lane. Whenever they wanted some fun in the Florida sun, it was theirs. They simply had to work it out between themselves so they wouldn't arrive at the same time
Congressman Lane had died in a car crash, ran it into a deep ravine in Rock Creek Park, two weeks before Schulz's death.
A connection? Maybe. Gerry was looking into that. So far he'd come up with zilch, but he was still looking.
"One interesting note, " he said to Ketter. "I came across a fat canceled check for plastic surgery."
"Let me guess, drawn on his reelection campaign funds. ' Of course.
"So what's the point? " "Well, seems to me people who've looking to end it all don't drop a bundle on cosmetic surgery. Sounds more like someone who's looking toward the future.
'"Possibly. Or someone who's unhappy with himself, tries plastic surgery to improve his looks, finds out it doesn't make him feel the least bit better, so he dives for the dirt."