Twisted Triangle Read online

  As their conversation progressed, Margo began to pick up that Patsy wasn’t heterosexual, not just from the leg touching, but also from the way she talked about the women in her life. She could also tell that Patsy had suffered a lot of emotional pain.

  “She was very quiet, soft spoken. She seemed to have a lot of hurt in her life,” Margo said later. “She wasn’t clingy or needy; she just was very intense. She seemed to have a lot of depth in her, a lot of experiences.”

  Patsy told Margo a story about a woman who used to work for her. After Patsy fired her, she brought something of Patsy’s back to her house and left it on the front step.

  “That’s something you’d see in the breakup of gay people,” Margo said to her.

  Patsy looked at her with surprise, and Margo could tell she’d hit a nerve. She later decided that Patsy either hadn’t realized how she was coming off or was testing Margo’s reaction.

  Patsy also told Margo about a homeless person who’d yelled at her and a friend as they were getting off an escalator in DC.

  “He yelled out ‘Butch’ at us,” Patsy said. “It was scary.”

  Time flew by. When Margo looked at her watch, it was 11:45 PM. She suddenly realized she had to close up the building, check in with the front desk, and send the late drinkers in the Board Room to bed.

  After their lengthy chat, Patsy started calling Margo a couple of times a week. Soon Margo felt comfortable calling her, too.

  Initially their phone conversations were brief. They were both very busy. Patsy was doing a lot of book signings, so they’d talk about which city she was in, where she was traveling to next, and what Margo was teaching.

  Later that month, Margo and John were visiting with Ed one morning at the Richmond field office, when he suggested that they drop over to see Patsy. They drove to Windsor Farms, the upscale subdivision where she lived, and sat on her leather couch drinking coffee, eating croissants, and shooting the breeze for nearly an hour.

  Patsy’s living room walls were made of dark stained wood, leading up to exposed beams that ran across the ceiling. There was a wet bar on one side and a massive stone fireplace on the other, framing a set of sliding glass doors that opened onto a nicely landscaped backyard lined with mature trees. At the time, Margo wasn’t thinking about Patsy’s protagonist, Kay Scarpetta, but later, as she read more of Patsy’s books, she felt that Scarpetta’s house seemed very familiar, as if she’d been there before.

  Margo felt content to be at Patsy’s, playing a game of hide-the-attraction from her male colleagues. “At that point, we had not progressed much further, so it was a mutual infatuation,” Margo said later. “It was interesting being in her house because I was with John and Ed, when I would have much preferred to have been there just with her.”

  In February, Patsy came to Quantico regularly to hang out with the profilers, often checking in at Margo’s office.

  One day, she came by wearing a black Escada silk tie with a pattern of small white flowers, Greta Garbo style.

  “That looks very good on you,” Margo said.

  Patsy pulled it off. “Here, why don’t you take it?”

  Margo thanked her and wore it to work the next day.

  A few days later, Patsy bought a Mont Blanc pen-and-pencil set at the academy store. She gave Margo the pen later that afternoon, drawing Margo into the gray area where Patsy’s life and her fiction intersected. In Postmortem, Benton Wesley, the married agent who becomes Scarpetta’s lover in her later books, is described as “slowly turning his Mont Blanc pen end over end on the table top, his jaw firmly set.”

  Margo wanted to share more with Patsy, so she invited her over to the house for dinner with the family, driving her there in the Bennetts’ van so that they could talk on the fifteen-minute trip over.

  “She was very successful, well respected, and it was a nice feeling to know that someone who was that nice of a person, and also that important, was interested in spending time with me, wanting to meet my children, wanting to meet my husband,” Margo said later.

  But she also felt a little self-conscious about her attraction for Patsy in case Gene picked up on it. “I was a bit apprehensive about bringing my submerged feelings into the house. I didn’t know where it was going with Patsy, and I didn’t want to expose that.”

  After the meal, they all went onto the back deck, which looked out into the woods, so that Gene could show off his new night goggles. Gene took the opportunity to pull the top of his sweatpants open and look down.

  “Yeah, everything is still there,” he joked.

  Mortified and humiliated, Margo turned and walked into the house.

  “He must have felt something was weird, something was different, about Patsy, so he was exerting his passive-aggressive behavior, calling attention to the fact that he was a man with a penis,” Margo recalled later. “To some degree, I believe that his embarrassing me made him feel better.”

  Patsy handled Gene’s strange behavior graciously, laughing at his jokes and questioning him about his undercover activities.

  Margo apologized on the drive back to Quantico, where Patsy was staying overnight.

  “I’m sorry about the way Gene acted.”

  Patsy took Margo’s hand gently and said, “Don’t worry. It’s okay.”

  Patsy continued to hold her hand as they drove the rest of the way in silence.

  Back at the academy, Margo walked Patsy up to her room in the Washington Building, where they chatted for a few minutes.

  “When we hugged goodbye, she liked to be held until she was ready to let go, and I would just hold her until it felt like she was ready to let go,” Margo said later.

  Margo enjoyed having this private time with Patsy, behind that closed door.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow?” Margo said, assuming they would run into each other.

  “Yes,” Patsy said.

  Margo invited Patsy back to the house for dinner in early March. Patsy stroked Margo’s hand in the van coming and going, which Margo found extremely erotic.

  “She was making love to my hand,” Margo said later. “It was like my whole system was in overdrive.”

  Back at Quantico, they had another prolonged embrace. When they parted, Margo saw a look of longing in Patsy’s eyes, the same look she was sure Patsy could see in hers.

  Margo felt herself getting increasingly caught up in her physical connection to Patsy, but she still didn’t intend to take any action on it.

  They started talking on the phone every day, and Patsy faxed her book tour itinerary to Margo every couple of weeks so that she could reach Patsy at any time. They exchanged such sentiments as “I miss you,” “I’ve enjoyed my time with you,” and “I’m looking forward to seeing you again.”

  On March 20, Patsy showed up in Margo’s office with a surprise.

  “I have something for you in my car,” she said.

  In the trunk of her Mercedes was a framed poster-size copy of the Postmortem book jacket, signed, “To Margo, a special woman and wonderful friend. Love, Patsy.”

  They took it back to Margo’s office, where Patsy pulled two of her books off the shelf and wrote new inscriptions with that day’s date under the ones she’d already written on the front pages.

  “Why don’t I sign your books every time I visit?” she asked. “Sooner or later it will fill out the book.”

  Patsy underscored that sentiment with the message she wrote in Postmortem: “If I sign this every time I visit, yours will be the rarest of 1st editions. Warmly, Patsy.”

  She also signed Body of Evidence for the second time, writing, “To Margo on the day I fell from Grace. Well, it may not get better with me, but it will always get different. Love Patsy. (I did inscribe it after all, but I’m going to do it again. What a special pleasure to be your friend.)”

  Patsy was referring to the fall she’d taken during a run that day with some agents on a path at Quantico known as the Yellow Brick Road, a three-mile obstacle course, which made for a
nine-mile run if the agents started from the gym.

  A few days later, Margo was telling Patsy about a tour of Quantico she was giving that week to a group of about thirty kids with cancer, called Camp Sunshine. The children were in grades four through six.

  “Is there something I can do to help?” Patsy asked. “Can I buy them FBI hats?”

  Margo was happy to take her up on the offer. “Would you like to join us and meet the kids?”

  “That’d be great.”

  So Patsy met up with Margo and the children, some of whom were rail thin and bald, but all of whom wore smiles and exuded courage. Together, they explored Hogan’s Alley, a two-block area comparable to a Hollywood movie set, with buildings and two grassy common areas that look like a small town square, where new agents train to respond to bank robberies or hostage situations.

  In addition to a phony bank, Hogan’s Alley has mock townhouses and a fake bakery, drugstore, and hotel. It also has a reproduction of the Biograph Theatre, complete with a marquee advertising Manhattan Melodrama, starring Clark Gable and Myrna Loy. The Chicago theater has historic significance for the bureau because that’s where fifteen agents gunned down bank robber John Dillinger on July 22, 1934, right after he’d watched this movie.

  Patsy put her arm around Margo, and they posed for a few photos on the sidewalk. The snapshots show how very comfortable they were together—two slender and athletic thirty-something blondes, standing hip to hip.

  Patsy continued to give Margo presents, sometimes in a gift box, for no other reason than that she felt like it. A black-and-red silk Nicole Miller blouse, for example, was “just because.”

  In early April, Margo invited Patsy over for a third family dinner while she was attending another seminar at Quantico.

  This time, Patsy brought presents for Margo’s three- and five-year-old daughters: two dark-brown mink teddy bears she’d picked up in New York City. They were six inches tall and extremely soft.

  Margo found the gifts a bit extravagant, given that her girls were at the age where they were pulling off the heads of their Barbie dolls, but she appreciated Patsy’s generosity.

  After dinner, Margo went out to the van, thinking Patsy was right behind her. Patsy got in a couple minutes later and was quiet all the way back to Quantico. A month later, she told Margo that Gene had grabbed her ass on her way out, saying, “Call me sometime.” Patsy was disgusted, and Margo was embarrassed once again by her husband’s behavior.

  Margo walked Patsy back to her dorm room as usual, only this time she sensed that the dam was about to burst on her will power. The emotional walls that had been straining to contain her attraction for Patsy were collapsing as the two of them made their way down the hallway.

  In the room, their embrace lasted even longer than usual while Margo leaned against an armoire, with Patsy’s head on her shoulder.

  “I can feel your heat,” Patsy said. “I can’t believe how hot you are.”

  Margo reached down and started kissing her on the jaw and neck, moving slowly over, finally and at long last, to Patsy’s lips.

  “This is crazy. I’m sorry,” Margo said.

  “No, don’t be sorry,” Patsy replied.

  They kissed again.

  “It was a total sensual bath of feeling,” Margo said later. “Plain nerve endings going Fourth of July bonkers. I was not there. Time wasn’t there. It was so astounding. Took my breath away. Up to that point in my life, that was the most tender kiss I had ever had, and yet at the same time, it was the most ferocious in the intensity of it and what it was doing to the inside of me. I was mush. The hardest thing I had to do was let go of her and say, ‘I have to go home.’ ”

  When Margo finally did get home, reality smacked her in the face. Gene was pissed. She’d been gone for over an hour.

  “Where have you been?” he snarled at her. “You needed to be at home to put the kids to bed.”

  So Margo did her motherly duties, then got into bed with Gene, who was still pouting. She gave him the usual goodnight kiss on the cheek while he channel surfed, but he didn’t kiss her back. That was fine with her. She needed time to think.

  “It took me a long time to fall asleep that night,” she recalled later. “I rolled away from him and just lay there, wondering what the hell was going on in my life.”

  The next morning, she went to straight to Patsy’s dorm room to apologize. She was a married woman, after all.

  “Patsy, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean for that to happen last night.”

  As their eyes met, Patsy softly said, “Margo, I wanted that to happen.”

  Margo later said, “Then it was like the cards were out on the table. I knew we shouldn’t be doing this, but sometimes people do stupid things. I admit I should have turned and run down the street. Why? Because I was married, if for no other reason. I should not have walked into that, but I did because, frankly, it felt good, and it was the first time I had the sense of being appreciated for what I brought to the table.”

  Over the next two hours, Patsy unveiled some of her more personal struggles. She seemed tired and fragile.

  Patsy talked about growing up with her mother, who had suffered from mental illness. She explained how her brother had kept a gun in their bedroom in case their mother came in again, acting crazy. How she’d been molested as a child by a security guard. How her dog went missing when she was in elementary school, and when she came home one afternoon, her mother was burning something in the fireplace that looked and smelled like meat.

  Patsy also told Margo she’d recently come out of a relationship that broke her heart, but she didn’t elaborate. Margo took that to mean that Patsy was ready to feel something for someone again. Margo’s own heart had felt frozen for a long time, but she was ready too.

  After they hugged goodbye, Margo left, confused. She really wasn’t sure what she was doing or what it all meant.

  But she was quite sure of one thing: the desire for more was entirely mutual.

  On April 15, Patsy extended a welcome invitation to Margo over the phone.

  “Would you like to spend some time together?” she asked. “I’ll come and pick you up and bring you back.”

  Clearly, Patsy meant intimate time.

  “Yes, I would,” Margo said, scared but forging ahead nonetheless.

  Margo was expected to be at Quantico all day, but nobody kept close tabs on her. So they made arrangements for Patsy to come by two mornings later, then bring Margo back around three in the afternoon so that she could check her messages and be available to students.

  Over the next two days, Margo let herself remember the satisfaction and completeness of being with a woman. It was a feeling she’d thought she’d left behind more than fifteen years earlier.

  To have that memory reawakened after all that time, coupled with the physical attraction and passion she felt for Patsy, was a heady experience. She was not thinking rationally at this point. She was enjoying being in the moment too much for that.

  She’d felt passion and lust for Gene in the beginning, too. She’d even grown to love him, but it was different. Being with a woman was more of an emotional experience for her, an intermingling of spirit and soul, something she’d never felt with Gene or any other man. She didn’t think Gene had ever fully let go of control over his emotions, and neither had she, so they had sex. When she’d been with Donna, they both had let go. To her, that was making love, and she expected it to be the same with Patsy.

  When the morning of their rendezvous arrived, Margo was ready.

  “I’ve got some things to do,” she told John Hess as she left the office around ten that morning. He had no idea what was going on and frankly wouldn’t have cared anyway.

  Patsy was waiting for her at the parking circle, dressed in a white pantsuit. She handed Margo a toasted bagel, doused with olive oil and wrapped in foil, for the hourlong drive to her house.

  “I’m glad you could get the day away,” she said.

&nb
sp; “Me, too,” Margo said.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Yes,” Margo said definitively. “I’m sure.”

  From that point on, Margo felt no guilt or confusion, only nervous excitement about consummating her feelings for Patsy.

  During the drive, they talked about Patsy’s writing, how she drew her ideas from conversations with police, news events, and her own imagination. She said she’d sit down to write, blocking out the world, not knowing the end of her own plots until she got there, which made for rapid, unexpected endings.

  Despite the difference in their incomes, Margo didn’t feel any socioeconomic divide or awkwardness between them. Patsy may have chosen a Mercedes or an Escada tie to make a statement, but Margo was wearing her three-carat diamond ring, her diamond earrings, and her Rolex watch. Patsy was a successful author, but Margo saw herself as a success in her own right: she was an instructor at the FBI academy. The degree of emotional risk between them felt equal as well.

  “It wasn’t her chasing me, or vice versa,” Margo said later. “It was a mutual attraction.”

  Patsy drove through her secluded, affluent neighborhood, with its expansive homes and well-groomed lawns, and up the driveway to her large ranch-style house. They entered through the garage, then Patsy led her into the kitchen, through the living room, and into the bedroom, which had a queen-size bed directly in front of the door.

  Patsy went over to the vanity and started taking off her rings and jewelry. She seemed a little nervous and unsure of how to proceed, so Margo took the lead.

  Margo came up from behind and put her arms around Patsy. Patsy looked up at their reflection in the mirror, where their faces and blond heads were side by side. Now they could both see their expressions of longing.

  “It was a perfect picture,” Margo recalled. “It just felt right. She turned around in my arms, and I held her. And then we kissed.”