by Warren Adler
"What did the mayor tell you," she said gently. "I have a right to know that."
The eggplant sat down again and lit another cigarette.
"The White House. One of the President's top guys..."
"That high up?" Dr. Benton said.
"A man named Arthur Fellows. He said you were messing in areas that are very sensitive. That the President was upset. That unless there was solid evidence of foul play in this suicide you'd better stop messing around. He made me check, so I read your reports. There is no evidence. He said you were apparently working on your own, harassing people and you had to be stopped."
"He didn't mention O'Haire?" She could have understood O'Haire. Even Martin. They, at least, had a legitimate gripe.
"No."
She tried to assimilate the information.
"The White House. Is it possible?"
"Hey, woman. You know the games they play. They all jerk each other off. Clout. Remember that word. They trade things around with each other. Appointments. Favors. Who the hell knows? Maybe the mayor thinks he's going to lose next time out and wants to be ambassador to Zululand. It wouldn't be the first time the White House scotched an investigation. National security or some shit like that. Besides, it's not like we're squelchin' anything. FitzGerald..." He raised his voice. "There's no crime here. No fucking crime."
"Well, there sure as hell is a lot of other shit going down," she said sharply.
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
She looked at Dr. Benton, who shrugged and turned away.
"Shall I tell him?" she asked.
"I can't make that decision, Fiona," Dr. Benton said.
She knew his courage was faltering, that he would have rather not heard anything. It wasn't cowardice, she knew. Just surrender. He loved his work and knew the survival techniques of the bureaucracy. Knowing too much wasn't one of them.
"I'm sorry, Dr. Benton, to have dragged you into it."
"I'm the goddamned boss and I don't know nothin," the eggplant said with disgust, sitting down in a corner chair, crossing his heavy thighs. As she talked, she watched him. Every word she uttered seemed like the blow of a blunt instrument. His jaw grew slack and his bloodshot eyes seemed tired. The glass trembled in his hand. There was, she knew, a sense of evil power in her explanation as she told him about Justice Strauss, the oversized underwear, O'Haire, the cans of caviar, the four-star pin, Gribben, Jason Martin.
"An investigative reporter," she emphasized.
Hearing it come out in her own words, she was startled by the tangle of events. Was this all because of Clint?
"Lord have mercy," the eggplant said when she finally finished. He took out a handkerchief and mopped his face. "Is that all?" he asked, obviously stunned.
"No. I don't think that's all," she said. She poured the last remains from Dr. Benton's bottle into a glass and drank it in one gulp. The eggplant slumped back in his chair, as if his bones had suddenly dissolved.
"I tried to tell you. It did smell. You've got to admit that."
When he didn't answer, she continued, feeling the heat of the brandy roll inside her.
"She could have also had a friend in the White House."
"Who needed this?" the eggplant mumbled.
"I'm sorry. I really am sorry." She felt her contrition deeply, knowing it was too late for that.
"At least she wasn't black," the eggplant said, emitting a forced chuckle. Fiona looked from his face to Dr. Benton's, connecting with their anguish. It's like we were playing bridge on the Titanic, she thought. Minding our own business.
"That dumb nigger mayor," the eggplant exploded. Again, Dr. Benton and Fiona exchanged glances. The signs were obvious. He was winding up once more. No one could ever accuse him of being a quiet brooder.
"That White House fucker knows his niggers."
Suddenly he seemed to abort his temper and grew quiet, his eyes drifting as he played with his empty glass. "You gonna cooperate, FitzGerald, or do we all have to go through the exercise?"
He was obviously pleading. It was too big to cope with. "Unless you're a good liar, and I don't think you are, we can't go through an internal inquiry. Not with all that shit going down. Everybody loses. Except maybe you, FitzGerald. The avenging white angel."
"I didn't ask to be suspended," she snapped. No, she wouldn't want to go through it, either. Sooner or later they'd get at the root of it. Maybe even to Clint.
"What do you mean, cooperate?" she asked.
"I'm not sure," the eggplant said, drifting again. "Just let it pass. Blow over. I'll try to talk him out of suspension."
"Without telling him?"
"I'm gonna try. Why should I give that son of a bitch a club? Rule numero uno. Never trust a politician." He paused, waiting for her answer. "Well?"
"Do I have to answer now?"
She looked helplessly at Dr. Benton.
"They're too big to play with, FitzGerald. We're little guys. The big guys don't like little guys messin' with their shit. Somewhere along the line we all get it. Dig? So they were playing around. We're not the..." He laughed, a sad little bleat, "...the moral minority."
Maybe, she thought, her loyalty ought to be to the living. Sorry, Dorothy, she told herself. Dead is dead. It was, she knew, because of a bit of power that had fallen into her lap, undeserved. But she could show them her loyalty, her commonality with them, crossing all racial and sexual borders. She'd be one of them and they'd owe her for that, she mused, upset by the nastiness of the thought. When all was said and done, they were her people. Just cops. Like her. Like her old man. She had finally made it, she told herself, wanting to cry, but holding back. She would never show them that.
"Sure, I'll play," she said, feeling the room spin.
"And Cates?"
"Timothy? I'm sure he'll play, too."
"Thank the Lord," the eggplant said, getting up.
And what about Dorothy, she thought. Had she played along, too? The question persisted, leaving a knot in her stomach that she couldn't ignore.
XVI
"Dot."
Before he turned on the lights, he called out. It was a useless effort. He knew she wasn't there. Wild hope had driven him through the heavy rain back to his Capitol Hill apartment. What he had failed to calculate in his scheme, excised by sheer blindness, was the power of desperation. If he hadn't moved quickly, Arthur Fellows would have run him down without pity or remorse. In cold blood. He shivered, less from the chill than his fear. Had she escaped as well?
He picked up the phone and called the Cathedral Avenue apartment. He let it ring five, ten times, praying to hear the sound of her voice at the other end. Without changing, he jogged through the rain back to his car. Please God, no, he begged, as he sped toward her.
Absolution was what he craved. He would get down on his knees and beg her forgiveness. In the car, he held tightly to the wheel, feeling the chill permeate his body. He began to shiver as he maneuvered the car along the Southwest Freeway, forcing his alertness to be sure he took the right cut-off and not the one that led to Virginia. It could lose him as much as half an hour.
Please be safe, Dot, he begged God. God! It was, he discovered, suddenly not just a figure of speech. He was beseeching a tangible source, a protector of his childhood. Don't punish her, he pleaded. It was my evil, mine alone. It wasn't her fault.
It was frustration, he beseeched. It had corrupted him, destroyed his sense of morality, melting good and evil into an indistinguishable mass. Hadn't he once done good as a journalist? All he wanted was to prove a point, illustrate hypocrisy. Wasn't that good? To satirize their phony standards? To bring back relevance?
As his thoughts whirled, he headed the car up Seventeenth Street to a deserted Connecticut Avenue. The light drizzle continued. The street lights, set for heavy traffic, inhibited his speed, and he pounded the seat beside him every time he was forced to stop. He was afraid to go through the reds. Being stopped by the police now would only slow him fur
ther.
By the time he reached Calvert Street he was pleading to Dot, offering justifications to her as well. No. He had no right to deny her feelings, to force her into this against her will. "Never," he vowed in desperation. He would protect her forever, take care of her, make amends. He would destroy the tapes. They would go away together. He would get another job in some other place and spend his days and nights loving her, demonstrating his sweet love in a thousand ways. The idea energized him and for the first time in months he felt real elation. Finally, hate had gone. Just give me the chance, he begged.
There were no parking spaces near the house, forcing him to double park. The lights were still blazing in the apartment. Thank you, God, he thought, rushing out of the car and fumbling for his key, bursting with the news of his, their, liberation. His fingers trembled so badly, he couldn't fit the key into the slot and he pressed the apartment buzzer.
"Dot," he called. "Please. It's over now. Please. Open the door."
When she didn't answer his buzz, he steadied himself and managed to get the key in the slot, hoping the door would not be chained or bolted. Surprisingly, it opened freely and he rushed in.
"Dot. Dorothy? Please. Where are you?"
When it was apparent she wasn't there, his mind filled with dread, searching for an answer. Was it possible that one of the men had actually offered her a haven? Perhaps she did mean more to one of them than even he had suspected. If that were true, she was in good hands. He deserved it, deserved to lose her.
The thought of her escape calmed him, but not for long. Looking in the closets, he had seen nothing amiss, nothing out of place. Nor had there been signs of her taking anything out of their Capitol Hill apartment. She would not have left without taking something. Inspecting the apartment, he noted its extreme neatness, even neater than it had been earlier. In the kitchen and bathroom, everything gleamed. The contents of her drawers were perfectly placed. Her little nest was spotless.
But in the kitchen trash can, neatly lined with a white garbage bag, was a piece of crumbled plastic, the kind used to protect dry-cleaned garments. It was the only thing in the can. Had it been there earlier? He looked in her clothes closet and as he fumbled with the neatly hung clothes, searched his memory for a dress that might be missing. The white cocktail dress, pure white, lacy. It had been her favorite. He was genuinely puzzled now, roaming through the apartment, searching for other clues. Where was she? Under less tense circumstances, his journalist mind would have thrived on speculation. Now it seemed blocked. Nothing she had done in the last few hours seemed in character. She was not the Dorothy he knew.
For a little while, he was able to hold back any further morbid thoughts. She had simply gone away. It had been too much to handle. One of them must have helped her.
So this was the way it was going to end. Another dead end. Jane had been right from the beginning. Everything he touched was doomed. He thought of his son. Was he, too, doomed? Another generation of tainted Martin genes. Like his old man. Another life aborted by impossible dreams.
His mouth felt parched, and he went into the kitchen for a drink of water. Standing before the sink, glass in hand, waiting for the tap water to cool, his eyes drifted toward the window. Not far was the string of lights across the Ellington Bridge. They seemed so close. If he reached out, he felt he could almost touch them.
The bridge--suicide bridge! No, he told himself. Morbid thoughts begot morbid thoughts. But the idea persisted, and soon it crowded out everything else. Never, he assured himself. Never.
But the morbid itch had, finally, to be satisfied. It was absurd, but when he remembered how Arthur Fellows had nearly killed him, he shuddered with anxiety. Letting himself out of the apartment, he went into the deserted street and walked quickly to the corner, making a left on Calvert Street. A few cars passed by, but not a soul on foot was in sight. The span began at the edge of a large apartment house and the low concrete railings were broken periodically by a circular platform that the builders had evidently designed as observation posts for nature lovers. What the builders hadn't anticipated was that they would be used for more bizarre purposes, mainly by those contemplating suicide.
Stopping at the first one, he peered over the edge. Heights always made him queasy and he could feel the tingle of fear in his groin. Although it was still dark, the lights provided some illumination of the terrain below, and the occasional headlights from the parkway offered a brief, sweeping view of the trees and vegetation that lined the edges of the ravine.
He rebuked himself for his morbidity as he moved further over the bridge to another platform. Peering over, he could see the shiny thread of the creek, reflecting the passing headlights.
At first it had seemed like a crumpled newspaper drifting at the edge of the creek, and he had dismissed it until a blast of light had given it more definition. Again he denied the possibility to himself. The events he had lived through that night had already diluted the edges of reality and part of him had begun to insist it was merely a dream, and he had no control over the twists and turns of the subconscious plot line.
Denying it still, he moved from the platform, crossed to the end of the bridge and headed downward into the ravine, holding on to the scrubs to keep his balance. Slipping and scudding downward on the soaked ground, he cursed the anxiety that was driving him, knowing it could not be true. Soon he would hear the familiar sound of his alarm clock, the reassurance of reality.
The downward thrust of gravity was relentless, propelling him toward the creek. But he could not deny to himself the ultimate feeling of aloneness, the desperate sense of an impending rendezvous with horror. By the time he was halfway down the ravine, he recognized the truth of it, and finally in front of him, a broken doll in a white party dress, was Dorothy. He kneeled before her, struck dumb with terror as the empty eyes peered back at him. Forgive me, God, he cried into the night, looking upward, tasting the rain and his tears.
He did not know how long he knelt there. Time had no logic. Only the inertia of his will moved him. There was something he had to do, but it had not yet reached reason. The first texture of dawn began in the thickly clouded sky and he clambered upward. He had wanted to bend down and kiss her lips, but when the whitening light revealed her face, he was certain that the real Dorothy had long departed, that this misshapen, broken form was not her at all. Struggling upward, he reached the summit of the ravine's edge and ran to the apartment again, hoping that his beating heart would explode his ribcage. Once inside, he closed the door and leaned against it as if his weight could keep out the pursuing spirit of vengeance.
Yet, even in this blind anguish, his mind asserted itself. He searched the apartment again. No note. Nothing to indicate what she was about to do. She had even left the lights on, as if she were certain to be back. A fleeting thought speared out like flotsam to a man caught in a whirlpool. She was coming back. Soon. She would be back soon. That broken lifeless figure was merely wood and sawdust, a castoff doll. He felt better, but only for a moment. Why? Was it to punish him? Them? Now the idea emerged again. Them. One of them. Arthur Fellows would have run him down in cold blood.
Breathing in great gulps of air, he tried to calm himself. He must fight grief, a new enemy, and he scoured his mind for some thread of redemption for himself. And for Dorothy. His own life was worthless now. Had it ever been worth anything? All he had to show for time spent was Trey, and even Trey was denied him. Dorothy at least had her innocence, a rare gift, a talent. His grief was slowly transforming itself into anger. Anger was good. White hot. Anger gave sustenance. Anger gave him back his reason. He called Arthur Fellows at home.
"Yes."
The voice was irritable. In his job, Jason supposed a call in the early hours would be routine. Important White House business.
"You must come," Jason said.
"Who is this?"
"We got problems, Arthur."
"You again."
There was a long silence, but Jason could hear A
rthur's breathing at the other end, waiting. He didn't hang up.
"She's dead."
"Dead?"
"Very."
"Where are you?"
"At the apartment. You know."
"There?"
"You had better come. Now!"
"You think I'm crazy? No way."
"You'd better trust me now."
"Trust you? Of all people."
"You have no choice. You better come. And fast. Or I'll blow you out of the water right now."
He hung up and tried to form a pattern of action. Somewhere in the distance of his thoughts it was taking shape, sustaining him. Had one of them done away with her? It was a speculation that would never be far from his thoughts. Or had she killed herself? Was her innocence so pure? Again, he had to tamp down grief, recall anger.
With a towel, he cleaned himself off, then wiped every surface that he could find. Nothing went untouched. Sills. Windows. Furniture. Every piece of tell-tale surface. The floor as well. He detached the answering machine, gathered every scrap of paper that might bear witness and placed everything, including the towel, in a plastic bag.
By the time Arthur arrived he'd finished. The ring reminded him that he would have to wipe the doors clean and the railings and the buttons. In his early days as a journalist he'd been a police reporter--he knew too well that the inanimate also had eyes and ears.
Arthur was in a state of blind panic. Deep pockets had etched themselves below his bloodshot eyes. He seemed to be breathing too deeply, as if he were unable to bring his body to its usual rhythms. His hands shook.
"This isn't some kind of trick?" His natural bent had always been skepticism.
"No trick. She's dead. Off the bridge."
"Bridge?" He didn't wait for any explanation. "Oh my God."
"I'm not sure whether she jumped or was pushed."
"What are you implying? You know where I was."
"I also know what you tried to do to me."
"I wanted to scare you. I'm not a killer." He sat down. "I'm a fucking victim. I was taken in and you know it." He covered his eyes, trying to maintain control. "You want to destroy me. My family. It isn't fair, Jason. I don't deserve it and neither do they."
