Immaculate Deception

by Warren Adler

  “So much for bad health as a motive,” Fiona said half joking. It had never been a consideration.

  “A not infrequent one, I might add.”

  “So she had health. And position and money. Why the hell would she commit suicide?”

  “Ah, sweet mystery of death,” Dr. Benton said, leaning back in his chair, peering at her through the smooth light tan cathedral structure. Often, he would sit like this for long moments, raking at the mulch of ideas that his pathologist’s mind had harvested. She left him to his thoughts, waiting for him to speak.

  “A member of Congress, was she?” he asked rhetorically, needing no answer. She knew he was, like a boxer, jabbing at something inside his mind, dancing around the ring, probing the always illusive opponent. Suddenly he broke the cathedral and sat up.

  “Tell me more about the political life,” he said.

  “Not good for marriage,” Fiona said, remembering her childhood. “The usual tensions of separation. It’s a bitch in that racket, which was why Mother insisted on setting up full housekeeping within commuting distance. Early on when Daddy first went up to the Senate, we kept the house in Yonkers. But she knew that Daddy was too attractive and vulnerable to set loose among all the pretty young things from Pennsylvania and Ohio who migrated down to snare a politico.” She stopped short. “Mother of Jesus. Here I go meandering.”

  With Dr. Benton, her defenses and normal detective’s discipline always became unravelled. Theoretical logic in the detection process, she had learned, was always filtered first through the dust-laden light of something deeply personal.

  Rarely did she articulate such allusions to her colleagues in the MPD. For a woman, it was considered more than just bad form. It was perceived as typical female emotionalism, that old chestnut so prevalent in a male-dominated world. A pose of neutrality, more like the blindfolded lady of Justice, was considered the operative stance for a woman in her position. Only with Dr. Benton would she have dared offer her most deeply felt personal perspective.

  “So you think her act came out of personal unhappiness? A typical condition of the political life . . . domestic-wise.” Dr. Benton coaxed.

  “It has some logic,” Fiona continued. “They had five kids, all grown, and what amounts to an arrangement. Another not uncommon situation for couples of the Roman persuasion. McGuire was proud of the lady, though, and is pushing a big show of it in the Capitol rotunda tomorrow. Cates is checking it out.”

  “All right then. An arrangement,” Dr. Benton said, sitting back once again and reconstructing the cathedral. “An unhappy marriage of longstanding is rarely a motive for suicide.”

  She nodded agreement.

  “Have you considered unrequited love?” Dr. Benton asked. She knew better than to ridicule the idea. His love for his wife, he had told her, was the most compelling obsession of his life. Even in death. It was, she had concluded, more than hopeless romanticism. If Dr. Benton had an Achilles’ heel it was this. Even his home had been turned into a shrine for his beloved.

  Once, in a moment of depressive grieving, he had confessed that they had eschewed having children on the grounds that it would have threatened a diminution of their love, their sharing. Time, too, had not done a thing to lessen this obsession. His wife had been in her grave for fifteen years.

  “Are you suggesting she had a lover?”

  “It happens,” he sighed. Frankie McGuire? Somehow it seemed off the mark, farfetched, but she did not discount it. Dr. Benton was obviously heading in a specific direction.

  “We are talking of a middle-aged female politician, very conscious of her image and about to run again.”

  But even in her denial, Fiona felt a strange sense of personal testing against her own experience. Did age confer immunity? With some men, she had been reduced to emotional rubble. Nor could she deny the power and exhilaration of being in love and the sense of loss and depression it engendered when the object of it rejected her. It had happened. Yes, indeed. But she had wanted to kill the sons of bitches. Not herself.

  Dr. Benton raised his soft brown eyes, gentle as a doe’s, and looked at her. She could tell he had again turned inward, that he was chasing a theory along its natural path.

  “Suicide is rarely a compulsive act,” he said. “Mostly it is a planned response, usually the result of depressive but logical thought processes. In this case, too, careful planning was required. Research as to the expected reaction of the poison, its aquisition, not a common off-the-shelf item, the choice of scene, timing and means of ingestion. If it was suicide, she had worked that out beautifully.”

  “Then why no note? Why make it a mystery? She was a woman with many responsibilities. She was the most vocal voice in Congress on the issue of abortion, a leader of the pro-life movement, a . . .”

  Dr. Benton, swiftly collapsing his cathedral, stood up abruptly. For him it was a rare display of excitement and it startled her.

  “Of course,” he said. “I’d forgotten.” He turned to look at her. “Forgive me Fiona for playing the ferret.” He shook his head. “The woman, you see, was six weeks pregnant.”

  7

  The flag-draped closed casket stood at the far end of the Capitol rotunda. Chairs had been placed a dozen rows deep in front it. Every seat was filled and a respectful crowd stood behind the chairs and along the rotunda’s rim.

  From her vantage along the rim, Fiona could see the grim faces in the front row, the chief mourners. Jack McGuire sat between what were obviously two of his daughters. Their arms were interlocked, an appropriately grieving trio.

  On either side of the daughters sat the two McGuire sons, straw haired like their father and speckled with freckles like their mother. The girls, in a genetic sex reversal, were beefier with darker hair and no freckles, with cheeks flushed with rouge circles, more like their father, although his radishy skin had been embellished by the brush of John Barleycorn.

  Fiona assumed that others seated in the first row and dressed appropriately for mourning were relatives. Also sitting in the first row as if he, too, were a member of the family, was an ashen faced Harlan Foy. Their eyes had drifted toward each other, engaged, then his snapped away with a look of contempt as if Fiona’s presence here was an affront to the dead lady.

  She recognized the more famous political faces from both Congress and the Executive branch. Some, she assumed, had come out of genuine respect. Others, she observed cynically had rather obvious political motives. A group of violinists in Air Force uniforms played dirge music as the audience gathered. The photographers were also busy. Television cameras had been set up to record the event.

  It was a first-class sendoff, Fiona thought, remembering her father’s lonely funeral back in Yonkers, the hearse threading its way through the clutter of cemetery angels, the sudden downpour that puddled his open grave as they lowered his casket into the dreary dampness. No last hurrah for this true hero. A sob bubbled out of her chest and, for a brief moment, her eyes filmed over.

  They had printed a program on glossy cover stock, complete with Congresswoman McGuire’s picture and bio and a short list of speakers.

  The Speaker of the House was the first to stand before the microphone in front of the casket. The violinists had ceased their playing. Fiona listened to the platitudes. A good and valiant woman, taken to God in her prime, whose contributions would be remembered by future generations, a woman, above all, who believed with all her heart in the righteousness of her cause, who was not afraid to speak out. The usual script.

  He was followed by Harold Hoskins, the Secretary of Health and Human Resources whose theme was conviction and compassion. He read his speech from a little card and was properly laudatory and complimentary. Then came the two senators from Massachusetts, one of whom, tragically, was an acknowledged expert at funeral orations. Despite her role as mere observer, she could not keep her eyes dry as the early trauma of the Kennedy brothers’ assassinations rose once again in her memory.

  But it was Charles Rome�
�s speech that sparked a special interest. He was a tall slender man with a thick shock of curly grey hair, an eaglelike nose and eyes set deep over high cheekbones. He had the quintessential look of the distinguished stylish gentleman, the kind that might grace a haberdashery advertisement seeking to persuade the older man.

  As he moved toward the microphone, a woman in the second row muttered something that sounded unmistakably like the word “shame” and flounced in her seat. A man beside her patted her hand in a comforting gesture. May Carter (who else?) Fiona decided. Charles Rome was chairman of the committee on Labor, Health and Human Services, the enemy according to Foy, whose picket line sat athwart the road to ban abortion funding, a key target of the pro-lifers.

  Chairman Rome had an old-fashioned rhetorical style, complete with body and hand flourishes and dramatic phrasing, a man with obvious powers of persuasion.

  “We stood on opposite sides of a great issue,” he told the mourners, who listened respectfully, all except May Carter whose posture was one loud harumph. Twice during his oration, she uttered the word “shame”.

  “Her conviction carried the power of her personality and intellect and those whom she represented were blessed to have such a passionate advocate for their cause. Yes, it is true we were at opposing ends of the great fulcrum of democracy, but the true balance was our love for this great country. Above all, on a personal level we did not allow our opposition, sometimes bitter and contentious, to interfere with our great friendship. Barbara and I have lost a dear and devoted friend.”

  He had the ability to tap into deep emotion and to encapsulate the essence of the political process. He spoke of human beings compromising, giving and taking from each other to blunder through, to make the jerry-built system called democracy work. In such a system, he told the group with conviction, it was inevitable and certainly desirable for friendships to be forged, for people of pure heart, as he put it, to rise above the fray. Fiona had, of course, heard it all before. But Rome was a master presenter of ringing patriotic clichés, and it came out of him as if it were being said for the first time.

  He was followed by a priest who offered the usual Catholic sermon of resurrection and a ritual prayer for the dead in Latin. As the priest droned on in a singsong tone, Fiona’s thoughts drifted back to her discussion with Dr. Benton.

  He had explained that he had held back the public revelation of the woman’s pregnancy until he had a chance to discuss the matter with Chief Greene. A pregnancy in a woman of forty-seven was not exactly a common event. In a congresswoman who had died by a self-inflicted act or, worse, a possible murder, it was extraordinary.

  A number of logical scenarios had come immediately to mind. For Frankie to have a child at this stage in her life would have been a strong career negative, not to mention the physical danger. One could only assume that she had given up any idea of more children and that a new baby would be a massive inconvenience to a woman with other priorities. And, without question, abortion was both politically and morally unthinkable for her. But a suicidal way out of the dilemma was even more morally repugnant than abortion, a cruel twist to the entire Right to Life concept . . . the taking of two lives not just one.

  “Could have been the product of an extracurricular liaison,” Dr. Benton had suggested. “I’ve typed the fetus’ blood just in case, but even that is never conclusive and the so-called DNA print is too experimental to be valid.”

  A repugnant image of the deceased woman coupling with Harlan Foy floated into her mind. The possibility existed. It was common practice between intimate office buddies, a neat and discreet solution to safe infidelity. He did, after all, have a key to her apartment. National politics was, she knew, a game which forced the necessity for squirreling away dirty little secrets, many of which grew naturally out of the fact that extracurricular sex was a human consequence of separation.

  Such thoughts opened a musty trapdoor in her memory. Daddy was no goody-goody on that score. A bitter female staffer, objecting to the senator’s stand on the war, had spewed her filthy confession into her mother’s ear. Tales of sexual license, highly detailed, poured out of her, only to be hysterically recycled again by her mother to her denying husband.

  Fiona, sitting in her pajamas on a step of the winding household staircase, had heard every word, enough to rekindle memories which, despite the passage of time, had never lost their power to sting.

  “It’s political vengeance,” he had said, dismissing the accusation.

  “Liar,” her mother had screamed. “Not only in the office. You took her on trips. She gave me chapter and verse. It was revolting. You’ve defiled me.”

  “Can’t you see her motives?” her father had argued, using his lawyer’s skills. “And keep your voice down,” he had warned. Fiona, still virginal, had to be protected at all costs. But her mother, usually serene, had erupted beyond control.

  “I will not have it. It is an affront, worse, a sin. I can’t bear the thought of it. I will not have you consorting with whores.”

  “I never touched her,” she heard her father say, sensing the lie. The man was too attractive, too powerful. What her mother undoubtedly resented most was the forced confrontation. She had always looked the other way, making excuses to herself. Later, after more words, her mother had dissolved into tears, folded her cards and slipped back into self-denial. Her father, she was certain, had admitted nothing.

  It was not uncommon for politicians, especially where distance made it too difficult for frequent visits back home and even those on the Tuesday to Thursday legislative run to actually have two families, a mistress, sometimes with children and often complete with a cozy paid-for separate domicile. This was the darker side of the legislative process, revealed in the press only when it was unavoidable, like when the legislator in question was running for the Presidency or being considered for the Supreme Court or some such where a definition of “character” was required.

  Washington was tailor-made for clandestine lovers and being a politician’s mistress was, ironically, a reasonably respectable position for a woman. The thought brought a hot blush to her cheeks as the unseen accusatory finger pointed square at the center of her forehead.

  Despite her cop cynicism, Fiona’s early Catholic orthodoxy came out on the side of Mrs. McGuire. Surely it was her husband, demanding his marriage entitlement, that had done the deed. It was Dr. Benton’s reaction to that conclusion that dealt a heavy blow to the suicide theory.

  “As a politician, a leader in the pro-life movement,” he had told her, “wouldn’t it have been politically glorious for her to flaunt her pregnancy? Show her commitment by example? ‘Look world, I am the recipient of an unwanted pregnancy but I will not evade my responsibility to that unborn child.’ ”

  “Congratulations,” Fiona said, surrendering to his view. “You have entered a politician’s mind.”

  Still, their speculations were inconclusive. As the Eggplant had assumed from the beginning, all was not kosher here and further investigation was necessary.

  After her talk with Dr. Benton, she had come back to the office. Cates had come in some time later griping about folderol, his English schoolboy word for bullshit, forcing him to beat shoe leather merely to concoct a murder scenario for the ego gratification of the Eggplant. He had reported on the planned ceremonies in the rotunda, then had slumped in his chair and groused.

  She had let him rant for a while, then, in flat tones, she had told him what Dr. Benton had discovered in the woman’s dead uterus. It had stiffened him instantly. He did not need to play out the possibilities, absorbing them by osmosis.

  “So what did he know . . .” His head moved toward the Eggplant’s closed office door. “That we didn’t?”

  “That might be even more of a puzzle than the other,” Fiona had sighed. For an overbearing, egotistical, status-conscious person like the Eggplant to be ahead of his troops was always galling, despite its frequency.

  She had motioned with her eyes to Briggs who
, as always, sat eagle-eyed and alert for anyone wishing to speak to the Eggplant. He had shrugged his consent, meaning that the Eggplant was approachable. Then she had knocked on the Eggplant’s door.

  “Come,” he had snapped and she and Cates found him, feet on the desk, showing off spit-shined tasseled loafers, puffing a thin panatela and reading People magazine. He was an inveterate celebrity worshiper. At one end of his office was a television set, playing without sound, tuned in to the all-news channel.

  Without a shred of guilt, he had draped the magazine across his thighs and squinted inquiringly at them.

  “I’m here to apprise,” she had said, pronouncing it, “apprahze.” Ignoring the mimicry, he had nodded. They sat facing him on two wooden arm chairs.

  He had listened without comment until Fiona revealed Mrs. McGuire’s pregnancy. Like Dr. Benton she had strung out the revelation.

  He had uncurled his legs from the desk and sat up stiffly. The People magazine slipped unnoticed to the floor and he smiled a toothy smile.

  “Be damned,” he had said.

  Preempting what he was surely thinking, Fiona had offered the speculations and theories that she had discussed with Dr. Benton.

  “Actually it could make the case for suicide even stronger,” Fiona told him, again preempting him. Without giving him time for comment, she had filled him in about her discussion with Harlan Foy, although she had edited out, for the moment, the possibility that Harlan might have been Frankie’s lover. Too incomprehensible, she had decided, although the Eggplant, listening intently, his head bowed in concentration, had undoubtedly picked up the unspoken subtext.

  He had rubbed his chin, stood up and strode toward the window. The upper rim of a spring sun was slipping behind one of the government buildings to the west. After a long silence, he had turned suddenly.

  “That woman was murdered,” he said. His tone was emphatic, without doubt.

  “But how can you be so sure?” Fiona had asked. His surety was exasperating.