Dead Heat

by Linda Barnes

  “And Donagher’s not one of them. He lied to me. And he did a pretty good job.”

  “Isn’t that a requirement of elective office?”

  “He was expecting someone to be at the top of Heartbreak with a water bottle—”

  “Then he had an arrangement with that woman?”

  “No. I don’t mean he was looking for her. He took the bottle from her because he got stood up. Whoever he was expecting didn’t show. He’s protecting somebody—and I’ll bet it’s his wife.”

  “Not exactly the perfect political wife, is she?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Chronic alcoholism is not an election plus, so I’ve heard.”

  “Where do you dig up all this dirt? Is Pierce a gossip?”

  “I keep my ear to the ground.”

  “The ground right over the sewer?” He peered over his aunt’s shoulder as she gently blew excess powder from the surface of the glass. “How’s it going?”

  “Fine. The fingers have not lost their cunning, although the eyes are rather on the way out, I’m afraid. Still, they suffice to tell me that these prints are not yours. Now, do you want me to lift them, so that you can present them to your Captain Hurley without telling him from whence they came?”

  “That was the general idea.”

  “Ahhhhh. There.” She brandished a white four-by-six card on which she had fastened the plastic tape that held the prints. “Beautiful, if I do say so myself.”

  “Lovely.” Spraggue pressed his lips together, then said in a faraway voice, “One more thing. Do you have a VCR?”

  “Videocassette recorder. I have two. One VHS; one Beta.”

  “Do you have a standing order for every gadget that comes out on the market?”

  “Just about.”

  “Do you mind if I play a cassette I recorded at home?”

  “Not if it’s good.”

  “It’s last Sunday’s eleven o’clock news.”

  “What a depressing thought.”

  “The Channel 4 news.”

  “Ed Heineman?”

  “The man does interest me,” Spraggue admitted. “He keeps Lila Donagher’s picture in his wallet.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Ed Heineman had a voice Spraggue wouldn’t have minded appropriating: effortlessly mellow for a man of his limited age and experience, with unusually low pitch and pleasing timbre. Ten years ago, some speaking coach would have hauled the upstart aside and hurriedly eliminated any vestige of his Southern upbringing. Today, in the anything-goes TV-radio world, accents were considered homey and attractive, no longer the kiss of death.

  He watched the tape for the fourteenth time moving his lips along with Heineman’s. The videocassette recording was easier to work with than an audio tape alone; he could not only hear the deviations from Standard American Speech, he could see the shape of the newscaster’s lips on his curiously open A, his unconventional E. After a while he just listened to it, lying flat on the Oriental rug in the library, staring at the grape-leaf molding of the ceiling two stories over his head. Mary had long since returned to her bedroom office. The walls and doors of the mansion were so thick they muffled even the sounds of her clacking machinery. He might have been alone in the vast house.

  He scooped up the notebook lying at his side, scratched out a symbol, made another in its place, and nodded with satisfaction. Phonetics had been a compulsory part of his classical actor’s training, at RADA, where professors thought nothing of ordering up Hamlet’s soliloquys in anything from Northumbrian to Liverpudlian to Texan. Spraggue thought Heineman might hail from Georgia, but he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t any Henry Higgins; his goal wasn’t identification, but mimicry. Short-term mimicry at that.

  Transcribing Heineman’s words into the International Phonetic Alphabet was an exercise in frustration. Just as he would start to congratulate himself on how well he remembered his lessons, he’d come across a sound for which he recalled no symbol, have to flick off the tape, and search through an old copy of Kenyan and Knott’s Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language. When he at length completed the transcription, skipping a few words he knew he’d have no occasion to use, words like government, which Heineman pronounced guvment, and Iran, which he pronounced airun, it was two in the morning and only the beginning.

  There was no sense in perfecting a general Ed Heineman; that would take days, and he only needed a persuasive two-minute Heineman. So, first, he constructed the message, a single thought conveyed in three variants. Which one he actually delivered would depend on who answered the phone. He wrote them out, deliberately choosing as many words as possible directly from the evening news, it being more difficult to extrapolate from an accent than to copy one. Nowhere in his prepared text did he actually lie. The lie was in his voice, not in what he said. If someone answering the phone were to mistake him for Ed Heineman … well, he could hardly be held accountable for that.

  He jackknifed into a sitting position and carefully recited ten words, common everyday words in which Heineman’s pronunciation differed from the norm—lowering his pitch to the level of Heineman’s, breathing where Heineman would have breathed. The man, in his newscasts, had a jerky pattern of delivery. Talking to him in the bar, Spraggue had noticed a similar quality in his off-camera speech, an easy gimmick to copy. That and the slightly Southern pronunciation should carry the deception. He practiced his lines nonstop until Aunt Mary appeared, cheerful and rested, to announce that it was 5 A.M. and would he like croissants for breakfast?

  He succumbed, ate three freshly baked pastries smeared with apricot jam, but foreswore Dora’s excellent coffee. He drove back to Cambridge, set the alarm clock to allow a scant four hours sleep, threw himself fully dressed across the bed. When he woke, he showered, shaved, and changed, rehearsed in front of a mirror. At the last minute, he decided not to make the call from his house. Who knew what tracing devices the cops might have rigged on Donagher’s line? He set off on foot for Harvard Square.

  The morning air was cool and bracing, more like nippy autumn than gentle spring, but it hadn’t fooled the swelling buds on the oak trees. The heavy tree limbs were speckled with tiny verdant spots of color, like a pointillist painter’s dots: lush, vivid green from a distance, sparse, separate buds from close at hand. Keyed up with a rush of pre-audition adrenalin that compensated for too little sleep, he repeated his lines into the breeze as he walked down Brattle Street, hardly aware of the great houses on either side of what had once been called Tory Row.

  The first real phone booth he encountered was on Church Street. The others he’d passed had been ugly, modern stands, blue poles with phones perched on top and no provision for privacy. Behind Sage’s, where that old French restaurant had been and the new building was now, were actual booths.

  He placed a ragged-edged three-by-five card, his speech written painstakingly in the letters and symbols of IPA, on the shelf reserved for the ripped-out Yellow Pages. The dangling metal cord that should have bound the phone book to the booth got in his way and he used his right hand to wrestle it under the shelf, dialing with his left hand and cradling the phone between his shoulder and chin. He dialed the number Collatos had given him two weeks earlier, tapped his fingers through six long rings, hoped the right someone would answer the phone.

  A woman’s voice, low and sweet.

  “Həl” was all he said. It was one of Heineman’s most distinctive words: He said həl, not hεlo. He was sloppy with his vowels.

  “Ed?” the woman murmured, alarmed. Spraggue exulted; she’d got it in one.

  He’d taken time selecting a likely setting. Where would Lila Donagher agree to meet Ed Heineman? Someplace that offered privacy, someplace she wasn’t known. Not a park, not an open space, where she could simply walk away when he, not Heineman, approached. He wanted her seated, with food in front of her, in a place where a hasty departure would cause a scene.

  The Harvest Café.

  It was always crowded; the central bar
was the focal point of Cambridge’s young, affluent dating crowd. It boasted alcoves and tall plants and one booth, in particular, that was almost invisible from the door. Heineman was known there, probably lunched there; it was credible. And the food was good, entailing no gastronomic sacrifice.

  “a nid t∧ tͻk t∧ yu,” he said. “Urgently. Tomorrow. Lunch at the Harvest Café. One thirty. Ask for Mr. H’s table.”

  “Someone might see us.” The protest came out in a harsh whisper.

  “Trust me,” Spraggue said. “It’s important.”

  When he hung up, there was a clatter of change and his dime was refunded into the compartment at the bottom right of the pay phone. He stared at it, a dingy gray circle resting on his palm, stuffed it back into the phone. Ma Bell deserved it.

  EIGHTEEN

  He won the complicity of the Harvest’s headwaiter with an early arrival and an improbable romantic tale solidified by a sizable tip. The arrangements completed, he waited outdoors at a white, painted wrought-iron table on a chilly semi-enclosed patio still off-limits for the season. Pigeons foraged underfoot.

  It wouldn’t do for Lila to approach a seated Spraggue. She might have seen him going into the Sparhawk Street house; if so she’d back off, aware that a trap had been baited. He planned to wait until the headwaiter had relieved her of her coat, anchored her to the table with a drink. Then he might have a chance to get out enough words to convince her to stay.

  She was late. He heard her heels tap-tapping on the concrete blocks of the path that passed the patio and froze, but she didn’t glance his way. Instead of giving her the stature she lacked, her high heels accented the wobbly thinness of her ankles, made her seem more childish instead of more adult. She wore the same raincoat she’d worn the morning he’d read the anonymous letters, belt cinched tight, collar raised. Her corn-silk hair, her slightly receding chin, her wide-set blue eyes all made her look as dangerous as a waif in an orphanage, as murderous as Alice in Wonderland.

  Before she passed out of sight, she fumbled in a maroon leather shoulder bag for a small leather case. From it, she removed a pair of glasses. Not attention-grabbing dark sunglasses, but rose-tinted aviator frames that subtly shortened her nose and broadened her face. She donned them with the practiced gesture of a woman schooled in pretense and yanked open the Harvest’s front door.

  Spraggue watched white paint flake off wrought iron.

  She would be settling into the booth at the back of the front right-hand section of the restaurant, the part called Ben’s Café. The waiter, following instructions, would have urged her into the seat facing away from the door. She wouldn’t object to the table or the choice of seat. No one disturbed that table except the staff. Only the kitchen lay beyond it; the telephones and restrooms were elsewhere.

  Curtain time. The black-vested waiter elaborately mouthed his readiness.

  He’d succeeded in parting her from her raincoat. She wore a mannish pale blue shirt tucked neatly into a slim navy skirt. A schoolgirl outfit. A thin gold chain gleamed around her neck. She sipped at a glass half full of amber liquid and ice cubes.

  “Hi,” Spraggue said easily as he slid into the booth.

  She was startled. Her arm jerked and she hastily slammed her drink back on the table. “I’m sorry, but—” Her cheeks reddened. She thought it was a pickup. Then she stared up at him and her eyes narrowed even as her blush deepened.

  “I wanted to talk to you—”

  “I’m sorry.” She had the habit of apology. “I have to—” She half stood, remembered her missing raincoat, tried in vain to catch the waiter’s eye.

  “Michael Spraggue.” He held out his hand, but she didn’t take it. “You already knew that.”

  She sucked in a deep breath. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m waiting for someone, and—”

  He let his voice descend to Heineman’s pitch. “I’m sorry,” he said in Heineman’s drawl. “I didn’t know any other way to get to see you.”

  While she stared at him with her mouth slightly open and her cheeks burning scarlet, he nodded to the waiter who hovered just out of Mrs. Donagher’s sight. Eager to play his role in smoothing over this lovers’ quarrel, the waiter set steaming bowls of soup in front of them.

  “It’s great stuff,” Spraggue said encouragingly. “And I’d hate to eat it alone.”

  She swiveled her head and peered suspiciously at the other diners.

  “It would make quite a scene if you walked out now,” he said.

  “It would? Or you would?”

  “I might call out your name. Who knows? I might faint.”

  A corner of her mouth twitched. She measured the distance to the door with her eyes, then said, “What do you want?”

  “Sit down. People are getting curious.”

  “I asked you what you were after.”

  “A bowl of soup. A quiet lunch. The answers to some questions.”

  “Such as?”

  “Eat your soup. And smile a little. The waiter’s getting anxious.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Better you shouldn’t know.”

  “I know who you are, Mr. Spraggue.”

  He raised an eyebrow, spooned soup.

  “I know that you used to be a professional busybody of sorts and that you gave it up. I’ve seen you on stage at the Harvard Rep. If I’d recalled your histrionic abilities, I would have handled ‘Ed’s’ phone call differently.”

  “How differently?”

  “I would have hung up.” She made an attempt at the soup, put her spoon down with a clatter against the china bowl. Spraggue started at the noise, looked up. For a moment he thought she would brave the thirty feet to the door and the threatened scene, but to his amazement, a slow smile spread across her face. “And then,” she said, after a long pause and in a manner nicely calculated to flatter, “I would have missed what promises to be an interesting afternoon.”

  He wished he could snatch the rose-tinted glasses off her nose, divine in those blue eyes a reason for her sudden change in tactics. Not that the blue eyes were focused on him. No, she had a way of looking over him, behind him, through him—never at him. He was saved from immediate reply by the timely arrival of a bottle of Chateau St. Jean Chardonnay. The waiter, delighted by their apparent rapport, tried some clumsy banter; it fell flat.

  “So,” she said confidingly, when the silence after the waiter’s departure had stretched to the breaking point, “I suppose my husband hired you to do this.”

  She might as well have dispensed with the question altogether and given the traditional en garde to begin the fencing match.

  “To do what?”

  “Let’s not be naïve. To set me up.”

  “You don’t think he has any right to be curious about you and Heineman?”

  “I hope you are not one of those people who believes that when a married woman agrees to lunch with a man other than her husband, there is something sordid going on.”

  “I hardly believe in anything. Keeps me from being shocked.”

  “So often the simplest explanation is the best. Once things start getting complicated—” She shook her head gravely, stared down at the tabletop, tilted her bowl slightly, and ate the dregs of her soup.

  “Would you call this a complicated situation?”

  “Only because I tried to keep it simple.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I wanted to avoid just the misunderstanding that seems to be taking place.”

  “In your husband’s mind?”

  “I don’t think my husband would have hired you to check on any extramarital outings I might be arranging—not on his own. He knows me too well, knows I wouldn’t fool around on principle.” She attempted a smile. “And knows I don’t have the time. But he might have been convinced to do it by one of his aides, if said aide thought I might be up to something that would screw the precious campaign. One of his aides might have hired you himself, in which case that aide is going to
be out the door so fast once Brian finds out—” She bit at her lower lip as if that were the only way she could stop the angry words pouring out of her mouth. She tried to make her voice light and inconsequential again.

  “I’ll soothe your fears,” she said, with a touch of sarcasm. “Eddie Heineman and I went to high school together. We did have a passionate affair; it took place half a lifetime ago and was consummated by hand-holding in the library.”

  She was doing it again; looking at everything but him. Spraggue wanted to reach over and lift her chin, frame her delicate face with his hands, and force her to meet his gaze.

  Instead, he hazarded a guess, said, “Why did you tell your old friend Ed that he might want to talk to me?”

  “Ed didn’t tell you …” Her sentence didn’t end. It ran out of steam.

  “Tell me what?”

  She took her time answering and when she finally replied it was to his first question, not his second. “I was trying to help him out. He’s new here. I mean, we went to school together years ago, in Lynn, but his people were from the South and they moved on. Didn’t like it, the cold and the snobby Yankees. He wants to make a name for himself, so when all the reporters were going crazy about that horrible business at the reservoir and then you came over to the house, I thought, well, I thought I’d give Ed the inside track.…”

  Plausible, but it didn’t fit with the rest of the conversation, with her forced flirty tone, her searching manner. If she’d assumed then that her husband had hired him for protection, why was she now assuming that the senator had hired him to ‘set her up’? Set her up for what? The short end of a divorce settlement?

  “You could have given him a bigger break, an exclusive interview with your husband.”

  “No.”

  “They don’t get along?”

  “It’s not like that. It’s not some stupid rivalry, for heaven’s sake. They haven’t even met.”

  “Your dear old friend and your husband?”

  “They’re just separate parts of my life. I knew Ed before I met Brian. They have nothing in common. Politically, they’re on opposite poles. Ed’s as conservative as they come … and …”