American Quartet

by Warren Adler

  “A minute,” she mimed to Jefferson, who watched her from inside the car. She entered an outdoor phone booth and dialed Remington’s number. Breathing deep to calm herself, she listened to the rings, counting them out. After the fifth ring, she heard a woman’s voice. It had a Spanish accent, Mrs. Ramirez.

  “Mr. Remington, please.” Her voice was tight, constricted.

  “He’s not at home,” the woman said politely.

  “Do you know where he is?” She felt her heartbeat accelerate. Her palms suddenly turned hot. There was a moment of hesitation.

  “Sorry, no. Can I take a message?”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “No.”

  “He doesn’t tell you where he goes?”

  She could hear the woman’s breathing, the note of hesitation.

  “I give him a message.”

  “I must know where he went.”

  “Out. He doesn’t say. I take a message.”

  “To the theater. Did he say he went to the theater?”

  “He don’t say.” There was a long pause. “I take a message.”

  Fiona hung up and dashed out to the car. At best, it had been a calculated risk. If her intuition was correct, she could have the blood of the victim on her hands. The thought gave her a cold chill.

  “Who was that?” Jefferson asked, moving the car up Pennsylvania Avenue, past the rear of the White House, swinging left on Seventeenth Street.

  “Personal,” she snapped. He was silent for a moment.

  “You don’t go with that Congressman dude no more?”

  “Mind your fucking business.” She was instantly sorry. “You don’t deserve that, Frank,” she said.

  “Say what?”

  “You heard me.”

  “You called me Frank again. You’re gettin’ too familiar, Fiona.” She hadn’t realized he noticed such things.

  They pulled up in front of the Eisenhower entrance to the Kennedy Center, pulled down the sun visor with the police shield, then walked through the tall glass doors. The red-carpeted foyer was filled with both tourists and theatergoers and they threaded quickly through the jostling crowds to the Grand Foyer, dominated by the huge tragic bust of Kennedy. The irony was not lost on her. Assassinations were a kind of theater of the absurd, and there was a bizarre appropriateness to Ford’s and the Kennedy Center being memorials to martyred Presidents. She wondered why she hadn’t seen it before. Mentally she rejected Warner’s and the National as potential murder sites. The killer had too much of a sense of historic irony for that.

  All of the Kennedy Center’s four theaters, the Opera House, the Concert Hall, the Terrace Theater, as well as the Eisenhower, were in use that night. The Grand Plaza, with its massive chandeliers and huge expanse of red carpet, was crowded with patrons. Interspersed with the crowd were plainclothes cops, who nodded as they passed. They checked out each theater.

  “The manpower’s here,” Jefferson said. “I hope it’s enough. Hey, how do you guarantee we’ll be at the right place at the right time?”

  “I can’t even guarantee that it’s going to happen.” Again, she resisted mentioning Remington.

  They milled about in the Grand Foyer, watching the crowds converge. She searched each face. Nothing must slip by her. She remembered reading that Booth had left for the theater carrying a disguise, a beard, makeup. But he had used it after the killing, putting it on first at Dr. Mudd’s house. It was maddening, trying to correlate details that were buried in historical fact and speculation nearly a hundred and twenty years ago.

  And she could be dead wrong about Remington. It was simply that he had crossed her field of vision and was stuck in her frame of reference. Was it possible that her world had become so narrow? Then why did she persist in searching the crowd for him?

  They had stationed themselves near the ticket taker stations at the Eisenhower, and when the line dwindled they stepped into the theater. Moving from vantage point to vantage point, she studied every face in every row. He wasn’t in the balconies or the boxes. There were few bearded faces and those were quickly scanned and rejected.

  When she was reasonably certain that he wasn’t in the Eisenhower, she moved to the Concert Hall, repeating the process there. Then the Opera House and finally the Terrace Theater.

  “I wish I knew what you were doing,” Jefferson said, following her obediently. “You seem to be looking for someone in particular.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Still, he followed her. They had checked the interior of the Warner and the National.

  “You know something I don’t?” he asked.

  She looked at her watch. It was nearly nine. They drove quickly to the Ford’s Theater where, once again, she checked the faces of the audience. Maybe he’ll come in later, she decided. They went down to the command post where the eggplant was working the radio, barking orders, getting reports. He was wrapped in a haze of blue cigarette smoke. Dr. Benton still sat impassively, sipping coffee from a plastic cup.

  “Everybody is in place,” the eggplant said, looking at his watch. He got up and came over to Fiona.

  “So far, nothing,” he said, with a note of sarcasm.

  “The time was 10:15 or thereabouts.”

  “He better not let us down,” the eggplant warned.

  “He won’t.”

  The plainclothesmen on the scene reported the intermissions and she went upstairs with Jefferson to mix with the crowds. They seemed like all theater crowds she had ever seen, absorbed, anticipatory, some bored, others animated. She continued to search their faces.

  “It’s got to happen,” she whispered to Jefferson.

  “You never know what’s in the head of a crazy.”

  “We know what’s in this man’s head.”

  She posted herself behind a red curtain to the left of the stage under an illuminated exit sign. Another plainclothesman stood there, surveying the crowd. Jefferson went to the opposite side of the stage to an identical exit. Through a slit in the curtain, she watched the crowd. The actors were involved in a song and dance number. Looking up, she could see the empty Presidential Box, the picture of Washington, the red, white and blue bunting. Just below it, she saw the curtain stir behind which Jefferson waited. Without actually seeing it, she knew he had drawn his Magnum.

  Time seemed to crawl. At nine-forty-five, she went back to the command post. The eggplant’s eyes lifted as she came in, then shifted to his watch.

  “I’ve ordered them all to draw their guns, but keep them hidden,” he whispered. “But I hope to hell they don’t shoot.” He shrugged. “Who knows with these trigger happy bastards?”

  She moved over to Dr. Benton.

  “I’m scared,” she whispered.

  “So am I,” he said, patting her back.

  At five after ten, she walked up the stairs again and followed a corridor to her former position behind the curtain of the side exit. She nodded to her colleague beside her. In his hand, his gun was at the ready. Parting the curtain, she looked into the audience. A number of people stood along the back rail. Most of them were policemen. Again, she looked at her watch.

  The music seemed to grow louder, keeping tempo with the maddening passage of time. Someone in the audience coughed.

  Now, she screamed within herself. Now! The curtain across the auditorium stirred and suddenly she saw Jefferson’s face and, below it, the muzzle of the Magnum. The actors sang, their shoes tapping on the stage. She waited a few minutes more and whispered into the radio.

  “Anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  Running back into the corridor, she came down to the command post again. The eggplant’s eyes flickered gloomily.

  “All fucking clear,” he said.

  “Give it time.”

  “That I’ve got,” he said, his lips curling in a snarl.

  “And the Kennedy Center?”

  “Nothing.”

  By then it was 10:45. A voice sputtered over the radio.r />
  “The show’s breaking.”

  A roll of applause exploded above them and soon they heard shuffling feet and the clatter of voices and footsteps coming down the stairs.

  “Nothing anywhere,” the eggplant said, rubbing his eyes. Jefferson came up behind her.

  “Anything?” He didn’t wait for a response. “Sheet.”

  “Maybe we scared him off,” Fiona said. Her insides seemed to have shifted position. She felt her pulse beating in her neck.

  The eggplant said nothing, lighting a cigarette, inhaling. The smoke seemed to stay in his lungs forever. Finally, it emerged through clenched teeth.

  “I bought it. I put my balls in your hands.”

  “I was sure,” Fiona managed to say. “Everybody bought it.”

  “Yeah. But I’m the one that sold it.”

  A lieutenant came up.

  “Wrap the fucker,” the eggplant said. The lieutenant spoke into the radio, ordering the operation to cease. Technicians began to dismantle the equipment.

  “I still say . . .” Fiona began, but the eggplant’s look caught her short.

  “I never did care what you thought. Fucking cunts in the police. Never could work. Never will work.” He began to pace the room. “So I’m the department asshole.”

  Offering protestations now, she realized, would be futile. Turning away, she walked upstairs. There was a pay telephone against the wall and she dialed Remington’s number again. Maybe she had rattled him. Yet her suspicion was obsessive, mindless. Her imagination had run away with her.

  His voice was on the phone after two rings, firm, oozing resonant charm.

  “Hello.”

  She did not respond, hanging up, suddenly feeling physically spent, emotionally done in. She went to the ladies’ room and, squatting in front of a toilet, began to throw up.

  29

  WHEN she awoke, she was wrapped in a sheet like a mummy. Vague bits of memory, like a splintered mirror, rose in her mind, tormenting her. It was still night, pitch black. Being locked in the wound sheet triggered a sense of panic, awakening her from what must have been a nightmare. Her pores had opened like floodgates and the sheet was saturated with perspiration.

  In disjointed fits her memory returned, the splintered bits reforming to record the reflection of her humiliation. Jefferson had driven her home, unable to penetrate her silence. His voice had persisted. There was an effort at reassurance but, in the end, she got out of the car and, without looking back, found herself in her book-strewn apartment.

  The rooms closed in on her. Expectations had driven her and now that they had slipped away, nothing was left but a terrible emptiness. For a long time she had sat slumped on her couch, pasteboard covers of books denting her flesh, deliberately suffering her discomfort as a punishment for her self-righteous, self-indulgent obsession. What she needed now was arms, muscled haired arms, to envelop her, a hard male-smelling body to caress her, reconstitute her shattered ego, a male pistoning to ram away reality, and give her back her sense of womanhood. She needed that flame of passion to warm her now. She cursed the trumped-up ideal that had disconnected her from Bruce. Loneliness, the parched infinity of emptiness, was more offensive, more debilitating than her high-minded ideas of independence. Everybody must act in their own interest. People manipulated others, according to their passions and compulsions.

  “Shit,” she cried into the unforgiving darkness. It was a sin against nature, her nature, not to demand the comforting touch of a male. She needed her body to be probed and searched and pleasured, her cheeks licked clean of tears, the burdens lifted, the afflictions soothed. It was no fucking fun coming home to nothing. Not after tonight.

  Reaching for the telephone, she dialed his number. It rang interminably. Finally a hoarse voice cleared itself, croaking a reluctant greeting.

  “Bruce.”

  Behind his voice, she sensed agitated breathing, a hurried whisper. A woman’s bleat of annoyance. Then silence. He must have covered the mouthpiece with his hand.

  “Fiona.” She pictured the phone on its long wire carried to the privacy of the bathroom. His whisper gave it away. “Is there anything wrong?”

  “Yes.”

  Another pause.

  “Can it wait until morning?” he asked. The words came in a harried whisper.

  Demand him, she goaded. But the image assaulted her. In the bed, their bed, the other female squinted into the darkness, waiting while his other life deflected his interest. If it could wait, why sound this alarm in the night? “Yes,” she said, hanging up.

  She dialed her parents’ number, but quickly hung up before the ring. They would be startled out of their sleep. Cruel work. Besides, they had long ago ceased to offer the needed solace, two aging people with their own pallid, dead dreams.

  The depression rolled over her like lava, penetrating her flesh, burrowing into her bones. She had been so certain. Her doubts had been a deliberate hedge, a facade, unreliably constructed, a false protection. Her reason had been toyed with, like a woman’s virtue in another age. It was that man. That man. His smug charm had oozed out of him like hog’s sweat.

  Humiliation doesn’t come easy to Irish blood, someone had said once to her in childhood. They were always explaining away their stubborn pride and, in the end, it defeated them. Where in the name of hell did her brash certainty come from? This was no logical, ordered mind concocting fantasies of death, resurrecting history like some cosmic puppeteer. These events were being perpetrated by an aberrant mind, twisted, deluded by God knew what dark, tortuous motives, out of the slime of thwarted ambitions.

  It was him. I know it is him!

  But saying it did nothing to soothe her. Finally, she got up and paced the apartment, yielding to another dark prompting of her Irish blood, alcohol. But even that eluded her. There was less than a quarter bottle of Scotch left, and she nipped at it until it was gone.

  Groping through the darkness, she lay supine on her bed, eyes open, determined to stare down the demons. But her mind would not cool, as she rehashed the material that had crowded into her brain. Assailed suddenly by an overwhelming urge to call Remington, she reached for the phone, partially dialed, then hung up. Her courage had failed her, and she quickly turned the phone button to secretarial.

  She was offended, not only by the humiliation of defeat, but by the fact that she had implicated others in her fantasy. Somehow, she felt, they had fallen victim to her intensity, her obsession.

  Yet, despite everything, the idea persisted. Someone out there was still doomed, whatever the break in sequence. Maybe she should make a clean breast of her suspicions, she thought, then quickly rejected the idea. Her credibility was gone. The eggplant would treat her, from now on, as a pariah.

  The ring of the doorbell stabbed itself into the gloom and she quickly unrolled herself and put on her robe. Through the peephole she saw Jefferson’s gleaming black face, and opened the door. He seemed wan in the cloudy post-dawn light.

  “Better get dressed. They want us downtown.”

  His skin looked like slate and the network of veins in his eyes had multiplied since last night.

  “What is it?”

  “Trouble.”

  She dared not react, as if the slightest bark out of him would make her break in two. Dressing quickly, she attempted to hide the dark circles under her eyes and erase the haunted look that peered back at her in the mirror.

  Beside her in the car, Jefferson was sullen, unapproachable.

  “We should have left it alone.”

  It was all he cared to say. For a big man, the sense of defeat seemed incongruous, but the boy’s fear filtered through the macho mask.

  Chief Howard sat behind his big ornate desk, lips tight, dark eyes glaring behind horn-rimmed glasses. He was not a tall man, but behind his desk he seemed large, awesome. Cold silence greeted them as the chief pointed to two chairs in front of his desk. Dr. Benton was already seated. On another chair against the wall, slumped like a broken do
ll, the eggplant sat. Rage seemed to boil out of him, polluting the air.

  “The door,” the chief barked. The eggplant, reacting like a robot, got up and closed it. The chief tapped his fingers on the desk nervously, then picked up a pencil and broke it in half, flinging the remains into an ashtray.

  “Do you know what this week is?” he shouted, his eyes shifting to the four frightened faces. Fiona searched her mind, confused by the man’s rage. She needn’t have been. The chief answered his own question.

  “Easter week. The biggest tourist week of the year. There are more than a million visitors in town. To the business people, that is a bonanza. Am I correct?”

  Fiona heard mumbling beside her. Turning toward the eggplant, she could understand his fear of the chief. “Am I?” he roared. Again, the question was rhetorical. He was working himself into a lather. Jefferson and Dr. Benton remained silent, perhaps understanding the peculiarities of ethnic rage.

  “An hour ago.” He looked at his watch. “An hour ago, I got a call from the Washington Post. Not just a flunky reporter. Himself, Bradlee. He asks me this question: Is it true that there is a psychopathic killer on the loose in this town bent on gunning down innocent people? He didn’t wait for an answer. And did you not try to apprehend him last night in the theater, seven theaters to be exact?” His lips trembled and his nostrils quivered as he confronted Fiona.

  “Now how would I answer that question, little lady?”

  I’m not your little lady, she wanted to scream out at him. Instead, she bit her lip.

  “I . . .” He punched himself in the chest “. . . approved last night’s operation, which netted a big fat zero. So how do I answer that question, bearing in mind that it is Easter week and there are one million tourists in the city and this is the Washington Post, perfectly capable of scaring the shit out of any human being within spitting distance?”

  Jefferson lowered his eyes. The eggplant did not move.

  “Tell him the truth,” Fiona said, her voice cracking.