Death of a Washington Madame

by Warren Adler

She knew he was the kind that would never give up. If one strategy didn't work he would try another. His first wife had died three years ago of cancer. Pressed by Fiona, he had told her that in his marriage he had been devoted and ever faithful. He had stressed, too, that although he was away often, she never complained.

  He had married her on his graduation from West Point and she knew exactly what she was taking on, segueing comfortably from the military to the similar corporate life without a blip in their marriage.

  "Let's leave it like this, Hal," Fiona had decided, knowing the pressure would not go away. "For the moment, think of me as your faithful mistress." She had been that, discarding all the other men in her life.

  "I'm too old fashioned for that," he had contended, although he had not rejected the idea outright. She wondered how long the arrangement would be acceptable to him and steeled her for the inevitable moment when he would declare the relationship too painful to endure.

  She headed the car into Page Aviation where his Gulfstream and retinue of staff and colleagues waited. She parked the car and he leaned over and embraced her, kissing her deeply.

  "That's a lover's kiss," Fiona said when they had disengaged, "not a husbands."

  "You're the light of my life, Fi," he said.

  "I try harder," she said, feeling the welling begin, the genuine physical pain of parting. She kissed him again. He opened the car door.

  "And remember. You have my central number ... if you ever need to reach me anytime, anyplace."

  "I need you always," she said.

  "So you say. In the meantime, go get the bad guys," he said blowing her a last kiss. Turning, he strode toward the building entrance, every inch the General.

  "Am I mad?" she asked herself, blinking away the tears and heading the car back to the city.

  COM: ENDEXCERPT

  CHAPTER 2

  "Yes you are mad," Gail said later, when Fiona had broached the question as they sipped mugs of Sherry's strong coffee. Sherry's was the broken down greasy spoon that served as their favorite cop hangout.

  "That's not the answer I was fishing for," Fiona sighed.

  "When it comes to men, I'm the wrong person to ask," Gail said, her coppery skin glowing in the morning sunlight that filtered in through Sherry's battered blinds. "I'm not as mate prone as you, Fiona."

  "Must I be reminded of this flaw in your nature, Gail," Fiona mocked good-naturedly. Their partnership had approached a level of emotional bonding that transcended even the most violent disagreements between these two independent-minded females pasted together in an experiment that was considered crackpot by most of their colleagues in the Homicide division and above.

  The chief, the hassled Captain Luther Greene, the revered Eggplant, had seized upon the notion of "gendering." He had actually come up with the word, meaning that females were more likely to solve crimes against females than representatives of the other gender.

  Fiona and Gail were the guinea pigs, or "guinea girls" as they liked to call themselves out of earshot of the Eggplant, who, they both knew, was courting disaster by this championing of reverse politically correct activity .

  "It's not a flaw. It's an act of will," Gail countered. "I'm self-contained. I do not need the emotional crutch of a permanent mate. I am not needy in that regard. You are."

  They had been over this ground before. In a rare moment of letting her guard down, Gail had revealed that she had been the victim of a brutal rape at the age of nine by a man who had also strangled her younger sister. The trauma had naturally taken it's toll, considerably distorting her perspective of the male gender and greatly inhibiting her intimate relationship with that sex, although she had hinted at one or two abortive attempts at normality.

  But despite her deliberate attempt at sexual neutrality, Gail was thwarted in this by an astonishing female physicality. She was spectacular, six four shoeless, a monumental female figure, large high breasts, flat stomach, perfectly proportioned buttocks, well turned legs, a body sculpted out of dark Montana stone.

  Her hair was cut short in an Afro cap. She wore pendant earrings swinging from small well shaped ears and looked out on the world through light brown yellow-flecked eyes and smiled at it with perfect white teeth.

  Her appearance belied her crippled sexual emotions and, despite her generally standoffish attitude, men continued to make a grand attempt at contact. She was a living male challenge, knew it and had become adept at defensive maneuvers to keep them at bay.

  If there were lesbian tendencies, Fiona had not detected them although, once her wall of cold steel armor had been penetrated, Gail revealed a loving, confiding nature expressed through occasional affectionate hugs and hand holding, gestures equally common to the most innocent female gender bonding.

  The Eggplant had been shrewd in his pairing. There was a commonality of class between Fiona and Gail. The daughter of a prominent black surgeon and a surgical nurse who lived in a big colonial style house on the legendary "gold coast" of upper Sixteenth Street near Rock Creek Park, Gail had come out in the debutante cotillion which was a feature of black society in Washington for more than a hundred years. The event was one of the shining diadems of the most class conscious and least known circumscribed social circle in America.

  Gail's father had overcompensated after the loss of his youngest daughter and the premature death of Gail's mother. She had escaped his cloying affection by entering the Los Angeles police force, much to his chagrin and disappointment.

  There, she had distinguished herself in the LAPD Homicide division until transferring to Washington MPD to be near her father in his last days. Unlike Fiona, who kept the family house, she immediately sold her family's plush homestead and bought a condominium on Connecticut Avenue with her ample inheritance.

  "Hal predicted burn-out in this job," Fiona pointed out. "Clearly implying that I should get out before this happens and marry him."

  "Good advice."

  "He could be right about burn-out. He compared it to combat."

  "Smart man," Gail sighed.

  "You'd lose a good partner," Fiona said.

  An odd expression suddenly crossed Gail's face, a hesitancy not quite expected.

  "Might be academic," Gail muttered.

  It was an eventuality that Fiona had put in the back of her mind which her three days off had buried further. The fact was that the Chief's gender idea was not panning out to the satisfaction of the powers that be.

  There had been hopeful fanfare at first and over the Eggplant's objections it had become a public relations ploy, raising expectations that fed the fires of the gender wars that were fought in the department just beneath the surface of accommodation and tolerance. The race war, on the other hand, still raged openly, although every effort was being made to find neutrality, the department now having reached a 75% black majority.

  In the last few weeks there had been four homicides with female victims, two drive-bys where stray shots had killed a six year old girl and a mother of three, both still on the open and unsolved list. Without witnesses such cases were almost impossible to solve and most people were too frightened or intimidated to come forward.

  Then there was a murder where the badly decomposed body of a female had been found in a wooded area. The body had been identified as a missing person, the daughter of a prominent lawyer. Unfortunately, the condition of the body and the time frame were inhibiting factors in finding the perpetrator who was probably long gone from the area.

  The problem was that all three were grist for the media mill and had been pumped up in the newspapers and television to high profile cases in which the gender matter of the detective partnership had been brought up.

  There had also been a drug related killing of a woman crack head that had a gang component, another difficult case due to lack of witnesses.

  "Coming to a head is it?" Fiona asked.

  "There are rumblings, I'm afraid."

  "We're not magicians," Fiona said angrily.

 
; "Neither is he," Gail said. "He's in the middle of a four pronged attack. It's a no-winner. First there are the swinging dicks that would love to see homicide picked clean of all females. Then there are those, mostly females, who think this gender idea was a deliberate set-up on his part to discredit the female of the detective species. The third prong is those competing with him to be the next top dog, who would donate a testicle just to see him humiliated and cut from the pack of wannabees."

  "And the fourth prong?"

  "Our enemies in the class war, who would like to see the white Princess and the uppity girl nigger cut down a peg or three."

  "Poor bastard," Fiona said, her earlier angst about her love life put on a back burner.

  "There's more, but we don't have all morning."

  At that moment, Gail's radio sputtered. It was the Eggplant.

  "Yes, sir," Gail said, shooting a glance at Fiona. "Right over."

  He was in his office waiting for them, looking as harassed as ever, biting into an unlit panatela, his ashtray littered with unsmoked moist tobacco remnants. In the last few months they had pushed back some walls and expanded his office, slapping on a fresh coat of paint, which he had promptly covered with his awards and pictures of himself with various minor celebrities.

  On his desk were photographs of his wife, the bane of his existence, and his daughter, the apple of his eye, who was studying computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  They had also installed a round conference table and padded metal chairs, a marked difference from the mismatched wooden monstrosities that had graced his old office. Fiona disliked the formality of the Eggplant's new office, especially the clean windows which looked out at the view of the park-like promenade that linked the indifferent Police Department building with the more architectural pleasing Federal courthouse.

  The redecorating had also seemed to change the calibration of attitude. Even the Eggplant seemed more subdued and formal, less prone to tantrums and outbursts, more sly and subtle.

  "Enjoy your leave Sgt. FitzGerald?" the Eggplant said as they seated themselves around the conference table. Fiona detected the usual note of sarcasm, as if any time-off was a desertion. Perhaps it was her imagination, but he seemed grayer, more wrinkled than he was only three days ago.

  "Very much, Chief," Fiona said pleasantly.

  "I'm glad," he said with a frown that belied his words.

  He smashed out his unlit panatela and folded his dark gnarled hands on the table, always a bad sign.

  "We are in a long dark tunnel and we cannot see the light, ladies." Was the term "ladies" meant to insult? It was, of course, a blatant violation of the revised social compact of the department, but having seen the Eggplant's soft center, Fiona could never characterize such lapses as mean-spirited or deliberately cruel, merely militantly politically incorrect.

  He paused, his bloodshot eyes peering out over drooping lids as they panned from one female face to the other. "I think I have created a monster that cannot be appeased. By establishing a category that calls attention to gender I have cooked the books. Extracted from the statistics is a zero closure of female cases of the last few weeks. Zero closure. Do you know what that means?"

  "You can't base the statistics on gender alone, Chief," Gail protested. "It could also show up as zero closure on victims who are left-handed, or red haired." She hesitated for a moment and offered a quick glance at Fiona. "Or white." This, of course, was the issue beyond fact or logic that permeated the psychic bloodstream of their world. White and it's opposite.

  For Gail, the black debutante Princess, color appeared at first to be less dominating than gender, except when it came to the subject of her concept of ethnic superiority and privilege. In her world, or so it seemed, "elite" was a meritocracy, created by brilliant, resourceful and enormously clever blacks who had navigated successfully, some for generations, past the shoals of bigotry and strong tides of prejudice to arrive at the other side of hate and were, therefore, far more worthy of success and the resultant social cache than their white counterparts. The contemporary subtext was Secretary of State Powell and Condileeza Rice, plus hundreds of rising and risen stars.

  They were "better" because it had been "harder" to become "better." While Gail hadn't quite expressed herself in that way, Fiona had reconstituted her partner's attitude into language of her own.

  Having not been corrupted by the crumbs that fell from the abundant table of the welfare state, Gail's sense of superiority, according to Fiona's initial interpretation, precluded any real identification with the burgeoning black underclass with whom the only common denominator was burnished skin tones and ancestors who arrived in the continent through forced immigration dressed in rags and heavy chains.

  Lately, however, Fiona was beginning to see cracks in her initial assessment. Gale was developing what best can be described as an "attitude" which hinted that perhaps guilt about her fortunate upbringing was exposing a more militant ethnic stance.

  "These cases have to be thrown in with the whole homicide spectrum," Gail continued. "Besides, Chief, you know the odds on finding a drive-by killer, not to mention a crime committed years ago. It's a bad rap."

  "We are dealing here not with logic Prentiss, but with politics. We are embattled, surrounded, under attack as if we were the cause not the solution. In this, one of the worse murder venues in the U.S. of A., rebuttal is futile. We have three female bodies and no perps. That is not what most people perceive we do here. Capeesh?"

  "Are we being scrapped as a team, Chief?" Fiona asked.

  "The matter is under advisement," the Eggplant said.

  "By whom?"

  "Them," the Eggplant said pointing upward in the midst of unwrapping another panatela and shoving it in his mouth. "In other words..."

  "The enemy," Gail interjected.

  "Another unsolved and its bye bye to the girl's team."

  "That's patently unfair," Fiona said, ignoring yet another grating gender reference. She shot a glance at Gail who shrugged. What could they say? They were a party to the political incorrectness. Indeed, more than a party, advocates. The fact was that they liked their partnership and believed implicitly in its intuitive efficiency despite the current slump in closures.

  "Like life," the Eggplant sighed. Despite his outward arrogance, his sigh could mysteriously evoke sympathy.

  "What about the Harrison case, Chief?" Gail asked, referring to their first well-trumpeted success.

  "In this business there are no yesterdays, only tomorrows," the Eggplant said, shaking his head "You think I like telling you this. We are not the masters of our fate. Besides, it was my idea, remember?"

  He stood up and faced the window watching the people scurrying across the grass of the campus-like complex serene in the glow of the bright April sunshine, so different from the dirty blurred view of his old office. But the gesture of dismissal had not changed. It was a clear signal to retreat.

  "Thanks Chief," Fiona said, understanding his pain. Nevertheless it was obviously a real possibility. His gender idea was on the block, the axe poised.

  CHAPTER 3

  For the next couple of weeks, Gail and Fiona tried harder, if that was possible. They broke open two domestics, but that didn't count. Domestics were easy. They had prior behavior to go by, men who beat their spouses or girl friends repeatedly, episodes that escalated into murder. With the O.J. thing, spouse beating and murder had entered a new era of awareness as a common event. Solving such cases were invariably gender-neutral requiring no special detective skills.

  Neither of them wanted the partnership to be dissolved. They had grown accustomed to each other, and were getting especially proficient at good cop/bad cop interrogation. The two domestics were cracked that way, confession in record time, although that didn't count either.

  But what did truly count came early one morning in late April. Fiona and Gail had worked all night following a lead on yet another domestic, where the alleged perpetrator ha
d stabbed his girlfriend to death and disappeared. He was spotted by the sister of the deceased coming out of a blue Buick and going into a large apartment complex in Southeast Washington.

  Not knowing which apartment the man was visiting and unwilling to roust people in the complex, the two detectives staked out the car until the man came out sometime after three in the morning. He was arrested without incident protesting his innocence, a given, and by the time he was booked and they were heading home it was nearly dawn.

  They drove in Gail's beige Camaro and preceded northward, then cut to the East toward Spring Valley. The car pulled into the circular driveway of Fiona's house just as the sun began to poke above the budding Magnolias Fiona's father had planted to partially screen the house next door.

  Bone tired, Fiona gave Gail a good-bye tap on the shoulder and watched as the car kicked up gravel and sped out of the driveway.

  She stood for a while studying the facade of the house in the incandescence of the early morning light. Her father had bought the house in the spring of the year he had been elected to his second Senate term. She must have been five or six. It had seemed less of an extravagance then, a fitting home for such a political rising star, a neighborhood of equals, a validation for a shanty Irishman who had burst into the lace curtain firmament. She was determined never to sell it, a treasured heirloom, to be passed down through the generations, except that there was no progeny ... not yet ... perhaps never.

  Seeing the house in the glory of the April morning, sun tinting the brick in a rusty glow, trees and shrubs pregnant with burgeoning life, she felt again the renewal of the instinctive drive to propagate. At such moments it, the mating phenomena and its complications rose once again in her mind as a central concern. It was, she knew, the one temptation she had so far resisted for a more permanent relationship with Hal Perry, a subject she did not have the courage to broach, mostly because she feared it would sentence her to the role of Corporate wife for life.

  At this moment, she felt needy. And when she felt this way, she found herself reflecting on the shipwreck of her various relationships, assigning blame, mostly to herself, which she knew was over-reacting. At times she berated herself for being too independent, too heavy-handed, too demanding, too romantic, too honest, too analytical, too picky, as her mother had alleged, or the ultimate, too fearful of commitment, always a convenient cop-out.