The Shadow Cabinet

by W. T. Tyler

  But Wilson knew what he’d seen. He knew it again by the nightmares that haunted him for years, dreams in which the details were as clear as ever—the bright spring morning, the swift brown water, the rib cage of the canoe under his feet, and then the small body lifting, white fingers, white arms, white feet. Only the face was different.

  That moment in the drizzle on the beltway ramp was similar in certain ways. The morning mists had parted, he’d seen an averted head, a thin white mouth, and an agonized hand clutching the steering wheel—a man caught up in some nightmare of his own—and knew that he was being lied to. No one would ever convince him otherwise.

  The traffic carried him away. Driving down the ramp and into the stream of cars moving northward along the boulevard, he still pondered the mystery. But then the wet autumn morning returned. The coffee-colored van horneted past him on the inside lane with a supercharged roar of its V-8 engine—a kind of reckless triumph, announced not only by the engine’s whine as it ripped past but by a denim-clad arm held languidly out the window, giving him the finger.

  BMWs, Audis, and Datsuns filled the small parking lot behind the three-story brick building on the outskirts of Falls Church, most of them owned by the insurance brokers in the suite of offices on the first floor. A boy of ten or eleven was wandering about the lot, inspecting the automobiles. As Wilson drove into his parking space, the boy turned to study the battered fenders and the thick exhaust fumes, then brought his hand up, holding his nose, his elbow high, in a kind of rodent leer. Wilson left the car, and the boy ducked his head, disappearing behind a parked Audi, like a gopher dropping into his hole.

  The owner of the real estate brokerage on the second floor was a man named Matthews, with whom Wilson had invested some money from his father’s estate in the late sixties, buying industrial and undeveloped residential property. The previous spring, Matthews had been approached by a national real estate company and had decided to sell out. The transfer was to take place at the end of the year and Wilson had been handling the negotiations and the legal work.

  The young receptionist was gone from her desk at the top of the stairs on the second floor. Two women in the reception room’s orange leather chairs were awaiting the arrival of a sales agent. Identically dressed in knit suits, they were smoking and drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups. One was plump and dark-haired, the other a thin, washed-out blond, rawhide hard, her flocculence of bright hair shrunk to an orange-bronze scouring pad atop her small head.

  “Well, you never know, hon,” he heard the blond woman say as he hung his coat in Matthews’ office. Her whispered voice was full of ancient mistrust and uxorial grievances, as treacherous as a plastic garbage bag full of smashed bottles. “You gotta watch ’em every minute. There’s no tellin’ what kind of cardboard they’re building houses out of these days. I told him after I found out, I told him right out, I said we wanted a wet bar, sure we did, but that didn’t mean we wanted no goddamn crik running through the basement.…”

  Wilson stood behind Matthews’ desk, looking at the telephone call slips the receptionist had left for him. For the past ten days, Matthews had been in Florida, arranging a condominium purchase and his upcoming relocation to Sarasota. In his absence, Wilson had promised to keep an eye on the brokerage.

  “That woman called you again for about the twentieth time,” the receptionist said as she joined him. She was a dark-haired, energetic young girl just a few years out of high school. “The Kramer woman. She had to see you today, she told me—no alibis. She said today was the last day, absolutely the last day.”

  “That’s what she said last week.” He found the call slip with Rita Kramer’s name on it and sat down. She was a Californian, come east to buy a house. Her husband was a Los Angeles entrepreneur awaiting a White House political appointment. She had been carrying on a guerrilla war with Wilson for over a week now about a house she thought was overpriced, and wanted to negotiate directly with the owner. “Anything else?”

  “Mrs. Polk isn’t in yet,” she said, lowering her voice. “Those two ladies outside have been waiting for twenty minutes. I don’t know what to tell them.”

  Mrs. Polk was one of the sales staff. Her husband was retired, both enjoyed their bourbon, and she sometimes found it hard to get out of bed in the morning. “She’ll be in,” Wilson said. “Just give her a few minutes more.” He picked up the phone and dialed. The hotel switchboard put the call through to Rita Kramer’s seventh-floor room, but a masculine voice answered. He thought the accent was a little theatrical, like Rita Kramer herself.

  “Might I ask who this is?” the voice inquired.

  “Haven Wilson. She called me a little while ago.”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Wilson. She’s very anxious to talk to you. She just went down to the flowershop. I’ll get her. Please don’t go away.”

  He waited. The gray light flooded through the metal sash like seawater. The wind blew water from the trees against the smoky panes. The office walls, metal partitions papered in coconut fiber with metallic threads running through them, were as thin as matchwood. From the desk he could hear the two women gossiping outside the door, the one voice droning on in a grating whisper that fastened to his skull like a cutting edge, peeling hardwood to pulp. He didn’t know how Matthews had managed this for so many years, day after day, week after week. He couldn’t shut the door without putting down the phone, and so he sat there as the voice drilled on:

  “… an’ you can never tell, you know what I mean? There’s this here insulation they got now causes cancer, you know? Breathing it in all day? Then you take someone that went an’ used acid to clean up asphalt tile, makin’ it all bright an’ fresh like they do. Well, I remember when we was out at Fort Riley, we had us a little kitten, sweetest little thing you ever did see. Then she went to licking up some spilt milk off the kitchen floor, you know, the way they do. Before we knowed it, her belly went hard, hard as a rock, an’ the poor thing dropped over, dead as a doornail.…”

  “Wilson? Where in the hell have you been?” Rita Kramer was on the phone, angry and out of breath. Watching her cross the lobby of the downtown hotel before their first meeting a week earlier, Wilson had had intimations of Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive. She was tall and wide-shouldered, with the long arms and legs of an ex-dancer or show girl. Her dark odalisque eyes and wide mouth were so carefully made up that at that distance her face had the artificiality of a Kabuki mask. Her voice was rude, contemptuous, bawdy, and indiscreet. What impressed him most was her sheer physical vitality, relentless and inexhaustible. She reminded him of a high-class stripper from East Baltimore street who’d often shared his table when he was a young draftee at the counterintelligence school at Fort Holabird.

  “I’ve been out, like you. Someone said you called me.”

  “I waited all day Sunday, all day yesterday, shut up in this goddamned hotel room. You told me I’d hear from the owner—”

  “I said I’d pass on your request to talk to her. I didn’t say she’d call you.”

  “Well, she hasn’t called. Did you give her my latest offer?”

  “I passed it through her lawyer.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said no, just as I said he would. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry!” Her voice erupted sharply and he held the phone away from his ear. “Sorry! Well, that’s just nifty, isn’t it! You’re still hustling me, Wilson, you and that goddamned Matthews, who took a powder to Florida. You think I don’t know a hustle when I hear one? My lawyer’s here and he wants to talk to you.”

  He heard the two arguing in the background and a minute later the masculine voice returned, as crisp and mannered as before.

  “Edelman here, Mr. Wilson. Mrs. Kramer is very upset about this entire transaction, as I think she has reason to be. It’s almost a week now since she offered you a contract on this property—”

  “Five days,” Wilson said. “It was too low.”

  “Perhaps, but we’d like to deal direc
tly with the lawyer who’s handling the estate or the owner herself. Mrs. Kramer has only a limited time available to her here in Washington, as she’s explained. Since you’ve become involved, we seem to be getting nowhere. Under those circumstances, I think it perfectly appropriate that Mrs. Kramer be placed in direct contact with the lawyer or the owner, Mrs. Ramsey.”

  Wilson said nothing. Rita Kramer’s voice came back.

  “You get my message, Wilson? I’m tired of you giving me the runaround. I want to talk to the owner, Mrs. Grace Ramsey.”

  “She’s in Majorca.”

  “Friday you said Bimini!”

  Wilson had forgotten what he’d said. Grace Ramsey floated around the Mediterranean and the Caribbean like a wisp of high-flying cirrus. “Bimini, Majorca, they’re both the same—out of the country. Abroad. I’ve told you that.” He lifted his feet to the desk and reclined in his chair, ready for another five rounds. After a week of sparring and brawling, a certain basis for communication had been established. “I’m sorry, but you can find something else in Washington. Try those Georgetown brokers, like I suggested—”

  “And how many times do I have to tell you that’s not what I’m looking for!”

  A long silence followed.

  “Are you still there?” she asked finally.

  “I’m here.”

  “Good.” She slammed down the phone.

  A little after eleven, Wilson led the two women from the reception room down the front stairs. Mrs. Polk had a dead battery and was waiting for a booster charge from a nearby service station. She’d telephoned to ask him to deliver her client and her friend to her residence on his way to an eleven o’clock meeting with an Arlington tax lawyer. The dark-haired client, named Fillmore, was the wife of an army sergeant recently assigned to the Pentagon from Oklahoma. Her blond companion was also the wife of an NCO, and lived in the same transient quarters while waiting to move into a house they’d bought in Annandale. The basement leaked. An aggrieved party, she’d joined Mrs. Fillmore to give her the benefit of her house-hunting experience.

  Waiting for them in the rear parking lot was the boy Wilson had seen skulking between the Audis and BMWs upon his arrival.

  “I was wondering where you was sulking at,” said Mrs. Fillmore, her parental tone less friendly than the girlish chatter that had accompanied them down the stairs. She’d told Wilson she was from Arkansas and was a beautician.

  A faint red splash illuminated the boy’s cheek. At closer range, Wilson saw ghostly fingers from a powerful hand still outlined against the left side of his face.

  “I was waitin’.”

  “Mr. Wilson, this here is my boy Willard.”

  “Hello, Willard.” The name echoed familiarly in Wilson’s mind.

  “I guess you heard that name before,” Mrs. Fillmore said. “Say hello to Mr. Wilson, Willard.”

  “Hello, Mr. Wilson,” Willard said without enthusiasm. The small insect eyes were still stung unnaturally bright.

  “I think I know the name,” Wilson acknowledged sympathetically. Willard’s brightness hardened visibly.

  “Well, it wasn’t all my doin’,” Mrs. Fillmore admitted philosophically. Her brown purse was shoved under one heavy arm as she pulled on her gloves. A filter-tip cigarette was clamped in the side of her mouth. “That boy’s a handful, I don’t mind telling you, a heavy burden, an’ it’s not just the name that does the tormentin’.” Wilson held the rear door open and Mrs. Fillmore backed in, found the rear seat, settled back for a moment, then lifted her heavy ankles around. “We’re not kin, if that’s what you’re thinking, Mr. Wilson,” she confided as they drove out of the parking lot. Willard Fillmore, next to Wilson in the front seat, small shoulders erect, sat alert on the edge of the seat as if being in front were a rare privilege. “Wouldn’t that be something?” his mother added in a girlish aside to her suspicious blond companion. “Being in Wash’n’ton an’ being kin to President Millard Fillmore?”

  “Ha ha,” Willard said.

  There was a momentary delay from the rear seat as Mrs. Fillmore gathered her ordnance together. Leather creaked and an instant later Willard Fillmore took a salvo in the back of the head, delivered by a purse swung by its strap. “Don’t smart-talk me, mister,” his mother warned. “I done told you—I had enough.”

  “I heard tell of stranger things,” replied her companion fatalistically.

  “Tell Mr. Wilson what President he was, Willard,” Mrs. Fillmore commanded.

  “The thirteenth President,” Willard answered expertly, “only his name was Millard.” He turned to watch Wilson suspiciously.

  “Was he Republican or Demo—”

  “There wasn’t no Republicans in them old days,” Willard said, the hostile eyes still fastened to Wilson’s face, awaiting his reaction.

  “He’s sure got it learned by heart, don’t he, Mr. Wilson?” Mrs. Fillmore called in her loud beautician’s voice, the one she used for talking to a customer under a hair dryer five chairs away. “We was on Okinawa when Millard was born.”

  “Willard,” her son said immediately. “My name’s Willard.”

  “Willard. Did I say Millard? Lordy, I done forgot what I said. There I go again.” Mrs. Fillmore chuckled, but Willard’s expression didn’t change. “Anyway, like I was saying, we was on Okinawa when Willard was born and the names kinda went nice together, you know, the way they do sometimes, bein’ on the tip of your tongue that way, like Sears Roebuck.…”

  Wilson also heard Willard’s whispered voice from alongside, a seditious undertow attempting to drag him away from these backseat humiliations: “Where’d you get this car, sucker?”

  “… an’ then when my husband Albert decided they just went together, that was that. So we named him Willard Fillmore, right there on Okinawa, not knowing all the time it was Millard Fillmore, the thirteenth President of the United States, we was thinking about all that time, something we clean forgot, me an’ Albert both.”

  Mrs. Fillmore laughed. “You’re a loser,” Willard was whispering, “same as this here car.”

  “… an’ so we just had the birth certificate made up like that, right on Okinawa, right at the base hospital—Willard Fillmore.”

  “Them Japs don’t know nothing,” her companion said truculently.

  “… an’ it wasn’t till we got back stateside that someone in the PX nursery school told me it wasn’t Willard I’d been thinking on at all back on Okinawa, but Millard—Millard Fillmore. Don’t that beat all, Mr. Wilson? I wisht I’d knowed my history better, don’t you? You ever lived overseas, Mr. Wilson?” Her voice drew closer as she held her cigarette out. “Here, pinch that out the winder for me, would you, son?”

  “Yes, m’am.”

  Wilson opened the dashboard ashtray but Willard ignored it and pretended to blow lusty smoke rings for the benefit of a passing gray-haired motorist, who immediately fixed her sharp censorious eye upon Wilson. After she’d slid by, Willard quickly cranked down the glass and let fly with the butt aimed at her rear window.

  Mrs. Fillmore didn’t notice. “Willard’s my little computer,” she was saying. “He can beat his daddy at Atari, and Albert’s a missile ordnance man. Totes up a Piggly Wiggly bill faster’n IBM, don’t you, son?”

  “Yes, m’am.”

  “It’s not addin’ them bills up that worries me,” said her thin companion. “It’s payin’ ’em.”

  “He can add up a license plate quicker’n you can read him out the numbers. Show Mr. Wilson, hon.” She leaned over the front seat, pointing through the windshield. “What’s that car up ahead say?”

  “Which one?” Willard sat alertly on the edge of his seat, like a dove hunter at the edge of a cornfield.

  “The van.”

  “That’s not no van, it’s a combie.”

  A sharp knuckle cracked the skull above the right ear. “All right, but what’s it say, dummy?”

  “Four hundred and eleven one way, twenty-four the other.”

  The
Virginia license plate read 327-84. Wilson frowned, trying to interpret Willard’s calculus sets.

  “You see? You see what I’m telling you, Mr. Wilson?” Mrs. Fillmore sat back, gratified.

  “Three hundred and twenty-seven plus eighty-four is four hundred and eleven,” Willard explained. “Three and two plus seven is twelve. Add eight and four and see what you get, sucker.” He turned to the backseat to look at his mother. “He’s moving his lips, same as you an’ Albert do.”

  “Faster’n an IBM, ain’t he, Mr. Wilson? He did that all the way from Oklahoma to Nashville, where we throwed a rod. Laid over for three days, but it wasn’t too bad. You ever been to the Grand Ole Opry, Mr. Wilson?”

  Wilson admitted he hadn’t.

  “You ever seen the President?” Willard asked.

  “No, not much. He doesn’t call me into the Oval Office much these days.” It was the kind of reply he might have given his own sons over the breakfast table years earlier, but Willard was insulted.

  “Tell me something I don’t know, sucker,” he whispered vehemently. “Who’d ever think I was talking about you being in the White House?”

  “What’s that you’re saying, Willard?” Mrs. Fillmore demanded from the backseat, her Arkansas drawl full of heavy metal, threatening retribution.