The Witch of Watergate

by Warren Adler

  There were peaks and valleys in the rhythm of her desires. She was now in a long, dry, barren valley of sexual disillusion, lustless and unfeeling. It was a time of questioning, which always left her vulnerable. Was this single life her subliminal choice? An exercise in self-protection or self-deception? Like her love life, the maternal instinct also ebbed and flowed, usually in inverse proportion to her emotional involvement. When she loved, she felt threatened by the idea of marriage and motherhood, but when she was meandering through the dry valley, she felt as if she had been abandoned by life, the womanly role of wife and mother sorely missed.

  However convoluted the trail of self-pity, the full focus of her anger was directed against Charleen Evans, the castrating black ballbuster. She could identify now with the horror experienced by the black male when confronted with such a menace, the humiliation, the fear.

  This was the monster that caused them to cup their balls for self-protection and reach for their “johnsons” for self-assurance. These black overbearing bitches, like the African honeybadger, were out to tear off their genitals, rendering them useless as performing males.

  Charleen Evans’ message was loud and clear. Fiona could identify it all right. In a mysterious gesture she reached for her own crotch, seeking her own reassurance, finding none.

  Through all this self-pity and angst she heard the rasp of the telephone, boring into her consciousness like a metal drill. She reached for it with an unsteady hand as if she were awakening with a hangover.

  “FitzGerald?”

  The voice was instantly recognizable. Fiona shot up to a sitting position. Her. The voice of the damned. She pinched her cheeks to be sure she was not dreaming.

  “Yo,” Fiona replied, determined to be casual.

  “Officer Evans,” the voice said.

  Fiona squinted into the red digital numbers of the clock on the dresser. It was barely five in the morning.

  “He just called,” Evans said, oddly tentative.

  “Who?”

  “Captain Green.”

  “He called you?”

  Fiona could not contain her indignation. She was the senior detective. Why call Evans first? A Homicide rookie to boot. It was, she knew, petty and egocentric to think such thoughts, but she couldn’t stop it.

  “He wants you to pick me up as fast as you can and get us over to the Watergate.”

  “The Watergate?”

  “You won’t believe this. But there’s a woman hanging from a balcony.”

  “A suicide?”

  “We’ll soon know, won’t we?”

  There it was, the incipient arrogance. But somehow it had the opposite effect. Fiona had more homicide experience. In that area the woman was a real tenderfoot. Nor would she want to fuck up for lack of experience. The worm turns, Fiona thought, banking the fires of her indignation. Just like the Eggplant to call Evans first. He wouldn’t want to go through any protest shit. Not now. Not with a woman hanging from a balcony of the Watergate, soon to be fully visible to an awakening Washington.

  “Give me directions to your place, Evans,” Fiona barked, taking charge. Evans gave them. “And call Flanagan and the tech boys.”

  “I already have, Sergeant FitzGerald.”

  “Ain’t you just wonnerful,” Fiona told herself silently.

  “Meet you outside, Officer,” Fiona snapped.

  “I’ll be there . . . Sergeant,” Evans shot back.

  Fiona hung up.

  “Black bitch,” she muttered, jumping out of bed.

  They could actually see a woman dangling over the tooth-shaped cement balcony of the tenth floor of the Watergate South Building, like a broken puppet on a string, flapping in the breeze, her pink satiny dressing gown catching a phosphorescent glint from the meager predawn light.

  They stood on the river side, squinting upward along the building’s white curved facade from the vantage of the greening lawn that separated the building from Rock Creek Parkway. Cars did not slow since the body was too high up and it was too dark for a clear visual shot.

  Three elderly people in robes stood in a cluster a few feet from Fiona and Evans looking upward as a doorman in uniform described the event of the discovery. Fiona figured him for about fifty, a cut above the ordinary variety of doorman.

  “Got this call from Mrs. Epstein in 1H,” the doorman said, pointing to one of the two grey-haired ladies, her complexion white and pasty in the dull light. “Said she walked out on her patio. I’m used to it. Lot of older folks here. They see things, hear things. I check them all out anyhow.” He looked at his watch. “Forty minutes ago. You people are fast.”

  Mrs. Epstein sensed that they were talking about her and moved closer.

  “You could have knocked me over,” Mrs. Epstein said.

  “Have you been up there?” Fiona asked the doorman.

  “Hell no,” the doorman said. “That’s your job.” He looked up and pointed. “You can tell from here the lady’s dead.” He was right, of course.

  “I don’t sleep very well,” Mrs. Epstein said. “Sometimes I come out here on the patio in the middle of the night. I just happened to look up.”

  “That was when?” Evans asked, poised, pad and pen in hand.

  “Just about an hour ago, I’d say. Wouldn’t you, Howard?”

  “Just about,” the doorman said, nodding.

  “Better lead the way,” Fiona told him. She turned to Evans. “Get her statement. I’ll take scene.” She saw the hesitation in Evans’ eyes, the brief debate of dominance, then the surrender. Cop professionalism was taking over. Fiona was by far the more experienced in these matters and Evans knew it.

  “Before Mrs. Epstein’s call, did you sense anything in the building that seemed different?” Fiona asked the doorman as they went up in the elevator.

  “Same as always. Wish I did.”

  “Why so?”

  “Hell, this is Watergate, Officer. This could get me famous like those others.” He smiled, showing his yellowing teeth.

  She followed the doorman to the service door of the apartment and waited as he found the right key.

  “Apartments here have a main door and a service door,” the doorman volunteered.

  Fiona put out her hand and he placed the passkey into her palm. He seemed disappointed by the silent request as if they were shunting him aside and he was seeing fame slip away.

  “Could be on security,” he grumbled. “They got these systems, but people forget to activate them.”

  “Apparently, this one did,” Fiona said, carefully turning the key, feeling the locking mechanism retract. Wrapping her hand in a handkerchief so as not to spoil the prints, she opened the door. It opened to the kitchen and they walked through a dining area into the living room.

  It was getting lighter now, throwing shadows along the walls and on the carpet, which was thick and well padded. There was art on the walls, large splashy canvases. A breakfront, looking very much like a real antique, in which numerous ceramic figures were displayed. Dresden, she observed, remembering her mother’s penchant for them, delicate human figures in groupings, the women in long gowns, the men in stockings, tight pants and powdered wigs. Low bookcases lined the inner walls.

  The outer walls were floor-to-ceiling windows and a sliding door that led to the terrace. With the wrapped hand, she slid open the door and stepped out. The view was panoramic, the slate grey Potomac waiting for the glint of sunrise. She could see the three bridges that crossed over the river to the Virginia side. To her left she saw the Jefferson Memorial, and straight ahead the high-rise skyline of Virginia and a sprinkling of window and street lights.

  The terrace was shaped in a half-moon lined with plantings along its edge. A rope was wrapped around a cement tooth, held fast by a complicated professional-looking knot.

  Two potted evergreens in wooden tubs lay on their sides as if they had been deliberately toppled to make room for someone, a body, to scale the low terrace wall. On the inside edge of the terrace, ju
st beyond the sliding door, were two pink slippers placed casually parallel to each other.

  Peering over the edge, Fiona saw the female corpse swinging gently in the breeze, a pale ghostly apparition in a pink dressing gown hanging from the end of about eight feet of rope.

  “People downstairs will get one helluva surprise when they wake up and see Miz Dearborn’s body swinging up here,” the doorman said as he looked over the terrace wall.

  “Dearborn?”

  Fiona suddenly remembered Chappy’s remark referring to “the Witch of Watergate.”

  “Not Polly Dearborn?”

  “That’s her down there. Make no mistake,” the doorman said, proud to be back in the game again.

  “Big stuff,” Fiona said, thinking of the Eggplant and his allocation of manpower resources. Can’t avoid this one, she thought, wondering if she could persuade him to give Cates back to her. At least it solved the matter of her protest, put it on the back burner.

  “Rotten way to do it,” the doorman said, continuing to peer down at the corpse. “She should have just jumped, got it over with.”

  “What makes you think it’s suicide?” Fiona asked, leaving the question in the air as she turned to face the oncoming Flannagan and his band of technical people. They fanned out. Cameras flashed.

  “Crazy,” Flannagan muttered as he looked over the terrace. More pictures were taken, then the body was hauled up and laid on the tiled floor, over which the men had placed a body bag.

  Although these people had done such a thing many times before, Fiona was always surprised at the almost reverent regard for modesty with which the body was handled. In this case, the woman’s dressing gown, worn over her nightgown, was stretched taut and tucked tightly behind her calves.

  They could, of course, do nothing about the neck, which was askew and reddish blue where the rope, to which it was still attached, had cut into the flesh. The woman’s head was permanently cocked to one side. The protruding eyes and extended purple tongue were part of the classic death mask of a hanging victim.

  “It’s her all right,” Fiona said to no one in particular as she studied the corpse’s face then kneeled to inspect the knot, which appeared to be a well-constructed, obviously efficient hangman’s noose. “Polly Dearborn of the stiletto pen.”

  “Polly Dearborn, the writer?” It was Charleen Evans’ ejaculation of surprise as she came through the door to the terrace. Evans looked down at the body as if the identification needed corroboration.

  “Used to be,” Fiona said.

  Evans kneeled beside the body. She reached out, pulled at the upper part of the dressing gown. The dead woman was wearing a metal device of some sort around her neck.

  “We’ll need that,” Evans muttered.

  “What is it?”

  “The key to her computer,” Evans said, fingering it. “Custom job. I was wondering why her computer didn’t work.” She looked up at Fiona. The key was on a gold chain. “It’s that important,” Evans said.

  Fiona nodded. With strong agile fingers, Evans loosened the rope and lifted it over the woman’s head. She did the same with the gold chain, inspecting the key.

  “I’ll see if it fits,” Evans said, going off to the bedroom.

  The men began to bag the body, which they lifted and placed on a stretcher. Two men carried it out of the apartment. The doorman followed, perhaps reasoning that his potential notoriety was now directly proportional to his proximity to the body.

  “Through the garage, please,” Fiona barked as the men passed through the door. In sensitive high-profile cases like this one, the Eggplant’s caveat on the media was always operative. Only one voice speaks for Homicide. His. The object was to keep things under wraps until the Eggplant was “apprahzed.”

  When the last of Flannagan’s technical team had gone, Fiona stood in the center of the living room, inspecting the immediate vicinity, while Evans roamed through the other rooms.

  Always when she was working scene, she needed a single moment of calm reflection, a time to concentrate. Suicide or murder? This was the overriding issue here.

  Beware the obvious, she cautioned herself, although the visible evidence clearly bespoke suicide. Death had offered its blandishments and become the operative choice at the historic moment of bedevilment, the so-called wee hours when the imagination fixates on the worst-case scenario.

  She carried the idea further in her mind, letting it take hold in her imagination. Depression, like a spreading oil spill, would have soaked into the woman’s psyche, crowding out all optimism, leaving death as the only alternative to a life of guilt and the pain inflicted by ghosts and goblins.

  For whatever reason, fame, money and power were no longer a palliative against real or imagined outrages. Death as a temptation had become tantalizing.

  A rope lies waiting. Earlier the woman had chosen it as the weapon of choice, a common idea with a familiar history. It has lain in readiness, coiled like a snake, the hangman’s slipknot awaiting its weighted prize.

  Then suddenly, at the appropriate moment, the bewitching hour, the reaction takes place, the explosion that prods the mind to take action. The woman reaches for the coiled rope. This she has done before, many times, perhaps fitting the noose over her head, pulling it taut around the neck, waiting, summoning the courage that had not come. Until now.

  She fastens the unknotted end around the cement tooth of the railing. It has already been rehearsed, tested, imagined. She lifts the hoop of rope over her head yet again, pulls the heavy knot against the vertebrae of her neck, makes a path by upending the two potted trees, then rolls over the side. Hardly a gurgle upsets the balance of the soft night.

  “No note in sight,” Evans said, interrupting Fiona’s thoughts. She had come back from the bedroom.

  “The computer key?”

  “It fits. Custom made. She had her own method of computer security. Has two hard disks instead of the usual slots for soft ones.”

  “What’s your assessment, Evans?” Fiona asked in her most official manner. She knew she had interrupted Evans, who was on the verge of saying more about the computer. It was a deliberate deflection and Evans complied.

  “An obvious conclusion. Murder by hanging is statistically rare.”

  “You’ve studied it, have you?” Fiona asked.

  “The better informed, the more options available,” Evans said, exhibiting a self-proclaimed superiority that embellished her arrogance.

  Smartass, Fiona thought, longing for Cates whose humility, which often infuriated her, now seemed refreshing.

  “Note the slippers,” Evans said, pointing to the slippers placed just outside the terrace door. “The woman walked to the terrace, took off her slippers, put the rope around her neck, anchored it and jumped.”

  “That’s the way you see it, do you?” Fiona asked. Evans had offered a perfectly logical explanation. It was the hasty conclusion that irritated Fiona.

  “For starters, yes,” Evans said through tight lips.

  Fiona offered only a grunt in reply and started to explore the apartment. In the bedroom, she inspected the bed. It was turned down, but too neat to be slept in. On one side of the bedroom was an alcove with a desk, a computer and bookshelves. Where she worked, Fiona assumed.

  “This the computer?” Fiona asked.

  “That’s it,” Evans said.

  Fiona nodded and turned her attention elsewhere. She studied a forest of pictures on the bureau: Polly with familiar faces, Polly with youngsters, Polly with Harry Barker, the Editor-in-Chief of the Post, Polly with Mrs. Grayson, who owned the paper. “To the best in the business,” an inscription at the bottom of the Grayson picture read, and a signature, Sally Grayson. No Polly as a child, Fiona noted. No sign of Polly with parents.

  She carefully opened drawers, looked in the closets, the bathroom. Where had the rope been stored? Fiona wondered. The closets were exceptionally neat, carefully compartmentalized: dresses, slacks, blouses, belts, shoes, were all carefully
hung on identical wooden hangers.

  In the drawers, underwear, panties, bras, pantyhose, all folded as if awaiting a military inspection. There were no signs of a man, not even the hint of a toilet article nor a sign of the sex act, not a vestige of its contemplation, like a dial of birth control pills, a diaphragm, condoms, spermicides, the safety equipment of the sexually active.

  Evans held up a plastic case that she had discovered in the cabinet under the vanity, hidden behind boxes of tampax, tissues and a mound of toilet paper.

  “She got it off with this,” Evans said, holding up a red dildolike vibrator of generous size.

  “What does that tell us, Evans?” Fiona asked with a deliberately patronizing air accompanied, she hoped, with a sneer of sarcasm. At the same time, she detested her own attitude. But the woman, her manner, her humorless demeanor, her blatant arrogance, her superior airs, was, to Fiona, aggressively offensive.

  “It tells us . . .” Evans paused, raising a pugnacious chin toward Fiona as her eyes narrowed. “It tells us that the lady was . . .” Again she paused. This time her lip seemed to curl in contempt. “. . . An independent, self-contained.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Fiona snapped, wanting to hear it said aloud.

  “She did not need men.” She held up the vibrator as if it were a weapon. “She pleasured herself.”

  “Mistress of herself,” Fiona snickered. Tells me a lot about you, Evans, Fiona thought. To characterize the possession of such an instrument as a total substitute for men was revealing. Fiona owned one, but it was strictly an alternative, not a first option.

  “Maybe she didn’t want complications,” Evans said, confirming Fiona’s speculation.

  “Lot of good it did her.”

  Evans activated the vibrator. A muted whirring sound cut the air. Then she shrugged, cut it off, replaced it in its plastic box and shoved it back where she had found it.