by Tim Cockey
“Pretty, isn’t she?” Kate said. “She looks sort of like Grace Kelly.”
“Everyone says that. A little bigger in the hips, I think.”
“I was talking about her face.”
“I’m going to guess that this video was not made solely to reveal to the world Amanda Stuart’s hubba-hubba hips.”
Kate answered, “I think what she is doing with them is more the point. And with who.”
“Whom.”
“Oh, Hitch. What-fucking-ever.”
Guy Fellows had been attempting to blackmail Alan Stuart. A dozen still shots taken from the video had appeared in the mail one morning several months ago at Alan Stuart’s office. The images were slightly fuzzy, having lost a bit of their clarity in the transfer from video. But they were still sharp enough to guarantee the Alan Stuart for Governor campaign a lock on the love-a-good-sleazy-scandal vote, if little else. Fellows was demanding a modest one hundred thousand dollars, in return for which Alan Stuart would receive the entire videotaped escapades of his energetic wife. It was a one-shot deal. Money for tape. Or two tapes, according to Kate. The original, in Fellows’s possession, and a copy as a security measure being kept by the reluctant cameraperson, Carolyn James. That was the tape that Kate had.
But Alan Stuart hadn’t bought into it, not for a single sliver of a second. Big men squish small bugs. Not the other way around. Guy Fellows was good-looking and sexy. He apparently had a killer serve and an equally effective follow-through. But going up against the likes of Alan Stuart showed that despite all that, he was also just plain stupid. And the proof was in the proverbial pudding. Alan Stuart was still up and walking around and making plans to govern the State of Maryland. And for reasons that one would have to assume simply couldn’t be unrelated to this blackmail attempt, Guy Fellows was rotting in the ground. This couldn’t have been a part of his plan. Unless he was really stupid.
Kate had not been in on the game at the very beginning—she was just one of Alan Stuart’s loyal soldiers—but she was able to reconstruct the basic sequence of things.
Alan Stuart was not going to squander any of his—or his campaign’s—money on Guy Fellows. That was the first decision, and the easiest one to make. The likelihood of yet another duplicate tape having been made for the purposes of future extortion if, say, Stuart were to win the governor’s race (or even later, should he set his sights higher) seemed almost a foregone conclusion. There was simply no way to guarantee that Guy Fellows wouldn’t hold his dirty pictures of pretty Amanda over her husband’s head from now until Doomsday (which keeps getting rescheduled, have you noticed?). And there was no way that someone like Alan Stuart would ever allow himself to be told when and how high to jump by the likes of a Guy Fellows. Not now. Not ever.
According to Kate, the entire affair of the videotape had been kept quiet, handled solely by Alan Stuart and Joel Hutchinson. My old buddy Hutch. Seems like he was just born for this kind of thing. I could easily picture him in Alan Stuart’s office, tie loosened, sleeves rolled to the elbows, feet up on a low table, throwing out his speculative “Well, what if this… maybe if we try that…” as his candidate paced back and forth calmly plotting strategies one minute, hurling curses at his wife and Guy Fellows the next.
But would Hutch have said, What if we just kill him? That hyperbolic smile rose up again in my mind’s eye. Are you happy? Do you feel better now?
Was Hutch this nuts?
Guy Fellows made no effort to conceal his identity in the photographs. And even if he had, a few sharp shakes and a slap would have gotten the name out of Amanda Stuart anyway. According to Kate, it was Hutch who had pointed this out and it was Hutch who came to the conclusion that Guy Fellows had a partner. The photographs that had landed on Alan Stuart’s desk were clearly taken off of a videotape. What’s more, the various angles and close-ups of the pictures made it clear that these images were not the job of a stationary camera hidden somewhere in the room. Someone had been at the controls of the video camera, seeing to it that Amanda Stuart’s face got plenty of exposure. Along with the rest of her. And this—I can just see Hutch gravely stroking his chin over this one—this was a problem.
Guy Fellows was cleanly in their sights. What to do with him specifically would have to be worked out. What if, what if, what if…
But his partner. That was a problem.
“Joel began to refer to Guy’s partner as ‘Insurance,’ “Kate said to me. “That’s what he would say. ‘We can’t lay a finger on Guy Fellows until we’ve also fingered Insurance.’ That’s how he talked.”
And that was the problem. The fact is, Guy Fellows hadn’t even needed to use the U.S. Postal Service to deliver his dirty pictures. He could have waltzed into Alan Stuart’s office in his birthday suit and slapped the nasty goods down on his desk. “My name is Guy Fellows. I’m here because your wife and I have been bopping like bunnies. Here are the pictures to prove it. I’ve got the home video version back at my place and it can be yours for just nineteen ninety-nine, plus ninety-nine thousand and change for shipping and handling. And by the way, if you touch so much as a single hair on my beautiful birthday suit my partner will be only too glad to give the eleven o’clock news something to drool over.” He could have taken a handful of cigars from Alan Stuart’s humidor (if one existed), lit one up and moonwalked a complete backwards circle around the room, shaking a hat in the air like Jimmy Durante.
Stupid men with balls. Sometimes a very frustrating combination.
• • •
The afternoon’s rainstorm had finally ended, leaving behind a gray hollow sky and a peculiar stillness to the air. I think that Kate and I were beginning to suffer the first stages of cabin fever, having now been inside her apartment for some twenty hours straight. The end of the rainstorm brought with it a ball of clammy hot air. Apparently Kate didn’t own an air conditioner and I couldn’t see a fan anywhere. We were seated apart from each other as she told me her story. I was still on the couch. She sat across from me in a large chair, her legs pretzeled beneath her. She was chewing absently on a plastic straw as she spoke.
“I got a call from Alan some months ago, asking me to come in and see him. The call came from him directly, not from his secretary. We met at the end of the workday. At the end of his workday, I should say. Police shifts don’t really line up with the nine-to-fivers. Alan offered me a drink. And I knew right there that something was wrong.”
“Because cops don’t drink while on duty?” I’d seen my Dragnet. I know this stuff.
She shook her head. “Because I had developed a not-so-great relationship with alcohol over the past couple of months, and Alan knew that.”
“Oh.”
“He knew it full well. So when he offered me a drink, my radar went up immediately. Alan is a smart man. Think what you want about his character or his politics, but you’ve got to hand it to him for his smarts. He knew that I’d smell danger and that I’d automatically start to protect myself. He knew that.”
“Wait. I don’t understand all this. Was he being a good guy or a bad guy? I’m confused.”
“Bad. Count on it.”
“So then why do something, offer you a drink, if he knew it would put you on guard?”
“That’s Alan’s way of pretending to level the playing field. It’s a mind game. Alan enjoys putting all the pieces on the table. Exposing his tactics. He’ll come right out and say, “Okay, now I’m going to find a way to make you walk off the edge of that cliff over there, you think I’m not?’ ”
“He sounds like a mean bastard.”
“That’s the only kind I know.”
Kate uncoiled from the chair and went over to the window.
“Alan put me on alert immediately. What he wanted was my full attention. He wanted me to know that this was serious business he was calling me into his office to discuss. And he wanted me to be vulnerable. That was really the bottom line.”
“You declined the drink.”
“I
said to him, ‘You know I wouldn’t like a drink.’ He gave me his best smile and said, ‘Yes, I know.’ It was cat and mouse. He was just setting up the game and letting me know which parts we were playing.
“Alan said that he wanted me to take a temporary leave of absence from the force. This wasn’t my first. I took one after my husband died. In fact I had only been back a little over a month.”
“Why did he want you to take another leave?”
“He showed me the photographs. He was very simple about it. Not at all emotional. His wife looking like a goddamn porn star and he simply sits there at his desk and watches me flip through the pictures. Politicians can stop their own hearts from beating. I mean that literally, I really do. Anyway, he told me the name of the man in the photographs. Guy Fellows. He said, ‘I believe you have already met my lovely wife.’ He told me that Guy Fellows taught tennis at the country club and that his wife had been taking lessons and that—obviously—the two had gotten involved sexually. He said that Guy Fellows was attempting to blackmail him, that there was an entire video collection out there. What he needed was my help. There was a partner. The person who had taken the actual video. Until they knew the partner’s identity they could not make a move on Guy.”
“‘Make a move.’ Do you think that meant kill him?”
Kate pursed her lips. “I don’t think so. Or I certainly didn’t think so at the time, anyway. The police commissioner is not going to call one of his grunts into the office and discuss plans to murder someone. He didn’t say what he meant. He probably didn’t even know yet himself. He just knew that he had to have the other person in hand before he could make any moves.”
“So your job was to locate the partner.”
“Yes.”
“But why the leave of absence? He was giving you a job assignment, right?”
“There is undercover and there is undercover. Alan couldn’t have any paperwork on this. An official assignment would have meant a file. Reports. Those photographs would have had to go into the file. The basic facts of the top cop’s wife boffing the tennis pro would have had to go into that file. Even under normal circumstances, this would have been a little rough for Mr. Stuart. In light of a gubernatorial campaign, it was a nonissue. There would be no files. There would be nothing to leak to the press, or to the other campaign. It was all to be handled off the books. The only way I could do that was to take a leave of absence.
“And so I did. I did my boss’s bidding. I went out and got myself a nice little country club wardrobe. Behind the scenes, Alan quietly made the arrangements with the club. I have no idea what he told them. But voilà. Instant member. No background checks of my Mayflower ancestry. Nothing. Katie Zabriskie from Thirty-eighth Street in Hampden, member in good standing of the Baltimore Country Club. Wouldn’t my father have gotten a roar out of that! I almost wished he were still alive, just to see it.”
I noted the “almost” of that last statement. I think she noted me noting it. We didn’t mention it. She went on.
“The rest is pretty simple and, frankly, none of your business. I did my job. I infiltrated. I contacted my target. This is the lingo we use. I have to say, the contact part was pretty damned easy. Guy was an outrageous flirt. He was running a real number at that club, I can tell you.”
“So then Amanda Stuart wasn’t his only, uh, extracurricular student?”
“Hitch, you’re such a pilgrim. No, she wasn’t. He was on the make with any number of women there. Some of them weren’t married, so you have to pretty much dismiss them. Or at least downgrade them.”
“What do you mean?”
“As suspects.”
“Suspects?”
“Murder. Hitch, are you forgetting that we’re talking about a man who has been murdered?”
Holy moly, and I used to think I was a smart little pumpkin. It had never even occurred to me that there might be someone out there completely unrelated to Alan and Amanda Stuart who might have held a murderous grudge against Guy Fellows. Other lovers. Other pissed-off hubbies.
Kate continued. “He was sleeping with a number of other women. He might have been blackmailing any one of them as well. Who knows? That’s a part of what I had to investigate. What did you think, my entire task was to go to bed with this guy and squeeze the name of his partner in crime out of him? I don’t mean to sound offended, Hitch, but I’m offended. I’m a detective.”
I muttered an apology. Though I wasn’t exactly certain what I was apologizing for.
“Let me just get this all clear,” I said. “Alan Stuart, your boss, very possibly the next governor of this state, calls you into his office and tells you that some huckster tennis pro is screwing his wife and is threatening to go public with dirty videos and that he—Stuart—wants you to go out there and slither in between the guy and his sheets as part of your job? That’s in your job description? Fetch coffee, seduce suspects?”
“I don’t fetch coffee,” Kate said flatly.
“I’m sorry, but am I misguided here in thinking that something about all of this maybe, just maybe, puts Alan Stuart in a somewhat unfavorable light?”
“Did you hear me say I was happy about it?”
“I’m just—”
“I wasn’t then and I’m not now. And I’d appreciate your not sitting there on my couch taking cheap shots at me.”
“I’m sorry, Kate. I don’t mean to be doing that. I just don’t see where this guy gets the authority to tell you to go to bed with a blackmailer.”
Kate took a deep breath and stared out the window. I had looked out of it earlier. There is nothing to see. A Street. Cars driving by. Rows of brownstones across the street.
Kate turned back to look at me. Her anger was gone. She looked pale and uncertain.
“He doesn’t have the authority, hitch. There are strict departmental regulations about that sort of thing.”
“Then how—” I cut myself off. She was going to tell me. I didn’t need to badger.
“It wasn’t an official investigation,” she said slowly. “It was strictly off the books. There were no regulations to follow. I had to be as free as I needed to be to get as close to Guy Fellows as I needed.”
She came away from the window.
“It wasn’t an official investigation,” she said again. “There is no paperwork. Alan called me into his office and then into his confidence. He asked me to go after Guy Fellows and to root out everything that I could.” She sighed. “He asked me to do it as a personal favor to him.”
“Kate …” I hesitated, seeing the forlorn look that had come over her face. “Oh, Kate, isn’t that an awfully large favor?”
She sighed. “Yes it is.”
“Could you have just said no?”
She lowered her head. I could barely hear her answer. “I owed him.”
I stood up from the couch—finally—and went over to her. I touched her on the arm and she looked up into my face. God, she looked exhausted.
“You owed him? You owed him what?You owed him a favor? Kate, how big a favor can you owe a person?”
She searched my face, but it was clear she wasn’t finding what she needed there. She stepped past me and disappeared into the kitchen. I heard a cabinet door being shut. She reappeared, holding a bottle of Wild Turkey and two glasses.
“Would you do the honors?”
I didn’t move. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m asking you to pour me a drink. I’m in my own home, for Christ’s sake.”
“Are you sure?”
“Hitch, I’m not sure of anything, okay? That’s the whole problem. But maybe if I can get everything out on the table I can start to sort it out better. I’m sorry … I’m sorry if this stuff helps me do it, but right now it does. So do you want to lecture me or be my friend?”
I didn’t really think that the two choices she offered me were the only ones that should be available. She didn’t wait for me to answer.
“Never mind. I can pour.” She
sat down on the couch and poured two inches into one of the glasses. She looked up at me. “For God’s sake, don’t make me drink alone. Please.”
I motioned for her to pour out a second glass. She did. I picked it up. She picked up hers as well and held it just beneath her chin. She had trouble getting her words out.
“The reason … the favor that I owed Alan. The … reason he could feel so confident in calling me in and asking me to … to do his dirty work for him …” She took a tiny sip.
“I lied to you, Hitch. I lied to you the other night, about my husband.”
“The shoot-out?”
“That part was true. The shoot-out was true. The bungled stakeout. All that was all true. It just happened a little differently from how I told you. The guy up on the walkway? The one who I said shot Charley?”
I nodded.
“He didn’t shoot Charley. He shot me. He shot me in the shoulder. That was the scar you were so polite not to ask me about last night.”
It was this morning, but I didn’t quibble.
“Okay,” I said. “So he shot you. And your … whoever he was, the other cop—”
“Lou. Lou Bowman.”
“Bowman. He shot the guy up on the walkway. Was that part true?”
“That part was true.”
“So what am I missing, Kate?”
“You’re missing Charley. That’s what you’re missing. You’re missing my husband who is lying on the ground bleeding to death.”
“But you’ve just said that the guy on the walkway didn’t shoot him.”
Kate held up her glass, out at arm’s length. “You see how steady that is? Do you see how the glass isn’t shaking? We’re trained to be steady like that. Hours and hours at the firing range so that if and when the time comes, we’ll come up with our guns as steady as I’m holding this glass. And pow, pow, pow.”
