“No.”
“Anything else?” Never before had he seen such big, beautiful green eyes. His first wife had had green eyes, too, but there were no freckles on Roseann Blackburn, at least not on the portions of her that he could see.
“I don’t think so. She talked a lot with George Bowen.”
“Bowen?” Potamos’s voice reflected his surprise.
“Yes. She called him ‘professor.’”
“Yeah, that’s right, she was a journalism student at Georgetown. How did you know it was Bowen?”
“He isn’t exactly an unknown face. TV, the papers. Besides, he comes into the Four Seasons a lot and requests songs.”
“Yeah? What kind of songs?”
“He likes Gilbert and Sullivan.”
“Did you hear what Frolich and Bowen discussed?”
“No, sorry. You must know him from the newspaper.”
“Yeah, I know him.”
“Wow, that bad, huh? You sound like I mentioned… I don’t know, your ex-wife who wouldn’t accept your award for the alimony.”
“Worse than that. She’s the mother of my children. Bowen, he’s… he’s a mother of a different sort. He sold me down the river after I did the Cables story. Cables was an old friend of his and Bowen told me to lay off the investigation. I figured ‘Screw you,’ and I kept going. I got an award and a permanent demotion to the cop beat.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Yeah. I could’ve left and done something else, especially after the story broke, but Bowen knows everybody in the business. I could never prove it but I know damn well he killed some nice offers I had…. Well, that’s then. I’m heavy into now. Anything else from the party?”
“I guess not. I did have one strong feeling, though.”
“What’s that?”
“That Senator Frolich has something going on the side with Elsa Jenkins.”
Potamos sat back and shook his head. “How do you know all those people? They request songs, too?”
“No, but I play a lot of posh parties. I’ve played a couple at the Jenkinses’ house. House? Mansion is more like it.”
“Frolich and Mrs. Jenkins? What makes you think they have it on?”
“Instinct, intuition. You sit on a bandstand all night and you watch the crowd, match people up, read their lives. It passes the time during the dull sets. I don’t know, I just picked up on the way they looked at each other. This is silly. It has nothing to do with the kid’s murder. I have to get back. I’m already late.”
“I’ll hang around a bit,” he said. “I like to listen to you play. Hey, maybe when you’re through we could get a bite to eat, coffee, whatever. You interested?”
She hesitated, which worried him. Then she grinned. “Okay, but don’t stay until the end. I don’t want people seeing me leave with anyone. Where are we going?”
“I don’t know, the American Café?”
“Great. See you there at eight-thirty.”
| Chapter Five |
“Pete, Joe Potamos.”
“Yeah. What’a you want?”
“I called a couple of times. I left messages.”
“Too busy. What’a you want?”
“The Frolich case. I’m on it.”
Languth laughed. “You and every other media slob in town. You guys are crawling all over us.”
“Not me, Pete. I’m doing color.”
“Color? Jesus, you make it sound like ‘Monday Night Football.’”
“Anything new?”
“No.”
“The autopsy? When’s it being released?”
“That’s color, all right. Whenever.”
“The funeral. You going?”
“Nah. It’s in Jersey.”
“I’m going.”
“That’s wonderful. I have to go, Joe. Thanks for calling.”
“I figured I could buy you a beer and—”
“Forget it.”
MPD detective Peter Languth hung up.
Potamos hung around the metro room at the Post until noon, when he went to the National Press Club to meet an old friend, literary agent Frank Belosic. Belosic had represented Potamos after he broke the story on Senator Cables’s under-the-table arms deal with the Middle East. He had gotten Joe a contract to do a book on the affair, but Potamos never delivered a finished manuscript and he’d had to return the advance. He and Belosic had remained friends despite the complication. Both belonged to the Press Club, and Belosic developed many clients through it.
Potamos had the same reaction to entering the club that he always had—the feeling that they’d lost a lot in the $6-million renovation. Gone was the crusty, smoky, smelly atmosphere, replaced by a modern, state-of-the-art library complete with cubicles in which out-of-town visitors could work, and staffed by research assistants available to members. The restaurant’s food had always been relatively edible. Now, a French chef named Bernard served up gourmet meals that tasted better but didn’t stick to the ribs like in the old days. At least not to Potamos’s ribs—he’d grown up with everything cooked in his father’s diner in a special grease that pasted it to the rib cage like Krazy Glue.
Potamos missed the all-night poker games (hardly the atmosphere for them anymore), which always gave him the feeling of belonging to a special and threatened species. He loved the stories about when President Harding stayed all night at the poker table, drink at his side, telling aides who brought him important papers that he’d deal with them in the morning—after the game.
Potamos was browsing in the library when Belosic came through the door. Tall and slender, with Slavic features and thinning blond hair combed straight back, Belosic crossed the room in a long, loping gait and shook Potamos’s hand. “Hey, you look great. Must be in love,” he said.
Potamos said, “As a matter of fact I am.”
“No kidding. Who?”
“It doesn’t matter. Where are we dining? I’d say eating, but having a French chef makes it ‘dining.’”
Belosic laughed. “Where else? The dining room. Come on, it’s on me.”
“Selling?” Potamos asked as they went upstairs.
“Sort of.”
“I’m not buying.”
“For Christ’s sake, Joe, at least let me do my spiel.”
They filled the time over drinks with small talk. Finally, Belosic got to the point. “How about a book on the Frolich murder?”
Potamos shook his head and reached for a cigarette that hadn’t been there since he quit four years ago. “There’s no book there. Besides, I’m just chasing the fringe elements of the story. I’ve been banished, remember?”
“I sure do. George Alfred Bowen. Why in hell did you stay?”
“Insecurity.”
“Crap.”
“No, true, Frank. You know me, I’m not out to conquer worlds.”
“A book could be a hell of a move for you, Joe. I’ve had four major publishers call me looking for somebody to write one about Valerie Frolich. I suggested you every time and the reaction was positive.”
“You didn’t talk to…?”
A laugh from the agent. “Of course I did. All is forgotten. Editors come and go. Yours went.”
Potamos smiled and looked at the menu. They ordered. Belosic lighted his pipe and leaned forward. “What about Bowen and the murder, Joe? She was his student, and you know his reputation with young women.”
Potamos shrugged. “One doesn’t necessarily go with the other. You can sleep with kids, but murdering them is another ball game.”
“Just a thought, Joe. Do you think Bowen slept with her?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
After lunch they went out onto the new terrace where lunch and dinner would be served in better weather. Belosic walked to the edge and looked down. When Potamos came up beside him, Belosic said, “This is one of the biggest murder stories of our lifetime, Joe. Bright, beautiful college kid, daughter of one of the Senate’s most powerful figures, gets her brains batted aro
und by an unknown person. Her professor is America’s leading muckraker, George Alfred Bowen. She and her father dislike each other intensely. She—”
“How do you know that?”
“What, that they didn’t get along? Everybody knows that. The kid lives in a posh Georgetown apartment provided by her father’s close friend, the multimillionaire real-estate developer Marshall Jenkins, whose wife is rumored to be having an affair with the senator. Shaping up juicy, Joe, the sort of thing best sellers are made of.”
“Jenkins’s wife and Frolich having an affair? Everybody knows that, too?”
“Rumor, D.C. style. Hey, what’s happened to you, you fall out of the mainstream?”
Potamos smiled. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Belosic turned and leaned on the railing, dead pipe in his hand. “What do you say, Joe? A book? It could turn your life around.”
“No, absolutely not.”
“Okay.” Belosic fished an envelope from his pocket and handed it to Potamos.
“What’s this?”
“A telegram of intent from one of New York’s better publishing houses.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Hang on to it. If you don’t want to, tear it up and I’ll tell them. But don’t make the decision here, now. Okay?”
“All right.”
“Tell me about your new love.”
“Who’s that?”
“You said when I came in that—”
“Oh, she’s a piano player. She was at the barge party the night Frolich got it.”
“Good source?”
“No, knows nothing.”
“But you’ll cultivate it in the interest of journalistic investigation.”
“Come on, let’s go,” Potamos said, crossing the terrace. “I have to file what I have tonight, and I’m going to the funeral tomorrow.”
“Take notes,” said Belosic. “Could make a nice first chapter.”
***
Rain poured on the crowd that ringed Valerie Frolich’s New Jersey grave. The Episcopal bishop was an old man with a gray face. He clutched his black miter with one hand; his other hand held the Book of Common Prayer. He said in a barely audible voice, “Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our sister departed, Valerie, and we commit her body to the ground….”
Potamos stood apart from everyone and looked over the ring of people who’d gathered to pay their final respects. Several TV cameras recorded the proceedings, and a battery of still photographers and reporters stood behind ropes that had been strung to keep them in line.
The Frolich family—Senator John Frolich; his wife, Henrietta; and three of Valerie’s grandparents—were clustered together at the foot of the grave. Next to them stood Marshall and Elsa Jenkins. Assorted friends formed distinct groups. Potamos figured that a group consisting of George Alfred Bowen and four young people was Bowen’s seminar. A few feet behind them stood MPD sergeant Peter Languth. He wore a black single-breasted raincoat and gray fedora. Typical cop, Potamos thought. Liar, too. He wasn’t coming.
He switched his attention to Senator Frolich, standing ramrod-straight, eyes focused on the gaping black hole that would be his daughter’s final resting place. He wore a gray Chesterfield topcoat and was bareheaded. Others had turned up their collars against the rain that whipped across the open cemetery, but not the senator, looking as though he were defying God for what He’d done to Valerie.
Henrietta Frolich looked decades older than her husband, a dumpy, rumpled woman who seemed on the verge of collapse. Potamos found it strange that her husband wasn’t touching her, had not even offered his arm for support.
The coffin containing Valerie Frolich’s body was lowered slowly into the grave. The bishop sprinkled earth over it as it disappeared from view. “The Lord be with you,” he said.
“And with thy spirit,” a few people mumbled.
“Let us pray. Lord have mercy upon us.”
“Christ have mercy upon us.”
“Lord have mercy upon us.”
Potamos hung around where the cars and limos were parked. Bowen passed with the students and ignored him. Languth lumbered toward him and Potamos said, “Must be your ghost.”
“Huh?”
“You said you weren’t coming.”
“So?”
Potamos hadn’t seen Languth in a while and had forgotten how big he was, and ugly. He stood six feet, four inches and weighed in at 250 pounds. Everything about him was big—hands, nose, ears, the whole face, big and red with watery blue eyes. Potamos noticed the wedding ring that dug deep into his left ring finger. “Still married. Amazing,” he told himself. He considered Languth to be a cop off the deep end, warped, too filled with the grime and grim reality of his job to ever be fully human again. Still, there was a side to him that Potamos almost enjoyed—the side that matched Potamos’s own cynical views from having covered too many fires and murders, distasteful scenes set in ghettos, seeing D.C. at night when a whole new world of pimps and hookers, knife artists and con men, perverts and dope hustlers emerged after the day people had fled the city to their warm, secure homes in the suburbs—after they’d raped and plundered in their own genteel, accepted white-collar way.
“Sad, huh?” Potamos said.
Languth shrugged, looked around at the last of the mourners getting into their vehicles, and turned back to Potamos. “You still buying beers?”
“Yeah, sure. You want one?”
“Yeah. Let’s get outta here. You heading right back?”
“Uh-huh.”
“We’ll catch up back there.”
“Good. Martin’s?”
“You still go there?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yeah, Martin’s. Five?”
“You got it.”
***
Potamos arrived at the tavern early and called Roseann Blackburn but got her answering machine. He nursed a beer and wondered why Languth had decided to meet him. The answer was obvious: He wanted something. So did Potamos. Whoever got the most out of it should pay, but he knew it would be on him. He’d just have to try to get enough for himself to make it worthwhile.
Languth came through the door a few minutes after five and wedged himself into the booth opposite Potamos. He struggled with his raincoat, then decided it wasn’t worth the effort and left it on. He ordered a vodka on the rocks and a chicken salad sandwich. “You eating?” he asked.
“Later. What’s new, Pete?”
“On Frolich? Not much. What are you chasing on it?”
“I told you, color. Background.”
“What about Bowen?”
“What about him?”
“He was the kid’s teacher. He likes young girls. How much did he like her?”
Potamos finished his beer and waved for another. “I don’t know anything about Bowen and Valerie Frolich. He and her father are tight. You don’t mess with your friend’s daughter—do you?”
“Some do.”
“Bowen? I doubt it. Why screw up a friendship with a leading force in the Senate? Too much to lose. Are you focusing on Bowen?”
“No, just keeping him in mind, that’s all. I’ve been talking to students who knew Frolich.”
“And?”
“Nothing yet. Let’s go back, Joe, to when Bowen kicked your pins out from under you.”
“Why?”
“Because I remember sitting with you one night in some joint on Mass. Ave. with you crying in your beer. You had lots to say about Bowen—nothing good, all bad. You knew a lot about him, only I forget most of what you said. Tell me again.”
“About Bowen? You know as much as I do, Pete. He’s a big man, America’s leading columnist, a dandy, confidant to the rich and famous. What’s to add?”
“The seminar. You ever hear him talk about it, about his students?”
Potamos laughed. “Pete, I haven’t had ten words with Bowen since he cut off my legs.”
“Who else at the paper would know what goes on in tha
t seminar?”
“Lots of people. High-ups. Whoever he talks to, friends, I don’t know.” He narrowed his eyes. “Hey, be straight with me, Pete. You really are looking to Bowen on this thing, aren’t you?”
Languth offered a patronizing smile and finished his sandwich. “Good chicken salad,” he said, wiping his fleshy mouth with his napkin.
“Glad you liked it. What about the students you talked to? You get to everybody in the seminar?”
“Yeah, and a few others, too.”
“And?”
“Nothin’. A bunch a spoiled kids. Bowen’s God to them. They probably figure if they suck around him enough, he’ll get them a job.”
“Maybe he will.”
“If they’re especially nice to him. These college professors are scum, you know? They get these naïve kids—the girls I’m talkin’ about—and they take advantage of them.”
“Bowen’s not a professor. He just does the seminar a couple of times a week and—”
“You know what I mean, Joe. It’s the old castingcouch game, only this time it’s on a campus. That’d be a good book title—The Campus Casting Couch. Maybe you ought’a write it. I get ten percent for the idea.”
They left Martin’s and stood on the sidewalk. “What about the autopsy?” Potamos asked.
“They’re releasing it at a press conference in the morning. I’ll give you a leg up. Multiple contusions of the head, fractured skull. Somebody beat her dead.”
“Object?”
“Blunt, unknown. Thanks for the beer.”
“And the sandwich.”
“Yeah, that, too. See you around, Joe.”
| Chapter Six |
Walking into a Georgetown University dorm brought a shock of recognition to Potamos, and a realization of how long ago he’d been a student. He admired two cute co-eds as they bustled past him and caught up with two young men who were also leaving the building. “That’s right, a co-ed dorm,” Potamos told himself as he started up the stairs to the second floor.
The door to Room 22 was open. Strains of a string quartet playing a Schumann piece came through it.
“Steve McCarty?” Potamos asked from the hall. A young man in jeans and T-shirt looked up from his desk. Potamos stepped into the room. “I’m Joe Potamos, Washington Post.”
Murder in Georgetown Page 3
