Adler, Warren - FitzGerald 03 - Senator Love

by Senator Love [lit]

  "Not really. It was getting hot and heavy. I could see that the time had come. Then before I could act she came to me. Said good-bye and upped and left. Just like that."

  "How did the Senator react?"

  "The thing is," Bunkie said with a smile, "I told him I had sent her away."

  "That satisfied him?" Fiona asked.

  "Look at it this way. I spared him the rejection." He shook his head. "Sounds awful, doesn't it?"

  "Did Nell know?" Fiona repeated, cutting a quick glance at the eggplant, who nodded his approval.

  "I would doubt that."

  "Why do you think Judy something left so abruptly?"

  "I told you. She was smart as hell. Knew it wouldn't work, I suppose. Jumped the gun."

  Whatever her feelings about him, which were highly negative, Fiona felt he had been forthcoming, almost too fthcoming. Indeed, he seemed to go out of his way to leave that impression.

  They gave him another treat ment of extended silence. Finally he said: "I've answered all your questions. I've been a good boy. Now tell me what the fuck is going on."

  "You don't know?" It was Cates who asked. He had been silent throughout the entire interrogation.

  "Haven't got a clue," Bunkie said.

  Suddenly, the eggplant took an envelope from the table beside him and handed it to Bunkie. Fingers fluttering clumsily, he opened the envelope. He looked at the pictures, his eyes squinting.

  "Looks like a skeleton," he said hoarsely.

  It was the pictures that had been taken at the site where Betty Taylor had been buried.

  "Betty Taylor, Bunkie," the eggplant said. They were all watching his face. The color disappeared from it. His lips trembled.

  "Betty Taylor?" He could barely say her name.

  "Strangled," the eggplant pressed. "Not long after you gave her the word. Buried in the backyard of an abandoned house. Same MO as Helga Kessel. What do you make of this, Bunkie?"

  "I … I … I'm speechless."

  "So I see," the eggplant said.

  "I can't believe it," Bunkie said, faltering, gasping for air.

  "Have we been leaving something out?" the eggplant said gently.

  "Leaving something out?"

  "Still think it's robbery?" Fiona asked.

  "I don't know what to think."

  "It's over now, Bunkie," the eggplant said gently. "It'll take some work on our part, but we'll get it right, Bunkie. Why go through all that pain? It's all over now."

  "What the hell is happening here?" Bunkie exploded. He looked into their deliberately expressionless faces. "You really believe it. You think that I did this." He waved the pictures in front of him, then dropped them onto the coffee table.

  "Gotta admit," the eggplant said. "It's an idea with legs."

  Bunkie seemed to have collapsed from the inside out. All the bravado had disappeared and beads of sweat had broken out on his upper lip.

  "Sam know this?" he whispered.

  "We thought you'd like to be the first," Fiona said.

  "He'll go crazy," Bunkie said. "He'll think I fucked everything up. All that we've been working for."

  "Maybe you tried too hard," the eggplant said.

  Bunkie's nostrils quivered as he sucked in a deep breath. All the Ivy League arrogance had run out of him like air from a punctured tire.

  "I didn't do these things," he whispered. "I couldn't." His eyes welled with tears and he wiped what spilled over with the cuffs of his jacket. "The question here is, how will this impact on …" He moved his hands in a way that suggested that he was too choked up to continue. It was hard, Fiona decided, to generate any sympathy for the man. The craft of acting was part and parcel of a politician's arsenal, extending to his staff and sycophants.

  "Make it easy, Bunkie," Fiona said gently, falling into the good-cop role, knowing that the eggplant would take off the gloves now. He got up from the leather wing chair and moved toward Bunkie.

  "You're a fucking killer, man," the eggplant said. He stooped down and grabbed Bunkie's jacket, half-lifting him from the couch. "We're going to fry your ass one way or another. Hard or easy, you're finished."

  The eggplant's face butted close to Bunkie's. His bloodshot eyes were popping and he was blowing sour breath in his face. The eggplant was doing his "physical intimidation" act now. She had seen it work before. Bunkie's body hung limply above the couch, like a puppet whose strings had suddenly been cut. He made no effort to resist.

  "I'm no killer," he insisted.

  "Fucking liar," the eggplant sneered, pushing him back on the couch. He paced the room like a caged animal, then came back and pointed a finger at Bunkie's nose.

  "We'll squeeze you like a grapefruit. We'll be on your ass day or night, Farrington. One day other bodies will turn up."

  Up to then had been accepting the intimidation with only the mildest protest. Now he seemed to have pulled some strength from a hidden resource.

  "Destroy for the sake of destroying, would you?" Bunkie said. His

  voice seemed stronger, and his confidence level had risen considerably. She could not understand why. "That would be damned shitty. Least you could do is give us the benefit of the doubt. We're not killers."

  "Sure. The jails are full of innocent guys. We just put people away for fun."

  But the fire was burning out in the eggplant as well. None of the strategies was working. Innocent or guilty? She wasn't sure. None of them could be sure.

  There was something else troubling her. Bunkie was certainly the logical suspect. He had openly admitted his connection. But something was awry and she felt a troubling barrier between the obvious and the real truth.

  The fact was that all the evidence presented was circumstantial. No confession. No case. Not yet. They'd have to keep digging. They'd have to check out Harriet Farley and Judy Something. Were they, too, buried in someone's backyard?

  "I'm no angel," Bunkie managed to croak, sensing that the tension had eased. "But I didn't kill anybody."

  "We'll see, won't we?" the eggplant said. He had stopped his pacing and now leaned against a wall. He looked toward Fiona, widened his eyes and gazed toward the ceiling. His message was obvious. No point in pursuing the interrogation any longer. The parameters had been set. They'd need more evidence before Bunkie would break. He was either acting, stonewalling or truly innocent. One thing was certain. No confession was forthcoming. If guilty, he had opted to play out the string and there was nothing they could do to force the issue.

  Bunkie uncrossed his legs and folded his hands around them. His knuckles were white, yet he seemed to have finally taken command of himself again, although he was emerging as someone else. He was, Fiona knew, exercising the chameleon option, the politician's last resort, changing colors in mid-campaign.

  "You can destroy us politically with this," he said. "You know it and I know it and soon Sam will know it. Even if we're innocent, which we are. Neither Sam nor I is guilty of any of this. I don't know how or why these terrible things occurred. Could be coincidence. I don't know. But the least you can do, without any other corroborating evidence, is to protect us. Is that too much to ask?"

  "Might be," the eggplant said, leaving open the possibility. If, indeed, they were innocent, he would not want to lose the chit he had earned. "Hard to keep these things from the media."

  "I wish Sam were here," Bunkie said. Obviously, he had realized that he had gone as far as he could go by himself.

  "You're welcome to use the phone," the eggplant said.

  _No way,_ Fiona thought, and he made no move to look for a telephone.

  "May I go now?" he asked, standing up, straightening his jacket. A flash of arrogance had returned, which was puzzling to Fiona.

  "For the moment," the eggplant muttered.

  "I know you'll want to speak with the Senator," Bunkie said, shooting a glance at Fiona. "And you can bank on his cooperation." He started to walk, then stopped. "We have nothing to do with this. Once more can I prevail on you to
keep this quiet? I mean as far as the media is concerned."

  "We'll do our best," the eggplant said, pausing. "Up to a point."

  "What point is that, Captain?"

  "The point that heads in your direction, Farrington," the eggplant said. It was intended as a threat, but for some reason it seemed to lack teeth, as if even the eggplant was losing conviction. Again Bunkie started to move, but there was something contrived in the way he was doing it, the cadence, perhaps, as if all along he was preparing to turn and confront them. Her observation proved correct. As he exited the den, he turned.

  "Judy something," he said. "I remember her name. Peters. Judy Peters." He stood therwatching them, making no move to leave. "I said I haven't heard from her since my conversation. I haven't. But she's very much alive. I just saw her picture on the cover of a cookbook."

  ———— *18* JUDY PETERS lived in a townhouse on P Street, renovated to take advantage of every architectural strategy to make the house seem more light, airy and spacious than it really was. Floor-to-ceiling windows, a mirrored wall, a painting with a long-distance perspective, hanging plants, exposed blonde wood beams and bookcases snaking everywhere screamed out the pretense of the intellectual and superior taste level of the occupant.

  From her vantage in the living room, Fiona could see the professional- size kitchen with its array of butcher block surfaces, hanging pots and up-to-date cooking devices, including a gold-plated cappucino machine, the obvious signature of a woman who writes cookbooks. On the coffee table in front of the couch where Fiona and Cates were seated were an array of these books, all by Ms. Peters, dealing with gourmet cooking sans such ingredients as salt, sugar, eggs and red meat. One was titled, _Cuisine Without Pesticides_. Ms. Peters, Fiona decided, had indeed found her _ouvre_.

  The woman herself was tall and slender, with a high-cheek-boned esthetic face that went well with the house. She wore a long belted sweater and an expensive-looking, egg-shaped clock hanging from a beaded necklace. Her wrists were festooned with lines of gold bracelets.

  Ms. Peters reeked with feminine militancy. Miss would simply not fit the subject. Her brown eyes peeking out from long lashes, despite an effort to appear serene, seemed wary, guarded. She had agreed to see them on the usual grounds of confidentiality, although from her initial questions on the telephone Fiona detected an inord inate curiosity. They had, of course, concocted a subterfuge, deliberately vague, something merely hinted at, about a scheme to blackmail Senator Langford. They were, of course, careful not to use the word blackmail.

  "I'm not part of it?" she had asked with a dollop of expectation.

  "Not yet," Fiona had answered, her voice pregnant with warning.

  Fiona attributed Judy Peters' consent to the side-effects of what she called the "star-fucker syndrome." In Washington this was usually the affliction of women who interpreted participation in the political process as a sexual connection with an important politician or other powerful figure. Although most of those who were victims of the syndrome were the first to deny it in themselves, they were an accepted part of the fabric of the Capitol. Nor could Fiona deny to herself that there was some special excitement in it, a tantalizing temptation despite all the caveats and pitfalls.

  Which was not to say that Ms. Peters was a typical example. But Fiona had found that after years had gone by, women who had "star-fucked" were not reluctant to discuss it. Jack Kennedy's women, for example, had been blabbing all over town for years.

  Both Cates and Fiona had accepted her offer for, what else, cappucino, which they sipped from cream white cups.

  After their abortive interrogation of Bunkie Farrington they had all agreed that if this was, as it had originally appeared, a kind of serial crime, they had better discover what had gone wrong with the serial and, consequently, their logic. All were also agreed, however, that there was a direct relationship between the murders of Helga Kessel and Betty Taylor.

  "Yes, I did," Judy Peters acknowledged, after Fiona had finally posed the question. The initial opening had been the usual small-talk of ingratiation and the eliciting of biographical details. Judy Peters had been a legislative aide on the Hill until she had discovered cookbook- writing. She had actually been a legislative assistant to another Senator at the time of her meeting with Senator Langford. Not long

  after, she had joined the Senator's staff as a speechwriter.

  She showed no embarrassment at the revelaon.

  "I came of sexual age in the sixties," she explained. "I was as much to blame as him."

  Fiona figured Ms. Peters for a couple of years older than herself, but of the same mind-set when it came to men. Sitting beside her, Cates fidgeted. Being younger and having grown up under the strict supervision of a stern mother, Cates rarely alighted conversationally on the subject of sex and, in the course of business, would deal with it in rigid, clinical terms. When he made an effort to loosen up on the subject, his comments were always forced and hollow.

  "It was ages ago, of course," Judy Peters clarified. She closed her eyes to dramatize her calculation. "Eight years."

  "And how long did it last?"

  "Oh, no more than six months."

  "How was it conducted?"

  "Ah yes, the modus operandi," Ms. Peters said, smiling. "Sweet impulsive youth. He was gorgeous. Still is. I adored him. We met a couple of times a week at a house on the Hill."

  "Bunkie Farrington's?"

  "Now there is a first-class prick," Judy Peters said.

  Fiona wanted to acknowledge agreement, but kept quiet. She cut a glance at Cates, who smiled.

  "You met at his townhouse?"

  "I must say, Officer FitzGerald, you know a great deal."

  "There were others," Fiona acknowledged.

  "Oh, I'm sure of that. The man was irresistible." She laughed. "And insatiable." She showed not the slightest embarrassment. "He also brought out the tigress in a girl."

  "Did you rate it as a real romantic attachment?" Fiona asked.

  "A love affair, you mean," Ms. Peters said.

  Fiona nodded "Most definitely that. A glorious, romantic love affair."

  "Were the feelings mutual?"

  "Very much so. It took a great effort for us to keep our hands off each other. I would often find excuses to get to his office." She paused. "God, we were like rutting pigs."

  "People noticed?"

  "Only those who weren't blind. That probably led to our undoing. He had been married less than six months. Can you imagine? Six months. She found out." Ms. Peters shook her head. Fiona and Cates exchanged glances. "I felt awful." She straightened in her chair and caught Fiona in her gaze. "One thing I'm not is a home-wrecker."

  "How did she find out?" Cates asked. By their immutable law of unseen signals, it became his turn to ask the questions. Judy Peters shifted her attention seamlessly. She seemed to enjoy talking about it.

  "Someone told her."

  "How do you know?" Cates asked.

  She sucked in a deep breath, and for a moment her eyes lost their sparkle, glazing over.

  "She told me."

  Fiona's heart lurched. Cates pressed on.

  "In person?"

  "On the telephone. Called me at the office. She said she had heard that I was having an affair with her husband. I was shocked. I lost the power of speech. What was I supposed to say? I was also ashamed. Oh, I thought of the possibility of being the third Mrs. Langford. To his credit, he never hinted at that as a possibility. Wouldn't have worked anyhow. I like my freedom."

  She was drifting and Cates pulled her back.

  "Did you tell her it was true?"

  "I'm one of those people who are constitutionally unable to tell a lie. I said yes. I was." She shook her head. "I remember there was a long silence. Then she said, 'Can you see your way clear to end it? You see, I'm pregnant.' Christ, I felt _that_ small." She made the appropriate gesture, then fell silent.

  "What did you do?"

  "I said I was sorry that she had found
out, that I never meant to hurt her."

  "And the ending of it?"

  "There and then. I went in and saw Farrington. That was his department. I said bye-bye as of that moment."

  "Not to the Senator."

  "I was too embarrassed. And I didn't want to face him. Cut it clean. That's what I was after. To get the hell out of there."

  "And what did Bunkie say?" Cates asked.

  "Best all around or somesuch. He sounded relied. In a way I was, too. It was getting out of hand."