Washington Masquerade

by Warren Adler

  “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know. They are… well… they. I’m making assumptions. They? He was not specific—not the President, he made that clear—people inside, people with intelligence connections and real political clout. Who knows what goes on beneath the surface? I don’t want to know. All I know is they… yes, they, whoever they are, are making him crazy. You know how it works? They make a suggestion. Rumors start that you are not playing with the team, that you’re disloyal. Even if it isn’t true and you deny it, you’re out—career shot, all you worked for gone. Them.” She bent her head back as if she was pointing with her chin. Fiona had no trouble deciphering the gesture. Dolly was imagining her husband caught in a web of paranoia and deceit.

  “It’s a perfectly logical suspicion, Dolly,” Fiona said soothingly. “I agree that there are lots of shadowy things that take place in the government—people protecting their turf, backbiting, payback, strange mysterious goings-on. I try not to believe in conspiracy theories, but that doesn’t mean that there are no people in government capable of indulging themselves in such activities.”

  She was reaching for words that might blunt her friend’s anxieties, knowing they were hollow and speculative.

  “I just don’t want to see Phil hurt. You know what I mean? His career ruined by rumor and innuendo or him being forced to lie to some grand jury. There are always grand juries in Washington. Things are getting so ugly.” She paused, looked around her again, visibly frightened. She shook her head.

  “Phil says just because he can’t find it in his shop, doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

  “Or they know something he doesn’t,” Fiona said, yet another strategy to calm Dolly down with some measure of false optimism. There were always eager geeks in government willing to act outside the boundaries for reasons both sinister and virtuous, willing to carry out or advocate disinformation, to further established policy or merely foment trouble for nefarious reasons. Dolly sucked in another deep breath and expelled it as a long sigh.

  “Damn! You’re the only one I can trust about this, Fi. If Phil knew I was talking to you, he’d throw a fit. I’m violating his trust.” She shook her head and brought out another tissue. She was sobbing now.

  “Help Phil through this, Dolly,” Fiona said, feeling deep empathy for her friend’s emotional state. “What else can I say? I wish I could be more helpful. Hell, you know that I’m one of the point men on the investigation of Burns’ death. Of course, there are ideas about government involvement, rumors, hints, speculations, the usual bullshit. But I can’t let these asides unduly influence me. I know they exist. I don’t totally ignore them, but in the end we deal in facts, hard facts, Dolly.”

  Dolly cast her eyes downwards and shook her head.

  “Phil couldn’t live with bearing false witness, creating facts that don’t exist. Not my Phil.”

  “I’m not so sure I could live with it either, Dolly. Or you, as well.”

  Fiona continued to study her face, watching her expression. She looked up and their eyes made strong contact.

  “I needed this, Fi. I needed you to hear it.”

  “I know. Just stay calm. Phil may be overreacting, and you may be overreacting to Phil’s dilemma. Sometimes… you remember the old saying: ‘Today is the day you worried about yesterday, and all is well.’”

  Dolly smiled for the first time since they had begun their conversation.

  “Dumb cliché,” Fiona said.

  They stood up and embraced.

  “I love you, my great dear friend,” Dolly said, kissing Fiona’s cheek.

  “And I love you, Dolly. Just hang in there, baby.

  “I’ll try.”

  She disengaged and Fiona watched her move out of the lobby. For a brief moment, her memory shot back to her discussion last night with Larry, who could happily co-exist with hypocrisy. A sudden wave of guilt assailed her.

  ***

  “He goes in and out,” Izzy said when she got back to the hospital. “He’s too doped up to make sense—talks about seeing colors in his head, traffic lights, red, yellow, green. The doc says that it’s par for the course in head injuries. No point in hanging out here.”

  Fiona agreed and they got in the car and sped back to headquarters, which was still swarming with reporters, who they managed to dodge. She debated whether or not to discuss with Izzy what Dolly had told her, finally opting on the side of silence, knowing that there would come a time when she was obliged to enter it into the record.

  The Chief was in as worse a mood as she had ever seen him. The ashtray was overflowing. Again they moved to the men’s room, which was empty.

  “The Mayor was livid, jumping up and down. I asked—no, begged—for more time. Worse, I lied, said we had promising leads. My nose got longer.”

  He laughed but it was joyless and hollow. Fiona was sure of the subtext. He did not want his charge, our homicide pew, to look lesser in the eyes of the public and his status-conscious wife. He was on center stage, in the spotlight. At this point, he was the reluctant celebrity hero. Above all, he did not want to look like a puffed-up fraud, just another incompetent black official unable to compete on the white man’s playing field, doomed to fail. Perhaps the Mayor, a racial brother, felt the same way, and the Chief was working hard to exploit the emotional leverage to gain the extra time.

  She could see his dilemma clearly, now that the case had exploded into the national arena and beyond. He did not want to expand the investigation with all the resultant fanfare, and fail. Nor did he want the Feds to steal his thunder, just in case they found the magic key that unlocked the mystery. An exercise in pure ego, she knew, an opportunity to project himself into the major leagues of law enforcement, and in the process, vindicate himself to the jury of his peers, the Gold Coast black elite. She gave herself an A for insight, which changed nothing in the matter of the investigation.

  They went over all the obvious aspects of the case, providing Hodges with a detailed overview. Again, she did not interject what Dolly had told her, judging it not to be relevant at the moment, and unwilling under any circumstances to betray a friend’s confidence. Not yet. The Chief listened carefully, his eyes narrowing in concentration.

  “It’s like we’re looking in one direction, and everyone else is looking in the other direction.”

  “Murder by Presidential proxy,” Izzy said. “The universal conspiracy motive, believed by both the naïve and the sophisticated.”

  “That’s what they want us to believe,” Fiona said. “Everybody who is anti-President can get his fifteen minutes of fame on television and the Internet. Not much downside for them. Besides, the hit-man idea is sexy, the stuff of movie thrillers. Popular culture trumps all. Suicide is boring.”

  “Boring, yes,” Izzy interjected, “also defies logic. Burns was not depressed, apparently, showed no signs—happy home, good daddy to his kids, devoted wife, plenty of dough. In my book, not a chance.”

  Fiona and the Chief exchanged glances and nodded in agreement.

  “Round and round,” Fiona said. “On the other hand….”

  “Is there another hand?” Hodges asked.

  Fiona pondered for a moment then speculated aloud.

  “Maybe Burns observed, saw, heard something so horrendous, something he uncovered, so life changing that he couldn’t bear it, and in the spur of the moment, suddenly a trigger goes off in his head. Outta here, his mind says, get me the hell outta here.”

  “It’s dramatic,” the Chief said. “I’ll give it that.”

  “Possible,” Fiona said, “hardly probable, worst of all, unconvincing, unless we discover what this life-changing experience was. Without that, no closure is possible. We go down the hole with Alice in Wonderland.”

  “What about the subway driver?”

  “Head trauma,” Fiona said.

  “Makes n
o sense, talks about colors. He connects more with his traffic accident than the subway train. Lights changing, red, green, yellow—makes no sense.”

  The Chief paced the room. Fiona knew he was deep in cogitation. Someone banged heavily on the door. Hodges paid no attention.

  “We’ve got a pot full of whys and wherefores,” he said, finally stopping his pacing. “Where was he going on the subway?”

  He pulled a diagram of the Washington subway system out of his pocket. They gathered round for a better look. He pointed with his finger to the Metro Center station, a hub that connects all the lines.

  “He could only have been heading here,” he said, pointing to the Glenmont stop in Maryland, “or here, Greenbelt.”

  “Or changing at Fort Totten,” Izzy said, “then going on to the train that goes to Branch Avenue.”

  “Everything connects at Metro Center,” Fiona said. “If he was in disguise, he was also confusing any surveillance, going back and forth.”

  “Or heading to a specific destination.”

  “Which was?” the Chief asked.

  Nobody answered the question, nor did they expect it to be answered. Instead they reviewed yet again what they had learned from Mrs. Burns, Jack Perkins, and Charlotte Desmond, the three people who were apparently the closest to Burns. All had alleged that they saw no specific change in Burns’ attitude or behavior.

  “But he had changed,” Izzy insisted. “He got rid of Charlotte. He begged off his squash games with Perkins and was not fulfilling all his carpooling dates.” Izzy grew silent.

  Again, the banging began on the bathroom door.

  “You say the wife saw no change?” Hodges asked. “Hard to hide things from your wife.” For him, Fiona knew, it was a cross to bear.

  “It has been said that the wife is the last to know,” Fiona said.

  Then she remembered her earlier conversation with Dolly. How, she wondered, could a wife not know?

  “Would be a pretty dumb wife,” Izzy said, chuckling. “Take my wife, for example….”

  The idea posed a dilemma. Was it possible to dissimulate in a close personal relationship? She thought suddenly of her relationship with Larry. How long could people get away with lying to each other? How strong was the power of denial? What idiot said that the wife was always the last to know? Know what? She let the question hang in limbo.

  “I think maybe you should give her another once-over,” said Chief Hodges, as if he had read her mind.

  At that moment, the bathroom door caved in, and three uniformed men stood aghast, seeing the Chief and a female officer.

  “When you gotta go, you gotta go,” the Chief said, winking at the men as they left.

  Chapter 16

  They found Mrs. Burns at her desk in her real estate office in Northwest Washington. Although she expressed reluctance, she made herself available, albeit with the usual dollop of attitude.

  “Appears we’re escalating,” she said when Fiona and Izzy were settled around her desk. “I told you this is a lot bigger than you think.”

  Fiona ignored her comment, refusing to take the bait.

  “Two of the three people who were closest to your husband have indicated that something had occurred months ago that affected their relationship.” She cited the firing of Charlotte Desmond and the cancellation of squash games with Perkins.

  “You people are gluttons for iteration. I saw nothing, nothing at all, that could be characterized as a change in attitude or behavior on my husband’s part. Nothing.” She shook her head and expelled a deep breath to emphasize her exasperation. “I told you that ad infinitum.” The telephone on her desk rang. She picked up the receiver, listened, then spoke.

  “Later,” she said. “I’m in the middle of something. I’ll call back.” She sighed and looked at Fiona. “I also told you before that any routine investigation like this had to end in failure. Do I have to repeat this idea? Just pick up a newspaper or look at television! The country—no, beyond that—the world has been baffled by my husband’s killing.”

  “Death,” Izzy corrected.

  Mrs. Burns turned away and offered a cynical chuckle.

  Fiona noted that, if anything, she was still on her original tack, grown even more confident by the media onslaught in support of her accusation. Suicide had morphed into murder.

  “Finally, people are waking up,” she said haughtily.

  “And you observed not even the slightest change in…,” Fiona pressed, “in the routines of the household, in living patterns—coming home later than usual, problems with sleeping, a change in, you know, personal relationships?”

  “Like between us? The intimate side?”

  Fiona saw a light flush mantle her cheeks.

  “That, is none of your business.” Mrs. Burns smoldered. “You have no right to ask such questions.”

  Fiona had hit a raw nerve, expecting some hostility, but Mrs. Burns’ reaction was hotter than expected. Fiona let it pass, not wanting to further diminish her cooperation. Mrs. Burns, perhaps noting that her comment was too reactive, seemed to retreat as well.

  “If you must know, there was no change in that department.”

  “We appreciate your answer, Mrs. Burns. Unfortunately, we have to explore every angle.”

  “Just doing your job is it?”

  Fiona caught the unmistakable note of sarcasm.

  “It has its unpleasant characteristics, Mrs. Burns,” Fiona replied, offering an expression she hoped would be interpreted as apologetic.

  “Don’t you ever give up? You are looking under the wrong rock, people.”

  “That’s where the secrets are normally hidden,” Fiona said, leaving the question unanswered.

  “This is not a job for the police alone,” Mrs. Burns said. “Everyone knows that this is simply not a local situation. Why belabor the obvious? Sooner or later federal agencies will have to act. The media will never give them a pass. In the long run, the truth always wins. My husband’s death will not go unpunished.” She seemed to be winding up for another speech of accusation but then retreated and mumbled. “What’s the use?”

  “Search your memory, Mrs. Burns,” Fiona persisted, keeping on track. “He had his reasons for the disguise, for telling his best friend he had a knee problem when he didn’t, for having Charlotte transferred. These things happened months ago about the same time. Surely, something must have changed that you noticed. Something—a change in schedule, something he had done before but could no longer fit into his scheduling.”

  “Boy, you’d make a great real estate salesman. Nothing stops you.” Oddly, the observation seemed to impact on her attitude, which seemed to have softened.

  Fiona watched Mrs. Burns’ expression, which indicated that she might be sincerely searching her memory. She raised both her palms, a gesture that indicated consent. They waited through a long silence until Mrs. Burns spoke again.

  “We… well, we made a point of having breakfast together every morning and dinner together every night. We both believed that being together at meals was essential to our sense of family. We believed strongly in parental participation. We both were active in carpooling, although he was more active than I….” She paused. “Occasionally, he would miss his scheduled time and prevail upon me or another parent to take his place.” She grew thoughtful and rubbed her chin in contemplation. “He did need more substitutes than usual during the past year.” But she quickly added. “He got very busy, I guess. Lots of parents of children at the National Cathedral School are busy people with very important jobs.”

  “You say, the past a year?”

  “I didn’t keep track. Maybe less. Sometimes I would sub for him, sometimes others would. It was routine.” She frowned and looked at Fiona. “Don’t read too much into that. He was a columnist. He had deadlines. Parenting is very complex these days, very labor-intensive. Ada
m was a particularly devoted parent. Not that I wasn’t, but he could better manage his time.”

  She had brought up the parenting aspect in context, which indicated that she had fixated on the subject.

  “I’m a parent, Mrs. Burns,” Izzy said. “I know the drill.”

  “Well….” Mrs. Burns seemed to be struggling for an answer to some inner question. “I doubt if it means anything. There were always time concerns. If either he or I couldn’t make it, some parents were available to step in, and some were not. Adam was apparently working on something that was keeping him busier than usual, creating time conflicts. I never questioned him, and he never questioned me. Believe me, he wouldn’t let Lisa down if he didn’t have a damned good reason. Actually, he was the only dad in the carpool.”

  “Are you saying,” Fiona said, catching the inference, “that there came a time when he was not as reliable…?”

  “No, never that. If he could, he would. He’d never let down his girls. He was the same way with Barbara, our oldest child. Never. He’d always been like that. Better than me. He was a passionate, involved, and loving father. Not that I’m not the same as a mother, but he was more so, if you know what I mean. His girls were his most important possessions.”

  “More important than you, Mrs. Burns?” Fiona asked.

  The woman was startled by the sudden interjection. Fiona allowed the thought to sink in.

  “Probably,” she replied, but without rancor. “Of course, he was a wonderful, devoted, loving husband, but his children… our children were our highest priority. You might say I felt the same way, but the thing about Adam… the most characteristic thing about him….” Her mind seemed to be wandering to some distant place of memory, “…his intensity. Few, if any, could ever match his intensity… in everything.”

  Intensity in everything, the words stuck in Fiona’s mind. She looked at Izzy who, she noted, seemed fixated on the woman and what she was saying, absorbing the information, obviously making judgments, and presumably hatching theories about her relationship with her husband. Fiona was forcing herself to observe the imaginary timeline.