Washington Masquerade
Page 26
“I just can’t stand her,” Deirdre said. Her mother looked at Fiona and frowned.
“You said you wouldn’t upset her,” Judge McGrath said to Fiona.
“Why would such a harmless question upset her?” Fiona asked, turning to the mother then turning back to the daughter. “Are you upset, Deirdre?” Fiona taunted.
“I hate her. So what?” the girl said through pursed lips.
“Why do you hate her, Deirdre?” Fiona pressed.
“Because I hate her, that’s why.”
“That’s not an answer, Deirdre.”
“It is to me,” the teenager snapped.
Fiona noted that her anger was now bordering on rage. Her eyes shifted from side to side, and Fiona noted that she had dug her fingers into her bare thighs. Fiona stared at her, unrelenting now.
“Answer the question,” Fiona commanded.
“Please!” the Judge cried.
“Tell me why you hate her,” Fiona pressed. “What did she do to you?”
Deirdre shook her head from side to side. Her lips clamped together, becoming bloodless.
“None of your business,” Deirdre shot back.
“You said you hated her, Deirdre. Why?”
“Please!” the Judge cried.
“Is that such a hard question, Deirdre?” Fiona pushed. “What are you hiding? Why can’t you answer a simple question?”
“I won’t have this,” the Judge said, standing up.
“She’s a shit face, that’s why,” Deirdre screamed, “like her fucking father.”
“Deirdre!” her mother cried.
Fiona watched the girl on the verge of an emotional explosion. The fuse was lit and crawling swiftly to its target.
“You wanted an answer. That’s the answer. She is a shit-faced retard.”
“I would appreciate your not using that language, Deirdre.”
“Shit face,” Deirdre cried in defiance. “She was a shit face, just like her father.”
“Stop it!” Judge McGrath shouted, confused and alarmed.
Fiona ignored her remark, zeroing in now; the teenager’s visceral response indicated something was beginning to break inside her. Fiona was surprised at the quick reaction, as if the simmering anger was just below the surface. It was just what she had been seeking.
“Was it anything she said?” Fiona asked with relentless precision. “Anything she did? Did she lie to you? Say anything upsetting? Was she catty? Really, Deirdre, people have reasons, some imagined, some real, as to why they hate another person.”
“Well, I hate the shit face. She is a disgusting, hateful, miserable person—she and her father. Every time I look at her, I think of him, and I want to vomit.”
“Really, darling,” Judge McGrath cried, obviously shocked by the increasing vehemence of her daughter’s response. She turned to Fiona. “Perhaps, Officer, we should avoid that subject. Maybe some other time.”
Fiona paid no attention. She was certain that she had found a hot spot and meant to exploit it.
“They must have done some pretty awful things to you, Deirdre, for you to hate them that much.”
“You bet your ass,” Deirdre snarled.
“She’s not herself,” Judge McGrath said. “I’ve never seen her like this.” Her daughter huffed.
“Sorry, Judge,” Fiona said, turning back to Deirdre. “But you got even with them, didn’t you, Deirdre?”
“Bet your ass.”
“Deirdre!” her mother shouted, panicked now.
Her daughter turned to face her. “Fuck you,” she said.
“I don’t believe this,” Judge McGrath cried.
“Does that mean you hate your mother as well?” Fiona snapped. The situation was moving unexpectedly swifter than she could have imagined.
“What is going on here?” Judge McGrath said, standing up, confused, upset, looking at her daughter with disbelief.
The daughter turned to her mother, scowling. Her face had turned beet red.
“You dirty whore,” she cried.
“Good God!” her mother cried.
“And Lisa’s father?” Fiona pressed. She knew what was coming.
“A fucking cocksucker!” Clearly, the teenager was raging beyond any effort to control it. “Fuck him, too, especially him!” Deirdre cried.
She looked at her mother. Her nostrils flared and her lips pursed. Fiona noted that her hands had become fists and her chest was heaving as if she was short of breath. The vulgarities seemed totally incongruous to the girl’s looks and age.
“What is the matter with you, Deirdre?” Judge McGrath cried. She turned to Fiona. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“So you hated him,” Fiona said, her expression accusatory, honing in. “Hated his daughter, hated your mother.”
Experience told her that the teenager was out of control now. Fiona had provoked her.
“Fuck them all,” Deirdre said.
“Will you stop using that word,” Judge McGrath said. Her eyes had watered and tears were beginning to crawl down her cheeks.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Deirdre screamed, the word coming out in a hail of spittle. She stood up, addressing her mother and pointing her forefinger in her face. “Don’t you tell me what to do, you whore!”
Judge McGrath, who had risen, was suddenly unsteady on her feet and fell back into the chair. The daughter remained where she was, flushed, angry, struggling like a cornered animal.
“So how did you get even with them, Deirdre?” Fiona pushed, letting the words hang in the air, waiting.
She watched the girl’s eyes narrow, and her lips formed a thin smile. She seemed to have entered another self.
“He deserved what he got,” she smirked.
Fiona knew now that a breakthrough was coming.
“What did he get, Deirdre? What are you talking about, Deirdre?” Judge McGrath whispered weakly.
Deirdre looked at her mother. Suddenly she spat at her.
“You know what I’m talking about. You think I didn’t know?”
“What didn’t you know, Deirdre?” Fiona asked.
Deirdre looked at her mother, who had not wiped the spittle from her face, her expression frozen with horror.
“Tell her, Mommy dearest. Go on, tell her how you would meet him at motels and fuck your brains out. Tell her. I’ve been following them for months. They thought they were smart.” She banged her chest. “I was smarter. I knew!”
Judge McGrath covered her face. Her shoulders shook with hysterical sobs. Her daughter looked at her with disgust.
“You filthy pig.” She turned to Fiona. “I followed them both for weeks. I knew their every move. I could have done it earlier, but I waited. And one day, I got lucky. Whoosh! It took a second and that bastard was dead meat. I loved it. I’d do it again for what he did to her, made her a whore. Then I decided it was her fault as well as his.”
In a flash, she moved toward her mother and grabbed her around her throat. Fiona reacted swiftly, pulled them apart, and quickly cuffed Deirdre and pushed her onto the couch. Izzy joined in the restraint. Deirdre struggled, screaming and kicking, her rage unabated, and finally she calmed. After a while, she grew silent and lay on the couch facedown, whimpering.
Judge McGrath, ashen, tears running down her cheeks, slumped in defeat and enervated in her chair.
“Got it?” Fiona asked Izzy.
Izzy nodded.
“Filthy business,” Fiona muttered, swallowing to hold down a big glob that had formed in her own chest.
Chapter 30
They listened to the recording in stunned silence—Wallinski, Kinney, Fiona, Izzy, who worked the machine, and Chief Hodges, who had been contacted by Wallinski and Kinney.
The child had been remanded to the juvenile authorities and was in that
limbo period between temporary incarceration and the appearance of lawyers, whom Judge McGrath had quickly retained.
“Her lawyers will figure out all sorts of ways to find this inadmissible,” Chief Hodges sighed. He looked toward Fiona and Izzy. “They’ll put the kid away for treatment. Go figure.”
“Sons-of-bitches got it all wrong,” he said.
“Sure did,” Wallinski said. “Now comes the hard part.”
Fiona had burned a number of CDs, and Wallinski had pocketed two. They could have sent it over the Internet, but it was obvious that they were not taking any chances of leakage.
“What puzzled us is that she never told Lisa Burns why she was so angry with her,” Fiona said.
“Maybe she felt so much shame she could not bear to reveal it,” Izzy said. “Teenage girls can be relied upon to do the unexpected. Believe me, I know this from intimate experience. She directed all her pent-up anger toward Lisa Burns, who admitted to being baffled by her once-best friend’s rage.”
“As if she suddenly had become a different person,” Fiona added.
“But they did cooperate on the soccer field as teammates,” Wallinski said.
“Leave it to the shrinks,” Fiona said.
They all knew that the first thing the girl’s lawyers would do is to try to get the recording destroyed. For Wallinski and Kinney, this was more of a public relations problem that would be quickly taken out of their hands. Fiona knew that the recording’s credibility would be challenged, and the media would continue to justify their original reportage and find ways to keep the spin going.
The story, of course, would be a lottery for the media—sex, murder, intrigue, politics, suicide. It would spawn a worldwide industry—books, movies, television. To Fiona, the idea was revolting, and she was certain that the others seated in her living room felt the same way. The exploitation of other people’s misery for profit was one of Fiona’s pet peeves.
“Teenagers sure are fragile,” Izzy said, undoubtedly thinking of his own children. “Not easy to accept the fact that their parents have clay feet. I guess she suddenly found her whole world torpedoed and reacted with a vengeance. She’ll certainly get the sympathy vote.”
“Ours is not to reason why,” Wallinski said.
“They weren’t quite as careful as they thought,” Fiona said. “It’s not easy keeping secrets within a family. The slightest change sets off alarm bells, especially in this case, an only child of achieving parents. The Judge thought she was doing a great job of parenting. She hadn’t noticed what knowledge of her adulterous affair was doing to her child.”
“The girl was clever and resourceful,” Wallinski said.
“Bottled it up, took out her frustrations on the daughter of the culprit whom she had decided had corrupted her mother. The effect was a disaster,” Kinney said.
“Especially for Adam Burns,” Chief Hodges mused. “The sympathy vote will go with the child. As for the victim….” He shook his head. “In the end, the victim loses relevancy, becomes a historical artifact. Way the cookie crumbles.”
“I’ll leave all the psychological and philosophical factors to others,” Wallinski said. “The irony here is that we were looking at the whole episode from the outside in, instead of the inside out. The President, the media, the internal mechanisms of government and politics had nothing at all to do with it. It was a personal matter.”
He was right, of course, Fiona thought, recalling all the people whose lives were disrupted by this event, including her own.
The two men from Homeland Security stood up and put out their hands.
“Nice working with you, folks,” Wallinski said. “Great performance.”
“Great,” Kinney echoed.
Fiona accepted the compliment, but her focus was elsewhere.
“And the Judge?” she asked.
“Supreme Court is out, but she might stay as an appeals Judge, although even that is doubtful,” Wallinski said.
“Poor Phil died for nothing,” Fiona sighed.
“Afraid it’s not a business for the good guys,” Kinney said.
“Not our job to criticize or second guess,” Wallinski said. “The geniuses upstairs will handle it. From the President’s point of view, it’s a good thing. It was a hard bone to swallow, the idea that the Administration engineered the deliberate murder of a critic. If that were the case, the streets would run with blood. The media should leave that stuff to the movies. Not that knowing the truth will change anybody’s minds. People might assume that this little caper, despite the proof, was a phony.”
“Toughest thing to discover,” Chief Hodges said. There were times, Fiona had observed, when the Chief’s thoughts would emerge and surface, like air from a pricked balloon, not meant to be spoken. “The goddamned truth.”
As if he was aware suddenly of his remark, Chief Hodges smiled and nodded. Fiona noted his air of satisfaction and contentment, something that Fiona believed they all felt at that moment, that sense of commonality that infuses people who know they have done good and honest work.
“Don’t knock it, Chief. We need the work,” Fiona said.
More Thrillers from Warren Adler
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Also by Warren Adler
FICTION
Banquet Before Dawn
Blood Ties
Cult
Empty Treasures
Flanagan’s Dolls
Funny Boys
Madeline’s Miracles
Mourning Glory
Natural Enemies
Private Lies
Random Hearts
Residue
Senator Love
Target Churchill
The Casanova Embrace
The David Embrace
The Henderson Equation
The Housewife Blues
The Serpent’s Bite
The War of the Roses
The War of the Roses: The Children
The Womanizer
Trans-Siberian Express
Treadmill
Twilight Child
Undertow
We Are Holding the President Hostage
THE FIONA FITZGERALD MYSTERY SERIES
American Quartet
American Sextet
Death of a Washington Madame
Immaculate Deception
Senator Love
The Ties That Bind
The Witch of Watergate
Washington Masquerade
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Jackson Hole: Uneasy Eden
Never Too Late For Love
New York Echoes
New York Echoes 2
The Sunset Gang
PLAYS
Dead in the Water
Libido
The Sunset Gang: The Musical
The War of the Roses
Windmills
About the Author
Acclaimed author, playwright, poet, and essayist Warren Adler is best known for The War of the Roses, his masterpiece fictionalization of a macabre divorce adapted into the BAFTA- and Golden Globe–nominated hit film starring Danny DeVito, Michael Douglas, and Kathleen Turner. Adler’s internationally acclaimed stage adaptation of the novel will premiere on Broadway in 2015–2016.
Adler has also optioned and sold film rights for a number of his works, including Random Hearts (starring Harrison Ford and Kristen Scott Thomas) and The Sunset Gang (produced by Linda Lavin for PBS’s American Playhouse series starring Jerry Stiller, Uta Hagen, Harold Gould, and Doris Roberts), which garnered Doris Roberts an Emmy nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a
Miniseries. In recent development are the Broadway production of The War of the Roses, to be produced by Jay and Cindy Gutterman, The War of the Roses: The Children (Grey Eagle Films and Permut Presentations), a feature film adaptation of the sequel to Adler’s iconic divorce story, Target Churchill (Grey Eagle Films and Solution Entertainment), Residue (Grey Eagle Films), Mourning Glory, to be adapted by Karen Leigh Hopkins, and Capitol Crimes (Grey Eagle Films and Sennet Entertainment), a television series based on his Fiona Fitzgerald mystery series.
Adler’s works have been translated into more than 25 languages, including his staged version of The War of the Roses, which has opened to spectacular reviews worldwide. Adler has taught creative writing seminars at New York University, and has lectured on creative writing, film and television adaptation, and electronic publishing. He lives with his wife, Sunny, a former magazine editor, in Manhattan.