American Quartet (27 page)

“You know something I don’t?” he asked.

She looked at her watch. It was nearly nine. They drove quickly to the Ford’s Theater where, once again, she checked the faces of the audience. Maybe he’ll come in later, she decided. They went down to the command post where the eggplant was working the radio, barking orders, getting reports. He was wrapped in a haze of blue cigarette smoke. Dr. Benton still sat impassively, sipping coffee from a plastic cup.

“Everybody is in place,” the eggplant said, looking at his watch. He got up and came over to Fiona.

“So far, nothing,” he said, with a note of sarcasm.

“The time was 10:15 or thereabouts.”

“He better not let us down,” the eggplant warned.

“He won’t.”

The plainclothesmen on the scene reported the intermissions and she went upstairs with Jefferson to mix with the crowds. They seemed like all theater crowds she had ever seen, absorbed, anticipatory, some bored, others animated. She continued to search their faces.

“It’s got to happen,” she whispered to Jefferson.

“You never know what’s in the head of a crazy.”

“We know what’s in this man’s head.”

She posted herself behind a red curtain to the left of the stage under an illuminated exit sign. Another plainclothesman stood there, surveying the crowd. Jefferson went to the opposite side of the stage to an identical exit. Through a slit in the curtain, she watched the crowd. The actors were involved in a song and dance number. Looking up, she could see the empty Presidential Box, the picture of Washington, the red, white and blue bunting. Just below it, she saw the curtain stir behind which Jefferson waited. Without actually seeing it, she knew he had drawn his Magnum.

Time seemed to crawl. At nine-forty-five, she went back to the command post. The eggplant’s eyes lifted as she came in, then shifted to his watch.

“I’ve ordered them all to draw their guns, but keep them hidden,” he whispered. “But I hope to hell they don’t shoot.” He shrugged. “Who knows with these trigger happy bastards?”

She moved over to Dr. Benton.

“I’m scared,” she whispered.

“So am I,” he said, patting her back.

At five after ten, she walked up the stairs again and followed a corridor to her former position behind the curtain of the side exit. She nodded to her colleague beside her. In his hand, his gun was at the ready. Parting the curtain, she looked into the audience. A number of people stood along the back rail. Most of them were policemen. Again, she looked at her watch.

The music seemed to grow louder, keeping tempo with the maddening passage of time. Someone in the audience coughed.

Now, she screamed within herself. Now! The curtain across the auditorium stirred and suddenly she saw Jefferson’s face and, below it, the muzzle of the Magnum. The actors sang, their shoes tapping on the stage. She waited a few minutes more and whispered into the radio.

“Anything?”

“Nothing.”

Running back into the corridor, she came down to the command post again. The eggplant’s eyes flickered gloomily.

“All fucking clear,” he said.

“Give it time.”

“That I’ve got,” he said, his lips curling in a snarl.

“And the Kennedy Center?”

“Nothing.”

By then it was 10:45. A voice sputtered over the radio.

“The show’s breaking.”

A roll of applause exploded above them and soon they heard shuffling feet and the clatter of voices and footsteps coming down the stairs.

“Nothing anywhere,” the eggplant said, rubbing his eyes. Jefferson came up behind her.

“Anything?” He didn’t wait for a response. “Sheet.”

“Maybe we scared him off,” Fiona said. Her insides seemed to have shifted position. She felt her pulse beating in her neck.

The eggplant said nothing, lighting a cigarette, inhaling. The smoke seemed to stay in his lungs forever. Finally, it emerged through clenched teeth.

“I bought it. I put my balls in your hands.”

“I was sure,” Fiona managed to say. “Everybody bought it.”

“Yeah. But I’m the one that sold it.”

A lieutenant came up.

“Wrap the fucker,” the eggplant said. The lieutenant spoke into the radio, ordering the operation to cease. Technicians began to dismantle the equipment.

“I still say . . .” Fiona began, but the eggplant’s look caught her short.

“I never did care what you thought. Fucking cunts in the police. Never could work. Never will work.” He began to pace the room. “So I’m the department asshole.”

Offering protestations now, she realized, would be futile. Turning away, she walked upstairs. There was a pay telephone against the wall and she dialed Remington’s number again. Maybe she had rattled him. Yet her suspicion was obsessive, mindless. Her imagination had run away with her.

His voice was on the phone after two rings, firm, oozing resonant charm.

“Hello.”

She did not respond, hanging up, suddenly feeling physically spent, emotionally done in. She went to the ladies’ room and, squatting in front of a toilet, began to throw up.

WHEN
she awoke, she was wrapped in a sheet like a mummy. Vague bits of memory, like a splintered mirror, rose in her mind, tormenting her. It was still night, pitch black. Being locked in the wound sheet triggered a sense of panic, awakening her from what must have been a nightmare. Her pores had opened like floodgates and the sheet was saturated with perspiration.

In disjointed fits her memory returned, the splintered bits reforming to record the reflection of her humiliation. Jefferson had driven her home, unable to penetrate her silence. His voice had persisted. There was an effort at reassurance but, in the end, she got out of the car and, without looking back, found herself in her book-strewn apartment.

The rooms closed in on her. Expectations had driven her and now that they had slipped away, nothing was left but a terrible emptiness. For a long time she had sat slumped on her couch, pasteboard covers of books denting her flesh, deliberately suffering her discomfort as a punishment for her self-righteous, self-indulgent obsession. What she needed now was arms, muscled haired arms, to envelop her, a hard male-smelling body to caress her, reconstitute her shattered ego, a male pistoning to ram away reality, and give her back her sense of womanhood. She needed that flame of passion to warm her now. She cursed the trumped-up ideal that had disconnected her from Bruce. Loneliness, the parched infinity of emptiness, was more offensive, more debilitating than her high-minded ideas of independence. Everybody must act in their own interest. People manipulated others, according to their passions and compulsions.

“Shit,” she cried into the unforgiving darkness. It was a sin against nature, her nature, not to demand the comforting touch of a male. She needed her body to be probed and searched and pleasured, her cheeks licked clean of tears, the burdens lifted, the afflictions soothed. It was no fucking fun coming home to nothing. Not after tonight.

Reaching for the telephone, she dialed his number. It rang interminably. Finally a hoarse voice cleared itself, croaking a reluctant greeting.

“Bruce.”

Behind his voice, she sensed agitated breathing, a hurried whisper. A woman’s bleat of annoyance. Then silence. He must have covered the mouthpiece with his hand.

“Fiona.” She pictured the phone on its long wire carried to the privacy of the bathroom. His whisper gave it away. “Is there anything wrong?”

“Yes.”

Another pause.

“Can it wait until morning?” he asked. The words came in a harried whisper.

Demand him, she goaded. But the image assaulted her. In the bed, their bed, the other female squinted into the darkness, waiting while his other life deflected his interest. If it could wait, why sound this alarm in the night? “Yes,” she said, hanging up.

She dialed her parents’ number, but quickly hung up before the ring. They would be startled out of their sleep. Cruel work. Besides, they had long ago ceased to offer the needed solace, two aging people with their own pallid, dead dreams.

The depression rolled over her like lava, penetrating her flesh, burrowing into her bones. She had been so certain. Her doubts had been a deliberate hedge, a facade, unreliably constructed, a false protection. Her reason had been toyed with, like a woman’s virtue in another age. It was that man. That man. His smug charm had oozed out of him like hog’s sweat.

Humiliation doesn’t come easy to Irish blood, someone had said once to her in childhood. They were always explaining away their stubborn pride and, in the end, it defeated them. Where in the name of hell did her brash certainty come from? This was no logical, ordered mind concocting fantasies of death, resurrecting history like some cosmic puppeteer. These events were being perpetrated by an aberrant mind, twisted, deluded by God knew what dark, tortuous motives, out of the slime of thwarted ambitions.

It was him. I know it is him!

But saying it did nothing to soothe her. Finally, she got up and paced the apartment, yielding to another dark prompting of her Irish blood, alcohol. But even that eluded her. There was less than a quarter bottle of Scotch left, and she nipped at it until it was gone.

Groping through the darkness, she lay supine on her bed, eyes open, determined to stare down the demons. But her mind would not cool, as she rehashed the material that had crowded into her brain. Assailed suddenly by an overwhelming urge to call Remington, she reached for the phone, partially dialed, then hung up. Her courage had failed her, and she quickly turned the phone button to secretarial.

She was offended, not only by the humiliation of defeat, but by the fact that she had implicated others in her fantasy. Somehow, she felt, they had fallen victim to her intensity, her obsession.

Yet, despite everything, the idea persisted. Someone out there was still doomed, whatever the break in sequence. Maybe she should make a clean breast of her suspicions, she thought, then quickly rejected the idea. Her credibility was gone. The eggplant would treat her, from now on, as a pariah.

The ring of the doorbell stabbed itself into the gloom and she quickly unrolled herself and put on her robe. Through the peephole she saw Jefferson’s gleaming black face, and opened the door. He seemed wan in the cloudy post-dawn light.

“Better get dressed. They want us downtown.”

His skin looked like slate and the network of veins in his eyes had multiplied since last night.

“What is it?”

“Trouble.”

She dared not react, as if the slightest bark out of him would make her break in two. Dressing quickly, she attempted to hide the dark circles under her eyes and erase the haunted look that peered back at her in the mirror.

Beside her in the car, Jefferson was sullen, unapproachable.

“We should have left it alone.”

It was all he cared to say. For a big man, the sense of defeat seemed incongruous, but the boy’s fear filtered through the macho mask.

Chief Howard sat behind his big ornate desk, lips tight, dark eyes glaring behind horn-rimmed glasses. He was not a tall man, but behind his desk he seemed large, awesome. Cold silence greeted them as the chief pointed to two chairs in front of his desk. Dr. Benton was already seated. On another chair against the wall, slumped like a broken doll, the eggplant sat. Rage seemed to boil out of him, polluting the air.

“The door,” the chief barked. The eggplant, reacting like a robot, got up and closed it. The chief tapped his fingers on the desk nervously, then picked up a pencil and broke it in half, flinging the remains into an ashtray.

“Do you know what this week is?” he shouted, his eyes shifting to the four frightened faces. Fiona searched her mind, confused by the man’s rage. She needn’t have been. The chief answered his own question.

“Easter week. The biggest tourist week of the year. There are more than a million visitors in town. To the business people, that is a bonanza. Am I correct?”

Fiona heard mumbling beside her. Turning toward the eggplant, she could understand his fear of the chief. “Am I?” he roared. Again, the question was rhetorical. He was working himself into a lather. Jefferson and Dr. Benton remained silent, perhaps understanding the peculiarities of ethnic rage.

“An hour ago.” He looked at his watch. “An hour ago, I got a call from the
Washington Post
. Not just a flunky reporter. Himself, Bradlee. He asks me this question: Is it true that there is a psychopathic killer on the loose in this town bent on gunning down innocent people? He didn’t wait for an answer. And did you not try to apprehend him last night in the theater, seven theaters to be exact?” His lips trembled and his nostrils quivered as he confronted Fiona.

“Now how would I answer that question, little lady?”

I’m not your little lady, she wanted to scream out at him. Instead, she bit her lip.

“I . . .” He punched himself in the chest “. . . approved last night’s operation, which netted a big fat zero. So how do I answer that question, bearing in mind that it is Easter week and there are one million tourists in the city and this is the
Washington Post
, perfectly capable of scaring the shit out of any human being within spitting distance?”

Jefferson lowered his eyes. The eggplant did not move.

“Tell him the truth,” Fiona said, her voice cracking.

“The truth.” The chief nodded. “That two hundred cops were massed in town seeking a psychopathic killer who may be tied to four random killings? That three of the killings took place in or near public buildings? That one of the victims was a cop? That we’ve acted on some half-baked hypothesis having to do with the killer’s acting out previous assassinations of our Presidents? That’s front page stuff. Juicy. And how do you think we geniuses at MPD will look, especially since this fourteen-karat prick tried to cover up the fact that the first two killings were related, and he had deliberately tried to pin it on some spic country terrorists?” He shook his head sadly. The eggplant looked contrite. It was obvious that he had confessed, or it had been wrung out of him, when he sold the chief last night’s caper.

“Do you think MPD, this great nest of incompetent nigger cops, would come out good in the press if I told Bradlee the truth?”

“We’ve gone through that, chief,” the eggplant said. Fiona’s heart went out to him. The poor sad bastard had tried, had really tried. She vowed tentatively never to call him the eggplant again.

“So what do you think I told him?” the chief said, dismissing the ex-eggplant with a contemptuous squint. A film of sweat had popped out on his upper lip. “I told him. . .” He looked at his watch again. “Over an hour ago, I told him that I would call him in two hours with the facts, the absolute facts. Now I know the paper’s self-interest is involved as well and he wouldn’t do anything to hurt their damned advertising, but if I said that to him, he would have my ass. It could be that he, too, will see the light and not wish to shake up the tourists, or hurt the night-out business.”

Fiona was having trouble determining his thrust. Then the chiefs eyes bored in on her alone.

“I want to tell him that we reacted last night to an anonymous tip. I do not want to tell him that it was a mission cooked up by our own people, responding to intelligence developed internally. In other words, until we have a killer, I want to tell a little white lie and keep a publicity avalanche from coming down on my head. Our head.” He took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair.
“Kapish?”
His eyes rested on each one in turn. “I will not tell him about this presidential assassination stuff.” He banged the desk with the flat of his hand.

“Can I count on this little circle to keep their lips zippered?” He drew in his breath. “Not a Watergate here. No cover-up necessary. We don’t want to impede our investigation and we don’t want the business community to get upset, or Congress, or the mayor. See, it becomes an ecological problem. Besides,” he looked at Fiona, “your theory is out to lunch now that your loony missed his date with destiny.
Nestpa?
”

“Well, I . . .”

“I’m glad you agree, Officer FitzGerald.”

He turned to the eggplant.

“I want this investigation to proceed with dispatch. I want this killer.”

Fiona, Jefferson and Dr. Benton were dismissed together while the eggplant stayed behind. As soon as they were far from his office, Fiona turned to them.

“My theory is correct. Something went wrong. I’m not sure what.”

“Leave it alone,” Dr. Benton said. “Why belabor the obvious? They did their dance of self-defense.”

“And now they’re going to sit on it.”

“Not necessarily,” Fiona said.

They looked at her and shook their heads together.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Jefferson said.

“Leave it alone, Fiona,” Dr. Benton said. “You’re a cop in a bureaucracy. The game is to make the guy ahead of you look good. Look. We all gave it our best. All of us. Even them in there.”

“But I think I know . . .”

He lifted his hand, palm outward, like a traffic cop. It was the signal to stop.

“Just try. Cold turkey. Later, maybe, you can confront it. Not now.”

She tried to follow his advice. She took the next three days off. She cleaned her apartment, brought most of the books back to the libraries. Then she spent long hours in the police gym, working herself into a lather. She took long walks along the river, hired a bicycle and pumped for miles on the tow path. She visited Jefferson’s monument and caught the last lingering gasps of the cherry blossoms. She toured the Smithsonian, went to the Mint, joined the endless line of tourists on the FBI tour.

She tried. She really tried, but she could not escape. Leave it alone, Fiona. Leave it alone, Fiona. It became a litany, and finally it grew meaningless with repetition. Her secretarial service picked up Bruce’s call, but she declined to call him back. That was over irrevocably. A need demanded to be filled at the time of its greatest urgency. For her, that had been her lowest point. Never again, she promised, will I allow myself that kind of vulnerability.

Unfortunately, she discovered, loneliness was corrosive and without a human support system, her will cracked and by the third day she was back at her research. She reviewed her findings. The accuracy of the three previous episodes foreshadowed what must come next. She went back to the library and pored over whatever she could find on the criminally insane. Almost always the pattern was irrevocable in mass killers. They perpetrated murders with exactly the same MO in spaced intervals, responding to some inner need. A sexual psychopath attacked women only, mutilated them, performed sex on their corpses, but always it was the same. A killer in Atlanta attacked and killed only black children.