Dead Watch (14 page)

She picked up quickly: “Yes?”

“Jake Winter returning your call.”

“You live someplace near me, right? Could I come over to talk to you?”

“Mrs. Bowe, things are getting complicated,” Jake said.

“I know that. I talked to Novatny,” she said. “I need to talk to you. This whole thing may be more in your area than Novatny’s.”

“The two areas have become somewhat the same,” Jake said.

“Listen, can I come over and talk, or what?” she asked.

While he waited for her, he clicked around the cable news channels. They had hardly any real news—aerial tapes of the crime scene, with FBI vehicles clogging the narrow road, Madison Bowe’s accusations from
Washington Insider
, taped interviews with the last persons to have seen Bowe alive—but they ran them in an endless loop, interspersed with interviews with prominent politicians and a couple of conservative movie stars.

Madison Bowe arrived at ten o’clock. He’d left the back gate open, and she nosed up to his garage. He let her in the back door, and she walked slowly through the house, appraising the kitchen, touching a table in the hallway that led to the living room, stopping to examine a watercolor, and peered at the newsreader on Fox, on the television in his den.

“She’s barely got any clothes on,” she said.

“She won’t have, if CNN’s ratings keep going up,” Jake said. “I’m looking forward to the day.”

In the living room, Madison settled into an easy chair next to the fireplace.

“This day . . .”

“I can imagine.”

“A nightmare. I’ve got people I don’t like all over the place. I’ve got the media, I’ve got the FBI . . .”

“It’s the only thing on the news,” Jake said.

“Yes.” She shuddered. “Somewhere, though, Lincoln is laughing. He would have hated to go as an old man with tubes dripping into his veins. He’d have wanted something spectacular. He once told me that if he lived to be eighty-five, he’d buy the fastest Porsche he could find, wind it up to two hundred miles an hour, and aim it at a bridge abutment. The only thing he wouldn’t like about this is that Goodman lived longer than he did. He would have hated the thought that he hadn’t managed to take Goodman down.”

“You don’t sound . . . mmm.”

“As upset as I might? Dead is dead. I was expecting it, to tell you the truth. I knew he hadn’t just wandered off.” She exhaled, slumped another inch; her eyes looked tired, with undisguised crow’s-feet at the corners. “Do you think this Schmidt person killed my husband?”

He said nothing for a moment, considering her, then said, “I don’t know. I’m not trying to avoid the question. I just don’t know.”

“Are the Watchmen involved?”

He thought about the five men in Goodman’s parlor. “I don’t know that, either. My inclination, at this moment, is to think they are not.”

Now it was her turn to consider him. Finally she said, “They are. Somewhere along the way, somehow, they’re involved.”

“I don’t know that,” he said. “I do know that they are running around like chickens over there. Between you and me, I can tell you that Goodman and all of his top people are personally involved in trying to figure out what happened.”

“You talked to him?”

“Tonight, at the governor’s mansion. They’re worried. They believe there’s a conspiracy against them. They believe that your husband was part of it, and that you may be.”

She shook her head, then asked, “Is it safe to walk here? The streets?”

“Sure.”

“So let’s take a walk around the block. I mean . . .” She flushed. “If your leg . . .”

“My leg’s okay,” he said. “Let me get my stick.”

They walked down the back stoop, past her car, out the alley to the sidewalk. She said, “Something happened today. Maybe. Everything was moving so fast, everything is so foggy.”

“What happened?”

“Let me think about it for a minute . . .”

They’d gone to the left, out of the alley. The corner house had an old-fashioned front porch, and a couple was sitting in a porch swing. Jake tapped along with his stick, and the man called, “Is that you, Jake?”

“Yeah, going for a walk. How’re things?”

“Very quiet, when they aren’t ripping up the street on your block. You can hear the jackhammers all over the goddamned neighborhood.”

“Ought to be done in a week,” Jake said. “Then my house will be worth a lot more money.”

“But not mine,” the man said.

“Suck it up, Harley,” Jake said. The woman laughed, and Jake and Madison continued down the sidewalk.

When they were out of earshot of the couple on the porch, Madison said, “I’m telling this to
you,
and not the FBI. The FBI would pretend to hold the information, but there’d be leaks, it’d all be the most cheesy kind of thing . . . I’m telling you because you’re political, but you’re still in a position where maybe you could get justice for Linc.”

“Okay.”

They walked along, and then she said, “Lincoln is not—was not—one hundred percent oriented toward women. Sexually.”

“Ah, jeez,” Jake said, and stopped in his tracks.

“It’s not unheard of, even for U.S. senators,” Madison said.

“It could have a bearing on the murder,” Jake said. “It could be a purely personal matter. In fact, if he was romantically active, then there’s better than a fifty-fifty chance . . .”

They were facing each other and she reached out and put a hand on his chest. “Gay doesn’t mean violent.”

“Of course not. But given any kind of secret sex life, and then a disappearance, there’s usually a connection. That’s just the way it is,” he said.

“What, you’re the big crime historian now?”

“No. But I read the papers, for Christ’s sake.”

“If that’s what it is, then it will come out. But that really isn’t the way it is—I know some of his friends, and they’re a good bunch. They’re also very, very private, and very sophisticated. They would not murder anybody over an infidelity.”

“You can’t know that for sure,” Jake argued. “All it takes is one crazy guy.”

“That’s not it,” she said. She sounded positive.

“Ah, boy . . .” They turned together and started walking again. Then, “If he was gay, why . . .” He waved his hand, taking her in.

“Did he marry a woman? Because he wanted a political career. All of his family is involved in politics, one way or another, and a conservative Republican gay was not going to get elected in the state of Virginia.”

“That’s not what I was going to ask. Why did
you
marry
him?”

He could see her turn her face away from him, one hand going to her cheek. After a moment, “I wasn’t entirely aware of his . . . preferred orientation . . . when we got married. Also, I was tired of bullshit. Especially from men. I’d been in a long relationship that didn’t work out, and then I did some running around, and finally . . . I was tired of being chased by men who were more interested in my ass than they were in me. And here came Lincoln. He was smart, good-looking, powerful, he was rich, he was
commanding.
My mother picked up the gay thing, hinted at it before we got married, but there really wasn’t a performance issue on his part. We got together okay in bed.”

“And . . .”

“After we got married, the sex just drifted away,” she said. “Then I became aware that he had other attachments. There was usually an assistant or a political associate whom he was a little too fond of, whom he spent too much time with. Maybe that’s why I’m not as out of control as I should be. Linc was more like a favorite uncle. He hadn’t been a lover for years. There wasn’t that tie.”

“Where are we going with this?” Jake asked.

“Well, if it’s going to break, we’d like it to break in some civilized way. Not to leak. Not drizzle out. Not with all kinds of denials . . . Maybe, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that you just announce . . . I was hoping you could help.”

“Jesus.”

“Years ago, the French president had a longtime mistress. Everybody knew, including his wife. They invited the mistress to his funeral, the public pretty much thought that was cool . . . maybe something like that would work with Linc.”

“No. Because Linc was murdered. His body was burned in the most spectacular way. If this comes out . . . ah, man.”

“Linc had a lover, for a year or so, a few years back. Then they stopped being lovers and got to be close friends, almost like brothers. His name is Howard Barber. He’s a tough guy, one of you ex-servicemen, Iraq, and he’s very successful. He started a company that sells electronics to the military. He came over this afternoon, after I got the news about Linc. He said it was going to come out. He said there was no way to contain it. He was hoping to find some way to . . . You know.”

“Be civilized about it.”

“Yes.”

“This is not a very civilized country when it comes to stuff like that,” Jake said. Then he revised himself: “Actually, the country is civilized, it’s the media that’re not.”

She walked along a little farther, and then she asked, “Can you do something?”

“Let me think about it. I need to talk to Barber.”

“Of course.”

“And you trust him.”

She hesitated, then said, “Yes.”

Jake picked up the hesitation: “You
don’t
trust him. I could hear it.”

“I do trust him . . . or I did trust him.” She paused, then added, “When he came over today, he was looking at me. He was checking me out. He kept talking about the Watchmen, and then he was watching me, watching how I reacted.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I had the feeling—just a feeling—that he knows more than I do, maybe knows what happened. He was checking me to see what I’d been told about it. To see where the investigation was going. And somehow, he was priming me to be angry. To point me at the Watchmen.”

“That’s not good,” Jake said.

“I might be misreading him. He’s got to be freaked out—as I said, he and Linc were really close. When this gay thing comes out, people are going to look at Howard. Big, good-looking guy, always single . . . he hangs out with all the important colonels at the Pentagon, plays poker with them, goes on fishing trips down the bay. You know, the people who buy his products. They’re probably not what you’d call gay-centric.”

“Probably not,” Jake agreed.

They’d turned two corners, and now walked across a street, Jake’s street, but went ahead, down another block. Nice walking in the night, humid, cooling, quiet.

“What do you want me to do?” Jake asked.

“Talk to him, talk to Howard. Not as a policeman, but as somebody who knows what the FBI knows . . . and who also knows about this. See if there’s anything.”

“I can talk to him. But if anything serious comes out of it, I’d have to tell the FBI.”

“Of course—if it looks like there’s reason to believe that Howard had something to do with it. But he didn’t. He wouldn’t. He and Linc really were like brothers. He’s the last person in the world who’d hurt Linc.”

“That makes me suspicious. If somebody told Miss Marple that so-and-so couldn’t possibly have done it . . .”

“You’d know who the killer was. I’m not Miss Marple, and Howard didn’t kill Linc.”