Dead Watch (23 page)

“I can understand that,” Danzig said. “But believe me, there’s a terrific upside if you pull this off.”

“What upside?”

“What do you want?”

The question hung there. Jake stared at him, then said, “You’re serious.”

“Absolutely.”

“I might want a lot,” Jake said.

“I can’t give you a billion dollars, but I can get you something good.”

Jake thought about it for a minute, then nodded. “You’ll pay off this consult?”

“As of tonight.”

“Should I stay in touch?”

“Call me if you get it,” Danzig said.

“And if I don’t?”

“Then don’t call me. But Jake: you gotta get it.”

Jake stood up, leaned on his cane for a moment, then took a slow turn around the office, looked at the Remington bronze that sat on the credenza, touched the buffalo head, turned back, and said, “The whole thing, the package thing, started with an anonymous tip. A guy calls in the middle of the night and says, ‘See what Packer and Patterson talked about at the Watergate.’ So—who was that, and what was the motive? There’s somebody else out there. I can’t see him. I can’t see what he wants.”

Danzig tapped on his desk with a yellow pencil, staring at Jake but not focused on him, and finally sighed and said, “Shit, Jake, there’s
always
somebody out there. What he wants . . . he might want anything. The simple pleasure of knowing he took down Landers. Maybe there’s a better job in it for him. Maybe he figures they’ll make a movie about him, he’ll get to go to Hollywood and fuck Brittany West.”

“Patterson suggested that Goodman could benefit. Take a big step up,” Jake said.

Now Danzig’s eyes snapped. “Well. We’ll see how things work out. I know why he’d say that, though. God help us.”

Jake headed for the door: “I’ll see you.”

“You’re gonna do it?”

Jake smiled. “You don’t want to know, right?”

Jake arrived at Madison’s town house at 10:30, wrestled his overnight bag out of the cab, hung it over his shoulder, carried his briefcase on the other side, tapped his way up the walk with his cane. He’d called Madison from the cab. Halfway up the walk, the porch light came on and she opened the door.

“Mrs. Bowe . . .”

“Did you have a good time at the White House?”

“You hardly ever have a good time at the White House, unless you’re the president,” Jake said. He thought about Danzig, and the
What do you want?
“You
can
have interesting times.”

“Gonna tell me about it?”

“No.”

She had a black dress hanging on a hook in the entryway, still in a plastic dry-cleaning bag, and a shoe bag sitting on the floor beneath it. Funeral clothes, Jake thought, as he went by into the living room. She had a gas fireplace. The fire was on, flickering behind a glass door. He dropped his bags, sat on the couch, and she asked, “A glass of wine?”

“That would be great.”

She was back in a minute, with two glasses. The wine was already open, and she held it up to the ceiling light and peered through it. “I started without you,” she said. She poured and handed him a glass. “I talked to Novatny. They have no ideas, other than this Schmidt man.”

“But Schmidt’s a pretty good idea,” Jake said. “What happened in New York? You said something odd happened.”

“First of all, tell me what happened the other night. When you got mugged.”

He told her, succinctly, trying not to show his embarrassment, nipping at the wine while he talked. She listened intently, and then said, “Doesn’t sound like a robbery.”

“I know,” he said. “And I know what you’re going to say. I don’t think the Watchmen are involved. Goodman thinks I’m out scouting around for
him.
I was actually thinking that your friend Barber might be a possibility—though I don’t see what beating me up would have gotten him.”

She frowned: “He has a violent streak in him. I’ve seen that in the past. I think Linc was attracted to it. But remember when you told me about
The Rule?
Who benefits from your getting beaten up?”

“The Rule doesn’t say that the benefit has to be obvious. In fact, it usually isn’t. We just don’t know enough yet . . . So: New York?”

“Yes.” She poured a glass of wine for herself, set the bottle on the coffee table, and perched on an easy chair, folding her legs beneath herself as women do. “I took the shuttle up early this morning and went to the apartment. To check it, make sure everything was okay, to look for some papers, to pay the maid. I needed to get Linc’s will, for one thing, some insurance policies that Johnnie Black needs to see. I got everything I needed, but . . . his medical records were gone. There were two big folders, in the top drawer of the file cabinet, and they were gone. They aren’t here and I know they aren’t at the farm. I can’t see why they’d be in Santa Fe, his doctor is in New York.”

Jake thought about it and shrugged. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Neither do I. Except that underneath the bed sham, I found a bottle of prescription medicine, Rinolat. I looked it up online, and it’s a painkiller. I didn’t understand it all, something about monoclonal antibodies. Anyway, he was taking a heavy dose. The stuff would put a horse to sleep.”

“I know . . .” He slapped his leg. “I have some experience with it. Was it dated?”

“Yes. A month before he disappeared.”

“He was sick?”

She shook her head: “Not as far as I know. I haven’t seen him for a while. The last time I saw him, he was a little cranky, but he wasn’t in pain. Not that I could see.”

“Huh. The stuff isn’t of any use recreationally . . . Are you sure it was his?”

“The prescription was in his name, from his doctor.”

Jake sipped the wine, swirled it in his glass. He didn’t know much about wine, but it tasted fine; tasted like money. And he thought about the autopsy report. Novatny said that Bowe’s body had been suffused with painkiller, possibly to keep him helpless. But was that what happened? “You think somebody stole the medical file? Have you talked to the maid?”

Madison nodded. “Yes. I did. This is the other funny thing. She saw his doctor. At the apartment. With medical equipment.”

“What doctor?”

“James Rosenquist. He’s an old friend of Linc’s. One of his special friends, or once was. I called him, and he said he hadn’t seen Linc for six months, since a physical. But James has a white streak in his hair—he’s a little vain about it—and the maid said the man she saw in the apartment, the doctor, had a stripe like a skunk.”

“Ah, man.” Jake leaned back, rubbed his face, and yawned. Shook his head and admitted, “I still don’t know what it means.”

“Neither do I. It’s just that there seems to be another mystery in New York and there shouldn’t be two mysteries at the same time. Not unrelated ones,” Madison said. “I was thinking about siccing Johnnie Black on James, but since James denies even
seeing
Linc . . .”

“Rosenquist is in New York City?”

“Yes. He has one of those practices on the bottom floor of a co-op, on the Upper East Side.”

“One of the rich guys,” Jake said, “who’ll be all lawyered up.”

“Absolutely.”

Jake sighed, gulped the wine, bent forward to pick up his case, winced at the pain. “Mrs. Bowe. Let me check around, but to tell you the truth, I don’t know what I can do.”

“What if James, what if Rosenquist is hooked up with Goodman somehow? I mean . . .” She flapped at him.

“There’s no reason to think that? That there’s a connection?”

“No, but it seems odd. Linc didn’t hide things from me. We no longer had a sexual relationship, but we were still married. We were certainly fond of each other. I didn’t know anything about an illness. I didn’t . . . I mean, what if Rosenquist drugged him somehow? Delivered him?” Her voice trailed away, and she frowned. “Am I being a dingbat?”

“Not at all,” Jake said. “Nothing you said is crazy, I just don’t see where you’re going with it. Or where it can go.”

She chewed her lip for a moment, looking at him, then said, “You don’t trust me.”

“I do, as far as . . .” He stopped.

“As far as what? You can throw a Toyota?”

“No. I do trust you.” Another little lie. Or was it? She
felt
trustworthy. On the other hand, apparent trustworthiness was a quality that Washingtonians spent a lifetime perfecting.

He’d thought of asking her about the Landers package, but decided not to: he had to do more checking. If she had it, or knew who did, he didn’t want to do something that might inadvertently pull a trigger, get the package dumped to the
Times
. Not until Danzig was ready for it, anyway.

He stood up, said, “I’ll call you tomorrow. Let me think about all of this. I’ll call you.”

She leaned back in the chair for the first time, took another sip of wine, looking at him over the top of the glass, and then said, “All right. This probably won’t help you learn to trust me, but I need to tell you something. I thought about it when we started talking about his sexual orientation.”

“Okay.”

“Linc had his outside relationships—but so did I. I’ve had two affairs in the last nine years. Both of them lasted about two years, with nice, discreet men, and then they stopped. They stopped basically because they weren’t going anywhere. Linc knew about both of them, and it was okay with him. I mean, he was a little wistful—but he understood.”

Jake said, “Mrs. Bowe . . .”

“You should call me Madison, under the circumstances.”

“What circumstances?”

“The circumstances of me using you as a confessor. But let me finish. I thought you should know, because it’s another thing about us . . .” Her forehead wrinkled, and she gestured with the glass, then, “. . . it’s another thing, that if I hadn’t told you, and you found out later, you’d wonder about. You’d wonder if there might be some reason that somebody would want to get rid of Linc. But: I promise you, I have had exactly two relationships, no more. Neither of the men involved would have any reason to wish harm to Lincoln. Neither affair continues. Everybody is more or less happy. So . . .”

He nodded now, and said, “You really didn’t have to tell me. I don’t think people do what was done to Lincoln because of
your
outside relationships. In the most extreme cases, somebody might get shot, I suppose. But in this day and age . . .”

“You’re a little cynical,” she said.

“I work in Washington.”

That night, he lay awake for a while, considering possibilities. One seemed clear: all roads to the truth ran through the dead body of Lincoln Bowe. And he thought about Madison Bowe and the medical records . . .

He was gone before he knew it, awake again before five o’clock. He cleaned up, stretched, worked his leg. He ached from the beating, and the bruises, if anything, were darker, bluer. The lingering headache was still there, a shadow, annoying but not limiting. He’d been lucky.

Or possibly, he thought, he was being manipulated, not only by Madison, but by the men who’d beaten him up. Perhaps they’d beaten him for some reason that he couldn’t even imagine, pushing him toward . . . what?

From his office, he used his access to government records to go online with the Social Security Administration. There, he checked the records of one Donald Patzo, a man from deep in his past. Patzo had skills he might need . . .

There were twenty-four Donald Patzos in the records, but only one fit by age and by employment. Patzo was sixty-six years old. He’d started drawing Social Security when he was sixty-two, and his employment record suggested that he wouldn’t have much of a pension—he’d had twenty-four jobs in the forty years after he’d gotten out of the military, and hadn’t worked at all for the fifteen years he’d spent in prison.

Jake noted his address, then looked it up on his laptop map program. At seven o’clock, he called Madison.

“This is Jake. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“No, no, this is going to be a hellish day,” she said. “I’ve been up since five.”

“Can I stop by and pick up the key to your New York apartment?”

Pause. “What are you going to do?”

“I want to go over it inch by inch. I’ll try to preserve your privacy, if there’s anything you don’t want me to look at.”

“No, no.” Another pause. Then, “I guess I’d rather have you tear it apart than the FBI. When are you going up?”

“Right away. I’ve got to do some running around, but I’d like to get the shuttle out of National at noon.”

“Soon as you can get here.”