Dead Watch (29 page)

He knew that wasn’t the idea. There should have been an urbane approach, an understated threat, a sly blackmail, and instead, it had gone straight in the dumper, and here he was . . .

And then he made the mistake of pushing Green in the chest. Green didn’t just look like a wrestler: he’d been one, at the University of Wisconsin, twenty years earlier. He was scared and angry and strong. He caught Goodman’s arm and made a move, so quick that Goodman, good athlete that he was, was spun off balance and found his arm locked and bent and choked off a scream and Green said, “I oughta throw your ass out. . . .”

Nobody found out where he was going to throw Goodman, because George, in one quick motion, pulled a silenced .22 from a shoulder holster and shot Green in the back of the head. The gun made a spitting sound, clanked as the action moved, and Green went down like a load of beef.

Goodman twisted in surprise, said, “Jesus Christ,” looked at George, looked at Green. The blond secretary looked at both men, looked at Goodman’s eyes, knew she was dead: she launched herself at him with her fingernails, slashing, as quick as Green had been, cutting Goodman at the neck and down his arms, and Goodman said, “Jesus, Jesus,” trying to fend her off, and there was another quick spit and the blonde went down, bounced, landed on her back, naked blue eyes staring lifelessly at the ceiling.

Goodman was breathing hard, stunned, astonished, looked at George, gasped, “We gotta get the fuck outa here,” and he led the way out, said, “Put away the fuckin’ gun, we gotta get out,” and panic clutched at him and he shook it off, and they were out, the door locking behind them . . .

Jake lost some time with
The Goshawk Squadron
; glanced at his watch and was shocked to see that it was after one o’clock. He got up, put the novel in his case, and headed back to the PollCats office.

Up State, down Johnson, watching the ass on a tall slender blonde, and when she turned, thought, my God, you’ve been watching the ass of a
child.
She stopped at a curb to cross the street, caught his eye and smiled a bit; not a child’s smile.

In the old brick building, the smell of rug and flaking paint, up the stairs, to the PollCats door. It was locked. He rattled the handle, then knocked. No answer. And he thought,
Ah, man
.

They’d run on him, and he hadn’t seen it coming. He rattled the door again, exhaled in exasperation. The critical thing was,
time,
and Green must know that. All he had to do was stay out of sight for a while. . . .

He was turning away from the door when he noticed the shoe. The shoe was in the open doorway of Green’s private office. He couldn’t see all of it, just a heel and part of the instep. It was a woman’s shoe, upside down, the short stacked-heel in the air, and there, in the corner, an oval, that might be a toe in a nylon stocking.

Jake backed away from the door. Wondered what he’d touched. Thought,
Maybe it’s not what it looks like.
Thought,
What if somebody’s not dead, what if I can save a life by calling the cops?
Thought,
The big GMC with the blacked-out windows.

Thought,
That’s ridiculous, there’s gotta be a thousand of those trucks in Madison . . .

But he knew what was in the office. Felt it like an ice cube in his heart.

He walked to the end of the hall, searching the corners of the ceilings, listening for voices. Heard nothing; but did see a woman in one of the offices, hunched over a stack of paper, working with a pencil. No cameras. But: he’d not tried to hide his approach. He’d used his cane, carried his case, hadn’t worn a hat. If anybody had seen him, they’d remember. And he’d for sure wrapped his fingers around the arm of a chair in Green’s office.

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit.” He walked back to the PollCats office, knocked once, then again, rattled the door. Nothing. The shoe sat there. “Goddamnit.”

He used the steel grip on the cane to punch a hole in the glass panel. He punched out enough that he could get a hand through, didn’t try to hide the noise; but then, there really wasn’t much noise.

He stepped inside the door, crossed to Green’s office.

The blond secretary lay on her back, a palm-sized spot of blood under her head. Green was also on his back, a stain on the rug beneath his head. There was a spatter of blood on the glass of the pictures on the wall.

Jake looked for a moment, then took out his cell phone and dialed. Novatny came up:
“Yes?”

“Chuck, this is Jake Winter. We’ve got a hell of a problem, man.” He looked at the blank dead face of the young secretary. “Jesus, Chuck, we’ve got, ah . . .”

“Jake, Jake . . . ?”

Novatny told him to walk out of the office and wait in the hallway, not to let anyone in the office. “I’ll have somebody there in five minutes. I don’t know who yet.”

Jake hung up, took a step toward the door. Hesitated. Stepped back to Green. Reached beneath him, toward his heart. Felt the cell phone. Slipped his hand inside, took the phone, put it in the phone pocket of his briefcase. Looked at the office phone for a second, then took a tissue out of a box of Kleenex on Green’s desk, picked up the desk phone and pushed the redial button. The phone redialed and a man answered on the first ring, “Domino’s.” Nothing there—not unless Domino’s Pizza was delivering the package.

He hung up, stepped toward the door, caught the glaze on the secretary’s dead, half-open eyes. The rage surged: the same rage that he’d felt in Afghanistan when he’d encountered dismembered civilians, killed by dissidents to make some obscure point. The secretary had been a kid. Probably waiting to get married; probably looking forward to her life. All done now. All over.

His hands were shaking as he turned away and stepped past her, out into the hallway.

An agent from the Madison FBI office arrived one minute ahead of the Madison cops.

The FBI man took a look and backed away, pointed a finger at Jake and said, “Wait.”

The first cops walked in and walked back out, shut the door on the PollCats office, faced Jake to a wall, checked for weapons, read him his rights, and sat him down in the hallway, on a chair they borrowed from one of the occupied offices.

Jake told them that he didn’t want a lawyer, but he did want to talk to Novatny privately, and wouldn’t make any other statement. The FBI man went away for a while, then came back and said, “Agent Novatny will be here in three hours. He’s flying straight in from Washington.”

The Madison homicide cops, who arrived ten minutes after the patrolmen, were pissed, though the lead investigator, whose name was Martin Wirth, allowed that Jake probably wasn’t the killer, since he’d reported the crime. “But he knows something about it and I want to know what it is,” Wirth told the FBI man. “This is my town, this is my homicide, and the entire FB fuckin’ I can kiss my ass. This guy’s going nowhere until I say so.”

The FBI man put his sunglasses on, looked at the investigator, and said, “Uh-huh.”

Wirth asked Jake, “Where’d you get that cut on your head?”

“I was mugged, in Washington.”

“Right.”

“I have a copy of the police report in my briefcase,” Jake said.

“You know, these guys are getting away . . .”

Jake said, “Look: Nothing I know can get you to anyone. Everything I know is background. I didn’t see anything you haven’t seen. I don’t know who might have done this.”

“Then how come you won’t make a statement?”

“I can’t tell you why I won’t make a statement, because then you’d know something I’m not sure I should tell you,” Jake said. “Okay?”

“Fuck no.”

“I will make a statement to agent Novatny and then agent Novatny can either tell me to make a statement to you, and I will. Or he’ll tell me not to, for national security reasons, and I won’t,” Jake said. “I’m probably saving your life. If I told you what I know, the FBI might have to come in here and kill all of you.”

“You’re being a wiseass,” Wirth said. “We don’t like wiseasses in Madison.”

“Marty,” the FBI man said, “Madison is the national capital of wiseasses. What are you talking about?”

The police kept Jake sitting outside Green’s office as their crime-scene people came and went; investigators talked to everyone in the building, but nobody had seen any strangers coming or going at the time of the murders. Nobody had heard any shots. The building, it seemed, was more than half empty, and the offices that were occupied were mostly sedentary businesses without much traffic: two bookkeepers, a State Farm agent, an insurance service bureau, the office for a medical waste-disposal service.

In the end, to make the city cops happy, Jake had to go down to the police headquarters and sit in a conference room. He felt as if he should be sitting on a stool, with a pointed hat on his head, facing into a corner. On the other hand, the cops were exceptionally mellow, and gave him coffee, doughnuts, and magazines.

Novatny showed up four hours after Jake called him, Parker trailing behind. Wirth was still working, bared his teeth at Jake when he showed the two Washington FBI men into the conference room, and said, “I’ll be waiting.”

Parker nodded and pulled the door shut.

“What happened?” Novatny asked. He took a seat across a conference table, while Parker braced his butt on a windowsill.

“I was following up a possibility on Bowe,” Jake said. “Just cleaning up. I thought it was thin. Then this. Either it’s not related at all or somebody killed Alan Green to shut him up.”

“Keep talking.”

“Bowe was gay,” Jake said. “He was also dying of brain cancer. That’s why he was full of drugs, for the pain. I think—but I don’t know—that Bowe and a group of his gay friends plotted a way to make his death look like a murder, and to blame Arlo Goodman for it.”

They both stared at him for a moment, then Parker, his forehead wrinkling, asked, “Why?”

“Because they think Goodman is the point man for a fascist political movement—or a populist movement, whatever. Profamily, prochurch, semisocialist, antigay, intolerant, authoritarian. They set up Schmidt for the fall, because he was linked to Goodman. Then, I think, they killed Schmidt. But I don’t know that. That’s just what I think.”

“Green was in on it? I saw the pictures in his office . . .”

“Green was gay, a former lover of Bowe’s. He might have been about to fold up. I mentioned Schmidt to him, how he disappeared. He sorta freaked. I got the feeling that he looked on the whole Bowe-death thing as a complicated political joke. Certainly didn’t think murder was involved . . . Anyway, I came out to talk to Green about it and scared the hell out of him. He said he had to talk to some friends about what to tell me, so I walked down to a bookstore, bought a novel, ate a bagel, and when I came back . . . there they were.”

“Sonofabitch,” Parker said.

“How long have you known this, Jake?” Novatny asked. “That Bowe was gay? That the whole thing might have been a setup? Why in the hell didn’t you tell us?”

“I’ve known Bowe was gay for a couple of days. Madison Bowe told me, asked me not to pass it along if I didn’t have to, but left it to my discretion. She was afraid that it would leak—and it would have—and that would have ended the investigation. It would have become a gay thing. She still believes that her husband was murdered, and that Arlo Goodman was involved. And she had a point.”

“But now . . .”

“Now things have changed,” Jake said. “I didn’t think it was a gay thing. That was too far-fetched and that’s why I didn’t tell you about it. Nobody cares about gay anymore—and Bowe wasn’t even in office. Then I got Madison Bowe’s permission to go to New York and look at Bowe’s apartment. I found an empty pill bottle there—it’s still there—and tracked it back to Bowe’s doctor, who told me about the cancer.”

“And then you thought . . .”

“I thought it was all too much: Nobody can figure out where Bowe went. He was smiling when he disappeared. His body is found in this spectacular way with an arrow pointing straight at Schmidt. Why did Schmidt get rid of every gun in the house, except the one that could convict him of killing Bowe? That was goofy. I started thinking that the whole thing was faked. And I’ll bet you something: I bet if you look at Schmidt, that you’ll find some kind of tie to Arlo Goodman. One that Goodman might not even know about, but that would look suspicious if somebody got tipped off.”

“So it’s all a fraud. The Bowe murder,” Parker said.

“Yes. I started to think it was basically a suicide, and it occurred to me that, if that’s what happened, that his friends had to be involved. People he could trust absolutely—and that suggested it might be this group of gay lovers, people who’d kept the secret all those years. And who had reason to fear Goodman.”

Novatny and Parker looked at each other, then Novatny rubbed his face with his hands and said, “On the way out here, I figured out twenty reasons why you were here and there were dead people, and how it might be related to Bowe. Nothing I thought of was this weird.”

“Is Madison Bowe in on it?” Parker asked.

“No.” Jake shook his head. “She and Lincoln Bowe haven’t been together for years. She’s just been a cover for him. And she’s the one who’s been pushing the investigation. She got me started in this direction. She gave me Green’s name. She gave me the key to her apartment, pointed me at the doctor. I think that Lincoln Bowe deliberately kept her in the dark. Maybe because she wouldn’t have gone along; or maybe to protect her.”

Novatny was skeptical. “You have no idea who the killers might be.”

“Bowe’s gay friends. You could ask around, you’ll turn them up. Madison still thinks that Goodman is involved. She thinks the idea of a bunch of Bowe’s friends getting together to kill him is ludicrous. Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Assuming that you’re telling us the truth—and I think you are, even if we’re not getting all of it—then the killer’s somebody from here in Madison,” Parker said. “Got to Green inside of an hour.”

Jake scrubbed at his hair with the palms of his hands, then said, “That doesn’t seem right. That just doesn’t seem right. But that’s what happened.”

“Have you figured out how it went down in Green’s office?” Jake asked.

Novatny frowned. “We think the killers were professional—nobody heard any shots, but the shots were probably fired from a .22. Those are not so quiet, so it must have been silenced.”

“How do you know it was a .22?”

“Took a slug out of a wall,” Parker said. “The base was intact, looks like a .22.”

“Could be a .22 mag. The damage was pretty big,” Novatny said.

“They were executed, then,” Jake said.

Novatny brightened: “Not exactly. We think that the secretary tried to resist, tried to fight them off, went after somebody with her nails. She got some skin and a little blood, so we’ve got DNA. If we can find the guy, we can nail him.”

“And Green . . .”

“He took it right in the back of the head. He was executed. We think the secretary tried to resist, that’s when she lost her shoes, got her hands on someone, and Green just stood there and
boom.
”

“What now?” Jake asked.

Novatny got a tape recorder, read Jake his rights, and got him to repeat the statement. Jake did, but insisted that most of what he said, other than the basics about Bowe’s sexuality and the cancer revelation, was speculation. “I just want out of this,” he said. “I’m a research guy, not a cop. I just want out.”