Dead Watch (38 page)

In the outer office, a saleswoman named Cheryl Pence was standing in her office pod when the screaming started: “No, no, don’t, don’t, help, help . . .”

There was an impact like an explosion, and without thinking, Pence ran to Barber’s office door and yanked it open, the other five office employees all standing, staring. When the door came open they saw three Virginia state cops looking out through a broken window. Pence screamed at them, “What did you do, what did you do . . . ?”

Bell, shocked, white-faced, turned and muttered, “We didn’t do anything. We didn’t do anything.”

He was talking to air. Pence had backed away and then started to run for the outer door, the other five stampeding behind her. Bell said to the other two cops, “We didn’t do anything.”

Outside, three television crews, tipped by what they believed to be local police, had been waiting to film the arrest. They hadn’t been ready for a man to come hurtling out through the wall of glass, five stories above them. One cameraman, saddled up and ready to roll, got a shot of the three cops at the window, looking down.

The three reporters stood there openmouthed, and then one of them said, “Holy shit.” He turned toward his cameraman: “You get that? Tell me you got that?”

“I got the cops,” the cameraman said.

A hundred miles away, Arlo Goodman screamed, “What? What?”

Madison Bowe heard about Howard Barber’s death from Johnson Black, who heard about it from a television reporter who was calling Black to ask him to call Madison for a comment. She turned on the television, watched for a moment, then found the maid and said, “Harriet, I’m going shopping for a few minutes. I’ll just run down the hill, I’ll be back in half an hour.”

Afraid reporters might already be lurking, she put on a hat, went out through the back door, cut through the yards of a half dozen neighbors, then out to the street, not quite running.

Jake was working on the script for the evening’s drama when Madison called. “I’m down on M Street. Did you hear about Howard?”

“What about Howard?”

“He’s dead.” Her voice was hushed, nervous. “Three of Goodman’s cops went to arrest him, they supposedly got some information that he was involved in Linc’s disappearance. But something happened, and he crashed through his office window and fell five stories and he’s dead. Some of his office workers told the television that he was screaming for help and then they heard the crash . . .”

Jake was astonished, groped for words. “Jesus. What do the cops say?”

“All three claim he threw himself through the window. Right through the plate glass. I don’t know. I just don’t know. The FBI is there, I guess they’ve taken over.”

“I’ll call Novatny, see what I can find out.”

“What about tonight?”

“It’s still on, unless the cops delay you . . . I’ll come in, we’ll talk about Barber, I’ll tell you everything I know, you tell me what you found out—you should start calling people about it, because that’s what you’d naturally do. Then we’ll go into our play. Just follow my lead.”

“What if there’s no bug?”

“Then nothing will happen,” Jake said.

“Should I make a comment about Howard? For the media? They’re going to start calling. They were already calling Johnnie Black to see if I’d do one.”

Jake scratched his forehead, thinking for a minute, then said, “I guess . . . That’s up to you. It won’t make any difference, one way or another, to the play tonight. But we can’t have anyone else in the living room when we talk. We have to be alone, or we wouldn’t do it.”

“All right. Maybe . . . I’ll tell Johnnie that I could have a comment tomorrow, but I want to wait and see what happens.”

“What do you think about Barber? Could it be suicide?”

She hesitated, then, “Maybe. He’s depressive. He’s excitable. He could do it . . . I don’t know.”

“All right. Hang on: manage it. See you at nine.”

Jake called Novatny, but the FBI man wouldn’t talk. “You’re too deep in this, ol’ buddy.”

“I’m not asking for a state secret—I just want to know if it was suicide.”

“That’s what the Virginia State Police say.”

“What do you say?”

“Too early to tell.”

“Thanks a lot.”

Jake called Danzig’s office and talked to Gina. “Tell Bill that there’s a story on television about a guy who jumped, fell, or was thrown out a window over in Arlington. Virginia State Police were there and some of the witnesses say the guy was thrown. The thing is, this guy is mixed into the Lincoln Bowe disappearance. There’s going to be a stink around Goodman, at least for a while.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“You almost done over there?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t.”

She knew everything, of course. They were building some distance between themselves and Jake, just in case. “Talk to you later.”

They were getting into the endgame on Lincoln Bowe: Jake could feel it coming. In a week, there’d be nothing left to do but the cleanup. The cleanup, depending on who was doing the cleaning, could send a few people off to jail.

For the moment, there was still room to maneuver.

He climbed the stairs to his junk room, unlocked his gun safe, took out the Remington .243 and a semiautomatic Beretta 20 gauge with two boxes of shells. He’d last used the .243 six months earlier, on an antelope hunt in Wyoming. When he left Wyoming, he could keep three slugs inside three-quarters of an inch at a hundred yards, shooting off sandbags. It was sighted a half inch to an inch high at a hundred, so any shot he wanted to take, from muzzle-tip to two hundred yards, was point ’n’ shoot.

Or back in Wyoming, had been. He’d traveled with the gun in a foam-padded case, but it generally wasn’t healthy to assume that a scope sighted-in six months earlier, and moved two thousand miles, was still on.

He looked at his watch: he had just enough time to get to Merle’s and back to Madison’s at nine o’clock. He whistled a line from Eric Clapton’s “I Shot the Sheriff,” took the rifle, shotgun, and hunting-gear bag down to his bedroom, packed an overnight bag, and carried it all down to the car.

Made a mental note to stop at Wal-Mart.

Endgame coming.

Arlo Goodman was in the mansion’s front parlor, feet up on an antique table donated by the Virginia Preservation Society, talking to Darrell. “Can we wall ourselves off? That’s the only question that matters.”

“Absolutely. Nothing points at us,” Darrell said. “Nothing. Bell and the others swear to God that Barber jumped. I think the feds believe them. For one thing, his office would have been wrecked if a guy Barber’s size was thrown out the window. He was like a goddamn weight lifter, and Bell’s fifty-five years old and is fifty pounds overweight. He threw
Barber
out the window? He’s lucky Barber didn’t throw him out.”

“The problem is, eighty percent of the equation is image,” Arlo said. “They have an image they want. They want a guy who’s an economic liberal, but who’s in touch with the prayer people, who’s in touch with the gun people. Right now, I’m it; but with just a little twist, I become Hermann Göring. Then I’m not it. Then my fifteen minutes are up.” He stood up, took a lap around the room, gnawing at a thumbnail, tugging at it. He wrenched a sliver of it free, spit it into the carpet. “Look. We need a leak. We need to leak to the media that the feds think Barber killed Bowe. We need that out there right now. Everything’s right on a knife edge . . .”

“We can do that. I can do it,” Darrell said.

“If we can get that out for tomorrow—even if the feds equivocate—we’re in good shape. If we can get that out there tomorrow, it’ll make suicide more reasonable. It’ll take the story away from Bell and those other fuckups, no matter what they did.”

“I’ll move,” Darrell said eagerly. “The
Post
, the
Times
, three or four TV channels . . . I’ll talk to Patricia. He’s got contacts everywhere. He’s got the phone numbers. We can reel it back in, Arlo. They won’t be naming a new guy until after Landers is gone, and that’ll take a while. We’re still good.”

Merle’s was a long, low concrete-block building painted an anonymous cream, buried in a block of warehouses in the flight path of Dulles International. The sign outside, an unlit wooden rectangle, said,
MERLE
’
S
, and nothing else, in fading red paint.

Jake parked, carried the rifle around to the front door, pushed in, was hit in the face by the not-unpleasant tang of burned gunpowder. The shooting lanes took up the back of the building; the first fifteen feet in the front was the salesroom, isolated from the shooting lanes by a double concrete wall, with panes of double vacuum-glass on both walls. You could still hear the gunfire, but distantly.