by Warren Adler
Like Fiona, his personal dignity was his dominant priority but it was always at war with his thirst for acceptance. Like her, too, he was often outspoken, especially at the least tactful moment. And, also like her, he could be tough, icy mean when cornered, but with very delicate insides, requiring extraordinary discipline to tame his inherent vulnerabilities.
The Eggplant, true to his vaunted instincts had teamed them. At first she had interpreted it as an exercise in nastiness and malice, especially since she had just become an expert, through the Eggplant’s previous choice of partners for her, in the care and feeding of the black machismo virus, as opposed to the white machismo virus. She was less of an expert on the latter.
Cates with his jet black shiny skin taut over his distinctively Caucasion features carried neither the black nor white viruses. He started out as an enigma to her, then grew into a perpetual challenge and, finally, into a trusted colleague. But he definitely worked on a different frequency than herself which made the association interesting, although often exasperating.
She had turned on the all-news station, keeping it just audible enough to alert them to any news of the case.
“Do people murder to get the political advantage of being next in line for a House seat?” Cates asked. His academic approach to a killer’s motivation was always in direct contrast to her own more gut-oriented modus operandi, although at some point, their approaches invariably intersected.
“Political ambition has a powerful drag,” she shrugged, again remembering her father. Such ambition had dominated their lives. Getting elected and reelected was everything and she had been privy to many a conversation that, in retrospect, had had a violent undercurrent.
Remarks like “We’ll cut the legs off the bastard” or, “Let’s drown the son of a bitch in his own bile” or, “We’ll club him to death with his girlfriend” were all phrases that stuck in her mind. Often she had heard such things when her father and his political team held endless discussions around the dining room table which was the only place big enough to hold these all-male meetings. She was never allowed to attend, of course, but their loud raucous tones were easy enough to overhear.
Their remarks with their violent images were commonplace, hardly ominous to her then, merely figures of speech coined by the rough Irishmen among her father’s coterie, faces flushed by Scotch and excitement as they talked on into the night through a haze of cigar smoke. Politics, her mother had sighed, forever trying to shoo her far out of earshot. Such talk, punctuated by the foulest of language, was not designed to pollute the ears of nice little Catholic virgins, which made her all the more curious and the talk itself all the more fascinating.
How they reveled in it. How they loved the hurly-burly of the political game. It struck her as so Irish, so subject to the paranoia and parody of the Irish spirit, so punctuated with the Irish sense of grudge wars and dark funks and dire consequences that often appeared, out of the blue, hard on the heels of boundless euphoria and blind optimism. Sharp mood swings were the knell of doom to the vulnerable Irish psyche.
It occurred to her years later that all that late night Irish blarney had little to do with governing, but a great deal to do with getting reelected, knocking off opponents and speculating how Paddy Fitz, as her father, Senator Patrick Ignatius FitzGerald, had been dubbed by the media, could become a presidential contender.
Her mother, ever the lace curtain Irish snob, was appalled by the moniker since it reflected a shanty heritage that she had hoped her marriage to him would obliterate. It hadn’t, nor did the common man image it reflected propel him into a serious contender. Perhaps in that were the roots of his self-destruction, although she would never call it anything but “high purpose.”
It was true that politics was a bloodsport. But random murder for political advantage was hardly an option of American politics. As opposed to political assassination of our Presidents which was frequent enough in America to be embarrassing. The thought triggered an idea.
“Maybe for a cause,” she told him. “Comes under the heading of ideological reasons.”
“Right to Life?”
“Could be. Don’t they call abortionists murderers? These touchy causes make people violent. People on McGuire’s side used bombs on abortion clinics. Could be an act of vengeance.”
“You’re not serious?” Cates asked.
She shrugged.
“Anything is possible.”
Although it was purely a tease on her part, she knew he was mulling it over, looking for logic.
“Maybe I’d buy that if it was more violent. A cutting maybe, a real hack job, say, or a shotgun blast, something that made a real political statement. Perhaps even the bloody work of a fanatic, something outside of the committees that ran strategies for causes. A loner who needed to leave a brutal calling card.” He tapped his lips with a thin graceful ebony finger, a familiar tick of his when concentrating. “But a poisoning. Its too low-key for ideological motivation.”
Peripherally, she felt him look toward her, his expression earnest. He was about to say more, but Fiona had turned up the volume of the radio.
“Representative Frances McGuire of Massachusetts died today. Known affectionately to everyone as Frankie, Representative McGuire will be best remembered for her strong stand against abortion. The forty-seven-year old congresswoman and mother of four was serving her sixth term. She was discovered in the early morning hours by Harlan Foy, her administrative assistant. We talked earlier with Captain Luther Greene, Chief of Homicide, who was on the scene within moments of being notified.”
Fiona harumphed and shook her head.
“Hot dog,” she whispered.
“We have not yet determined the cause of death,” the Eggplant explained. “Considering the prominence of the deceased, we do not wish to comment at this time until we have fully investigated the situation.”
The hook was in. Fiona smirked.
“Does this mean that Representative McGuire did not die of natural causes?” the announcer asked.
“We’ll know more when we complete our lab tests,” the Eggplant said. “As you know, Bill, our mandate is to investigate every death in the District of Columbia. In the case of a distinguished woman such as Representative McGuire we must be extra thorough as we discharge our responsibility.”
Dulcet tones investing the case with great importance. And mystery. On television he would see himself as attractive, brilliant, charismatic, a legend in his own mind. Grudgingly, she gave him high marks as a performer. He had certainly mastered that end of the business. She clicked off the radio.
“More like a hambone than a hot dog,” Cates sighed as she accelerated the car down Massachusetts Avenue.
“He set up an appointment,” Briggs told them when they arrived back in the squad room. He was the Eggplant’s factotum and general handyman, a greying white relic of the time when the MPD was white man’s turf. He’d struck his bargain with the Eggplant after being passed over for the job as homicide chief. For him it was smooth sailing until retirement a few months down the road. Mostly, he did routine backup stuff for the Eggplant, handling his scheduling and doling out assignments.
He had a big gut and an ego to match and, although he pretended to be scrupulously color blind, underneath, as everyone knew, he was a hard core red-neck bigot. He had often accosted Fiona outside the office to vent his anger at the “jungle-bunnies” who had robbed him of his career entitlements.
“You ain’t goin’ anywhere with the cops, FitzGerald. Three strikes and out. You’re a woman, you’re a honky and a ballbuster. Ain’t no room at the top for that M.O.”
“Times change, lieutenant,” Fiona would sigh.
“Right, babe. Come a time when instead of any whities in the department, like the ten little Indians, there’ll be none.”
“A cop’s a cop,” Fiona muttered. She had tried to believe implicitly in the idea. Someday, she hoped, all this black/white animosity would end. It would never end for Bri
ggs. “All this power’s new to them.”
“I believed once, FitzGerald. There’s a black cloud acomin’. Pitch black. Niggers are out-screwing us, baby. Power in numbers. Whitey’s finished in this town’s cops. We’re just tokens now. And you’re a triple. White, woman, snobby smartass.”
No point in explaining to the bastard that she was in the cops for the work and the challenge, that she didn’t worry about retirement and was reasonably well-fixed financially.
Yet, for some reason, perhaps racial affinity, she was outwardly more tolerant of him than she might have been to others with the same views. The fact was, that professionally, he was a good cop, a smart detective in his prime. His respect had been won for his work not for his views.
Her earliest, and most surprising, discovery at MPD was that the black cops actually related more to a bigoted red-neck than to the effete liberal. Perhaps it was because both understood each other’s anger and hatred. What was it that Foy had said? Something about being too friendly with the enemy?
“An appointment with whom?” Fiona asked, responding to Briggs’s pronouncement, glancing at Cates.
Briggs pulled out a pocket-sized battered leather notebook and flipped the pages.
“Jack McGuire, the lady’s husband.” Taylor looked at his watch. “Bouta half hour in the icebox. McGuire will be there for an ident.”
“Thanks for the notice,” Fiona smirked.
“And the chief has already requested an autopsy,” Briggs added. He enjoyed doling out information piecemeal, a cop’s inevitable affliction.
“Moving that fast, is he?” Cates said.
In the case of an ambiguous suicide, it was the detective’s option to have an autopsy done. Next of kin, if they were available and notified of the decision, usually balked. They were not anxious to have their loved ones mutilated.
“McGuire know about the autopsy?” Fiona asked, suspecting that the Eggplant had deliberately ducked him. Undoubtedly, he had already calculated the case’s political fallout, which was just beginning to dawn on Fiona. Congress, after all, still controlled much of the District government’s purse strings and there was some currency in protecting the image of those stalwart legislators.
“Not exactly,” Briggs answered.
“Who notified him to show for an ident?”
“I did.” Briggs tipped his head in the direction of the Eggplant’s office. “I just follow orders.”
“Then he signed off and left us the shit detail,” Fiona said, clucking her tongue.
She turned her back on Briggs and walked over to her battered metal desk, identical with the others in the squad room. As always it was three-quarters empty with most of the detectives out on the street. Mornings were a kind of garbage collection service, scouting the O.D.s, suicides, and homicides and checking out the routines, the natural deaths.
Most death came at night, but the cleanup came in the morning. It was also, for some unknown reason, seasonal. The grim reaper worked overtime in the summertime. Not that he ever really rested. Certainly not in the capital of one of the most violent countries on earth.
She called Dr. Benton, but couldn’t get him on the phone and had to talk to his assistant, a young woman named Melanie Marks.
“He’s been on the tables for the last three hours,” Melanie said in her squeaky voice with its broad, pronounced ‘brawd’, New York, pronounced ‘New Yawk’, accent.
“We did big business last night.” She giggled nervously. When Fiona didn’t respond to the humor on cue she grew more serious. “We had seven murders and three O.D.s. They’re being taken in priority order.”
“What about McGuire?”
“Just a sec.” She paused and looked over a clipboard, which she took from a wall hook.
“As we speak,” Melanie said.
So it’s rush rush down the line, Fiona thought. Means the Eggplant’s got the mayor’s backing. Maybe some kind of leverage deal in the works. There was no end to political machinations between the D.C. government and its resident nemesis and provider, the Congress of the United States of America.
“We’re meeting the spouse there, Melanie. Tell Doc to clean up the lady as much as he can. And keep a lookout for him. Jack McGuire.” Jack of Diamonds, she remembered. A man named Grady was the Jack of Clubs.
She had never quite hardened to the corpse identity process, although she was tolerating it better than the first time when she had thrown up and fainted. But the man’s head had been crushed by a six-wheeler and the wife had also been carried out. Since then, she had seen equally horrible corpses, broken, mutilated, dismembered and decapitated. It was not exactly the sight of the corpses that made her queasy. It was the reaction of the next of kin. For them it was always awful and it was for them that she bled, although she no longer threw up or fainted.
5
Jack McGuire, was a big man, puffed up with Irish pride, although this wasn’t the moment to judge him on that score. He was red-faced, veiny around the nose, which meant long acquaintance with John Barleycorn, and he had smooth grey hair combed with a dead-straight part about two inches above his left ear. His eyes were chocolate brown, the whites covered with a network of red lightning bursts.
He wore a well-fitted grey suit, rumpled from his morning’s travels, and an appropriate black tie. And he made no effort to be ingratiating. He shot Fiona a glance that clearly meant that he was used to power and command.
On the surface, he did not look like a grieving man, more like a man annoyed to have to suffer this interruption in his busy life. He was getting increasingly impatient and nasty, despite their attempts to soothe him with condolences and testimonials to his deceased wife. His reaction was merely to acknowledge their words with a grunt. He was not interested in conversation. Fiona and Cates were obviously perceived by him as mere functionaries with whom he was not obliged to have any peer dialogue.
She and Cates were stalling him in the outer office, waiting for word that Mrs. McGuire had been “reassembled” and returned to the icebox, a large whitewashed room with refrigerated drawers which stored the bodies until disposition.
“You didn’t have the right to move her here,” he muttered. “No right.” He looked directly at Cates, then gazed around the room. Various official personnel passed through.
“Standard procedure,” Fiona said. It wasn’t quite standard, but standard for a case of this sort, an ambiguous suicide.
“Shithouse,” he grumbled. “Whole goddamned city. Bunch of dummies. Do nothing but fuck up the country.” He lowered his voice to barely a whisper. Fiona heard it. “Mau Maus.” If Cates heard it he did not acknowledge it.
She had opted for tact, knowing that this was to be a traumatic moment. She had wanted to ask many questions, but she had deliberately demurred, postponing them until he had recovered from the aftershock still to come. All efforts to engage him in conversation ended in failure and finally they let him stew in his own anger.
“Ready now.”
It was Melanie herself, dressed in a crisp white smock that led the way to the cold room. She was a small woman who knew her job. Along with the smock, she had donned the appropriate expression for the deed. She had often done this chore and was remarkably inured to it. “My father owned a kosher butcher store in Brooklyn,” she had explained, although the comparison, when dredged up in memory, always gave Fiona the willies.
Accompanied by Cates and Fiona on either side of him, they followed Melanie to a drawer. She bent toward it and rolled it out, a slab on which was a sheet-covered corpse. Fiona kept her eyes fixed on McGuire. The bright lights picked out the crimson network of veins on his nose.
Waiting for the dead face to be uncovered, his breathing became labored. She had seen it before. A man steeling himself, anticipating the pain, holding on to control. This could not be an easy chore, even for the Jack of Diamonds.
Melanie drew down the sheet to the neck of what had once been Frances McGuire. Surprisingly, she appeared even younger than
she had looked on the bed, the bones beneath the skin more clearly defined, the freckles faded. They let the spectacle sink into Jack McGuire’s consciousness. He was clearly moved. He crossed himself. His forehead rippled and tics began in both cheeks. His eyes moistened and fluttered and his lips trembled.
“Is this your spouse Frances McGuire?” Cates asked.
“That’s Frankie,” he whispered, bowing his head. When he lifted it finally all the crimson network on his face had turned blue and his complexion matched the sheet. Melanie quickly slid the drawer closed. McGuire stood there for a moment, looking mutely at the drawer’s metal faceplate. Then he shook his head and walked slowly out of the room.
“Goddamn,” he said when they had returned to the waiting room. “She didn’t have to do that.”
“Do what, Mr. McGuire?”
The Irishman lifted his eyes. The blood had returned to his face, filling the veiny tributaries and putting color back into his skin.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. McGuire,” Cates said. “These questions have to be asked.”
He looked directly into Cates’s eyes, narrowing his own, attempting to stare him down.
“You mean you don’t think she committed suicide?”
“I think we’d all be better off if we sat down quietly in that office,” Fiona said, pointing to the empty office off to one side that was reserved for such discussions. McGuire hesitated, looking confused, but he followed Fiona into the room. Cates joined them. Fiona pulled out the chair from behind the desk and the three of them sat facing each other.
“There was no note found in her apartment,” Fiona began.
“Did you receive one?” Cates asked.
He looked at them and shook his head.