Immaculate Deception

by Warren Adler

“You may get one in the mail in a couple of days,” Fiona said. “That should dispose of the matter. Any of your children receive a suicide note from their mother?”

  “No. They would have told me.”

  “That’s a drastic step, suicide,” he sighed. “Can’t understand it.”

  “The thing is, Mr. McGuire,” Fiona said, “we can’t be sure.”

  “Not sure.”

  “We might have a better idea when we receive the autopsy report.”

  “Autopsy?”

  He rose to his feet, seething, his face blood red with anger.

  “Autopsy? Who the fuck gave you permission to perform an autopsy on my wife?”

  “We have that right, Mr. McGuire,” Fiona said, gently. She had been through this before.

  “We’ll see about that,” McGuire said, standing up, pointing a pudgy finger in Fiona’s face. She noted a ring with a diamond on his pinky. Royal Order of Hibernians. She recognized the symbol. “I want your badge number.” He shifted his attention to Cates. “Yours, too. There’ll be hell to pay. I swear it.”

  They swiftly withdrew their card cases, Cates from his pocket and Fiona from her pocketbook. On each was the person’s name, the homicide division, address, telephone and badge number. He seemed startled by the speed of the reaction, took the cards and put them in a side pocket of his jacket.

  “We have to ask questions, Mr. McGuire. You can’t blame the messenger,” Cates said.

  He muttered and grumbled, then began to pace the little room. He was a strong bulky man, rough-hewn. Probably hell on his workers.

  “Did she have any reason to commit suicide, Mr. McGuire?” Fiona asked.

  His reaction was silence, but she wasn’t sure he was stonewalling, just unsure and confused.

  “Did you notice anything different about her recently?” Cates asked.

  “Different?”

  “Was she depressed?”

  “Depressed? Frankie? Hell, no. Not her. She got angry, but never depressed.”

  Fiona caught the undercurrent, the unmistakable hint of sarcasm. She cut a glance at Cates.

  “Why not her?” Cates pursued.

  “Too tough, Frankie was, to let herself get down. She could shrug things off. Nothing bothered her. Not Frankie.”

  Again she caught an undercurrent. This time a tinge of regret, as if he would have welcomed a streak of vulnerability in his wife.

  “In a suicide,” Cates said, measuring his tone, “something usually bothers a person who commits it.”

  McGuire seemed to draw into himself, reassessing his words. Then he shrugged and responded.

  “What the hell reason would she have? She had it made. Hell, she was a member of Congress. Her father was a bartender for crissakes. Her mother was a maid, a chamber maid for Hilton. She had dough. Four kids. All grown now. She was a celebrity. She had clout. What the hell else did she want?” He stopped pacing abruptly and stared into space. His eyes glazed. “All in all a good woman. A good mother. A God-fearing woman.” He paused for a long time with that glazed spacey look, then slowly got hold of his sense of place again. “She had no good reason to do this. None. She was master of her fate. No good reason.”

  “Are you implying that someone else did it?” Fiona asked gently. It was in essence the same question that they had asked Foy.

  “Someone else?”

  “A murderer,” Fiona emphasized.

  “Frankie murdered?” He seemed aghast. “Why would anyone want to murder Frankie?”

  “Could have been for ideological reasons. She was the number one enemy of the abortion gang,” Fiona said, her tone implying a commitment. Do I really feel like that? she wondered. At that moment, she fully comprehended the power of the issue’s politicization. What would it take for her to abort her own child? She shivered at the prospect. And other women? What did it take for them? Was that the issue? It was so personal, so intimate. She shrugged it away.

  “Politics is politics,” McGuire said. “I’ve seen some bruising scraps in my day. But murder . . .” He shook his head.

  “Then you are convinced it was suicide.”

  “Looks like it, doesn’t it?” he said after a long pause, speaking the words through clenched teeth. By then, he was in full control of himself again, his obviously shrewd mind working in high gear.

  “Did you have any hint of it?” Fiona asked.

  “Hell no. She was always a lady in charge of herself. She was tough, headstrong. She always knew where she was going.”

  “Then it is out of character,” Fiona coaxed.

  “Yeah. I’d say that,” McGuire said. “But people have been known to . . .”

  “Snap,” Cates said helpfully.

  “Listen, she was my wife of twenty-seven years. I married her at twenty and we had five kids together. They’re all busted up about this, I can tell you. It wasn’t very white of her to do this to them. Hell, we could have helped her. But how the hell do you get a hint of it. How the hell do you do that?”

  He started to pace again, genuinely troubled. As he walked his lips moved, as if he were cursing silently to himself.

  “What was your marriage like, Mr. McGuire?” Fiona asked suddenly.

  He bristled at that one.

  “None of your fucking business what my marriage was like. I won’t have our personal lives explored by anyone. That was our business. Next thing you know you’ll be accusing me.”

  “Of what, Mr. McGuire?” Fiona asked.

  “It’s unthinkable. You oughta be ashamed.”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions, Mr. McGuire,” Cates said.

  “Next thing you know you’ll actually be asking me where I was last night.”

  He was sputtering off again into a temper tantrum. They let it work itself out.

  “It would be a legitimate question under any circumstances, Mr. McGuire,” Cates said. “Look, we’re investigating the possibility of foul play. A routine investigation. Also if your wife committed suicide she had to have her reasons. We need to get close to that as well. Wrap things up. A domestic motive is quite common. She must have been unhappy about something. The first question that always comes to mind in a case like this is: Was she happy in her marriage?”

  Of course he was uncomfortable with the question, but Fiona could feel the wheels working to devise a proper answer. He had already telegraphed the message. How could anyone be truly happy in a marriage where the partners were separated most of the time? That was more like an arrangement. Perhaps, she thought, the proper question would be: Was she unhappy with the arrangement? It was a question that quickly found her voice.

  “Arrangement?”

  “Did you spend much time together?”

  “No we didn’t. How could we? She was in Congress and I had a construction business to run. No way we could. But we’ve been doing that for years so it was no hassle. We got together when she came back to Boston.”

  “Like how many times?” Cates asked.

  “I don’t count things like that.” His defensiveness telegraphed another message. This was no happy marriage. She had to come up to service her district. Probably quick trips, except during campaigns when the family banded together to help her get reelected. All part of the game.

  “Was she happy with this arrangement?” Fiona asked, pressing forward now, watching McGuire marshall his defenses.

  “She didn’t complain,” McGuire muttered. “Besides we did talk on the phone.” He bit his lip, then in a strangely swift change of mood, his eyes seemed to catch fire. It reminded Fiona of those comic strip drawings where a light bulb suddenly appears above a character’s head saying “bright idea.”

  “It was me that tried getting her last night. Hell, just check with the apartment lobby desk. I must have called four, five times. I finally had to call Foy.” His head rose in a repetitive nod of self-confirmation. “Yeah. We talked on the phone.”

  “And you?” Fiona pushed. “Were you happy with the arrangement?”
>
  He shook his head and smiled sardonically.

  “I don’t get the point of all this. I’m the victim here. I just lost my wife. It looks to me like she committed suicide. Whatever the motive, she’s dead and while I’m in mourning I really think it’s an imposition for you to ask those questions. I’m leaving.” He started toward the door and turned. “And I want my wife’s body to be sent to the Capitol. Foy is handling it all. There’s going to be ceremonies day after tomorrow in the rotunda to honor her. We don’t need to be harassed by questions about our personal lives. If you think that Frankie was murdered, it’s up to you to make a case for it. Personally I couldn’t believe that in a million years. Frankie snapped is all. She pushed herself too hard. It’s a damned shame that we didn’t see it coming. Maybe she was just too sick at heart about what she was about to do to write a note. Thought this would be the best, the easiest way out. If that was her wish, then we must respect it. Just don’t subject me to this. I don’t need it in my life and my kids don’t need it either. Frankie was a great lady and in two days we’ll honor her memory in the Capitol of the United States, then I’ll take her home and bury her next to her folks in our family plot in South Boston.”

  He pulled the card out of his pocket and read the names. He turned to Fiona.

  “And you, FitzGerald, a good Irish girl should know better than to press too hard on a grieving man of the same persuasion. Maybe this one . . .” He nodded toward Cates. “. . . doesn’t know better, but I certainly expect you to observe decency and respect. You got any clues that are legitimate and might make me or you change our minds, I’d be happy to hear it. In the meantime get my wife’s body the hell out of this shithouse, post haste.”

  Bully Irish all right, showing his authority, giving them his ass. He had drawn himself up to his full height and walked with exaggerated dignity out of the office and the waiting room. They let him go. It was pointless to argue. They had no facts, not even theories. There was a great deal to say for his argument. If it was, indeed, suicide, which it probably was, then he had a right to balk at those questions.

  No, all was not right in the marriage of Jack and the late Frankie McGuire. How could it be?

  6

  Dr. Charles Benton, the Chief Medical Examiner, had the unconscious habit of making cathedrals out of his fingers and fitting the forefingers and middle fingers into the cleft of his chin. It had always seemed to Fiona to be an elaborate but suitable pose for this very wise and very gentle man.

  When she had started in homicide, they had established an instant rapport and she had spent long hours with him in the sunny little parlor of his Northeast Washington row house which he had shared with his beloved late wife. Here, she had often unburdened herself, told him of her fears and aspirations and, mostly, her disappointments, especially with men.

  “My priest and confessor,” she would chide him after one of her many visits. “Catholic habits never die.”

  “More like a free shrink.”

  He would chuckle wryly and show his still white even teeth, remarkable for a man of sixty. Often when they were together, she would study his face, which she found endlessly fascinating. He was a light skinned black man with hair as white, but not as fine, as cotton and eyes as blue as a South Pacific lagoon. A good Cajun mix, he had joked in the faintest cadences of a Louisiana drawl.

  To be with him was comforting and comfortable. He was, she was certain, a rare find, especially for an orphan girl like herself living astride two worlds, as remote from each other as Earth and Mars.

  Most of his emotional life was invested in his past and he had, unlike her, no pressing problems in his contemporary existence, despite the heavy pressures of his job. This gave him the ability to make dispassionate judgments and insights, not blemished by personal baggage. He feared nothing, knew most of the strategies of survival in a bureaucracy and his access to the secrets of the dead had provided him with a wisdom that she was certain few men possessed.

  She saw his face now through a haze of cigarette smoke, his only apparent vice. Shafts of early afternoon spring sunlight had begun to spear through the open slats of the blinds in his office. The tobacco smoke could barely mask the medicinal odor that clung to him in this environment. It always came as a pleasant surprise to note that for some reason he had never brought the odors of his job home with him.

  He was tired, she knew. It took nearly a full week to complete the work of Washington’s normal weekend orgies of blood. Special cases like that of Frankie McGuire added to that burden.

  Yet, despite the press of work and the endless parade of corpses, not once had he ever referred to these corpses as “stiffs” or “dead meat.” To him, they were all people, their humanity still articulate in their revelations, their dignity still intact. Often he had said that a human being’s soul continued to live as long as others retained their memory of them as a living person.

  Cates had gone to check on the memorial service planned for Mrs. McGuire and Melanie had run out to get them sandwiches, although lunchtime had long passed.

  Fiona had explained to Dr. Benton what she had come about, but there was always more to it than a mere report. In these business dealings between them there existed an elaborate gamesmanship in which the psychological implications of the victim’s pathology were invariably broached. It gave every inquiry a cat and mouse quality with roles reversing frequently. Always she started out as the cat. Invariably she ended up as the mouse.

  “A first for me, Fi. I’ve never done a member of that august body. Luther was quite adamant about scheduling. Used her VIP status to take her out of turn, put her at the top of the list. I told him that rank has its privileges but that they normally end at the moment of death.”

  He undid his cathedral of fingers, took a deep drag on his cigarette, blew smoke into the air, then looked at the glowing ash.

  “Shame on me,” he sighed. “Me, who knows more than anyone the true color of a healthy lung.” He shook his head, took another deep drag, then punched out the cigarette.

  “The speed of it caught me by surprise,” Fiona acknowledged.

  “I always respond to Luther’s persuasiveness.” He would under no circumstances ever refer to him as the Eggplant and there existed between them an enormous professional respect. “He gave me to understand that something was fishy in Denmark. Then he admitted that he couldn’t explain it, that something was nagging at him, that his peace of mind was shattered because of it. I’m a sucker for Luther’s humility.”

  “I’ve never seen it myself.”

  “Yes, I did her out of turn. It was quite a revelation.” He winked at her, teasing.

  At that moment, Melanie came in with the sandwiches. She had ordered a tuna on rye and Dr. Benton had his usual peanut butter and jelly on white bread. Beside the wrapped sandwiches, Melanie placed two styrofoam containers of coffee.

  “The comfort of habit,” he said, unwrapping the sandwich with deft and sure fingers, fingers that she had seen lift out an unbeating heart from a cracked open chest or separate a human liver from its perch among the oily entrails. He bit into the sandwich and chewed carefully, then washed it down with a swallow of coffee. She started on her tuna sandwich oddly unruffled by the gory images that floated in her mind.

  “It’s all right for you to be curious. But what about me. I’ve just taken a great deal of abuse from the woman’s husband, as if it were me that ordered the autopsy.”

  “Aside from the speed, would you have ordered an autopsy?” Dr. Benton asked.

  She thought a moment, took another bite of her sandwich.

  “I don’t think so. On the surface it looks like a clear case of suicide. No sign of struggle. Appears to be a classic case of self-inflicted poisoning. Nevertheless, the old Eggplant has a weird antenna. Sometimes picks up strange messages.”

  “The choice of poison is strange. Cyanide. Haven’t seen much of that ever.”

  “Not exactly your average pharmaceutical.”


  “Killed the poor woman in seconds,” Dr. Benton said. “Excellent choice for quick disposal. Paralyzes the nervous system for a blessed exit. My own method of choice if I were so inclined. Did you know that Goering kept a capsule of it in his anus?”

  She shook her head. Her experience with the Hitler era came from books. Goering had died years before she was born.

  “Was this a capsule?”

  “Doubtful. It was clearly mixed with the wine.”

  “No container was found,” Fiona said. “Of course it could have gone down the disposal.” She reconstructed it in her mind, finally utilizing the images she had gathered earlier. “The bottle of wine was in the refrigerator. She poured herself a glass, put in the dose, flushed the wrapper down the toilet, probably nothing more than a folded bit of paper or plastic. Then she replaced the bottle in the refrigerator, carried the glass containing the poison to the bed, crawled in, smoothed out her nightgown and the bedclothes, picked up the glass, took one big gulp and waited until blessed death arrived. The remaining wine fell on the comforter. A single glass. Meaning no company. Suicide for one.” Fiona nodded, pleased with her description. Later, after the results of the lab tests, she was certain that her theory would be validated.

  “Impeccable logic,” Dr. Benton said.

  “But no impeccable motive,” Fiona sighed. She put aside her sandwich, sipped some coffee, and watched him take the last bite of his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “All right then. She now arrives on your table. What message, pray tell, has she sent from the grave?”

  “A most remarkable organism,” Dr. Benton said, his fingers reconstructing his cathedral, the apex of which he tucked back in his chin.

  “Remarkable?”

  “The woman had the most unblemished organs I’ve seen in a long time in a body over forty. I wouldn’t have given you two cents for an Irish liver. Not a penny. They’re invariably semi-cirrhotic. This was clean as a whistle. And the rest of her as well. Good muscle tone. Nice clean veins, a healthy heart and kidneys. Inside, everywhere, despite child-bearing, she was well, ten years younger at least.”