American Quartet

by Warren Adler

  “No question about that. She took an overdose of sleeping pills and left a note in her own hand to her parents, asking for forgiveness. Just a couple of scrawled lines.”

  “All right, then. Why bother me about it? There’s no question of foul play?”

  “No.”

  He seemed fully relieved now. What she did not tell him was that the girl was the closet mistress of an important senator, although she was certain he knew that. In the capital, young vulnerable girls were passed around by powerful men like pieces of meat. Few made it to the altar. Most remained in the closet, sometimes all their lives. Police files were filled with information about similar suicides. It was, as she had told him, routine. The juicy details were kept hidden forever, largely to protect appropriations or to be used for subtle blackmail. Even the press, with occasional lapses, joined in the conspiracy, unless they had targeted an enemy or needed the hapless lecher as a source.

  “She was stupid, throwing away her life,” Bruce Rosen said with disgust. “Don’t you think?” His yellow-flecked hazel eyes probed at her. She felt his minute inspection, and involuntarily she pressed her thighs closer together. Inexplicably, the man moved her.

  “I try to stay away from emotional judgments,” she said. “It confuses the facts.”

  Al Short, sensing the tension, said: “I think we got all we need from the congressman.” He stood up and put out his hand. The congressman shook it with obvious political sincerity.

  “Glad to oblige,” Bruce said, winking at her. She had learned to ignore these little macho bits. But she couldn’t dispel the pull, the magnetic attraction. It annoyed her. It interfered with business. Perhaps she hadn’t been trying hard enough to be neuter that day. She found out why a week later.

  He called and asked her for dinner at Tiberio’s. She said yes, perhaps too quickly. Was she transparent? she wondered. She was irritated by her vulnerability. They met at the restaurant, where he was waiting for her in the little alcove bar.

  “I was nasty,” he said, offering his little boy’s abashed look. She had gone off to Loehman’s and bought a new dress for the occasion. “You look smashing for a cop.”

  “Just routine.” She giggled, feeling clumsy and unsophisticated.

  Julio put them side by side at a table under a bright floral painting that matched the colors of the flowers on the table. It was late October and Washington was enjoying one of its golden fall seasons. The air was clear and crisp and the moon was full. She would always remember that.

  After two Scotches, she felt braced enough to face the routine litany. Men simply could not rest without knowing why she had become a cop. Knowing what? At least it was something that made her interesting.

  “I’m not good at explaining it,” she confessed. She had avoided the nuances of street talk, taking care with her language; she was trying to impress him. People came over to shake his hand and he reacted in practiced political style. But there was no mistaking his interest in her, and she was loving it.

  “Maybe nostalgia. Maybe some instinctive filial urge because of my family being cops. Maybe it was also a deliberate attack on the concept of a woman’s place. Maybe I’ve got an urge to be a heroine.”

  “Maybe it was opportunism,” he said shrewdly. “You’re a double minority.”

  “You noticed.”

  “There must be a lot of pressure.”

  Because he was a congressman, she resisted telling him about the poor morale, the promotions based solely on race, her gripes against the eggplant. The D.C. government still depended on Congress for its money. The department, despite its flaws, carried a special brand of loyalty. The eggplant would have loved her tact.

  “I’m all for women going as far as they can,” he said, a trifle unctuously. He appeared to her then as a beautiful, elegant man, secure in his manhood, filled with an obvious sense of male superiority. It might be intellectually repelling, but his explosive sexuality could not be denied. Soon he was telling her about his first wife. She listened, trying not to betray her impatience. God, get the preliminaries over with, she thought.

  “It was my wife who wanted out,” he said over the linguini. “There’s a certain type of New Yorker who could never be transplanted. She could never hack it here. Went back to the Big Apple. Anyway, we had had it. No problems with the kids. It’s not a good divorce. Not a bad divorce. We’re strangers with memories.”

  “I never found the right guy,” she told him. The Chablis had loosened her tongue. Maybe it was the sense of power in him that goaded her. His aura. It acted on her like an aphrodisiac. Suddenly she felt a disturbing kinship with poor dead Carol Harper.

  “Maybe it’s the distribution system,” she sighed. “I’m not exactly in the perfect mating environment. I don’t think I could go home every night to a cop. They’re depressing. There’s a kind of stink about them. Comes from human misery.”

  “Does it get to you?”

  “You learn to insulate yourself. Maybe I can hack it better because I am a woman. Most of the bad guys are men.”

  “I never thought of it that way.”

  He seemed to have lost his smooth edge and she worried that she had turned him off. He became introspective, less talky.

  In the car, driving to his place for a nightcap, he admitted some confusion.

  “I was watching you. I saw a beautiful woman. I looked into your eyes and suddenly realized what horrors you see every day. Autopsies. Bruised bodies. Every conceivable aberration. Death everywhere. It scared me.” Reaching out, he took her hand and lifted it to his lips.

  “You saw that?”

  “I want to love away the pain of it.”

  “I told you. I keep the pain at bay.”

  They were silent until he opened the door of his townhouse and they stood facing each other in the vestibule. He took her in his arms. Deep inside she felt the great tidal wave surge.

  “Just don’t love away the joy,” she said. She felt the wave crest, carrying her forward on its inexplicable power.

  The memory of that first conflagration always thrilled her. Now she stretched out beside him, her body pressed against his, her fingers tapping along the length of his long lank body. He stirred. A hand reached behind him, caressing.

  “Don’t work late tomorrow. Let’s see the fireworks at Remington’s.” She understood. He didn’t want to be alone, without her, another night.

  5

  A Full-length painting of Thaddeus Remington III hung over the fireplace, reaching upward almost to the beamed ceiling of his Linnean Drive mansion. The portrayal was heroic, a handsome young lieutenant, junior grade, in dress whites, his naval cap cocked with nonregulation jauntiness, a blond lock of hair spilling over his forehead. The eyes, bluer than the sea in the background, looked confidently out to the horizon, as though in search of an impossible dream.

  The strong square jaw offered a target to all takers, and the high glistening cheekbones set off the straight proud nose and delicate nostrils. The elegant body showed the strength and power of youth at its finest, most glorious, moment. Inscribed on a solid gold plaque were his name and the words, “At Inchon, Korea, 1950.”

  Until his mother’s death six years before, it had hung over the fireplace in her Nob Hill townhouse.

  “My golden boy,” Mrs. Remington would tell visitors, her eyes lingering over the portrait with wistful pride. “A gift of God,” she would sigh. It was the first thing guests were shown in the elaborate house, a shrine to young Tad.

  Later, he would explain why he had placed the portrait so prominently in his Georgetown home.

  “I put it there more as a monument to her than to satisfy my well-known egocentricity.” Indeed, the Post had dubbed him “the Golden Host,” despite the fact that the shock of shimmering finespun blond-gold hair had turned mustardy with age. His real life pose almost surpassed the heroic posturing of the young war hero, complete with Navy Cross with clusters on his chest.

  “I’ll say one thing for him
. He’s got style.” Everybody who compared the portrait with the original agreed on that. But they couldn’t pin him down. They asked themselves and one another, what does he do with his days? When the question was put to him, he would respond with a wink: “Drink a lot and read financial statements,” thereby implying a private knowledge of deep financial entanglements, of spider-webbed interlocking directorships.

  Because he was single and squired some of the capital’s spectacularly beautiful women, as well as imports from New York or Beverly Hills, he was always an object of rumor, and ladies no longer on his escort list were not above exchanging little confidences. He was too charming and, by their standards, too important, for real malice. He was also generous. Trips to Paris or Newport or even safaris to Africa were not gifts to be ignored by women over thirty swimming in the treacherous eddies of the Washington social stream. A date with Tad Remington was a brownie point in an arena where a brownie point counted for more than the gold star of achievement.

  Remington’s home, reflecting his style, added another note, pure Americana. The neo-classic house’s architecture, with its solid fluted columns, reflected a time when American architects put a distinctive Grecian stamp on the capital’s architecture. Inside, the antiques, autographs, paintings, photographs and framed letters bespoke vast collectible wealth.

  The house was filled with exhibits of scrimshaw and marine decorations—stern pieces, taffrails, trailboards, paddle-wheel covers and pilot house carved American eagles. One fierce version was perched ominously on the heavy oak headboard of his oversized bed; other carved wood colonial pieces filled the master bedroom, and a curious collection of small antique mirrors filled an entire wall. The bedroom contrasted sharply with the American Empire style furnishings of his parlor, including an array of bowfront cabinetry, relics of the time America went mad for Hepplewhite.

  There was also a profusion of mirrors elsewhere in the house, some of them topped with carved eagles or other early American motifs, and guests always seemed surprised to come upon them in odd nooks and crannies.

  Along the corridors Tad Remington had hung his most prized possessions of Lincolniana, including several interpretations of the assassination as drawn by contemporary artists. A Currier and Ives print in a gold frame hung on the wall of an ornate powder room, with the legend: BOOTH KILLS LINCOLN, GOOD FRIDAY, APRIL 19TH, 1865. Scattered around the house were framed letters signed by “A. Lincoln,” some of them dealing with unbelievably trivial matters. Apparently the Great Emancipator loved writing letters, as though he sensed their special value to future generations. Behind the bar in his large paneled den were photographs of Tad with John Kennedy, two handsome golden boys, sometimes formal, sometimes mugging for the camera, but always signed “With Thanks, Jack.”

  He owned other letters and framed memorabilia signed by Andrew Jackson, Garfield, both Roosevelts, Truman and McKinley, as well as a collection of gilt-framed portraits of these Presidents. His library, floor to ceiling, offered even more presidential lore with complete leather-bound sets of books by and about the chief executives from Washington to Nixon.

  There was also what he called the “Rustic Room,” dedicated to his prowess as a hunter, with stuffed antlered heads and a huge prized head of a grizzly, with bared, ominous long teeth. Two glassed-in gun cabinets graced a far wall, one for long guns, the other showing a collection of hand guns. Tiger rugs covered the stepped plank floor, kept glossed and shiny by his housekeeper, a dark Spanish lady.

  Because he treated his possessions with a self-deprecating humor, he was able to soften the awesome effect of its spectacular profusion.

  “Here,” he would tell guests. “Take the catalogue and look around. I’m bored being the museum director.”

  He was fond of stitching together his history, as if following some intricate needlepoint pattern, although the morgues of various California newspapers contained fairly documented accounts of his official, personal and family background. There were nonofficial accounts, too, mostly dredged up during his ill-fated Senate race in 1964, a year too late for the other golden boy, mowed down by Oswald’s bullet, to be of much help to him.

  He had done rather badly in that contest. Postmortems attributed it to his boyish, patrician manner. The voters didn’t take him seriously enough and his opponent had somehow got the message across that there was something Scott Fitzgeraldish about him. He had tried to point out that he was not Gatsby, that he came from three generations of authentic old money, cattle, oil and real estate, but the voters went cold. Perhaps he was too handsome, too rich. His mother blamed his defeat on jealousy, the press, the ignorant voters, the communists. Because he had divorced when he was twenty-three and never remarried, the rumor mill portrayed him as kinky, or homosexual. It was, his mother assured everybody, a deliberate attempt at character assassination.

  “One thing about him,” some of his ex-girl friends had later confided, always with a sigh of regret, “he knows how to make a woman feel good.” But even that kind of comment carried with it something mysterious and provocative. It certainly didn’t keep the girls away.

  “He takes them to the best places. He gives them a glimpse of an elegant life-style, and when he travels he lets them have their own room. That’s class.” Perceptive Washingtonians agreed.

  To the senators, congressmen, ambassadors, cabinet ministers and others in the high ether of Washington society, he carried a glow of undefined importance, earned by fifteen years of glossy entertaining. His invitations were heeded less for himself than because a guest was sure to make an important connection, the real currency of the capital. He was a catalyst, his lavish home a crucible, even though everyone knew that real power was denied him.

  Aside from charm, most of his guests agreed he was interesting and slightly eccentric, an image he assiduously cultivated, and a going joke was that if reincarnation existed the men would be happy to return as Thaddeus Remington III. When he heard the joke, he took it as a compliment and retorted that he would foreclose on that possibility by living forever.

  Bruce had described him to Fiona long before the July Fourth fireworks party; because he had been single for more than five years, Bruce was an ideal extra man when Remington invited unattached females to his elaborate dinners. When he became attached to Fiona, the invitations ceased temporarily, but now that the Washington grapevine had officially recognized the liaison, the invitations came again, appropriately stated: The Honorable Bruce Rosen and guest.

  “Well, we made it,” he told her.

  To Fiona, Remington was an apparition, foreign to her social world which, up to then, had revolved around cops and their milieu. She had learned early that Bruce, despite all his high-minded liberalism, loved the closed circle of the Wasp world and enjoyed the privileged social access to important people.

  “I admit it,” he had agreed. “I’m bathing in bat dung and loving it.”

  He was also a gossip. She had found that hard to accept; it was too rarified, too inside, as hers had been when she talked about the eggplant, the chief, the black mafia in the department and some juicy morsels gleaned from the sex squad.

  “Sometimes I dated the girls he did,” Bruce once confessed during a long postcoital discussion. “They usually skipped any references to Tad’s virility as if it were a conspiracy of silence. But they had a lot to say about that damned eagle watching over them on his big bed. Perform or else. One of them had a fantasy that if she faltered, the damned thing would swoop down and bite off her nipples.”

  “Gross.”

  “One of them said it was the eagle that really turned her on. She wouldn’t dare not come.”

  “Who was that?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Your business is my business. Especially this business.”

  She patted him fondly there, a signal for the beginning of a new cycle.

  “You’re just about the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me,” he said, and their sexual stirrings
altered every nerve end.

  “Must be love,” she whispered.

  “Must be.” Only this could stop him talking.

  “Just don’t introduce me as ‘My Homicide Honey,’ ” she whispered as they passed through Remington’s heavy paneled door. He was receiving in the vestibule in front of a large oil of Frederic Remington, a cowboy with a droopy moustache on a horse. The host claimed distant cousinship to the artist, although no one had checked its veracity.

  “Wearing your gun?” Bruce asked. He could never accept the fact that she always brought her gun with her to parties. It was regulation for an off-duty cop to have his piece handy when in the District of Columbia. Because it was summer, she had put it in a shoulderstrap purse, the daintiest and dressiest she could find.

  “In here,” she patted the purse. “Less chic than serviceable. But it does the job.”

  “If they only knew what was in there.”

  “Well, if you can carry a hidden weapon, I can.”

  He had wanted to respond in kind but Remington was upon him, offering his handsome face with a broad smile.

  “I see you brought your daughter,” Remington joshed. He knew how to pay a compliment.

  “I didn’t want to compete in your range,” Bruce countered, introducing Fiona.

  “Ah,” he said admiringly. “A daughter of the old sod. I’m really glad you could come.”

  “He’s got the best view in town,” Bruce said. “Had the house moved to accommodate the spectacle.”

  “Well, it’s patriotic at least,” Fiona murmured. The house had begun to weave its awesome spell, adding to her discomfort. Her trained detective’s eye swept the room, revealing no one she knew, although faces were vaguely recognizable. Bruce introduced her around and picked two Scotches off a silver tray being passed by a waiter. In the dining room, she saw portraits of somber ex-Presidents overlooking waiters in black tie who were preparing a buffet.

  “There’s Senator Moynihan,” Bruce said suddenly. “Got to do my thing. I need the guy in my campaign. Mind?”