American Quartet

by Warren Adler

  “The truth.” The chief nodded. “That two hundred cops were massed in town seeking a psychopathic killer who may be tied to four random killings? That three of the killings took place in or near public buildings? That one of the victims was a cop? That we’ve acted on some half-baked hypothesis having to do with the killer’s acting out previous assassinations of our Presidents? That’s front page stuff. Juicy. And how do you think we geniuses at MPD will look, especially since this fourteen-karat prick tried to cover up the fact that the first two killings were related, and he had deliberately tried to pin it on some spic country terrorists?” He shook his head sadly. The eggplant looked contrite. It was obvious that he had confessed, or it had been wrung out of him, when he sold the chief last night’s caper.

  “Do you think MPD, this great nest of incompetent nigger cops, would come out good in the press if I told Bradlee the truth?”

  “We’ve gone through that, chief,” the eggplant said. Fiona’s heart went out to him. The poor sad bastard had tried, had really tried. She vowed tentatively never to call him the eggplant again.

  “So what do you think I told him?” the chief said, dismissing the ex-eggplant with a contemptuous squint. A film of sweat had popped out on his upper lip. “I told him. . .” He looked at his watch again. “Over an hour ago, I told him that I would call him in two hours with the facts, the absolute facts. Now I know the paper’s self-interest is involved as well and he wouldn’t do anything to hurt their damned advertising, but if I said that to him, he would have my ass. It could be that he, too, will see the light and not wish to shake up the tourists, or hurt the night-out business.”

  Fiona was having trouble determining his thrust. Then the chiefs eyes bored in on her alone.

  “I want to tell him that we reacted last night to an anonymous tip. I do not want to tell him that it was a mission cooked up by our own people, responding to intelligence developed internally. In other words, until we have a killer, I want to tell a little white lie and keep a publicity avalanche from coming down on my head. Our head.” He took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. “Kapish?” His eyes rested on each one in turn. “I will not tell him about this presidential assassination stuff.” He banged the desk with the flat of his hand.

  “Can I count on this little circle to keep their lips zippered?” He drew in his breath. “Not a Watergate here. No cover-up necessary. We don’t want to impede our investigation and we don’t want the business community to get upset, or Congress, or the mayor. See, it becomes an ecological problem. Besides,” he looked at Fiona, “your theory is out to lunch now that your loony missed his date with destiny. Nestpa?”

  “Well, I . . .”

  “I’m glad you agree, Officer FitzGerald.”

  He turned to the eggplant.

  “I want this investigation to proceed with dispatch. I want this killer.”

  Fiona, Jefferson and Dr. Benton were dismissed together while the eggplant stayed behind. As soon as they were far from his office, Fiona turned to them.

  “My theory is correct. Something went wrong. I’m not sure what.”

  “Leave it alone,” Dr. Benton said. “Why belabor the obvious? They did their dance of self-defense.”

  “And now they’re going to sit on it.”

  “Not necessarily,” Fiona said.

  They looked at her and shook their heads together.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Jefferson said.

  “Leave it alone, Fiona,” Dr. Benton said. “You’re a cop in a bureaucracy. The game is to make the guy ahead of you look good. Look. We all gave it our best. All of us. Even them in there.”

  “But I think I know . . .”

  He lifted his hand, palm outward, like a traffic cop. It was the signal to stop.

  “Just try. Cold turkey. Later, maybe, you can confront it. Not now.”

  She tried to follow his advice. She took the next three days off. She cleaned her apartment, brought most of the books back to the libraries. Then she spent long hours in the police gym, working herself into a lather. She took long walks along the river, hired a bicycle and pumped for miles on the tow path. She visited Jefferson’s monument and caught the last lingering gasps of the cherry blossoms. She toured the Smithsonian, went to the Mint, joined the endless line of tourists on the FBI tour.

  She tried. She really tried, but she could not escape. Leave it alone, Fiona. Leave it alone, Fiona. It became a litany, and finally it grew meaningless with repetition. Her secretarial service picked up Bruce’s call, but she declined to call him back. That was over irrevocably. A need demanded to be filled at the time of its greatest urgency. For her, that had been her lowest point. Never again, she promised, will I allow myself that kind of vulnerability.

  Unfortunately, she discovered, loneliness was corrosive and without a human support system, her will cracked and by the third day she was back at her research. She reviewed her findings. The accuracy of the three previous episodes foreshadowed what must come next. She went back to the library and pored over whatever she could find on the criminally insane. Almost always the pattern was irrevocable in mass killers. They perpetrated murders with exactly the same MO in spaced intervals, responding to some inner need. A sexual psychopath attacked women only, mutilated them, performed sex on their corpses, but always it was the same. A killer in Atlanta attacked and killed only black children.

  As for Remington—if, indeed, he was the killer—the investigation required a massive commitment of time and effort to determine where, exactly, he was at the time of each previous killing. Surveillance had to be established around the clock. If she approached them now, they would think she was crazy. She could, of course, do it herself, but that required total immersion. One person was not enough. And if she was wrong, he could scream police harassment which wouldn’t sit too well upstairs. Besides, it was still only a hunch, the hated intuition, and it annoyed her to be afflicted with it.

  On Friday, she got into bed early and turned on the radio, half-listening as her mind tried to cool itself down. Even her excitement at what she considered her new theories on the Kennedy killing was losing its power. It was all theories, unprovable, although, she conceded, there would still be mileage in it for years to come. Especially for a politician. The Lincoln killing raised questions for more than a hundred years. Hadn’t Carter pardoned Samuel Mudd who had innocently set Booth’s leg? One could spend a lifetime on the research.

  She listened to a clergyman give a mini-sermon on the meaning of Good Friday. Then came the news. The President was going to see the Coward play. It was nearly nine and she began to drowse, succumbing finally. Her mind relaxed.

  Suddenly, as if her brain had been jolted with a bolt of electricity, she sat up in bed, her mind racing. Reaching for the telephone, she dialed Jefferson’s number.

  “You’re home?” she gasped, as she heard his voice. “I have it. I have it.”

  “What?”

  “Proof positive. Good Friday. It was Good Friday.”

  “What the hell . . .”

  “Just trust me, Frank. Trust me. Lincoln was killed on Good Friday.”

  “Say what?”

  “Not now, Frank.”

  “Sheet.”

  “The President. I just heard it on the radio. He’s gone to the theater tonight. The Kennedy Center.”

  She turned on the light and looked at the time. It was nine-fifteen.

  “Pick me up in fifteen minutes.”

  She bounded out of bed and jumped into her clothes. Before putting on her holster, she checked the cylinder. As she put on her jacket, she stopped and reaching again for the phone, dialed Remington’s number.

  The Spanish lady answered.

  “Where is he?”

  There was no effort at politeness, no preliminaries.

  “He has gone to the theater.”

  She hung up quickly.

  30

  HE had floated through the last three days like a cork on a river’s tid
e, certain that the relentless flow would be inexorable and that, at the appropriate moment, there he would be, bobbing in open sea. Not a doubt assailed his calm. Even the policewoman’s visit had left him unshaken. Indeed, he had actually enjoyed the cryptic duel. When the sun rose and set on April fourteenth, he merely refocused his expectations, and when the phone intruded on the Good Friday calm, he knew even before he picked up the instrument that the moment had arrived.

  It was his friend at the Kennedy Center. There was, he knew, nothing really sinister or suspicious in his request. By now, the theater management had been alerted and the elaborate preparation required for a presidential movement was in operation. The man was, after all, only going to the theater. He had explained to his friend that he was intent on putting together a theater party on the day of the President’s attendance. A party. Wasn’t that the principal business of Thaddeus Remington III, the capital’s most illustrious host, the multi-millionaire political contributor, friend to the powerful?

  Friday was the ideal day. Most of Washington’s social schedule, the state dinners, the embassy parties, the six to eights, all the demanding little entertainments of the capital’s official life, were scheduled Tuesdays through Thursdays. The weekends were for the plebians. On those days, the elite rested.

  There were eight chairs in the box in two rows, four abreast, and he planned to fill seven of them with suitable personalities, whose presence would continue to agitate in the wake of his cataclysmic act for years to come. Perhaps a millenium. When the Soviet ambassador, now dean of the diplomatic corps, accepted the evening’s outing, he knew that his little party would be a resounding success.

  Had he made it sound as if he were part of the President’s party? They would, after all, be occupying the box directly next to him. The penultimate symbol of power was always a seductive inducement. Wasn’t he the flame they all danced around and wasn’t the Soviet ambassador symbolic of the other superpower? He relished the conspiratorial theories that such nearness would suggest. Ambassadors always reacted with an eye on their home governments. Look, the Soviet ambassador would be telling his Politburo leaders, I am in the box next to the President. See what my connections are to the new American leader. Proximity, as they well knew in the Soviet Union, was a tangible measure of power.

  It was the same reason that induced the Saudi Arabian ambassador and his lovely wife to attend, another ingredient for his witch’s brew. Weren’t they the holder of the keys to the American energy prison? Certainly, the presence of the principal representative of such an aberrant power would spice the brew with a perpetual aftertaste. Naturally, the Saudi accepted, despite the fact that his country did not have diplomatic relations with the Soviets. The event, after all, was of too special a nature to be missed. Besides, the Arab mind relished symbols.

  To complete the seven, a number charged with its own mystique, he invited Bruce Rosen and, in a touch of irony that induced a giggle at the moment of its conception, Louise Padgett. She would recall a connection with that other assassination and Bruce, poor Bruce, would provide a line with another bizarre event in the Remington home. It would not take much digging to find a connection between Bruce and his former mistress, that suspicious detective lady.

  Everything would connect, assuring the world of a momentous explosion that would propel his name to instant immortality, beyond all the others that went before him and sending out the ultimate message. Denying him, Remington, the Presidency was, of course, part of the grand design, set in motion at the beginning of his life, at the moment of conception in his mother’s womb.

  It was all there to be savored, a gigantic feast, foreshadowed by the God-driven Guiteau, the anarchist Czolgosz, the twisted, impotent Oswald and the egocentric, willful Wilkes, to whom honor must be given for the final replication. It was in Wilkes that the force began its relentless march, illustrating its manipulative genius and perfection.

  The foreshadowing was pristine. A child could have seen it. But it had to be seen whole, in one flash. In the box with Lincoln, a wife who went mad, the woman later murdered by her husband, he, too, ending his days in an institution. Four ciphers brought together in one ill-starred night, destined for either murderous death or madness. Did this not transcend fate?

  And Wilkes, cornered in a barn ten days later, felled by an impossible shot alleged to have come from a man, Boston Corbett, who later castrated himself, and after his appointment as doorkeeper of the Kansas state legislature, closed all the doors and with two revolvers began to fire away at the members. Neither Corbett’s gun nor Wilkes’s were ever examined to determine who fired the fatal shot. Years later, the gun that Jack Ruby used to shoot Oswald was also never examined, the assumption being that millions had seen him do the deed and, therefore, it was not necessary to offer absolute proof. Little details meant to perpetrate mysteries. His would last the longest of all.

  Even those who played minor roles in the Lincoln drama showed the hand of the cosmic genius. The two men who barred the daughter of one of the alleged conspirators, Mrs. Surratt, from the White House to plead a pardon for her mother, a senator and a customs collector, were both killed by their own hands within eight months of the execution.

  And so it went. Connections! On the day Lincoln was shot, a crowd of fifty thousand armed with knives, guns and sticks were on the verge of smashing the office of Southern sympathizers when one man climbed on a platform and calmed the crowd. He was General James Garfield. An endless train of odd happenings, hints, clues to the transcendent power.

  There were the missing pages of Booth’s diary, implicated through a coded book found nearly a century later in a secondhand bookstore, that accused Secretary of War Stanton of having masterminded the Lincoln assassination; these connected as well to Nixon’s Watergate tapes. Nixon, who missed by a hair being elected in 1960, was accused of excising eighteen and a half minutes of damning tapes. How many pages were missing from Booth’s diary? Eighteen!

  The Kennedy matter, too, was an endless trail of odd signs that defied explanation. An autopsy without a forensic surgeon, an alleged second gun, the mystery of Jack Ruby. Oswald’s denial. An avalanche of theories that would never be fully proven, leaving the lingering doubts forever.

  They would be nothing compared with what he would leave them. Nothing. Because he was aware of the power within him. Every tissue, every cell, every nerve end had been dedicated to this one supreme moment.

  Hadn’t he tested and retested the credibility of his role, the linkage to a divine power that mocked any speculation that the mind of ordinary mortals could devise?

  “You must stay tonight,” he told Mrs. Ramirez, whose pattern was to visit her daughter every Friday night at her home in Arlington. He wanted to be sure his house was in order when they came to inspect it. Someday it would be a museum. He spent the day arranging the weapons he had used during the three previous episodes in his gun cases and carefully labeled the clothes he had worn.

  That finished, he picked up the letter he had prepared for the Post. He would mail it himself. Wilkes had given his letter to a fellow actor who later destroyed it, although he had read it first and reconstructed it for the investigators. He went to the post office where he paid the clerk extra for the overnight service.

  “Will it get there tomorrow for sure?”

  “We guarantee it.”

  He smiled at the black woman who stamped the letter and passed along his change, oblivious to the role she would soon play. Everything, every detail, every imagined nuance would be analyzed and reanalyzed. In this age of technical miracles, there would not be a detail that would escape the repetitive scrutiny of an army of investigators, legions of historians. His grave, in that spot next to his mother’s in the little cemetery on Nob Hill, would be a shrine to the man who warned the world of the fragile vulnerability of the Presidency and the need to elect the best, the very best, to fulfill the solemn task. As he might have been.

  He held the brass Derringer in the palm of
his hand, reviewed the way he had loaded it, the insertion of the percussion cap, the tamping of the powder, the wadding and finally the ball. Laying it carefully aside, he assembled the other artifacts that he would carry with him, essential symbols of comparison; the false beard, the makeup pencil, the gimlet, the Sheffield knife. Wilkes had carried two Colts as well, but he had needed them for his planned escape. He would have no need of them.

  He had instructed his male guests to wear black tie, which meant gowns for the ladies, implying an after-theater social event. The idea amused him. It was so in keeping with his life style and certain to add elegant spice to the historical details.

  After shaving carefully, he showered, lingering in the steaming water, cleansing every orifice. If he did not survive the evening, he wanted to present them with a well-cleansed and groomed corpse. In his bedroom, he watched his movements in mirrors, his flesh reflected in an aura of pink health. It was his mother’s flesh remembered as he had seen her in her full womanly glory. Those parts of him in the mirrors that did not reveal his sex, offered a reminder of days past, the curve of a buttock, the patch of a shoulder, the curly beginnings of his auburn pubic hair. Hers! His blood surged and he felt the old excitement as he watched that part of him twitch to life.

  “One more time, mama.” He felt her tousled delicate hair brush him there, her soft lips caress the ivory hardness. It came quickly, the joyous elixir of their consummated passion. I am here, my son, my man, her voice said.

  After dressing, he added the final touch, an evening cape with red silk lining.

  Before he left, he walked through the rooms of his house. Lovingly, he touched his scrimshaw, his marine artifacts, his exhibits of presidential memorabilia. If a picture seemed angled, he straightened it, an object out of place, he put it where it was supposed to be. Everything must be in its proper place. So it would be, for all time, beyond the memory of living man.

  “What time you come home, Señor Remington?” Mrs. Ramirez asked as he pushed open the front door.