by Warren Adler
"Tough when they lose their status," Fiona mused, remembering her mother after her father had died.
"There's some cache in being an ex-wife. You get to keep the name, for example." He lifted his chin. "Like her."
"And she goes to the best places."
"She deserves it," Monte said, bending closer to her ear. "Old Sam certainly unloaded her wagons. Now it's little Nell's cross to bear." Fiona looked over at Nell, whose pose was of one deeply interested in what the Ambassador had to say, while her eyes drifted frequently to take in the sight of the Senator and Helga. On the surface, it seemed to Fiona as quite innocent. Bunkie and Helga seemed to be doing most of the talking.
"Ten to one Sam and Helga are locked in an undercover crotch hold," Monte said.
"A regular gambler," Fiona said.
"I don't gamble," Monte smirked.
"Considering where he wants to go, you'd think he'd know better," she whispered, surprised at her judgmental tone.
"Can't kick the one-eyed monster," Monte sighed, taking another deep sip of wine. She turned to look at him, slightly puzzled, until she realized what he meant, then, like a doe-eyed virgin, she felt herself blush.
"Sorry to put it that crudely. The man's incorrigible. Like tonight. Blatant stuff. In a minute he'll be asking all the girls to dance, little Nell for openers. You included. A red herring for what he really wants."
"How does he manage it? A man in the public eye?"
"That's old Bunkie's job. He's the staff man in charge of nooky. Plays the role, though. Beard, pimp, arranger. Also does the kiss-off routine when things get too hot. Valuable job in this town."
"And nobody knows?" Fiona asked.
"We try to keep it in a tight little group."
"Then why are you telling me?"
She turned to him. He shook his head and smiled.
"You're a cop. I trust you."
After a while the Senator stirred and asked his wife to dance. As Monte had predicted, then came Bonnie-something, who had barely uttered a word. On cue, Fiona came up on the dance card. Actually, the Senator asked Monte's permission in the old-fashioned way. Monte shrugged his consent. Fiona snickered her distaste. I dance with whomever I please, she told herself pugnaciously, then let the Senator lead her to the dance floor.
Close up, she felt the tightness of his body, his absolute sense of confidence in the way he held her. His dance technique, a bit heavy on the pelvis, was a blatant flirt.
Actually Monte had spoiled her discovery. The Senator was a natural seducer. She would have liked to find that out for herself.
"You're the prettiest homicide detective I've ever met," he whispered, pulling her closer for the compliment. Was he making a move? she wondered. "Maybe someday you can tell me how you do it."
"Do what?"
"Find the killers."
He twirled her around the floor, chuckling. Despite the warning bells, she felt strangely comfortable in his arms. She even felt, she allowed herself to admit, tiny tingles in the right places. Son-of-a-bitch had the stuff, she decided, providing him with a nickname on the spot. Senator Love. Hands-down that was it. Senator Love.
"Odd work for a politician's daughter, cops," he said as they moved around the floor. The sexual statement made, he moved to a more cerebral subject. Even his way of putting her on hold was a class act. Often, he would nod and smile at the other dancers.
"What did your father do?" she asked.
"A minister, actually."
"Well then," she said, leaving the idea unfinished. He quickly caught the innuendo.
"We do only the possible and leave the miracles to God."
Peripherally, she could see his first wife as she two-stepped toward him. Inexplicably, she found herself resisting his lead as if the confrontation was to be avoided.
"Hello, Sam," his ex-wife said as she whirled past. Close up she looked bigger than life, big bosom, a round face. Pleasing plumpness filled out the skin, holding back any discernible wrinkles. She was a picture of strength. Hardly an ex-anything.
"Frances," he acknowledged, offering a thin smile. She felt a snicker of contempt escape his lips. No love lost, she decided. But the greeting seemed quite civilized.
"You have any children?" Fiona asked, embarrassed suddenly by her oblique curiosity.
"Just two. Eight and six," he said, offering no details. None with the other, Fiona thought, oddly relieved. The band stopped and he led her back to the table.
"Now," Monte said as the band struck up again.
The Senator and Helga got up to dance. It seemed a cue for all the others. The Ambassador and Nell, Bunkie and Bonnie.
"Bad knee," Monte smiled, explaining himself.
"Really?" Fiona asked.
"Time to watch the fun."
They watched. Helga's slender body melted into the Senator's, although above the waist the dance had the illusion of decorum.
"Surely not tonight," Fiona asked.
"Never at night," Monte clucked. "That's his modus operandi. He's a matinee man and Bunkie's a past master of scheduling and timing. Easier to elude detection."
"Does little Nell know?"
"Oh, I'd say she might suspect about the sport fucking. It's the serious stuff that she's on the lookout for." He looked at the Senator and Helga intent on keeping their pose casual. "Like that."
"Must be exhausting work," Fiona said.
"Keeps her on her toes."
Fiona watched them. Without Monte's running revelations, she might have missed it. They didn't appear obviously improper. Not unless the idea was put into your mind. Her gaze wandered to the Ambassador and Nell, talking as they danced. Occasionally, on a turn, Nell looked toward her husband and his partner. Was it a look of curiosity or anxiety? For a moment, her eyes narrowed as she watched them, as if she were making a great effort to pierce the invisible veil in which the two seemed shrouded.
At one point in the dance, the big woman, the ex-Mrs. Langford, sailed past. She, too, seemed to be observing the Senator and his partner. When she passed him, she offered a smile. But the Senator was oblivious, his attention directed exclusively to Helga Kessel. Fiona watched her smile hold, then fade as she swung out of his line of sight.
The poor bastard is on display, Fiona thought, her sympathies suddenly with the Senator. In deference to this idea, she allowed her eyes to wander elsewhere, but only for a few moments. Senator Love drew her gaze back to him like a magnet.
2
"HARD NIGHT, FitzGerald?"
It was Cates' clipped exaggerated Bahamian British singsong pouring into her ear from the instrument that lay beside her on the pillow. She had heard its ring through the fog of sleep, a relentless assault on her attention.
She managed to squint into the red digital face of the clock perched on the antique dresser.
"Six in the a.m., you bastard," she moaned, still disoriented. "We're cops, not obstetricians."
Four hours, she calculated. That was all she had slept, a deep pass-out kind of sleep.
"We got old bones," Cates said. She wondered if he was enjoying the intrusion. She had told him she was going to this party, had expected a late night. They weren't due until three in the afternoon. All signs had pointed to a routine day, late shift. In the background she could hear the relentless cacophony of heavy rain banging against the house.
"Do me a favor, Cates. No cryptic. Not now."
Wine invariably translated into morning headaches. She imagined there would be other poundings among last night's assemblage, but inclusion did not comfort her. They simply poured too hard and she had not had the will to stop her lapping. Poor Monte's loquaciousness had been cut off abruptly at its source. After he had passed out in the back of their cab, she had had to half-cajole and half-cart him into the house, where he was now sleeping it off in the downstairs den.
"Literally old bones, Fi," Cates said, abandoning his torturous singsong, getting to the serious nub of things, his usual demeanor.
"
Why us?" Fiona said with a sigh, feeling the sour backwash in her mouth, remembering further. She supposed that in a day or two her judgement would be that she had had fun at the Pepsi bash. Even the sudden squall that had crashed down on the party had failed to upset the festivities. Apparently the host, rather than send the guests home on the river in the hard rain, had managed to organize a giant fleet of cabs and limos to return all guests to Washington, albeit two hours later than scheduled.
All that talk about Senator Langford's sex life had been interesting, of course, although at the moment it seemed quite inconsequential to her life.
"Again the obvious. It's the eggplant's bigoted sense of demographics. The old bones are on your turf." He sucked in a deep breath and she pictured his delicate nostrils twitching, always a sign of his inherent disapproval. Like her, his Bahamian ancestry, accent and faintly mulatto skin tone assured his fish-out-of-water status in their inner-city, black, street-smart environment.
"So once again. Cates, I got to carry you on my lily-white ass."
"My fate, Fi," he whispered.
Her turf, in the eggplant's mind, was the clearly defined bounds that housed the power elite. At first she had railed against this pigeonholing, demanding equality of assignment. There was logic to it, of course, considering her background. Also resentment, although she had earned a grudging respect when she broke the hard cases.
Lifting her naked body, she sat upright on the bed, determined to gather her wits and attain some degree of professionalism. She could hear his breathing at the other end of the line.
"Where?"
"Woodland Hills. Just off Rock Creek. Yesterday they were bulldozing for a swimming pool. Apparently the rain did the rest."
The chill on her naked skin revived her somewhat.
"How much time?"
"Pick you up in ten," Cates said with a hint of a smile in his voice.
"Make it fifteen," she said.
"I'll split the difference," he said as she slammed the receiver into its carriage. She padded across the room into the shower and turned on the cold taps, screaming herself into alertness.
One thing she could say about the eggplant, he got his priorities right. A homicide happening in certain neighborhoods like Georgetown, Woodland Hills, Cleveland Park and upper Massachusetts and Connecticut Avenues to the District line—the hallowed Northwest quadrant—put the ball in her personal court. Parts of Capitol Hill were on a par and certain pockets elsewhere as well. Everyone knew exactly where. It was a class and money thing, well beyond race. In D.C. this was where, as he put it, the "powah resahded." And, as everyone knew, the "powah" must be served.
THE RAIN had continued through the night and looked certain to be one of those long, soaking spring rains that cast a different tone of light on the city, putting everything, from the wedding-cake buildings and monuments to the people themselves, into sharper definition.
She watched the windshield wipers make little progress against the slanting rain as Cates drove through Rock Creek Park, respecting her need for silence. The normally benign creek was churning white water beside them as Cates hurried the car to the Woodland Hills area, where the wooded backyards of the western line of large homes backed up to the park.
They spotted the site by the police cars parked along the shoulder of the road and the uniforms poking around in the wet tree-studded land that dipped sharply upward toward the rears of the houses.
They got boots and slickers from the trunk of the car and, getting handholds on stubborn brush, maneuvered their way up the slope to a plateau carved out of the hillside. Yards away loomed a large house, three stories high from the rear, with a wide stone terrace edged with a gracefully winding stone balustrade. Obviously the owners planned a large pool and deck. A bulldozer stood idle at the bottom of the muddy hole that would one day be the pool.
Flannagan's technical boys were already on the job, but all that seemed called for was to bag the bones and check the area for related artifacts. Large floodlights had been set up to enhance the rain-shrouded grey light. A police photographer snapped a series of photographs showing the bones, which were still intact.
"It's all here, the skeletal remains," Flannagan said. Fiona could see them clearly visible in the strong light, which also defined the heavy rain. "Can't be sure of the sex," he said, squinting upward and winking, his usual prelude to some gross joke. "Not without skin around it."
"Or how long it's been there," Fiona muttered, ignoring his remark. She was standing at the edge of the excavation and looking downward at the skeleton. "Bag some earth around it as well," she told him.
Cates jumped from the edge of the excavation to the bulldozer then moved toward the far wall of earth where the skeleton was lodged.
The body looked to be buried at the furthest end of the lot about four feet deep, and the area around it now formed a shelf about halfway down the excavation. Apparently the men digging the hole had used shovels to unearth the full length of the skeleton after it had been uncovered by the action of the bulldozer.
"Get it to forensic," Fiona said. "At least we'll have the sex. I hope they can tell how long it's been there."
Cates, standing at the bottom of the muddy excavation, inspected the bones from stem to stern. She watched him move suddenly, his hand reaching out. Then he called up to the photographer.
"Get down here and get this," he said, rain splashing about his head. His boots were three feet deep in water and mud.
"What is it?" Fiona asked.
The police photographer, using the bulldozer as a bridge, scrambled down and, following Cates' finger, took his pictures. Then Cates fiddled with one of the bones and with his pencil lifted an object and put it in a plastic bag. Fiona waited for his answer.
"A slave bracelet," he shouted up at her, holding the plastic bag to the light. "Name of..." He squinted at it. "Looks like Mabel."
Cates scampered up the bulldozer again and jumped to where Fiona was standing along the edge of the excavation. He showed her the plastic bag.
"Very narrow. Looks like gold," Fiona said, her mind finally ratcheting forward, concocting theories. Her head had cleared. She was working. All other considerations vanished.
"Nothing else visible," Cates said.
The kind of bracelet suggested a younger woman. One riddle quickly solved. She couldn't quite make out the engraving in the poor light.
The men began to bag the skeleton with great care and Fiona and Cates wandered to the terrace, where an older couple watched the proceedings. Both wore matching red flannel bathrobes, which gave the illusion that they were twins. Actually they were a married couple named Parker. He was ruddy with cherub cheeks and bushy grey eyebrows. She was a washed-out bleached blonde, and the gloomy greyish light was not kind to her wrinkles. They both looked angry, as if the messenger was somehow the cause of this dilemma.
"It does take the enthusiasm out of the project," Mrs. Parker said. Mr. Parker shook his head and sighed in agreement. He seemed to be muttering under his breath.
"How long have you been living here?" Fiona asked.
"Three years."
"Probably before your time," Fiona said, asking, "Remember who owned the house before you?"
"Matter of fact I do. Fella named Prescott. Worked for Cap Weinberger. Assistant Secretary of Defense I think he was, an early Reagan appointee."
"About 1980 then."
"Might have been second wave, maybe '83."
"And before that?" Cates asked.
"How the hell should I know? We were out of the country. I was Ambassador to Kenya. Democrat. Carter appointee." He hadn't cracked a smile. "This country's changed, I tell you. Bodies in the backyard. Got any idea who it was?"
"You know a Mabel?" Fiona asked. Parker looked at his wife, whose wrinkles seemed to have multiplied in the harsh light.
"Soft and able," Parker said with an air of disgust. "Goddamned house cost me two mil."
"Gives me the creeps now," the woman shivered.
"How can I ever go into the pool now? How awful. How absolutely awful."
Fiona, who had been taking notes, snapped her notebook shut. She could see their point. She started back toward the excavation and the way they had come.
"What do we do now?" Mrs. Parker called after her.
Fiona turned.
"Build the pool," she snapped. "And call us if you find any more bodies."
3
"I HATE OLD bones," Captain Luther Greene said.
"Ups the statistics of open cases," Fiona acknowledged.
Captain Greene, known affectionately—and often derisively—by colleagues, supporters and foes as the "eggplant," had been drumming that point home now that politics was in the air again. The Mayor, getting ready to run for a third term, needed better statistics for his law-and-order stance, much better. The crack and gang wars had escalated, driving the homicide rate through the roof and scaring the hell out of the voters.
By definition, it was homicide—violent, brutal and ugly. But, in fact, it was really urban combat, not the kind of homicide that challenged the imagination, offering a puzzle of motives and a mysterious cast of suspects. Still, every murder counted in the statistics. They were rising ominously. The Mayor wanted them cut. And he was the boss, lord of influence and promotions, career maker and breaker.
The eggplant had assigned her and Cates to rummage through some of the recent open unsolveds and a number looked very promising. He needed them to stay on that track. It was a political necessity.
The eggplant was a political animal, often too political, which partly accounted for the negative aspect of his sobriquet. Cops, in general, despised political pressures. Unfortunately, few cops could move up the ladder without understanding these realities.
The eggplant understood. In fact, despite his vanity, short temper, sarcastic arrogance and obsessive ambition, he held the respect of his co-workers since, above all, he was professionally talented and instinctive and often wise and cool under pressure.