The silence was back to positive. “I’ll see you at Martin’s.”
“Yup. Listen, one other thing. Don’t mention any of this to Bowen. Okay?”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t anyway.”
“Good.”
Minutes later, as Potamos and Blackburn hurriedly undressed, she again expressed her objections to the way he was playing Fiamma along. He responded, “Do I tell you how to play a song?”
She giggled. “Of course not. You don’t know how.”
“So, since when do you know how to deal with murder?”
“A song is different. Murder is… well, it’s people.”
“That’s right, and I know people. You know music.”
She sighed. “All right, Joe, but I still don’t think it’s nice to lie to a college student. Besides, if you keep pursuing this after your boss told you not to, you’re going to end up in big trouble.”
“Bigger than that, my dear. Probably fired.”
“And then what do you do?”
“Write a book. But first…” He kissed her belly and ran his hand down, and up, and down, and up her leg.
“You know what?” she said as she turned to face him.
“What?”
“That’s what’s wonderful about sex. Once you’re started, the rest of the world goes away.”
“That’s right,” he said, nuzzling her neck. “It’s like an oasis, an hour of freedom.”
She laughed. “Joe…”
“What?”
“An hour? I’m due on stage in half an hour.”
| Chapter Sixteen |
Potamos wedged himself between other customers at the bar in Blues Alley and ordered a beer. Served, he turned, leaned back, and listened to Roseann and three black musicians weave their way through an up-tempo version of “All the Things You Are.”
She seemed so small and delicate in the midst of the three big men sharing the bandstand with her, but her playing certainly wasn’t frail. Potamos listened and watched with keen interest and appreciation. He didn’t understand how the four of them could blend together without having rehearsed, each improvising against the underlying chord structure of the song, the bassist nimbly providing a smooth, walking bass line beneath the vigorous, flowing lines of the tenor saxophonist, the drummer creating a sheet of sound on multiple cymbals, the drumstick in his left hand and the bass-drum pedal beneath his right foot injecting unexpected punctuations, Roseann feeding a series of complex chords to everyone, her head bowed over the keyboard, long fingers probing the rich musical colors available to her. When it was time for her solo, she wove a series of choruses, each building in intensity until she’d exhausted her ideas of the moment. The customers applauded her enthusiastically, which made Potamos feel good. The quartet extended the tune’s ending until it just faded away, the overtones of their instruments drifting into space along with the cigarette smoke.
“You came,” Blackburn said once she’d navigated customers who wanted to compliment her and reached Potamos at the bar.
“Yeah. You were great, really great.”
“Thank you. I become very inspired playing with musicians like them.”
“I can understand that. They’re good, too.”
She smiled. “Feel like a walk?” she asked. “The smoke gets to me.”
“Sure.”
She told the bartender they’d be back and they left the club, went down the narrow alley from which the club drew its name, and down Wisconsin toward the C & O Canal. The night was balmy and humid, a precursor of the long, sticky Washington summer that wasn’t far away. They held hands, said nothing to each other until crossing the canal and standing alone on the far side.
“I met Fiamma. He gave me a portion of Valerie Frolich’s diary,” Potamos said.
“Then he did have it.”
“Yeah, he has it. How and why, I don’t know, but he has it. He’d only give me selected pages. He’s shrewd and tough, Roseann. He wants his name on a story before he’ll share the rest with me.”
She sighed and looked toward the Potomac. “You can’t blame him, Joe.”
“Of course not. Roseann, some of what he gave me is dynamite.”
She faced him. He put his hands on her arms and felt a tremble in her body. “Cold?” he said.
“No. Concerned.”
“About the diary? Why?”
“Not just the diary, Joe, about all of it. It involves murder.”
“I know, but why should that scare you?”
“Because I’m… because I’m involved with you.”
He grunted and looked down at the ground. “Are you saying you don’t want to be involved with me anymore?”
“Oh, Joe, I don’t know what I mean. I’ve spent my life with music. That’s all I know. It’s a beautiful way to live, making music, maybe not profitable, but satisfying, and simple—I play, I get paid. The people I spend my time with are happy because of the music. They laugh and dance. When I play in places like the Four Seasons, I see them touched by a song. Maybe they remember something pleasant from the past, or a song starts them thinking a new way. The right music sets a romantic mood for couples, or picks up the spirits of somebody who’s blue about something. When I work with musicians like tonight, we share a wonderful bond that few people can understand. Like I said, Joe, it’s beautiful and simple.”
“And I complicate it.”
“Not you, Joe, but what you do for a living, this whole Valerie Frolich thing. I don’t understand why you want her diary. Give it to the police. They’re the ones responsible for it, not you.”
“Not true, Roseann. My job is a lot like theirs. I’m supposed to dig until I find something interesting for a story. That’s my training and that’s my job. Having the diary means I’ll be able to scoop everybody, be first, maybe even be the one responsible for solving the murder. That’s important to me.”
“I know, and it isn’t to me. I wish it were.”
“You do? Why?”
“Then maybe we could… I should get back. I like to talk over a set ahead of time.”
“Okay, but can’t we see each other?”
“I’ll be very late, Joe. I’ll probably go out with the band after, get something to eat, rehash the night. We don’t get many chances to play top places like Blues Alley.”
Potamos had another beer and stayed through the next set. He told Roseann at intermission that he was going home, and asked her to call him the minute she got in. He knew the moment he said it that it set up, for her, that feeling of having to account, so he added, “Only if you feel like it. If you don’t, we can talk tomorrow.”
“I’ll call,” she said, kissing him gently on the lips. “And I do want to hear about the diary. I’m sorry. I can be very selfish sometimes.”
He grinned and kissed her again. “You play great. I envy you.”
***
His envy multiplied as the night progressed, especially when he thought about the idea of a simple life. He’d contemplated that often, thought about how much he wanted one, but always ended up asking himself why, if he wanted it so bad, he didn’t go after it. He came to the reluctant conclusion that something inside him craved chaos and living on the brink. If not, why two divorces? Why the turmoil in his career? Why was he in an awkward, frustrating position with George Bowen again? You’re a professional screw-up, he told himself. Some errant gene or unresolved argument with his father. Maybe a shrink would help… Nah—probably make things worse and charge handsomely for the privilege.
His phone rang at one o’clock. He hoped it was Roseann calling from the club. It wasn’t. Tony Fiamma said, “What’d you think?”
“I’m… I haven’t finished,” Potamos lied. He’d read the selected pages of Valerie Frolich’s diary three times, and was on the fourth.
“Remember, no copies,” Fiamma said, reading Potamos’s mind. He intended to photocopy the pages first thing in the morning, maybe even look for an all-night drugstore with a copying machine.
>
“Don’t worry about it,” Potamos said. “Look, call me tomorrow,” he added, thinking of Gil Gardello.
“Let’s just meet,” said Fiamma.
“I have a crazy day, Tony. Call me here tomorrow night.”
“Hey, you’re not playing games with me, are you?”
“You feel that way, hook up with somebody else.” Potamos said it with as hard an edge as he could muster.
“I didn’t mean anything by it, but that diary…”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s your ticket to stardom. I’ll tell you this, Tony, for me to make a decision, I’m going to have to see more.”
“More? Why?”
“So far I really haven’t seen much I can use.”
“You’re nuts. What about the Bowen stuff?”
Potamos didn’t want to let on that he’d read everything, so he said, “I didn’t get to that yet.”
“You read slow.”
“And you’ve got a big mouth. Tomorrow, call me tomorrow.”
A dejected Fiamma agreed and hung up.
Potamos dozed off in a chair at three. He was convinced he wouldn’t hear from Roseann, but the jarring ring of the phone at 3:30 proved him wrong. “Where are you?” he asked sleepily.
“Home.”
“You want to come over?”
She hesitated.
“I can come there,” he said.
“If you wouldn’t mind,” she said. “I’m beat.”
He arrived a little after four. She’d made coffee and had heated a tray of frozen Danish pastries. They sat in her kitchen. Roseann could see that he was excited. “The diary?” she guessed.
He smirked and handed her the pages Fiamma had given him. She held them like a teenage boy holds an infant, tentatively and with trepidation. “Go ahead,” he said, “read.”
She went to the living room and settled on the couch beneath the single light of a floor lamp. Potamos stayed in the kitchen for a half-hour sipping his coffee and staring out a small window.
“Joe,” she called.
He went to the living room and sat beside her.
“She mentions George Bowen,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“The others—do you know any of them?”
“Yeah. Steve McCarty’s one of the seminar students. Walter Nebel. The other names don’t register with me.”
She handed him the pages and his eyes focused on a section describing a weekend spent in an inn in Leesburg with McCarty. Most of Valerie’s entries were poetic responses to what she’d seen and done that weekend. There was a long discourse on how she felt about McCarty, some of it positive, much of it cruelly negative. She alluded to their lovemaking in a circumspect way, nothing graphic, an indication of gratification one night, disappointment another.
The section devoted to Walter Nebel was based upon a weekend at the same Leesburg inn. It was less personal than the McCarty pages, dwelling more on vast philosophic and intellectual differences between her and Nebel. He obviously was an ambitious young man, a climber impressed with wealth and position, at least from Valerie’s perspective. There was a strong hint in her writing that she felt Nebel’s interest in her had more to do with her father’s position than with any attraction she exuded. She’d confronted him about it that weekend, and they’d fought. She’d written:
The hoop of power is dangled before the callous, ambitious young Walter and he leaps through it, again and again, always hoping to please his master, to be rewarded with cold water and biscuits and, if he jumps enough, happiness ever after as the bureaucratic dog seeking pats on the head and fur booties for his feet. No, just young and dumb and without spine. Unfortunate. He is handsome. A shame his coal-miner beginnings didn’t stay with him. Would be an interesting package if they had.
Potamos flipped through more pages, saying as he did, “I keep thinking about Leesburg. Why Leesburg?”
“Because it’s a beautiful place for a weekend with a lover,” Blackburn said. “I know the inn. I’ve played it. It’s lovely, very quaint and old-fashioned.”
“Yeah, I know what you’re saying, but that’s where Marshall Jenkins has his retreat. So does LaRouche, another right-winger. He owns half the town.”
“So? What does Marshall Jenkins have to do with this diary? You can go to an inn there and not have anything to do with Jenkins and LaRouche or anyone else.”
“You’re right, but it keeps crossing my mind, that’s all. Senator Frolich and Jenkins being so close, and Bowen and Frolich’s kid sneaking off for trysts there. Silly, I guess.” He found another page and handed it to her. “This is the Bowen stuff. You read it?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think?”
She shrugged. “Looks like they had an affair. That’s what I get from it.”
“What else could you take from it?”
“Well, it could be the sexual fantasies of a young, impressionable woman.”
“No way,” Potamos said, again reading what Valerie had written:
… the older man, the excitement of it, the stuff sexual clichés are made of—there she is, the young, sexually yearning student, wide-eyed herself but seeing a bigger, more interesting world through his eyes, through his wisdom, through his nurturing and mentoring, so skilled and gentle compared to the too-anxious young men trying to prove they are men—the older man, the professor (professor, no less!), sinfully handsome, body lean and without the folds expected in men his age—and the mind, bursting through in such a physical way and enhancing the sexuality—the professor and the student—Valerie Frolich, poor little rich girl, and the erudite, romantic professor, George Alfred Bowen—a soap opera—so what????—why limit one’s sexual experiences only to peers?—so silly and confining and absolutely sophomoric—what’s to be learned from it—and that’s everything, isn’t it, to learn, to keep learning?
“She doesn’t say she was intimate with him,” Roseann said. “It could be just a sexual daydream, sitting in class and writing a… a soap opera.”
“Can’t be,” Potamos said.
“Okay,” Roseann said, tucking her bare feet underneath her and adjusting her crimson robe over her breasts, “let’s say they did have an affair. What does it mean? Can you write about that?”
“No,” Potamos said, “and that’s what’s wrong with these pages. Fiamma gave me just enough to whet my appetite. There’s nothing here except confirmation that she had affairs with Steve McCarty and Walter Nebel. McCarty denied it. Why?”
“Maybe because he’s afraid it will involve him. I can understand that, Joe. He dated her, didn’t kill her, and can do without becoming a suspect just because he took her away for a weekend.”
“And Nebel takes off. Why’d he do that?”
“Same reason, I suppose.”
“And Bowen slept with her.”
“Maybe.”
“Likely.”
“Possible.”
“Probable.”
“Whatever.”
Potamos crawled into bed while Roseann practiced a batch of new tunes in the living room. He closed his eyes and allowed the music to drift into his consciousness. There was something very special about being there as she created music. He considered it a privilege and wanted to tell her that, but at the same time didn’t want to disturb her.
The phone jarred his reverie. Roseann answered and shook him totally awake. “It’s Tony Fiamma.”
Potamos slowly got up and stretched, yawned, and picked up the receiver by the bed.
“What’s going on, man?” Fiamma said.
“Huh?”
“Somebody broke into my room, man. I just came back and the place is a mess.”
Potamos was almost afraid to ask. “The diary?”
“No, I had it with me.”
Potamos’s sigh was audible across the room. “They take anything, Tony?”
“No, just turned everything upside down. I don’t like it. No, sir, I sure don’t like it. You know nothing about it, h
uh?”
“What are you getting at, Tony, that I’d break into your room to find the rest of the diary?”
“I don’t know, but somebody sure as hell did. I have to see you.”
“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea. Bring the diary and we’ll get it copied.”
“And what, you take a copy?”
“Sure, why not? We’re working together, aren’t we?”
“I wonder.”
“Well, just keep wondering, Tony. I’m your best shot. Of course, you can go to the police and be a good citizen.”
Fiamma laughed. “What’ll I get for that, lunch with some politician and a plaque?”
Potamos laughed, too. “There you go being greedy again. A plaque? Stick with me. Want breakfast?”
“Yeah. What time is it?”
“Six-thirty. Meet you at eight?”
“Where?”
“The Florida Avenue Grill. You know it?”
“Sure, that’s the diner where the cabbies hang out.”
“You got it. Eight.”
Before leaving Roseann’s apartment, Potamos handed her the diary pages and asked her to hide them somewhere.
“Joe, I’d—”
“I’ll pick them up tonight. I just don’t want them with me when I see Fiamma. Okay?”
“Okay.” She placed them beneath sheet music in her piano bench.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Take care, huh?”
“Sure. Get some sleep. Hey, what are we doing tonight?”
“I’m working. The Four Seasons.”
“Maybe I’ll stop in. After?”
“I think I need a couple of quiet nights alone, Joe. Okay?”
“Sure. Me too. I have to go out to see the kids this weekend, probably Saturday. Save me some time Sunday.”
| Chapter Seventeen |
“Here’s the APB that went out on Walter Nebel.” The officer from Communications handed it to Languth. “And here’s a background on Nebel.”
Languth sat back and skimmed the pages, then picked up a similar background check on Samuel Maruca. Both Nebel and Maruca were from Pennsylvania—Nebel from Pittsburgh, Maruca from New Castle, about fifty miles north. Both fathers worked in the mines. Maruca had been a star high-school athlete, excelling in football and wrestling. Nebel had been more of a student, but had been a state all-star in track, and had played on the basketball team. Both students were on scholarships at Georgetown University. Neither had ever been in trouble with the law. Family means in both cases were meager.
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