Dead Watch

by John Sandford

  “Yeah. Are they important?”

  After a long silence, she said, “He’d never take those out of his wallet. Those are . . . If he left them behind, they’re a suicide note.”

  “A suicide note?”

  “Yes. He would have known that I would know. He was sending me a message. They’re pictures of his parents, his sister, and himself. They were personal icons. He never would have left them behind, anywhere. They’re a suicide note.”

  “A suicide note only works if somebody finds it,” Jake said.

  “There’ll be something in his papers, somewhere, that’ll tell me where to look. Or maybe his mother knows, she’s still alive. But Jake: he knew he was going to die. Either he was being stalked, or he’d do it himself. But he knew.”

  He opened his mouth to tell her about the three-by-five card, and then stopped. He’d rather see her face-to-face for that. If all this meant his disappearance, he wanted to see her face when he gave her Lion Nerve. To see if it registered . . . What’s this, Jake? You don’t trust her?

  They talked for another two minutes, and Jake said, “I’m going to see Rosenquist.”

  “Call me tonight. Tell me what he says.”

  When he got off the line, he said to Patzo: “Your lucky day. I’d like to see your buddy’s face when you ask him to get rid of a diamond-studded dog collar.”

  Patzo’s face broke into a beauteous smile. “Jesus, man. I mean, this is my life, right here. This dog collar . . .” He held it up, half wrapped in a piece of toilet paper. “I got a retirement.”

  “You think you can get back to Baltimore on your own?” Jake asked.

  “Sure. Lemme make a few calls, maybe take a train back. Could you gimme a couple hundred bucks? I don’t like those fuckin’ airplanes,” Patzo said. “What are you going to do?”

  Patzo made his calls, gave the antique table a long, lingering look, patted it good-bye, and left Jake alone in the apartment.

  When he was gone, Jake found the most comfortable chair, pulled it over to a window, where he had a clear view down Park Avenue, and thought it all over. All of it, from the circumstances of Bowe’s disappearance, to Schmidt and the poorly hidden gun, to Barber, to the mystery call that led him to Patterson, to the missing medical files.

  To that morning’s kiss.

  Everything that had happened ended in a mystery. He had almost no resources to solve any of them . . . with one exception.

  He sat until it was dark, working it out. And when it was dark, the red taillights streaming up Park Avenue, electronic salmon on the way to spawn, he pushed himself out of the chair, turned on a single light, went into the master bedroom, and got the gun and holster from the back of the headboard.

  He pulled the gun out, checked it, ejected the five .38 shells from the cylinder.

  When they’d gone through the apartment, they’d found a toolbox in a kitchen drawer. Jake used a pair of pliers to pull the slug out of one of the .38s, dumped the powder down the sink, washed it away.

  He loaded the empty case back in the pistol, turned it until it was under the hammer, found a knee-high woman’s boot in the closet of the second bedroom—part of Madison’s New York clothing cache—shoved his hand in the boot, holding the gun and the boot between two pillows, and pulled the trigger. There was a muffled crack, and the smell of burning primer.

  “Hope the cops don’t do any forensics up here,” he muttered to himself, as he was putting the boot back in the closet. He opened a couple of drawers in Madison’s dresser, took out a pair of black panty hose. He pulled them over his head, asked the mirror, “How do I look?” He considered himself for a moment, then said, “Like some moron with a pair of underpants on his head.”

  He took them off, refolded them, put them away. He couldn’t wear them past a doorman anyway.

  He went back to Madison’s dresser, sat down, looked at himself in the mirror. He looked all right, he thought. Like a bureaucrat or a college professor just back from vacation, who hadn’t had a chance to get his hair cut, who stayed in shape with handball.

  There was nothing he could do, without a makeup expert, to make himself look like a thug. He didn’t have the scars under the eyes, he didn’t have the oft-broken nose, he didn’t have the shiny forehead. He did have the scalp cut. If he combed his hair just so . . .

  He could definitely go for the insane look, he decided. He half smiled, thinking that he should have kept the Hello Kitty hat.

  He went through Madison’s drawers, then through Lincoln Bowe’s, found a comb and a tube of hair gel. Went to the bathroom, gelled his hair, swept it straight back. Gelled it some more. The gel made his face look thinner, his head smaller, like a Doberman’s. And it made him look a little trashy. Expensive trashy, a street guy who’d lucked into a thousand-dollar suit. Better.

  Stared at himself in the mirror again, took a quarter out of his pocket, put it between his upper right gum and his cheek. Talked to himself in the mirror, while holding the quarter in place with cheek and lip pressure: “Hi. I’m a killer for the CIA, and I’m crazy. I’m here to put a bullet in your head . . .”

  No. He was being cute. He didn’t want cute, he wanted cold. He rehearsed for another moment: “Get your fuckin’ ass on the couch, fat man . . .” More gravel in the voice: “Get your fuckin’ ass on the couch . . .”

  Rosenquist lived on the twelfth floor of a co-op apartment in the Park Avenue six-hundreds, a bulky granite building with a liveried doorman. One of the residents, leading a dog only slightly larger than a hoagie, went through ahead of Jake. The doorman nodded and she took the elevator. When the lobby was clear, Jake walked in. The doorman straightened and Jake asked, “Dr. Rosenquist?”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Andy Carlyle.” No point in going on record with the doorman. “A friend of his died and I helped clean out the apartment. I found some, mmm, personal items that I believe belong to Dr. Rosenquist.”

  The doorman called up. After a brief chat, he handed the phone to Jake. Jake took it and said, “Hello?”

  “This is James Rosenquist. What do you have?”

  “Your friend’s wife asked me to clean out, mmm, his apartment.” Ostentatiously not using the name. “I found some, ahh, jewelry. There were some personal papers, plus a note that said that you should get the jewelry. One of the pieces is leather with diamonds, two are separate gold chains.”

  “Give the phone back to Ralph. I’ll tell him to send you up.”

  In the elevator, Jake said aloud, “Tough and mysterious. Tough and mysterious. CIA killer. Movie killer, movie killer, movie killer . . .”

  Looking at himself in the elevator mirror, he did a quick recomb of his hair, baring the shaved strip and the stitches. The Frankenstein vibe. When he was done, one lobe of the greased hair had fallen over his forehead, and he liked it, a vague Hitleresque note to go with the Frankenstein. He put the quarter between his gum and his left cheek and said, “Here’s lookin’ at ya.”

  No. He was being cute again. No cute. He needed crazy.

  Rosenquist was a blocky, round-faced man dressed in sweatpants, a half-marathon T-shirt that said, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE, and slippers. A soft man, fifty pounds overweight. He had a glass in his hand. Dance music played from deeper in the apartment. Jake bobbed his head and held up his cane and the briefcase, tried to look like a polite CIA killer, and asked, “Dr. Rosenquist?”

  “Better come in. You recovered these things from Linc’s apartment?”

  Rosenquist had closed the door and Jake took two quick steps down the hallway and looked into the living room. Empty; music playing from a stereo in the corner. Jake turned back and said, his voice as hard and clipped as he could manage, “Yes, but we disposed of them. I used them as an excuse to get in here. I want to know what you did with Bowe’s medical records.”

  Rosenquist stopped short, his lips turning down in a grimace, and he growled, “Get out.”

  “No. We no longer have room to fuck around.” Jake stepp
ed closer to him, and then another step, and Rosenquist stepped backward. “You’re right in the middle of this, Rosenquist, and people are getting hurt. I need the records.”

  Rosenquist moved sideways, his hand darting toward an intercom panel. “I’ll get . . .”

  The gun was in Jake’s hand, pointing at Rosenquist’s temple. “You don’t seem to understand how serious this is, fat man,” he said. “I’ve been told to get the records. I will get them, one way or another.”

  Rosenquist’s hands were up, his eyes wide: “Don’t point the gun at me. The gun could go off, don’t point the gun.”

  “The records . . .” The quarter slipped and Jake caught it with his upper lip: a snarl, a sneer.

  “There are no records, there are no records,” Rosenquist babbled. “Whatever records there are, are in my office, but they’re meaningless. He never had anything wrong with him.” But he was lying; his eyes gave him away, moving sideways, then flicking back, judging whether Jake was buying the story.

  He wasn’t. Jake waggled the gun at him. “In the living room. Put your ass on the couch, fat man.”

  “There are no records . . .” Rosenquist sat on the couch.

  Jake said, “What were you treating him for?”

  “I wasn’t treating him, honest to God.” Lying again.

  Jake looked at him, then said, in a kindly voice, “I’ve had to kill a few people. In the military. And a couple of more, outside. You know. Business. I didn’t like it, but it had to be done. You know what I’m saying? It had to be done. These people were causing trouble.” He hoped he sounded insane. The quarter slipped, and he pushed it back.

  “I know, I know.” Rosenquist tried a placating smile, but his voice was a trembling whine.

  “This is the same kind of deal, when you get right down to it,” Jake said. He said, “If you move, I’m going to beat the shit out of you.”

  “Listen . . .”

  Jake flipped open the gun’s cylinder, shucked the shells into his left hand, and Rosenquist shut up, his eyes big as he watched. Jake picked out the empty shell, with the firing pin impression on the primer. Held it up so Rosenquist could see it, slipped it back into the cylinder, snapped the cylinder shut.

  “Now,” he said. He spun the cylinder.

  “Gimme a break,” Rosenquist said. “You’re not going to do that.”

  Jake pointed the pistol at Rosenquist’s head and pulled the trigger. It snapped, nothing happened. Rosenquist jumped, his mouth open, his eyes narrowing in horror: “You pulled the trigger. You pulled the frigging trigger.”

  Jake spun the cylinder: “Yeah, but it was five-to-one against. Against it blowing your brains out. Though maybe not. I can never do the math on these things.” The quarter slipped, and he stopped to shove it back in place with his tongue. Drooled a bit, and wiped his lips with his hand; saw Rosenquist pick up on the drool. “It’s supposed to be five-to-one every time, right? But if you do it enough, it’s gonna go off eventually, right? How many times on average? You’re a doctor, you should have the math. Is it five times to fifty-fifty? Or is it two and a half times to fifty-fifty? I could never figure that out.”

  He pointed the gun at Rosenquist’s head again and the doctor’s hands came up as if to block the bullet, and he turned his face away and blurted, “He had cancer.”

  “Cancer.” Jake looked at him over the barrel. “Where, cancer?”

  “Brain. A tumor.”

  “How bad?” Jake asked.

  “Untreatable.”

  “How long did he have it when he disappeared?”

  “He’d had it for probably a year, but we’d only known about it for a few weeks. Growing like crazy. Nothing to do about it. When he went, he was already showing it. He was losing function, physical and mental. He had some deep pain. We could treat that for a while, but not for long.”

  “Was he planning to suicide?”

  “I think so. I don’t know. I don’t know what happened with this . . . beheading. I don’t know. He told me to keep my mouth shut. He was my friend.”

  Jake stepped back, flipped the cylinder out again, reloaded the gun.

  “You’re going to kill me?”

  “I don’t have to,” Jake said. “If you say anything about any of this, it’ll all come out. Prison’s not the best place for a fat soft gay guy. You’d have to deal with it for a long time.”

  “I can’t believe Madison had anything to do with this,” Rosenquist said, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

  “Jesus Christ.” Jake laughed, his best dirty laugh, shook his head, drooled again, wiped his lips. “You’re just so goddamned dumb, fat man. This is way past Madison Bowe. You don’t know what you’ve done with this little game. You don’t know what you’ve stepped into. The FBI’s in it, the CIA, God only knows what the security people are doing. I know the Watchmen are working it and there’re some guys working for Goodman you wouldn’t want to meet. They’ll cut your fuckin’ legs off with a chain saw. Madison Bowe? You fuckin’ dummy.”

  “If you’re not with Madison . . .” Rosenquist was confused. “Who are you with?”

  “Best not to know,” Jake said. He smiled the crooked coin-holding smile. “It’s one of those deals where I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

  Old joke; Rosenquist recognized it, at the same time he seemed to buy it. Jake pushed on: “So. Mouth shut, ass down. Maybe you’ll live through it—though I don’t know what the other side’s thinking. Wouldn’t destroy any records, but you might put them someplace where your lawyer can get them if he needs them. They’re about the only chip you’ve got in this game.”

  And he was out of there.

  On the street, clear of the building, walking fast, he called Madison. “I think I should come and see you,” he said.

  “Come on,” she said.

  Then he started to laugh. If his grandmother had heard him up there, using the language, she would have washed his mouth out with soap.

  So he laughed, and the people on the sidewalk spread carefully around him; a man, alone, laughing aloud on a New York street, in the dark. Not necessarily a threat, but it pays to be careful.

  12

  On the way back in the plane, Jake tried to work through what he knew: that Lincoln Bowe had been dying, and that Bowe had known about a scandal, a package, that would unseat the vice president of the United States, and, if delivered at the right time, probably the president as well.

  They did not fit together. He kept trying to find a way, and not until they were coming into National, the Washington Monument glowing white out the right-side window, did one answer occur to him.

  He resisted the idea. Struggled again to find a logic that would put all the pieces together—but Occam’s razor kept jumping up at him: the simplest answer is probably the right one.

  And the simplest answer was very simple indeed: they weren’t related at all.

  Jake got out of the cab at Madison’s a little after midnight. The front-porch light was burning, and Madison opened the door as he climbed the stairs.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Come in . . . You look exhausted.”

  “I’m fairly well kicked,” Jake admitted. “The days are getting long.”

  They drifted toward the front room. “Tell me,” she said.

  “I’ll tell you, but you can’t ever admit knowing, all right? It could put you in legal jeopardy. If you have to perjure yourself, and say you didn’t know, that’s what you do,” Jake said.

  “What happened?”

  “Rosenquist didn’t want to talk. I faked a Russian roulette thing, using a pistol of your husband’s. I pointed it at Rosenquist’s head and pulled the trigger. That’s a felony, aggravated assault. But he started talking. I hinted that I was from some political group, maybe even an intelligence organization. I told him I didn’t know you.”

  “Jeez, Jake.” She was standing close to him, and put her hand on his elbow.

  “We had to know,” Jake said. “He
re’s the thing: he told me that your husband had brain cancer. He was terminal. Rosenquist said there was no chance he’d make it. When he died, he was already showing functional problems, both physically and mentally. That explains the press reports that he’d been drunk in public. That he seemed to be on the edge of control . . . He was medicated. I think he killed himself—had himself killed—and tried to hang it on Goodman.”

  Her hands had gone to her cheeks. “My God. But . . . his head?”

  “He might not have known the details, might not have worked through the logic of it. On the other hand, maybe he did. They couldn’t leave the head. They had to know that it would be destroyed, completely, or an autopsy would have shown the tumor. Best way to get rid of it would be . . . to get rid of it.”

  “That’s unbelievable.” She was pale as a ghost.

  “You don’t believe it?”

  “No, I sort of do—but I can’t see anybody planning that. It’s too cold.”

  “I was told by somebody who knew him that Lincoln had a mean streak . . . a mean streak can mean a coldness. Maybe he could do it.”

  She walked away from him, both hands on top of her head, as if trying to contain her thoughts. “I just, I just . . .”

  “Novatny told me the autopsy indicated that Lincoln had been drugged—painkillers. We thought it was to control him; it was actually for the pain. I’d bet he was unconscious when they did it and I’ll bet you anything that Howard Barber set it up. He was Lincoln’s best friend, they share both a sexual orientation and a set of politics. They both hated Goodman, and Barber had done some rough stuff in the military. He had the skills, the guts, the motive, and Lincoln could trust him to do it right.”

  “The Schmidt man?”

  “I think he was set up. By Barber. I didn’t have a chance to dig for connections, but they were both in the military at the same time. Schmidt was given a general discharge, which usually means a kind of plea bargain. He did something, but they didn’t want to waste time with him, or maybe they didn’t want the publicity. I’ve got some access to military records. I can probably figure out what happened.”