Dead Watch

by John Sandford

  Late morning. One of Johnson Black’s assistants brought over two sacks of groceries, mostly vegetables, and Madison began making veggie chili, which she told Jake that he’d love. At noon, dressed in a blue suit with a green tie—not an intuitive match, Madison said, but it looked terrific—he got in the car and headed for the White House. The moment he backed into the alley, he was surrounded by shouting reporters. He eased through them and headed east.

  Danzig, Gina, and the president’s counselor, a sober middle-aged woman from Indianapolis named Ellen Woods, were waiting in Danzig’s office. Woods had the package in a black leather portfolio. She was dressed in a blue power suit; her eyes were like black flint. “We want you to inventory the items before we go over,” she said, glancing at her watch.

  Jake went through it quickly: it was intact. “It’s all here.”

  “Then let’s do it,” she said.

  They went in a presidential limo. Danzig called twice while they were en route, though the trip took only five minutes. “Just wondering if we were there yet,” Woods said dryly.

  Novatny, Mavis Sanders, and three other high-ranking FBI functionaries and lawyers met Jake and Woods in Sanders’s office. Woods pointed Jake at a chair, gave the feds a brief oral explanation of the materials, and then handed over the package.

  Though he’d been warned, Novatny was astonished. He asked Jake, “Wisconsin? Wisconsin? You knew about this when Green and his secretary were killed?”

  “There were rumors here in Washington of a package like this. I was checking them out—I went out to Wisconsin because I’d learned that Green and Bowe had been lovers, and that Green was well connected around the state,” Jake said. “My feeling was, if he didn’t know about the package, he might be able to point me at somebody.”

  “And he pointed you at this Levine woman? Wait a minute . . . I don’t understand the timeline.”

  Jake took him through his arrival in Madison, the morning interview, the afternoon discovery of the bodies, and then he began to lie a little.

  “Green told me he didn’t know about it but he could make some calls,” Jake said. “I gave him a specific name: he denied knowing it. Later, when I tracked the woman down—this was the next day—she admitted that she did, in fact, know Green. By that time, I had the feeling that I was in the grip of a political conspiracy to damage the administration, and that it might all be a fraud set up by Lincoln Bowe. I brought the package back for evaluation, and the instant we realized that it might be valid, the president ordered me to turn it over to you guys.”

  The FBI people all sat back. “You’re willing to talk to a grand jury?” one of them asked.

  “Absolutely. But I don’t have a lot of information. All I have is fragments. I pressed Madison Bowe on the subject and she knows even less than I do. It appears that Mrs. Bowe was deliberately kept out of the circuit by her husband, as a way to protect her.”

  “I understand from media reports that you and Mrs. Bowe are friendly,” one of the feds said.

  “Yes. We are. But most of this developed before we became . . . friendly.”

  “And you think there was a conspiracy,” one of the suits said.

  “Yes, I do. I think—I’m not sure—that it was set up by Lincoln Bowe, when he found out that he was dying from brain cancer. I think it was carried out by Howard Barber. I think the body was burned to attract the kind of intense press attention that it got, and I think the head was removed so that an autopsy would not show the cancer. I think if he is exhumed, an analysis of his spinal fluid would show the presence of cancer cells. Mrs. Bowe knew none of this—she never even saw him after the cancer diagnosis. They lived apart.”

  The feds all looked at each other, and one of them said, “Heavy duty.”

  “Did Barber kill Green?” Novatny asked.

  “Barber or one of his group,” Jake said. “I don’t know that for sure, but that’s what I suspect.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  One of the functionaries, looking like he couldn’t wait to get to a telephone, said, “And the vice president is going to resign?”

  “Yup,” Jake said. “He’s toast.”

  After a moment of silence, the sober, middle-aged presidential counselor said, “Given his home state, more like a grilled-cheese sandwich.”

  When Jake got back home, a little after three o’clock, the place smelled wonderful, though meat-free. Madison was still cooking, barefoot in jeans, wearing one of his T-shirts, crunching on a stick of celery. She stood on her tiptoes to kiss him, asked, “All done?”

  He thought, What a gorgeous woman this is, and said, “Everything we’re going to do, unless there’s a grand jury—and I’m sure there will be. But that’s probably not going to happen until after the election. You Republicans don’t want to talk about what Lincoln did, we Democrats don’t want to make the Landers mess any bigger than it is . . . so it’ll be a while.”

  “I still don’t want to go to prison,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about it. You could get hit by a car before then.”

  “God, you’re such a comfort.”

  “Mmm . . .” He looked at the potful of chili. “Think we could stick a pork chop in there?”

  They ate early. As they were eating, Fox flashed a newsbreak: “Sources at the White House are telling Fox News today that there is speculation the vice president will resign. We repeat: Vice President Landers may be resigning his office. Sources say he has been accused of corruption going back to his administration in Wisconsin . . .”

  “In my day, when I was on TV, you generally didn’t let your nipples show through your blouse,” Madison said.

  “Poor girl’s excited,” Jake said. “She can’t help herself.”

  “I think we should go into seclusion,” Madison said. “The New York apartment—we could leave a phone number for Novatny.”

  “If we did that, we could walk over to the Met, down to MoMA.”

  “Museum of Natural History.”

  “Spend a lot of time in the bathtub,” he said.

  “Down on Madison Avenue. I could use a new hat.”

  “Hide out until midnight,” Jake said. “Catch the red-eye out of National.”

  “Good idea.”

  A minute later, he said, “Sooner or later, I’ll go down to talk to Arlo. We need an understanding.”

  “Is he going to be vice president?”

  “No. As I understand it, the front-runner is the senator from Texas.”

  “Hmm. Our first female VP,” Madison said. “It’s gonna be tough to get you fuckin’ Democrats out of there, if all the girls are voting for you.”

  “That was the thought,” Jake said.

  The vice president announced his resignation at seven o’clock, his weeping wife, in a pale orange dress, seated behind him. Landers was a large man, pink and fleshy, with thick political hair going white.

  “If these absurd and tendentious charges came at any other moment, I would fight them from office, as the president has urged me to do. But they are being made, as Lincoln Bowe was perfectly aware when he began this conspiracy, at the one moment when I could not afford to fight them from office—at the beginning of a long and difficult reelection campaign.

  “Bowe and his criminal gang have succeeded to an extent: I am going. But they attacked me not because they wanted to damage a mere vice president. They attacked me as part of a greater game, to damage our party, our president, and indeed the aspirations of the American people, as reflected by this presidency. I won’t allow that to happen. I will fight with all my might, but I will not allow the best American president since John F. Kennedy to be handicapped during a campaign of such great importance to the American people.”

  The speech was widely ridiculed in the papers and the television talk shows the next day, as was his wife in her orange dress, and his daughter, who was overweight, and who was filmed eating a caramel-and-pecan bun at a bakery near her apartment in Cambridge.

  T
he bodies of Darrell Goodman and George Brenner sat in the SUV for four days, until somebody got curious about the fact that the truck hadn’t been moved. When the somebody got close enough, he noticed a “peculiar odor” and called the cops.

  Arlo Goodman blamed the gangs, and vowed to free up more funds for gang-suppression efforts.

  The FBI announced a massive investigation under the direction of a special prosecutor, the federal district attorney from Atlanta, Georgia.

  “You remember when I begged you to appoint him,” Danzig said to the president. They were in the president’s private office, drinking a wonderful single-malt Scotch that the president had extorted from the distiller, using the British prime minister’s office as the pry-bar.

  “I remember that. I was reluctant. There was some question about his integrity . . .”

  “There was no question at all,” Danzig said. “He’s crookeder than Landers, and I’ve got the sonofabitch’s testicles locked in my desk drawer. That ‘independent counsel’ theory can kiss my ass.”

  Jake and Madison hid out in New York for two weeks, talking only to Danzig and Novatny. Then Jake called Arlo Goodman from a pay phone, and flew out to Richmond on a Wednesday afternoon. Goodman walked out of the governor’s mansion at six o’clock, the sun sliding down in the sky, told his bodyguard to take a break, and met Jake at the corner.

  They walked along for twenty yards without speaking, looking at the day: a good day in Richmond, summer heat coming on, but not there yet; flowers in the gardens next to the sidewalk. Two men walking, one with a limp and a cane, the other with a bad hand half curled in front of him.

  Goodman opened. “That was a cold thing with Darrell.”

  “I didn’t invite him out there.”

  Goodman grunted. “Don’t bullshit me, Jake. You had him on a string and you pulled.”

  Jake said, “I wouldn’t have done it, if it weren’t for Wisconsin.”

  Goodman looked at him. “Wisconsin? You don’t think . . .”

  “I do think. I can prove it,” Jake said. “And I think I can prove you knew about it. Enough to thoroughly fuck you. Maybe, with the right jury, get you sent away for first-degree murder.”

  Goodman thought it over. Then, “Gimme a hint.”

  “Did they do an autopsy on Darrell?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then they would have found some scratches on his arms, already partly healed. Wouldn’t have been a big deal, given the rest of the damage. The thing was, the scratches were put there by the secretary out in Madison. The FBI took skin and blood off her fingernails. They don’t know who it belongs to; don’t know where to look.”

  “Darrell was cremated,” Goodman said.

  “Yeah, but you weren’t,” Jake said. “You share most of Darrell’s gene load. If they did a test on you, they’d know that the skin didn’t belong to you, but that it did belong to your brother. And I’ve rounded up a few pieces of paper. Cell-phone calls, state airplane records . . . they don’t make it a sure thing, but they would cause you some trouble.”

  “The dumb shit,” Goodman said. They walked along. “You can believe me or not, but I didn’t want those people in Madison to get hurt. Wasn’t any point in it. We wanted the package, but if we didn’t get it, knowing that you had it was almost as good.”

  Jake nodded. “You could have pushed it out there, the way you did on Howard Barber and Lincoln Bowe.”

  Goodman smiled, not a happy smile, but resignation. “Yup. But that fuckin’ Darrell . . .” He sighed. “If you mess with me, Jake, they’ll probably find the Madison Bowe surveillance tapes in Darrell’s safe-deposit box. They’d pretty much establish that she knew about the Landers package, and that she’s been lying about it.”

  “We know about the tapes, of course,” Jake said. “We’d hate to see them get out. Also, Madison has some . . . ethical . . . concerns about the investigation into Darrell’s death. We’d hate to see some poor broken-ass Mexican hauled up on murder charges, just so you can clear it.”

  “Won’t happen. I got my dumbest guys running that investigation.” A few more steps. “So we’re dealing?”

  “Mmm. We think everything is fine as it is now. We’ve got a good vice-presidential nominee, you’re the respected governor of the great Commonwealth of Virginia, Madison is recovering nicely from her husband’s death. Why stir the pot?”

  “That was exactly my thought,” Goodman said. “There’s no reason at all—no reason to stir up anything.”

  “What’re you going to do next year?” Jake asked. “When you leave office?”

  “I don’t know. Go fishing. Go on television. But I’m a pretty damn good public executive, Jake. I like the work and people like me. Would’ve been a good vice president . . .” He sighed. “Well. I’ll find something. Maybe the president will have something for me. A year from now, all this noise will be ancient history.”

  They didn’t shake hands; Arlo just peeled off as they walked back toward the mansion, said, “If you ever need anything, I’d hesitate to ask me for it.”

  “I will,” Jake said. “Hesitate.” And on the way back to his car, thought about Goodman hoping for a job offer from the president. Over my dead body . . .

  Danzig said to Jake, about the national convention, “There’s a big goddamn hang-up on the electrical work. We’ve got three different unions and two city councilmen going at it tooth and nail, and we need somebody to go talk some serious shit with them. Figure out who to talk to, how to get it done. The media’s already screaming about their booths, they can’t plan their setups until they can configure their booths . . .”

  “I’ve been spending some time in New York,” Jake said. “I’ve got a couple of guys I can call there. Probably a matter of money more than anything.”

  As Jake stood up to leave, Danzig asked, “You figure out what you want?”

  “I want peace and quiet,” Jake said. “However I can get it. However Madison and I can get it.”

  “I believe that can be had,” Danzig said. “I have a relationship with the special prosecutor, although you don’t know that. What else?”

  “That’s a lot. But there’s this girl who used to work for Arlo Goodman, as an intern. She’d like to move up to the White House. She’s smart, she’ll take anything. No big deal, though.”

  “Tits and ass?”

  “Excellent.”

  “Give me her name—we’ll find something,” Danzig said.

  “Thanks. I’ll get going on New York. What’s the timeline there?”

  “Gotta be done by yesterday,” Danzig said. As Jake got to the door, he asked, “Is this gonna be a full-time thing? You and Madison Bowe?”

  “We’re pretty tight. I don’t know—it could work out.” Jake hesitated, then asked, “Is Goodman gonna get behind us for the election? I know he wanted the vice presidency.”

  “The president’s talking to him next week,” Danzig said. “We’re worried about what happened down in Norfolk, with his brother. Unregistered machine guns, camouflage suits, it looked like an assassination went bad. Now all this stuff is coming out about interrogation techniques, and the Watchmen. I don’t know . . .”

  “I’ve been talking to people,” Jake said, and thought, Just take a second to fuck Goodman for good. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s going to surface when Goodman’s out of office, when he’s out of power down there. There are literally going to be bodies coming up. Death-squad stuff. I thought you guys should know about it. I leave the decision up to you; this is the only place I talk about it.”

  One of Carl V. Schmidt’s neighbors called an FBI man who’d left him a card. “Agent Lane? This is Jimmy Jones down by Carl Schmidt’s house, you asked me to call you if I saw anything going on down there? Yeah? Well, Carl just got back. What? Yeah. He’s standing right here. He’s a little pissed . . .”

  Carl V. Schmidt took the phone: “Hey. What’ve you guys been doing in my house? The place is wrecked. What the hell is going on here
?”

  After an active phone call, Schmidt agreed to wait at his house for an FBI man to get there for an interview. When Schmidt hung up, the neighbor asked, “Where’n the hell you been, Carl? Where’d you get that tan?”

  The president said to Arlo Goodman, in the Oval Office, “How the heck have you been, Arlo? Man, has this been a month, or what?”

  “This has been a month and a half, Mr. President,” Goodman said, as they sat down. Goodman crossed his legs. “The Lincoln Bowe thing . . . who would have thought?”

  “The man was crazy,” the president said. “Maybe the medication . . . or maybe he was just nuts.”

  “That’s my theory,” Goodman said.

  The president allowed the slightest frown to glide across his face: “I was shocked to hear about your brother. How’s that investigation going?”

  Goodman shook his head. “It’s going nowhere. Darrell was off on his own. I may have screwed up, letting him run too free, but he solved a lot of problems down there. Now . . . might be time to tighten the reins on the Watchmen.”

  The president nodded. “They seem a little too . . . what? Executive? A little too military?”

  “It bothers me,” Goodman confessed. “I think there are still uses for the organization, but more as a goodwill brotherhood. Remove any idea that there might be police functions.”

  “Excellent,” the president said, rapping the top of his desk with his knuckles. “Listen, I’m almost embarrassed to ask, but how heavily can we lean on you for the campaign? You must be tired, you have your own problems. I suspect you might have liked the vice presidency . . .”

  “You did exactly the right thing, there, Mr. President.” Goodman was embarrassed; he could feel himself brownnosing. “She absolutely guarantees that you’ll carry Texas—and she’ll be a good vice president, to boot. As for me, I’ll do whatever you want. Work as hard as you want me to, or go as easy. Actually, I think this campaign is gonna be fun. We’re gonna kick ass and take names.”