American Sextet (13 page)

Her first act that day would be to rid herself of the
compulsion to continue to investigate Dorothy Curtis's suicide. That was total
madness. The eggplant had been right. As for Cates, she would offer no
explanations. He had been reluctant to pursue it in the first place.

Usually she made coffee and offered him a cup before
leaving, an idea she quickly rejected. She wanted no more post mortems. Clint
was right. She was not cut out to be a mistress. Too many traditional mores
against it had been programmed into her to keep it from working. It was time to
devote herself to her work again, to regain control over her life. Once she'd
been determined to follow an unwavering track in order to become the first
woman police chief in the history of the MPD. Indeed, the first lady chief in
the United States. Admittedly, she'd been side-tracked, although all she'd lost
was time in the process. She was still the best goddamned detective in
homicide, wasn't she?

Tiptoeing around the apartment, she selected a pocketbook
that matched her outfit and transferred her belongings. Then she buckled on her
piece, shifting it round so that it rested on the back of her hip.

Not looking at his sleeping figure in her bed, she started
toward the door, the new and restored Fiona ready to tackle the world. Before
she could grasp the knob the telephone rang, breaking the silence. Her first
reaction was to avoid it, turn the doorknob, flee. Instead, instinctively, at
the second ring she rushed to pick it up. Peripherally she saw him stir, the
arm move as he hoisted himself on his elbow, watching her.

"Fiona?" It was Dr. Benton's voice.

"Yes, Dr. Benton."

"I tried to get you last night."

There was a pause at his end. An ominous urgency flickered
inside of her, as if the new Fiona was wavering.

"I got the toxics back," he said. "On that
woman."

"Dorothy."

"Nothing," he said. "She was clean."

She felt a sense of disorientation, remaining silent,
turning her back to avoid Clint's stare. What had she expected?

"Did you think she was poisoned?" he asked.

Her heart lurched. Was Dorothy betraying her now? A nerve
palpitated in her temple.

"Yes," she admitted. By something, she added to
herself.

"It's only a suicide, Fiona." There was a long
pause. "Why did you think otherwise?" Like the others, he was
dismissing it, writing it off.

"Are you all right, Fiona?" he asked gently.

"I m not sure, Dr. Benton," she sighed.

"Leave it alone, Fiona. Accept it."

Accept what, she wondered, disoriented again, the earlier
resolve disappearing.

"She didn't have to die," she said.

"It's not police business, Fiona." He paused for
a moment. "Oh yes," he said, "the vaginal smear."

She had forgotten.

"Evidence of recent intercourse," he said.
"And that's no crime either, Fiona."

"Depends," she said, her resolve cracking. So she
was with a man before she died.

"It's not a crime, Fiona," he repeated before he
hung up.

The image of the ravaged young body returned to her
thoughts. I won't desert you, Dorothy. On the table near the phone were the
prints that Flannagan had given her, tossed aside now.

"Damn," she muttered, retrieving the plastic
envelope and slipping it into her purse.

She heard Clint's voice.

"Fiona?" It was tentative, slightly hoarse.

"Close the door on your way out," she said,
without looking back. "There's no need to make the bed." It was a
gratuitous remark, merely for effect, filling the void.

He had never made the bed anyway.

When Jason saw the account of the council meeting in the
paper the next morning, comparing it to what he had heard on the radio, he knew
he had it wrong.

"You screwed me," he shouted into the phone at
the man who had subbed for him, a stringer for one of the weeklies. The Fairfax
County Council had voted to rescind a sewer moratorium for one of the sewer
districts. Later, apparently after the man had left the meeting, they had
tacked on an addendum, putting a 60-day limit on the moratorium. A minor point,
perhaps, but not for
the
Washington newspaper and for a reporter under
in-house surveillance.

"So they'll print a retraction," the stringer
said. Jason had given him twenty-five bucks. "It's not that
important."

"You don't understand."

"Want your money back?"

He had hung up in a rage. He was too close to have
something go wrong now. The result was predictable. The editor of the Virginia section called him into the suburban office, a tiny clutch of desks in a
storefront with word processing computer connections to the main building.

"You fuck up, it's my ass," the editor told him.
He was a thin young man with an Adam's apple that bobbed up and down as if he'd
swallowed a ping-pong ball. Taking it from such a lowly flunky taxed his
self-control even more. Barely listening, he tried to think other thoughts, of
Dorothy and how far they had come in engineering his plan. Don't blow, he
warned himself, not now.

"It's not that important," he said, repeating the
stringer's line.

"It is to me," the editor replied, inspecting him
contemptuously. "I'm too young to be a has-been."

No you're not, Jason thought, a broad smile forming
inwardly behind a taut mask. You're going to be a never-was. Little did the
poor bastard know that standing contritely before him was a man who was sitting
on the juiciest story of the century, a man about to make history.

What he dreaded most was losing his accessibility to
Webster, who, despite other misgivings, would know a good story when he saw
one. Hang in there, baby, he told himself.

"I'm sorry," he said to his young superior.
"It won't happen again."

It mollified the man, but indicated to Jason that time
could be running out. They had to move faster.

Time!

It had come down now to the management of time. Dorothy's
time was being programmed like a computer. She was having affairs with five men
at once, a feat of planning that sometimes approached farcical proportions. To
keep them separated they had to resort to all kinds of creative subterfuge. At
first, when there was a conflict, he had instructed her to say she was having
her period. But they soon found out that keeping track of her cycle in five
different stages was almost impossible.

Finally, they managed to force the assignations to some
regularity. The men were all married. Most of them operated in a goldfish bowl
with assistants who scheduled their time. Also, the men were perpetually going
out of town on short trips, although keeping track of those schedules sometimes
proved formidable.

After a month of rotating the five, the scheduling process
boiled down to weekday evenings, one lunch hour and one weekend evening,
usually Sundays. The general seemed to prefer Sunday evenings, when he was
allegedly playing tennis at the club. The Czech had reserved Tuesday and Friday
evenings, the senator Wednesday, the congressman Thursday and good old Arthur
Fellows kept his lunch hour free every Monday

"We should make a time and motion study," he told
her one day after a repetitious debriefing. She didn't understand and he didn't
bother to explain it. The sexual parts had become, like a bad pornographic
movie, somewhat of a bore. But he continued to probe for any information
slippage that might be potentially embarrassing. In her wonderfully naive way,
Dorothy had filled up enough tapes with their indiscretions to fill volumes.
Still, he was not ready to end it. There seemed always to be more to find out.

They were also making an interesting collection of odd
gifts. Tate O'Haire wrote her erotic love poetry, scribbled in his own hand,
mostly describing their genitalia and his feelings about them:

"My sword of love stands firm
Awaiting thy secrets to confirm
Let me prove its power
In that special bower
And convert its hard steeling
To the ultimate joy of feeling."

Jason read the poem out loud, doubling up with laughter.
Dorothy became oddly disturbed by his reaction.

"He's sincere," she protested.

"Sincere?"

When she continued to pout, he let the matter drop.

The Czech ambassador gave her exotic foods. Senator Hurley
brought her leather souvenirs from his home state. And Arthur gave her matchbooks
from Air Force One and the luncheon menu from the White House mess.

"What's that?" she had asked, looking at the
special of the day. "I hate fish."

He made her bring all the gifts back to his Capitol Hill
apartment, where he stashed them with the tapes in his safe deposit boxes.

"What do you do with these?" she asked him one
day after she had seen him snap out a used cassette and slip it into his
pocket.

"I keep it in a safe place. Just in case."

"In case?" Her brow furrowed into a frown.

"Wouldn't want it to get into the wrong hands."

She thought for a moment, her frown deepening.

"That would be awful." It seemed a half-satire,
and he could tell by her hesitation that more was coming. "Are they
helping you, Jason?"

"Who?"

"My boyfriends. I hope they're helping you ... like
you said they would if I ... you know."

"Oh yes," he said, remembering. "They
are." It was, he knew, a vague assurance. Somehow he caught a warning in
her words and it troubled him. He hadn't expected the reminder. "Just
trust me," he said, knowing it was a weak response, but hoping she would
understand his emphasis.

"You know I do, Jason."

Just the same, he was still troubled.

The taped information continued to grow in volume and value
and he found himself perpetually disgorging the information in his mind,
putting it into palatable journalese.

Another strange thing was developing between them. She
seemed to be soaking up information subconsciously, like a transmission line,
inert but alive. It was as if some built-in sensor was picking up signals and
translating them back to him. She had become a medium and the bits of
potentially damaging information strewn around in her mind were being quickly
converted into a battery of lethal weapons.

The general, aside from his outspoken views on his
colleagues, the secretary of defense, and even the President, whom he also
called an asshole, was particularly vociferous on the inability of the army to
function. Bad weapons. Bad manpower. Bad planning. Bad leadership.

Senator Hurley's verbal indiscretions revolved around the
sexual peccadillos of his colleagues. He confessed to her that he was having
affairs with other women. He also revealed that he was thinking of running for
President.

"He asked your advice?" Jason asked her, stunned.
"What did you tell him?"

"I said it would be good if he could still come to
visit me."

"You said that?" It staggered him. These are our
leaders! The revelations were positively lip-smacking. Was it possible? Could
she be inventing this?

"He also said the minority whip was a fag. I didn't
understand. I thought that whip stuff was something else."

When Jason laughed, she enjoyed it all the more.

"I really like these guys," she told him.

"Just don't like them too much," he warned her.
That look he'd seen on her face once before returned, disturbing him in a way
he couldn't fully comprehend.

What was incredible was that he, too, continued to make
love to her, and she responded with equal passion. It was as though all of his
past knowledge of female behavior had been trashed and remade.

The Czech ambassador brought her exotic foods and bragged
about his ability to circumvent the security apparatus of the United States, the Soviet Union and his own country.

"They are all stupid," she reported the Czech to
have said, "especially the Russians."

He had her repeat it for the benefit of the recorder. It
seemed to spill from her mind with uncommon clarity.

"He said he likes the renewal of the cold war. He
keeps telling his country that the U.S. is planning trouble, so they keep him
here. He says he made nearly a half-million smuggling out certain Czech works
of art from the U.S."

"He told you that?"

She shrugged, indicating a dubious comprehension, but it
did not stop the flow.

"And they got paid in diamonds. His wife smuggled them
out in her cunt."

"My God."

"He said they couldn't get them out. He had to search
all over town for long thin tongs."

It was incredible. Again, he made her repeat it into the
tape recorder. Would they believe this? he wondered.

From Arthur Fellows, Dorothy relayed a picture of
backbiting and intrigue that had spilled over into violence.

"He said the secretary of state hauled off and hit the
secretary of defense, breaking two teeth. He said he was the only witness and
had to separate them. But not before the defense guy kicked the state guy in
the balls."

She had to repeat that as well.

"Should be worth another fifty thou..."

"What?"

"Go on."

"Also, he said the President's wife demanded the
resignation of the secretary of energy because she overheard him call her iron
pussy." He remembered the language of the Watergate tapes and the great
gap they illustrated between the private and public person. Tearing away the
facade of probity had become big business and he, by God, was going to be
chairman of the board.

"So that's why he resigned," Jason recalled.
"I thought he said something about personal commitments."

"He also said the President is taking drugs to control
high blood pressure. He said he's the only one who knows that, besides his
doctor. The prescriptions are made out to Arthur."

What she had told him moved from the bizarre, to the
fantastic, to the incredible. Was it her ingenuousness that was so disarming?
It was not possible for her to be inquisitive. Yet he was beginning to acquire
a nagging presumption that she knew more than he had imagined. The things they
confided seemed appalling. Was their need for expiation so strong that they
felt compelled to empty their substance, psychic and sexual, onto this
absorbing human blotter? Indeed, perhaps she was becoming more than that...

"What is it in you that makes them feel so safe?"
he asked her.

She smiled proudly. "They're good old boys. They trust
me."

Not once had she indicated a sense of being used or abused
by any of them.

"It's all going to make you rich someday, Dot,"
he said.

"Rich? How?" Her concern was tangible. Had he
seen panic in her eyes?

"You'll see."

As always, he quickly squelched any further explanation.

The tapes, after two months, had filled up three safe
deposit boxes. Still, he wasn't ready. If he were to discredit the entire
checks and balances system, he would need a member of the Supreme Court. It was
the final mountain to be climbed.

Accessibility posed the biggest problem when it came to
members of the court. They were outside the hurly-burly of politics and did not
need to mix socially, except as a form of entertainment.

Using the
Washington Post
library of clippings, he
pored over everything he could find out about the personality of the men on the
Court. A female member had narrowed his choices down to eight. Four were
eliminated because of age. Not a breath of scandal emanated from the remaining
four. They were all upright family men of sterling character, long tested in
the crucible of peer investigations and public conduct.

Another obstacle was their natural reclusiveness. They
shied away from publicity and rarely granted interviews. What he could glean
from the clippings was mostly dated or peripheral knowledge. One was a weekend
sailor. Another a part-time cabinet maker. Only one seemed to offer the
remotest hint of accessibility, Associate Justice Orson Strauss. His hobby was
walking. He walked every day from his home, an apartment in Shoreham West, two
blocks from Dotty's place, to the Supreme Court building, a distance of five
miles.

Because it was a daily thing, it had a predictability that
intrigued him and the man himself was, according to some accounts of observers,
open and gregarious, a reasonable possibility.

He and Dorothy stalked him for three days, sitting in Jason's
car parked near his apartment house. He came out at precisely five forty-five
every morning, wearing a gray jogging outfit, walking at a steady pace. His
path was invariable. He would move east on Calvert Street, turn south on
Connecticut Avenue, continue to Seventeenth Street past the old State
Department Building, then along the great parade route toward the Capitol and
his office in the Supreme Court Building.

"Can you do that?" he asked her after they had
confirmed the regularity of Justice Strauss's schedule.

"Hell, yes," she said proudly. "I've always
walked a lot."

Looking at her, her eyes wide with a special pride, he
could not resist hugging and kissing her. For the first time since they had
begun, she seemed more eager, more dogged than himself.

"A Supreme Court justice. Now that's something,"
she said.

"You're getting quite a lesson in how America works," he said, somewhat facetiously.

"Yes, I am," she responded with intensity.

"Soon," he whispered, leaving the comment
unfinished. It was a matter he was not yet ready to deal with.