American Sextet (2 page)

The question that was in everyone's mind was, was the
killer white or black? In the MPD such thoughts always came first. The
department was very sensitive about its competence. Whenever a murder wave hit,
the eggplant became the pressure point of the MPD brass.

"We're missing things," he shouted, banging his
fist into his palm. Behind him was a blackboard with a short list of clues. The
air in the room was smoke-filled, stifling, and Fiona felt exhausted from her
early morning bout with Clint. Her eyelids were like small weights and she
fought to keep them opened.

Suddenly Cates jabbed her thigh and she looked up to see
the eggplant, his dark face shiny with sweat, glaring at her.

"You see me later, FitzGerald," the eggplant
shouted. As always, he needed a scapegoat. Although the rebuke awakened her, it
did nothing to help her concentration and she struggled to look attentive.
Again the jumper surfaced in her thoughts. Trouble over a man, Cates had said.
Was such trouble worth dying for? She shivered, recalling her relationship with
Clint.

After the meeting the eggplant, who hadn't forgotten,
summoned Fiona into his office. As always, several ashtrays on his desk
overflowed with cigarette butts. His black hands gripped the desk's edge, and
she was sure his smoldering anger was magnified by her white female face.
Office gossip had it that his wife mistreated him. Pussy-whipping, they called
it, not that the eggplant could do anything about it--his wife was related to
the MPD chief's wife. When under the gun, the poor bastard got it from all
sides. But when he dished it out, his victims were carefully chosen. Taking
flak from the eggplant had become an accepted part of the job, like leave,
pension rights and coffee breaks.

"This case may not be a big deal to you,
FitzGerald," he began in a low voice. For appearance's sake, his barbs had
to be muted. She was, after all, a double minority, which meant double
protection--another source of irritation to the son of a bitch.

"I'm sorry," Fiona said, determined to disarm
him. "I was absorbed with the jumper." She felt stupid for being
caught drowsing, but she had enough of her own personal pressure and didn't
want to deal with the eggplant's problems--not now. The look of smoldering
anger didn't subside, and instinctively she knew that any effort to placate him
would have little effect.

"No white-assed twat is going to bust morale around
here. You don't know what's comin' down. We have an Atlanta here and we've all
bought it. They're just looking for a chance to show up us dumb nigger cops."

There it was. "They." The ubiquitous white enemy.

"Why don't you put me on it?" she said brightly,
ignoring his mood. Instantly, she knew it was a mistake, like throwing a match
on dry tinder.

"Sheet," he said, lifting a cigarette from a pack
and shoving it in his mouth. "You like puttin' us down, white
princess." The cigarette stuck and bobbed on his lower lip as he spoke.

"No need to get racial," she mumbled, feeling the
Irish temperament rise like an expanding bubble in her chest. Cool it, mama,
she ordered herself, thankful that he took time out to light his cigarette.
Inhaling deeply, he exhaled the smoke through his nostrils, like a black
dragon. Her comment was gratuitous--she knew that everything around them was
racial by definition.

"I'm gonna bust this fuckin' case before it gets out
of hand and I don't need no shit from you." He appeared to have already
forgotten her transgression.

"I'm sorry," she said.

Seeing it from his point of view softened her--it was no
more personal than usual. Her brief drowse had simply ruffled his dignity.

"This jumper..." she said, trying to keep his
anger deflected. There were times when he could be quite rational about police
business. She avoided his eyes and took out her notebook, using it more as a
prop than an aid.

"There may be more to it."

She rattled off details, the absence of a note, or some
other tangible sign, the uncommonly neat apartment, her youth, her beauty, her
pretty clothes, the lack of any male evidence. His disinterest was obvious.

"I don't need this," he muttered, inhaling again,
the cigarette burned down to a nub. Removing it from his lips, he squashed it
into the butt pile in his ashtray.

"I know about female jumpers," she said quickly.
"It just feels different." Was she fishing for his commitment to
further the investigation? He turned away, looking out of his window at the
rain-slicked street.

"I'll know more when I get the medical examiner's
report." Somehow she was unable to put the matter to rest. The dead woman
seemed to be goading her, flaunting her death. Trouble over a man. Clint, you
bastard, she cried out to herself. None of them was worth it. She remembered
how she had broken up with Bruce Rosen, the congressman. A triumph of will over
emotion. Had Dorothy, too, been put to that test and failed?

"Gimme a break lady," the eggplant said.

He was right, of course. Suicidal motivation was for the
psychiatrists, not cops. Besides, there was a backlog of naturals. He couldn't
spare the manpower for something so inconsequential, having already diverted
most of the squad to the can murders. His back was to her now, his shoulders
hunched over in frustration. The hell with it, she decided. Who needs this?

When she finally left him she noted that the office was
deserted, except for Cates.

"Don't ask..." she said.

"I got a make on the jumper."

She shrugged with disinterest. Returning to her own desk,
she sat making doodles on a notepad.

"Personnel office at Saks, where she worked. The woman
was from a place called Hiram, Pennsylvania. Probably coal country. I called
there."

She tried to ignore him.

"I got a next of kin, a second cousin in Hiram, with a
real pollack name. Zcarkowiz." He read it aloud and spelled it.
"That's her real name as well. Her parents are dead. Apparently all the
brothers split. The cousin's an old lady. Won't claim the body."

From the way he hesitated, she could tell there was more.
She wanted it to end.

"About a year ago, a newspaperman came through Hiram.
Did a piece about unemployment in the mines.
Washington
Post
. She
left town with him." He hesitated, perhaps noting her indifference.
"The cousin still had the clipping. The reporter's name was Martin."

The name meant nothing and she stood up and slapped her
notebook shut.

"Don't you see," he said. "I found the man
in the woodpile."

She was thinking instead about the man in her own woodpile.
The fate of Dorothy what's-her-name had certainly called him to her attention.

Picking up the phone, she dialed Clint's number.

Below them, the Potomac slowly flowed eastward, its surface
glinting in the high noon sun. The front windows of Jason's Cutlass were open
on both sides, catching sparse midsummer breezes.

"Wrong," Nolan said for what seemed like the
hundredth time.

Jason Martin continued to press him, his reporter's pad
ominously perched on the windshield shelf. He had put it there deliberately, a
symbol of his power. Occasionally Nolan held it in his gaze, a rattlesnake he
was determined to avoid.

It was a test of wills. A simple question lay at the heart
of it. Did someone on the vice-president's staff leak the China grain deal to favored commodity dealers, thereby shooting up the price? No matter how
he asked it, backtracked, broke his field, tried every psychological
investigative reporter's ploy, Nolan's answer was always some version of
"no."

"Speculation doesn't always require information,"
Nolan said coolly. He was tough and good at capping his exasperation.
"Sometimes it's only instinct, wishful thinking."

"Sooner or later, I'll find out," Jason replied.
By then, all pretense and subtlety had evaporated.

"It won't wash. The only reason I'm here is to
categorically deny it."

"Then why all the secrecy? You could have told me on
the phone."

"The meeting was your idea, remember," Nolan
said. "I would have said it in my office."

Jason had picked up the vice-president's man three blocks
from the Executive Office Building and driven across Memorial Bridge to the George Washington Parkway, where they had pulled onto a promontory. It was all
for an orchestrated cloak and dagger effect. It had worked before. He had
expected Nolan to suggest that they do their talking outside the car, not that
he couldn't bug that conversation as well. It annoyed him that Nolan didn't
show a lick of fear.

"We're all clean, Jason," Nolan said.

"Millions were made by the speculators--surely you
don't expect me to believe it was a stroke of luck."

"Nothing is ever airtight, Jason. Washington is one
big ear. Maybe the Chinese said something."

He wondered if Nolan was softening. His gaze drifted across
the Potomac where the great gothic spires of Georgetown University rose in the
distance. Without the glass and concrete slabs of buildings around them, the
view might have seemed old world, perhaps a hill beside the Rhine.

"The issue," Nolan said, "is whether someone
in the vice-president's office profited from the deal. That's the dirt. Without
that, there is no story and you know it."

"I'll find it if there is one."

"Good luck."

Jason gunned the motor and swung the car back onto the
parkway, barely hiding his annoyance.

He'd been working on it for a month. Up to now, Webster,
his editor, had been cooperative, but hadn't let him write a
"fishing" story.

"What I'd really like to do is put out the bait,"
he'd said. "Someone will come forward. It never fails."

"That's assassination by implication," Webster
had countered. He'd made it sound as if Jason were bending ethics. They were
very touchy about that at the
Post
these days, now that they didn't have
any competition to worry about. His instincts told him they were soft-pedaling
the real investigative stories. When he had broken the FDA scandal, they'd let
him go the distance without any obstacles. But that was four years ago and now
he needed this story, needed it badly. Heroes had a short shelf life in this
town.

* * * *

"Dammit, Nolan, it's another cover-up and you know
it," Jason said, knowing that his own exasperation had broken through
first. It was going badly.

"You're off the wall, Jason. The guy is sitting pretty
for the next election. He doesn't need the headache. Besides, money isn't real
power around here."

He's putting me down, Jason thought, wondering why Nolan
wasn't the least bit unnerved. Was the
Post
losing its power or was he
losing his grip? Or his credibility? They were supposed to shit when the
Post
came smelling around like this. Had he been misled? Earlier, when he had picked
Nolan up at the street corner near the F Street Club, he was dead certain he'd
found his inside man. It was a gut reaction that hadn't failed him ... yet.

"This is the eighties, Jason," Nolan said,
sighing. "It's different now." Nolan had once been a reporter for the
now defunct
Star
. They had covered stories together, but any evidence of
the earlier comradeship had now been lost.

"You've really gone over to the other side,"
Jason said, pulling up in front of the Executive Office Building.

"Good try, Jason," Nolan said as he stepped out
of the Cutlass. "But you can't bake bread with horseshit."

The man had played with him. Jason was too unnerved to go
to the office. Instead, he drove back to Capitol Hill and mooned about his
cluttered apartment, missing Jane and Trey and the old glory. He finished half
a bottle of Scotch.

Maybe he had been out to lunch while the rest of the world
rolled by, he thought, tossing restlessly on cold, rumpled sheets. Indignation
over government corruption was on hold. These days investigative reporters
looked for the big story with one eye on book publishing and movie rights and
talk show hype instead of concentrating on the simple act of going for the
jugular. He could have parlayed his FDA stories in that direction, but had
eschewed all offers.

"You're stupid," Jane had told him. More than
once.

"I'm an investigative reporter. A newspaperman."
When it came to other writing, he planned to do a big book.
The
novel.
But he had to remain pure as a reporter; it sustained him.

Twisting and turning, he got up finally, finished the
bottle of Scotch and went outside to get the
Post's
bulldog, which he
spread out in front of him at an all night coffee shop. His eye caught a bold
headline just below the fold.

"What's this garbage," he said to no one in
particular.

"More coffee?" the man behind the counter asked.

Ignoring him, he read the headline. "Agency Change
Suggested. SEC to SEX." The secretary to the chairman of the SEC was
coming clean--cross-country trips, jets hustling her around the country so that
she could be with her boss, a married man with five kids, a Catholic. Sexual
peccadillos and conflict of interest, the story implied, citing sexual acts in the
SEC private dining room, the chairman's office, the boardroom table.

It was prurient scandal, pure and simple. The
Post
had bought the girl's story hook, line and sinker. The poor bastard never had a
chance.

"My God," he whispered, his stomach congealing in
a knot, anger and disgust rising above the alcoholic buzz. He pushed the paper
away from him, paid the check and walked out.

"This is what the eighties are all about," Nolan
had told him. And who would know better than he?

Webster sat behind his desk with both legs curled under
him, a characteristic stance meant to soften the sting of authority. Jason
Martin stood at the opposite side of the desk. Inside the glass wall he felt he
was on exhibit to the entire city room, although the staff worked busily around
them.

Didn't the bastards know he was being heroic? He was
standing up for real journalism, not that entertainment pap that was passing
for reporting nowadays.

"I'm onto something, Paul," he said, his fingers
spread on the polished desk.

"It's only a hunch," Webster said. "We can't
commit to hunches."

"What about Watergate? Woodward and Bernstein?"

"It paid off," Webster acknowledged. Not that
again. Jason saw the flicker of forced tolerance.

"I need time. More people to work on it. It goes all
the way up to the vice-president. Someone is covering up a tips-for-profit scam
in his own shop."

"It's a fine line thing. Not a deliberate
cover-up."

"Someone in the vice-president's office leaked advance
word on the grain deal with China. The commodities market goes bananas
and..."

"Coincidence. Hunches. Commodities people speculate.
You can't pin it on anyone."

"You can if you dig."

"And what will that accomplish? Bring down a
vice-president? He can't be responsible."

Jason sucked in his breath, carefully watching Webster's
tanned face. The man was into sailing now, investments, trendy company, a new
wife.

"Are we losing our balls?" Jason had quickly
edited the second person pronoun to the first. "We used to go for the
inside story no matter who got it."

"He's innocent," Webster said, shifting in his
chair, his pose of tolerance cracking. "I spoke to him."

"You spoke to him?" Jason shot back angrily. He
should have guessed--the old school tie. Both same year Yalies. "I thought
they were supposed to be our adversaries. Now we're all in bed together."

"I know the man forty years. You use things like that,
Jason. I have gut reactions, too. And they've been damned solid all these
years. They haven't forgotten Watergate either."

He had him on the defensive. Jason liked that. A man
reveals his vulnerability on the defensive.

"This used to be a great newspaper. Now look at
us." He pointed to the front page. "Some broad screws the chairman of
the SEC and it makes page one."

"It's news whether you think so or not and it sells,"
Webster said, still tolerant. "The headline was a corker, don't you
think?"

"It's not substantive." He had wanted to say
"crock of shit," but he'd held back, trying to formulate a more
subtle response. "And what if the vice-president were caught with his
pants down? Would you print that?"

Webster rubbed his arm. "No question."

"Even if it destroyed him?" Jason pressed.

"Of course. Corruption is corruption. If not us,
who?" the editor said, obviously losing patience.

Yeah, Jason thought, whip us with self-righteousness.

"This sex stuff stinks and you know it," Jason
countered.

"Sexual corruption is a category, Jason. A man who
used his political clout for that is dangerous."

"It's also cost effective. The broad comes in,
confesses and it's confirmed. Then she writes a book, shows her box to
Playboy
and sells the movie rights."

"My concern is what makes news, not books and movies.
If the mighty fall that's news, especially when they get caught with their pen
in the inkwell."

"We never used to cover that shit."

"Where've you been? Maybe twenty-five years ago we
didn't, but it's a whole new angle now. Women's rights. The woman cries
exploitation. Hell, the big boys know the score. Every time they whip it out,
they're playing Russian roulette."

"I think it sucks."

Webster laughed at the inadvertent pun.

"It's not my kind of journalism. I'm an investigative
reporter, Paul. That's the way we built this damned rag."

"You're a hunter, Jason. Problem is we've given you
big guns to play with. When you carry one on a hunt you look for prey. But it's
my job to dole out the bullets. If it was up to you guys, you'd shoot up anyone
in sight." Jason looked up at Webster, who blinked first, turning his eyes
away.

Webster had changed, Jason thought. Grown soft. He had a point,
though. The paper
was
overweight with reporters who itched to topple the
guy on top, like himself. Wasn't that what Washington journalism was all about?

"Look, Jason. Cool it for a while. We don't
manufacture these scandals. They happen and we report them. You're right about
one thing, though. The other kind is expensive. Requires too much checking.
That phony Pulitzer thing hurt us more than you think." He paused,
studying Jason for a moment. "Look, on the V-P thing I think you're wrong.
Call it gut reaction, judgment. Still," he said, pressing his chest,
"it's mine to make. I suggest you let that anger run on idle for a while.

"I can't," Jason muttered, thinking of Jane, who
had said the same thing three months before. Then she went back home to Indiana, taking Trey.

"It'll destroy you," Webster warned him. Jason
wondered if he knew about him and Jane.

"We're just a glorified
National Enquirer
these
days, Paul. And I'm not the only one who thinks that."

"Take it easy, Jason," Webster said, obviously wanting
to end the conversation on a high note. "You've earned your stripes around
here. You shook up those buggers in the FDA. It's just that this one won't fly.
That doesn't mean there won't be others. Let it sit for a while. Remember,
there's a financial angle to this as well. We're still a business and I've got
to juggle a lot of balls."

"It's a fucking sellout just because you know the man.
It clouds objectivity." It was absolutely the worst accusation one
newspaperman could make against another.

Webster untangled his feet and stood up, lifting his hands
palms forward. A flush of anger rose in his cheeks.

"That's it, Jason. You're pushing."

Looking into the city room, Jason saw a few faces turn
towards them. Sweat began to roll down his side.

"I'm sorry. It's just..."

"I do understand, Jason."

It was maddening not to control one's destiny. Contrition
seemed his only choice. Or he could walk. Hell, the
Post
was still the
only game in town. Webster loosened up, sat down again and handed Jason a memo.

"We've budgeted a piece on the Pennsylvania coal
situation. Big guys gobbling up the little guys. Forcing unemployment until
things shake-out. Venal big business stuff."

"But away from town." He was being patronized now
and it galled him.

"You got it, Jason. No one can do it up brown like
you. Worth two in a series. Anyway, you can still be angry."

"Coal," Jason said, looking over the memo.
"Most of the mines are owned by the oil companies. They advertise. Suppose
I offend them?"