Dead Watch (33 page)

At ten minutes to eight, he went out and sat on the back stoop. At five after eight, a car turned down the alley. He recognized it as Madison’s, opened the back gate, and she drove into the yard. She got out of the car and asked, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Come on, let’s get you out of sight.”

Inside the door, she asked, “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

She had a soft leather carry-on bag and a briefcase. Jake took the bag, led her into the house, up the stairs to the guest room. “Bathroom, first door down the hall,” he said. “Come on: I’ll get you a glass of wine or a beer and tell you the story.”

She took a beer, settled into a chair in his living room, while he sat on the couch across from her. “Tell me about the gun,” she said.

“The two people killed in Madison were executed. They were killed in an office building and nobody heard any shots,” Jake said. “The gun was probably silenced, and the killers are probably professional—at least, they’d done it before. The only reason there weren’t more dead people in the building is that nobody happened to bump into them in the hallway.”

“Why didn’t they come after you?”

“I was behaving unpredictably, maybe. Or maybe they didn’t know I’d been there already,” Jake said. “After I found the bodies, I called the cops, and then there were cops all over the place.”

“That’s why you’re carrying a gun,” she said. “You’re afraid they might come here.”

“Yeah. Or to your place.”

“You think my house is bugged. Why wouldn’t you think this place is?” Madison asked.

“Because somebody followed me out to Wisconsin, or maybe even tried to get there before me. We talked about it in your living room. That’s the only place I talked about it. The thing is, I was on the earliest plane to Milwaukee and there was no way to get into Madison faster than I did, unless they’d rented their own jet and flown directly to Madison. That would leave too much of a trail.”

“If they come here, you plan to shoot it out?” She sounded skeptical.

“I’ve got alarms. The woman who used to own the place thought she might be raped and murdered at any minute, and she covered everything,” Jake said. “If anybody comes, we’ll know it. The gun would give us a chance to call for help. A little time.”

She pushed off her shoes, curled her feet beneath her, and said, “It’s not Howard Barber, Jake. I know him well enough to tell you that he wouldn’t have executed a secretary.”

“How about Schmidt? I know what he told you, but I want to see the guy.”

She looked away from him, her tongue touching her bottom lip, and then she said, “We’re coming up on that trust thing. I made you feel bad the other night, when I asked if you trusted me, and made you admit that you weren’t quite there yet.”

“You
did
make me feel bad,” he admitted.

“Well, you were right . . . I’ve been lying to you a little. I didn’t know about Linc. That was a shock. But I knew about the package. I didn’t know the details, but I knew it was out there, I knew that it might bring down this administration. I didn’t tell you about it when you really needed to know.”

Jake watched her for a moment, suppressing reaction. The truth was, he’d known that something wasn’t quite right. He
hadn’t
trusted her. “Then why did you send me out to Madison?”

“I thought I was sending you on a wild-goose chase. I’m sorry. Howard had already talked to Al Green, and Al denied knowing anything about the package. We wanted to get you out of the way for a few days, hoping the whole hunt for the package would die down, so we’d have more time to find it. We sort of expected the gay thing to get out . . .”

“You expected me to put it out to the media?” She’d expected betrayal of what she’d portrayed as a personal confidence.

“Well, yes. It would have solved some of your problems.”

“Thanks,” he said, his voice dry. He felt as though he should be angry, but he wasn’t—not yet.

“We just wanted . . . delay,” Madison said. She knotted up her hands, twisted them. “We wanted the package to come out in the fall. Or if not that, just before the convention, to ruin the convention. But Howard didn’t think Green had it. Green swore he didn’t.”

Jake peered at her for a moment, then said, “Now you’re telling me the truth.”

“I didn’t want to mislead you,” she said. “I really didn’t. But you were working for Danzig and we were working against him.”

“Why tell me now?”

“Because I’m tired of lying to you,” she said. “I just want this to stop. I want the girl in Madison to be alive again. And I don’t want to be . . . on the other side from you.”

Jake thought about it, then said, “If Howard Barber didn’t do the killing, it must have been Goodman. Or somebody acting for him.”

“That’s all I can figure out. Unless there’s a third party that nobody knows about. The CIA, the DIA.”

“Ah, that’s not it. Outside of the movies, they don’t murder all that many people.”

“I’ve got more bad news,” Madison said. “I didn’t know that Howard had been involved in Linc’s disappearance until you told me. I accused him of it, and he admitted it.”

“So that’s clear.”

“The problem is, I did it in my living room. Which you think is bugged.”

“Ah, man.”

They were working through the implications of her confrontation with Barber when the phone rang and Jake stepped into the hallway to pick it up.

“Jake, this is Chuck Novatny. When did you get back?”

“This afternoon. What’s going on?”

“Have you seen, or spoken to, Madison Bowe since we talked yesterday?”

“Yes. She’s here. I’m not plotting with her, I just don’t want her to be alone with these killers out there. You want to talk to her?”

“Jake, goddamnit.”

“Hey, pal, if you want to put a few FBI bodyguards in her house, I’ll send her back home. But I’m not going to have her sitting there like a big goddamn jacklighted antelope while the FBI tiptoes around, trying to get its protocols right.”

“Fuck you,” Novatny snapped.

“Yeah, well, fuck you, too.”

Silence. Then, “All right. Let me talk to her.”

Jake carried the phone into Madison, said, “Novatny.”

Her eyebrows went up and she took it and said, “Hello? Yes. I can do that. Can I bring Johnson Black with me? Okay.”

She handed the phone back to Jake. Novatny said, “We need her here tomorrow for another statement. We need to talk to her about who else is in this gay ring . . .”

“I’m not sure it’s exactly a ring.”

“You know what I mean,” Novatny said.

“Yeah, I do, but I’ll tell you what, Chuck. ‘Ring’ sounds bad. It sounds like a supermarket tabloid. And if I were you, I’d start choosing my words carefully. This thing . . .”

“I know. It’s run completely off the tracks. Officially, I don’t like the fact that you’ve got Madison Bowe at your place. Unofficially, keep an eye on her. You’ve got a gun?”

“Yup.”

“Okay. She’s got an ocean of money, I could give her the name of a good security outfit if she needs it—all ex–Secret Service guys.”

“I’ll tell her,” Jake said.

“And, Jake—best of luck.”

Jake had to think about it for a half second and said, “Yeah, fuck you again.”

Novatny laughed and hung up.

Jake told Madison about the security service and suggested that she might try it: she said she’d think about it. “It might be inconvenient to have those people underfoot,” she said. “What about the bug? If there is a bug.”

“Leave it. I have an idea for a pageant.”

“A pageant?”

“You know, a play,” Jake said. “A drama. We’ll need the bug.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’d have to trust you to tell you,” he said.

“I know . . . ah, God. Jake: you can trust me. Not before, but now you can. I don’t know how I can prove it.”

They sat in silence for a while, and then another idea popped into his head. He said, “Hang on a minute,” went into the study, dug in his briefcase, and found a hospital room number for Cathy Ann Dorn.

She picked up the phone and said “Hello” with a broken-tooth lisp. “My dad said you called,” Dorn said when he’d identified himself.

“Are you okay? Are you getting back?”

“No. I’m really, really messed up. Not hurt bad, but my nose is broken . . .” She started crying, caught herself, and then said, “And they broke my teeth so I look like some kind of fu-fu-fu-fucking hillbilly or something. . . .” And she started crying again.

“Can I come and see you?”

“Yes. I’m just sitting here, with this thing in my arm. I have to go to imaging tomorrow morning, but I’ll be back before noon. A dentist is coming tomorrow afternoon . . .”

“I need to see you privately. Is there any possibility . . . ?”

“Dad comes in the morning and then he goes to work, and he and Mom come for lunch about twelve-twenty. If you were here after ten, it should be private.”

“I’ll be there,” Jake said.

“Don’t look at me weird when you get here,” she said. “I’m ugly now, so don’t look at me weird.”

“Cathy, I’ve got a friend who was hit in the face with a piece of shrapnel the size of a butcher knife and it almost took his face off. We folded it back over and got him to the hospital, and today he’s got this little white scar. You can’t even see it unless he’s got a tan. The docs can do anything. In a couple of months, you’ll be looking great, and I’ll introduce you to the president.”