Death of a Washington Madame (24 page)

"I'm really sorry about that. But you see, they didn't
know. The Shipleys had no idea. If Mr. Parker hadn't lit that fire and if it
hadn't been reported, they wouldn't have known."

"All's well that ends well, Angus," Fiona said.

"Mrs. Shipley is a most gracious lady," Macintosh
enthused. "Said she couldn't bear all those wonderful possessions going to
strangers. Mentioned that beautiful portrait of her husband's father, too.
Isn't that a wonderful gesture?"

"The bank should send her flowers," Fiona said,
remembering that the Governor was entitled to the heirlooms anyway. It was
obvious that this was a ploy to shortstep the media at a comparatively cheap
price.

"They already have."

After hanging up, Fiona looked through her messages,
turning her mind back to the events of last night and this morning, remembering
the terse note she had written to Hal. Was she having second thoughts? Yes, she
admitted, looking forward to a lonely night alone after what was a trying day.
Some days were more draining than others and this had been one of the most
enervating.

Gail had already left for home. She wished she hadn't.
Perhaps she would call her at home and they'd go out for dinner. She hated the
idea of going home to the house from which she had willfully, deliberately,
chased her lover. Perhaps all this talk of undying love and sexuality had led
her thoughts into a morass of self-pity and perceived deprivation.

Then it occurred to her that she must call Roy. His condition was worrisome and his fate pressed upon her thoughts.

She looked up the number of the Shipley house and dialed.
She let the phone ring ten times. No answer. Of course, she thought. He had
fallen asleep with his hearing aids intact. He probably awoke, took them off,
and went back to sleep. Subliminally, she accepted that explanation, although
there was a tiny jab of lingering doubt.

She got into her car and started home. The sense of loss,
of Hal especially, was getting to her as she drove, pushing her into a
depressive state. She felt bereft, regretful, unsure of her decision. What, she
wondered, was so precious about her work, tracking down evil, angry,
destructive people? Was their pursuit worth wasting her youth, expending the
energy of her prime on such a thankless occupation?

It was Thoreau who said that most people lived lives of
quiet desperation. Did she fit that description? What she needed most at this
moment, she knew, was the comfort of a man's body, strong arms wrapped around
her, the feel of male flesh, the rejuvenating force of his body entering hers.
In that act, life had meaning, the joy of pleasure, the wonder of human
contact.

Suddenly the lights in front of her swam in the tears of
her eyes. She wondered if Dr. Benson was home and reached for the phone. No,
she decided, his gentle way and soft rebuke would surely talk away her present
state of mind. That was not exactly what she wanted. She needed this quake of
private introspection to shake her up and perhaps find the key to her own
self-cure.

It was Gail who had announced that she had achieved her own
"self-cure." Fiona had taken it to mean that she had come to terms
with the perpetual ache of her guilt and the overwhelming sense that she was
not without blame for all the suffering of her black brothers and sisters. It
was, Fiona knew, a dangerous state of mind.

But anxiety about Roy intruded again. It prodded that
errant thought still bubbling in a distant puddle of her mind. She was
approaching Thomas circle where the street spokes branched off toward Massachusetts Avenue, which was her direction and Sixteenth Street, which led to the Shipley
house.

She called the Shipley number on her cell. Despite her
earlier reasoning, the lack of response was worrisome and her sense of anxiety
accelerated. At times, she had been plagued by this intuitive sense of
impending doom. Mostly it was a highly inaccurate measure of the future.
Nevertheless, in her highly vulnerable state, the idea panicked her and she
took the Thomas Circle spoke that led to the Shipley house. She was there in
minutes. The house was in total darkness.

Remembering that the lock had been broken when the firemen
had entered the front door, she parked and found she was able to open the door
with little effort. When she entered, she flicked the switch and the big rock
crystal chandelier bloomed with light.

She moved along the hallway to the rear of the house,
toward the kitchen, putting lights on as she went. She allowed herself to
assume that Roy was sleeping and did not call out to him. For her, the ideal
situation would be to merely check on his condition, then satisfied that all
was well, she would leave.

But when she reached his room, his bed was empty. The
blanket with which she had covered him lay rumpled on the floor.

"Roy," she called, listening. No sound returned.
She studied the room. Nothing seemed to have changed. The door to the storeroom
was still open, with the materials she had seen there before still intact.

"Roy," she called again, raising her voice in
counterpoint to the returning echo.

Of course, she told herself, although Gail had taken the
ignition key, there was another set. Oddly that possibility had never crossed
her mind. To confirm this presumption, she went out the rear door and crossed
the alley to the garage. The car was gone. She felt ashamed of their oversight.

Instead of leaving, she went back into the house, still
arrested by the nagging idea that still nibbled on the edge of consciousness.
She roamed the house, intent on dredging up this idea, certain that it had
something to do with the secret scenario that had played out in these rooms. At
the same time, she used this emerging germ of an idea to delay her leaving the
house. Surely, Roy would be back shortly, his mission accomplished She would
wait.

Entering the great room, she clicked on the various lamps
that were scattered in various places. One switch put a spotlight on the
painting of Mrs. Shipley's young husband, forever frozen in his hero's pose.

She studied the painting, arrested by the eyes, which, as
often happened when one concentrated on a painting, seemed to become alive.
When she moved, the eyes moved, as if she were trapped in its gaze. The
inevitable corny question popped into her mind. Was the picture trying to tell
her something?

She moved toward it, reached out and lifted it partially so
that she could see behind the canvas. There it was, the neat lettering, Roy
Parker, April 1945. The idea that had been assailing her began to take shape in
her mind. She remembered the old and yellowing sketchbook that she had seen in Roy's storeroom.

Retrieving it, she came back into the living room and
compared the various charcoal sketches with the pose in the painting. The
position of the body seemed to have been fixed in the very first sketches, but
as she turned the pages, she noted that the face had undergone considerable
changes. Indeed, the first sketch of a face had barely any resemblance to the
last in the sketchbook, the one that most closely resembled the face in the
painting.

As she turned the sketchbook pages, many of them yellowed
and fragile with age, a fragment of what seemed like a page ripped from a
magazine floated to the floor. It was a compendium of medals and ribbons
depicting decorations of various types. The date on the magazine was July 1944.

She thumbed through the sketchbook and continued to study
the picture. Something in the soldier's face arrested her, kept drawing her
back, but she couldn't quite decide what it might be. Again she studied the
sketchbook. Obviously the artist was evolving the final version of the face.

The evolution was troubling. One would expect that a dead
soldier's portrait might be done from a photograph. She began to search the
room for a photograph of the young soldier.

There were any number of photographs of Deb Shipley and
important people at the time. Deb with President Eisenhower, Deb with a young
John Kennedy, with Lyndon Johnson, with a young Richard Nixon, Deb with various
Senators and Congressman who were certainly celebrities in their time. There
was even a picture of Deb Shipley and Fiona's father. Although it surprised
her, she realized that it would not have been uncommon. In his day, Senator
FitzGerald maintained a very high profile. He was handsome, gregarious and very
much on the social scene.

The photographs were mostly in silver frames of elaborate
designs, tucked away on every available surface and shelf. The walls seemed to
have been reserved for paintings of dogs, obviously lovingly rendered by Roy
Parker.

The dog paintings were accessible and she unhooked a number
of them to look on the backs of the canvasses. The earliest painting was of a
German Shepherd, painted in February 1943.

Of course, the dominant picture in the room by far was the
painting of the young soldier. Fiona estimated that it was probably life-size,
the portrayed figure at least six feet tall.

Fiona knew it was not uncommon for a public room to contain
many pictures of the host or hostess with various political celebrities. Nor
did she think it amiss that there were few personal family pictures in the
room. It did not strike her as unduly odd that there were no pictures of Deb's
dead husband. After all, his spectacular portrait was a ubiquitous presence in
the room.

Ascending the stairs to the first level, she walked through
the master bedroom where Mrs. Shipley had been murdered. The room was
immaculate now, obviously cleaned and lovingly tended and polished by Gloria
and Roy. There was even the sense that Roy had administered his care to the
room that very day. The way it was cared for indicated that it had been treated
as a kind of shrine to the memory of its lifelong occupant.

Unlike the great room, the bedroom was filled only with
personal pictures, all depicting various phases of Deb and William Shipley's
life. There was Deb as a baby, Deb with what must have been her parents when
she was a child. Deb in jodhpurs, holding the harness of a horse. Deb with
William as a baby. William at various stages in his life. William as a graduate
in cap and gown. William being sworn in to various elective offices. William
with a woman who must have been his first wife.

As she had noted before, there were no pictures of Madeline
Newton, conspicuous by their absence, considering that she was probably one of
the most photographed women in the world. But there was another, even more
telling conspicuous absence.

There were no pictures of the young senior William Shipley.
No wedding pictures. No pictures of a happy couple on their honeymoon. Not a
trace of the young dead soldier.

One could argue, Fiona thought, that such real life
photographs of the dead husband might be too painful to exhibit. People grieved
in different ways. And, after all, there was a highly romanticized picture of
the young man in full view of anyone who had ever walked into the house.
Holding with that argument, Fiona searched the room for any photo albums that
might have held pictures of the man.

At the bottom of a chest of drawers, Fiona found a number
of leather bound albums. She sat down at Mrs. Shipley's desk and trained the
desk lamp on the albums, studying them carefully to see if she could find any
face that might remotely resemble the man in the picture.

Unsuccessful, she began to roam through the house. One of
the front bedrooms was obviously William's room from childhood through teenage.
It was large, a typical boy's room with diplomas, photographs of various
athletic teams, banners of the schools William had attended, Choate, Harvard,
various summer camps.

There were photographs of William with what obviously were
teenage sweethearts, photographs with Deb. Again, conspicuously, there were no
photographs of anyone resembling the young dead soldier.

Her detective's curiosity informed her that she was missing
something, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it. In the Post article it
was recounted that William Shipley, the elder, had volunteered for overseas
duty in 1944, after spending a year in a Pentagon desk job.

According to the article, he had risen to the rank to
Captain and had participated in the invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge where he was highly decorated. It was in that battle that he was
declared missing in action, which was not an uncommon designation in that fierce
battle. Young William was born in the same month, December, 1944, that his
father had been killed.

In her mind, Deb had told the interviewer, she had often
fantasized that her husband was the unidentified body in the tomb of the
Unknown Soldier, which accounted for the picture displayed prominently in the
den of William Shipley Jr.'s house in Middleburg. Jogged by the memory of the
picture in its silver frame, Fiona also remembered, what she had not noted at
the time, that in the Shipley den there was not a single picture of Deb Shipley
with or without her son.

With her curiosity operating at full bore, she inspected
every room on the upper floors with the exception of the one in which the fire
had been set. Many of the rooms were obviously guest rooms that apparently
hadn't been used for years, although they looked as if they were all well cared
for through the years. A number of them contained paintings, mostly landscapes,
although none bore the mark or style of Roy Parker. No family portraits were
displayed.

She went back into the great room and sat for a long time
pondering the portrait of the young soldier.

Roy had acknowledged that he had
been smitten at first look, using the time-honored cliché "love at first
sight." As near as she could calculate, considering that the date of the
first dog picture was in February 1943, Roy had arrived on the scene at the
beginning of that year. Certainly, there was no reason to believe that Roy's affair with Deb Shipley had started prior to William Shipley's death.