The Hearse You Came in On (16 page)

“Guy Fellows,” I said. “Who’s the woman?”

“Watch.”

The camera panned shakily back to the original position, centering on the bed. I still couldn’t make out the woman’s face as she and Fellows reached the bed. His back was in the way. They kissed. The woman’s arms came around, one arm across Fellows’s back, the other at an angle, her fingers splaying out over the back of his head. Apparently he was unbuttoning his shirt, for suddenly he held it open and the woman helped to pull it off of him, never breaking the kiss. Then she dug her fingernails into his shoulder.

“God,” Kate muttered in disgust.

The camera started to zoom in, until the back of Guy Fellows practically filled the screen.

“The cameraman stinks,” I said.

“It’s not a man,” Kate said. “It’s Carolyn James.”

Guy Fellows’s big head tilted to the right and he went in for a taste of the woman’s neck. She had thrown back her head, as if to show him her throat. As it happened, it made for a pretty nifty first shot of her face. Ready for her close-up. Lips parted and eyes closed, she reacted to whatever it was that Fellows was doing to her neck—reacted warmly—and then she opened her eyes. She was looking in the direction of the camera.

“She doesn’t know she’s being filmed,” I said.

Kate verified. “No, sir, she does not.”

Kate stood up abruptly. “I’ll be back in a minute. I really don’t want to see this again. You can turn it off when you’ve seen enough. If you watch the whole thing, I’ll understand. I did the first time. It’s a very sexy train wreck.”

She touched me lightly on the shoulder as she crossed in front of me and went into the bedroom. I settled in to watch the grim show. No surprises really. I’ll simply tell you that the appetite for sex between the two folks on the video was very highly pitched. The camera was unable to capture all of it in precise detail as occasionally the contortions of limbs left nothing but a flank or a thigh centered on the screen. But in zooming back, the woman’s face—more often than Guy’s—came back into view and each time it held an expression that can best be described as one of exquisite pain. I was tempted to unmute the TV, but I pretty much knew what sort of noises I would hear, and I didn’t want Kate, waiting it out in her bedroom, to hear them.

After about ten minutes, I hit the pause button. The image froze. The woman was on top of Guy. Her cello-shaped torso was centered on the screen.

“I’ve paused it!” I called out.

Kate appeared in the doorway.

“How much longer does it go on?” I asked.

“This episode? Maybe another five minutes.”

“There are more?”

“Oh yes. There are a half dozen on that tape alone.”

“You mean there’s another tape?”

“Allegedly.”

“Same stuff?”

“Same stuff.”

“I don’t know, that seems like overkill to me,” I said.

“It seems like it to me, too.” Kate paused. “Are you going to watch any more?”

“No. I think I’ve figured out the major themes. Boy meets girl. Screws her ten ways to Sunday. The end.”

“Do you recognize ‘the girl’?”

“Oh yes. I recognize her. She gets more close-ups than Dan Rather.”

“That was the point, of course. She had to be recognizable.”

I centered my thumb over the pause button of the remote and began to punch it. Onscreen, the woman’s torso jerked a little and then moved a tiny bit with each subsequent click of the frame. Her head had been tossing side to side before I paused the image. It continued now, in the halting fashion. I click-click-clicked until she came to the apex of her head toss. The hair was held motionless in midair, like Kate’s curtains when the storm had begun. The profile was sharp: the small
nose, the high cheeks, the subtle look of the fox in her heavy-lidded eyes. It occurred to me that the last time I had seen this face had also been on TV. It had tossed a peeved look at the camera. This time, though, there was nothing peevish about the expression on the face of the police commissioner’s wife. Amanda Stuart was having her groove thing shaken by the Baltimore Country Club’s tennis pro. He was apparently shaking it good and Mrs. Stuart was loving every second of it.

“Pretty, isn’t she?” Kate said. “She looks sort of like Grace Kelly.”

“Everyone says that. A little bigger in the hips, I think.”

“I was talking about her face.”

“I’m going to guess that this video was not made solely to reveal to the world Amanda Stuart’s hubba-hubba hips.”

Kate answered, “I think what she is doing with them is more the point. And with who.”

“Whom.”

“Oh, Hitch. What-fucking-ever.”

Guy Fellows had been attempting to blackmail Alan Stuart. A dozen still shots taken from the video had appeared in the mail one morning several months ago at Alan Stuart’s office. The images were slightly fuzzy, having lost a bit of their clarity in the transfer from video. But they were still sharp enough to guarantee the Alan Stuart for Governor campaign a lock on the love-a-good-sleazy-scandal vote, if little else. Fellows was demanding a modest one hundred thousand dollars, in return for which Alan Stuart would receive the
entire videotaped escapades of his energetic wife. It was a one-shot deal. Money for tape. Or two tapes, according to Kate. The original, in Fellows’s possession, and a copy as a security measure being kept by the reluctant cameraperson, Carolyn James. That was the tape that Kate had.

But Alan Stuart hadn’t bought into it, not for a single sliver of a second. Big men squish small bugs. Not the other way around. Guy Fellows was good-looking and sexy. He apparently had a killer serve and an equally effective follow-through. But going up against the likes of Alan Stuart showed that despite all that, he was also just plain stupid. And the proof was in the proverbial pudding. Alan Stuart was still up and walking around and making plans to govern the State of Maryland. And for reasons that one would have to assume simply couldn’t be unrelated to this blackmail attempt, Guy Fellows was rotting in the ground. This couldn’t have been a part of his plan. Unless he was
really
stupid.

Kate had not been in on the game at the very beginning—she was just one of Alan Stuart’s loyal soldiers—but she was able to reconstruct the basic sequence of things.

Alan Stuart was not going to squander any of his—or his campaign’s—money on Guy Fellows. That was the first decision, and the easiest one to make. The likelihood of yet another duplicate tape having been made for the purposes of future extortion if, say, Stuart were to win the governor’s race (or even later, should he set his sights higher) seemed almost a foregone conclusion. There was simply no way to guarantee that Guy
Fellows wouldn’t hold his dirty pictures of pretty Amanda over her husband’s head from now until Doomsday (which keeps getting rescheduled, have you noticed?). And there was no way that someone like Alan Stuart would ever allow himself to be told when and how high to jump by the likes of a Guy Fellows. Not now. Not ever.

According to Kate, the entire affair of the videotape had been kept quiet, handled solely by Alan Stuart and Joel Hutchinson. My old buddy Hutch. Seems like he was just born for this kind of thing. I could easily picture him in Alan Stuart’s office, tie loosened, sleeves rolled to the elbows, feet up on a low table, throwing out his speculative
“Well, what if this… maybe if we try that…”
as his candidate paced back and forth calmly plotting strategies one minute, hurling curses at his wife and Guy Fellows the next.

But would Hutch have said,
What if we just kill him?
That hyperbolic smile rose up again in my mind’s eye.
Are you happy? Do you feel better now?

Was Hutch
this
nuts?

Guy Fellows made no effort to conceal his identity in the photographs. And even if he had, a few sharp shakes and a slap would have gotten the name out of Amanda Stuart anyway. According to Kate, it was Hutch who had pointed this out and it was Hutch who came to the conclusion that Guy Fellows had a partner. The photographs that had landed on Alan Stuart’s desk were clearly taken off of a videotape. What’s more, the various angles and close-ups of the pictures made it clear that these images were not the job of a stationary camera hidden somewhere in the room. Someone had
been at the controls of the video camera, seeing to it that Amanda Stuart’s face got plenty of exposure. Along with the rest of her. And this—I can just see Hutch gravely stroking his chin over this one—
this
was a problem.

Guy Fellows was cleanly in their sights. What to do with him specifically would have to be worked out. What if, what if, what if…

But his partner. That was a problem.

“Joel began to refer to Guy’s partner as ‘Insurance,’ “Kate said to me. “That’s what he would say. ‘We can’t lay a finger on Guy Fellows until we’ve also fingered Insurance.’ That’s how he talked.”

And that was the problem. The fact is, Guy Fellows hadn’t even needed to use the U.S. Postal Service to deliver his dirty pictures. He could have waltzed into Alan Stuart’s office in his birthday suit and slapped the nasty goods down on his desk. “My name is Guy Fellows. I’m here because your wife and I have been bopping like bunnies. Here are the pictures to prove it. I’ve got the home video version back at my place and it can be yours for just nineteen ninety-nine, plus ninety-nine thousand and change for shipping and handling. And by the way, if you touch so much as a single hair on my beautiful birthday suit my partner will be only too glad to give the eleven o’clock news something to drool over.” He could have taken a handful of cigars from Alan Stuart’s humidor (if one existed), lit one up and moonwalked a complete backwards circle around the room, shaking a hat in the air like Jimmy Durante.

Stupid men with balls. Sometimes a very frustrating combination.

•  •  •

The afternoon’s rainstorm had finally ended, leaving behind a gray hollow sky and a peculiar stillness to the air. I think that Kate and I were beginning to suffer the first stages of cabin fever, having now been inside her apartment for some twenty hours straight. The end of the rainstorm brought with it a ball of clammy hot air. Apparently Kate didn’t own an air conditioner and I couldn’t see a fan anywhere. We were seated apart from each other as she told me her story. I was still on the couch. She sat across from me in a large chair, her legs pretzeled beneath her. She was chewing absently on a plastic straw as she spoke.

“I got a call from Alan some months ago, asking me to come in and see him. The call came from him directly, not from his secretary. We met at the end of the workday. At the end of
his
workday, I should say. Police shifts don’t really line up with the nine-to-fivers. Alan offered me a drink. And I knew right there that something was wrong.”

“Because cops don’t drink while on duty?” I’d seen my
Dragnet.
I know this stuff.

She shook her head. “Because I had developed a not-so-great relationship with alcohol over the past couple of months, and Alan knew that.”

“Oh.”

“He knew it full well. So when he offered me a drink, my radar went up immediately. Alan is a smart man. Think what you want about his character or his politics, but you’ve got to hand it to him for his smarts. He knew that I’d smell danger and that I’d automatically start to protect myself. He knew that.”

“Wait. I don’t understand all this. Was he being a good guy or a bad guy? I’m confused.”

“Bad. Count on it.”

“So then why do something, offer you a drink, if he knew it would put you on guard?”

“That’s Alan’s way of pretending to level the playing field. It’s a mind game. Alan enjoys putting all the pieces on the table. Exposing his tactics. He’ll come right out and say, “Okay, now I’m going to find a way to make you walk off the edge of that cliff over there, you think I’m not?’ ”

“He sounds like a mean bastard.”

“That’s the only kind I know.”

Kate uncoiled from the chair and went over to the window.

“Alan put me on alert immediately. What he wanted was my full attention. He wanted me to know that this was serious business he was calling me into his office to discuss. And he wanted me to be vulnerable. That was really the bottom line.”

“You declined the drink.”

“I said to him, ‘You
know
I wouldn’t like a drink.’ He gave me his best smile and said, ‘Yes, I know.’ It was cat and mouse. He was just setting up the game and letting me know which parts we were playing.

“Alan said that he wanted me to take a temporary leave of absence from the force. This wasn’t my first. I took one after my husband died. In fact I had only been back a little over a month.”

“Why did he want you to take another leave?”

“He showed me the photographs. He was very simple about it. Not at all emotional. His wife looking like a goddamn porn star and he simply sits there at his desk and watches me flip through the pictures. Politicians can stop their own hearts from beating. I mean
that literally, I really do. Anyway, he told me the name of the man in the photographs. Guy Fellows. He said, ‘I believe you have already met my lovely wife.’ He told me that Guy Fellows taught tennis at the country club and that his wife had been taking lessons and that—obviously—the two had gotten involved sexually. He said that Guy Fellows was attempting to blackmail him, that there was an entire video collection out there. What he needed was my help. There was a partner. The person who had taken the actual video. Until they knew the partner’s identity they could not make a move on Guy.”

“‘Make a move.’ Do you think that meant kill him?”

Kate pursed her lips. “I don’t think so. Or I certainly didn’t think so at the time, anyway. The police commissioner is not going to call one of his grunts into the office and discuss plans to murder someone. He didn’t say what he meant. He probably didn’t even know yet himself. He just knew that he had to have the other person in hand before he could make any moves.”

“So your job was to locate the partner.”

“Yes.”

“But why the leave of absence? He was giving you a job assignment, right?”