American Quartet (15 page)

“How much do you need?” he asked abruptly.

“A hundred thousand,” Bruce said, startled. “To . . .”

“Never mind for what. I’ll get it for you.”

“You will?” Bruce’s jaw had dropped but his eyes continued to probe Remington as if seeking confirmation.

“I’ll sign a note and be responsible for raising the money.”

“My God, Tad. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.”

“Want to kiss my ring?”

They moved, laughing, into the dining room, where the corner of the long table had been set for two. As they came in, Mrs. Ramirez stood aside, greeting them with a shy smile.

If he wins, I will know for sure, Remington thought, reaching for the bottle of Burgundy, jabbing the corkscrew point into the cork.
For sure
. He poured the ruby liquid into his glass for the first taste.

DR.
Benton’s hands were surprisingly smooth for his age. Fiona had often observed them during his autopsies. She saw them now, as he handed her a pony of sherry with the same delicate grace that probed dead tissue as if it were alive. They were seated in the living room of his modest house in a quiet neighborhood in northeast Washington, one of the few that had somehow escaped the ravages of urban change. The city was sprinkled with these surprising oases of black gentility.

On the wall beside his book-lined shelves were citations, photographs, memorabilia of a life of achievement. His wife had been a lawyer, one of the first black women lawyers in Washington, a dubious honor, he would comment ruefully, for which she paid “bitter dues.” Dr. Benton was a second-generation medical man.

“My father’s fee was occasionally turnips, sometimes collard greens and squirrel. Have you ever eaten squirrel, Fiona?”

“Never on Fridays,” she bantered.

She had taken the Eastern shuttle back to Washington earlier in the day. Bruce was busy making plans with Clark for the big “hegira,” as they had begun to call their election day ploy. Remington’s money had buoyed Bruce’s spirit and the need for her had measurably lessened. She wasn’t sure whether she ought to be relieved or disappointed.

“No sense me hanging around,” she had told Bruce. She had been on the verge of asking for more leave, staying until election eve. It was a question of the lesser evil. She chose to go home.

Bruce was disappointed, but now that the scent of victory was in his nostrils he felt more secure. Besides, she found herself surprisingly uninvolved, an appendage. The candidate’s girl friend.

“You’ve been wonderful,” Bruce told her, insisting on driving her to LaGuardia. “That’s what loving is all about. When you need me, I’ll be there, Fi.” He squeezed her hand and burrowed it against his thigh.

“I know,” she said, not wholly convinced.

“These bouts of insecurity and paranoia every two years make us all crazy. At least, in the Senate you can space out the agony.”

As he drove, she looked at him in profile, the handsome face pointed at the road. Occasionally he shot her a seductive look, his eyes flashing, offering a wink of charm and reassurance. It was little gestures like that that titillated her.

“Do you love me?” He asked this, always at odd moments, catching her off guard. The question had become a litany, yet the random repetition, like a sultry love song on a scratchy record at breakfast, sounded hollow.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she would reply at these off moments. Maybe it meant something different to her. When you’re “in love” you’re supposed to know it beyond the shadow of a doubt. But when it counted, when his embrace was urgent, and the joy of it engulfed her, when the question came in gusts of passion, her response was immediate, emphatic, without doubts.

“Yes. I love you. Yes. I love you.”

In the afterglow, when it was as good as it could be, he invariably told her, like a comment on a college term paper for high achievement:

“Perfect pitch, Fiona.”

Was that love?

There were times, many times, when she missed his closeness. Alone in her bed, she felt an enormous void. The depression of loss was awesome. She wondered how she had survived aloneness all these years. There had been other men. Not many. She detested both the catalogue and the comparison. None of it had ever really moved her in a purely physical sense. Not until Bruce.

When she had seen him faltering, she had intellectualized her emotion. She wished she hadn’t seen him so vulnerable.

Once, during an investigation, she had had to poke around a male locker room. It seemed permeated with maleness, the residue of sweat and striving, torn jockey shorts, a discarded jock strap under a bench. In the adjoining bathroom, the line of urinals added a touch of militant arrogance to their exclusivity.

It wasn’t the physical difference that affected her. More like a psychic difference. Aggressiveness, ambition, violence. It was raw, mindless. Like the involuntary gorging of their penises, a mysterious primitive demand for maleness.

“You’ve seen me at my worst,” he told her as she stepped out of the car, the tender good-byes completed. “Break a leg,” she had said, adding, “just keep the rest the way it is.”

As his car sped away from the airport curb, she felt an immediate sense of loss and, contradictorily, an unburdening. Perhaps, she wondered, deliberately searching for some humor to tide her over, she should hire Dr. Benton to dissect his primal urges and cut away those she detested.

She had planned to clean her apartment but the effort to assuage her sense of loss had once again opened the door to her outrage. She wondered if it were all connected. Not wanting to be alone with her uncertainty, she called Dr. Benton.

“I’m looking for tea and sympathy,” she told him now, as she settled herself in his living room.

“Sherry is better,” he said. “As for sympathy, I’m sorry. You don’t look in dire need.”

“I’m just confused,” she admitted. “I’ve had a double helping of politics. Professional and personal.”

“Life is politics,” he shrugged. She told him first what Bruce’s campaign was going to do. In the telling, it didn’t seem as devious.

“So what else is new?” Dr. Benton said. “The winning is all.”

“Whatever happened to integrity?” she asked. She felt his eyes searching her. Turning away, she looked around the book-lined room. In books people worshiped integrity. Life was different.

“I think you’re making harsh judgments,” he said. “Much too rigid.”

“Then where’s the standard?” she asked.

“Is integrity a requirement of society?”

“You can’t answer a question with a question.”

“You can if you want to avoid the answer.”

“Now there’s a strategy for survival.”

“You should heed those words, Fiona.”

“I know,” she agreed.

“She was like you,” Dr. Benton sighed, looking at his wife’s picture. A calm dark woman with soft eyes peered back at them. “Integrity came first.” Instantly, she felt the sisterly bond. Had he seen through her? She realized suddenly that she had come for more than tea and sympathy, more than sherry. She told him about the so-called cover-up; she added “so-called” only out of respect to his caution.

“Saying it seems such a small thing. Why is it so big in my mind? So against the grain?” She thought of Bruce, also against the grain.

She watched his eyes shift. It was a subtle move but enough to show that his guard was up.

“Honesty,” he said, smiling. “It will get you every time.”

“I can’t screen it out,” she confessed.

“You’ll learn. It doesn’t always equate with survival.”

“But there’s a killer loose. He’s already wasted two people.”

“You can’t pin that on yourself.”

“But he’s trying to evade our responsibility to find him. I feel like an alien.”

“Now there’s a subject I can empathize with,” he said.

“You people always think with your skin.”

She had blurted it out without thinking. The eggplant’s trigger response rang in her mind:
And you always think with your pussy
. If he hadn’t said it, he surely meant it.

“Conditioning,” Dr. Benton said. For a moment, he seemed disconnected, lost in thought. “Whoever it is, he’ll do it again. You have to learn patience. If he does it in our jurisdiction, you’ll have your vindication.” It wasn’t the advice she had wanted to hear.

“What about human life?”

“Compassion,” Benton sighed. “The curse of police work.”

“It’s like waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“Exactly. More sherry?” She downed her drink and he refilled her glass. She noted that his hands shook, uncommon for him. He settled back in silence. She let him ponder, knowing that he was searching to fill the vacuum.

“Aside from your captain’s motives, survival is his only real goal; the fact is that the revelation would make people uncomfortable. Not only the powers that be. But ordinary people on a tourist holiday. Visiting the seat of government. More tourists are killed in automobile accidents.”

“It’s still wrong.”

“That it is. Ethically. Professionally. It’ll all come out in the wash. It always does.”

“I keep thinking about that innocent guy out there waiting to get his.”

His lashes fluttered and his eyes opened wide. “That’s too heavy a burden for you, Fiona.” He shook his head, challenged finally in his gut. “The man’s obviously a psychopath. No one can be responsible for that.”

“But if we don’t do our best to find him, we’re not earning our keep.”

“My God, woman,” he blurted. “You take too much on yourself.” His gaze drifted again to the photograph of the dark woman. “Like her. It ate her alive. This is no well-ordered paradise.”

“I guess I’m in the wrong business.”

With his smooth polished hands he reached out and touched her arm.

“We’re both in the wrong business, Fiona. I started out to be a healer.”

She tossed in bed all night. Then got up, took two aspirins and spent the rest of the night tossing on her couch. In the morning, she was groggy, her thoughts wispy and untidy.

Jefferson welcomed her back with uncommon concern.

“You okay, woman?”

She hadn’t turned him in. For that, she hoped, he might be grateful.

“Integrity sucks,” she muttered, hoping it confused him.

“Say what?”

Well, she sighed, they were back on the old track. They spent the day investigating a suicide, which seemed a tiny leg up from the perpetual naturals that they were assigned. The victim was a young man of twenty. His mother was ill and hospitalized and, in despair, the boy had tried to hang himself. But he couldn’t seem to manage it. Then he stabbed himself in the gut with a kitchen knife, but miraculously missed all the vital organs. Finally, he swallowed a full bottle of gout pills. They did the trick.

“Now that’s determination,” Jefferson said.

“At least he had the courage of his convictions.”

Jefferson looked at her and shrugged. She felt transparent and brittle, helpless, feminine. You’ve lost your
cojones,
Fitz, she railed at herself later that night, sitting alone in her apartment, slowly sipping straight gin. After four gulps, it made her nauseous and she put it aside.

Bruce called her at midnight.

“Tomorrow is V-Day,” he exulted.

“For vote or victory?” she asked, masking her mood of despair.

“We’ve got the logistics down to the last gallon of gas. This guy Clark is a genius. If the weather is good, we could hustle out maybe five or six thousand more votes.”

“Enough to win?”

“Pray to the Madonna . . .” She could picture him sitting alone at his desk at campaign headquarters surrounded by debris, discarded Styrofoam containers, half-eaten burgers, soft drink bottles, mildewed newspapers; the sour stench of human aspirations. She had detected this strange effluvium emanating from him in those last days she had spent with him, something oozing out of him along with the usual juices. She could almost detect it through the telephone.

“. . . I need every edge I can get. The iron lady, I hear, is frantic. She’s yelling foul all over the place. I’ll say this for the broad. She’s tough. She’ll be a shoo-in two years from now.” He hesitated. Still, he wouldn’t totally give in to optimism. “If she doesn’t make it now. She could, you know. Something could fuck up.” There was a long pause. “You love me?”

“You have to ask me that?”

“Yes.”

“Of course I do.” Integrity does suck, she thought bitterly.

“It was wonderful, your coming up. It helped a lot. I wish you were here now. But I’m glad you’re not. I have an assignment for you.”

“For me?”

“I promised Remington you’d be at his place tomorrow night. He’s having a big election party. I owe that man a lot.”

“Must I?”

“I need a cheerleader. Hold his hand. I’ll need him for the Senate run.”

A long sigh came down the line. “I think I’m his surrogate. He’s living vicariously through me and the others he’s helping. Poor bastard. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. You go and keep things warm for me.” She could hear his breathing, forced and hard. “I better beat that broad.”

His vulnerability crackled over the wires along with that musty odor.

“I’ll do my duty,” she groaned. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. Maybe it was destined to be her fate as well.

“You love me?” he asked.

“I told you,” she said evasively.

There was another long pause. She could hear his breathing.

“Put the phone there,” he commanded. Damned if I will, she thought, but said nothing.

“Feel me?”

“Yes,” she lied.

“Good?”

“Yes.”

“Love me,” he said after a while. She did not wait to hear the click of the phone.

All the fireplaces were lit in Remington’s house and every light burned brightly. Three big television sets blared in the drawing rooms. In the dining room, under the polished crystal chandelier, the long table was covered with an elaborate buffet. Remington wore a red velvet jacket with a black collar and red paisley slippers. Fiona recognized many of the faces from her previous visit, mostly diplomats, and a scattering of politicians.