American Quartet (17 page)

JEFFERSON
sat beside her, silent and morose. She had sensed the welling of emotion in him at the church and she had deliberately taken the wheel for the slow ride to Arlington Cemetery. Officer Temple had served with Jefferson in Vietnam and his senseless murder had moved him to a rare show of feeling. He had actually cried in church; the incongruity with his usual macho bluster tore the mask off his vulnerability. The Department had determined to make a big show in Arlington Cemetery to underscore Temple’s service to his country and the community. The killing of a cop always united the disparate elements of the police fraternity. Intrigue and politics were suspended. All infighting was postponed. The family had been attacked.

Fiona felt it too. Hadn’t the same thing happened to Old Fitz, her grandfather? Officer Temple had been a ten-year veteran with a family of five. Not a world beater, his record was, nevertheless, a good one, achieving sudden new heights by this brutal killing. Temple’s wife worked as a secretary in the Census Bureau and he moonlighted as a cabdriver, sometimes going with less than four hours sleep. It was a not uncommon occurrence. There was quiet heroism in that.

The newspaper stories made much of his selflessness, his family life, with a self-conscious determination to create a hero out of the black cop. Representatives of police departments from as far west as Chicago were in the funeral procession.

“Damn,” Jefferson said beside her, wiping his tears, “the poor bastard. Another dead nigger.”

“What the hell has that got to do with it?”

“Everything,” he muttered. She let it pass. For some reason, she thought of the other man who had also died that day. She wondered whether there was an outpouring of grief for him, at that other funeral in a Methodist church in Prince George’s County. A white man also struck down by an unknown killer. Probably only a handful of relatives were present, bewildered by the popping flashes, the strangers in attendance, their eyes watchful and suspicious. There wasn’t a shred of evidence to connect the killings. And yet . . . she shrugged away the possibility.

The dead white man was a used car salesman. He was, according to the woman customer with him, taking the Chevy Impala in which he was killed on a test drive. She had insisted, she told the police, that he drive a minimum of twenty-five miles and he had come all the way down from Lanham, driving around Capitol Hill in aimless patterns to show her how the car handled in city traffic. The only common thread of the killings was the fact that both men seemed to have no compelling reason to have been wasted.

Fiona had read the woman’s verbatim statement. Her dress was splattered with blood, a detail noted in parentheses. She was a waitress with a salty tongue, reddish hair, blousy, cynical, wary, much used and abused. “I was driving,” she told them. “But the car was a piece of shit inside. They had made it all shiny and new-smelling and I told him to drive the damn thing himself once we got into the city. He had just taken the wheel and was saying: ‘See . . . smooth.’ He was going slow, just rolling. It wasn’t smooth. No way. And the brakes were too tight. I also didn’t believe it only had fifty thousand miles on it. That was bullshit, too.” They had grilled her. She was a hard broad and despite the horror, the humor trivialized it.
USED CAR SALESMAN KILLED BY SNIPER
the headlines read in the
Post
, as if the headline writer, immune to the endless saga of news terror, could not resist the absurdity.

They had tried to connect the lady romantically to the dead man and she had really given them a piece of her tongue.

“Him,” the transcript read. The interrogator was obviously speculating. The invective came out like a stream of consciousness. If she had been Queen Victoria, she couldn’t have been more indignant. Unfortunately she was white trash in their eyes, and they had really leaned on her, searching for motives.

As for the dead man, he was the other side of the coin. A red-neck con man from West Virginia. Mathew Luther Pringle, a ridiculous name. His police sheet was the catalogue of a drifter’s rage, barroom brawls, nights in the tank. He had beaten up his wife in Charlestown. They had reconciled. He beat her up again and then left their squalid nest. “Did he have enemies?” Someone had surely asked this of his estranged wife. “I would have pulled the trigger myself,” she might have responded.

Worse, the whole litany spilled across the front page of the
Post
, like ketchup stain. They couldn’t find a picture of Pringle anywhere, not even from his high school yearbook. He had opted out after the first year to join the army. Why, Fiona wondered, couldn’t they have written something else instead of Used Car Salesman? At least Officer Temple had gotten his picture in the paper and a headline reference as a “Hero Cop.”

The connection still nagged her. For a few hours it had nagged at everyone, including the eggplant. But the autopsies denied the connection. Pringle had his head blown away by a rifle and Temple had his heart exploded by bullets from a .38 revolver.

“Coincidence,” the eggplant had concluded. He had pulled the troops together in the lineup room. The chief was there as well, looking somber, as he listened to various reports. Everybody at homicide was present, even those who stumbled in from sick call. They had two crazies, a wacko sniper and a cop killer, but it was clearly the cop killer who had their attention.

“I want that muvva,” the eggplant shouted after he had outlined the details. He had, of course, been gilding the lily. For him the death of Officer Temple was a minor miracle, like a piece of flotsam that nudges a drowning man to shore. He was holding on for dear life. By the time the meeting broke up, he had them believeing that Temple’s killer was the Antichrist, while the sniper was some dumb deranged kid playing with matches.

They had found the three empty cartridges on the top floor of the Library of Congress. So the shots had come from a public building. The connection seemed studiously avoided.

Without attempting to resurrect the contentious circumstances of the two previous killings, Fiona quickly ascertained that the ammunition had been of comparatively recent vintage, made less than twenty years ago, exploding further her own nagging suspicions. A connection, therefore, could only remain in her mind, a lingering intuitive burr.

The sniper’s vantage was easy to calculate. As for motivation, despite their intensive grilling of the hapless waitress, it seemed an example of random selection. The victim had simply appeared in the killer’s sights at the right moment.

Watching the eggplant rage during the meeting, her thoughts coalesced around a discordant theme, like an irritating off-key musical phrase in a classical piece. Try as she could to screen it out, it was impossible. Worse, it nudged her funny bone and she had to bite her lips to keep herself from laughing out loud.

“Who benefits?” It was the investigative axiom around which every criminal investigation whirled. In this case, the immediate beneficiary of Temple’s killing was none other than the eggplant. It was almost as if he had heard about the sniper killing, realized its damaging potential and went out with a gun to drill down the black cop. In her mind, he might even have invented the victim or, at the least, exchanged the bodies. Who gave a shit about a drifter, a no-good used car salesman, who also happened to be white? If she had a conspiratorial mind, she might have also put the headline writer in league with the eggplant. And Officer Temple himself, the gallant upwardly mobile self-sacrificing hero-cop. And the keeper of the personnel records who had created heroic police exploits for Temple as well. And the Argentinian junta.

It was bizarre because what it boiled down to was a conspiracy against her, blocking her from getting even a shred of help for what they would all say was an intuitive compulsion by a pushy cunt. Still, she knew she was preparing herself for that moment of confrontation. Be patient, Dr. Benton had said. Not that the role of gadfly tantalized her. She wondered if she would be able to muster the courage or stand the pain when the time came. Sooner or later, it would have to come.

To complicate matters, Bruce had returned to Washington like a man fully cured from a debilitating illness. He had become his old self or, at least, her old image of him, strong, loving, beautiful. At Tiberio’s, where he took her to celebrate his homecoming, she had searched his face for any signs of residual trauma, and found none at first. But midway through the meal, she caught it, a faint rumble like the distant sound of an oncoming train.

“The bitch wouldn’t call me to concede,” he said, caressing the rim of his wine glass. He had been holding her hand under the table and she felt the knuckles harden.

“Maybe she didn’t like the way you won.”

“You win any way you can,” he said. “Would you have rather I lost?”

She felt his attempt to make her guilty. Anger rose in her like a geyser.

“It’s like cheating.”

“So was she.”

“How so?” she snapped.

“She wasn’t one of them either. Educated. Aggressive. She had broken out. It was only a stepping stone. Besides, she was taking advantage of her femaleness and the color of her skin, darker than mine. Actually, we were two of a kind. She had a white lover.”

“What’s so terrible about that? So have you.”

“Hers was a woman.”

“How noble then to have ignored it.”

“We weren’t sure. Clark had paid for the information. It could have backfired. Besides, we were thinking ahead. The gay vote is not to be ignored in a statewide election. As a front runner, I don’t want to get anybody mad. Not yet.”

“No. You wouldn’t want that.” He looked at her archly.

“I won. That’s the bottom line.” His fingers tightened around hers. “You’re getting self-righteous in your old age,” he said gently.

“Can that be all?”

“Come on, Fi. It happens that way in business every day. It’s accepted. The law of evolution. The strong eat the weak. The smart eat the dumb. It just hangs out more in politics. The media put the wash on the line, stains and all. I’m not saying I like it. I just hold my nose, close my eyes and take the dose. Who am I to change the rules? Especially if I want to continue playing. You think the cops are any different?”

He finished his drink, like a winded athlete who had worked up a good thirst, and ordered another.

“Don’t confuse the issues,” he said quietly, turning to kiss her neck. “I love you and I hope you love me. Don’t look for perfect. Better a winner. A survivor, Fi. There’s nothing worse than a loser.”

“No,” she said sadly. “I guess not.”

“Believe me, I can imagine how she must have felt,” he said. “Anyway, you’ll be happy to know that I called her.”

“How gracious.” She could not quite get the edge off her anger.

“Butter would melt,” he said. “Why not? I told her it was hers next time around. She knows where I want to go. Be a good little girl and stand in line, I told her. I could feel her ambition sweating through the phone.”

“Could she feel yours?”

“Of course she could. Takes one to know one.”

She pondered this a moment, wondering why she wasn’t sharing his enthusiasm. Something about him frightened her.

“So where do you want to go?” she asked, feeling foolish because she knew the answer. Why couldn’t she leave it alone? “Fiona’s a strange one.” Her father’s words came back in a rush. Perhaps all that original sin shit had encrusted itself on her reason. She was thinking so hard she had barely heard him say “Up.” But she made him repeat it.

“Up,” he said again. “Maybe President.
Numero uno
.”

“That far?”

“Why not?”

The heat in his fingers rose. Turning, she saw his eyes glisten. A vein palpitated in his neck. She imagined he was salivating.

“What good is living without striving for an impossible dream?” he said, puffed up with pride. “The bigger the better.”

She saw him clearly now. What he was offering was company, not real sharing. Perhaps it did not exist. The shock of revelation sobered her and she projected a lifetime of loneliness for herself. Without her realizing it, he had moved closer, his thigh touching hers.

“Let’s change the subject,” she said. She had better start making compromises, she told herself firmly, and pointed to her glass for another drink.

They watched the body of Officer Temple lowered to its Arlington grave. Observing the somber faces, she sensed the pull of unity, and the pervasive power of comradeship. At that moment they were one mind, a unit beyond race or class or gender. She wished she could cry. But then the first shovelful of dirt was cast into the open grave and she felt the guilt of the living reality. Nothing had changed.

“It was a damned shame,” she said later, after they had returned to their car. His big, hamlike hands gripped the rim of the automobile wheel as he eased the car out of the parking lot in fits and starts. The car always seemed to react to his inner moods.

“Just another dead nigger,” he growled.

“You’re being unfair,” she said.

“We should be out there, lookin’ for that dude.” It was enough to telescope the message of his discontent. It was a good time to fix blame.

“Hell, Jefferson, we’re in Siberia together,” she countered. “It wasn’t me that asked for this. Let’s just accept things for the time being. The eggplant’s the enemy. Not me.”