American Quartet (2 page)

The eggplant seemed pleased. Not that she and Teddy were experts who performed under his care and feeding. He defied experts. All his brains were in his ego and all his energies were directed at making himself look good to his superiors. The next step for him was inspector. Beyond that, chief. They all knew where he was heading. He swaggered across the gallery to the nearest exit, already posturing to face the press.

“A lineup might light a spark,” Teddy said. “We’re making arrangements. I’ve also asked the guard to come downtown. Maybe with an artist, we might get lucky.”

“An Italian high school teacher from Hagerstown is shot in the back while viewing a work of art. Why here?” She knew it was a rhetorical question. Teddy watched her, his eyes gloomy with disappointment. The son of a bitch had ruined his July Fourth weekend.

PUZZLES
always made her appear distant. Her unconscious became heavily involved. She had developed this characteristic early and it had a profound effect on her relationships with other people, especially men.

“Fiona’s daydreaming again.”

It was her mother’s favorite rebuke. Her father, as always, was kinder.

“She’s a deep one, that one,” he would say. There was a broguish lilt to the way he said it, although he was born in Brooklyn. Grampa FitzGerald had brought the brogue all the way from Limerick and died crying it on his lips, gunned down in Bedford Stuyvesant, three weeks from NYPD retirement.

She was five years old at the wake, but the memory still prompted total recall more than a quarter of a century later. Beery, sodden cabbage smells. Big red veiny faces. Swollen bloodshot eyes. Moving shadows in the dimly lit living room where old Fitz was laid out, rouged and smiling, as if he had confronted his killer, daring him to ship him off to Gaelic heaven. To them, it was the only respectable way to die.

To Grampa Fitz, and to her father, the police department was always the “farce,” and all FitzGerald males were expected, indeed decreed, to “jine the farces.” Retribution to her father came in the form of three daughters. Coupled with the sexual revolution and the radicals in the church, especially the language change in the liturgy, the poor man was rendered punchy, always on the edge of rage, by the time she, the youngest daughter, began to menstruate.

She grew up with threats of “mortal sin” and “you’ll roast in hell” burning in her ears—it was the only preventive medicine her parents knew, to make her preserve her virginity for some nice Irish boy. It was a losing battle. She saw them, beginning in her teens, as quaint relics of Irish myth. They abominated the freedom of contemporary life; it was all murky darkness, redeemed only by a sliver of light that was their love for her, and she forgave them everything.

Events in her life seemed to happen in mysterious apposition. She moved to Washington to escape the family. Then, after a stint as an FBI office worker, she joined the Washington police “farces” as if to redeem herself in their eyes.

It was not, of course, a woman’s place, and her father ranted and raved over such effrontery to the male imperative—until the day he saw her in uniform, and then he collapsed in tears of pride. Her two older sisters had, in their way, followed the family’s wishes. They had both married cops and were busily producing future members of the “farces,” as if the new techniques of birth control had never existed.

Once she had gained family approval, she took a further step, a master’s in criminology at American University. This turned out to be a brutal attack on the maleness of her brothers-in-law, who had only their high school diplomas, creating family tensions.

“Goddamned niggers, spics and broads are invading the forces,” one of her brothers-in-law, deep in his cups, had railed at her one day. Surprisingly her father had stood up for her.

“She can’t help it if she was born a girl,” he shouted. “Besides, there’s more niggers in Washington. At least, she’s Irish. In my day we kept the kikes and niggers out. Before the politicians mucked things up.”

She hadn’t the guts to introduce Bruce Rosen to her parents. He was the embodiment of all their pet hates. Jewish, a politician, a liberal, divorced and, frosting the cake, about to live with her in sin. They would find this out soon enough. Why hassle them? As she carried her two suitcases up the walk to his Georgetown townhouse, she felt the tug of guilt, the old trepidations. Bruce’s presence steadied her.

“I left the light burning in the window,” he said, opening the door before she could insert the key.

“You shouldn’t have.” She let him embrace her, annoyed by her own gaminess after a long sweaty day’s work. “I smell awful.”

“
Au naturel
,” he said. He smelled beautiful, like a bar of lime soap. He was wearing a velour robe, which he drew slightly open to show his eagerness.

“I’ve got a headache,” she giggled, making no move. She felt his surety, his comfort. He kissed her hair. He could wait.

He released her to bring her suitcases in and carry them up the stairs of the three-story house. His ex-wife had decorated the house with charcoal gray carpets and red throwaways. She had arranged it around their collection of Chinese “Bloods,” antique sixteenth-century vases. His wife had thoughtfully left him three or four, although she had taken most of the antiques, which had tripled in value since their divorce settlement three years earlier.

He hadn’t done much with the house since, and the divorce had left a big dent in his bank account. It was, he told Fiona, a ransom just to have the kids half-time. Also, it foreclosed on a nasty divorce proceeding that could have affected his political career. From the moment she met him she understood that as a “given.”

Soaking in the hot tub, Fiona felt her body soften. It was her ritual to have a long soak after the day’s grimy work. It was as if she were washing away the film of human filth that daily clung to her.

In her work she floated in a sewer of human degradation, a scum of horrors, aberrations, cruelties. She was always fighting a battle with herself to maintain professional indifference, the same standard of a surgeon operating on a cancer, leaving the emotions to others. But sometimes the tide of human horror flowed through all too vulnerable chinks of her being. A sexual mutilation, a child ripped apart solely for gratification—you never were too hard-boiled for that. Sometimes the utter madness of crime crashed through the ramparts of her defenses. When she faltered, she would pray it was not because she was a woman. Compassion was the enemy of homicide cops.

Yet there was something bizarre, something oddly clean about murder by gunshot, like killings in a cowboy flick. Pain without tears. As she lay in the tub, she felt the distance growing between her and that day’s murder. Her eyes were closed and she did not notice Bruce until he stood above her, holding a drink.

“Pour that in your snout,” he said, clinking the ice in the glass. She took the glass and held it against her face, feeling the cold. She sipped, watching him, the aesthetic aquiline nose, the full lips and strong cleft chin. Above his high forehead the bed of steel-gray curls began in endless ripples, tight but soft.

In his flecked hazel eyes she saw the intensity of his own drama, predatory when it came to political ambition, a trifle too shrewd at times, frightening when he was on the attack. She preferred watching them on the threshold of pleasure.

He was so well made and he made her feel so good. Yet, in many ways, they were opposites. She was light, thin-skinned, with veiny networks under her patina of freckles. Her hair burned auburn in the right light and her pubic bush was carroty and, she thought, unfetching. She loved the lush black jungle mysteries of him.

In any light her eyes were Kelly green, matching the Irish flag. They carried their own inner lamps, he once told her. She had a good straight Gaelic nose, unfleshy, with nostrils that quivered when she restrained anger. Her Irish was a beast on a leash, she knew, and she could let it out when her turf was invaded. She could also slip into deep brooding dark moods, like the most morose black Irishman.

“The boys downtown should see you now,” he said, soaping her breasts. She reached out for him.

“And you your constituents.” She kissed him there. “Good old Johnson.”

“What?”

“Police nomenclature.” She laughed. “You’d get every lady’s vote.”

“I’m going to need them in November.” She caught a tremor of anxiety.

He helped her out of the tub and toweled her off like a baby, adding light oil and sliding his palms over her skin.

“God, it’s good to feel like a woman again,” she whispered. He hitched her to him and carried her to bed. She was surprised at the fury of her pleasure after such an exhausting day. When it had subsided and his soft breathing found its sleeping rhythm, she lay beside him, energized, unable to sleep. In that state the puzzles always surfaced, like a submarine emerging from the deep.

She had carried away from the scene a half-made image, a negative aborted in mid-development. Later, she had watched Dr. Berton do the autopsy and had seen the killer bullet extracted. They had a
corpus delicti
with a history. He was a painter, frustrated by failure, a common ailment, who taught art history to teenagers and haunted museums, presumably searching for the missing link to his own talent.

“Who would kill Joseph?” the victim’s wife had gasped. Surely not her. She was bogged down by three young children, overwork, and her husband’s perpetually lit fuse of unrequited artistic ambition.

Fiona would have to go up to Hagerstown and ferret out more details. Poor Teddy. He’d have to go as well, courting Gladys’s wrath and jealousy. Fiona always went out of her way to make Gladys feel secure, but nothing helped. It was simply a hazard of the industry.

“She thinks that women get into police work so they can get laid a lot,” Teddy had confessed. “Even though she likes you.”

Can’t be helped, she had decided. It hadn’t been her motivation. Police males hardly made a dent in her libido. For that reason she tried to neuter herself, not an easy task in a sea of men who played with guns and their precious Johnsons. The uniforms, the camaraderie, the occasional brutality were all a man’s game. That, she knew, made homicide all the more challenging.

Whatever the motive, it was an unlikely setting for a killing. The National Gallery of Art! Nobody ever murdered anybody in an art gallery. And why in that specific spot under Childe Hassam’s painting? She made a mental note to check out Hassam. And the crime lab reports would tell them a great deal. When she grew drowsy, she fitted herself against Bruce’s body, two embryos, and let her mind idle. Soon she was asleep.

His hands wakened her, their movements sensual and probing, lifting her out of the mud of unconsciousness. At first her sense of place was confused, but soon a warm wave of pleasure overtook her, and she yielded to its power.

“I love this woman,” he whispered as his lips smoothly glided over her body. No one should be allowed such joy, she told herself, with a nod at the old Catholic guilt. It had long lost the power to inhibit her. She threw herself into the sexual duet with fierce joy, hearing the echo of her cries of pleasure in the cool room.

“A regular screamer,” he laughed, biting her earlobe. She felt her heart pounding against the hand on her breast. “And very much alive.”

“Maybe it’s compensation for all that death around me,” she said, and instantly regretted saying it. “Sorry. I’m getting too analytical.”

A buzzing began, and Bruce reached over and pressed the clock button, which threw a time reading on the ceiling. It was after nine.

“I forgot to shut it off,” he murmured. He embraced her again. “A whole weekend,” he sighed.

“Not all of it, I’m afraid.” She realized that she had blurted it out too soon. It struck right at the heart of their major point of contention . . . time together.

“You’re getting to be an Indian giver,” he said, releasing her.

“You can’t schedule a killing,” she said. “I had scene.”

“After the weekend, I’m going to be hounded until November. I’ve got a race on my hands. A Hispanic lady with a Harvard law degree, who talks street talk. Her name is Rodriguez. Her brother is married to a Rosenbaum. And she has a voice like Lauren Bacall.”

“And her looks?”

“Disgustingly attractive.”

“You’re just running scared.”

“Scared?” He got up and opened the blinds, squinting into the sun. “I’m petrified. I need this win. Otherwise, I don’t have a shot at the Senate seat.”

“Doesn’t a dozen years count?” she asked.

“They count for change. The district’s gone to seed.”

She could see the fine glaze of his long slender body, the hairs swathed in the glow of bright light. His manhood was still engorged. She patted it.

“You’ll make it. Eight the hard way.”

“In craps, it’s not an easy roll to make, Fi. I just got the poll yesterday. Only twenty percent even know who I am. I’ve been their congressman for seven terms and only twenty percent know who I am. Can you believe it? That’s not merely a disaster. It’s a catastrophe.”

“When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” she mumbled foolishly.

“You’re trivializing it.”

He went into the bathroom and she heard the steady gush of the shower. She started to brood, then picked up the phone and called a man at headquarters.

“Odd as hell,” Jim Hadley said in his Baltimore twang. He was one of the examiners in the Firearms Examination section. “A forty-four. From the lands and grooves it could be either an English Bulldog or a Wembley. It’s the ammo that bugs me. Ancient. Like maybe a hundred years.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing probably. Anyway, that’s your job to find out.”

She hung up, then dialed Flannagan, whose cheery “Yo” defied his gruesome task.

“Prints?”

“An army.”

As she listened to other details, Bruce came out and without looking at her left the bedroom. When she finished with Flannagan, she called Teddy at home. Gladys answered, her voice distant and angry.

“I’m sorry,” Fiona said.