Fair Play (All's Fair Book 2) (10 page)

Chapter Fourteen

“Why do I get the feeling you aren’t here for the tomatoes?” Nobby called when he spotted Elliot crossing the open dirt parking lot.

Elliot returned easily, “Fresh tomatoes sound like a great idea. And while I’m at it, do you have any summer squash?”

Nobby slammed shut the gate of a blue pickup, accepted the thanks of the diminutive brunette driver, and waved away her attempt to tip him. He turned, hands on hips, to meet Elliot. “Kid, you can buy one of every vegetable on the place, if you want to. I still can’t tell you where Rollie is.”

“It’s okay, I spoke to him yesterday.”

Nobby looked taken aback. “I see. Well, then to what do I owe this honor?”

“What do you know about Will MacAuley?”

Nobby turned and spat at a large black beetle. He missed, and the beetle scuttled away in fright, only to be crushed beneath the tire of the slowly reversing pickup. “Professional jerk-off. That sound about right?”

“I don’t know him. Was he around back in the day?”

“Back in the day?” Nobby asked blankly.

“I know he’s lived in Washington all his life. Did you know him, were you aware of him back when you were active in the antiwar movement?”

Nobby shrugged. It was about as noncommittal a shrug as Elliot had seen. He said finally, “He’s younger than me. Younger than your dad too. He’d only have been a kid back then.”

They had all been kids back then. But Elliot didn’t bother to say it.

“There were conservative youth groups around that time, weren’t there?”

“I guess.”

“Did my father know MacAuley back then?”

“I don’t know.” Nobby added, “I don’t know that he knows him now. Figuring in one of MacAuley’s columns doesn’t mean anything. Hell, MacAuley wrote a column about us once. Told people not to buy fruits and flowers from an antiwar commie traitor.
Me.
After I got my ass shot off fighting the real commies! That jackoff. Told people organic was anti-American.” Nobby made a sound of bitter disgust.

“It doesn’t seem to have done you any harm.” Elliot nodded at the customers wandering around the flourishing vegetable patches and long, low white tents.

“People are smarter now. That’s one thing we taught them. Don’t trust anybody. Don’t trust your government. Don’t trust the media. Don’t trust anybody over thirty.” Nobby laughed. “I guess we thought none of us would live to get old.”

“Do you still keep in touch with the rest of them? With the rest of the Collective?”

Nobby’s amusement faded. His face fell back into its normal sepia map of rough roads and endless highways. “No.”

“You keep in touch with my dad, right? And you said you and Tom had talked about trying to get my dad not to publish his book. And you asked Mischa to talk to him. So you must keep in touch with some of them.”

Nobby said, “Elliot, you have to stop. You don’t understand what you’re doing.”

This isn’t what you think it is
, Roland had said.

“Then someone needs to explain it to me.”

“I know what you think. You think we all tried to stop Rollie from publishing that book because we had something to hide. You’re wrong. We tried to stop him publishing that goddamned book because
he
has something to hide.”

“What does he have to hide?”

Nobby’s lips folded. He looked away. He seemed to be thinking, or maybe struggling with some painful thought. He faced Elliot once more. “Murder,” he said flatly.

“
Murder?
” Elliot shook off his astonishment. “Whose murder?”

Nobby shook his head. “I already told you too much.”

“Well, you’re sure as hell not stopping there.”

“I can’t tell you anything more. I don’t
know
anything more. Not for sure.”

“You must know who you think was murdered.”

“I shouldn’t have said anything.” Nobby took his cap off and wiped his sweaty forehead. He looked old and unwell.

“But you
did
say something.”

Nobby slapped the cap on his head and turned away. “I did, but that’s all I’m going to say. Now. Did you want to buy some tomatoes or not?”

* * *

Elliot tore off a slice of still-warm pizza and said, “There were nine core members, as far as I can tell. My father, Tom Baker, Oscar Nobb, Mischa Weinstein and Frankie Blue—”

Tucker, pizza halfway to his mouth, interjected, “‘The ‘Black Wedding’ guy?”

“The same.”

“That is a horrible song.”

Elliot grinned. “Greatest antiwar song ever written.”

Tucker chewed, swallowed, said, “This from the guy who listens to the soundtrack albums of documentaries.”

“Anyway, Frankie Blue died about twenty years ago in a plane crash, but the others are still alive and kicking. That leaves the rest of the group: J.Z. McGavin, Ruth Margolies, Suzy D., and someone, a girl I think, named Star. I don’t have any background info on those four yet. They could all be dead for all I know, but then again I don’t know that Nobby was suggesting someone within the Collective was murdered. I jumped to that conclusion because of a few oblique comments my father makes in his book.”

“How far are you through the manuscript?”

“About halfway. They just took part in the 1969 aquatic invasion of Fort Lewis as part of the GI-Civilian Alliance for Peace, and they’re debating whether—or more exactly, how—to drop a bomb on a military target, but they can’t agree on a target.”

Tucker stared at him. “Nice,” he said finally.

“I know.”

“Who was going to fly the plane?”

“J.Z. He had a pilot’s license. Anyway, if there was an unexplained death within the Collective, it’s probably one of that last bunch. I’m hoping the next couple of chapters will give me some idea of the angle to pursue, because Tom, Mischa and Nobby aren’t talking.”

“Your father never mentioned any of these people?” Tucker was eyeing him speculatively.

“I don’t think so.” Elliot admitted, “I won’t say I hung on his every word when I was growing up. And there were always a lot of people coming and going in my parents’ home, but I think I’d have remembered someone named Star, for example, showing up for Sunday brunch.”

“Do you find it weird that he stayed in contact with his first wife?”

“Not really.” Elliot thought of his father’s words on that Friday afternoon walk. “For all I know he kept in touch with the second wife too. He never talked about them though. I just knew he’d been married before.”

“That wouldn’t have bothered your mom? If he kept in touch, I mean.”

“No.” Elliot smiled faintly. “She used to find it funny the way other women responded to him.”

“Yeah, I don’t get that,” Tucker said. “No offense to your dad, but...”

“Believe me, I know.”

“Being such an iconoclast, it seems funny he bothered to get married at all.”

“I agree. I guess he is traditional in some ways. Lucky for him neither of his exes wanted alimony. I think they still did alimony back then.”

“What does your father write about the other members? Does he say much about them?”

“Yes. Plenty. But it’s all personalities. He avoids specifics about background or what became of most of them, and I think that’s a deliberate, if useless, attempt to make it more difficult to track them down, should they not want to be tracked. There are a lot of photos. Those will be lost now unless the publisher still has the originals.” He took another bite.

“Photos,” Tucker said thoughtfully.

Elliot said thickly, “Skinny girls in bell bottoms and very hairy boys.”

“You’re going to choke one of these days,” Tucker observed. “If you’re worried about who gets the last piece of pizza, I’ll leave it for you.”

Elliot ignored this commentary on his table manners. “Mostly the Collective were other students at the University of Washington. Blue was a rising star on the folk music scene. I’m not sure how he connected with my dad, but it seems like he was trying to save the world in between building his music career. Nobby was active in the GI Movement and found my dad through the GI-Civilian Alliance for Peace. I know J.Z. McGavin was from out of state, and he seems to have almost operated as a co-captain of the Collective. It sounds like he and my dad were pretty close, at least at this point in the manuscript.”

“You find that surprising?”

“I don’t know that it’s surprising. It sounds like this McGavin was closer to my dad than Tom Baker. I always pictured Dad and Tom being pretty tight, but so far in the saga Tom seems to be a peripheral player.”

Tucker had a very strange expression on his face. Like the pepperoni didn’t agree with him. Or as if something didn’t agree with him.

“What’s wrong?”

“McGavin was his middle name,” Tucker said slowly. “Jacob McGavin Zelvin. He was one of ours, working undercover. And we do believe he was murdered by someone in your father’s cell.”

Chapter Fifteen

Elliot repeated, disbelievingly, “My father’s
cell?
”

“The Collective.”

He felt winded, as if Tucker had grabbed the table and rammed the edge into Elliot’s ribs. Even as he told himself not to overreact, not to jump to conclusions, he could see Tucker watching him warily, waiting for him to absorb the full implication of his words.

He said flatly, “That’s why you suddenly got so cooperative. You’re working for the Bureau on this. You’re trying to pin Zelvin’s murder on my father.”

Tucker’s face turned the color of his hair. He sounded a little winded himself. “You really think that of me? You think that’s how little I value you, how little I value what we have together?”

Tucker was genuinely angry. And maybe hurt too. The darkness in the back of his eyes was probably pain. So that made two of them. Elliot said, “Truth? I think no matter how much you care about me, there’s no way you’d let
me
get away with murder. Let alone my father.”

Tucker said, “Well, here’s the difference between us, Elliot. I don’t think your father committed murder.”

That stung. As it was intended to do. “I don’t think my father committed murder,” Elliot said. “What you’re not denying is you’re working with the Bureau on this.”

“No, I’m not denying it. You want access to federal resources, then there has to be a trade-off. Zelvin’s murder is not a closed case. The Bureau has a vested interest in helping you get to the truth.”

Elliot shoved his chair back and rose. Tucker rose too. He looked braced for combat, but his gaze met Elliot’s steadily, unwaveringly. Tucker believed his conscience was clear.

But then lots of people told themselves their consciences were clear when they did the wrong thing for what they believed were the right reasons.

“Did you approach the Bureau or did the Bureau approach you?” Elliot asked.

Tucker sucked in a long, harsh breath. “I approached the Bureau—no, you don’t turn away from me with that just-as-I-thought look on your face!” In two steps he had grabbed Elliot’s arm, halting him in his tracks.

Elliot looked at Tucker’s big white-knuckled hand gripping his arm, looked into Tucker’s furious, taut face. At his expression, Tucker’s grip changed, grew...entreating? “After last night, after the things we said, do you really think you can’t trust me?” Tucker’s voice was rough, but it held a certain note.

No. Elliot didn’t think that he couldn’t trust Tucker. Maybe he was a fool, but he knew Tucker loved him. Tucker probably loved him more than anything or anyone in the world. He knew because that was the way he felt about Tucker. But what the hell? First there had been the thing with Tova. Now this. What else was Tucker keeping quiet about?

“I don’t know what game you think you’re playing then. You think Montgomery won’t see through this?”

“Montgomery, the Bureau, has nothing to lose here. They want justice for a dead agent, they want to be able to tell Zelvin’s family what happened to him—while there’s still someone left to tell. They will help us because it helps them achieve that goal. It doesn’t matter that our goal is different.”

“If it’s such a nonissue, why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“I just told you.”

“When did you go to Montgomery?”

“Today.” Tucker’s brows drew together. “Right after I talked to you. A few hours ago.”

“You didn’t think maybe you should discuss it with me first?”

“I didn’t know how it was going to go,” Tucker said. “There was no point promising you anything until I spoke to—”

“You’re missing the larger issue here.” Elliot narrowly studied Tucker’s face. “Did you know about Zelvin before you went to Montgomery?”

“No. I sure as hell did not.”

Again, Tucker met his eyes steadily. Elliot said nothing.

Tucker said, “Look, your dad has a very healthy ego, but I don’t buy for one second that he would publish that book if he had a murder to conceal. Anybody who thinks that can’t know your dad very well. One thing he’s not, is stupid.”

“I agree. But I can also see how it looks. The guy he trusted most turned out to be an FBI agent. His best friend betrayed him and the cause he believed in. From some people’s perspective, that’s one hell of a strong motive.”

No wonder Roland had had such a hard time with Elliot joining the FBI.

Tucker was saying, “Which is why it’s better that it’s me—and you—running point on this. Right? Because we’ve already eliminated the most obvious solution. We know your dad didn’t do it.” Tucker’s thumb lightly brushed the pulse point on Elliot’s wrist, a delicate, almost seductive touch, and Elliot swallowed, both amused and dismayed by the way his body—even under these stressful circumstances—was reacting, instinctively succumbing to Tucker’s will.

“Right?” Tucker repeated.

Elliot nodded. But he said, “I don’t understand why you wouldn’t talk to me first.”

“I told you why.” Tucker relaxed, smiled crookedly. “Come on, Elliot. You
have
to know I’m on your side. Always.” He angled his head and nuzzled Elliot beneath his ear. Elliot shook his head, but what exactly was he protesting? His treacherous body was already leaning in, surrendering to whatever Tucker had in mind.

Tucker’s teeth closed on his earlobe, nipped him. Elliot gulped at the jolt of sensation that zinged straight to his groin.

Tucker said so softly the words were almost inaudible, “You’re wrong, you know. I
would
let you get away with murder. Hell, I’d probably help you commit it, if that’s what you wanted...”

* * *

After finals on Wednesday Elliot began the slow process of locating the former members of Roland’s collective. Despite Tucker’s reassurances, he wanted to keep his footsteps off the map as much as possible, which meant using the Bureau’s resources only as a last resort.

He had eventually found Suzy D.’s full name in Roland’s manuscript—Susanne DeWoskin—but he could find no trace of her through any of the usual sources. She had probably remarried and settled down long ago. Like Mischa, a lot of women in the movement had gone on to be active in feminist politics. Conveniently, they kept their own last names or, if they married, hyphenated their old and new surnames.

But the tradition of taking a husband’s name gave women who wanted to vanish an edge. Maybe that was the case with Suzy D.

Elliot studied a group photo of the Collective taken in what looked like one of the back pastures of Nobby’s farm. Frank Blue held a guitar, his back to the camera. Roland was laughing and flipping off the photographer—probably J.Z., since he wasn’t present in the picture. Nobby looked stoned as usual. Mischa, tall and bony with waist-long dark hair, was easy to pick out from the other girls. Tom Baker, muscular and bare-chested in low-slung Levis, had his arm around a very young blonde, who had to be “Star.”

Star was a complete dead end. She was never referred to as anything else in the book, and good luck hunting a nameless sixteen-year-old runaway radical with a noun for a moniker.

Elliot’s first success came with Ruth Margolies, now Ruth Margolies-Rossiter. She taught sociology at Cascadia Community College in Bothell.

He called the school and learned that Ruth was not teaching summer session, but that they would pass his info on. He had his doubts, but within the hour he had a return phone call from her.

Ruth had a light, pleasant voice, which did not fit the two photos he’d seen of her as a slim, scowling young woman in braids.

“I haven’t kept in touch with your father, but I’ve kept track of him. I saw on the news about the house fire. The police think it’s arson?”

“They do. Have you kept in touch with any of the Collective?”

“No.”

That was plain enough. “Any reason why?”

He could feel her hesitation. She said, “You got my name from your father’s manuscript. Did you read the entire thing?”

“No. I’m about three quarters through.”

She gave a funny laugh. “Then I think I have the advantage of you.”

“How so?”

“When your father went underground, I went with him. The rest of the group took Mischa’s side.”

“Went with him as in...?”

“Went with him as in went with him. I was your father’s second wife. He divorced Mischa and married me.” She added caustically, “You know what they say about politics making strange bedfellows.”

Okay. A little awkward. In fact, maybe a lot awkward. Elliot said, “I didn’t realize.”

“I’m not surprised. Roland was always cagey. But back then everybody slept with everybody else. It was practically our social duty to sexually experiment. Of course, Roland was married, at least in theory. But I think it took a couple of inoculations before commitment really took with Rollie. Our marriage lasted eighteen months.”

Hmm. Come to think of it, maybe there was more than one reason someone might want Roland dead.

“Was it an amicable split?”

“No.”

“So,” Elliot said, trying to get the conversation into less perilous waters, “you would have no idea what happened to Star or Susanne DeWoskin?”

“Susanne who?”

“Suzy D.?”

“Oh. No. Suzy was playing Revolutionary for a Day. She got bored and wandered off. I’m sure she’s married with grandchildren by now. Star...was different.”

“What about Star?”

Ruth’s tone seemed to soften. “I still think about Star sometimes. First of all, she was far too young to be hanging out with the rest of us. I was younger than the rest of them, but Star was, at the
most
, sixteen. Now that I have daughters of my own, well, I realize how young she had to be. And how vulnerable. She was in love with your father, of course. We all were. But Rollie, first and foremost, was interested in saving the world. Well, blowing it up and then saving what was left. So Star turned her sights on J.Z.”

“Who turned out to be an FBI agent.”

There was a startled silence. Ruth said, “My God, he really
did
put it all in there!”

“Not of all it,” Elliot said. “He doesn’t seem to know what happened to J.Z. after his cover was blown.”

Ruth said nothing.

“The obvious theory, the Bureau’s theory, is that McGavin was killed.”

“I don’t believe that. I have
never
believed that.”

“What do you think happened to him?”

“Me? I have no idea.”

“The FBI never heard from him again. His family never heard from him again. None of you ever heard from him again.”

“You can’t trust anything the FBI tells you.”

“Of course,” Elliot said. Not like he hadn’t heard it all before, and from someone whose opinion mattered to him.

“You have to understand something. We wanted
peace
. We wanted the killing to stop. I don’t believe anyone in the Collective killed J.Z. There was no need to kill him. He was out. He was finished. What would have been the point?”

“You wanted peace but you weren’t above blowing up monuments and breaking into army installations. You plotted to bomb military targets, didn’t you?”

She said uncomfortably, “A lot of that was talk. Anyway, all that changed after the Weather Underground blew up their Greenwich Village townhouse. We all made a point of never taking an action that might result in a loss of life.”

Well, that was a nice idea, but Elliot could have told her how often it didn’t work out like that. Humans had a way of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“If J.Z. just conveniently went away, why do you think everyone else in the group believes he was killed?”

“I don’t know. It
was
strange the way he just...disappeared.”

“Would there be another reason someone wouldn’t want my father’s memoirs published?”

“Your father has stayed politically active. That alone guarantees he’s made more than his share of enemies. I’m pretty sure no one on the right is going to be happy about his autobiography being published.”

“I mean someone in the Collective.”

She gave a short laugh. “Well, frankly, I can’t say I’m thrilled about it. I’m not retired yet, and I’m married again with two college-age daughters. Do I want my family and students reading about some of the stupid things I did when I was their age? Not particularly.”

“Fair enough.”

“But would I set your father’s house on fire? No. As much as I cringe at the idea of that book being published, there’s a part of me that wants people to remember how it was. We nearly changed the world. We
did
end that war. That shouldn’t be forgotten.”

“Can you think of anyone else within the Collective who might have some other particular reason for not wanting the book published?”

“Maybe Tom Baker? He was always in love with his own image and reputation, and I know he’s a big-shot lawyer now. On the other hand, the book probably would have resurrected Frank Blue’s career. He’d have been delighted, except he passed away in the nineties. He was another one in love with Star.”

“What about Star? Did you ever know her real name?”

“No. None of us did. That was Tom’s idea. He said if we didn’t know her legal name, we could never be forced to give her up if the fuzz came hunting her.”

The fuzz
. Oh boy.

Elliot said, “Hopefully he hands out better legal advice now than he did back then. Do you know where she came from?”

“Michigan, I think. North Dakota? Or maybe that was just the last place she’d been before she joined up with us. But she did have a little bit of an accent. I wish I could remember more.”

“What happened to her?”

“She left.” Ruth’s voice was grim. “She accused your father of murdering J.Z. and then she picked up her little army surplus backpack and marched out. I never saw her again.”