The Shadow Cabinet (6 page)

“It was that cop car,” he said. “They nearly junked me, coming up like that.”

The accent had a jagged metallic edge, as ugly as a South Philly scrapiron yard. South Philly, or Jersey, Wilson thought, someplace where the lace curtains and the row house steps ended.

“You might have queered up the alignment, yours more than mine,” he said. The white shirt was gray along the open collar; the shoulders of the blue blazer were powdered with dandruff. “How about your license?”

“You crazy? It was just a touch.”

“I need your license,” Wilson said. The blister eyes were as blank as a mantis's, the mouth a thin white line. Wilson had the sense of someone unwilling to give up his license, a predator caught mistakenly in the gill nets of a suburban traffic jam. “A license, a business card, anything. I may have to get in touch with you.”

“Hey, pull it over, will you, Ichabod!” A bushy-haired kid leaned from the front window of a coffee-colored van behind the Alfa. “You're holding up traffic, man!”

Wilson stepped back. There were plexiglass fishbowls on the sides and star trails in gilt paint along the door. A beltway cowboy. “Keep your shirt on, sonny.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

The cars had begun to crawl forward at the foot of the ramp, merging with the northbound traffic. A second police car had joined the first. Wilson gave the young man his card through the window and waited while he searched his jacket and trouser pockets for his wallet.

“I lost it—I lost my fucking wallet,” he said.

“Hey, mister! C'mon, for Christ's sake!” the van driver pleaded. “We get the cops up here, we'll never bust it loose!”

“We're trying. Hold your horses.” At the foot of the ramp, the policeman directing traffic had seen the two stalled cars and was beckoning them forward.

“What'd he say?” The Alfa driver's movements were less controlled now and Wilson thought he was frightened.

“He said if we get the police up here, we're in for a long morning.”

The man lifted his eyes, saw the police motioning to them from the road below, and then found a business card lying on the dash just under the windshield. He passed it quickly to Wilson. “This is all I got. I swear to Christ, I can't find my goddamned wallet!”

The card was gritty, one corner was bent. The card was from a firm called Caltronics, with offices in downtown Washington.

“There's no name here,” Wilson said, lifting his eyes, “just the company.” He heard the patrolman's whistle from the foot of the ramp. Horns had begun to wail from behind the van.

“Davis,” the man said, head turned away toward the beckoning policeman. “Charles Davis. Hey, come on, man. Let's get out of here.”

Wilson couldn't see the masked eyes, but he saw the mouth, the Adam's apple, and the thin hand clutching the steering wheel. It was a small thing, of little consequence, one of life's minor mysteries which break the surface of our lives for an improbable second and then just as abruptly are swept away, like the body of the small child he'd seen while floating the rapids of the Rapidan River during the spring of his junior year at the University of Virginia. The canoe was in the chutes, his paddle was lifted, and the small body had boiled to the surface, drifted for a few yards with the plunging canoe in a lifeless imitation of what as a schoolboy he knew as the dead man's float—swollen arms, small swollen fingers, grotesquely swollen feet—and then had disappeared again. He had searched for it for two hours in the quieter pool below and then had gone to the local sheriff, to the state police, and the only local newspaper within fifty miles. No one knew anything of a missing child. The sheriff assembled a grappling crew from the police and fire departments and they dragged the river below the rapids the next day, a Sunday, but found nothing. For two weeks Wilson drove over from Charlottesville on weekends to pursue the search, joined by a young journalist from a weekly paper who telephoned communities all along the Rapidan. No missing child could be found. By the third week, the local sheriff and state police were persuaded that the young canoeist, unfamiliar with the river at spring flood, had probably seen the body of a farm animal—a shoat, a lamb, or even a heifer.

But Wilson knew what he'd seen. He knew it again by the nightmares that haunted him for years, dreams in which the details were as clear as ever—the bright spring morning, the swift brown water, the rib cage of the canoe under his feet, and then the small body lifting, white fingers, white arms, white feet. Only the face was different.

That moment in the drizzle on the beltway ramp was similar in certain ways. The morning mists had parted, he'd seen an averted head, a thin white mouth, and an agonized hand clutching the steering wheel—a man caught up in some nightmare of his own—and knew that he was being lied to. No one would ever convince him otherwise.

The traffic carried him away. Driving down the ramp and into the stream of cars moving northward along the boulevard, he still pondered the mystery. But then the wet autumn morning returned. The coffee-colored van horneted past him on the inside lane with a supercharged roar of its V-8 engine—a kind of reckless triumph, announced not only by the engine's whine as it ripped past but by a denim-clad arm held languidly out the window, giving him the finger.

BMWs, Audis, and Datsuns filled the small parking lot behind the three-story brick building on the outskirts of Falls Church, most of them owned by the insurance brokers in the suite of offices on the first floor. A boy of ten or eleven was wandering about the lot, inspecting the automobiles. As Wilson drove into his parking space, the boy turned to study the battered fenders and the thick exhaust fumes, then brought his hand up, holding his nose, his elbow high, in a kind of rodent leer. Wilson left the car, and the boy ducked his head, disappearing behind a parked Audi, like a gopher dropping into his hole.

The owner of the real estate brokerage on the second floor was a man named Matthews, with whom Wilson had invested some money from his father's estate in the late sixties, buying industrial and undeveloped residential property. The previous spring, Matthews had been approached by a national real estate company and had decided to sell out. The transfer was to take place at the end of the year and Wilson had been handling the negotiations and the legal work.

The young receptionist was gone from her desk at the top of the stairs on the second floor. Two women in the reception room's orange leather chairs were awaiting the arrival of a sales agent. Identically dressed in knit suits, they were smoking and drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups. One was plump and dark-haired, the other a thin, washed-out blond, rawhide hard, her flocculence of bright hair shrunk to an orange-bronze scouring pad atop her small head.

“Well, you never know, hon,” he heard the blond woman say as he hung his coat in Matthews' office. Her whispered voice was full of ancient mistrust and uxorial grievances, as treacherous as a plastic garbage bag full of smashed bottles. “You gotta watch 'em every minute. There's no tellin' what kind of cardboard they're building houses out of these days. I told him after I found out, I told him right out, I said we wanted a wet bar, sure we did, but that didn't mean we wanted no goddamn crik running through the basement.…”

Wilson stood behind Matthews' desk, looking at the telephone call slips the receptionist had left for him. For the past ten days, Matthews had been in Florida, arranging a condominium purchase and his upcoming relocation to Sarasota. In his absence, Wilson had promised to keep an eye on the brokerage.

“That woman called you again for about the twentieth time,” the receptionist said as she joined him. She was a dark-haired, energetic young girl just a few years out of high school. “The Kramer woman. She had to see you today, she told me—no alibis. She said today was the last day, absolutely the last day.”

“That's what she said last week.” He found the call slip with Rita Kramer's name on it and sat down. She was a Californian, come east to buy a house. Her husband was a Los Angeles entrepreneur awaiting a White House political appointment. She had been carrying on a guerrilla war with Wilson for over a week now about a house she thought was overpriced, and wanted to negotiate directly with the owner. “Anything else?”

“Mrs. Polk isn't in yet,” she said, lowering her voice. “Those two ladies outside have been waiting for twenty minutes. I don't know what to tell them.”

Mrs. Polk was one of the sales staff. Her husband was retired, both enjoyed their bourbon, and she sometimes found it hard to get out of bed in the morning. “She'll be in,” Wilson said. “Just give her a few minutes more.” He picked up the phone and dialed. The hotel switchboard put the call through to Rita Kramer's seventh-floor room, but a masculine voice answered. He thought the accent was a little theatrical, like Rita Kramer herself.

“Might I ask who this is?” the voice inquired.

“Haven Wilson. She called me a little while ago.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Wilson. She's very anxious to talk to you. She just went down to the flowershop. I'll get her. Please don't go away.”

He waited. The gray light flooded through the metal sash like seawater. The wind blew water from the trees against the smoky panes. The office walls, metal partitions papered in coconut fiber with metallic threads running through them, were as thin as matchwood. From the desk he could hear the two women gossiping outside the door, the one voice droning on in a grating whisper that fastened to his skull like a cutting edge, peeling hardwood to pulp. He didn't know how Matthews had managed this for so many years, day after day, week after week. He couldn't shut the door without putting down the phone, and so he sat there as the voice drilled on:

“… an' you can never tell, you know what I mean? There's this here insulation they got now causes cancer, you know? Breathing it in all day? Then you take someone that went an' used acid to clean up asphalt tile, makin' it all bright an' fresh like they do. Well, I remember when we was out at Fort Riley, we had us a little kitten, sweetest little thing you ever did see. Then she went to licking up some spilt milk off the kitchen floor, you know, the way they do. Before we knowed it, her belly went hard, hard as a rock, an' the poor thing dropped over, dead as a doornail.…”

“Wilson? Where in the hell have you been?” Rita Kramer was on the phone, angry and out of breath. Watching her cross the lobby of the downtown hotel before their first meeting a week earlier, Wilson had had intimations of Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive. She was tall and wide-shouldered, with the long arms and legs of an ex-dancer or show girl. Her dark odalisque eyes and wide mouth were so carefully made up that at that distance her face had the artificiality of a Kabuki mask. Her voice was rude, contemptuous, bawdy, and indiscreet. What impressed him most was her sheer physical vitality, relentless and inexhaustible. She reminded him of a high-class stripper from East Baltimore street who'd often shared his table when he was a young draftee at the counterintelligence school at Fort Holabird.

“I've been out, like you. Someone said you called me.”

“I waited all day Sunday, all day yesterday, shut up in this goddamned hotel room. You told me I'd hear from the owner—”

“I said I'd pass on your request to talk to her. I didn't say she'd call you.”

“Well, she hasn't called. Did you give her my latest offer?”

“I passed it through her lawyer.”

“What'd he say?”

“He said no, just as I said he would. I'm sorry.”

“
Sorry!
” Her voice erupted sharply and he held the phone away from his ear. “
Sorry!
Well, that's just nifty, isn't it! You're still hustling me, Wilson, you and that goddamned Matthews, who took a powder to Florida. You think I don't know a hustle when I hear one? My lawyer's here and he wants to talk to you.”

He heard the two arguing in the background and a minute later the masculine voice returned, as crisp and mannered as before.

“Edelman here, Mr. Wilson. Mrs. Kramer is very upset about this entire transaction, as I think she has reason to be. It's almost a week now since she offered you a contract on this property—”

“Five days,” Wilson said. “It was too low.”

“Perhaps, but we'd like to deal directly with the lawyer who's handling the estate or the owner herself. Mrs. Kramer has only a limited time available to her here in Washington, as she's explained. Since you've become involved, we seem to be getting nowhere. Under those circumstances, I think it perfectly appropriate that Mrs. Kramer be placed in direct contact with the lawyer or the owner, Mrs. Ramsey.”

Wilson said nothing. Rita Kramer's voice came back.

“You get my message, Wilson? I'm tired of you giving me the runaround. I want to talk to the owner, Mrs. Grace Ramsey.”

“She's in Majorca.”

“Friday you said Bimini!”

Wilson had forgotten what he'd said. Grace Ramsey floated around the Mediterranean and the Caribbean like a wisp of high-flying cirrus. “Bimini, Majorca, they're both the same—out of the country. Abroad. I've told you that.” He lifted his feet to the desk and reclined in his chair, ready for another five rounds. After a week of sparring and brawling, a certain basis for communication had been established. “I'm sorry, but you can find something else in Washington. Try those Georgetown brokers, like I suggested—”

“And how many times do I have to tell you that's
not
what I'm looking for!”

A long silence followed.

“Are you still there?” she asked finally.

“I'm here.”

“Good.” She slammed down the phone.

A little after eleven, Wilson led the two women from the reception room down the front stairs. Mrs. Polk had a dead battery and was waiting for a booster charge from a nearby service station. She'd telephoned to ask him to deliver her client and her friend to her residence on his way to an eleven o'clock meeting with an Arlington tax lawyer. The dark-haired client, named Fillmore, was the wife of an army sergeant recently assigned to the Pentagon from Oklahoma. Her blond companion was also the wife of an NCO, and lived in the same transient quarters while waiting to move into a house they'd bought in Annandale. The basement leaked. An aggrieved party, she'd joined Mrs. Fillmore to give her the benefit of her house-hunting experience.