Dead Watch (18 page)

“Last question, then,” Jake said. “I don’t know if you’ll know what I’m talking about, so I’m going to come at it obliquely—because if you don’t know, I don’t want you to guess.”

Barber studied him for a moment, then: “Okay.”

“Did you know that your friend Lincoln Bowe was involved in an effort to . . .” Jake hesitated, hoping he’d leave the impression that he was groping for the right word, though he’d spit at Barber exactly what the unknown man had told him on the phone, “. . . that he was, uh, what shall we call it: examining nonconventional means of destabilizing this administration. Does that mean anything to you?”

Barber’s eyes went opaque: “No. What the hell does it mean?”

Jake thought:
He knows.
“All right. I really can’t tell you . . .”

They talked for a few more minutes, and Barber, as he was leaving, promised to get back on the question of Bowe’s ongoing love affairs. At the door, Barber said, “When is the gay thing going to hit the streets?”

Jake shrugged: “I haven’t told anybody yet. I’m afraid it’d derail the investigation. You want a call before I do it?”

“I’d appreciate it . . . and if you could take it a little easy?”

“I’ll try. But it’s going to be out of my hands at that point.”

Jake let Barber out the back door, then spent an hour making notes of the conversation and listing questions. He’d noticed how Barber’s language switched easily back and forth from a street-flavored lingo to postgraduate sophistication. From
Goodman’s boys fuckin’ up people
at one moment to
proto-fascist charismatic führer
the next.

And he’d been lying about Bowe and the destabilization thing. Bowe had been into something. Now Jake had to work through it. Whatever it was, how did it tie in to Goodman? Or did it?

He made another call about Cathy Ann Dorn—he got the nursing desk and was told that she had been awake, had eaten some cottage cheese, and was asleep again.

He talked to Novatny.

“Bowe was alive when he was shot, but he was full of drugs. Enough painkiller to knock him on his ass. They may have kept him sedated to control him. Shot him in the heart. The debris in the wound canal was newsprint. The thinking is, they may have tried to use a wad of paper to muffle the sound of the shot.”

“That’s weird.”

“Shooting a drugged guy is weird,” Novatny said. “Cold, ice-cold, murder. Don’t get no colder than that.”

Jake went online, into the federal records. He had only limited access as a consultant, but he found a file on Darrell Goodman. The file was informative in an uninformative way—parts of his military record had simply been removed from the unclassified files. And that meant, almost certainly, that he was a snoop-and-pooper. Goodman had himself a hit man.

Jake was thinking about it when Merkin, the contact at the Republican National Committee, called back.

“Jake, we gotta talk. Where are you?”

“I’m home. Is this about Packer?”

“About Packer and Tony Patterson.” Merkin sounded worried.

“Okay. I can come there, or you could come here. . . .”

“No, no. How about at the National Gallery? Like in the nineteenth-century French paintings?” Merkin suggested. “I could walk over. Meet you outside in an hour?”

“I should be there by then. If not, pretty quick after that.” And he thought,
Doesn’t want to talk to me at his office . . . doesn’t want to be seen with me.

Barber called Madison Bowe on her cell phone, caught her on the way back from the funeral home. “I talked to Winter,” he said. “He says he hasn’t told anybody about the gay thing.”

“Huh. I was all braced.”

“He’s afraid it’d derail the investigation.”

“Ah, jeez,” she said. “I feel like I’m . . . It makes me feel rotten. I’m not made for this.”

“I know, I know. Maybe you oughta just get out of it, get away from Winter. The guy is pulling stuff out of the air. I didn’t even want to
look
at him. I was afraid he could read my eyes.”

“He is that way . . . ,” Madison said.

“I’ll tell you, it doesn’t really make sense. He should have told Danzig by now,” Barber said. “I’m wondering . . . Maybe Winter is trying to do right by you.”

“He likes me,” Madison said.

“I could tell. And you like him back.”

“Mmm.” She realized it was true. She hastened on. “About the other issue . . .”

“Not on the phone,” Barber said. “Tell you what. I’ll stop over and see you when we both have time. We can talk it all out.”

The National Gallery looks like a WPA post office. Jake found Merkin on the main floor, morosely examining Cézanne’s
House by the Marne.

“In Cézanne’s day, the Marne wasn’t
the
Marne,” Jake said, taking in the painting.

“Looks like a creek,” Merkin said. “Not like a million dead men, or whatever it was.”

“I didn’t know you were an art fan, Tom.”

“Ah, it calms me down, coming here,” Merkin said. “I never see anybody from work.”

“Probably be better if you did,” Jake said. “I mean, for the Republic.”

Merkin nodded. “Let’s walk.”

They walked toward the American wing, talking in hushed voices, Whistler’s huge
White Girl
peering at them down the long hall. Merkin said, “As far as I know, nobody did anything illegal.”

“Then what’re we talking about?”

“Patterson had worked with Packer in North Carolina on the Jessup campaign, and out in New Mexico on Jerry Radzwill’s. They saw each other around. Patterson is with ALERT! right now. He was an advisor on the Bowe campaign. He was set for a decent job if Bowe won, but Bowe didn’t, so he wound up at ALERT!”

“He’s a Bowe guy.”

“Was. Anyway, he got in touch with Packer and said he had a hypothetical for her. If, hypothetically, somebody had a package that would dump Vice President Landers off the ticket, when would be the best time for the package to be delivered?”

“What’s in the package?”

“Don’t know. Neither does Packer. Here’s the thing, here’s what Patterson was saying. He was saying that somebody has a package that’s so specific, so criminal, so irrefutable, that as soon as somebody respectable gets it, he’s gonna have to turn it over to the FBI or face criminal charges himself. But until then, it’s a figment of the imagination, floating around out there.”

“The implied question was, when did the Republicans want the package dumped to do the most damage?”

“That’s about it,” Merkin said.

“What was the answer?”

Merkin’s shoulders slumped, and he shook his head. “Jake, you know how the talk goes on these hypotheticals. People talk about this stuff all the time. Dump it October first, there’s plenty of time for the scandal to blow up, not enough time to recover . . . but who knows, maybe it could be suppressed until it’s too close to the election. So maybe September fifteenth. And maybe . . . Hell, you pick a date.”

“Sometime in the fall.”

“I would say that.”

“And you’re telling me this now because . . .”

“Because now that it’s out there and somebody knows about Patterson and Packer, we don’t want to get caught in the obstructing-justice squeeze,” Merkin said. “We’re reporting this to you, as the president’s point man on the Bowe investigation. I’m going to make a record of our talk here, and date it, get it notarized, and stick it in a safe-deposit box. If I never need it, that’s great. If I wind up talking to a Senate panel or a grand jury . . .”

“All right,” Jake said. “This information, whatever it is . . . Patterson got it from Senator Bowe?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Patterson.” He swung his sport coat off his shoulder, dug in a side pocket, and came up with a leaf torn from a desk calendar. A phone number and address were written in the memo block. “I happen to have his name and address with me.”

Jake stuck the paper in his pocket. “I’ll probably have to tell the feds.”

“We’ll do everything in the world to cooperate. Packer understands that. We don’t have anything to do with Patterson, so that’s not our problem. Remember: the whole thing was presented to Packer as a hypothetical. And it was all so vague, what was she going to report? Anything we did could be interpreted as an unsupported and scurrilous attack on the vice president.”

They walked to the end of the wing and stood looking at
White Girl
. She looked back with a boldness that was disconcerting, as though she were personally interested in their conspiracy. After a moment, Jake said, “Well, shoot, Tom. I was planning to sit in the tub tonight. Nice soothing soak.”

“It’s an election year, Jake.”

“Yeah, it is. But let me tell you something, Tommy. If I were you, I wouldn’t go leaking this around. If it’s real, it’ll come out. But there are elements of a conspiracy here—a conspiracy with a murder, and you guys are in it. We’re not talking about six weeks in minimum security anymore.”

“I know that.”

“So don’t mess with it. Talk to your people, too. Sit on them. This is gonna be . . . this is gonna be difficult.”