Dead Watch (26 page)

No. He was being cute. He didn’t want cute, he wanted cold. He rehearsed for another moment: “Get your fuckin’ ass on the couch, fat man . . .” More gravel in the voice: “Get your fuckin’ ass on the couch . . .”

Rosenquist lived on the twelfth floor of a co-op apartment in the Park Avenue six-hundreds, a bulky granite building with a liveried doorman. One of the residents, leading a dog only slightly larger than a hoagie, went through ahead of Jake. The doorman nodded and she took the elevator. When the lobby was clear, Jake walked in. The doorman straightened and Jake asked, “Dr. Rosenquist?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Andy Carlyle.” No point in going on record with the doorman. “A friend of his died and I helped clean out the apartment. I found some, mmm, personal items that I believe belong to Dr. Rosenquist.”

The doorman called up. After a brief chat, he handed the phone to Jake. Jake took it and said, “Hello?”

“This is James Rosenquist. What do you have?”

“Your friend’s wife asked me to clean out, mmm, his apartment.” Ostentatiously not using the name. “I found some, ahh, jewelry. There were some personal papers, plus a note that said that you should get the jewelry. One of the pieces is leather with diamonds, two are separate gold chains.”

“Give the phone back to Ralph. I’ll tell him to send you up.”

In the elevator, Jake said aloud, “Tough and mysterious. Tough and mysterious. CIA killer. Movie killer, movie killer, movie killer . . .”

Looking at himself in the elevator mirror, he did a quick recomb of his hair, baring the shaved strip and the stitches. The Frankenstein vibe. When he was done, one lobe of the greased hair had fallen over his forehead, and he liked it, a vague Hitleresque note to go with the Frankenstein. He put the quarter between his gum and his left cheek and said, “Here’s lookin’ at ya.”

No. He was being cute again. No cute. He needed crazy.

Rosenquist was a blocky, round-faced man dressed in sweatpants, a half-marathon T-shirt that said,
RUN
FOR
YOUR
LIFE
, and slippers. A soft man, fifty pounds overweight. He had a glass in his hand. Dance music played from deeper in the apartment. Jake bobbed his head and held up his cane and the briefcase, tried to look like a polite CIA killer, and asked, “Dr. Rosenquist?”

“Better come in. You recovered these things from Linc’s apartment?”

Rosenquist had closed the door and Jake took two quick steps down the hallway and looked into the living room. Empty; music playing from a stereo in the corner. Jake turned back and said, his voice as hard and clipped as he could manage, “Yes, but we disposed of them. I used them as an excuse to get in here. I want to know what you did with Bowe’s medical records.”

Rosenquist stopped short, his lips turning down in a grimace, and he growled, “Get out.”

“No. We no longer have room to fuck around.” Jake stepped closer to him, and then another step, and Rosenquist stepped backward. “You’re right in the middle of this, Rosenquist, and people are getting hurt. I need the records.”

Rosenquist moved sideways, his hand darting toward an intercom panel. “I’ll get . . .”

The gun was in Jake’s hand, pointing at Rosenquist’s temple. “You don’t seem to understand how serious this is, fat man,” he said. “I’ve been told to get the records. I will get them, one way or another.”

Rosenquist’s hands were up, his eyes wide: “Don’t point the gun at me. The gun could go off, don’t point the gun.”

“The records . . .” The quarter slipped and Jake caught it with his upper lip: a snarl, a sneer.

“There are no records, there are no records,” Rosenquist babbled. “Whatever records there are, are in my office, but they’re meaningless. He never had anything wrong with him.” But he was lying; his eyes gave him away, moving sideways, then flicking back, judging whether Jake was buying the story.

He wasn’t. Jake waggled the gun at him. “In the living room. Put your ass on the couch, fat man.”

“There are no records . . .” Rosenquist sat on the couch.

Jake said, “What were you treating him for?”

“I wasn’t treating him, honest to God.” Lying again.

Jake looked at him, then said, in a kindly voice, “I’ve had to kill a few people. In the military. And a couple of more, outside. You know. Business. I didn’t like it, but it had to be done. You know what I’m saying? It had to be done. These people were causing trouble.” He hoped he sounded insane. The quarter slipped, and he pushed it back.

“I know, I know.” Rosenquist tried a placating smile, but his voice was a trembling whine.

“This is the same kind of deal, when you get right down to it,” Jake said. He said, “If you move, I’m going to beat the shit out of you.”

“Listen . . .”

Jake flipped open the gun’s cylinder, shucked the shells into his left hand, and Rosenquist shut up, his eyes big as he watched. Jake picked out the empty shell, with the firing pin impression on the primer. Held it up so Rosenquist could see it, slipped it back into the cylinder, snapped the cylinder shut.

“Now,” he said. He spun the cylinder.

“Gimme a break,” Rosenquist said. “You’re not going to do that.”

Jake pointed the pistol at Rosenquist’s head and pulled the trigger. It snapped, nothing happened. Rosenquist jumped, his mouth open, his eyes narrowing in horror: “You pulled the trigger.
You pulled the frigging trigger
.”

Jake spun the cylinder: “Yeah, but it was five-to-one against. Against it blowing your brains out. Though maybe not. I can never do the math on these things.” The quarter slipped, and he stopped to shove it back in place with his tongue. Drooled a bit, and wiped his lips with his hand; saw Rosenquist pick up on the drool. “It’s supposed to be five-to-one every time, right? But if you do it enough, it’s gonna go off eventually, right? How many times on average? You’re a doctor, you should have the math. Is it five times to fifty-fifty? Or is it two and a half times to fifty-fifty? I could never figure that out.”

He pointed the gun at Rosenquist’s head again and the doctor’s hands came up as if to block the bullet, and he turned his face away and blurted, “He had cancer.”

“Cancer.” Jake looked at him over the barrel. “Where, cancer?”

“Brain. A tumor.”

“How bad?” Jake asked.

“Untreatable.”

“How long did he have it when he disappeared?”

“He’d had it for probably a year, but we’d only known about it for a few weeks. Growing like crazy. Nothing to do about it. When he went, he was already showing it. He was losing function, physical and mental. He had some deep pain. We could treat that for a while, but not for long.”

“Was he planning to suicide?”

“I think so. I don’t know. I don’t know what happened with this . . . beheading. I don’t know. He told me to keep my mouth shut. He was my friend.”

Jake stepped back, flipped the cylinder out again, reloaded the gun.

“You’re going to kill me?”

“I don’t have to,” Jake said. “If you say anything about any of this, it’ll all come out. Prison’s not the best place for a fat soft gay guy. You’d have to deal with it for a long time.”

“I can’t believe Madison had anything to do with this,” Rosenquist said, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“Jesus Christ.” Jake laughed, his best dirty laugh, shook his head, drooled again, wiped his lips. “You’re just so goddamned dumb, fat man. This is
way
past Madison Bowe. You don’t know what you’ve done with this little game. You don’t know what you’ve stepped into. The FBI’s in it, the CIA, God only knows what the security people are doing. I know the Watchmen are working it and there’re some guys working for Goodman you wouldn’t want to meet. They’ll cut your fuckin’ legs off with a chain saw. Madison Bowe? You fuckin’ dummy.”

“If you’re not with Madison . . .” Rosenquist was confused. “Who are you with?”

“Best not to know,” Jake said. He smiled the crooked coin-holding smile. “It’s one of those deals where I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

Old joke; Rosenquist recognized it, at the same time he seemed to buy it. Jake pushed on: “So. Mouth shut, ass down. Maybe you’ll live through it—though I don’t know what the other side’s thinking. Wouldn’t destroy any records, but you might put them someplace where your lawyer can get them if he needs them. They’re about the only chip you’ve got in this game.”

And he was out of there.

On the street, clear of the building, walking fast, he called Madison. “I think I should come and see you,” he said.

“Come on,” she said.

Then he started to laugh. If his grandmother had heard him up there, using the language, she would have washed his mouth out with soap.

So he laughed, and the people on the sidewalk spread carefully around him; a man, alone, laughing aloud on a New York street, in the dark. Not necessarily a threat, but it pays to be careful.

On the way back in the plane, Jake tried to work through what he knew: that Lincoln Bowe had been dying, and that Bowe had known about a scandal, a package, that would unseat the vice president of the United States, and, if delivered at the right time, probably the president as well.

They did not fit together. He kept trying to find a way, and not until they were coming into National, the Washington Monument glowing white out the right-side window, did one answer occur to him.

He resisted the idea. Struggled again to find a logic that would put all the pieces together—but Occam’s razor kept jumping up at him: the simplest answer is probably the right one.

And the simplest answer was very simple indeed: they weren’t related at all.

Jake got out of the cab at Madison’s a little after midnight. The front-porch light was burning, and Madison opened the door as he climbed the stairs.

“What happened?” she asked. “Come in . . . You look exhausted.”

“I’m fairly well kicked,” Jake admitted. “The days are getting long.”

They drifted toward the front room. “Tell me,” she said.

“I’ll tell you, but you can’t ever admit knowing, all right? It could put you in legal jeopardy. If you have to perjure yourself, and say you didn’t know, that’s what you do,” Jake said.

“What happened?”

“Rosenquist didn’t want to talk. I faked a Russian roulette thing, using a pistol of your husband’s. I pointed it at Rosenquist’s head and pulled the trigger. That’s a felony, aggravated assault. But he started talking. I hinted that I was from some political group, maybe even an intelligence organization. I told him I didn’t know you.”

“Jeez, Jake.” She was standing close to him, and put her hand on his elbow.

“We had to know,” Jake said. “Here’s the thing: he told me that your husband had brain cancer. He was terminal. Rosenquist said there was no chance he’d make it. When he died, he was already showing functional problems, both physically and mentally. That explains the press reports that he’d been drunk in public. That he seemed to be on the edge of control . . . He was medicated. I think he killed himself—had himself killed—and tried to hang it on Goodman.”

Her hands had gone to her cheeks. “My God. But . . . his head?”

“He might not have known the details, might not have worked through the logic of it. On the other hand, maybe he did. They couldn’t leave the head. They had to know that it would be destroyed, completely, or an autopsy would have shown the tumor. Best way to get rid of it would be . . . to get rid of it.”

“That’s unbelievable.” She was pale as a ghost.

“You don’t believe it?”

“No, I sort of do—but I can’t see
anybody
planning that. It’s too cold.”

“I was told by somebody who knew him that Lincoln had a mean streak . . . a mean streak can mean a coldness. Maybe he could do it.”

She walked away from him, both hands on top of her head, as if trying to contain her thoughts. “I just, I just . . .”

“Novatny told me the autopsy indicated that Lincoln had been drugged—painkillers. We thought it was to control him; it was actually for the pain. I’d bet he was unconscious when they did it and I’ll bet you anything that Howard Barber set it up. He was Lincoln’s best friend, they share both a sexual orientation and a set of politics. They both hated Goodman, and Barber had done some rough stuff in the military. He had the skills, the guts, the motive, and Lincoln could trust him to do it right.”

“The Schmidt man?”

“I think he was set up. By Barber. I didn’t have a chance to dig for connections, but they were both in the military at the same time. Schmidt was given a general discharge, which usually means a kind of plea bargain. He did something, but they didn’t want to waste time with him, or maybe they didn’t want the publicity. I’ve got some access to military records. I can probably figure out what happened.”

“But why can’t they find . . . oh. You mean, Howard killed him, too? Killed Schmidt?”

“That’s what I think.”

“If Howard killed him, there had to be a plan, Linc would have to have known . . . I don’t think Linc . . . Linc wouldn’t go away without feeding the
cats
, he wouldn’t kill a man who was innocent.”

“Your husband didn’t have to know the whole plan,” Jake said. “May have preferred not to.”

“Another thing . . .” He fished the note out of his pocket. “I found a note in the second safe. It says, ‘All because of Lion Nerve.’ Do you have any idea what it means? It was right on top of the safe, with the pictures, like it was important.”

She looked at it for a moment, and a thoughtful frown wrinkled her forehead. “I don’t know what it means, but I know what it
is
. It’s an anagram for something. Linc talked in anagrams—he could come up with an anagram for anything, off the top of his head. He used them as mnemonics.”

Now Jake smiled: “You’re the first person I’ve ever heard pronounce
mnemonics
,” he said. He took the note back. “The ‘Lion Nerve’ is the anagram?”

“I’d think so.”

He tucked the note in his pocket. “One last thing . . .”

He told her about the package, about the attempt to push Vice President Landers out of his job, about Patterson, about a Wisconsin connection. She listened carefully, then asked, “I know Tony Patterson from the campaign. He’s a smart man—so why couldn’t it be Goodman? How do you know Goodman
didn’t
take Linc, to get this package? You say that’s what Tony Patterson thinks. That makes perfect sense to me.”

“Because then, Schmidt doesn’t make any sense,” Jake said. “What I think is this: I think we have two groups fighting it out in the dark. Goodman’s people have gotten a sniff of the package, and they are desperately trying to find it, to push it out early. Maybe even to make an explicit deal that would get Goodman into Landers’s job. Barber’s group has the package, or knows where it is, or who has it, and they don’t want it pushed out until the last minute, when it’ll do the most damage.”

Madison thought about it for a minute, then said, “Wisconsin.”

“That’s where the package is supposedly coming from.”

“There’s a man there named Alan Green,” Madison said. “He runs a polling company called the PollCats, something like that.”

“You think?”

She nodded. “He was an aide to a congressman here for ten years or so, before his guy lost and Alan went back home to make some money. He’s gay. He and Linc had a relationship. They’ve always been tight politically. If the package is coming from Wisconsin, Al knows everybody in Wisconsin. He could be the tie between Wisconsin and Lincoln.”

Jake thought about it for a few seconds, then, “I’ll go out there. Tomorrow.”

“Can I come with you?” she asked. “I know Alan fairly well, he’d talk to me.”

Jake was shaking his head. “You’re too visible. If there’s ever an investigation, you don’t want to have been anyplace around Wisconsin. You want to be able to claim that even if your husband was involved in the package deal, he didn’t tell you, specifically to protect you. If you’ve gone to Wisconsin . . .”

“What about you?”

“I’ll go to a little trouble to cover my tracks, though nothing’s ever perfect. You have to hope that the tracks get lost in the clutter.”

“All right.” She put her hands to her face and rubbed. “What will you do if you find the package?”

“Break it out,” Jake said. “I’ll have no choice.”

“You could just walk away,” she said. “Right now. Go back to the university. Write another book.”

“I could. But there are two factors here. If the Republicans—you guys—have it, you’ll break it out anyway, and wreck someone I like. The president. He’s a pretty good guy. But the other thing is, as long as there’s a scramble going on,
you’re
going to be near the center of it. Everybody’s going to at least check you. Both sides, Barber and Goodman, have people who I suspect would kill for it. I don’t want you to become a target.”

She shook her head. “Howard wouldn’t hurt me. We’ve always been sympathetic . . .
simpatico
.”

“This isn’t a friendship thing anymore,” Jake said. “Listen, I’ve got to . . . mmm . . . I don’t want to think that you’re playing me. That Madison Bowe is playing Jake Winter. Because there are some real problems. They’ve got lethal injection in Virginia. Even if Barber could beat the charge of killing Lincoln, making it out to be assisted suicide, he’s got the Schmidt thing hanging over his head. I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that Schmidt’s buried out in the woods. If you know about it, you could be in trouble with him. You could be part of a murder conspiracy. If you don’t, you could still be a serious danger to him, and he to you. Either way, you could be in trouble.”

She stared at him for a second, then stood up and dusted the seat of her pants. “Maybe I should go to New York. Or Santa Fe. Tell a couple of people I can trust, and just split.”

“That might not be a bad idea, going to New York,” Jake said. He looked at his watch, stepped back toward the door. “I’m going to try to work this through. You—don’t isolate yourself. The more people you keep around you, the safer you’ll be.”

She walked him back to the door. “What you said a minute ago . . . whether I’m telling you the truth about Schmidt.”

“Yeah?”

He turned on the porch, his stick and briefcase in hand, hoping for a good-bye kiss, and she said, “You don’t trust me.”

“Not yet, not entirely,” he confessed. “But I’m trying as hard as I can.”

“Try harder.” She closed the door, and he walked down to the curb to wait for the taxi.

The governor was asleep when Darrell walked through the front door, punched a code in the burglar alarm, flipped on a hall light, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. He tripped another alarm, a silent alarm, on the way up, and a strobe began blinking at the governor’s bedside.

Goodman woke and heard Darrell call, “It’s me, Arlo.” Goodman sat up, turned on the bedside lamp. “Come in. What happened?”

Darrell pushed into the bedroom. “Sorry. It’s important. I want you to know what I’m doing.”

“What?”

“We’ve got a lead on the package. Winter was in New York, he came back to talk to Madison Bowe, we got the whole conversation. They must’ve been sitting right under the bug.”