The Witch of Watergate (2 page)

A WEEK LATER Fiona called Chappy from the office. Polly
Dearborn's latest story was spread out on the top of her battered squad-room
desk. Some of it had absorbed coffee stains and smears from the sticky bun she
had brought in with her from the basement carry-out.

"You must be prescient," she said.

It was morning and his voice was still hoarse with sleep.

"I am?" He seemed confused, not yet oriented.

"I woke you."

"Busy night," he mumbled.

"Are you alone?"

"Just a minute, I'll check," he said. He was
obviously awakening. Out of consideration, she supposed she should call back.
But no. Under present crisis conditions in Homicide, there wouldn't be time.
The yellowing fuzzy glassed clock on the wall read eight. In a moment the
Eggplant would be roaring into the squad room, breathing fire. Things were
getting worse. The night before there had been five more murders, all of them
drug and gang-related.

"There is a large Parker House roll in the bed beside
me," Chappy said.

"Christ, Chappy. Stop being so literal."

"So why am I prescient?"

"Polly Dearborn did Chester Downey this morning."

"Poor bastard."

"You called it, Chappy. That day at the races. You
said it wouldn't matter. Remember how cozy she was with him that day. Made no
difference."

"Never does."

"Bottom line is that Chester Downey, our erstwhile
Secretary of Defense, once you cut through the bullshit, is a bit of a rogue.
He apparently hid his assets from his wife during their divorce and she
suggests that he favors a certain company for defense contracts. His son just
happens to be an executive there. And that's just part one. First of
three."

"More than enough already for the dry rot to begin its
work."

"She does her homework."

"You mean her incantation. The 'Witch of Watergate' is
doing her thing again. She's whipped up an impression, recorded it for all
time. Now it's in data banks, clipping services, libraries, a commodity for
instant information retrieval. Old Chester will have to live with it, of
course. It won't be enough to topple him now. But it will dog him forever, kill
him slowly, foreclose on any other public ambitions in the future."

She let him spend himself, waiting for the pause. He had
apparently worked himself fully awake.

"Call me after you read it, Chappy."

"Sorry, Fi. I can't bear it. To read her always
depresses me. There, by the Grace of God, went I. My inclination is to call the
man and commiserate. Poor bastard is now a piece of bait. The so-called media
feeding frenzy begins once again. Only part one, you say. The man will be
nibbled to death." He cleared his throat. "Let he who is without sin
cast the first stone."

"Kind of early to be biblical," she joshed.

"You woke me. Now I have little choice."

She was confused.

"If you'll excuse me I will attend to this Parker
House roll beside me. It is my intention, if you will allow me to be biblical
again, to go in unto her."

"You're incorrigible."

"How would you know?"

He had barely hung up when the Eggplant's shadow loomed
over her desk.

"I'm happy to see that you, FitzGerald, have enough
time on your hands to read that rag. In their eyes, we are incompetent fools
responsible for making this city the murder capital of the U. S. of A."

He was in his usual foul mood and his milk-chocolate
complexion was grey with exhaustion. Pressure and frustration were taking their
toll.

He had called a meeting of everyone for eight-thirty. Such
meetings had become routine, angry sessions to vent frustration, blow off
steam. His harangues were often bitter and rambling, products of a growing
siege mentality that had rolled over them like hot lava. These morning meetings
had become a painful experience, a kind of group therapy gone awry that did
little to improve motivation and morale. She finished her coffee and sticky
bun, folded the paper and put it in her desk drawer.

She looked toward the door. The men and women on her shift
had straggled in, anticipating, like her, another agitating experience. Cates,
her partner, had not yet arrived. She hoped he wouldn't be late. God help those
who scampered in while the meeting was in progress.

They crowded into the Eggplant's "conference"
room, a forest of mismatched chairs surrounding a long, battered rectangular
table. The pictureless walls were painted a grim vomit green that was
especially hell on dark complexions, the possession of the overwhelming
majority of those present.

Seen together, as Fiona observed, they were a motley crew,
mostly black, male and ungainly in suits that bulged with fat, muscle and
firearms. Although they generally competed and covered with banter and sarcasm
their various antagonisms, they had been miraculously bonded by the crisis of
recent events.

There was one other woman in the room, a recent transferee
from Burglary, a severe-looking black woman who in the week that she had been
on the squad had, to Fiona's knowledge, never smiled or made a single friendly
gesture to any of the others. Her name was Charleen Evans.

The air in the badly ventilated room was filled with smoke.
Rules that applied in the civilian world were not applied here, not now in this
atmosphere of siege and despair. The Eggplant puffed deeply on his panatela,
expelling smoke through both nostrils like a raging dragon. His bloodshot eyes
squinted through the smoke, scanning the somber faces in the room.

"Last night makes the record," he rasped
hoarsely. "We're numero-uno, number-one in the whole fucking country. We
are the cutting edge of the scythe that is mowing down American society."
He had, Fiona noted, obviously been thinking deeply on the subject, searching
for words that might describe his rage and convey it to the squad. "I
am..." He paused and again scanned the faces in the room. His eyes were
heavy-lidded, tired, pitying. "...I am disgusted by my fellow man. The
conduct of these people defies rationalization."

He was conveying another message as well, especially to the
blacks present. It was essential that he make the moral separation between the
brothers, since it was, however it might be disguised, the good brothers ranged
against the evil brothers. Fiona sensed the painfulness of his having to imply
such a condition and she felt embarrassed for him and the others, especially
since it had to be implied in front of her, a white woman, a minority in this
place, further separated by privilege and class distinctions, a reality that
she detested but could not deny.

"Under ordinary circumstances," he continued, his
words cascading on a flume of smoke, "the performance of this division
would be the envy of any department in the world. Wherever. Nairobi, Bombay, or Tuscaloosa. Our apprehension record is, bar none, the top of the line. We're
making our cases stick. You people ... I'll say this once ... then forget where
you heard it." Small grunts of knowing snickers rippled through the room.
"...Are the best homicide cops anywhere. The fucking best." He drew
in a deep puff, mostly to mask a surge of sentiment. Out of embarrassment few
eyes confronted him directly at that moment. Then his voice boomed out.
"But, ladies and gentlemen, we are shoveling shit against the tide. We are
being overwhelmed by numbers. And we are manpower short by half. The bad guys
are winning. For the moment. Maybe forever. Who knows. They tell us help is on
the way." He made it clear by facial gestures in what contempt he held
that promise. "Nevertheless, our job is to plow ahead, and since we are
captive to a frightened and demanding establishment and an outrageous media we
must follow the priorities that they create."

She wasn't sure what he was driving at, glancing at Taylor, the Eggplant's number-two, for clarification. Taylor shrugged and lifted his eyes
to the ceiling. He was white and near retirement, an old hand who had seen it
all. To the Eggplant he was a point of reference between the old days and now.

At that moment Cates came into the room. As always, he was
immaculately groomed and attired, looking distinctly out of place in this
company of mostly males of nondescript appearance.

"Well, well, Sergeant Cates," the Eggplant said,
bringing the full force of his general animosity into specific focus on its
unwitting target. Actually, having seen public humiliations done on numerous
occasions by the Eggplant, Cates' only defense was to lock himself behind a
facade of scrupulous nonreaction. "We are talking here of priorities.
Apparently your priorities are not consistent with the rest of the group."

"I'm awfully sorry, Captain..."

"Sorry? Sorry, Sergeant Cates? We are all sorry. That
is the subject of this meeting ... sorriness. We are sorry for all the
killings, sorry for all the havoc, all the dead cops, all the wasted lives. We
are the collectors of human garbage, the harvesters of shit..." He paused,
glared for a moment silently at Cates, then directed his attention back to the
group as Cates dived for a chair behind a line of beefy cops.

"Priorities are as follows. From here on in, we do it
this way." He counted off the order of battle on his fingers. "Gangs
and drug-related. Double or triple teams if necessary. We have been assured
uniform backup. Everyone on that beat in vests. Capish?"

A wave of mumbling rippled through the room, quickly
preempted by the Eggplant. "The domestic bloodbath is strictly in second
place, along with naturals and suicides. Of course, we do them. Like always.
But it will be strictly skeleton crews. The name of the game is drug-related,
especially the gangs. And they're armed and dangerous. The bitch is we've got
to get enough to make the cases, get the bastards off the streets."

"Fat chance," someone whispered behind Fiona,
reflecting the general disillusionment with the criminal-justice system.

"It's not going to be business as usual," the
Eggplant continued. "There will be changes. New partnering and, what is
worse, transient partnering. It flies in the face of the way we have operated
for years. But we have no choice. Not now. We're in the midst of one fucking
dangerous trench war. For us it's a prescription for disaster. Understaffed and
overworked. In wars that's when people die." He paused and rolled his
eyes. "Things could change ... if help ever comes."

"You don't believe that, do you, Captain?" one of
the men asked. It was a question posed with deference by one of the less
loquacious of the group, a detective named Harding who had recently been
laterally transferred from Bunko.

"There is value in hope, Harding," the Eggplant
shot back. He panned the group once again. "The fact is, make no mistakes
about it, we are in heavy combat."

"For which we get no combat pay," Harding
muttered.

"Nobody is twisting your arm, Officer," the
Eggplant retorted with a sneer. The man brooked nothing less than dedication.

The remark prompted some to exchange glances, obviously
seeking allies in anger. One of the men, Robinson, a black twenty-year veteran,
flat nostrils quivering with indignation, took out his piece and put it on the
table.

"They got automatic widowmakers. We got
peashooters."

"And I got three kids," Alberts said. Like Taylor, he was one of the few white men still putting in his time.

"We're cops, not soldiers, Captain," someone
said, followed by a chorus of approvals.

To Fiona there was another, more ominous implication. The
notion of combat carried with it the idea of female inequality. Women, in the
fighting services, were still barred from combat. It was a notion that carried
over to the police, although it was not official policy. A not-so-subtle change
was taking place. Things were going to get a lot more physical in the streets.
As they, the men who ran things, saw it, being physical was still a man's game.

She detested the idea. From her perspective it was an erosion
of her rights as a police officer. Besides, she could be as physical as any
man.

The Eggplant shook his head, still contemplating the piece
being exhibited on the table.

"We are the law," he said quietly, raising his
eyes to confront the man making the challenge. "The thin blue line."

The statement had all the drama of simple but powerful
eloquence, and it quieted the recalcitrant rumbling. Robinson took his piece
off the table and replaced it in his holster. Oddly, the gesture seemed one of
satisfaction, as if the Eggplant's remark had miraculously settled the
question.

Despite all the secret ridicule and mimicry, some deserved,
Captain Luther Green did command respect. His ambition was naked, his ego at
times overbearing, his Machiavellian manipulation and bluster often
heavy-handed, but under fire and in the logic of police reasoning, he was
always the consummate professional, a leader who had the true trust of his
underlings. He knew his trade and he absolutely believed, a notion not without
merit, that he would make the perfect Police Commissioner. It was a goal toward
which all his waking energy was devoted.

"The bottom line is that all assignments are being
shuffled," he continued, now that he had recovered his sense of
domination. "Those on drug-related are to continue. Most of you on
domestics and naturals will be reassigned to drug-related."

"Cannon fodder," a detective named Thompson
blared. It was more an observation than a protest.

"'Fraid so, boys," the Eggplant said
lugubriously, confirming her worst fears. So this was one for the boys, she
thought, turning to exchange glances with Charleen Evans, who avoided looking
at her. Her face seemed like sculptured granite, carved forever in a fixed,
unblinking, unemotional, no-nonsense expression. Her transfer had, in fact,
deprived Fiona of her position as the only female on the squad, although she
retained the title as the only "white" female.