American Quartet Read online

  To Grampa Fitz, and to her father, the police department was always the “farce,” and all FitzGerald males were expected, indeed decreed, to “jine the farces.” Retribution to her father came in the form of three daughters. Coupled with the sexual revolution and the radicals in the church, especially the language change in the liturgy, the poor man was rendered punchy, always on the edge of rage, by the time she, the youngest daughter, began to menstruate.

  She grew up with threats of “mortal sin” and “you’ll roast in hell” burning in her ears—it was the only preventive medicine her parents knew, to make her preserve her virginity for some nice Irish boy. It was a losing battle. She saw them, beginning in her teens, as quaint relics of Irish myth. They abominated the freedom of contemporary life; it was all murky darkness, redeemed only by a sliver of light that was their love for her, and she forgave them everything.

  Events in her life seemed to happen in mysterious apposition. She moved to Washington to escape the family. Then, after a stint as an FBI office worker, she joined the Washington police “farces” as if to redeem herself in their eyes.

  It was not, of course, a woman’s place, and her father ranted and raved over such effrontery to the male imperative—until the day he saw her in uniform, and then he collapsed in tears of pride. Her two older sisters had, in their way, followed the family’s wishes. They had both married cops and were busily producing future members of the “farces,” as if the new techniques of birth control had never existed.

  Once she had gained family approval, she took a further step, a master’s in criminology at American University. This turned out to be a brutal attack on the maleness of her brothers-in-law, who had only their high school diplomas, creating family tensions.

  “Goddamned niggers, spics and broads are invading the forces,” one of her brothers-in-law, deep in his cups, had railed at her one day. Surprisingly her father had stood up for her.

  “She can’t help it if she was born a girl,” he shouted. “Besides, there’s more niggers in Washington. At least, she’s Irish. In my day we kept the kikes and niggers out. Before the politicians mucked things up.”

  She hadn’t the guts to introduce Bruce Rosen to her parents. He was the embodiment of all their pet hates. Jewish, a politician, a liberal, divorced and, frosting the cake, about to live with her in sin. They would find this out soon enough. Why hassle them? As she carried her two suitcases up the walk to his Georgetown townhouse, she felt the tug of guilt, the old trepidations. Bruce’s presence steadied her.

  “I left the light burning in the window,” he said, opening the door before she could insert the key.

  “You shouldn’t have.” She let him embrace her, annoyed by her own gaminess after a long sweaty day’s work. “I smell awful.”

  “Au naturel,” he said. He smelled beautiful, like a bar of lime soap. He was wearing a velour robe, which he drew slightly open to show his eagerness.

  “I’ve got a headache,” she giggled, making no move. She felt his surety, his comfort. He kissed her hair. He could wait.

  He released her to bring her suitcases in and carry them up the stairs of the three-story house. His ex-wife had decorated the house with charcoal gray carpets and red throwaways. She had arranged it around their collection of Chinese “Bloods,” antique sixteenth-century vases. His wife had thoughtfully left him three or four, although she had taken most of the antiques, which had tripled in value since their divorce settlement three years earlier.

  He hadn’t done much with the house since, and the divorce had left a big dent in his bank account. It was, he told Fiona, a ransom just to have the kids half-time. Also, it foreclosed on a nasty divorce proceeding that could have affected his political career. From the moment she met him she understood that as a “given.”

  Soaking in the hot tub, Fiona felt her body soften. It was her ritual to have a long soak after the day’s grimy work. It was as if she were washing away the film of human filth that daily clung to her.

  In her work she floated in a sewer of human degradation, a scum of horrors, aberrations, cruelties. She was always fighting a battle with herself to maintain professional indifference, the same standard of a surgeon operating on a cancer, leaving the emotions to others. But sometimes the tide of human horror flowed through all too vulnerable chinks of her being. A sexual mutilation, a child ripped apart solely for gratification—you never were too hard-boiled for that. Sometimes the utter madness of crime crashed through the ramparts of her defenses. When she faltered, she would pray it was not because she was a woman. Compassion was the enemy of homicide cops.

  Yet there was something bizarre, something oddly clean about murder by gunshot, like killings in a cowboy flick. Pain without tears. As she lay in the tub, she felt the distance growing between her and that day’s murder. Her eyes were closed and she did not notice Bruce until he stood above her, holding a drink.

  “Pour that in your snout,” he said, clinking the ice in the glass. She took the glass and held it against her face, feeling the cold. She sipped, watching him, the aesthetic aquiline nose, the full lips and strong cleft chin. Above his high forehead the bed of steel-gray curls began in endless ripples, tight but soft.

  In his flecked hazel eyes she saw the intensity of his own drama, predatory when it came to political ambition, a trifle too shrewd at times, frightening when he was on the attack. She preferred watching them on the threshold of pleasure.

  He was so well made and he made her feel so good. Yet, in many ways, they were opposites. She was light, thin-skinned, with veiny networks under her patina of freckles. Her hair burned auburn in the right light and her pubic bush was carroty and, she thought, unfetching. She loved the lush black jungle mysteries of him.

  In any light her eyes were Kelly green, matching the Irish flag. They carried their own inner lamps, he once told her. She had a good straight Gaelic nose, unfleshy, with nostrils that quivered when she restrained anger. Her Irish was a beast on a leash, she knew, and she could let it out when her turf was invaded. She could also slip into deep brooding dark moods, like the most morose black Irishman.

  “The boys downtown should see you now,” he said, soaping her breasts. She reached out for him.

  “And you your constituents.” She kissed him there. “Good old Johnson.”

  “What?”

  “Police nomenclature.” She laughed. “You’d get every lady’s vote.”

  “I’m going to need them in November.” She caught a tremor of anxiety.

  He helped her out of the tub and toweled her off like a baby, adding light oil and sliding his palms over her skin.

  “God, it’s good to feel like a woman again,” she whispered. He hitched her to him and carried her to bed. She was surprised at the fury of her pleasure after such an exhausting day. When it had subsided and his soft breathing found its sleeping rhythm, she lay beside him, energized, unable to sleep. In that state the puzzles always surfaced, like a submarine emerging from the deep.

  She had carried away from the scene a half-made image, a negative aborted in mid-development. Later, she had watched Dr. Berton do the autopsy and had seen the killer bullet extracted. They had a corpus delicti with a history. He was a painter, frustrated by failure, a common ailment, who taught art history to teenagers and haunted museums, presumably searching for the missing link to his own talent.

  “Who would kill Joseph?” the victim’s wife had gasped. Surely not her. She was bogged down by three young children, overwork, and her husband’s perpetually lit fuse of unrequited artistic ambition.

  Fiona would have to go up to Hagerstown and ferret out more details. Poor Teddy. He’d have to go as well, courting Gladys’s wrath and jealousy. Fiona always went out of her way to make Gladys feel secure, but nothing helped. It was simply a hazard of the industry.

  “She thinks that women get into police work so they can get laid a lot,” Teddy had confessed. “Even though she likes you.”

  Can’t be helped, she ha
d decided. It hadn’t been her motivation. Police males hardly made a dent in her libido. For that reason she tried to neuter herself, not an easy task in a sea of men who played with guns and their precious Johnsons. The uniforms, the camaraderie, the occasional brutality were all a man’s game. That, she knew, made homicide all the more challenging.

  Whatever the motive, it was an unlikely setting for a killing. The National Gallery of Art! Nobody ever murdered anybody in an art gallery. And why in that specific spot under Childe Hassam’s painting? She made a mental note to check out Hassam. And the crime lab reports would tell them a great deal. When she grew drowsy, she fitted herself against Bruce’s body, two embryos, and let her mind idle. Soon she was asleep.

  His hands wakened her, their movements sensual and probing, lifting her out of the mud of unconsciousness. At first her sense of place was confused, but soon a warm wave of pleasure overtook her, and she yielded to its power.

  “I love this woman,” he whispered as his lips smoothly glided over her body. No one should be allowed such joy, she told herself, with a nod at the old Catholic guilt. It had long lost the power to inhibit her. She threw herself into the sexual duet with fierce joy, hearing the echo of her cries of pleasure in the cool room.

  “A regular screamer,” he laughed, biting her earlobe. She felt her heart pounding against the hand on her breast. “And very much alive.”

  “Maybe it’s compensation for all that death around me,” she said, and instantly regretted saying it. “Sorry. I’m getting too analytical.”

  A buzzing began, and Bruce reached over and pressed the clock button, which threw a time reading on the ceiling. It was after nine.

  “I forgot to shut it off,” he murmured. He embraced her again. “A whole weekend,” he sighed.

  “Not all of it, I’m afraid.” She realized that she had blurted it out too soon. It struck right at the heart of their major point of contention . . . time together.

  “You’re getting to be an Indian giver,” he said, releasing her.

  “You can’t schedule a killing,” she said. “I had scene.”

  “After the weekend, I’m going to be hounded until November. I’ve got a race on my hands. A Hispanic lady with a Harvard law degree, who talks street talk. Her name is Rodriguez. Her brother is married to a Rosenbaum. And she has a voice like Lauren Bacall.”

  “And her looks?”

  “Disgustingly attractive.”

  “You’re just running scared.”

  “Scared?” He got up and opened the blinds, squinting into the sun. “I’m petrified. I need this win. Otherwise, I don’t have a shot at the Senate seat.”

  “Doesn’t a dozen years count?” she asked.

  “They count for change. The district’s gone to seed.”

  She could see the fine glaze of his long slender body, the hairs swathed in the glow of bright light. His manhood was still engorged. She patted it.

  “You’ll make it. Eight the hard way.”

  “In craps, it’s not an easy roll to make, Fi. I just got the poll yesterday. Only twenty percent even know who I am. I’ve been their congressman for seven terms and only twenty percent know who I am. Can you believe it? That’s not merely a disaster. It’s a catastrophe.”

  “When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” she mumbled foolishly.

  “You’re trivializing it.”

  He went into the bathroom and she heard the steady gush of the shower. She started to brood, then picked up the phone and called a man at headquarters.

  “Odd as hell,” Jim Hadley said in his Baltimore twang. He was one of the examiners in the Firearms Examination section. “A forty-four. From the lands and grooves it could be either an English Bulldog or a Wembley. It’s the ammo that bugs me. Ancient. Like maybe a hundred years.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing probably. Anyway, that’s your job to find out.”

  She hung up, then dialed Flannagan, whose cheery “Yo” defied his gruesome task.

  “Prints?”

  “An army.”

  As she listened to other details, Bruce came out and without looking at her left the bedroom. When she finished with Flannagan, she called Teddy at home. Gladys answered, her voice distant and angry.

  “I’m sorry,” Fiona said.

  “Speak to my kids,” Gladys snapped. Teddy was on the extension and shouted for his wife to get off the line.

  “It’s on page one,” he growled. “And there’s a picture of the eggplant. The mayor is very defensive. And the Board of Trade is raising hell. We’re all on the griddle. Got to find the bastard.”

  “They want things safe in their Disneyland,” she murmured. Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t cancel the weekend. “He’ll want something every day now.”

  “He just got off the phone with me. I got a pep talk and he’s authorized overtime.”

  “The eggplant? What makes him so generous?”

  Bruce came in wearing a short striped robe, his curly hair glistening. He put a cup of coffee on the bedside table and threw the Post on the bed. She picked up the paper and read the headline: “MURDER AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY.”

  “It’ll sell papers,” she told Teddy. “Pick me up in an hour. I’m at Bruce’s.” She hung up and jumped out of bed.

  “Sorry I blew up,” Bruce said. “I got greedy.”

  “I like you greedy,” she said, cuddling him.

  “Previous experience gets me edgy. My ex-wife’s career became her everything.”

  “No comparisons, please.” She felt the brief panic. It was bad enough being secretly, sometimes vociferously, jealous. It’s a dead ember, he had protested.

  “It’s my morning for apologies. I wanted us to start out on a perfect note.”

  “It did,” she said, caressing him.

  “At least arrange it so you can be with me to see the fireworks at Remington’s. From his place you get a clear view.”

  “I like the fireworks from here,” she said, insinuating her hand under his robe.

  “It’s an annual thing. Everybody is coming.”

  “Everybody?” She knew he loved surprises like this. “I’ll settle for just us coming.” It was the kind of double entendre they both loved.

  But suppose he does lose his seat in Congress, a voice inside her speculated. It didn’t wait for an answer.

  3

  “THERE,” MRS. Damato whispered. “A life.”

  They peered into the cramped room, heavy with the acrid smell of paint. Pigments permeated the warped wooden floor that creaked as they stepped forward. Painted canvases lay helter-skelter along the walls, mostly city scenes. She flipped through them hurriedly, recognizing the Hagerstown main street.

  “I thought they were good. Nobody else did.”

  “Did he?” Fiona asked. Teddy and Inspector Al O’Leary from Hagerstown PD still thumbed through the paintings. O’Leary pulled one out and slanted it to catch the gray light of a fading rainy summer day.

  “Harper Street. I grew up there,” he said in his flat Maryland accent.

  Mrs. Damato’s eyes were watery in their deep padded sockets. Her grief seemed to have resharpened her features, which had run to flesh. Her olive skin was pinched and when she spoke, she showed yellowed teeth with large gaps. Whatever money was left over obviously had gone to feed her husband’s artistic obsession.

  “Maybe I was too supportive,” she shrugged.

  “They weren’t bad,” O’Leary said, still looking at the pictures.

  “Too photographic,” Mrs. Damato complained. “That’s what they told him. In twenty years he never sold a single one for more than fifty bucks.” Her reddened nostrils quivered, and a sour odor emanated from her body, familiar to Fiona. She had often observed a particular smell about the grief-stricken, which undermined her professional indifference. She was better, cooler, with the dead.

  Teddy had begun to take Polaroids of the paintings.

  “His work was the most im
portant thing in his life,” Mrs. Damato said regretfully.

  The paintings were failed attempts at expressionism. The memory of Hassam’s “Allies Day” popped into Fiona’s mind, a complete image, powerfully stated. How Damato must have envied the painter’s talent.

  “And in there?” Fiona asked gently, nodding toward a door. She turned the knob. The door was locked.

  “A closet. He had the key. This was his place,” the widow said harshly, revealing the battle lines of their marriage.

  Fiona fiddled in her pocketbook, checking the make of the lock with the keys on her ring. They were Damato’s. She found the correct key and opened the door.

  “I never touched his things,” Mrs. Damato whined.

  There was no light in the closet, which was filled with canvases placed face-in. Fiona drew one out and brought it out to the light. Behind her, Mrs. Damato coughed nervously. Teddy stopped taking pictures.

  “Jesus,” O’Leary gasped.

  Fiona felt the exhilaration of surprise. The girl in the picture was nude, her flesh and blonde hair luminous in its natural grassy setting. She was just this side of puberty, a bud opening, glorious and unmistakably erotic. There were nearly half a dozen paintings in the closet, all depicting the same girl. As Fiona laid all the paintings against the wall the effect was startling. It was the dead man’s artistic apogee.

  Mrs. Damato stared at the pictures, making gurgling sounds.

  “You know her? Fiona asked gently. Mrs. Damato did not respond. So this was Damato’s dirty little secret, Fiona thought. He had certainly put his heart into it. From the way Mrs. Damato glanced away, Fiona sensed the recognition. The point had to be pressed slowly. The trail had now begun.

  Mrs. Damato moved back and sat heavily on a wooden chair, as though her own weight had become too much of a burden.