American Sextet Page 2

  "No white-assed twat is going to bust morale around here. You don't know what's comin' down. We have an Atlanta here and we've all bought it. They're just looking for a chance to show up us dumb nigger cops."

  There it was. "They." The ubiquitous white enemy.

  "Why don't you put me on it?" she said brightly, ignoring his mood. Instantly, she knew it was a mistake, like throwing a match on dry tinder.

  "Sheet," he said, lifting a cigarette from a pack and shoving it in his mouth. "You like puttin' us down, white princess." The cigarette stuck and bobbed on his lower lip as he spoke.

  "No need to get racial," she mumbled, feeling the Irish temperament rise like an expanding bubble in her chest. Cool it, mama, she ordered herself, thankful that he took time out to light his cigarette. Inhaling deeply, he exhaled the smoke through his nostrils, like a black dragon. Her comment was gratuitous--she knew that everything around them was racial by definition.

  "I'm gonna bust this fuckin' case before it gets out of hand and I don't need no shit from you." He appeared to have already forgotten her transgression.

  "I'm sorry," she said.

  Seeing it from his point of view softened her--it was no more personal than usual. Her brief drowse had simply ruffled his dignity.

  "This jumper..." she said, trying to keep his anger deflected. There were times when he could be quite rational about police business. She avoided his eyes and took out her notebook, using it more as a prop than an aid.

  "There may be more to it."

  She rattled off details, the absence of a note, or some other tangible sign, the uncommonly neat apartment, her youth, her beauty, her pretty clothes, the lack of any male evidence. His disinterest was obvious.

  "I don't need this," he muttered, inhaling again, the cigarette burned down to a nub. Removing it from his lips, he squashed it into the butt pile in his ashtray.

  "I know about female jumpers," she said quickly. "It just feels different." Was she fishing for his commitment to further the investigation? He turned away, looking out of his window at the rain-slicked street.

  "I'll know more when I get the medical examiner's report." Somehow she was unable to put the matter to rest. The dead woman seemed to be goading her, flaunting her death. Trouble over a man. Clint, you bastard, she cried out to herself. None of them was worth it. She remembered how she had broken up with Bruce Rosen, the congressman. A triumph of will over emotion. Had Dorothy, too, been put to that test and failed?

  "Gimme a break lady," the eggplant said.

  He was right, of course. Suicidal motivation was for the psychiatrists, not cops. Besides, there was a backlog of naturals. He couldn't spare the manpower for something so inconsequential, having already diverted most of the squad to the can murders. His back was to her now, his shoulders hunched over in frustration. The hell with it, she decided. Who needs this?

  When she finally left him she noted that the office was deserted, except for Cates.

  "Don't ask..." she said.

  "I got a make on the jumper."

  She shrugged with disinterest. Returning to her own desk, she sat making doodles on a notepad.

  "Personnel office at Saks, where she worked. The woman was from a place called Hiram, Pennsylvania. Probably coal country. I called there."

  She tried to ignore him.

  "I got a next of kin, a second cousin in Hiram, with a real pollack name. Zcarkowiz." He read it aloud and spelled it. "That's her real name as well. Her parents are dead. Apparently all the brothers split. The cousin's an old lady. Won't claim the body."

  From the way he hesitated, she could tell there was more. She wanted it to end.

  "About a year ago, a newspaperman came through Hiram. Did a piece about unemployment in the mines. Washington Post. She left town with him." He hesitated, perhaps noting her indifference. "The cousin still had the clipping. The reporter's name was Martin."

  The name meant nothing and she stood up and slapped her notebook shut.

  "Don't you see," he said. "I found the man in the woodpile."

  She was thinking instead about the man in her own woodpile. The fate of Dorothy what's-her-name had certainly called him to her attention.

  Picking up the phone, she dialed Clint's number.

  II

  Below them, the Potomac slowly flowed eastward, its surface glinting in the high noon sun. The front windows of Jason's Cutlass were open on both sides, catching sparse midsummer breezes.

  "Wrong," Nolan said for what seemed like the hundredth time.

  Jason Martin continued to press him, his reporter's pad ominously perched on the windshield shelf. He had put it there deliberately, a symbol of his power. Occasionally Nolan held it in his gaze, a rattlesnake he was determined to avoid.

  It was a test of wills. A simple question lay at the heart of it. Did someone on the vice-president's staff leak the China grain deal to favored commodity dealers, thereby shooting up the price? No matter how he asked it, backtracked, broke his field, tried every psychological investigative reporter's ploy, Nolan's answer was always some version of "no."

  "Speculation doesn't always require information," Nolan said coolly. He was tough and good at capping his exasperation. "Sometimes it's only instinct, wishful thinking."

  "Sooner or later, I'll find out," Jason replied. By then, all pretense and subtlety had evaporated.

  "It won't wash. The only reason I'm here is to categorically deny it."

  "Then why all the secrecy? You could have told me on the phone."

  "The meeting was your idea, remember," Nolan said. "I would have said it in my office."

  Jason had picked up the vice-president's man three blocks from the Executive Office Building and driven across Memorial Bridge to the George Washington Parkway, where they had pulled onto a promontory. It was all for an orchestrated cloak and dagger effect. It had worked before. He had expected Nolan to suggest that they do their talking outside the car, not that he couldn't bug that conversation as well. It annoyed him that Nolan didn't show a lick of fear.

  "We're all clean, Jason," Nolan said.

  "Millions were made by the speculators--surely you don't expect me to believe it was a stroke of luck."

  "Nothing is ever airtight, Jason. Washington is one big ear. Maybe the Chinese said something."

  He wondered if Nolan was softening. His gaze drifted across the Potomac where the great gothic spires of Georgetown University rose in the distance. Without the glass and concrete slabs of buildings around them, the view might have seemed old world, perhaps a hill beside the Rhine.

  "The issue," Nolan said, "is whether someone in the vice-president's office profited from the deal. That's the dirt. Without that, there is no story and you know it."

  "I'll find it if there is one."

  "Good luck."

  Jason gunned the motor and swung the car back onto the parkway, barely hiding his annoyance.

  He'd been working on it for a month. Up to now, Webster, his editor, had been cooperative, but hadn't let him write a "fishing" story.

  "What I'd really like to do is put out the bait," he'd said. "Someone will come forward. It never fails."

  "That's assassination by implication," Webster had countered. He'd made it sound as if Jason were bending ethics. They were very touchy about that at the Post these days, now that they didn't have any competition to worry about. His instincts told him they were soft-pedaling the real investigative stories. When he had broken the FDA scandal, they'd let him go the distance without any obstacles. But that was four years ago and now he needed this story, needed it badly. Heroes had a short shelf life in this town.

  * * * *

  "Dammit, Nolan, it's another cover-up and you know it," Jason said, knowing that his own exasperation had broken through first. It was going badly.

  "You're off the wall, Jason. The guy is sitting pretty for the next election. He doesn't need the headache. Besides, money isn't real power around here."

  He's putting me
down, Jason thought, wondering why Nolan wasn't the least bit unnerved. Was the Post losing its power or was he losing his grip? Or his credibility? They were supposed to shit when the Post came smelling around like this. Had he been misled? Earlier, when he had picked Nolan up at the street corner near the F Street Club, he was dead certain he'd found his inside man. It was a gut reaction that hadn't failed him ... yet.

  "This is the eighties, Jason," Nolan said, sighing. "It's different now." Nolan had once been a reporter for the now defunct Star. They had covered stories together, but any evidence of the earlier comradeship had now been lost.

  "You've really gone over to the other side," Jason said, pulling up in front of the Executive Office Building.

  "Good try, Jason," Nolan said as he stepped out of the Cutlass. "But you can't bake bread with horseshit."

  The man had played with him. Jason was too unnerved to go to the office. Instead, he drove back to Capitol Hill and mooned about his cluttered apartment, missing Jane and Trey and the old glory. He finished half a bottle of Scotch.

  Maybe he had been out to lunch while the rest of the world rolled by, he thought, tossing restlessly on cold, rumpled sheets. Indignation over government corruption was on hold. These days investigative reporters looked for the big story with one eye on book publishing and movie rights and talk show hype instead of concentrating on the simple act of going for the jugular. He could have parlayed his FDA stories in that direction, but had eschewed all offers.

  "You're stupid," Jane had told him. More than once.

  "I'm an investigative reporter. A newspaperman." When it came to other writing, he planned to do a big book. The novel. But he had to remain pure as a reporter; it sustained him.

  Twisting and turning, he got up finally, finished the bottle of Scotch and went outside to get the Post's bulldog, which he spread out in front of him at an all night coffee shop. His eye caught a bold headline just below the fold.

  "What's this garbage," he said to no one in particular.

  "More coffee?" the man behind the counter asked.

  Ignoring him, he read the headline. "Agency Change Suggested. SEC to SEX." The secretary to the chairman of the SEC was coming clean--cross-country trips, jets hustling her around the country so that she could be with her boss, a married man with five kids, a Catholic. Sexual peccadillos and conflict of interest, the story implied, citing sexual acts in the SEC private dining room, the chairman's office, the boardroom table.

  It was prurient scandal, pure and simple. The Post had bought the girl's story hook, line and sinker. The poor bastard never had a chance.

  "My God," he whispered, his stomach congealing in a knot, anger and disgust rising above the alcoholic buzz. He pushed the paper away from him, paid the check and walked out.

  "This is what the eighties are all about," Nolan had told him. And who would know better than he?

  Webster sat behind his desk with both legs curled under him, a characteristic stance meant to soften the sting of authority. Jason Martin stood at the opposite side of the desk. Inside the glass wall he felt he was on exhibit to the entire city room, although the staff worked busily around them.

  Didn't the bastards know he was being heroic? He was standing up for real journalism, not that entertainment pap that was passing for reporting nowadays.

  "I'm onto something, Paul," he said, his fingers spread on the polished desk.

  "It's only a hunch," Webster said. "We can't commit to hunches."

  "What about Watergate? Woodward and Bernstein?"

  "It paid off," Webster acknowledged. Not that again. Jason saw the flicker of forced tolerance.

  "I need time. More people to work on it. It goes all the way up to the vice-president. Someone is covering up a tips-for-profit scam in his own shop."

  "It's a fine line thing. Not a deliberate cover-up."

  "Someone in the vice-president's office leaked advance word on the grain deal with China. The commodities market goes bananas and..."

  "Coincidence. Hunches. Commodities people speculate. You can't pin it on anyone."

  "You can if you dig."

  "And what will that accomplish? Bring down a vice-president? He can't be responsible."

  Jason sucked in his breath, carefully watching Webster's tanned face. The man was into sailing now, investments, trendy company, a new wife.

  "Are we losing our balls?" Jason had quickly edited the second person pronoun to the first. "We used to go for the inside story no matter who got it."

  "He's innocent," Webster said, shifting in his chair, his pose of tolerance cracking. "I spoke to him."

  "You spoke to him?" Jason shot back angrily. He should have guessed--the old school tie. Both same year Yalies. "I thought they were supposed to be our adversaries. Now we're all in bed together."

  "I know the man forty years. You use things like that, Jason. I have gut reactions, too. And they've been damned solid all these years. They haven't forgotten Watergate either."

  He had him on the defensive. Jason liked that. A man reveals his vulnerability on the defensive.

  "This used to be a great newspaper. Now look at us." He pointed to the front page. "Some broad screws the chairman of the SEC and it makes page one."

  "It's news whether you think so or not and it sells," Webster said, still tolerant. "The headline was a corker, don't you think?"

  "It's not substantive." He had wanted to say "crock of shit," but he'd held back, trying to formulate a more subtle response. "And what if the vice-president were caught with his pants down? Would you print that?"

  Webster rubbed his arm. "No question."

  "Even if it destroyed him?" Jason pressed.

  "Of course. Corruption is corruption. If not us, who?" the editor said, obviously losing patience.

  Yeah, Jason thought, whip us with self-righteousness.

  "This sex stuff stinks and you know it," Jason countered.

  "Sexual corruption is a category, Jason. A man who used his political clout for that is dangerous."

  "It's also cost effective. The broad comes in, confesses and it's confirmed. Then she writes a book, shows her box to Playboy and sells the movie rights."

  "My concern is what makes news, not books and movies. If the mighty fall that's news, especially when they get caught with their pen in the inkwell."

  "We never used to cover that shit."

  "Where've you been? Maybe twenty-five years ago we didn't, but it's a whole new angle now. Women's rights. The woman cries exploitation. Hell, the big boys know the score. Every time they whip it out, they're playing Russian roulette."

  "I think it sucks."

  Webster laughed at the inadvertent pun.

  "It's not my kind of journalism. I'm an investigative reporter, Paul. That's the way we built this damned rag."

  "You're a hunter, Jason. Problem is we've given you big guns to play with. When you carry one on a hunt you look for prey. But it's my job to dole out the bullets. If it was up to you guys, you'd shoot up anyone in sight." Jason looked up at Webster, who blinked first, turning his eyes away.

  Webster had changed, Jason thought. Grown soft. He had a point, though. The paper was overweight with reporters who itched to topple the guy on top, like himself. Wasn't that what Washington journalism was all about?

  "Look, Jason. Cool it for a while. We don't manufacture these scandals. They happen and we report them. You're right about one thing, though. The other kind is expensive. Requires too much checking. That phony Pulitzer thing hurt us more than you think." He paused, studying Jason for a moment. "Look, on the V-P thing I think you're wrong. Call it gut reaction, judgment. Still," he said, pressing his chest, "it's mine to make. I suggest you let that anger run on idle for a while.

  "I can't," Jason muttered, thinking of Jane, who had said the same thing three months before. Then she went back home to Indiana, taking Trey.

  "It'll destroy you," Webster warned him. Jason wondered if he knew about him and Jane.

  "We
're just a glorified National Enquirer these days, Paul. And I'm not the only one who thinks that."

  "Take it easy, Jason," Webster said, obviously wanting to end the conversation on a high note. "You've earned your stripes around here. You shook up those buggers in the FDA. It's just that this one won't fly. That doesn't mean there won't be others. Let it sit for a while. Remember, there's a financial angle to this as well. We're still a business and I've got to juggle a lot of balls."

  "It's a fucking sellout just because you know the man. It clouds objectivity." It was absolutely the worst accusation one newspaperman could make against another.

  Webster untangled his feet and stood up, lifting his hands palms forward. A flush of anger rose in his cheeks.

  "That's it, Jason. You're pushing."

  Looking into the city room, Jason saw a few faces turn towards them. Sweat began to roll down his side.

  "I'm sorry. It's just..."

  "I do understand, Jason."

  It was maddening not to control one's destiny. Contrition seemed his only choice. Or he could walk. Hell, the Post was still the only game in town. Webster loosened up, sat down again and handed Jason a memo.

  "We've budgeted a piece on the Pennsylvania coal situation. Big guys gobbling up the little guys. Forcing unemployment until things shake-out. Venal big business stuff."

  "But away from town." He was being patronized now and it galled him.

  "You got it, Jason. No one can do it up brown like you. Worth two in a series. Anyway, you can still be angry."

  "Coal," Jason said, looking over the memo. "Most of the mines are owned by the oil companies. They advertise. Suppose I offend them?"

  "Fug 'em. The more we shit on them, the more they love it. Besides, they have no place else to go."

  Neither have I, Jason thought, turning to leave. "Who knows," he said sarcastically, "maybe I'll find a juicy sex angle."

  "So much the better."

  The meeting over, Jason walked quickly through the city room, speaking to no one. What he needed now was a goddamned drink.

  Alone in Art Smart's motel on route 63 on the outskirts of Hiram, Jason pounded out his story on his Coronamatic. Beside him, amid the clutter of cigarette butts, was a spiral notebook filled with scribbled notes which he checked periodically for correct spellings. Goddamned oil companies. They really were buying up the mines. An elite few controlling everything. Bastards, he muttered, pulling out the last page of copy. They had no right. After he'd revised and polished it, he lay on the bed and tried to calm himself. Jane came to mind, only making it worse.