American Quartet Page 3

  “They’re beautiful,” Fiona said. “Your husband was a talented man.” It was designed to be a con, but she really meant it. By comparison, the other paintings seemed pale wasted images.

  “She doesn’t look more than fourteen,” O’Leary said angrily. “The whore. I got girls in that school.”

  Mrs. Damato was playing with her fingers, watching them blankly. The dead, Fiona had learned early in the game, always took their revenge on the living.

  “Maybe he did it from imagination,” Fiona said, stalking now.

  “The hell he did,” O’Leary shouted.

  “Will you please . . .” Fiona snapped. She touched the woman’s shoulder. Mrs. Damato lifted helpless lugubrious eyes. “You do, don’t you?”

  The girl in the picture seemed to reach out of the canvases, revealing her arrogant disdain, shattering the myth of innocence. The nipples on her rising young breasts seemed rouged in the exquisite sunlight, and between her legs was the hint of a pout.

  “We’re looking for your husband’s killer, Mrs. Damato,” Fiona said. It was time to confront reality. The man’s guilt had died with him.

  “It looks like Celia Baines,” Mrs. Damato said hoarsely. “One of his students. I think two years ago he gave her private lessons.” The effort exhausted her; her voice was a whisper.

  “Yeah,” O’Leary croaked. “Dirty-minded somebitch.”

  “Will you please shut the hell up?” Fiona snapped again. Teddy told him to take it easy.

  “Hotshot big city cops . . .” O’Leary sneered.

  “It’s bewildering,” Mrs. Damato said, finding her voice again.

  “He was not like that at all.” It was a confession of a lifetime of sexual indifference. The smell of the woman seemed to fill the room, stifling the odors of the paint.

  “I thought I knew him.”

  They found her behind the counter of the McDonald’s on the edge of town. She was older, fuller, and although attractive in a teenage way, hardly the powerful pubescent image in the paintings. There was, however, no mistaking her identity. When she opened her mouth, she completed the destruction of the dead man’s fantasy.

  “Let me,” Fiona had urged. “You two gumshoes will frighten her.”

  The place was nearly empty and Fiona and the girl, Celia, sat in a corner booth away from the two men, who munched on Big Macs. Occasionally, O’Leary would glower at them from across the restaurant.

  Her police badge had frightened the girl at first, but Fiona recognized she was a sieve to vanity.

  “I wish I had hair like that,” Fiona said. It was the color of a wheat field in the morning sun, a perfect articulation of the painter’s image. Fiona wasn’t sure she meant the painting or the reality before her. Up close, the girl was duller, her blue eyes clear but reflecting a dim intelligence.

  “You got nice red hair,” the girl said. Fiona nodded her appreciation.

  “A terrible tragedy about Mr. Damato,” Fiona began slowly.

  “Yeah. Jeez.”

  “Mrs. Damato said you took lessons.”

  “Yeah. I like to drore.”

  “Was he a nice man?”

  “He was okay. A little creepy.”

  “How so?”

  “You know, funny.”

  “Funny-looking?”

  “You know. Woppy.”

  She felt sorry for the girl. Her looks had obviously spoiled her. A pampered darling of the working class. She was the kind of girl whom hard hats whistled at and greasers pawed in drive-in movies. In towns like this, no one was a virgin past thirteen. She could imagine the scenario of seduction. “You ain’t getting into my pants,” a protest that would be moot ten minutes later. Fiona laid the Polaroids on the table like a called poker hand.

  “Dirty wop bastard.” Her eyes didn’t leave the pictures and she flushed down to her neck, leaving a scarlet blotch on the soft skin under a cheap gold chain.

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  “Why should I?”

  “The man was murdered.” Fiona let it sink in. The girl’s lips snarled. “Maybe your old man found out about it.”

  “Sheet,” the girl said, showing a lipstick-stained smile. It was obviously the wrong tack.

  “Where were you last Tuesday?”

  She was an unlikely suspect, yet the question jarred her. Like everyone else, she, too, had secrets.

  “You think it was me?” The girl seemed genuinely startled.

  Fiona shook her head. She needed to calm the girl. Her frail defenses were no match for a professional attack. Besides, Teddy had already talked to the manager, who reported she had worked the breakfast shift that morning. But guilt came out of specifics. Everybody felt guilty about something and Celia was no exception.

  “You won’t tell?” the girl asked in a sly voice. It was the modus operandi of her young life: not telling. It had only made whatever guilt was inside her more painful.

  She spoke calmly, her eyes shifting, glancing occasionally at Teddy and O’Leary. The girl didn’t tell everything, Fiona was certain; but enough to provide the remote possibility of a motive.

  Damato had persuaded her to pose. She had done so reluctantly, but it felt good. They would go up to this secluded place in the Cumberland mountains. Not far. He played with himself, she admitted. It was as far as she would go. “I wouldn’t let him put his greasy hands on me.”

  “Did he try?”

  “They all try,” the girl said bitterly.

  “Did he try with any of the other girls?” Celia’s concentration had already wandered.

  “Do I look pretty?” she asked, fingering the pictures. “He said I was a masterpiece. He said I was very special.”

  “You look magnificent,” Fiona agreed.

  “Really?” The girl’s eyes brightened, emerging momentarily out of their dullness. She sighed. “Why would anyone want to kill him? He wasn’t that bad.”

  “Did you feel sorry for him?” Fiona asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I did.” The girl had grabbed at that and Fiona knew instantly that Damato had indeed put his hands on her. “He was like a big baby. When I got tired, we played.”

  “Played?”

  “You know,” she shrugged.

  Fiona knew. She also knew that the poor girl would soon be hounded, humiliated. There was no protecting her. Hagerstown was a small town with a single newspaper. The best she could do to postpone the inevitable was to impound the paintings as evidence.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep it out of the papers.” She tried to charm O’Leary, knowing it was a futile gesture.

  “It’ll hurt the investigation,” Teddy pressed. But she had already seen the small town cop in O’Leary chomping at the publicity bit. It was impossible to control the situation. She had made a bad mistake in offending O’Leary.

  “I’ll work with you,” the cop lied transparently. He hadn’t forgotten her put-down.

  “My fuse is getting too short,” she told Teddy as they drove back through the Maryland countryside. A fog had risen in the high spots as Teddy moved the car cautiously through the almost impenetrable haze.

  They had moved fast, interviewing as many people as they could. Damato’s students. His fellow teachers.

  “When it hits the papers, they’ll all clam up,” Teddy said. “And they’ll make a pervert out of the poor bastard. Juicy stuff.”

  They had packed the six paintings into the back of their car. Mrs. Damato showed no reluctance to part with them. Her life was already in flames.

  “I feel sorry for her kids,” Fiona sighed. “The garbage slops over.”

  “It’s never clean,” Teddy agreed.

  They had combed through the house, the yard, everywhere, looking for other pictures of young girls. And they had talked to Celia’s mother, carefully avoiding the truth of her daughter’s relationship with Damato. They’d find out soon enough. The girl’s father was an alcoholic drifter, with neither the will nor the energy to seek revenge. Besides, his a
libi was airtight. He was home sleeping off a drunk. Mrs. Damato, too, was well accounted for.

  “It’s a motive,” she said. “Especially if we find an outraged parent with an old revolver hidden in a drawer. The eggplant will love it.” Fiona closed her eyes, beat.

  “O’Leary will be pissed off when he finds we took the pictures,” Teddy mumbled.

  In her mind, she was speculating, following the trail. Damato had tried it again. He was caught at it. He was followed to the museum and shot. Open and shut. Simple logic. Too simple. It simply didn’t mesh with her instincts. The car’s rhythm nudged her to sleep.

  4

  BRUCE Rosen was not in a good mood. He was sitting in the gloomy half-light of a television set, slumped in a leather chair. Beside him was a half-filled highball glass. The scene did not augur well for the future of their experiment.

  She pulled the chain of the table lamp, throwing a yellow splash of light against the paneled walls and rows of leather-bound books. It was a “Wasp” room, down to the nineteenth-century landscape that hung over the fireplace, a touch that bespoke deeper American roots than had been sunk in a couple of generations. She hated spotting details like that. Cynicism was an occupational hazard, like spotted lung to miners.

  “It was the loneliness that bugged me the first time around,” he said, lifting heavy-lidded eyes. In the ten months she had known him, he had never seemed so vulnerable.

  “What the hell is it, Bruce?” She poured herself two fingers of Scotch and sat on the arm of the chair, putting her hand on his head. The curly touch of it warmed her.

  “There’s a kinky rhythm to our work,” she said softly. “Murderers work odd hours, too.” They had been through that before. In their time as lovers, politics had made her a grass widow as well.

  “And I don’t control it, baby,” she said, kissing his neck.

  Bruce picked up his glass, emptied it and squeezed her buttock with his free hand. It reassured her that her absence alone was not the reason for his depression. A talk show was in progress and she got up to shut off the inane chatter.

  “I think I’m going to get knocked off in the primary,” he said. “I saw the polls today. The bitch has got me by the balls.”

  She let it pass. The New Woman had scorched the earth, leaving behind her a race of injured men. They simply could not adjust to a nonmaternal woman. Was Bruce going to be one more victim? She wished his opponent was not a woman.

  “So you’ll fight it. You’re a pro. It’s not the first trip to the well.”

  “Too late. The fucking districts are changing. More black faces. Spanish is a second language. I’ve always been lousy at languages. The bitch . . .” She hated the word. She wondered if he was baiting her.

  “But it’s not over yet.”

  “She poses as a tough spic street broad. They love it. Maybe Jewish is out of fashion.”

  “Not to me. I’m just getting into it,” she said lightly.

  “Dumb mick.” He gathered a palmful of flesh and squeezed affectionately. “Always at the tail end of a trend.”

  She kept silent, afraid to go too lightly. It was his life. Sixteen years. It was the only occupation he wanted. Once, just once, she had asked him why.

  “I like the glory,” he had said. “It fulfills my thirst for recognition and power, for manipulating others. I like to see my name and picture in the papers. I like to make decisions. I like to touch the levers of power. It makes me feel alive.” It had come out like a confessional laundry list and she had actually felt like a priest peering out at him through the veiled opening. Say three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys and a sincere act of contrition, she had wanted to say, but it was too close to all those exposed nerves.

  “You could do with a little more Irish.” She poured more whiskey into his glass. “Here’s a temporary cure. Irish medicine.”

  “I just don’t want to be beached here,” he said. “I can’t go home anymore. Home has disappeared. I’ll have to stay. Be a ‘usta.’ I’ll get a couple of invitations with honorable on the envelope. Probably lobby for big oil or the potash industry.”

  “You are down,” Fiona said, biting his earlobe. There was something to this Jewish mommy bit, she had learned years before, during her first sorties out of the Irish ghetto. Jewish boys were puffed up with confidence by their mamas. Sooner or later, it came out in the wash. They expected their wives, or mistresses, to perform the same service.

  “You’ll make it,” she said earnestly. “You always have. So you’ll run scared.”

  “Petrified,” he said. “I’ll run petrified.”

  Her own mother would have put it all in the hands of providence. Her father would have called it a conspiracy of the Protestants and, of course, the kikes.

  “I needed a shoulder to cry on tonight,” he said, resting his head on her bosom.

  “That’s not my shoulder.” He seemed to be making an effort to come out of it.

  “Every compulsive achiever is paranoid.” He was quiet for a long time and she felt him listening to her heartbeat.

  “I was thinking of Remington earlier,” he said. “He was assistant secretary of the navy under Kennedy. Practically a kid then. Ran for the Senate from California. Lost. Now he throws parties. Goes everywhere. But he doesn’t count.”

  She had seen his name in the social pages of the Post and the Washington Dossier countless times. Thaddeus Remington III. Good old Tad. He lived in one of the great houses of Washington on Linnean Drive. Not important?

  “Remington depressed you?”

  “He’s loaded, but he can’t really buy his way in. It’s power that counts. Oh, they kiss his ass. He gets his brownie points. Ambassadors suck up to him because he’s a kind of social catalyst. He brings the mighty together, but he’s never mighty himself. You know what I mean. He’s a celebrity, true, but without power or achievement. Beached.”

  It was the second time he had used that word. Thwarted, she supposed he meant.

  “An empty life,” he continued. “Every four years, he becomes the new version of a fat cat. A fundraiser for others. But never a kingmaker and never a king. Even his dough can’t insulate from the corrosion of his failure.”

  “I can’t see him as an object of pity.”

  “If I go down in November, I kiss the Senate seat good-bye. It would be rough.”

  “But not the end of the world.”

  “The end of my world. In politics, to win is everything. All else is sudden death. All campaigns make me crazy, Fiona. I’m not fit to live with. None of us are. We’d shoot our mothers to get reelected.”

  “Would you really?”

  “My mother’s already gone.” He caressed her arm. “Bear with me. Pay no attention. This is not the real me.”

  “Who is it then?”

  “Some gluttonous monster without a shred of integrity. I have this man Clark. A hired gun. He’s figuring it out. I’ll do what he tells me.”

  “Anything?”

  “Almost.”

  He was obviously having an anxiety attack. A hurt child, she thought. Either that or male menopause.

  “I’m forty-five,” he murmured, as though reading her thoughts.

  “Eisenhower was an obscure colonel at fifty-two, before Marshall picked him and lightning struck. Nixon was a has-been in 1960, in disgrace a little more than a decade later. And still bouncing back. Where is your instinct for survival?” She felt like a cheerleader. “I thought you were Jewish. Besides, you haven’t even begun to fight back.”

  “I’m waiting for Clark to tell me how.”

  She let him wallow in silence, caressing him.

  “And how was your day?” he asked suddenly, turning to her. He began to unbutton her blouse. She let him. This was, after all, what a relationship meant. At least she was only tired, not down. His strength was one of his great attractions. He’s not really weak, she assured herself, just manic.

  “My day? I found myself a motive.” She edited herself. “A possi
ble motive.” She explained succinctly. He was a good listener.

  “How do you stand it?” he said. “Death morning, noon and night. At least old Papa Hemingway liked it only in the afternoon.”

  “A matinee man.”

  He laughed. She was drawing him out. It pleased her to see the dynamics of their relationship, she filling his need. When it was her turn, she hoped he wouldn’t let her down.

  Finally he had freed her breasts and buried his face between them. She felt the tickling roughness of his chin.

  “My bubby,” she said, pressing his head against her flesh.

  Death had brought them together. The suicide of Carol Harper, one of his receptionists.

  “We have to investigate every death in D.C., natural or otherwise,” she had told him in his office. Like all politicians, he was wary. She knew he was wondering how it would affect his image. He was divorced, handsome, visible. A good story. She was wearing a Wedgwood blue suit and a high-collared blouse. Very neuter. Very professional.

  Only three months in homicide, the only woman, Fiona was still shaky in her role, especially without the protection of her uniform and those clumpy sexless men’s shoes she’d had to wear. She had another white partner then, Al Short, who let her do the talking. The man was a congressman and Al was heading for early retirement in a month or two and not inclined to rock any political boats. At that time, she was still naive, learning the homicide trade.

  “You saw the medical report,” Bruce told her. “An overdose. No question about that.”

  “Did you see her socially?” The question infuriated him.

  “What are you trying to make of it? Your implication is a little presumptuous.”

  She had been tempted to apologize, but he wouldn’t let her break in.

  “She was a damned receptionist. I barely knew her. I was strictly her employer. I feel rotten that she did this thing, but I had nothing to do with it. Nothing.”

  She could see the color rising under his deep tan. She let him work it out.

  “It’s just routine, sir.” She was rocked back by his tongue-lashing.

  “Is she a confirmed suicide?” he asked, suddenly gentle.