Adler, Warren - FitzGerald 03 - Senator Love Page 5

"Very perceptive. Wouldn't you be, married to him? But Little Nell gets high marks for dissimulation. She seems to go more for appearances. Keeps her own counsel. That's the mark of a good political wife."

  "She's also human."

  "And being so, she knows the value of a long leash. Probably more upset by others seeing Sam playing pelvis touchee with the beautiful Helga. That's appearances, a different mad than jealousy. But she also knows that he has to keep it in the barn if he wants to be President. The fact is that, for now, at least, she's won. No more sharing for a while. Until he's President. Then he's got a whole army of Secret Service men to cover his ass. Like Jack Kennedy. He did more exercise of the venery in office than out."

  "You say he was single for a year. Has to be media grist in that."

  He looked at her and shook his head.

  "The affairs of a single man are not the stuff of scandal-mongering. Sam's drive in that regard actually subsided. They tell me that the lack of danger inhibits the intensity of the activity." He nodded and upended his glass.

  "That judgement, I assume, is based on personal experience," she said. Her own as well, she thought. It had to do, she had concluded, with time-frame and anxiety level. She had, after all, had experiences with married men, an unwise exercise at best, although the emotional and sexual intensity had been extraordinary.

  There had been a touch of humorous sarcasm in the remark, but he responded with dead seriousness.

  "Has to do with comfort level, Fi. Even in a bad marriage there is some security. Which leaves you the luxury of concentrating more on the other." A sudden faint blush dappled his dark skin. "A single person needs more than just …" His voice trailed off and he picked up his martini and finished it, avoiding her gaze. He had revealed the full extent of his vulnerability and at that moment it appealed to her. When he had put down his glass, she edged her leg closer to him, felt it touch along the side of the shinbone. He responded with his own pressure. Message sent. Reply received.

  The waiter brought their salads and for a few moments they ate in silence. With the evening's agenda agreed to, they could both relax.

  "I'm not saying it will be easy," he said, as if there had been no break in the conversation. He had never left his sphere of interest. Par for the genre, Fiona knew. A manifestation of the addiction. Everything personal was also political.

  "But I think we can mount a campaign with real legs. It's a long haul. The election is two years away, but you've got to start the ball rolling. He's a natural, don't you think? Hell, you know this business, Fi. Is that man not the perfect candidate?"

  "I have only one question, Monte."

  "What's that?"

  "What does he stand for?"

  "That's simple," Monte said, picking at his salad, his leg rubbing against hers. "He stands for getting elected." She could feel his eyes studying her.

  "And if he does get elected what will he stand for?"

  "Getting reelected," Monte said without hesitation.

  "And after? There are only two terms."

  "In the last two years of his last term, he will stand for assuring his place in history. He will graduate from politian to statesman."

  It did not offend her. She had expected the answers. It was no different in her father's time. Except that he had finally risen above it, chosen crucifixion and martyrdom to political expediency, thrown in his lot with the anti-Vietnam war movement at the worst possible political time. It had defeated him as a politician, but he had regained himself as a man, although he had, despite the doctor's report, died of a broken heart. She had been quite young, but old enough to understand, and it had validated her respect for him, and his memory continued to enrich her life and give her the assurances she needed to fight her own daily battle for moral rectitude.

  The waiter brought their sole, which was soft and tasty, and they washed it down with cold white wine. Throughout the dinner they continued to caress lower extremities.

  It was only later, after he had followed her home in his car and they had made love in her wide queen-size bed and she had discovered that he was, indeed, soft and furry all over and quite cuddly, effective and endearing as a lover, that she broached the question that had probably nagged at her all evening.

  "Why aren't you outraged?"

  "About what?" he asked.

  "About selling a straw man to the public for President."

  "That's the best kind. No baggage. We can fill him with the right kind of straw. Make him salable. Package him to attract the widest possible segments. The campaign is won on simplistic symbol-mongering and television-picture opportunities."

  "But what does that say about us? I shake my head in understanding. Not outrage, understanding. Are we such jaded, cynical and corrupt people that we acquiesce and go along? Know it's wrong, but go along?"

  She wrapped her arms around him and fingered her way across his wide expanse of hairy softness. As she had suspected, he felt comfortable, warm, his body a kind of metaphor for generosity. She felt comfortable and secure and she could barely summon up a sliver of outrage.

  "We're part of it," she whispered.

  "Part of what?"

  "The corruption," she sighed. "Of misplaced priorities and injustice."

  "All that?" he muttered.

  "I can't let it go," she said. "Those old bones were once a person. And that person has as much right to justice as anyone."

  "You lost me," he whispered.

  She was silent for a while, wondering if he was awaiting further comment or just drifting off into sleep. She said nothing, feeling the first faint signs of the return of her outrage. Then she heard his light snore of deep slumber.

  ———— *6* THE GENTLY rolling green hills of the Virginia countryside were capped with mist as the rain continued to fall, steady and relentless. She felt no sense of gloom nor did she long for the sun. It was, after all, a spring rain carrying with it the hopeful promise of fecundity and flowers.

  Driving alone had never seemed therapeutic. But it did today. The grey mistiness gave her a sense of sweet isolation, as if she were gliding through a bank of soft clouds. She allowed the car more speed than was legal, finding comfort in the smooth movement and the reassuring sights of the swiftly passing dark green fields, the sturdy houses nestled in their stands of shade trees and the shiny hides of huddling cows.

  SHE HAD acted out of compulsion, a reaction to the frustration of her expectations. It had been one of those deliciously languorous awakenings, a menu of tiny preludes, the extended hugging and cuddling foreplay induced by rainy days and the prospect of hours of exquisite leisure.

  Their erotic needs satiated, she went downstairs to make one of those after-play Hollywood breakfasts, bubbling bull's-eye eggs and bacon, toasted bagels, assorted cheeses and coffee. She brought in the plastic- wrapped _Washington Post_ and _New York Times_ and set the table in the breakfast alcove with the yellow patterned dishes that her mother always used for special breakfasts.

  Her heritance of the family house had seemed a headache at first, and she had rented it out for two years after their deaths. Mother had followed father by little more than a year, a kind of poetic justice. All her mother's life she had stuck by the Senator, had followed, albeit kicking and screaming but, in the end, obediently.

  Now the house had become her anchor, an oasis, a validation of her roots, an envelope of memories. An only child, she had treated the house as a sibling, a fact that had not occurred to her until she had lived away from it for a while.

  It was not without its ghosts, defined not as white-sheeted visitors from the spirit world, but invisible puppet strings of parental attachment that were irrevocably stapled to her, to be tugged at and manipulated as the occasion arose.

  Often, in the throes of some sexual acrobatics, she would find herself

  rationalizing the act, even as it were occurring, to counter her mother's disapproval. A practicing Catholic who reveled in verbalizing a catalogue of sinful don'ts, her mothe
r in afterlife seemed far more tolerating than forbidding, although Fiona was not indifferent to the pull of the strings. By explaining these perceived sins to her mother, Fiona felt that she somehow had mitigated part of the guilt.

  Indeed, just moments before she had begun this breakfast preparation, she had explained to her why she was on her hands and knees on the edge of the bed being done by this man resembling a bear, rearing and roaring on hind legs.

  "It's only fancy fucking, Mom. Doesn't He want us to go to the limits of our potential, soul and body?" Surely she understood the soul part.

  She had smiled to herself, just as she did in the recollection, and had looked out thr ough the kitchen window. The rain had dyed the lawn and trees a dark green and the grey sky was seamless. The table set, she turned back to the burners on the wooden work island. On the far side of the kitchen was a butcher block counter on which was a telephone. A button was lit. He was making a call. The light disappeared quickly and he was downstairs fully dressed.

  "I can't stay," he had told her, distracted.

  "Problems?"

  "Afraid so," he grunted. His gaze had taken in the table setting, the bubbling eggs, the toasting bagels. She moved toward him and kissed the bouquet of black curly hair in the V of his unbuttoned shirt.

  "It's the weekend," she said foolishly, echoing a hundred complaints from other weekends when she had been the spoiler and others were on the receiving end.

  "There are no weekends in politics," he had sighed, another recycling of her excuses. Duty decrees. She knew the drill.

  He was transformed, no longer the horny bear. His mind was elsewhere, wrestling with the problem that had intruded.

  "You shouldn't have called," she had rebuked, watching him wolf down her carefully prepared breakfast with little relish.

  "Hell," he said. "I bought us the night."

  He had finished his coffee standing, then put the cup on the table. For a moment, it crossed her mind that he might be one of those people who, once satiated and empty of desire, needed to rush away from the scene of their sexual enterprise. She had encountered men like that on occasion and had had episodes of such emotions herself.

  "Hope your day is awful," she had called after him. He had wrapped her in his bear hug and they had lingered for a long moment. No, she had decided, he truly wanted to stay and she could feel the tension calling him away.

  When he'd gone, she had stared at the table until her eggs had grown too cold to eat. Nor could she concentrate on the newspapers. She truly deserved this day of leisure, loving and release. She had reserved it in her mind. Indeed, last night and throughout the early morning, her body had seemed to demand it and acted accordingly, allowing her a feast of orgasms. Still, she knew that her appetite craved more. From self-pity, it was a tiny step to injustice.

  From the it was a circuitous but logical path to arrive at the injustices that had to do with the circumstances surrounding the investigation of the old bones of the young girl.

  It helped for her thoughts to sail back to this gritty reality of shop talk. For a detective, the puzzle was always in play in the subconscious. Little effort was required to bring it back to the surface and it came roaring back with all the force of the repressed anger that the eggplant's attitude had spawned. His priorities were misplaced. Time was not the issue.

  It was, she decided, unjust to ignore the girl's remains and all that they implied. It was a travesty, an outrage. It deserved more than short

  shrift. It demanded her attention.

  "It's my own time," she had said aloud, as if the eggplant was standing at her shoulder.

  She fished a name out of her notebook, Emma Taylor, Fredericksburg, Virginia. It took a half-hour to find the right Taylor, mother of Betty. The long silence after the question told her the truth of it. Had she been too callous in the asking? she wondered.

  "Did you have a daughter named Betty?" was the way she phrased it. It was too late to recall the tone.

  "Ah _have_ a daughter named Betty," the woman said, in a soft, polite, deep Virginia twang, yet offering a dash of indignance to mask the sudden pain of it. Fiona noted the not-so-subtle change of past to present tense.

  Fiona identified herself, then tried to soften the blow somewhat, although she knew it was too late.

  "We have some new facts …" she began, then waited, listening to the woman's breathing at the other end of the line. She imagined she could hear her pumping heart.

  "Ah'll nevah undastand wah she just upped and disappeared into thin ayah."

  The voice and inflection suggested the usual southern cliches. All the predictable images surfaced of a small-town woman holding onto appearances at all costs, playing for approval of the local ladies from the bridge club.

  "You heard from Betta?" the woman asked suddenly, hope ascending in her voice.

  "Not exactly," Fiona said, lying.

  "Ah'd appreciate ya tellin me if ya do," the woman said politely. There was a long pause. "Ah'll nevah undastand," she sighed. "Somethin up thayah in Washinton jes turned her head in the wrong direction."

  "I'd like to come out and see you, Mrs. Taylor," Fiona said.

  "Ah would welcome that," the woman said. "Deed ah would." Another pause. "Not a day goes bah when ah don hope."

  There was no point in a direct response. Instead Fiona got directions and hung up. She lingered for a long moment. Perhaps it had not been a good idea, after all. And yet something in the woman's voice, the inflection, not the words, troubled her. It was a trade-off, she decided. She detested playing the messenger of death. The fact that she would do so off-duty and unpartnered made it even more offensive. It was also too late for that. Her curiosity was too aroused to turn back. For a detective such an attitude was like raw meat thrown to a starving lion.

  SHE ROLLED the car through a long curving exit from the main highway and found herself on the outskirts of Fredericksburg, a fair-sized town, yet light-years away from the Washington metropolis. Following the precise directions the woman had given her, she traversed the main arteries of the town and drove through what passed for suburbs, noting large houses surrounded by big lawns.

  She had no preconceived notions of the kind of place in which Mrs. Taylor lived. No hint was given, except that the neighborhood where Betty's remains had been found had been very upscale, which suggested that she might have been used to such an environment. But that theory quickly dissolved. The neighborhood in which Fiona finally arrived was a sleepy southern ghetto, neat, look-alike small houses, each fronted by a miniscule patch of lawn.

  No way of telling race, Dr. Benton had told her, as she pressed the old-fashioned door bell and listened tohe now unfamiliar ring. A light- skinned Negress came to the door, tall, dignified and stately. Her voice was instantly recognizable.

  "Miz FitzGeral," Mrs. Taylor said, leading her through a small hallway to a neat, well-cared-for living room. The houses of black people were

  familiar to Fiona, and, aside from the tension of her mission, she did not feel uncomfortable or out of place.

  "Ah've made some coffee," Mrs. Taylor said. She was gone a moment, returning with two cups, a pot of coffee and a plate of chocolate-chip cookies. Because she moved with such self-absorbed intensity, Fiona was able to observe her without fear of being considered impolite. The woman's complexion was golden and seemed to glow from within. Not a wrinkle disturbed the symmetry. Chronologically she would be nearing 50, but there was no way of telling from her features. Her well-proportioned figure had thickened, but it was clear that in her youth she had been a knockout.

  Mrs. Taylor poured the coffee with a sense of solemnity in the ritual and handed it to Fiona with a thin smile. Her eyes, Fiona noted now, were a startling bluish grey like her own, her greying hair naturally wavy. Only a somewhat larger flair to the nostril testified to the Negroid genetic share. It was then that Fiona had realized why she had made the mistake of picturing Mrs. Taylor differently. Her voice and inflection revealed only the slighte
st clue to her blackness. Outside of this environment she might have easily passed for white, but it was quite clear which side she had chosen, and she was obviously proud of her choice.

  As she sipped the coffee, Fiona's gaze swept the room, arrested finally by the obvious. Betty Taylor's picture in full color. Undoubtedly a clone of her mother in her youth, a grey-eyed, golden beauty. She noted that the flare in the nostrils was less pronounced. Except for its environment, the woman in the photo might have had a great deal of trouble passing for black.

  "That's Betta," Mrs. Taylor said. From where she sat she could reach the picture. She took the frame, studied the picture for a moment, then held it up for Fiona to get a closer look, although she would not release it from her own hands.

  "She certainly was a beauty," Fiona said, once again regretting the tense. But a picture of the old bones had flashed in her mind. It was all she could do to keep her tears from coming.