Dead Watch

smart, good-looking, powerful, he was rich, he was commanding. My mother picked up the gay thing, hinted at it before we got married, but there really wasn’t a performance issue on his part. We got together okay in bed.”

“And . . .”

“After we got married, the sex just drifted away,” she said. “Then I became aware that he had other attachments. There was usually an assistant or a political associate whom he was a little too fond of, whom he spent too much time with. Maybe that’s why I’m not as out of control as I should be. Linc was more like a favorite uncle. He hadn’t been a lover for years. There wasn’t that tie.”

“Where are we going with this?” Jake asked.

“Well, if it’s going to break, we’d like it to break in some civilized way. Not to leak. Not drizzle out. Not with all kinds of denials . . . Maybe, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that you just announce . . . I was hoping you could help.”

“Jesus.”

“Years ago, the French president had a longtime mistress. Everybody knew, including his wife. They invited the mistress to his funeral, the public pretty much thought that was cool . . . maybe something like that would work with Linc.”

“No. Because Linc was murdered. His body was burned in the most spectacular way. If this comes out . . . ah, man.”

“Linc had a lover, for a year or so, a few years back. Then they stopped being lovers and got to be close friends, almost like brothers. His name is Howard Barber. He’s a tough guy, one of you ex-servicemen, Iraq, and he’s very successful. He started a company that sells electronics to the military. He came over this afternoon, after I got the news about Linc. He said it was going to come out. He said there was no way to contain it. He was hoping to find some way to . . . You know.”

“Be civilized about it.”

“Yes.”

“This is not a very civilized country when it comes to stuff like that,” Jake said. Then he revised himself: “Actually, the country is civilized, it’s the media that’re not.”

She walked along a little farther, and then she asked, “Can you do something?”

“Let me think about it. I need to talk to Barber.”

“Of course.”

“And you trust him.”

She hesitated, then said, “Yes.”

Jake picked up the hesitation: “You don’t trust him. I could hear it.”

“I do trust him . . . or I did trust him.” She paused, then added, “When he came over today, he was looking at me. He was checking me out. He kept talking about the Watchmen, and then he was watching me, watching how I reacted.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I had the feeling—just a feeling—that he knows more than I do, maybe knows what happened. He was checking me to see what I’d been told about it. To see where the investigation was going. And somehow, he was priming me to be angry. To point me at the Watchmen.”

“That’s not good,” Jake said.

“I might be misreading him. He’s got to be freaked out—as I said, he and Linc were really close. When this gay thing comes out, people are going to look at Howard. Big, good-looking guy, always single . . . he hangs out with all the important colonels at the Pentagon, plays poker with them, goes on fishing trips down the bay. You know, the people who buy his products. They’re probably not what you’d call gay-centric.”

“Probably not,” Jake agreed.

They’d turned two corners, and now walked across a street, Jake’s street, but went ahead, down another block. Nice walking in the night, humid, cooling, quiet.

“What do you want me to do?” Jake asked.

“Talk to him, talk to Howard. Not as a policeman, but as somebody who knows what the FBI knows . . . and who also knows about this. See if there’s anything.”

“I can talk to him. But if anything serious comes out of it, I’d have to tell the FBI.”

“Of course—if it looks like there’s reason to believe that Howard had something to do with it. But he didn’t. He wouldn’t. He and Linc really were like brothers. He’s the last person in the world who’d hurt Linc.”

“That makes me suspicious. If somebody told Miss Marple that so-and-so couldn’t possibly have done it . . .”

“You’d know who the killer was. I’m not Miss Marple, and Howard didn’t kill Linc.”

Twenty yards in silence; he could smell her, the scent of flowers, with some spice. Chanel, maybe? Had she put it on just before she came over? He pushed the question away and instead asked, “When did you last see Lincoln?”

“Two weeks before he disappeared. Sometimes I saw him every couple of days, sometimes I didn’t see him for weeks at a time. Besides the farm, and the town house here, we have an apartment in Manhattan and a house in Santa Fe,” she said. “He was always running around. He missed being in the Senate. He missed it desperately.