Dead Watch

“Yes. A major asshole.”

“You said you thought two things about the Watchmen. What’s the other one?”

Barber nodded. “Okay. From what Maddy told you, you know that I’m a gay black man. The Watchmen are a proto-fascist group, with their own little charismatic fuhrer. What should I think about them? I’d like to see them run out of the country.”

“They don’t seem to have a problem with blacks,” Jake said. “Or gays, for that matter. Not that I’ve read about.”

“Give them a while,” Barber said. “Being antiblack or antigay or anti-Jew isn’t useful to them yet. But they’ll get to it. Right now, they’re against immigrants. That’s not going to be enough, not when Goodman runs for national office. You know that thing he says, about how he never met a Commandment he didn’t like? Well, do not fuck your brother is in there somewhere.”

“You’re a pessimist, Mr. Barber.”

Barber smiled and spread his hands: “Hey. I’m a gay black guy. Pessimism keeps me alive.”

“Last question, then,” Jake said. “I don’t know if you’ll know what I’m talking about, so I’m going to come at it obliquely—because if you don’t know, I don’t want you to guess.”

Barber studied him for a moment, then: “Okay.”

“Did you know that your friend Lincoln Bowe was involved in an effort to . . .” Jake hesitated, hoping he’d leave the impression that he was groping for the right word, though he’d spit at Barber exactly what the unknown man had told him on the phone, “. . . that he was, uh, what shall we call it: examining nonconventional means of destabilizing this administration. Does that mean anything to you?”

Barber’s eyes went opaque: “No. What the hell does it mean?”

Jake thought: He knows. “All right. I really can’t tell you . . .”

They talked for a few more minutes, and Barber, as he was leaving, promised to get back on the question of Bowe’s ongoing love affairs. At the door, Barber said, “When is the gay thing going to hit the streets?”

Jake shrugged: “I haven’t told anybody yet. I’m afraid it’d derail the investigation. You want a call before I do it?”

“I’d appreciate it . . . and if you could take it a little easy?”

“I’ll try. But it’s going to be out of my hands at that point.”

Jake let Barber out the back door, then spent an hour making notes of the conversation and listing questions. He’d noticed how Barber’s language switched easily back and forth from a street-flavored lingo to postgraduate sophistication. From Goodman’s boys fuckin’ up people at one moment to proto-fascist charismatic fuhrer the next.

And he’d been lying about Bowe and the destabilization thing. Bowe had been into something. Now Jake had to work through it. Whatever it was, how did it tie in to Goodman? Or did it?

He made another call about Cathy Ann Dorn—he got the nursing desk and was told that she had been awake, had eaten some cottage cheese, and was asleep again.

He talked to Novatny.

“Bowe was alive when he was shot, but he was full of drugs. Enough painkiller to knock him on his ass. They may have kept him sedated to control him. Shot him in the heart. The debris in the wound canal was newsprint. The thinking is, they may have tried to use a wad of paper to muffle the sound of the shot.”

“That’s weird.”

“Shooting a drugged guy is weird,” Novatny said. “Cold, ice-cold, murder. Don’t get no colder than that.”

Jake went online, into the federal records. He had only limited access as a consultant, but he found a file on Darrell Goodman. The file was informative in an uninformative way—parts of his military record had simply been removed from the unclassified files. And that meant, almost certainly, that he was a snoop-and-pooper. Goodman had himself a hit man.

Jake was thinking about it when Merkin, the contact at the Republican National Committee, called back.

“Jake, we gotta talk. Where are you?”

“I’m home. Is this about Packer?”

“About Packer and Tony Patterson.” Merkin sounded worried.

“Okay. I can come there, or you could come here. . . .”

“No, no. How about at the National Gallery? Like in the nineteenth-century French paintings?” Merkin suggested. “I could walk over. Meet you outside in an hour?”

“I should be there by then. If not, pretty quick after that.” And he thought, Doesn’t want to talk to me at his office . . . doesn’t want to be seen with me.

Barber called Madison Bowe on her cell phone, caught her on the way back from the funeral home. “I talked to Winter,” he said. “He says he hasn’t told anybody about the gay thing.”

“Huh. I was all braced.”