Dead Watch

“He’s afraid it’d derail the investigation.”

“Ah, jeez,” she said. “I feel like I’m . . . It makes me feel rotten. I’m not made for this.”

“I know, I know. Maybe you oughta just get out of it, get away from Winter. The guy is pulling stuff out of the air. I didn’t even want to look at him. I was afraid he could read my eyes.”

“He is that way . . . ,” Madison said.

“I’ll tell you, it doesn’t really make sense. He should have told Danzig by now,” Barber said. “I’m wondering . . . Maybe Winter is trying to do right by you.”

“He likes me,” Madison said.

“I could tell. And you like him back.”

“Mmm.” She realized it was true. She hastened on. “About the other issue . . .”

“Not on the phone,” Barber said. “Tell you what. I’ll stop over and see you when we both have time. We can talk it all out.”

The National Gallery looks like a WPA post office. Jake found Merkin on the main floor, morosely examining Cezanne’s House by the Marne.

“In Cezanne’s day, the Marne wasn’t the Marne,” Jake said, taking in the painting.

“Looks like a creek,” Merkin said. “Not like a million dead men, or whatever it was.”

“I didn’t know you were an art fan, Tom.”

“Ah, it calms me down, coming here,” Merkin said. “I never see anybody from work.”

“Probably be better if you did,” Jake said. “I mean, for the Republic.”

Merkin nodded. “Let’s walk.”

They walked toward the American wing, talking in hushed voices, Whistler’s huge White Girl peering at them down the long hall. Merkin said, “As far as I know, nobody did anything illegal.”

“Then what’re we talking about?”

“Patterson had worked with Packer in North Carolina on the Jessup campaign, and out in New Mexico on Jerry Radzwill’s. They saw each other around. Patterson is with ALERT! right now. He was an advisor on the Bowe campaign. He was set for a decent job if Bowe won, but Bowe didn’t, so he wound up at ALERT!”

“He’s a Bowe guy.”

“Was. Anyway, he got in touch with Packer and said he had a hypothetical for her. If, hypothetically, somebody had a package that would dump Vice President Landers off the ticket, when would be the best time for the package to be delivered?”

“What’s in the package?”

“Don’t know. Neither does Packer. Here’s the thing, here’s what Patterson was saying. He was saying that somebody has a package that’s so specific, so criminal, so irrefutable, that as soon as somebody respectable gets it, he’s gonna have to turn it over to the FBI or face criminal charges himself. But until then, it’s a figment of the imagination, floating around out there.”

“The implied question was, when did the Republicans want the package dumped to do the most damage?”

“That’s about it,” Merkin said.

“What was the answer?”

Merkin’s shoulders slumped, and he shook his head. “Jake, you know how the talk goes on these hypotheticals. People talk about this stuff all the time. Dump it October first, there’s plenty of time for the scandal to blow up, not enough time to recover . . . but who knows, maybe it could be suppressed until it’s too close to the election. So maybe September fifteenth. And maybe . . . Hell, you pick a date.”

“Sometime in the fall.”

“I would say that.”

“And you’re telling me this now because . . .”

“Because now that it’s out there and somebody knows about Patterson and Packer, we don’t want to get caught in the obstructing-justice squeeze,” Merkin said. “We’re reporting this to you, as the president’s point man on the Bowe investigation. I’m going to make a record of our talk here, and date it, get it notarized, and stick it in a safe-deposit box. If I never need it, that’s great. If I wind up talking to a Senate panel or a grand jury . . .”

“All right,” Jake said. “This information, whatever it is . . . Patterson got it from Senator Bowe?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Patterson.” He swung his sport coat off his shoulder, dug in a side pocket, and came up with a leaf torn from a desk calendar. A phone number and address were written in the memo block. “I happen to have his name and address with me.”

Jake stuck the paper in his pocket. “I’ll probably have to tell the feds.”

“We’ll do everything in the world to cooperate. Packer understands that. We don’t have anything to do with Patterson, so that’s not our problem. Remember: the whole thing was presented to Packer as a hypothetical. And it was all so vague, what was she going to report? Anything we did could be interpreted as an unsupported and scurrilous attack on the vice president.”