Dead Watch

New York street, in the dark. Not necessarily a threat, but it pays to be careful.

12 

On the way back in the plane, Jake tried to work through what he knew: that Lincoln Bowe had been dying, and that Bowe had known about a scandal, a package, that would unseat the vice president of the United States, and, if delivered at the right time, probably the president as well.

They did not fit together. He kept trying to find a way, and not until they were coming into National, the Washington Monument glowing white out the right-side window, did one answer occur to him.

He resisted the idea. Struggled again to find a logic that would put all the pieces together—but Occam’s razor kept jumping up at him: the simplest answer is probably the right one.

And the simplest answer was very simple indeed: they weren’t related at all.

Jake got out of the cab at Madison’s a little after midnight. The front-porch light was burning, and Madison opened the door as he climbed the stairs.

“What happened?” she asked. “Come in . . . You look exhausted.”

“I’m fairly well kicked,” Jake admitted. “The days are getting long.”

They drifted toward the front room. “Tell me,” she said.

“I’ll tell you, but you can’t ever admit knowing, all right? It could put you in legal jeopardy. If you have to perjure yourself, and say you didn’t know, that’s what you do,” Jake said.

“What happened?”

“Rosenquist didn’t want to talk. I faked a Russian roulette thing, using a pistol of your husband’s. I pointed it at Rosenquist’s head and pulled the trigger. That’s a felony, aggravated assault. But he started talking. I hinted that I was from some political group, maybe even an intelligence organization. I told him I didn’t know you.”

“Jeez, Jake.” She was standing close to him, and put her hand on his elbow.

“We had to know,” Jake said. “Here’s the thing: he told me that your husband had brain cancer. He was terminal. Rosenquist said there was no chance he’d make it. When he died, he was already showing functional problems, both physically and mentally. That explains the press reports that he’d been drunk in public. That he seemed to be on the edge of control . . . He was medicated. I think he killed himself—had himself killed—and tried to hang it on Goodman.”

Her hands had gone to her cheeks. “My God. But . . . his head?”

“He might not have known the details, might not have worked through the logic of it. On the other hand, maybe he did. They couldn’t leave the head. They had to know that it would be destroyed, completely, or an autopsy would have shown the tumor. Best way to get rid of it would be . . . to get rid of it.”

“That’s unbelievable.” She was pale as a ghost.

“You don’t believe it?”

“No, I sort of do—but I can’t see anybody planning that. It’s too cold.”

“I was told by somebody who knew him that Lincoln had a mean streak . . . a mean streak can mean a coldness. Maybe he could do it.”

She walked away from him, both hands on top of her head, as if trying to contain her thoughts. “I just, I just . . .”

“Novatny told me the autopsy indicated that Lincoln had been drugged—painkillers. We thought it was to control him; it was actually for the pain. I’d bet he was unconscious when they did it and I’ll bet you anything that Howard Barber set it up. He was Lincoln’s best friend, they share both a sexual orientation and a set of politics. They both hated Goodman, and Barber had done some rough stuff in the military. He had the skills, the guts, the motive, and Lincoln could trust him to do it right.”

“The Schmidt man?”

“I think he was set up. By Barber. I didn’t have a chance to dig for connections, but they were both in the military at the same time. Schmidt was given a general discharge, which usually means a kind of plea bargain. He did something, but they didn’t want to waste time with him, or maybe they didn’t want the publicity. I’ve got some access to military records. I can probably figure out what happened.”

“But why can’t they find . . . oh. You mean, Howard killed him, too? Killed Schmidt?”

“That’s what I think.”

“If Howard killed him, there had to be a plan, Linc would have to have known . . . I don’t think Linc . . . Linc wouldn’t go away without feeding the cats, he wouldn’t kill a man who was innocent.”

“Your husband didn’t have to know the whole plan,” Jake said. “May have preferred not to.”

“Another thing . . .” He fished the note out of his pocket. “I found a note in the second safe. It says, ‘All because of Lion Nerve.’ Do you have any idea what it means? It was right on top of the safe, with the pictures, like it was important.”

She looked at it for a moment, and a thoughtful frown wrinkled her forehead. “I don’t know what it means, but I know what it is. It’s an anagram for something. Linc talked in anagrams—he could come up with an anagram for anything, off the top of his head. He used them as mnemonics.”

Now Jake smiled: “You’re the first person I’ve ever heard pronounce mnemonics,” he said. He took the note back. “The ‘Lion Nerve’ is the anagram?”

“I’d think so.”