“Don’t leave any for the poor people in China, Gunny,” Washington said. “They don’t need it.”
“I am a hungry guy,” Bob said, beginning to feel more or less whole again. “Sarge, can you drive me back to my hotel? I need to sleep.”
He glanced at his watch. It was nearly four.
“Sure. You sleep. I go to mass, I take my kids to school, I go be a policeman for twelve hours, then what?”
“Tomorrow I call my guy at the FBI and I lay my stuff out for him, the Willie Beazel connect, where I think we should concentrate, what I think should happen next. He argues, we yell, eventually it comes around. I fly out to DC and lay it out for them people, and suddenly there’s a new lay to the land. And now we have a really good chance of getting Carl Hitchcock out of the murderer’s box. Maybe even putting the real shooter in it. That ain’t a bad night’s work.”
“Swagger is the man,” said Washington.
The big detective got him efficiently enough back to the hotel room, and he fell into bed and felt the rush as unconsciousness overtook him. He slept and slept and slept, and when he woke it was near three. How could he have slept so long?
He rose, rushed through a shower and the other ablutions, then picked up his cell and pushed Nick’s number.
No answer.
He tried three or four more times, never connecting.
Finally he called the other number, the task force working number that he had, got some earnest intern, asked for Nick, waited, and finally a young woman’s voice came on.
“Agent Chandler, can I help you?” she said.
The one called Starling.
“Agent Chandler, it’s Swagger, you remember me?”
“Of course.”
“I have to reach Nick. I can’t seem to raise him.”
The pause told him bad news was incoming.
Finally she responded.
“Where have you been the last ten hours?”
“I was asleep. I was working three days without rest and I had to catch up, and now I have some things I-”
“Oh. Well, there’s been a shake-up. You didn’t see the
“I’m in Chicago.”
“Well, it’s national news. Anyhow, some Times reporter broke a big story on something in Nick’s background. Some botched shooting twenty years ago.”
Swagger knew the story; the shot that hit the woman, not the robber, and paralyzed her. He thought it was all over, forgotten. Whose business was it?
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“It’s caused a big stew. Some congressman is threatening hearings on how the Bureau is handling this. Nick’s been upstairs all day.”
“He’s all right, isn’t he? Jeez, he’s their best guy.”
“He is. But we don’t know what’s happening. There hasn’t been any news. There’s a rumor he’s resigned-”
“Resigned!”
“For the good of the Bureau. It’s all a mess, a typical Washington thing-politics, influence, lost time, anger, recriminations-and the press is eating it up.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Bob.
“Do you want to talk to anybody else? Ron is here.”
“Oh-No, I’ll wait and see how it shakes out. If you see Nick, give him my best and tell him, well, that I called.”
“I will,” she promised.
22
Bill Fedders hit the putt, watched it ride the undulations of the green and break right just where he thought it would. But he hadn’t quite hit it hard enough, and it quit short six inches.
“Great putt,” said the congressman. “I wish I could read a green like that.”
“My one true talent,” said Fedders with a glowing smile, and the smile was really his one true talent. He went to the ball, insouciantly leaned over it, and knocked it casually into the cup with one hand. Par, another par, and the congressman’s handicap kept him close so he wouldn’t go home embittered.
Bill could par any course in Washington. He was a superb gin, bridge, and poker player. He could drink ten Navy boatswains under the table. He had an aristocrat’s thick silver hair (you had to have had a relative at the original Round Table to get hair like that, he often joked), a keen, original wit, and a gift for strategy. His suits were Italian but subdued; he had an excellent collection of Aldens, in both wing tips and, for casual wear, the tasseled loafers. He had a good racquet sense, excelling at both squash and tennis. He could ride a horse or a motorcycle or pilot a sailboat or speedboat. He was a licensed flier. He was a Yale grad, from a grand old family. Skull and Bones, University of Virginia Law, Navy JAG during Vietnam, then a partner with Occam Dobalt Hunsucker until he established his own practice. He made three million a year and had put four kids through Ivy League schools and law school. He was on wife number three and mistress number twenty-five. He lived in a really big house in Potomac. He went to all the right parties, knew all the right people. He hated his life.
The cell rang.
“Oh, I know who that is,” said the congressman. “His master’s voice.”
Bill rolled his eyes and turned to wander to the edge of the green, while caddy and foursome gave him privacy, as all knew he was Tom Constable’s number one guy in Washington, and even here, on the fabled thirteenth green at Burning Tree, under soaring poplars wearing their fall russets and golds, when Tom Constable called, Tom Constable expected an answer.
“Yes, Tom. Did you see it?”
“I saw it,” said Tom Constable, from wherever he happened to be, in Wyoming or Atlanta or China, for Christ’s sake, Tom was always on the go; he might have even been on the twelfth or the fourteenth here at Burning Tree.
“Was it what you expected?”
“I liked the information. The tone was more sympathetic than I imagined.”
“Evidently Banjax got to know Memphis and liked him quite a bit. It seems everybody likes Memphis.
“I’m sure I’d like him too,” said Constable. “That’s not the point. The point is, he’s in the way, he has to be removed. That’s the point, the only point. Tell me what I want to hear. He’s gone as of now. Some obedient number two guy is about to release the report. I don’t see how they can keep him aboard with all this shit in the air.”
“No changes have been announced, but it’s still early. There’ll be a period when clarity isn’t available,” said Fedders. “It’ll be murky. Nothing will seem to be happening. What’s going on is that everybody is figuring out how the game has changed and how the situation now sits, where the power is, who’s got the momentum. That’ll take a bit of time. Then on to the next move.”
“I know, I know. If I ran a goddamn business like that, I’d be in the goddamn poorhouse by now.”
“That’s why I’ve always told you to stay out of Washington, Tom. You don’t have the temperament, and all you’d do is give yourself an ulcer. You pay me to have your ulcer for you.”
“Pay you goddamn well, Bill, as I recollect. So, the story ran, the Bureau is locked up behind closed doors, media pressure is building, there’s a lot of scrutiny. Has the White House said anything?”
“No, but Jack Ridings has gotten the Leader to threaten to hold hearings. The FBI does not want to go to the Hill and discuss dirty laundry, believe me. They want all this to go away.”
“Don’t they see? Dump Memphis, issue the report, watch the case-closed signs go up, and everything is fine. No more books on poor Joan, no more Internet shit about me. Have you seen the latest? Joan had pictures of me in a feather boa dancing with J. Edgar. We look like Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein. I had her murdered to get the negatives.”
“Tom, there are lots of people who hate you. You know that. It’s not worth acknowledging their existence. They would love nothing better than to be sued by you.”
“Okay, okay. Don’t let this slide, Bill. Stay on Jack, stay on the Bureau, keep me informed. I want to be in the loop. I want this goddamn thing closed.”
“Yes, Tom.”
“By the way,” said Tom, “you shouldn’t have hit the seven on the approach.”
23
Give it to Chicago homicide. In the four hours between the discovery of the Strong and Reilly bodies and the arrival of the FBI on the scene, not as advisers but as lead agency on the determination that a murderer-for-hire had crossed state lines (even though it seemed not to have gone that way) and the formation of Task Force Sniper, the usual processes had already begun to proceed. Given that Strong and Reilly were well-known and that their deaths were unusual enough to merit consideration as major cases, two teams of detectives were dispatched and spent the day interviewing witnesses and acquaintances under the commonplace theory that the vics’ death was rooted in their own behavior, not their membership in some larger, national pattern.
Thus detectives interviewed neighbors, colleagues, some journalists (Jack was a favorite of theirs, always good for a radical quote to get readers’ blood boiling), and so forth. That campaign was formally halted around 3 p.m. and the detectives then reported to the FBI, which was not interested in their findings and reassigned
