“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 them to crime scene inventory and other of the bureaucratic jobs important at a major investigative site. The feds already had their man, even if only a theoretical man, and local investigations were unnecessary.
But no cop ever throws out a notebook. So a few weeks later, casually and informally, Sgt. Denny Washington, under his own initiative, canvassed the dicks involved and recovered five of the six notebooks, with promises to return them. He turned them over to Bob, who alone had the patience, the time, the interest, and possibly the context to examine them carefully.
Bob was alone in his hotel room, sitting at a desk under a cheap HoJo lamp. It was near midnight, and today felt like a lost day, as he’d slept late, been disappointed to learn of Nick’s troubles and the way the case was now bollixed up in some sort of political situation. He’d watched the national news, where Nick’s face was prominently displayed, and anchor haircuts, without saying a word, communicated by eyebrow and turn of face their disappointment that the Bureau had chosen such a compromised candidate to head up this important investigation, and that the investigation, which had begun so promisingly, had seemed now to come off the tracks and was evidently barking up wrong trees or chasing wild geese hither and yon. What was wrong with the FBI? You’d think a case this big, they’d make sure not to screw up, huh?
Some reporter named Banjax was all over cable, documenting his disclosures, trying desperately to separate himself from the implication of his words. He of course had no opinion on the appropriateness of Nick to head the investigation, no investment, emotional or professional; his job was to report the facts and let others draw the conclusions. He just felt the public had a right to know that the FBI’s chief sleuth had been himself involved as a participant in issues similar to the ones here-tragically so, sadly so-and the question of why was a logical one to ask.
The Bureau had no comment; Nick, of course, had no comment. Bob saw a glimpse of the girl Starling, her head down, racing past the assembled cameras outside the Hoover Building in DC; he thought she looked upset.
Then the shows all cut to an interview with Joan Flanders’s ex-husband, the rich oddball T. T. Constable. He was all cowboyed up, because now he lived in the West, had essentially given up his eastern identity, and by now everybody was used to seeing him in a cowboy hat and open-necked red shirt with a red bandana about his neck.
As usual, he was ornery and colorful, and the cameras ate up his rugged, tanned face and grizzle of day-old beard, as if he’d spent the day ropin’ and brandin’ instead of sellin’ short and firin’ low producers.
“Well, damn,” he said, “I do expect more from the FBI. We all know who did this, and the sooner we reach that legal determination, the sooner we can put it behind us and celebrate Joan’s great life instead of her unfortunate death at the hands of some screwball marine who thought he was still in the war or something. It’s so straightforward, it’s a mystery to me how they could get it so knotted up.”
Then the Wyoming congressman-the shows didn’t point out that he represented the district in which much of Tom Constable’s vast ranch, one of several, was located, nor did they mention that his party affiliation was the same as Tom’s and that Tom had donated generously to his campaign-this Jack Ridings took over, and promised hearings on FBI hiring and promotional practices, and wondered how a situation like this could come about. Essentially you had a sniper investigating a sniper, and was it not fair to wonder where his allegiance lay? Did he have some sort of psychological investment in the act of sniping? Did he think it was noble to eliminate a human being at long range; would that cloud his professional judgment, cause him to refuse to accept certain realities?
Bob turned it off then. Enough. And shortly thereafter Washington called, at the end of the duty day, saying yeah, he knew what was going on, but he did have these notebooks for Bob, if Bob wanted them. Bob wanted them.
So Bob sat there, trying to make this or that out of the notes. Each guy or gal had his own scheme, his own method, his own set of abbreviations, so it wasn’t easy going, and a lot of it was guesswork or inference. Eventually, he got to know the two simplest styles of penmanship, so he could read those books easily enough, even if some of the initials remained mysterious, and another guy had gone back over his notes with a red pencil, starring each entry that he thought might lead to further inquiries.
Essentially what he found confirmed his own investigations. In the past few months or so, both Jack and Mitzi had been morose, uncommunicative, seemingly depressed. Friends wondered about the health of the marriage or the long-term depression the rejection of Jack’s book might cause. A perhaps too bitchy interviewee made the point that it had been so important to him to have a big New York publisher take it, but nobody would, and that had been a devastating blow to Jack’s dream of literary glory and a return to centrality. Plus, he now owed the publisher the money he’d been living on for five years.
But then everyone agreed that there’d been a miraculous recovery. Suddenly the old Jack, the old Mitzi were back: they always had a swagger to them, a charisma, and a happiness, an ebullience. Most people seemed to put this as happening somewhere early in September; it was as if that ship, which seemed to have vanished, had arrived at long last.