American Sextet

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A political sex scandal of massive proportions!

Fiona’s heels sank into the soft earth as she moved across the marsh to the edge of the creek. Her thin raincoat offered little comfort against the persistent drizzle that threw a gloomy chill over the gray morning. She heard Cates’s shoes making squishing sounds as he followed close behind her toward the two policemen in shiny slickers. Above her loomed the great brownish arches of the Calvert Street Bridge, recently renamed the Duke Ellington Bridge, over which stretched a symmetrical string of lighted globes.

The body rested precariously on the creek’s rim against a rocky outcrop that kept it from slipping into the rushing water.

The early April rain had churned up the ground, stripping away the last vestiges of winter and releasing the earth’s pungent odors. After being with Clinton, everything seemed good again—colors deeper, odors richer, sounds clearer. He had crept beside her earlier than usual this morning, but she was instantly awake at his touch. She still tingled with the afterglow of having been with him.

Now, beneath the bridge, she slipped and fell on the damp soil, her nostrils tickled by the manurey smell.

“You okay?” Cates asked, offering his hand. She grabbed it, allowing him to lift her. Struggling upward, she felt a tear in her raincoat, covered now with a coat of mud. Her pantyhose had been ripped along the knees. One thing about being a cop, she thought. It was hard as hell on pantyhose.

She let Cates go ahead of her now, guiding the way along the slippery ground to where the body had landed. As they arrived, the policemen pointed their flashlight beams on the sprawled lifeless heap that was once a young woman. They kneeled beside her, studying the body in the play of light. She was blonde, mid-twenties, Fiona guessed.

“Makes a mess,” one of the policemen muttered as Fiona touched the body, lifting an arm. It wriggled, then, when released, fell like a length of heavy rope. On impact, a jumper became crushed bones in a blubbery bag of bruised flesh. Fiona sniffed as her nostrils picked up the body’s odor, the stench of death strong enough to mask any natural competition. One of the policemen handed her an alligator purse.

“I didn’t open it,” he said. She wondered briefly if he had rifled the wallet. The woman’s driver license identified her as Dorothy Curtis, born December 8, 1958. The shock of similarity made her wince. Fiona was also born on December 8, six years earlier. The photo on the license showed a remarkably pretty woman. Fiona bent down again to confirm her identity. Except for the mouth, set irrevocably in a tight-lipped smile, it wasn’t easy. The body had hit face first.

Cates stood nearby writing in his notebook. The sound of sirens pierced the air until an ambulance pulled up, not far from where they’d parked. A pair of medic technicians quickly unloaded their gear and started towards them.

“Always seems stupid this way,” Cates said, shaking his head, his light brown complexion looking deceptively like a deep tan over caucasian features. His speech was clipped and sounded slightly British: Trinidadian parents, he’d explained to Fiona on their first assignment together. He was resented for that as well. Like her, he was a misfit in their tightly circumscribed MPD world. As the ultimate misfit—the only female in homicide—she was always partnered with those considered out of the mainstream; freaks. Poor Cates. He had the right appendage for getting ahead at MPD, but the color wasn’t quite right. The majority of the department was black and the percentage was rising fast. Cates unfortunately didn’t precisely fit quite into the prevailing tone. Luther Greene, commander of the Homicide division, who they called the eggplant, had mated them with a special glee verging on malevolence—two square pegs in his gameboard of round holes.

She fingered the handbag’s contents: a thin shiny alligator wallet, edged in gold, two fives, three singles, a ring of keys, a compact, lipstick, a perfume vial, a stub from a paycheck. The woman apparently had worked at Saks.

“No note?” Cates asked.

“None.”

“Lover’s quarrel?”

“Maybe.” Fiona noted the woman’s alligator shoes. Her white cocktail dress, gooey with mud, still properly covered her body. Peeling the dress upward from the hem, she noticed the policeman’s light beam hesitate near the thighs. She motioned his arm upward and the beam followed, showing satin panties that covered a sculpted triangle of jet black hair. There was always a message there, Fiona thought, but what? The medics arrived and she stepped back to let them bag the body and lift it to the stretcher.

“How do you see it?” Cates asked. Because she was his senior he routinely deferred to her, but sometimes his wide-eyed eagerness grated on her. Like Fiona, he was trying hard to make it—and like her, the odds were stacked against him. They had been together only a month, but in that time Fiona had assumed the role of teacher—she felt she had to take the lead if they were going to get anything done. He was also five years her junior, which didn’t help. Perhaps that was why her age was beginning to matter. Thirty-two. The child-bearing years left were narrowing. She had made the observation to Clint, whose only response had been stony silence. It was, of course, a stupid thing to suggest to a man who already had a wife and family.

“All the signs of a jumper,” she muttered, forcing Clint into the background again.

“If there was a note,” Cates said.

Fiona looked at him and shrugged; she hadn’t found a note pinned to the woman’s dress or any other sign of a personal motive.

Cates’s features were smooth and delicate, the skin taut on prominent bones, the eyes set deep with flecks of green in the light brown, the hair like a tight curly cap against his skull.

“They do that,” she said. “Sometimes the act itself is a note.”

“Aren’t people who die like this nearly always suicides?”

“Depends.”

“Probably some trouble over a man.”

“How would you know?” Fiona said harshly. This was the wrong case for her, she thought, I’m overreacting. Trouble over a man? Again, the image of Clint returned, the man she shared.

Fiona still clutched the alligator handbag, fingering the reptile mosaic as she watched the technicians start back across the marsh. She turned her eyes away when she saw one of them slip, dropping the body into the soggy muck. The dead deserved more dignity than that, she thought. Could love really have caused this? Don’t empathize, she warned herself. It’s not professional.

The drizzle had turned to fine mist as she and Cates started back to the parkway. She was more cautious now, making sure of each step.

Once in the car, she used a half box of tissues to blot the moisture on her clothes and skin and rub the mud off her shoes and raincoat.

“She sure got dressed up for it,” Cates said, starting the car.

“They always do. Sometimes they even fold their overclothes. Or line up their shoes.”

“Shiny new panties,” Cates muttered, shaking his head. “A dead giveaway.”

“So you noticed. You’re all prurient.”

He laughed appreciatively.

“Keep an open mind. Nothing is as it seems,” she said.

“You think she was thrown?”

“Never think with your guts,” she said irritably. The eggplant was always putting down her intuition, and along with it, her sex. The eggplant had earned the nickname from the dumb looking vegetable that, like the chief, could be cooked in a thousand ways. Little did he know that detection was an art as well as a science, she’d argued privately. She didn’t need to compound the persecution.

“I had a buddy did that,” Cates said, “Jumped from the sixteenth floor.”

“Trouble over a woman?” she asked innocently.

“A woman?” Again he laughed, and she immediately understood why. Men never committed suicide over a woman. They died in fights over them, but they never deliberately destroyed themselves. Not for a woman.

The thought increased her agitation as Clint surfaced again. Love hurt—it blunted judgment, destroyed instincts.

Forcing concentration, she guessed the time of death at between midnight and five, the horror hours, the time when anxiety replaced reality. They weren’t exactly her happiest hours either. She caught Cates glancing at her.

“You okay?” he asked. She quickly looked away, determined to shake her annoyance.

“Rough night?” he persisted. It was harmless small talk, but it was hitting the mark.

“Turn here,” Fiona snapped. Cates turned the wheel abruptly, forcing her to sway against the window. In the absence of anything else that could make her feel better, she took comfort in his obedience. They had turned into a side street of townhouses, and Fiona held the woman’s license in front of her, comparing addresses.

“That one,” she said, pointing to a townhouse situated in the middle of the block.

They looked at each other in a mutual double take as they entered Dorothy Curtis’s apartment, struck by the unexpected image—a flash of white, temporarily blinding. The living room was like a cloud bank, with puffs of white everywhere. The over-stuffed furniture, covered with a velvety white material, resembled rows of huge marshmallows. Heavy drapes of white hung from the windows. On the wall was a painting of a field of daffodils breeze-bent against a backdrop of cottony clouds. There was a white artificial fireplace with white birch logs in one corner, before which was a white bear skin.

In the bedroom, also white, were more marshmallow pillows and a platform bed under a mirrored ceiling, surrounded by white stuffed animals: rabbits, teddys, a lion, a Cheshire cat. The bathroom was carpeted and papered in white. There was a shower curtain of what seemed like plastic lace. Even the hardware was antiqued white.

“Looks like a white freak,” Fiona said. The woman’s white dress tarnished with mudstains troubled her now. It seemed so out of character. This woman should have died of an overdose in a white nightgown, lying on her platform bed with arms crossed over white lilies. The image made her wince.

“What is it?” Cates asked.

She ignored him, resenting his minute inspection. His dependence was too cloying. Looking through drawers and closets, she confirmed her expectations. More white.

“More like Hollywood than Washington,” Cates said, moving out of the bedroom.

Once he had gone, she stood motionless, soaking in the room’s silence, listening. The broken body in the ravine was totally foreign to this setting. Looking around, her own frazzled image in the overhead mirror caught her attention. There it was, the white room, reversed, and herself, out of place, incongruous, floating upside down.

She longed suddenly to run from the room, return to her own nest and the cluttered familiarity of her bedroom, with its mismatched furniture and its flash of colors, the candy-striped sheets and pillowcases, the jumble of clothes, the throw rugs and straight-backed wooden chair. Clint would be rising now. He always catnapped at her place until it was time for him to go to his office; it was part of their thrice weekly routine. He would leave his wife’s warm bed in Cleveland Park, proceed to hers on Connecticut Avenue, let himself in with his own key, and slide in beside her, ready to make love. She was always as eager herself. Sometimes, like tonight, they would have dinner in her apartment, another ritual of their affair.

Tonight, she thought, it could not go on like this. To her surprise the thought soothed her, penetrating the contrived whiteness and flogging her mind back to the job at hand.

“I found this,” Cates said, returning to the bedroom.

He held a photograph in a cardboard frame. The woman smiled back at her from a craggy promontory with a blue sky in the background. She wore a small bikini, white, of course, fully revealing a voluptuous figure.

“A knockout,” Cates muttered.

“And she knew it,” Fiona said. It was a model’s pose, blonde hair rippling shoulder length, the cleavage imposing, a flat belly, thighs well turned on slender legs.

“What a waste, to deliberately toss it all away.”

“Maybe it wasn’t deliberate.”

“Maybe,” he responded, without conviction. “You really think she got some help?”

Fiona didn’t answer, but began rummaging through drawers, looking for traces of a male presence, a telephone book, notes, names. The scent was there but not the source.

“Find anything?” she asked Cates, who was rifling through living room drawers.

“No,” he said, looking around the room. “But this place is obviously subsidized.”

“Obviously.” The feeling of maleness clung to the place like a layer of dust.

“It’s around here somewhere,” she said. Dorothy Curtis died because of a man. And Fiona FitzGerald was determined to find out why.

They were ordered back to headquarters by noon. Captain Green, a.k.a. the eggplant, had called a meeting of the entire squad and, as usual, he was fuming. Three black teenage girls had been strangled within three weeks, all on Wednesdays, their bodies chucked into trash cans awaiting the sanitation trucks. The press had already dubbed them the “can murders.” All three girls were mothers of illegitimate children.

“This ain’t Atlanta,” he ranted. The Post and TV reporters were already pointing up the comparison. The eggplant dreaded being second-guessed by the experts, pushed aside by the FBI or any other enforcement agency. They were always trying to muscle in on his business; he seemed to be fighting constantly for his professional life. It was a sure sign of his incompetence, Fiona thought, all this strident posturing.

Assigning more men to the can murders meant more pressure on her and Cates, whose assignment that week was “routines,” which meant checking out all deaths, natural or otherwise, that occurred in the District of Columbia. It was an assignment that rotated within the squad and was, occasionally, the eggplant’s method of punishing offenders, real or imagined.

The question that was in everyone’s mind was, was the killer white or black? In the MPD such thoughts always came first. The department was very sensitive about its competence. Whenever a murder wave hit, the eggplant became the pressure point of the MPD brass.

“We’re missing things,” he shouted, banging his fist into his palm. Behind him was a blackboard with a short list of clues. The air in the room was smoke-filled, stifling, and Fiona felt exhausted from her early morning bout with Clint. Her eyelids were like small weights and she fought to keep them opened.

Suddenly Cates jabbed her thigh and she looked up to see the eggplant, his dark face shiny with sweat, glaring at her.

“You see me later, FitzGerald,” the eggplant shouted. As always, he needed a scapegoat. Although the rebuke awakened her, it did nothing to help her concentration and she struggled to look attentive. Again the jumper surfaced in her thoughts. Trouble over a man, Cates had said. Was such trouble worth dying for? She shivered, recalling her relationship with Clint.

After the meeting the eggplant, who hadn’t forgotten, summoned Fiona into his office. As always, several ashtrays on his desk overflowed with cigarette butts. His black hands gripped the desk’s edge, and she was sure his smoldering anger was magnified by her white female face. Office gossip had it that his wife mistreated him. Pussy-whipping, they called it, not that the eggplant could do anything about it—his wife was related to the MPD chief’s wife. When under the gun, the poor bastard got it from all sides. But when he dished it out, his victims were carefully chosen. Taking flak from the eggplant had become an accepted part of the job, like leave, pension rights and coffee breaks.

“This case may not be a big deal to you, FitzGerald,” he began in a low voice. For appearance’s sake, his barbs had to be muted. She was, after all, a double minority, which meant double protection—another source of irritation to the son of a bitch.

“I’m sorry,” Fiona said, determined to disarm him. “I was absorbed with the jumper.” She felt stupid for being caught drowsing, but she had enough of her own personal pressure and didn’t want to deal with the eggplant’s problems—not now. The look of smoldering anger didn’t subside, and instinctively she knew that any effort to placate him would have little effect.

“No white-assed twat is going to bust morale around here. You don’t know what’s comin’ down. We have an Atlanta here and we’ve all bought it. They’re just looking for a chance to show up us dumb nigger cops.”

There it was. “They.” The ubiquitous white enemy.

“Why don’t you put me on it?” she said brightly, ignoring his mood. Instantly, she knew it was a mistake, like throwing a match on dry tinder.

“Sheet,” he said, lifting a cigarette from a pack and shoving it in his mouth. “You like puttin’ us down, white princess.” The cigarette stuck and bobbed on his lower lip as he spoke.

“No need to get racial,” she mumbled, feeling the Irish temperament rise like an expanding bubble in her chest. Cool it, mama, she ordered herself, thankful that he took time out to light his cigarette. Inhaling deeply, he exhaled the smoke through his nostrils, like a black dragon. Her comment was gratuitous—she knew that everything around them was racial by definition.

“I’m gonna bust this fuckin’ case before it gets out of hand and I don’t need no shit from you.” He appeared to have already forgotten her transgression.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Seeing it from his point of view softened her—it was no more personal than usual. Her brief drowse had simply ruffled his dignity.

“This jumper . . .” she said, trying to keep his anger deflected. There were times when he could be quite rational about police business. She avoided his eyes and took out her notebook, using it more as a prop than an aid.

“There may be more to it.”

She rattled off details, the absence of a note, or some other tangible sign, the uncommonly neat apartment, her youth, her beauty, her pretty clothes, the lack of any male evidence. His disinterest was obvious.

“I don’t need this,” he muttered, inhaling again, the cigarette burned down to a nub. Removing it from his lips, he squashed it into the butt pile in his ashtray.

“I know about female jumpers,” she said quickly. “It just feels different.” Was she fishing for his commitment to further the investigation? He turned away, looking out of his window at the rain-slicked street.

“I’ll know more when I get the medical examiner’s report.” Somehow she was unable to put the matter to rest. The dead woman seemed to be goading her, flaunting her death. Trouble over a man. Clint, you bastard, she cried out to herself. None of them was worth it. She remembered how she had broken up with Bruce Rosen, the congressman. A triumph of will over emotion. Had Dorothy, too, been put to that test and failed?

“Gimme a break lady,” the eggplant said.

He was right, of course. Suicidal motivation was for the psychiatrists, not cops. Besides, there was a backlog of naturals. He couldn’t spare the manpower for something so inconsequential, having already diverted most of the squad to the can murders. His back was to her now, his shoulders hunched over in frustration. The hell with it, she decided. Who needs this?

When she finally left him she noted that the office was deserted, except for Cates.

“Don’t ask . . .” she said.

“I got a make on the jumper.”

She shrugged with disinterest. Returning to her own desk, she sat making doodles on a notepad.

“Personnel office at Saks, where she worked. The woman was from a place called Hiram, Pennsylvania. Probably coal country. I called there.”

She tried to ignore him.

“I got a next of kin, a second cousin in Hiram, with a real pollack name. Zcarkowiz.” He read it aloud and spelled it. “That’s her real name as well. Her parents are dead. Apparently all the brothers split. The cousin’s an old lady. Won’t claim the body.”

From the way he hesitated, she could tell there was more. She wanted it to end.

“About a year ago, a newspaperman came through Hiram. Did a piece about unemployment in the mines. Washington Post. She left town with him.” He hesitated, perhaps noting her indifference. “The cousin still had the clipping. The reporter’s name was Martin.”

The name meant nothing and she stood up and slapped her notebook shut.

“Don’t you see,” he said. “I found the man in the woodpile.”

She was thinking instead about the man in her own woodpile. The fate of Dorothy what’s-her-name had certainly called him to her attention.

Picking up the phone, she dialed Clint’s number.

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