Immaculate Deception

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The clock is ticking away for Fiona FitzGerald.

Fiona awoke, her senses alert to instant reality. She did not grope for recognition of sounds, shapes and texture. She knew at once what had awakened her. Oak leaves from the twin oaks in the garden, showing their first spring growth, rustling, making sounds like beans shifting in a bean bag.

Then she felt the light breeze through the opened window caressing her left cheek and smelled the gamey odor of the sheep manure the gardener had spread over the rose beds. Opening her eyes, she could see the pale grey slate of presunrise framed by the window.

The texture of early spring always jogged her memories of place. This house and its voices. Daddy calling a cheery goodbye. Mommy’s footsteps crunching along the pebbled path of her beloved garden on the way to the shed. Death had not stilled the voices. Death never did. It was the axiom of homicide. People left tracks, left an aura, left flaked pieces of themselves like the invisible residue of dead skin cells.

She stretched under the comforter, toes touching Greg Taylor’s hard calf muscles. Her position was partially diagonal. Their strenuous couplings had caused them to shift crosswise in her king-sized bed.

Turning, she observed him in the pale light, then lifted the comforter for a full view of his now fetally positioned body. Hard muscles from calves to shoulders, tight buns, smooth sun-burnished skin, healthy, sexy, beautifully made, a magnificent specimen. Greg would be the first to agree.

Resting her head on her elbow, she studied him with her detective’s clinical eye. A good genetic match, she decided, at least physically. The odds were that they could make good babies, maybe a bit egocentric, a trifle compulsive, suspicious, distrusting . . . suddenly she was cataloging a long list of their mutual eccentricities and foibles.

Yet lately she had secretly entertained the idea of single parenthood. At thirty-six such ideas were understandable. Her mother, dead seventeen years, would have been appalled at the idea. Not that she wasn’t listening to her thoughts at this very moment. Only speculating, Mother, Fiona admonished the periodic apparition, just in case it might be planning to put in an appearance. It would be just like her mother’s apparition to catch her in flagrante delicto.

In fact, her mother, in whatever incarnation, would be appalled by her daughter’s present life. At the time of her death, Fiona was still every inch the senator’s daughter, groomed like a thoroughbred for life among the elite and powerful. Sweetly scrubbed and scented and being turned out for the good life at Mount Vernon Junior College, she was the very model of a good Catholic girlhood, providing boring confessions to old Father Thomas and, swear to Jesus and hope to die, still a true unblemished virgin as her mother’s casket was lowered into her grave.

"Respect and dignity is everything," her mother had counseled. It was at the heart of her litany and her life. "No stranger must invade the temple of your body which has been fashioned to accommodate God’s image." It was quite a convoluted explanation but she had gotten the message. Only marriage could obviate the status of man as stranger.

Loud and clear, the voice still rose in her mind. She had certainly cohabitated with a fair share of strangers. But she had long outgrown the secret sense of postcoital guilt that used to afflict her.

But the fact was that her mother would approve of her relationship with Gregory Taylor. Not entwined like this, of course. But fully dressed and posed for scrutiny. Greg was tall, handsome and, at least by heritage, Catholic, his mother of good Irish stock. His father had been a renegade Catholic all his life, but he had taken extreme unction to hedge his bet, which would have warmed her mother’s heart. Greg, on the surface, would appear to be the perfect prospective mate in every respect.

But then, her mother always trusted the books’ cover. Greg was right out of Central Casting for any mother’s dreams. Except that he was still married, although separated, pathologically ambitious, devious in the extreme, covetous, greedy, egotistical, self-centered and narcissistic. In short, he had picked up all the native diseases of the nation’s capital. And, oh God, she could barely expel the idea, forgive me Mommy, proud as punch of his beautiful specimen. She offered her palm as presentation of a deliciously ivory hard erection, his special pride. And her joy.

Husband and father material? Nada. No more than Daddy. But, at least, Daddy could bleed when pricked. And Daddy, in the end, had proved his bedrock morality and manhood and had died a real hero. He was the first, the very first Senator, to raise his fist against the stupid Vietnam war. For his troubles he was drummed out of the club. How glorious for him? Too bad, Mommy, you weren’t there to see the parade. It was wonderful. Wonderful.

Yet, daydreaming aside, Greg could, indeed, provide the spermatic libation that could change the course of Fiona’s personal history. Some latent maternal instinct seemed to be growing within her in direct proportion to her now galloping chronology. Perhaps there was some ego in it as well, certainly sentimentality and nostalgia. She was healthy, intelligent and reasonably independent financially. Her house, her parents’ legacy, was, aside from being valuable, a place that cried out for a child’s sound to fill its comparative vastness.

Such contemplation was taking up serious time in her thoughts, becoming less and less an impractical dream. She had read about others having done it quite successfully and single parenting was a commonplace situation for many. Technologically speaking, she was ready for impregnation. These days she was relying on the old-fashioned diaphragm. Not like the pill. No waiting period required for fertilization.

True, in her own mind, a female single parent alone might not be in the ideal state for child rearing. But surely she had the capacity to provide enough love and caring to satisfy and nurture a child. Was it pure selfishness on her part? She had grown to understand the motives of many of her black single female colleagues who had deliberately had their children. Few had regrets. Their reasons were arguably somewhat simple, shortsighted and naïve. Now we have someone to love and to love us, they told her. It was their universal cry and it had touched her finally. Selfishness aside, a woman’s natural role was to bear children, to give life. Wasn’t it?

Emotionally, she had not found a suitable mate. Nor would she compromise on that issue. Perhaps, she admitted, she was hung up on her father, was searching for replication. Or maybe she simply had lousy luck in the matter of long term relationships. Of course, it was partially her own fault. Perhaps she was too selective, too overly analytical, too independent.

She had determined that the distribution system involved in mating was definitely faulty, especially in the role she played professionally. It wasn’t likely that you could meet the man of your dreams in the Washington Metropolitan Police Department.

Perhaps she was too much of a threat, too strong-willed and painfully frank and honest to be a good wife, but that didn’t disqualify her from being a good mother. What she wanted also was a good child, good genetically, physically and mentally. No guarantees on that, but she could not, after all, have just anyone’s child. Besides, an attractive specimen had a leg up under any circumstances. The rest, like loving and sharing and decency and kindness, all qualities that she wanted her child to have, were environmental. Up to her. Was she ready?

She contemplated a strategy that might leave the decision partially in the hands of fate. They were going off to Harper’s Ferry tomorrow, had booked a quaint room with a canopied bed in a charming little inn. If the deed was to be done, she had decided that it must be done away from her parents’ house, away from the constriction of a place that still echoed with her mother’s prohibitions. She had gotten over the screwing part, but conception was really heavy duty, another matter entirely.

Despite the fact that she had rationalized the guilt part in terms of her mother, she had not quite jumped the hurdle of the principal deceit. Not telling Greg.

One thing was certain. He would never consent to it. He had children to whom he was devoted and he had often hinted, despite his love for them, that their existence greatly complicated any easy exit from his disastrous marriage. Nor would he react kindly to any confession of conception. That situation was just too painful to contemplate.

And telling him after the fact of birth would greatly compromise her independence and disturb the child’s life. It wouldn’t do wonders for Greg either. He would be appalled, probably think it was all a ploy to entrap him. She was certain, based on his own testimony in other contexts, that he could be very, very nasty if he thought of himself as attacked, beleaguered or double crossed. He admitted possession of a singular killer instinct.

As for loving him in the truly traditional romantic sense, she doubted that this involvement with him was the so-called real thing. Or, perhaps, she deliberately resisted such vulnerability. One or the other. It was quite possible that he loved her, at least to the limits of his capability, but his agenda did not include another marriage, or was he planning any imminent divorce from his present spouse. The fact was that she could not imagine him as her husband. He was too shrewd, his mind, although bright, too devious, his value system, to put it kindly, too flawed.

Perhaps she was deliberately painting his moral life in darker colors than they deserved. Most power driven Washington lawyers represented dubious causes and clients if the price was right. Moral compunctions rarely interfered with fees. As registered foreign agents and lobbyists, propriety, patriotism, loyalty and honor were hardly obstacles to yeoman service. They were simply hired guns on sale to the highest bidders.

And Greg served some beauts, killer countries like Libya and Iraq, cults like the Moonies and Hare Krishna, the tobacco lobby, certain well-publicized industrial polluters. He didn’t lose a mini-second of sleep about it. Not Greg Taylor, master of justification, rationalization, obfuscation and persuasion. No argument was immune to his convoluted little homilies of logic. A lawyer is a conduit. He merely advocates. Money is neutral. Nothing was hidden. Agents are regulated and policed. Representing the devil incarnate was perfectly acceptable Washington conduct for a lawyer. Somebody had to represent the bad guys. The Constitution says so.

But despite all his obvious character flaws, she was enormously attracted to him physically. In that department they were explosively compatible. All right, she admitted, sometimes his smug contentiousness was trying, but there were glorious compensations. To keep the peace, they had both learned the value of surrender on issues that separated them.

Not that she was any Joan of Arc. But in her musings, maybe she had to accept him as unthinkable husband material to further explain the impending deed of using him to impregnate herself.

She had even worked out a tentative compromise for her conscience. One day she would tell him. Perhaps when the child was ready for college. Or later. She would work that out. As for the child’s own inquiries as to the identity of his or her daddy, she would come up with a plausible explanation, one that, she hoped, would not backfire emotionally. But all that was getting ahead of oneself. Wasn’t it?

Greg stirred beside her, stretched in his sleep and turned on his back, showing his handsome face, years younger in repose. Yes, we would make a helluva pretty baby, Mommy, that I could guarantee. She lifted the comforter again. Take a gander at that, Mommy. Does God’s look like that? If he does, then I promise you I will run, not walk, back to the bosom of the Church. She could not restrain a giggle.

Lightly, she touched his chest, put her palm flat between his pectoral muscles, then lightly traced a single finger downward, lingering briefly at his navel, then following the hair trail south. Is that something, Mommy? See how it obeys nature’s commands, rises to glory. Dear God, a thousand hosannas for the joy of this life. She felt suddenly an enormous sense of power and it felt, well, delicious.

The telephone’s ring put a quick damper on her mood and she dropped the comforter. Pity, she thought. Curtain going down on joy. Quickly she transformed herself, stepped over the line into her other life.

"Yo," she said.

"Got one with your name on it, FitzGerald," the Eggplant said, his voice still hoarse with sleep. Luther Greene, Big Bad Black Rabbi of Homicide, head of the division. He had the knack, like those who can divine water in the ground, for absolute accuracy in finding the perfect inappropriate moment. "Eggplant" was a sobriquet with obscure origins, but somehow it had stuck, implying pigheadedness, which was accurate, and brainlessness, which was not. But it worked for her and her colleagues at MPD as a vent for frustration as well as something that signified on occasion, familial affection.

"You can’t, chief," she whined. He had promised her three unassailable days off. It would have given her a five day weekend. And Greg had rearranged his busy schedule to oblige. Was this to be God’s sign, her mother’s message to cease and desist? She tucked such a thought back in the guilt box of her psyche and closed the lid. My life, Mommy, she berated the specter. Such interdiction was hardly fate intervening. It was a common malady in the cop business.

"I feel bad about it FitzGerald. I really do," the Eggplant said, not without sarcasm as he cleared his throat.

"Bullshit," she said, the accent very heavy on the last syllable. It was, she knew, to be taken as a comment of deep disapproval, not a lack of respect. Actually, Luther Greene, was a man beleaguered and bedeviled. But he had developed a strategy to cope with harassment. As a captain of homicide, he wore a mask portraying him as a ruthless, bureaucratic, by-the-book son of a bitch. But when he took it off, which was rarely, he showed a subtle and singular view of human behavior, revealing the cynicism and optimism at war inside of him. Also the qualities that gave him the uncanny sixth sense of a persuasive leader. He knew what buttons to press to motivate his people, and collaterally get the best out of them.

She felt Greg stir beside her.

"Tell him to fuck off," he said. Apparently, he had gotten the full import of the conversation from Fiona’s reactions.

"Wait’ll you hear, FitzGerald," the Eggplant said.

"It’s sadistic," Fiona snapped, although she knew that there was no reprieve. The Eggplant rarely backtracked.

"One of your tribe, a congresswoman. Name of Frances McGuire." He waited for her reaction.

"Talk about stereotyping people," she sighed, knowing, of course, what he meant. A woman, Irish and, more to the point, a politician. "My father was a senator, remember." It struck her as facetious. But it probably reinforced his perspective that Frances McGuire was, indeed, a member of Fiona’s tribe.

"Tell the bastard to wait till Monday for chrissakes," Greg said. He had raised himself on one elbow and started twirling the nipple of her left breast. She let him for a moment, then slapped his hand away.

"Murder?"

Harper’s Ferry, once such a compelling idea, faded quickly. She would have to pick another time to do the deed.

"That or suicide. We’re not sure. Blake and Harris are on the scene. I’m leaving in a minute. It’s your meat and I want you on it, FitzGerald. You call Cates and shake your ass."

"Where?"

"4000 Mass. Avenue. Apart. 4J."

She was already off the bed, standing naked in the faint morning chill, locked into the idea, no longer the reluctant dragon. A prominent congresswoman. Nothing routine about this one.

"Christ, Fiona. This is not just an intrusion on your time. What about me? And our weekend?" She put a hand over the mouthpiece and offered a hurried explanation.

"I’m sorry as hell, Greg. We’ve got a dead congressman." She paused and smiled to herself. "Woman," she added. "Congresswoman." Normally, she rebuked fellow cops who made the error, less on principle than to razz their machismo. "Feeemale, sans Johnson, bro," she would tease. She looked at the pouting Greg and shrugged apologetically.

"Give the stud a raincheck, FitzGerald," the Eggplant quipped. "And move it. We want to get there before any press party."

He hung up. What he meant, of course, was that he was going precisely because there was bound to be a press party. The Eggplant, ever the thespian, loved the role. Probably dressed to the ears in his brown striped Sunday suit, shoes spit-shined, white shirt crisp, shiny gold tie clip pulling together a high collar over a red silk tie. Hambone, she smirked.

"Only good legislators are the dead ones," Greg said moodily.

She wasn’t sure whether this remark was meant to be cranky dark humor generated by pique or serious political comment. She decided on the former.

"That’s a sickee, Greg."

"I was speaking figuratively," he muttered. "Who was the lucky lady?"

"Frances McGuire."

His reaction surprised her.

"Frankie McGuire," Greg mulled, shaking his head. His face contorted into a sardonic smile which puzzled her. "So the bitch bought it."

"You knew her?"

He seemed to be smirking. His reaction was baffling.

"Only in passing, which was more than enough." She caught the hate in his voice. "Holy Roller, papist variety."

"My, the man is cryptic this morning," she said. "You’re talking gibberish."

"Right-to-Lifer, baby." He reached out and patted her on the belly. "If it was up to them, you don’t own this anymore. Plant the seed of mankind in there and you’re just a meat wagon. Only you’re not allowed to drive it yourself until the goods are delivered."

"What the hell are you talking about, Greg?"

"The corpse. Lady Goody-Good-Good. Abortion, Fi." His vehemence shocked her, a real rant.

"That’s politics. Not a motive," Fiona said.

"That was my wife Amy’s big number. The Right-to-Life. High sounding right? Moralistic. Self-righteous. God’s work. Save the child. I lived it all. Frankie was a combat general. Amy, a battalion commander."

Normally, Greg kept his enmity toward his wife repressed most of the time. But occasionally the vitriol would spill over and seep out of him like stagnating pus.

"Ticks me off," he sighed. He made a motion as if he were symbolically brushing away the idea of it.

"I’d never have known," Fiona said, ruffling his hair, trying placation.

"Stay away from causes," he said, grabbing her fingers, kissing them, making an effort to recover their sexy loving mood.

"This is Washington, land of the cause of the month," she said, hoping the way she said it would lighten his mood. He continued to kiss her fingers, but she could see his thoughts were drifting and he looked pained and vulnerable.

"Fanaticism is corrosive, Fi. It eats away at a person. I lived with it. A bitch, I tell you, a real downer. I saw how it changed Amy. Forced vindictive reactions in me." He shook his head. "After awhile even the pros and cons of the issue become obscured by the obsession." Looking up at her, he reached out and embraced her around the waist with both arms. She could feel the sprouts of his morning beard against her flesh as she caressed his face.

"I get low marks on organized causes," Fiona said. "And in my business I have only one cause."

"What’s that?"

"The truth. That’s as lofty as I get."

She pecked him on the cheek and maneuvered herself out of his embrace. Then she moved with a saucy swing of her hips into the bathroom. Jumping into the shower, she turned on the spigots, getting under the spray before the temperature was comfortable.

"Ouch."

Greg was beside her under the shower just as she got the taps right.

"Somebody really murder her?" he asked.

The Eggplant had said he wasn’t sure, that it could be suicide. But murder meant bigger grosses publicity-wise and greater glory. For her as well. A suicide was a one-shot.

"Apparently there’s some doubt about it," Fiona replied, lathering the soap bar. "That’s my job, Greg. Get at the skinny."

She got a good lather going and began spreading it over her arms. He grew suddenly reflective.

"Funny if they actually got to her, rubbed her out. What gorgeous irony." She stopped soaping and looked at him directly. "Some pro-choicer who got carried away. Show the world there’s a real war going on." He stuck his head into the shower stream. "Which side are you on?"

"The side of justice," she said with mock pomposity. On that issue, her defense mechanism was to straddle the political issue. Aborting her own child would be a trauma. Perhaps it is for all women. Beyond that, she refused to be judgmental.

He took the soap from her and started to lather her up. She let him. It felt too good.

"Now that’s a cause I can really get into," she murmured, playfully biting an earlobe. He was soaping her in all the right places. She took the bar from him and began to lather him where it counted.

"At least I know where you stand," she murmured.

"And I demand to be heard," he whispered placing his tight athletic body where it would do the most good.

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