52

Washington DC, like any cosmopolitan city, has wife restaurants and mistress restaurants. If you’re with your spouse, your partner for life, your better half, your ball and chain, the mother of your children, and you have a hankering for steak, then you go to Morton’s, subdued and swanky at the corner of Connecticut and K, right in the center of lobbyland. It’s wonderful, it’s tasteful, it’s perfect, it’s dull. If, however, you’re with your “mentee,” your walking, talking, quivering fountain of youth, your single-evening Viagra-consumption record, your “niece,” your lambchop, and the next Mrs. Whoeveryouare, then it’s off to the Palm, on Nineteenth, for your slab of protein.

The Palm has swagger, bravado, a New York gangster dive ambience. The waiters all look like they made their bones in Newark in ’67, with those walnutty faces, thick pomades of rich Mediterranean hair, and little khaki waiter’s coats, with all kinds of odd bric-a-brac pinned across the belly. The place is dark and, even in the decreed absence of cigarettes and cigars, still feels smoky; the walls are festooned with somebody’s dim idea of celebrity caricature (unrecognizable); the potatoes look like they could be called the myocardial infarction facilitation kit-pancakes fried in diesel grease, possibly?-and the meat is stark, primordial, and bleeding.

Thus on his one mistress dinner night of the month (his wife of thirty-five years and mother of his four children was so understanding), Bill Fedders sat with current flame Jessica Delph, in his usual booth on the left side of the dim room, sipping a powerful vodka martini while admiring the young woman’s aquiline features, drawn-back blond hair, and hooded eyes. God, she was beautiful! Too bad he was going to dump her soon.

“Jessie, when I look at you, I wonder why you haven’t given your heart away to some twenty-five-year-old linebacker.”

“Possibly it’s because all the linebackers in this town are Redskins, that is, losers,” she said, with a smile that concealed the fact that she had in fact given her heart away-and some other goodies, as well-to a thirty-one-year-old stockbroker, because she didn’t want to have that conversation until Bill had gotten her, as promised early in the relationship, a job with a really fine lobbying shop.

“I love a gal who knows that she’s as beautiful as she is smart and as smart as she is beautiful,” he said. It was a treasured line, but he didn’t think he’d used it on this one, and besides it didn’t matter, because he knew about the stockbroker.

“So are we celebrating something, Bill?” she asked.

“Actually, we’re in mourning.”

“Ohhh, death. I hate it when that happens.”

“It’s not death, just massive frontal trauma, a coma, the patient in the oxygen tent out like a light, but I think it’ll come out of it.”

“It?”

“Not a person, a campaign. My oldest and dearest client had me running a campaign to hurry a certain federal policy toward implementation.”

“Details boring or classified?”

“Details unnecessary. Long story shortened: I had a young guy on the team, he seemed so promising, and I let him develop something on his own and it proved to be a hoax. A fraud. He was caught. Disaster.”

“You let him go?”

“He wasn’t really in my employ. I was helping him in his career. Anyhow, he’s been placed on probation, as I understand it, and now he’s covering New Jersey sewer commissions.”

“Bummer.”

“Indeed. I do think we’ll be okay. It’s just that Monday I have to make a phone call I’m not looking forward to. But it’ll work out, I’m sure, just not quite as quickly as we had hoped. But that’s why I’m a little down for now.”

“Poor guy,” she said, reaching across the table to touch his hand. “Jessie will try to make you feel better.”

“Excellent. Now let’s order and-”

But a shadow fell across the table.

Bill looked up and was surprised to see Nick Memphis of the FBI. He almost did a double take.

“Nick, I-”

“Bill, imagine running into you here. Gosh, what a surprise.”

Was that mockery in his voice?

“Uh, Jessica, may I present Nick Memphis, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Nick, this is Jessica Delph, a friend of mine.”

Nick bowed.

“Ms. Delph, a pleasure,” he said.

Then he turned to Bill and smilingly said, “Bill, you know, I think it would be a good idea if you gave Ms. Delph carfare and sent her home. I think it’s going to be a long evening.”

Bill swallowed, dammit, and looked for the joke in the agent’s face but saw no humor.

“Ms. Delph, sorry, but I think your evening with Bill here is over.”

“Bill, is anything the matter?”

“Uhhh,” Bill stumbled, at a loss for words for the first time in his life. Then he said, “I don’t know. Is anything the matter, Nick?”

“Well, Bill, that depends on how well you do over the next few minutes as we have our little chat. I’m trying desperately to find out why I shouldn’t touch this button on my pager and stand back as our crack apprehension team-this is five guys who were all tackles or guards at Nebraska-come through that door in full SWAT gear, guns drawn, and throw you to the ground, mace you, slam on the cuffs, and drag you out by your ears, your Allen Edmonds shoes dragging in the sawdust. Imagine how quickly that would get all over town. We don’t want that, do we?”

Bill had no desire to find out if Nick was bluffing.

“Jessie, here’s a twenty, honey. I’ll call tomorrow.”

Quickly, she scurried out, and Nick slipped in.

Bill took a sip of his martini, then another, and ate the olive.

“Am I allowed to order another?”

“Sure.”

“And you’re not drinking, I’m guessing.”

“You got that right.”

Bill gestured Vito Corleone over and sent for another vodka martini.

“Okay, Nick, I’m all yours.”

“I want to know why I shouldn’t arrest you on seven counts of aiding and abetting a felony crime, namely murder, the first-degree kind.”

Bill’s lower jaw not merely hit the table top but fell clean through the floor to the wine cellar beneath. When he got his breath back and his jaw reinserted in its hinges, he spoke with a weak, phlegm-choked voice.

“I-I-”

It was not much of an argument.

“We recovered a 1971 bank camera film of a robbery in Nyackett, Massachusetts. It clearly shows the young Thomas T. Constable shooting and killing two security guards from behind.”

“I-Uh-Are you joking?”

“Not at all. Then we recovered very solid information linking him to four Irish contractors-professional snipers-who murdered Joan Flanders, Jack Strong, Mitzi Reilly, Mitch Greene, and Carl Hitchcock, and I’m betting we can pin the murder of a Chicago cop named Dennis Washington on him too. Tomorrow when we serve warrants, we’ll have a lot more evidence. Now, Bill, here’s where we are. You are either part of the solution or part of the problem. My bet is that you’ll want to get ahead of this thing, because you know if you don’t, it’ll crush you. You’ll do very hard time in a very bad joint.”

“Nick, I knew nothing-”

“Save that for your own lawyer. I don’t have time. Mr. Fedders, either you come with me tonight and start making like a tweety-bird, or you are looking at a grim end to a very pleasant life. Somehow I don’t think Ms. Delph is going to make the long trip to Marion every Sunday to hear your sad stories of gang rape. And maybe Mrs. Fedders won’t either.”

Bill threw down his martini, signaled Vito for another one.

Then he turned to Nick and gave him a solemn, sincere look, rather fatherly, one of his most persuasive tools, and in his rich mahogany voice, he said, “Nick, you’re asking me to turn on a man who’s supported me my whole life. Because of Tom Constable’s belief in me, I wear fine shoes-Aldens, not Allen Edmonds-and suits, am married to a beautiful, understanding woman, have four extraordinary children, well educated and prospering in their careers, and as you can see, I do still get out on the town once in a while, old dog that I am. All because of Tom. I make over five million dollars a year, have a fine estate in Potomac, a beautiful house in Naples, and another on the Eastern Shore, right near Dick Cheney’s. I have horses, Perazzi shotguns; I have a two handicap and am noted as one of the best poker and bridge players in town. Everyone returns my calls. All that because of the generosity, the support, the belief, even the love of Tom Constable, whom you now accuse of horrific crimes. And you say to me, will you betray this man? Will you turn on this man? Will you do harm to this great American?”