Death of a Washington Madame (2 page)

"We've been over that ground before General,"
Fiona sighed.

Indeed they had, ever since Hal Perry had declared his love
and proposed marriage. A widower with two grown sons, he was CEO of Seven
Continents, a high tech conglomerate with offices in thirty countries, which kept
him on a grueling schedule circling the globe. They had met at a party at the
Greek Embassy six months ago. He had taken her home and, after talking until
dawn,it was apparent that there was nowhere for the relationship to go except
to bed, which it had ... explosively.

Since then she had seen him every two months for two or
three days at a time, a paltry budget of private moments to feed their
passionate attraction. She had, of course, agonized over his offer, trying to
be as sensible and coldly analytical as possible.

"I couldn't be a corporate wife, Hal," she told
him, remembering her mother's sacrifice and self-imposed subjugation to the
glory of her father.

"We'd be partners, Fi."

"Not really. It's your show Hal. I just couldn't be a
full-time social director. Not to mention the abandonment of my own career. I
know ... blue collar ... lower class ... harm's way. I've heard it all."

"Not from me, Fi."

That was true.

"I'm sorry, Hal. I'm so used to defending my position,
I do it by rote. Downtown I'm the crazy white Princess, who gets her jollies
slumming with the brothers and the killers. Uptown I'm an eccentric idiot
having fun in the lower depths. You'd think I'd be used to it by now. The fact
is I love my work. I love being part of the thin blue line. Hell, we're holding
back the jungle." She clicked her tongue. "There I go again."

"I'll say only this and you've heard me say it before.
That job's a burnout Fi. You'll get a belly-f of blood and guts. That's not
a put down. It's like combat. It distorts your perspective about the human
race. I was there Fiona. A daily dose will take its toll."

"I'm not ready to quit, Hal. Let's leave it at that.
But that's only one aspect of my refusal."

"We'd be creative. Find a way. That's my expertise,
finding a way to solve any problem."

She knew he was the kind that would never give up. If one
strategy didn't work he would try another. His first wife had died three years
ago of cancer. Pressed by Fiona, he had told her that in his marriage he had
been devoted and ever faithful. He had stressed, too, that although he was away
often, she never complained.

He had married her on his graduation from West Point and
she knew exactly what she was taking on, segueing comfortably from the military
to the similar corporate life without a blip in their marriage.

"Let's leave it like this, Hal," Fiona had
decided, knowing the pressure would not go away. "For the moment, think of
me as your faithful mistress." She had been that, discarding all the other
men in her life.

"I'm too old fashioned for that," he had
contended, although he had not rejected the idea outright. She wondered how
long the arrangement would be acceptable to him and steeled her for the
inevitable moment when he would declare the relationship too painful to endure.

She headed the car into Page Aviation where his Gulfstream
and retinue of staff and colleagues waited. She parked the car and he leaned
over and embraced her, kissing her deeply.

"That's a lover's kiss," Fiona said when they had
disengaged, "not a husbands."

"You're the light of my life, Fi," he said.

"I try harder," she said, feeling the welling
begin, the genuine physical pain of parting. She kissed him again. He opened
the car door.

"And remember. You have my central number ... if you
ever need to reach me anytime, anyplace."

"I need you always," she said.

"So you say. In the meantime, go get the bad
guys," he said blowing her a last kiss. Turning, he strode toward the
building entrance, every inch the General.

"Am I mad?" she asked herself, blinking away the
tears and heading the car back to the city.

COM: ENDEXCERPT

"Yes you are mad," Gail said later, when Fiona
had broached the question as they sipped mugs of Sherry's strong coffee.
Sherry's was the broken down greasy spoon that served as their favorite cop
hangout.

"That's not the answer I was fishing for," Fiona
sighed.

"When it comes to men, I'm the wrong person to
ask," Gail said, her coppery skin glowing in the morning sunlight that
filtered in through Sherry's battered blinds. "I'm not as mate prone as
you, Fiona."

"Must I be reminded of this flaw in your nature,
Gail," Fiona mocked good-naturedly. Their partnership had approached a
level of emotional bonding that transcended even the most violent disagreements
between these two independent-minded females pasted together in an experiment
that was considered crackpot by most of their colleagues in the Homicide
division and above.

The chief, the hassled Captain Luther Greene, the revered
Eggplant, had seized upon the notion of "gendering." He had actually
come up with the word, meaning that females were more likely to solve crimes
against females than representatives of the other gender.

Fiona and Gail were the guinea pigs, or "guinea
girls" as they liked to call themselves out of earshot of the Eggplant,
who, they both knew, was courting disaster by this championing of reverse
politically correct activity .

"It's not a flaw. It's an act of will," Gail
countered. "I'm self-contained. I do not need the emotional crutch of a
permanent mate. I am not needy in that regard. You are."

They had been over this ground before. In a rare moment of
letting her guard down, Gail had revealed that she had been the victim of a
brutal rape at the age of nine by a man who had also strangled her younger
sister. The trauma had naturally taken it's toll, considerably distorting her
perspective of the male gender and greatly inhibiting her intimate relationship
with that sex, although she had hinted at one or two abortive attempts at
normality.

But despite her deliberate attempt at sexual neutrality,
Gail was thwarted in this by an astonishing female physicality. She was
spectacular, six four shoeless, a monumental female figure, large high breasts,
flat stomach, perfectly proportioned buttocks, well turned legs, a body
sculpted out of dark Montana stone.

Her hair was cut short in an Afro cap. She wore pendant
earrings swinging from small well shaped ears and looked out on the world
through light brown yellow-flecked eyes and smiled at it with perfect white
teeth.

Her appearance belied her crippled sexual emotions and,
despite her generally standoffish attitude, men continued to make a grand
attempt at contact. She was a living male challenge, knew it and had become
adept at defensive maneuvers to keep them at bay.

If there were lesbian tendencies, Fiona had not detected
them although, once her wall of cold steel armor had been penetrated, Gail
revealed a loving, confiding nature expressed through occasional affectionate
hugs and hand holding, gestures equally common to the most innocent female
gender bonding.

The Eggplant had been shrewd in his pairing. There was a
commonality of class between Fiona and Gail. The daughter of a prominent black
surgeon and a surgical nurse who lived in a big colonial style house on the
legendary "gold coast" of upper Sixteenth Street near Rock Creek Park, Gail had come out in the debutante cotillion which was a feature of black
society in Washington for more than a hundred years. The event was one of the
shining diadems of the most class conscious and least known circumscribed
social circle in America.

Gail's father had overcompensated after the loss of his
youngest daughter and the premature death of Gail's mother. She had escaped his
cloying affection by entering the Los Angeles police force, much to his chagrin
and disappointment.

There, she had distinguished herself in the LAPD Homicide
division until transferring to Washington MPD to be near her father in his last
days. Unlike Fiona, who kept the family house, she immediately sold her
family's plush homestead and bought a condominium on Connecticut Avenue with
her ample inheritance.

"Hal predicted burn-out in this job," Fiona
pointed out. "Clearly implying that I should get out before this happens
and marry him."

"Good advice."

"He could be right about burn-out. He compared it to
combat."

"Smart man," Gail sighed.

"You'd lose a good partner," Fiona said.

An odd expression suddenly crossed Gail's face, a hesitancy
not quite expected.

"Might be academic," Gail muttered.

It was an eventuality that Fiona had put in the back of her
mind which her three days off had buried further. The fact was that the Chief's
gender idea was not panning out to the satisfaction of the powers that be.

There had been hopeful fanfare at first and over the Eggplant's
objections it had become a public relations ploy, raising expectations that fed
the fires of the gender wars that were fought in the department just beneath
the surface of accommodation and tolerance. The race war, on the other hand,
still raged openly, although every effort was being made to find neutrality,
the department now having reached a 75% black majority.

In the last few weeks there had been four homicides with
female victims, two drive-bys where stray shots had killed a six year old girl
and a mother of three, both still on the open and unsolved list. Without
witnesses such cases were almost impossible to solve and most people were too
frightened or intimidated to come forward.

Then there was a murder where the badly decomposed body of
a female had been found in a wooded area. The body had been identified as a
missing person, the daughter of a prominent lawyer. Unfortunately, the
condition of the body and the time frame were inhibiting factors in finding the
perpetrator who was probably long gone from the area.

The problem was that all three were grist for the media
mill and had been pumped up in the newspapers and television to high profile
cases in which the gender matter of the detective partnership had been brought
up.

There had also been a drug related killing of a woman crack
head that had a gang component, another difficult case due to lack of
witnesses.

"Coming to a head is it?" Fiona asked.

"There are rumblings, I'm afraid."

"We're not magicians," Fiona said angrily.

"Neither is he," Gail said. "He's in the
middle of a four pronged attack. It's a no-winner. First there are the swinging
dicks that would love to see homicide picked clean of all females. Then there
are those, mostly females, who think this gender idea was a deliberate set-up
on his part to discredit the female of the detective species. The third prong
is those competing with him to be the next top dog, who would donate a testicle
just to see him humiliated and cut from the pack of wannabees."

"And the fourth prong?"

"Our enemies in the class war, who would like to see
the white Princess and the uppity girl nigger cut down a peg or three."

"Poor bastard," Fiona said, her earlier angst
about her love life put on a back burner.

"There's more, but we don't have all morning."

At that moment, Gail's radio sputtered. It was the
Eggplant.

"Yes, sir," Gail said, shooting a glance at
Fiona. "Right over."

He was in his office waiting for them, looking as harassed
as ever, biting into an unlit panatela, his ashtray littered with unsmoked moist
tobacco remnants. In the last few months they had pushed back some walls and
expanded his office, slapping on a fresh coat of paint, which he had promptly
covered with his awards and pictures of himself with various minor celebrities.

On his desk were photographs of his wife, the bane of his
existence, and his daughter, the apple of his eye, who was studying computer
science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

They had also installed a round conference table and padded
metal chairs, a marked difference from the mismatched wooden monstrosities that
had graced his old office. Fiona disliked the formality of the Eggplant's new
office, especially the clean windows which looked out at the view of the
park-like promenade that linked the indifferent Police Department building with
the more architectural pleasing Federal courthouse.

The redecorating had also seemed to change the calibration
of attitude. Even the Eggplant seemed more subdued and formal, less prone to
tantrums and outbursts, more sly and subtle.

"Enjoy your leave Sgt. FitzGerald?" the Eggplant
said as they seated themselves around the conference table. Fiona detected the
usual note of sarcasm, as if any time-off was a desertion. Perhaps it was her
imagination, but he seemed grayer, more wrinkled than he was only three days
ago.

"Very much, Chief," Fiona said pleasantly.

"I'm glad," he said with a frown that belied his
words.

He smashed out his unlit panatela and folded his dark
gnarled hands on the table, always a bad sign.

"We are in a long dark tunnel and we cannot see the
light, ladies." Was the term "ladies" meant to insult? It was,
of course, a blatant violation of the revised social compact of the department,
but having seen the Eggplant's soft center, Fiona could never characterize such
lapses as mean-spirited or deliberately cruel, merely militantly politically
incorrect.

He paused, his bloodshot eyes peering out over drooping
lids as they panned from one female face to the other. "I think I have
created a monster that cannot be appeased. By establishing a category that
calls attention to gender I have cooked the books. Extracted from the
statistics is a zero closure of female cases of the last few weeks. Zero
closure. Do you know what that means?"

"You can't base the statistics on gender alone,
Chief," Gail protested. "It could also show up as zero closure on
victims who are left-handed, or red haired." She hesitated for a moment
and offered a quick glance at Fiona. "Or white." This, of course, was
the issue beyond fact or logic that permeated the psychic bloodstream of their
world. White and it's opposite.

For Gail, the black debutante Princess, color appeared at
first to be less dominating than gender, except when it came to the subject of
her concept of ethnic superiority and privilege. In her world, or so it seemed,
"elite" was a meritocracy, created by brilliant, resourceful and
enormously clever blacks who had navigated successfully, some for generations,
past the shoals of bigotry and strong tides of prejudice to arrive at the other
side of hate and were, therefore, far more worthy of success and the resultant
social cache than their white counterparts. The contemporary subtext was
Secretary of State Powell and Condileeza Rice, plus hundreds of rising and
risen stars.

They were "better" because it had been
"harder" to become "better." While Gail hadn't quite
expressed herself in that way, Fiona had reconstituted her partner's attitude
into language of her own.

Having not been corrupted by the crumbs that fell from the
abundant table of the welfare state, Gail's sense of superiority, according to
Fiona's initial interpretation, precluded any real identification with the
burgeoning black underclass with whom the only common denominator was burnished
skin tones and ancestors who arrived in the continent through forced
immigration dressed in rags and heavy chains.

Lately, however, Fiona was beginning to see cracks in her
initial assessment. Gale was developing what best can be described as an
"attitude" which hinted that perhaps guilt about her fortunate
upbringing was exposing a more militant ethnic stance.

"These cases have to be thrown in with the whole
homicide spectrum," Gail continued. "Besides, Chief, you know the
odds on finding a drive-by killer, not to mention a crime committed years ago.
It's a bad rap."

"We are dealing here not with logic Prentiss, but with
politics. We are embattled, surrounded, under attack as if we were the cause
not the solution. In this, one of the worse murder venues in the U.S. of A.,
rebuttal is futile. We have three female bodies and no perps. That is not what
most people perceive we do here. Capeesh?"

"Are we being scrapped as a team, Chief?" Fiona
asked.

"The matter is under advisement," the Eggplant
said.

"By whom?"

"Them," the Eggplant said pointing upward in the
midst of unwrapping another panatela and shoving it in his mouth. "In
other words..."

"The enemy," Gail interjected.

"Another unsolved and its bye bye to the girl's
team."

"That's patently unfair," Fiona said, ignoring
yet another grating gender reference. She shot a glance at Gail who shrugged.
What could they say? They were a party to the political incorrectness. Indeed,
more than a party, advocates. The fact was that they liked their partnership
and believed implicitly in its intuitive efficiency despite the current slump
in closures.

"Like life," the Eggplant sighed. Despite his
outward arrogance, his sigh could mysteriously evoke sympathy.

"What about the Harrison case, Chief?" Gail
asked, referring to their first well-trumpeted success.

"In this business there are no yesterdays, only
tomorrows," the Eggplant said, shaking his head "You think I like
telling you this. We are not the masters of our fate. Besides, it was my idea,
remember?"

He stood up and faced the window watching the people
scurrying across the grass of the campus-like complex serene in the glow of the
bright April sunshine, so different from the dirty blurred view of his old
office. But the gesture of dismissal had not changed. It was a clear signal to
retreat.

"Thanks Chief," Fiona said, understanding his
pain. Nevertheless it was obviously a real possibility. His gender idea was on
the block, the axe poised.