“I know, I know.” Rosenquist tried a placating smile, but his voice was a trembling whine.
“This is the same kind of deal, when you get right down to it,” Jake said. He said, “If you move, I’m going to beat the shit out of you.”
“Listen . . .”
Jake flipped open the gun’s cylinder, shucked the shells into his left hand, and Rosenquist shut up, his eyes big as he watched. Jake picked out the empty shell, with the firing pin impression on the primer. Held it up so Rosenquist could see it, slipped it back into the cylinder, snapped the cylinder shut.
“Now,” he said. He spun the cylinder.
“Gimme a break,” Rosenquist said. “You’re not going to do that.”
Jake pointed the pistol at Rosenquist’s head and pulled the trigger. It snapped, nothing happened. Rosenquist jumped, his mouth open, his eyes narrowing in horror: “You pulled the trigger. You pulled the frigging trigger.”
Jake spun the cylinder: “Yeah, but it was five-to-one against. Against it blowing your brains out. Though maybe not. I can never do the math on these things.” The quarter slipped, and he stopped to shove it back in place with his tongue. Drooled a bit, and wiped his lips with his hand; saw Rosenquist pick up on the drool. “It’s supposed to be five-to-one every time, right? But if you do it enough, it’s gonna go off eventually, right? How many times on average? You’re a doctor, you should have the math. Is it five times to fifty-fifty? Or is it two and a half times to fifty-fifty? I could never figure that out.”
He pointed the gun at Rosenquist’s head again and the doctor’s hands came up as if to block the bullet, and he turned his face away and blurted, “He had cancer.”
“Cancer.” Jake looked at him over the barrel. “Where, cancer?”
“Brain. A tumor.”
“How bad?” Jake asked.
“Untreatable.”
“How long did he have it when he disappeared?”
“He’d had it for probably a year, but we’d only known about it for a few weeks. Growing like crazy. Nothing to do about it. When he went, he was already showing it. He was losing function, physical and mental. He had some deep pain. We could treat that for a while, but not for long.”
“Was he planning to suicide?”
“I think so. I don’t know. I don’t know what happened with this . . . beheading. I don’t know. He told me to keep my mouth shut. He was my friend.”
Jake stepped back, flipped the cylinder out again, reloaded the gun.
“You’re going to kill me?”
“I don’t have to,” Jake said. “If you say anything about any of this, it’ll all come out. Prison’s not the best place for a fat soft gay guy. You’d have to deal with it for a long time.”
“I can’t believe Madison had anything to do with this,” Rosenquist said, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
“Jesus Christ.” Jake laughed, his best dirty laugh, shook his head, drooled again, wiped his lips. “You’re just so goddamned dumb, fat man. This is way past Madison Bowe. You don’t know what you’ve done with this little game. You don’t know what you’ve stepped into. The FBI’s in it, the CIA, God only knows what the security people are doing. I know the Watchmen are working it and there’re some guys working for Goodman you wouldn’t want to meet. They’ll cut your fuckin’ legs off with a chain saw. Madison Bowe? You fuckin’ dummy.”
“If you’re not with Madison . . .” Rosenquist was confused. “Who are you with?”
“Best not to know,” Jake said. He smiled the crooked coin-holding smile. “It’s one of those deals where I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
Old joke; Rosenquist recognized it, at the same time he seemed to buy it. Jake pushed on: “So. Mouth shut, ass down. Maybe you’ll live through it—though I don’t know what the other side’s thinking. Wouldn’t destroy any records, but you might put them someplace where your lawyer can get them if he needs them. They’re about the only chip you’ve got in this game.”
And he was out of there.
On the street, clear of the building, walking fast, he called Madison. “I think I should come and see you,” he said.
“Come on,” she said.
Then he started to laugh. If his grandmother had heard him up there, using the language, she would have washed his mouth out with soap.
So he laughed, and the people on the sidewalk spread carefully around him; a man, alone, laughing aloud on a New York street, in the dark. Not necessarily a threat, but it pays to be careful.
12
On the way back in the plane, Jake tried to work through what he knew: that Lincoln Bowe had been dying, and that Bowe had known about a scandal, a package, that would unseat the vice president of the United States, and, if delivered at the right time, probably the president as well.
They did not fit together. He kept trying to find a way, and not until they were coming into National, the Washington Monument glowing white out the right-side window, did one answer occur to him.
He resisted the idea. Struggled again to find a logic that would put all the pieces together—but Occam’s razor kept jumping up at him: the simplest answer is probably the right one.
And the simplest answer was very simple indeed: they weren’t related at all.
Jake got out of the cab at Madison’s a little after midnight. The front-porch light was burning, and Madison opened the door as he climbed the stairs.
“What happened?” she asked. “Come in . . . You look exhausted.”
“I’m fairly well kicked,” Jake admitted. “The days are getting long.”
They drifted toward the front room. “Tell me,” she said.
“I’ll tell you, but you can’t ever admit knowing, all right? It could put you in legal jeopardy. If you have to perjure yourself, and say you didn’t know, that’s what you do,” Jake said.
“What happened?”
“Rosenquist didn’t want to talk. I faked a Russian roulette thing, using a pistol of your husband’s. I pointed it at Rosenquist’s head and pulled the trigger. That’s a felony, aggravated assault. But he started talking. I hinted that I was from some political group, maybe even an intelligence organization. I told him I didn’t know you.”
“Jeez, Jake.” She was standing close to him, and put her hand on his elbow.
“We had to know,” Jake said. “Here’s the thing: he told me that your husband had brain cancer. He was terminal. Rosenquist said there was no chance he’d make it. When he died, he was already showing functional problems, both physically and mentally. That explains the press reports that he’d been drunk in public. That he seemed to be on the edge of control . . . He was medicated. I think he killed himself—had himself killed—and tried to hang it on Goodman.”
Her hands had gone to her cheeks. “My God. But . . . his head?”
“He might not have known the details, might not have worked through the logic of it. On the other hand, maybe he did. They couldn’t leave the head. They had to know that it would be destroyed, completely, or an autopsy would have shown the tumor. Best way to get rid of it would be . . . to get rid of it.”
“That’s unbelievable.” She was pale as a ghost.
“You don’t believe it?”
“No, I sort of do—but I can’t see anybody planning that. It’s too cold.”