Jake told them that he didn’t want a lawyer, but he did want to talk to Novatny privately, and wouldn’t make any other statement. The FBI man went away for a while, then came back and said, “Agent Novatny will be here in three hours. He’s flying straight in from Washington.”
The Madison homicide cops, who arrived ten minutes after the patrolmen, were pissed, though the lead investigator, whose name was Martin Wirth, allowed that Jake probably wasn’t the killer, since he’d reported the crime. “But he knows something about it and I want to know what it is,” Wirth told the FBI man. “This is my town, this is my homicide, and the entire FB fuckin’ I can kiss my ass. This guy’s going nowhere until I say so.”
The FBI man put his sunglasses on, looked at the investigator, and said, “Uh-huh.”
Wirth asked Jake, “Where’d you get that cut on your head?”
“I was mugged, in Washington.”
“Right.”
“I have a copy of the police report in my briefcase,” Jake said.
“You know, these guys are getting away . . .”
Jake said, “Look: Nothing I know can get you to anyone. Everything I know is background. I didn’t see anything you haven’t seen. I don’t know who might have done this.”
“Then how come you won’t make a statement?”
“I can’t tell you why I won’t make a statement, because then you’d know something I’m not sure I should tell you,” Jake said. “Okay?”
“Fuck no.”
“I will make a statement to agent Novatny and then agent Novatny can either tell me to make a statement to you, and I will. Or he’ll tell me not to, for national security reasons, and I won’t,” Jake said. “I’m probably saving your life. If I told you what I know, the FBI might have to come in here and kill all of you.”
“You’re being a wiseass,” Wirth said. “We don’t like wiseasses in Madison.”
“Marty,” the FBI man said, “Madison is the national capital of wiseasses. What are you talking about?”
The police kept Jake sitting outside Green’s office as their crime-scene people came and went; investigators talked to everyone in the building, but nobody had seen any strangers coming or going at the time of the murders. Nobody had heard any shots. The building, it seemed, was more than half empty, and the offices that were occupied were mostly sedentary businesses without much traffic: two bookkeepers, a State Farm agent, an insurance service bureau, the office for a medical waste-disposal service.
In the end, to make the city cops happy, Jake had to go down to the police headquarters and sit in a conference room. He felt as if he should be sitting on a stool, with a pointed hat on his head, facing into a corner. On the other hand, the cops were exceptionally mellow, and gave him coffee, doughnuts, and magazines.
Novatny showed up four hours after Jake called him, Parker trailing behind. Wirth was still working, bared his teeth at Jake when he showed the two Washington FBI men into the conference room, and said, “I’ll be waiting.”
Parker nodded and pulled the door shut.
“What happened?” Novatny asked. He took a seat across a conference table, while Parker braced his butt on a windowsill.
“I was following up a possibility on Bowe,” Jake said. “Just cleaning up. I thought it was thin. Then this. Either it’s not related at all or somebody killed Alan Green to shut him up.”
“Keep talking.”
“Bowe was gay,” Jake said. “He was also dying of brain cancer. That’s why he was full of drugs, for the pain. I think—but I don’t know—that Bowe and a group of his gay friends plotted a way to make his death look like a murder, and to blame Arlo Goodman for it.”
They both stared at him for a moment, then Parker, his forehead wrinkling, asked, “Why?”
“Because they think Goodman is the point man for a fascist political movement—or a populist movement, whatever. Profamily, prochurch, semisocialist, antigay, intolerant, authoritarian. They set up Schmidt for the fall, because he was linked to Goodman. Then, I think, they killed Schmidt. But I don’t know that. That’s just what I think.”
“Green was in on it? I saw the pictures in his office . . .”
“Green was gay, a former lover of Bowe’s. He might have been about to fold up. I mentioned Schmidt to him, how he disappeared. He sorta freaked. I got the feeling that he looked on the whole Bowe-death thing as a complicated political joke. Certainly didn’t think murder was involved . . . Anyway, I came out to talk to Green about it and scared the hell out of him. He said he had to talk to some friends about what to tell me, so I walked down to a bookstore, bought a novel, ate a bagel, and when I came back . . . there they were.”
“Sonofabitch,” Parker said.
“How long have you known this, Jake?” Novatny asked. “That Bowe was gay? That the whole thing might have been a setup? Why in the hell didn’t you tell us?”
“I’ve known Bowe was gay for a couple of days. Madison Bowe told me, asked me not to pass it along if I didn’t have to, but left it to my discretion. She was afraid that it would leak—and it would have—and that would have ended the investigation. It would have become a gay thing. She still believes that her husband was murdered, and that Arlo Goodman was involved. And she had a point.”
“But now . . .”
“Now things have changed,” Jake said. “I didn’t think it was a gay thing. That was too far-fetched and that’s why I didn’t tell you about it. Nobody cares about gay anymore—and Bowe wasn’t even in office. Then I got Madison Bowe’s permission to go to New York and look at Bowe’s apartment. I found an empty pill bottle there—it’s still there—and tracked it back to Bowe’s doctor, who told me about the cancer.”
“And then you thought . . .”
“I thought it was all too much: Nobody can figure out where Bowe went. He was smiling when he disappeared. His body is found in this spectacular way with an arrow pointing straight at Schmidt. Why did Schmidt get rid of every gun in the house, except the one that could convict him of killing Bowe? That was goofy. I started thinking that the whole thing was faked. And I’ll bet you something: I bet if you look at Schmidt, that you’ll find some kind of tie to Arlo Goodman. One that Goodman might not even know about, but that would look suspicious if somebody got tipped off.”
“So it’s all a fraud. The Bowe murder,” Parker said.
“Yes. I started to think it was basically a suicide, and it occurred to me that, if that’s what happened, that his friends had to be involved. People he could trust absolutely—and that suggested it might be this group of gay lovers, people who’d kept the secret all those years. And who had reason to fear Goodman.”
Novatny and Parker looked at each other, then Novatny rubbed his face with his hands and said, “On the way out here, I figured out twenty reasons why you were here and there were dead people, and how it might be related to Bowe. Nothing I thought of was this weird.”
“Is Madison Bowe in on it?” Parker asked.
“No.” Jake shook his head. “She and Lincoln Bowe haven’t been together for years. She’s just been a cover for him. And she’s the one who’s been pushing the investigation. She got me started in this direction. She gave me Green’s name. She gave me the key to her apartment, pointed me at the doctor. I think that Lincoln Bowe deliberately kept her in the dark. Maybe because she wouldn’t have gone along; or maybe to protect her.”
Novatny was skeptical. “You have no idea who the killers might be.”
“Bowe’s gay friends. You could ask around, you’ll turn them up. Madison still thinks that Goodman is involved. She thinks the idea of a bunch of Bowe’s friends getting together to kill him is ludicrous. Your guess is as good as mine.”