Murder on the Potomac (12 page)

“After the horse is gone.”

“Yes. But I didn’t know the barn door was open.”

“The actual letters have been given to the press?”

“Oh, no. The letters are still in the Juris file. My understanding is that someone told a reporter what they contained.”

Small comfort, Smith thought. As angry as he was at the news, he realized there was nothing to be gained by beating up on her. He sighed in resignation. “Okay,” he said, “I appreciate being told this. I’ll pass on the information to Wendell. It’s going to be devastating to him and his family.”

For the first time since walking into the River Inn, Darcy Eikenberg seemed flustered. She started to say something, stopped, then said, “I am sincerely sorry, Mac, that what should have been a pleasant lunch has ended up this way. All I can do is assure you of one
thing. I am as angry and indignant as you are about what has happened. I just hope you’ll transmit that to Mr. Tierney.”

“Sure. I really should be going.” He motioned for the check. Eikenberg grabbed it. “My lunch, my suggestion, my check.”

“Can we do this again? Soon?” she asked outside, extending her hand.

His determination to say, “I don’t think that would be a good idea” turned into, “Perhaps. Thanks for the lunch—and the information.” He shook her hand.

Smith had gone straight from lunch to the Yates Field House at Georgetown University for a mind-clearing workout. He’d been a member for years. Although he had free access to facilities at his university, he preferred to stick with the familiar—at least where a gym was involved. He exercised vigorously for almost two hours, culminating with enough laps in the pool that he thought he might drown from exhaustion.

He returned home at four-thirty after picking up two pieces of swordfish and salad makings for dinner. He called Wendell Tierney and was informed that he was away overnight on business. He pressed for a way to reach Tierney and was given the name and number of the Waldorf Astoria. He left a message with the hotel operator to have Tierney call him as soon as he got it.

Annabel arrived home as he was preparing the swordfish for grilling on a hibachi on their patio. She spent a few minutes at her desk in the bedroom before changing into a sweatsuit and joining him outside. They kissed. “How was your day?” he asked.

“Basically hectic but nonproductive,” she replied. “Yours?”

“I suppose the same could be said for me, although I did manage to get in a good workout this afternoon.”

“Did you follow up with Detective Eikenberg?”

“As a matter of fact, I did. Bad news for Wendell. Someone at MPD leaked the contents of the letters to the press. According to Eikenberg, it’ll be in the papers tomorrow.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “That’s horrible.”

“It certainly is.” The sound of a phone ringing was heard through an open window. “That might be Wendell. I called him in New York. Excuse me.”

“Anything you want me to do?” she asked.

“Nope, but thanks. Everything is under control. More or less.”

The Next Morning

It seemed as though everyone was fighting that Tuesday morning.

Private investigator Anthony Buffolino (“with an
0
,” he told secretaries) had left the house at five that morning with Alicia’s loving words ringing in his ears: “You’ll never change. You are an irresponsible, uncaring, insensitive
moron
!”

The words between Tony and his third wife had broken what had been a relatively long period of calm in their marriage. His two previous matrimonial efforts hadn’t enjoyed such lulls. Two days of truce were like the span between world wars I and II.

It was different with Alicia. At least
he
was different with her than he’d been with his previous wives. Maybe she knew how to handle him better. Maybe not having
kids around the house all the time made the difference. Maybe—maybe he’d gotten older and more mellow. That possibility occasionally crossed his mind, but he would quickly dismiss it. It had to be Alicia. Or the absence of kids.

This unanticipated blowup had erupted at dinner the night before when he announced he was moving into a spare apartment in the Tierney complex until his assignment was completed. “He wants me close and on duty twenty-four hours a day,” he’d tried to explain.

Alicia brought up the obvious. They lived a half hour’s drive from Tierney. Tony tried to convince her that it was not his decision. His—their—good-paying client had requested he be on the premises. “What was I supposed to do, Al, blow him off? You’re on my back about making a buck. So, I’m making big bucks with Tierney, and I figure you can lighten up a little, huh?”

“Lighten up? While you can go out and screw around? You’re a married man, Tony.”

And so it went, right up until he left with his bag packed and his temper tenuously in check. His final words to her were, “I’ll call.”

And her final words were, “Don’t bother. I won’t be here.”

Now, after unpacking in a small, cramped room above Tierney’s garage that contained a single bed, a stall shower in need of a scrubdown, toilet, sink, and a metal cabinet that functioned as a closet, Buffolino came down into the courtyard created by the outbuildings and walked the grounds. After chatting with three guards he’d assigned to the overnight detail—one on disability, one retired, and one working the MPD day shift but needing extra money—he came around back
again and paused next to a small screen porch directly beneath the master bedroom. The first thing he heard was a woman crying. “Please, get hold of yourself,” Wendell Tierney’s voice said. Buffolino stood silently and controlled his breathing.

“You have disgraced this family,” the woman said loudly, her crying partly under control.

“I can’t control what other people do,” Wendell Tierney said. “I did not write those letters. And I am furious that they’ve gotten to the goddamn press. But I can’t control that, Marilyn!”

“But you could have controlled yourself with that woman!” A different female voice. Buffolino tried to place it, decided it belonged to the daughter, Suzanne.

“I suggest you shut your mouth,” Wendell Tierney snapped.

“And maybe if you shut your fly, we wouldn’t be in this embarrassing position,” Suzanne said.

Silence. A door slammed. Buffolino visualized the room upstairs and figured Suzanne had left.

“She’s right,” Marilyn said.

“She’s nothing but a little tramp, and you know it.”

Marilyn’s cruel, strangled laugh. She said, “Speaking of tramps. The least you could have been was discreet. Sleeping with Pauline was one thing. Writing her sophomoric love letters was stupid.”

“I told you I did
not
write any letters. And I did not sleep with Pauline. Christ, Marilyn, this thing is hard enough without you jumping all over me. Can’t you give me the benefit of the doubt?”

Mrs. Tierney’s voice lowered, now barely audible to Buffolino. He cocked his head and cupped one ear. “I have been giving you the benefit of the doubt for years,
Wendell. I have put up with your arrogance and your out-of-control libido. I can’t do it any longer. I
won’t
do it any longer.”

The door slammed again. Ear to the sky, he did not hear Chip Tierney approach the porch. The Tierney son cleared his throat. Buffolino turned, grinning. “Good morning, Chip,” he said. “Looks like … well, it’s going to be a nice day.”

Tierney said nothing.

“Are your folks home?” Buffolino asked.

A sardonic smile crossed Chip’s lips. “I think they are. Excuse me.” He disappeared through the back door.

The sound of tires on gravel caused Buffolino to turn to the driveway. A car parked, and two men who were to relieve the night shift got out. There were supposed to be three. Tony asked where the missing guard was. One of them said, “We swung by to pick him up, but his wife said he wasn’t going to work today.”

Buffolino muttered something under his breath. That was the trouble with taking on security assignments that involved other people. You couldn’t trust them. Even cops. Especially cops.

He went to the front of the house and asked the guard who’d been there all night if he would pull a double shift. He groaned, rubbed his eyes, stood, and stretched. “Time and a half,” Buffolino said.

“Yeah, okay, Tony.”

Buffolino returned to the courtyard and entered the house through the back door. He’d been told he had the run of the house, although he knew that offer came with restrictions. He picked up a telephone and dialed Mac Smith’s number. Smith answered on the first ring.
“Been sitting there waiting for me to call, huh?” Buffolino said.

“No. I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out why they’ve raised the taxes on my house, and reading this morning’s jaundiced article about the letters they found in Pauline Juris’s apartment. Where are you?”

“At the Tierney residence.”

“Any reaction from your client about the letters?”

“A little. A lot.”

“I imagine. Enjoying your new job?”

“Sure. This is a very nice position, and I figure I can’t thank you enough for introducing me to my new client. Only I think it’s overkill. The security system here is better than Fort Knox.”

“Have you told him that?”

“Whatta ya, crazy? Whatta you have planned for today?”

Smith’s conversations with Buffolino were infrequent and usually short in duration. But this morning the private investigator came off like an old friend inviting a buddy on a golf date. “Why do you ask?” Smith asked.

“I thought you might want to take a ride with me.”

“A ride? Where?”

“Up the river. I’ve got all my men in place, so I figured I’d kill a couple hours in the boat. Maybe have lunch up the river at one of the waterfront joints. Restaurants.”

He
is
inviting me on an outing, Smith thought. “As it turns out, Tony, I have nothing to do today except a little shopping for dinner, maybe work out at the gym, maybe—maybe—pick your brain about the Pauline Juris case.”

It was a Buffolino cackle. “So you are Tierney’s attorney.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I heard.”

“Heard what?”

“That you’re back in the saddle.”

“Where the hell did you hear that?”

“All over town, Mac. You know Washington. Anyway, I would be honored to have you aboard. Meet me at Tierney’s house at ten?”

Smith felt like a plate of iron filings being inextricably drawn toward a powerful magnet. He didn’t want to go. Somehow, based upon his upbringing, “goofing off’ in the middle of what was a workday for most people was anathema to him. He often vowed that one day he would go to an afternoon movie but never had. It didn’t matter that he might spend the time napping in his La-Z-Boy recliner, or killing an afternoon thumbing through catalogs and newsletters. For some reason, those activities seemed justified. But a movie in the afternoon? A trip up the Potomac with Anthony Buffolino?

Why not?

Suzanne Tierney stormed from the house and sat in her car for what seemed a long time. She hated her father, but not the car, a Chrysler LeBaron convertible he’d bought her two months ago. He was so controlling, so domineering. How could her mother have put up with it for so many years? His insistence that everyone in the family toe the line and do things his way was bad enough. Now there were the letters to Pauline Juris.

She was glad they’d surfaced. It was about time the
sham was exposed. Everyone knew about her father and Pauline. You’d have to be blind and deaf to miss it. Which no one in the household was. Her mother put up with it and turned the other cheek because she liked the money and the house and the expensive furnishings and the trips to Europe and South America. She’d sold out. How could anyone sell out that way?

She’d implored her mother to leave her father dozens of times. It wasn’t worth it, she’d told her, the humiliation of playing dutiful hostess to his friends and business associates, watching him come home at three and four in the morning without explanation of where he’d been or with whom. In moments of candor her mother would tell her that the family was more important than her individual pain. Crap! She loved her mother but knew the woman was tethered to her husband by money, pure and simple. What a way to live. At least she’d had the gumption to walk away from it. Drive away from it … in the latest new car he’d provided.

She slipped the automatic transmission into Low and deliberately spun the rear tires on the gravel as she left the compound. Next to her on the seat was a large, shapeless, empty canvas bag zippered across the top. She parked at National Airport and barely made the nine o’clock shuttle to New York.

The standard surly cabdriver drove her from LaGuardia to the Saul School of Dramatic Arts on lower Broadway. She tipped small, which prompted a string of obscenities—his best English—from the Arabic driver.

She bounded through a door, took a flight of noisy, graffiti-marred stairs two at a time, and stepped into the main rehearsal room where thirty other aspiring actors and actresses awaited the arrival of the school’s founder
and guru. Suzanne knew many of the young men and women in the room and greeted them, hugged a few, punched a young man in the chest in response to a flippant comment.

And then
he
entered.

Short, face pockmarked, black curly hair hanging in irregular strands from the sides of his head, black eyes glistening behind oversized wire-rimmed glasses, scripts cradled in his arms, Arthur Saul strode past his students and took his Customary seat in the center of the makeshift rehearsal hall.

Standing next to him was his assistant, a tall, younger man with white-bleached hair who wore his homosexuality as a badge and who surveyed the gathered like a shepherd choosing the first sheep for slaughter. He hissed a name: “Suzanne Tierney.”

“I have to be first?” Suzanne said nervously to those around her. She was about to request that someone else be chosen but remembered the last time she’d done that. It had raised Saul’s wrath to an intense level: “Yes,” he’d said, leaping to his feet and closing the gap between them, “tell the director you aren’t ready, my pretty little rich bitch.”