Dead Watch

the bay. You know, the people who buy his products. They’re probably not what you’d call gay-centric.”
    “Probably not,” Jake agreed.
    They’d turned two corners, and now walked across a street, Jake’s street, but went ahead, down another block. Nice walking in the night, humid, cooling, quiet.
    “What do you want me to do?” Jake asked.
    “Talk to him, talk to Howard. Not as a policeman, but as somebody who knows what the FBI knows . . . and who also knows about this. See if there’s anything.”
    “I can talk to him. But if anything serious comes out of it, I’d have to tell the FBI.”
    “Of course—if it looks like there’s reason to believe that Howard had something to do with it. But he didn’t. He wouldn’t. He and Linc really were like brothers. He’s the last person in the world who’d hurt Linc.”
    “That makes me suspicious. If somebody told Miss Marple that so-and-so couldn’t possibly have done it . . .”
    “You’d know who the killer was. I’m not Miss Marple, and Howard didn’t kill Linc.”

    Twenty yards in silence; he could smell her, the scent of flowers, with some spice. Chanel, maybe? Had she put it on just before she came over? He pushed the question away and instead asked, “When did you last see Lincoln?”
    “Two weeks before he disappeared. Sometimes I saw him every couple of days, sometimes I didn’t see him for weeks at a time. Besides the farm, and the town house here, we have an apartment in Manhattan and a house in Santa Fe,” she said. “He was always running around. He missed being in the Senate. He missed it desperately. That’s why he hates Goodman, and hates this administration, because he feels that they assassinated him. Though, the last couple of weeks before he disappeared, he finally seemed as if he was a little happier. I don’t know if something was going on, but it was as though he’d turned a corner.”
    “Huh.”
    They walked along for a while without talking, turning a corner and another one, finally ending back up at Jake’s house. They walked down the alley to the backyard, and at her car, she said, “I’ve got to go. But let me ask you one more thing. Or two things. Personal things, if you don’t mind. I talked to Johnnie Black about you . . .”
    “Remember, he’s on the other side. An evil Republican.”
    “Like me,” she said. He could see her upturned face in the light from his back window. “He said you were in Afghanistan. He said that’s where you got your disability. Is that right?”
    “I was in the special forces for a few years,” Jake said. “What’s the second thing?”
    “He said you were married to Nikki Lange.”
    “Yes,” he said.
    “The Queen of Push.”
    “I try not to think about it. You know her?”
    “I know her. We overlapped a year on the Smithsonian board. I heard a comment about sex and violence.” She sounded amused, peered at him in the dark. “That her husband provided the sex and she provided the violence.”
    He tipped his head back and laughed. “I heard the same comment. It’s generally accurate. Looking back, I would have preferred an Afghani prison.”
    “How could you have done that? Married her?”
    “Well, she’s an attractive woman,” Jake said.
    “Big tits, small ass . . .”
    “Come on, be nice.” Jake said. “Anyway, our politics are generally the same, and like you and Lincoln, we got along pretty well in bed. I just didn’t understand that she was the queen and I was the equerry.”
    “The what?”
    “The equerry,” he said.
    “My, you have a large vocabulary.”
    “You ought to check out my conjunctions.”
    “Some other time, maybe,” she said. “Do you ride? Johnnie said something about a ranch.”
    “I probably rode every day of my life from the time I was three until I was fourteen. Until my grandpa died and the ranch got sold. I’ve still got friends out there, I go out and ride when I can.”
    “You’ll have to come out to my farm sometime,” she said. “Of course, we ride the right way.”
    “We don’t have that luxury. Our horses work for a living.”
    She laughed quickly, quietly, popped open her car door, and looked at him across the window. “Stay in touch with me. Talk to Howard. Help me.”
    “Mrs. Bowe, I work for Bill Danzig. I’ll help you if I can, but my loyalty runs to Bill. And the president.”
    She nodded: “Then help me if you can.”

    She got in the car, backed carefully out of the drive. He