Dead Watch

out into the hallway.
    An agent from the Madison FBI office arrived one minute ahead of the Madison cops.

14 

    The FBI man took a look and backed away, pointed a finger at Jake and said, “Wait.”
    The first cops walked in and walked back out, shut the door on the PollCats office, faced Jake to a wall, checked for weapons, read him his rights, and sat him down in the hallway, on a chair they borrowed from one of the occupied offices.
    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