Текст книги "Strachey's Folly "

Автор книги: Richard Stevenson

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

"But," I said, "there must have been something on those sheets of typescript on the quilt panel that somebody badly wanted to keep out of public view. And when I looked at the pages, I saw what you both saw, and there was nothing remarkable about any of it on the surface. Maybe there was something revealing on the backs of the pages—although it's hard to imagine why anyone would be afraid of any words or pictures that weren't visible." I asked Maynard, "Did Jim Suter actually use a typewriter, and not a word processor or computer?"

"As a matter of fact, he did—does," Maynard said. "Jim is one of those writers who are sentimental about their old Underwoods and Smith-Coronas and are scared to death that if they throw over the machine they've always written on, they'll never write again. It's a karma thing, and I understand it. I compose on a Mac, but I keep a fresh ribbon in my IBM Selectric. I'm prepared for the day when I look into my video terminal and I can imagine nothing there besides I Dream ofjeannie reruns. And if the IBM quits—hey, I once lost my notebook in Eritrea and scratched out some notes with my Swiss army knife on a slab of sandstone. In fact, that's it right there on that shelf."

Maynard indicated a long, flat rock with scratches all over it. It sat next to a framed photograph of Maynard in the company of several slender Africans holding AK-47s, looking righteous and determined, and surrounding a Mobil Oil tanker truck. Next to this picture was one of Maynard and his lover of eleven years, Randy Greeley, who had been a Unicef field organizer and had died in a poorly aimed rocket-propelled-grenade attack by somebody—no one was sure who—in Somalia in 1993.

I said, "Maynard, it looks as if whoever designed the quilt panel for Jim knew him well enough to know he uses a typewriter instead of a computer."

"It does," Maynard agreed. "But of course that's a lot of people. Jim is among the more prolific hacks in the District. He's always been a writer who gets around, professionally and otherwise. Writer-slash-operator is a more apt description of what Jim does."

Timmy said, "Do you think Betty Krumfutz saw something on Jim's panel today that freaked her out and she sent some goons over to rip those pages off the quilt?"

Maynard said, "Well, yeah, it does look as if she did," and then he shook his head, as if he was both baffled and apprehensive and had no idea what to make of any of the afternoon's peculiar events.

We sat silently for a minute, deep in thought, the television jabbering in the background.

"I'm wondering," Maynard finally said, "what—if anything– I ought to tell the Names Project. Or even the police. I guess I can't tell anyone that I heard from Jim, or where he is. Not if it might actually endanger his life—or mine." Maynard smiled nervously, and we smiled nervously back.

"No," Timmy said, "and you specifically are not to tell the D.C. police where he is. Or anybody on the Hill. I take it that means Capitol Hill the national legislative establishment, not Capitol Hill the neighborhood."

Maynard said, "It probably means both."

"Has Jim ever had problems with the law?" 1 asked. "Of a political nature or otherwise?"

Maynard looked doubtful. "Not that I've ever heard about. And if he'd been mixed up in the Krumfutz scandal, that would have come out in court. I'd guess no. His ethics are malleable, but Jim has plenty of lawyer friends, and my guess is lie's been able to stay a centimeter or two on the nonindictable side of the law."

Timmy sat up straight. "Then that probably means that– jeez! It might well mean that the D.C. cops are actually involved in whatever the conspiracy is that Jim knows about!"

"Conspiracy?" I said. "What conspiracy?"

"Well, what would you call it?"

"Timothy," I said, "it seems to me unlikely that the entire District of Columbia Police Department would conspire to assassinate a political writer." I told Maynard, "Timothy, as you know, is overall a rational man. But when he "was a boy in Poughkeepsie, the nuns told him stories about Masons plotting to snatch and devour little Catholic children, and to this day Timothy's imagination occasionally runs away with itself."

Timmy gave Maynard a look that said, "I've told you about how off-the-wall Don can be on the subject of my Catholic background, and now you've seen it for yourself." What he said out loud was, "Some cops are corrupt, and often dirty cops are dirty together. Word of this phenomenon has even reached some lapsed New Jersey Calvinists, I think."

Maynard, already unsettled by the letter from Jim Suter and the strange vandalism of the even stranger quilt panel, now looked alarmed over the possibility that his houseguests might be headed for a spat. He said, "Don, Jim did say explicitly that I shouldn't mention his whereabouts to the D.C. police, and he seemed to be saying not any D.C. cop."

"Right," Timmy piped up. "That was in the letter."

"I get the point," I said. "The point, it seems to me, is this: be careful of the D.C. cops because one or some of them may be connected to threats against Jim Suter or even attempts on his life. Let's just not become unduly paranoid, imagining some Oliver Stone-style plot against Jim Suter that everybody from the D.C. meter maids to the ghost of LBJ is a party to. Just for the moment, let's be cool—whatever that might turn out to mean in practical terms."

"But that's just it," Maynard said. "What do I do with what I know? I guess I'll have to do something. I told that woman from the Names Project that Jim Suter is alive, and then his panel was vandalized. So she might give the cops my name."

We pondered this dilemma. After a moment, Timmy said, "Why don't you call the Names Project woman—what's her name?"

"I left it in the car," Maynard said.

"And find out if she told the cops about you, and if she didn't, ask her not to. Tell her you have your own reasons for not wanting to get involved at this point, which is true. Ask her if she'd mind keeping your name out of it, at least for now, and then get in touch with her when you have a clearer idea of what this . . . this conspiracy is about, and how far it extends, and exactly what the dangers are to Jim and to you. I have to use the word conspiracy, based on the situation Jim described in his letter. In English, there just isn't any better word for it."

"Timothy," I said, "maybe it wasn't the nuns. Maybe it's all the years you've spent as an employee of the New York State legislature, an institution that makes a Medici court look like a Quaker meeting. Whatever the reason, your overstimulated sense of melodrama is getting the best of you—as I suspect Jim Suter's might be getting the best of him. Maynard, has Suter spent a lot of time in Mexico? Living among the cops there could certainly leave a man with a powerful sense that somebody might be out to get him."

"Jim's been taking vacations in the Yucatan for years," Maynard said, "and I think he has friends there. As for the Mexican police, they're an ugly fact of life down there that people have learned to live with when they must and avoid when they can, like the bacteria in the water supply. I doubt that Jim has been unhinged by them. He's a worldly guy. You know, I think I will call the woman from the Names Project and at least find out what she told the cops. Just so I'll know what to expect."

Timmy said, "I think you should."

Maynard crossed his living room full of primitive and modern art and artifacts—paintings, carved-wood fertility totems, village-life-narrative wall hangings in brilliant primary colors– and walked out the front door.

"I wonder," Timmy said, "whether Maynard should tell the quilt official that the pages ripped off Jim Suter's quilt panel were from Jim's Krumfutz campaign biography and that he saw the actual Betty Krumfutz down on her hands and knees at the quilt this afternoon. I really don't see, Don, how you can sneer at the possibility of a conspiracy when—"

From outside the open front door came three loud pops. Then we heard the revving engine of a car speeding away down E Street, followed by silence.

Seconds later, when we reached Maynard—sprawled on the brick sidewalk next to his car, his blood pumping out of his body—he was still breathing, but only faintly. Timmy knelt by Maynard and began to speak softly to him as he searched for the correct pressure points to push against, and I raced back into the house.

Chapter 3

The George Washington University Hospital trauma center was where the Secret Service had rushed Ronald Reagan after John Hinckley Jr. shot him, along with James Brady, a Secret Service agent, and a D.C. policeman on the sidewalk alongside the Washington Hilton in 1981. Nancy Reagan later told reporters that as the Gipper was wheeled into the emergency room, he had cheerfully quoted W. C. Fields to the effect that, given a choice, he'd rather be in Philadelphia. But in fact, Reagan was lucky he had been shot in the District of Columbia, just blocks from GW. This hospital's emergency staff specialized in treating the thousands of gruesome gunshot wounds arriving each year from various points, mainly in the Northeast section, of one of the world's bloodiest capitals outside the Balkans.

Maynard was not jocular on his arrival at GW, he was unconscious. Timmy had been allowed to ride with him in the ambulance, and I followed soon in a cab. Maynard's wounds, one abdominal and one to the head, were so serious that he was quickly evaluated and moved directly to an operating room.

Timmy and I settled into a lounge outside the recovery unit where Maynard would end up if he lived. "He's in tough shape" was all we'd been told by an ER resident, and we both understood what that meant.

"It's just too ironic," Timmy said miserably. Even though we were both charged and alert from having drunk too much Ethiopian coffee, Timmy looked exhausted, haunted, suddenly older. It was an indication of how wounded he was that he seemed only dimly aware that his shirt and khakis were stained—caked in some places—with Maynard's blood. I had held Timmy's hand for some minutes but automatically let go when two elderly black women entered the waiting room and seated themselves.

"What's ironic?" I asked.

"You know."

"That Maynard survived Africa and Asia, but he might not survive Washington?"

Timmy grunted. Mounted on the wall across from us was a television set tuned to what looked like a self-esteem-industry in-fomercial. A muscular man rapturous with self-confidence was pumping up an audience whose faces were full of yearning for an end to self-doubt. The man's tapes, they wanted to believe, would bring clarity into their lives, and perhaps belief. The pitchman had a good thing going and he looked as if he knew it.

I said, "Maybe Maynard will make it. It's not over yet. You've been telling me for years how resilient he is."

Timmy sat slumped to one side of his chair, slating into space, his Irish eyes vacant and ringed, his ordinarily silky blond wave—he was the only man I knew with a kind of naturally art deco hairstyle—wet with sweat against his skull. He grunted again and shook his head hopelessly.

A gaunt, hollow-eyed man with both eyes and hair the color of lead and a sport coat of nearly the same shade entered the room and peered around. The two DC Metropolitan PD patrolmen who had responded to my 911 call had not asked many questions about the shooting, and something told me that this was the detective assigned to the case tracking us down. He walked over to Timmy and me.

"Are you the two that came in with Maynard T. Sudbury?" the man asked tonelessly.

"Yes," Timmy said. "How is he?"

"That I couldn't tell you." He continued to gaze at us with eyes that were cold and unrevealing.

"Are you a police officer?" I said.

The man produced his wallet, flipped it open and shut, put it back in his jacket pocket, and said, "Ray Craig, Detective Lieutenant, MPD." He looked at me, then at Timmy, then back at me. He made no move to extend his hand, and unsure of how to react to Craig's chilliness, or just rudeness, neither of us offered ours.

Timmy said, "We're really worried about Maynard. The resident said he was in tough shape. 'Tough shape' were the words he used."

Ray Craig did not reply. He studied Timmy and me for a moment longer. Then he turned and dragged a molded-plastic chair up to us, its metal legs snagging bits of carpet as it moved, and seated himself in front of us, his knees nearly touching ours. He leaned forward, and now I was within range of his powerful odor, stale nicotine and tar. Had I once smelled like this? I knew I had.

"Which one of you is Callahan?" Craig said dully.

Timmy said, "I am."

Then Craig looked over at me and said, "You're Starch?"

"Starch? No."

Craig got out a small notepad and read, "S-T-A-R-C-H, Donald."

"It's Strachey. S-T-R-A-C-H-E-Y. As in Lytton."

"Lyndon?"

"Lytton. L-Y-T-T-O-N. Lytton Strachey, the brilliant English biographer and fey eccentric. There was a so-so flick about him and his sort-of wife last year called Carrington. Maybe you caught it."

I felt Timmy tense up beside me, but Craig just colored a little, which suited him. He stared at me appraisingly for several seconds. Then he said, "Tell me exactly what happened on E Street tonight." He leaned back a little—a mercy—and continued to look at me as if I were the one who needed airing out.

I explained to Craig that Timmy, Maynard, and I had dined at an Ethiopian restaurant in Adams-Morgan and that from around ten on we had been hanging around Maynard's house watching television news and talking. I said Maynard had left something in his car, he had gone out to get it, and seconds after he went out the front door, Timmy and I heard sounds that could have been gunshots. We also heard a car speed away. We ran outside and discovered Maynard bleeding and unconscious on the sidewalk alongside his car. I said I immediately went inside and telephoned the police while Timmy tried to stanch the flow of blood from Maynard's body.

Craig continued examining me in a way that felt both hostile and somehow prurient. I was not touching Timmy, but I was aware that his respiration had increased.

Craig said, "So, what'd Sudbury go out to his car to get?"

"Maynard went out to bring in a name written on a piece of paper," I said. "We had all gone to the AIDS quilt display during the afternoon. We ran into an acquaintance and wrote her phone number on a Names Project brochure Maynard was carrying. He had left the phone number in his car and had gone out to retrieve it when he was shot."

Craig seemed to roll this information around in his mind. Then he shifted, shot Timmy a surly look, and said, "What's your connection with Sudbury? You don't live around here. You live in New York State." His tone suggested that anybody residing outside the District of Columbia might be of a different species from those residing within the District and whose associations with Washingtonians went against nature.

Timmy croaked out, "Maynard and I are old Peace Corps friends. We were in the Peace Corps together in the sixties. Donald and I stay with Maynard whenever we come to Washington. We're—we're just old Peace Corps buddies."

Timmy might as well have announced to Craig that he and Maynard had been members of the corps de ballet of the 1965 Fonteyn-Nureyev Giselle tour. Craig sniffed once, then looked Timmy up and down in the way he had just looked at me. He said, "Talk to me about your . . . buddy." He gave buddy a pronunciation that was somewhere between a sneer and a leer. "Does Sudbury have enemies?" Craig asked. "If so, who?"

Timmy went through the motions of mulling this over. "I can't think of any enemies Maynard has. He's generally well-liked. Of course, Maynard has been PNGed out of a number of countries. But I assume you mean domestic enemies. Personal."

Craig's eyes narrowed. "What's PNG?"

"Declared persona non grata. Maynard is a foreign reporter and travel writer. Some officials in some countries didn't like what he wrote about their governments. But I doubt any of them tracked him down to E Street in Washington and shot him."

"Skip the opinions," Craig snapped. "If I want your opinions, I'll ask for them. Just tell me what you know." He had his pen and notebook out but he wasn't writing any of this down. "Married?"

"Maynard?"

Craig's eyes flashed for a brief second. "Yes, Maynard. Maynard T. Sudbury. That's who we're talking about here, isn't it? Maynard T. Sudbury, the shooting victim."

"Not married," Timmy said, jaw clenched.

"Sudbury is gay," I added. "His lover died in 1993"

Craig's face tightened. "I'll bet you two are that way inclined also. Am I right?"

"Are we gay? You bet."

He snorted dismissively. He looked at me and at Timmy, then shook his head, as if our being gay was the most preposterous thing he had ever heard. "I want the names of family, friends, and associates. Start with family." Now his pen was poised.

Before I left for the hospital, I had grabbed Maynard's address book off his desk. If he died, I knew it was possible Timmy or I would have to notify his family. I had glanced through the address book quickly to make sure it included some Sudburys in Southern Illinois—it listed six—but I didn't take it out of my pocket for Craig. Timmy and I fumbled through our memories and named a number of people, in Illinois and in Washington, whom we thought the police would be duty-bound to notify and/or question. Neither of us mentioned Jim Suter.

A surgical intern walked into the lounge we were waiting in, and our eyes went immediately to him. But he did not approach Timmy and me. He went instead to the two elderly black women, looked down as they looked up, and shook his head sorrowfully. The women said nothing, just stood quickly and walked with the doctor out into the corridor as he spoke to them in a low voice.

Craig looked up from his notebook and said, "Did Sud-bury have any recent arguments or disputes with any of these people?"

Timmy said, "Not that he mentioned to us."

"That's a no?"

"Yes, that's a no."

"What about you, Starchey?" Craig stared at me and didn't blink.

I said, "I had no argument with Maynard, no. It's Strachey. S-T-R-A-C-H-E-Y."

"You weren't the asshole who shot your buddy Sudbury?"

"No, I wasn't."

"What about you, Callahan?"

His face radiating heat, Timmy said, "Of course not."

Craig's eyes came briefly to life again, and he said, "Did you suck his dick?"

Neither of us answered. Craig's gaze flicked back and forth between us. Finally, I said, "Neither of us has a sexual relationship with Maynard. He's a friend. In New York State, friends don't normally suck each other's dicks. Maybe the customs are different south of the Mason-Dixon line, and that's why you asked the question. If so, I'm happy to be able to clear up any misconception about sexual customs in the North."

Craig's mouth tightened and he stared at me hard. One of his loafers had begun to jiggle at high speed. It was apparent that he was making mental notes, and he was looking at me as if he wanted me to know it. After a moment, Craig lifted his pen again and said, "Sudbury's a travel writer. Where's he been to recently?"

After seeming to consider this carefully, Timmy said, "Maynard has been to Swaziland, Botswana, and Zimbabwe in the past year, I know."

Craig noted this with no apparent interest and said, "Where else?"

"Mexico," I said, "within the last couple of months."

"Mexico?" Craig's nose twitched and a light went on in his eyes and stayed on in a way it had not stayed on before.

I said, "Maynard was in the Yucatan researching a travel piece for the Los Angeles Times. He talked about enjoying the trip and he didn't mention any incident there—or any incident anywhere else—that might have led to his being shot tonight on a Washington street."

"Uh-huh." Craig waited, and when no one spoke, he said, "Did Sudbury go to Mexico frequently?"

"Not frequently, no," Timmy said.

"I think you know," Craig said, "this shooting doesn't look anything like a robbery."

"I know," I said.

"The shooter never stopped. Sudbury's wallet wasn't taken."

"No."

"The perp apparently had no interest in robbery," Craig said. "Somebody drove by, popped Sudbury, and drove away. Drive-by shootings in the District are seldom random. Normally that's something gangs do to members of other gangs. That's drug gangs, to be specific. Do you have any reason to believe that Sudbury is part of a drug operation?"

Timmy flushed. "I think not."

Craig said, "Yeah, I think not, too. Not some street-punk operation anyway. So you don't know who might have wanted to shoot your buddy in the head and in the gut?"

His face purple with anger now, Timmy said, "No. I do not."

"When did you say Sudbury was in Mexico the last time?" Craig asked.

"Two weeks ago."

Now Craig gave me the beady eye. "You said Sudbury was down in Mexico in the last couple of months. Which is it? Two weeks ago or the last couple of months?"

"Two weeks ago is within the last couple of months," I said. "Neither of us is telling you anything that's remotely contradictory to what the other is saying. So, what's the problem, Lieutenant?"

"The problem is that I think you two faggot assholes are telling me lie after lie after lie. The problem is, I think your buddy Maynard T. Sudbury doesn't just write about Mexico when he goes back and forth down there. And the problem is, I think when he goes down there, he may be involved in the type of illegal activities that can get a man shot in the gut on E Street when there's no other reason for that to happen. And the other problem is, I think you two pathetic queers know it."

Timmy shook his head in disgust.

I said, "That's a lot of problems you've got to contend with there, Lieutenant."

"That's what I say."

I said, "The biggest problem of all, as far as I can make out, Lieutenant, is you. With police work like this, in fact, it's no wonder Washington has one of the highest murder rates in North America. Up in Albany, New York, where we come from, police investigations aren't always handled as skillfully as a lot of us would like. But I've rarely encountered police presumption and speculation as wildly prejudiced and inaccurate and harmful to an investigation as I've witnessed tonight. This city obviously is not only the murder capital of the Eastern seaboard, it's also looking more and more like the capital of police fecklessness. You strike me as a blithering incompetent, Lieutenant, a disgrace to your department and to your profession."

This was not calculated, just sincere. It was reckless, too, although with hospital staff often passing by in the corridor, there seemed little chance an inflamed Craig would pistol-whip us or attempt to arrest us on a trumped-up charge. Craig did not, in fact, explode. He just colored again, looked at me dully, and said, "The murder rate in D.C. isn't all that high if you don't calculate in the niggers. The niggers distort the stats. It's easy to get a misleading impression. But Sudbury is no nigger. Even though it sounds to me like he sucks nigger dick."

I gazed at Craig and said nothing. Timmy was looking at his own lap and slowly shaking his head.

"So you two cocksuckers are sure you don't want to tell me about some trouble your buddy Sudbury said he was in? Some trouble down in Mexico?"

Timmy muttered, "There's nothing to tell."

Craig studied us with his dead eyes, then said, "Listen to what I say to you. Don't leave the District without checking with me. Have you got that straight?"

Neither of us had a copy of the Constitution to wave in Craig's face, but I knew it wouldn't have helped. For Craig stood up without another word, turned, and quickly walked out.

After a moment, Timmy said, "Is he just a rotten human being and one of the worst cops in the United States, or was there a lot more going on just now than was apparent on the surface? Why, for God's sake, did he keep harping on Mexico, for instance, over and over and over again?"

Before I could think about what might have been paranoid imaginings and what was well-founded fear, a doctor in OR gear walked into the lounge and came over to us. He didn't look happy, but he wasn't averting his eyes either.

Chapter 4

Maynard's chances of surviving were better than even. The surgeon told us that the head wound was messy but superficial, and the much more serious abdominal injuries had required major replumbing—just short of a colostomy—and if Maynard lived through the next twelve hours, full recovery was a good possibility. The surgeon said Maynard's sturdy constitution and overall good health were a big help, but that infection was a danger and Maynard would have to be closely watched over the next day.

Timmy said, "He's already got a stomach infection."

"He does? What's that?" A small, soft-eyed man with a cleft chin, the surgeon looked interested in this.

Timmy explained how Maynard had apparently picked up a parasite that wouldn't let go in Zambia, Burkina Faso, or Kyr-gyzstan. "He's had it for going on a year," Timmy said.

"That'll be the least of Mr. Sudbury's problems," the doctor said. "Infections like that are a month in the country compared to the kinds that urban North American hospitals have to worry about."

Timmy said he didn't find that reassuring, and the surgeon left us with instructions on how to attempt to pry information on Maynard's condition out of the hospital bureaucracy.

At just after 2 a.m., in a cab rolling south and east through Washington's nearly deserted early-Sunday-morning streets, I said to Timmy, "Ray Craig isn't the worst cop I've ever run into in my long career of running into law officers who'd have been equally comfortable on either side of the law, but he may be the second or third worst. He's so in thrall to his own insecurities and hatreds that he can survive professionally only in a place where most of the actual criminals fit his idea of a criminal stereotype– black or Hispanic or whatever. Bust enough black heads, and he's bound to catch an actual criminal sooner or later. It's cops like this that create juries like the one that acquitted O.J.

"But nasty as Craig is, Timothy, I didn't come away with any sense that he's aware of Jim Suter's letter to Maynard or Suter's alleged perilous situation, or the Suter quilt panel or Betty Krum-futz or any of that. He's not a party to a nefarious plot who was digging around to see what we know. Craig is just another unimaginative, mildly disturbed cop in love with the obvious who, when he hears about shootings and Mexico, he immediately figures drugs. But I wouldn't interpret his remarks to mean anything more extensive or more worrisome than that. Trust him with what we know about the Suter situation? No way—the guy's a flake and an incompetent. Clue him in at this point and he's liable to get Suter killed, and maybe us, too. But is Craig worse than a bigoted hack? I don't think so."

Timmy had been fidgeting restlessly as I spoke, and now, keeping his hands down low, he gestured urgently in the direction of the cabdriver and said, "Yes, I'm sure you're right. Maybe we should just forget about all that." Then, looking otherwise wild-eyed, he winked at me.

Now he thought the cabdriver was in on it? Whatever he thought "it" was? I leaned up and read the driver's name spelled out alongside his photograph on the cabbie's license mounted on the visor. He was a slim black man in a brown sport coat that gave him a dressed-up look, and his name was Getachew Tessemma. The man had been soft-spoken and polite when we'd climbed into his cab. I assumed the name was African, maybe Ethiopian; with his slender nose and dark, delicate eyelashes the size of marquees, Tessemma resembled the maitre d' at the restaurant we'd eaten in six hours earlier.

Tessemma's had been the only cab parked outside the hospital when Timmy and I came out. I was aware that sweet, placid people could be treacherous—I had been deeply involved in the great Southeast Asian disaster arranged for the nation by Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger, and others. But was it remotely possible that this unprepossessing African who waited for fares outside a hospital in the middle of the night was somehow out to do us both in? I thought not.

I caught a glimpse of the street signs as we rode along Seventeenth Street, NW, the American Red Cross headquarters on our right, and then the old Pan American Union building. Timmy had gone to school in Georgetown and knew D.C. much better than I did, but I had visited the city often enough to know its basic layout. I said, "This is a good route to Maynard's house, isn't it? We're going to the Hill by way of the Tidal Basin and the Southwest freeway. We've been with Maynard when he's taken this route."

"It's one way of getting there," Timmy said, and glanced nervously left and right at the passing Washington scene.

We cruised past the Mall, where, just east of the Washington Monument, the AIDS quilt panels had been folded up and stowed away for the night. The exterior columns of the Lincoln Memorial, off to our right, were dark, but I caught a glimpse of the big, illuminated marble statue within the structure. The great man was seated stiffly in an armchair in a characteristically formal pose of the era. Today he'd be grinning in a designer polo shirt, maybe seated at the wheel of his and Mary's retirement RV.

We rolled past the Tidal Basin, where House Ways and Means Committee chairman Wilbur Mills had been nailed for DWI in 1974 and his companion, Argentine stripper Fanne Fox, had ended up splashing around zanily in the drink. In the American capital, history was everywhere.

Within minutes, we were off the freeway, onto the quiet residential streets behind the mausoleum-like House office buildings, and headed up E Street. At Maynard's house, midway up the block, yellow crime-scene tape was still stretched around his Chevy and tied to a street sign. But the cops were gone and the street deserted. We paid Tessemma, who did not shoot us in the back as we stepped out into the cool October night, and we walked up Maynard's front steps.