Ah, Treachery!

Chapter 33

Sibley Memorial Hospital was out on Loughboro Road in northwest Washington and after Partain found himself on Massachusetts Avenue, heading more or less northwest, he increased the speed of the borrowed BMW convertible to 60 miles per hour until he was stopped by a red light.

While they waited for the green he asked Altford, “Who is he? Jerry?”

Staring straight ahead she said, “He’s my first husband’s bastard son.”

“The husband who didn’t finish the inside loop?”

She turned, examined him indifferently and said, “Jessie already told you, didn’t she?”

“Not about Jerry.”

“He was born in nineteen-fifty-seven, the son of Harry Montague, my future husband, and the young black maid who worked for Harry’s folks. Harry and I were engaged when I found out about it and I told him the wedding was off unless he acknowledged the kid legally and did something for the mother financially. The son of a bitch laughed at me.”

“Not much of a civil libertarian, Harry,” Partain said.

She shrugged. “In Dallas then who was? So I went to Texarkana the next weekend and talked to my former Congressman, the sainted Wright Patman. He told me there wasn’t anything he could do since Harry didn’t even live in his district, but then he grinned and said he had an idea but couldn’t tell me about it.”

“You asked a U.S. Representative to involve himself in a domestic squabble?”

“Maybe it sounds like a domestic squabble to you, but to me it was a civil rights issue and back then I was the biggest mouth in Dallas on that.”

“I still don’t see why a Congressman—”

She interrupted. “Because the Montague family was in the airplane parts business and the Federal government was their biggest customer. And because in Texas you damn well mess with whatever gets you elected and my kinfolks had lots of votes and lots of friends in Patman’s district.”

“Anything happen?” he asked.

“The light’s green,” she said and after a silence of two blocks, looked at Partain and said, “What do you care, anyway?”

“Somebody just shot one of your baby-sitters and I care just one hell of a lot about who and what he was.”

“Okay,” she said. “Harry and I were still arguing about the baby and his mother and we still weren’t married but sleeping together almost every night at this place his folks had out at the lake. That’s where we were when the phone rang one morning and Senator Lyndon B. Johnson’s on the line.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding. Johnson was talking so loud I could hear snatches of what he was telling Harry. Stuff like ‘doing right by that little nigger baby’ and how Harry’d also better do ‘something nice for that baby’s mama.’ It went on and on and Harry Montague, the Korean War Marine pilot and almost ace, shivered and shriveled and damn near wet his drawers.”

“So you got married.”

“Yeah, we got married but not until Harry agreed that ‘H. Montague’ would go where it said ‘father’ on Jerry’s birth certificate.”

“Did his mother come to work for you and Harry then?”

Again, she turned to stare at him. “You sure like soupy endings, don’t you? No, she didn’t come to work for us. All Harry ever did was mail her ten ten-dollar bills the first of every month, if he didn’t forget and I had to remind him. Most months he forgot. But the money stopped when Harry went up in his old biplane and failed to make the loop.”

“What happened to Jerry and his mother?” Partain said.

“I’m coming to that. Right after I married Dr. Carver, I told him about Jerry and his mama, and the doctor — devout secular humanist that he was — suggested she become our live-in housekeeper and bring the kid with her.”

“A happy ending after all,” Partain said.

“It was for a while. Then Jessica came along and Jerry sort of looked after her some. After the doctor died in ’sixty-nine, I managed to keep us all together ’til Jerry got out of high school. After that he sort of scuffled around for a while, dealing dope mostly, but then he straightened out, went to Denver and got on as an undercover narcotics cop. That lasted nine years until he got shot, retired on a small disability, moved to Washington, landed a job at the National Archives, bought himself a cab and moonlighted whenever he could.”

“He ever change his last name?” Partain said.

“No. Why?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think I would’ve.”

By the time they reached Sibley Memorial, Jerry Montague was dead from a bullet wound in his head. Altford tried to comfort Jerry’s handsome wife and pretty young daughter while Partain talked to a pair of bored homicide detectives.

To them it was another in a long string of random Washington cabdriver shootings. The only thing unusual about it, they said, was the eyewitness testimony of a homeless man they called “Billy the Bum,” who claimed to have seen it all happen.

The older of the detectives described what Billy the Bum claimed to have seen. “There’s this old black Caddy limo rolling along Mass Ave about seven blocks west of Wisconsin, okay?” the detective said.

Partain nodded.

“And not far behind it, according to Billy, comes this indy cab with the owner-victim behind the wheel. Got the picture?”

Partain said he did.

“Well, the old limo starts to buck and snort and backfire like it’s got engine trouble, then stops dead. The cab, it stops maybe fifty feet behind it.”

“Now comes the funny part,” said the second detective. “The limo driver keeps turning the engine over trying to start it, but it won’t fire up. So finally the limo’s left rear door opens and out gets this real short guy, I mean short, who starts walking back to the cab, spreading his hands out like, you know, he’s helpless and what the hell can he do? The cabdriver just sits there behind the wheel, staring at him.”

The first detective again took over. “When the short guy reaches the cab, the cabbie won’t roll down his window. The short guy taps on it politely and says something Billy the Bum can’t hear and that’s when the cabbie lowers the window. When he does, the short guy comes up with a small semiautomatic of some kind, sticks it in the cabbie’s ear and blows him away. Then he looks around, the short guy, I mean, strolls back to the limo, gets in and away they go.”

“How short is short?”

The first detective nodded his appreciation of Partain’s question. “Yeah, I know what you mean. Billy the Bum’s six-two or-three and skinny as a pole. So short to him might mean five-five or-six. But we pressed him on it pretty good and he swears the shooter was no more’n five even. Maybe less.”

“Did Billy the Bum call it in?” Partain asked.

“Nah,” the second detective said. “He just waited for us to show up. Right after a shot’s heard in that neighborhood, you probably got nineteen different houses dialing nine-one-one.”

“We figure it was a busted drug deal.”

Partain nodded as if he liked the notion and asked, “I don’t suppose Billy the Bum got the license number of the old limo?”

“Billy don’t think that’s way up there on his list of civic responsibilities,” the detective said.

Just after midnight Partain let himself out through the General’s front door and started walking toward Connecticut Avenue in search of a taxi. The temperature had dropped into the low twenties and he felt the cold immediately. He had gone less than a hundred feet when he heard the rapid clicking footsteps. He turned to find Jessica Carver hurrying toward him, a blue airline bag slung over her right shoulder.

“It’s turned into sort of an Irish wake back there,” she said.

“That’s why I left.”

“Millie’s getting nostalgic and a little bombed and she and Ver-non’ll probably wind up in bed.”

He nodded.

“So I thought tonight I’d sleep in her room at the hotel.”

“Or mine,” he said.

“Right,” she said. “Or yours.”