Murder Keeps A Secret Read online

  “I’m not going to give you a medical lecture, Mr. Frost,” the nurse said, “but a couple of things may help prepare you for the tragic sight you’re about to see. Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome destroys T-cells—the basis of the body’s immunity system for fighting disease. Someone with the AIDS virus is vulnerable to every sort of opportunistic infection. Horace Jenkins has three of the worst of them—PCP, the type of pneumonia that I mentioned; Kaposi’s sarcoma, which is a form of cancer. And oral candidiasis, or ‘thrush,’ as it’s called. His body is covered with purple spots from the Kaposi’s sarcoma and his mouth is full of white spots from the thrush.”

  Frost closed his eyes, unwilling to visualize the person he was about to see.

  “Now,” the nurse continued, “I have gloves and masks here if you like. Since you won’t be touching the patient, there’s no need for the gloves. And, for that matter, there’s no need for the masks either. But some people feel more comfortable wearing them.”

  “If there’s no need, we won’t bother,” Frost said. Confronting the stricken man with the news of the death of his friend and mentor was enough of an assault, Frost thought; there was no need to add the affront of protective masks.

  “Very well. Come this way.”

  Bautista and Frost followed the nurse into a ward with four beds, all occupied.

  “We’ve arranged it so you can talk privately,” she said in a low voice, pointing to a bed surrounded by white curtains in the corner. She approached the patient and called him by name. He turned, his eyes wide and staring at his visitors.

  Frost was shocked by what he saw. He had steeled himself for the ugly purple lesions of Kaposi’s sarcoma, which covered every visible part of Jenkins’s unclothed body. What he was not prepared for was the cadaverous, skeletal parody of a human form, which could not have weighed more than seventy or eighty pounds. Jenkins must be very near death, he thought.

  The nurse removed the oxygen mask from the man’s face and told him in a firm, but not domineering, voice that there were “two gentlemen” to see him.

  Frost looked at Bautista. Who should begin talking? Bautista did not hesitate.

  “Mr. Jenkins, we would like to ask you a couple of questions about David Rowan. I’m Detective Bautista from the New York City Police Department and this is Mr. Frost, who was a friend of Mr. Rowan’s.”

  The hollowed eyes shifted back and forth between the two men; they could not tell whether he had understood what had been said.

  “I am very sorry to have to tell you that David Rowan is dead,” Bautista announced. Now there was no mistaking that Jenkins understood. The already bulging eyes widened further and his sore-covered lips drew back. “He was murdered.”

  Jenkins moved his jaw up and down; he was trying to form a word. “W-w-w-where?” he said finally.

  “At his office,” Bautista replied.

  After a painfully long silence, Jenkins asked “How?” and Bautista described the circumstances.

  “Awful,” Jenkins said slowly, and then again, “awful,” in a choked voice. A tear rolled down his left cheek. Ms. Creighton gave Bautista a “get on with it” look.

  “Mr. Jenkins, I know this must be a great shock for you,” Frost said. “But I would like you to think if there was anybody in the time you worked for David who might have done such a thing. Please think very hard as we must find David’s killer.”

  Jenkins stared straight ahead for a long time; his questioners were sure they had lost him. But then once again he was trying to form a word, raising his head slightly from the pillow as he did so. The effort seemed to defeat him and his head fell back. Then he tried again. “It’s so hard to remember … Elizabeth’s the best I can do … look into Elizabeth …”

  Jenkins spoke so softly that Frost and Bautista leaned forward over the railings on the side of the bed to make sure of what they had heard. They would hear no more; Jenkins fell soundly asleep, and the nurse quickly placed the oxygen mask over his sepulchral face.

  As they walked out, Frost could not help but notice the other patients. All looked as ravaged as the victims of a Third World famine, vacant eyes bulging as the somber trio passed them. He was relieved when they were at last outside the ward, almost as if they had gone from Hades to the land of the living.

  “Miss Creighton, thank you very much,” Frost said as they shook hands. “I admire what you’re doing here.”

  “Thank you,” she replied. “What we’re doing is desperately little. I’m a nurse and I want to cure my patients. But the rules are different for Horace and the other AIDS victims. It’s different … and it’s horrible. There’s no cure. But thank you, Mr.—”

  “M’am, let me ask you, did you ever hear Mr. Jenkins refer to Elizabeth before?” Bautista cut in.

  “Never.”

  “And what about his records? It’s not his mother’s name, is it?”

  The nurse went to check. The answer was no.

  “Okay, that’s it,” Bautista said. “Thank you, m’am.”

  “Are you off duty?” Frost asked once he and Bautista were back in the police sedan.

  “Afraid not. Why?”

  “I need a drink.”

  “The hell with it. So do I.”

  They went to a deserted bar on Lexington Avenue. They drank in silence, both overwhelmed by the inexpressible sadness of what they had seen.

  “You’re right about those pictures. Put up a picture of poor Jenkins and sex would be driven out of New York.”

  “Thank God for Francisca,” Bautista said.

  “And for Cynthia.”

  They silently contemplated their heterosexual safety. And tried very hard, without success, to figure out who Elizabeth might be.

  9

  Background

  Frost was up early Monday morning, in time to catch the nine-thirty Pan Am shuttle to Washington. His luncheon with Marietta Ainslee was not until one-thirty, but he had arranged a meeting with a Washington lawyer and old friend, Dawson Evans, for eleven.

  Evans had begun work as a lawyer at Chase & Ward at roughly the same time as Frost, but had soon been attracted to Washington, where he had several times been through the revolving door that separated Government service and private practice. He was a legal, political and social eminence in the capital, as well-connected there as Reuben was in New York.

  Frost wanted to learn as much about Marietta Ainslee as possible before meeting her. There was no entry on her in Who’s Who. He had considered briefly trying to get a peek at the morgue file on her at the Times, an indiscreet device he had resorted to once or twice in the past, but there simply had not been enough time to activate one of his “moles” at the Good Gray Lady. He had also considered mining Dotty Sheets’s mental file of the world’s, or at least Washington’s, indiscretions. But then he decided that Dawson could probably be of more coherent and precise help.

  Once on his plane at LaGuardia, he settled back into the relative comfort of the seat on the Boeing 727, thinking as he did so that competition did have some benefits after all: Pan Am, in an effort to increase its share of the New York-Washington traffic, offered at least a minimal standard of comfort, as contrasted with Eastern, which Frost regarded as a cattle-car airline.

  He faced a long day. First the meeting with Dawson at his office, then his lunch, then a Metroliner trip back to Trenton, New Jersey, where he had arranged to see Nancy Rowan at the end of her workday. With this busy prospect before him, he was determined to rest on the way to Washington and was grateful when the seat next to him remained empty, even though it was the morning after the Easter weekend. One of the young Chase & Ward partners was aboard. He greeted Frost cordially and showed some surprise that he was traveling to Washington. Do these youngsters think one curls up and hibernates after retirement? Reuben thought angrily, uncertain whether to be irritated or amused.

  Once in Washington, Frost took a cab to Evans’s firm, located in an impersonal glass box on K Street. A delegation of midwester
ners crowded the waiting room, each with a carry-on garment bag and an aluminum attaché case, undoubtedly waiting to meet their lawyer-lobbyist before descending in search of a favor on their hapless local Congressman or some middle-range bureaucrat.

  Despite the confusion in the reception room, Frost was shown promptly to Evans’s office, which was in appearance as cold and impersonal as the exterior of the building. The lawyer did have the obligatory Washington display of autographed photographs—what politicians in New York called their “wall of respect”; no serious Washington practitioner was without one, convinced that the garment-bag crowd from beyond the Washington Beltway expected it. Frost’s quick perusal of the wall showed that it contained pictures of Evans with the four most recent Presidents and, except for a group photo with the ubiquitous Isaac Stern at the Kennedy Center, all the others pictured were of at least subcabinet rank.

  “You’re looking well, Reuben,” Evans said, greeting his visitor. Hale and hardy himself, with an impeccably coiffed mane of white hair, he could afford to be generous to his contemporaries.

  “You, too, Dawson. Washington has certainly agreed with you.”

  Evans smiled complacently. “So what’s all this about Marietta Ainslee?” he asked.

  Frost outlined the circumstances of David Rowan’s death, explaining that he was working on a biography of Garrett Ainslee when he died. His account was complete, except for any reference to the late Justice’s concupiscent diary entries.

  “Did you know Ainslee, by the way?”

  “Sure. Everyone knew him. He was a major celebrity around town when he was in the Senate. And he kept a very high profile after he got on the Court. A lot of Justices lead a pretty monastic existence, you know, but not Garrett. There used to be a joke that your party was a failure if he wasn’t there—he went to everything.”

  “So you might say he was a high-liver?”

  “Gregarious, certainly.”

  “A ladies’ man?”

  “Oh, yes. But entirely discreet. None of that stripper-in-the-fountain stuff for him. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, there’s some indication that David Rowan was starting to uncover some of the underside of Ainslee’s love life.”

  “And Marietta was objecting?”

  “Precisely.”

  “I’m not surprised. Marietta Swenson Leary Greer Greer Ainslee is a very determined woman.”

  “Greer, Greer?”

  “Yes. She married her second husband twice.”

  “Can you run through the chronology?”

  “I think so. I first knew her when she was Marietta Swenson, a charming, red-headed Southern belle. She had no visible talent, except for attracting attention. That was back in the Eisenhower days, when she must have been on the south side of twenty-five. Things were mighty dull around here then, and a sexy, good-looking girl could go pretty far. I don’t think she had any money, or any background at all, but that didn’t matter.

  “She fixed up the money part right away, by marrying Kevin Leary, a self-made shopping-center millionaire about twenty years older than she was. He was a charming guy—fancied himself a polo player. He had only one fault. Drink. Died of cirrhosis before he was fifty. But well before he’d drunk up his fortune, which went to Marietta.

  “We’re now in the Kennedy era, and she’s back on the block. Had quite a following, too. There’s plenty of power in this town, you know, but not all that much money. And certainly not much money in the hands of flaming redheads. There was even the inevitable rumor about Marietta and Jack Kennedy, though I personally never believed it.

  “Anyway, she married another millionaire named Greer, a cowboy oilman out of Texas who was an undersecretary under Kennedy. Transportation, as I recall. They were the hit of the party circuit for a while, then he wanted to go back to Texas and run for Governor. She would have none of it and they got divorced.

  “He did go back to Texas and got the pants beat off him in the Democratic primary. So he returned, Stetson in hand, and they got married again. But it didn’t last. He was getting on in years and Marietta was, shall we say, too frisky for him.”

  “Does that mean she played around?” Frost asked.

  “You have such a nice way of putting things, Reuben. But yes, she was sleeping all over town.”

  “Is that how she met Ainslee?”

  “You guessed it. She really set a trap for Garrett, the new widower. Being set-up financially, I think she wanted respectability, and respectability of a kind that shopping-center owners and cowboys couldn’t provide. And what could be more respectable than a Supreme Court Justice, and one with a good chance of being Chief Justice in the bargain?

  “Randy old Ainslee was captivated, and they got married about two years after LBJ appointed him to the Court. So Marietta was back on the party circuit again, but this time with a husband who wouldn’t be anywhere else.”

  “But he was a good judge, Dawson.”

  “Didn’t say he wasn’t. It’s just that he didn’t spend his evenings sitting at home reading certiorari petitions.”

  “What happened when he died?”

  “Very strange. Marietta became the proper matron, though she was still under fifty. Started becoming a mover and shaker in everything—beautification, the National Gallery, cruelty to animals, you name it. And the keeper of the lamp burning brightly at Garrett Ainslee’s shrine.”

  “How does her boyfriend fit with this respectable image? From what I hear, he’s a side of beef, what old crocks like us would call a gigolo.”

  “Now, now, Reuben, you don’t understand. Ralston Purina, as he’s sometimes unkindly called, is a serious writer. He just happens to be a side of beef. He’s a protégé that Marietta’s encouraging, not a gigolo. She’s only interested in his mind.”

  “I hear he’s rather mean.”

  “He’s a disgrace. Gets drunk and abusive without any provocation. He had to be carried out of the Gridiron Dinner last year. Makes that drunken lout from the Washington Redskins look like a prohibitionist. But Marietta’s going to beautify him, as well as the District’s parks.”

  “I’m not sure I look forward to lunch.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. He usually only acts up after dark.”

  Evans stopped talking, leaned back and ran his hand through his tawny white hair.

  “In her new way of life, she’s determined to make sure history regards Ainslee as a liberal icon,” he went on. “So she probably was furious when your friend Rowan started nosing around. But I’ll bet she was equally anxious that he stay out of her past, too. Her round-heeled days are over and, as far as she’s concerned, they never existed.”

  “Let me ask one final question,” Frost said. “Could she have put Ralston—Ralston Purina—up to pushing David Rowan out a window?”

  Evans paused and gripped the side of the desk, considering the question.

  “Christ, I wouldn’t think so. She’s damned determined and Ralston’s plenty tough. Yes, it’s possible, but I doubt it. Besides, Reuben, you’re about to have a chance to make up your own mind.

  “Have you ever been in a restaurant in the South?” Evans asked. “You know, where they take your money and say ‘Y’all come back and see us, y’hear?’ When you’re sure as anything they hate Yankees and really never want to see you again?”

  “Yes, I’ve encountered that.”

  “That’s Marietta. She’s the original steel magnolia—forget Rosalynn Carter. She’s charmin’ as can be, but bitch-tough behind it all. She used to flirt like crazy—‘My, my, don’t you scrub up nice!’ I can hear her saying to an unsuspecting subject. Then two minutes later cutting her quarry up behind his back. So just watch out.”

  “Thanks for the advice.”

  Evans looked at his watch; the meeting was over.

  “Let me walk out with you,” he said. As they passed his secretary’s desk, he took the pile of pink telephone message slips his secretary handed him and sorted through them as he walked with Reube
n down the hall.

  “You fully retired now, Reuben?” Evans asked.

  “Well … pretty much. I still keep my hand in some.”

  “I wish I could take it easy,” Evans said with a sigh, though not one exactly ringing with sincerity. “Look at these,” he went on, holding out the stack of message slips. “I spend an hour talking to an old friend and have my calls held. The Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy must talk to me urgently. Senator Dennison wants to have lunch. Secretary Foulkes has to meet with me. It just goes on and on. I wish I had time on my hands so I could go poking around in a murder investigation.”

  Frost felt, for an instant, that his contemporary was putting him down. But Evans had been very helpful and he knew he must not feel that way. So he thanked him and shook hands at the elevator.

  “Oh, one other thing, Reuben. I forgot to tell you—Marietta Ainslee’s a vegetarian. All part of the save-the-animals thing.”

  “Good Lord. That’s all I needed to hear. But surely bozo eats red meat?”

  “Don’t think so. He’s on some nut bodybuilding diet, I understand.”

  “Wonderful.”

  10

  Marietta

  Frost was apprehensive in both a major and a minor way as he took a taxi to the Ainslee residence on P Street in Georgetown. The prospect of a health-food lunch (after no breakfast except his morning orange juice) was the lesser anxiety; his principal worry was the imminent confrontation with the characters Dawson Evans had so colorfully described.

  He rapped the brass knocker on the green front door of the Georgian house at the Ainslee address and instantly he heard footsteps on the stairs inside. The door was opened by a handsome middle-aged woman with flaming red hair, as promised.

  “Mrs. Ainslee?”

  “Yes. You must be Reuben Frost. Come right in. I’m sorry, it’s the maid’s day off.”

  His hostess led him up the stairs to a large parlor that was draped in boldly patterned chintz. The early afternoon sunshine almost burned through the large windows and, combined with the chintz, created an effect of almost fauvistic brightness.