“Where?”
The two exited the House Office Building, where tourists were gathering, many living up to their stereotype in gaudy and inappropriately casual dress, Pentax cameras hanging like albatrosses around the necks of the dads. In an apparent show of force in the wake of the shooting, two Capitol Police officers stood at the corner; they nodded at Charlie and ignored Street. A chill remained in the air, for which the coatless congressmen braced themselves, but the sun was blinding, and spring had unmistakably arrived.
They stopped at the crosswalk of Independence Avenue, where the driver of a red convertible Mustang honked at them. It took them a second to realize it was Strongfellow; he stopped his car even though he had a green light. “Hey, boys!” he shouted. “You coming tonight?” Other cars began steering around him on the four-lane road, some honking angrily. The Capitol Police ignored the transgression.
“How on earth can you afford those wheels?” Street asked him.
“Rights to my life story paid for it,” Strongfellow said. “What do you think of James Dean for the movie?”
“As the car?” Charlie quipped.
“Har-de-har-har,” Strongfellow said. A dairy-truck driver shook a fist out his window as he leaned on his horn, while more cars backed up behind him. Strongfellow maneuvered his way closer to the curb, making it only slightly easier for anyone to pass him. “I was going to call you, Charlie, to make sure you’re coming tonight.”
“To what?” Charlie asked.
“Party in Connie Hilton’s suite at the Mayflower. Invitation only. Black tie.”
“Hilton’s throwing a party?” asked Charlie. “What for?”
“Let me guess,” said Street, knowing that he wasn’t invited for obvious reasons. “For reauthorizing the Mexican migrant workers. So he can keep paying pennies to his hotel maids and kitchen staff.”
“Winner!” shouted Strongfellow, cheerfully oblivious to the traffic chaos he was still causing. A moving-van driver blared his horn, leaning out his window and cursing at Strongfellow. It was tough to make out every word of the explosive monologue but certain terms were loud and clear. Charlie wondered how long Strongfellow might sit there tying up traffic, since law enforcement seemed uninterested in the matter. Strongfellow ignored it all completely.
“Bill got through the Senate and is now on its way to Ike,” he said. “I’m not exactly sure who’s throwing the party. Some club that Carlin is a member of? Hey—did you hear Senator Lehman claimed that a hundred Commies cross the Mexican border every day?”
“A hundred a day?” asked Charlie as another car honked at Strongfellow; Charlie felt slightly embarrassed to be part of this spectacle of entitlement. “Where does a claim like that even come from?”
“One’s nether regions, I suppose,” said Strongfellow.
“And Humphrey backed him,” said Street. “He said the Reds have one of their strongest infiltration programs out of Mexico.”
“Mexico?” asked Charlie incredulously.
“Kennedy voted against the braceros bill,” Street said. “Kefauver too. Big labor flexing some muscle.”
A heavy-duty Mack truck pulled up behind Strongfellow, and its driver started pounding on the horn.
Strongfellow sighed as if to say, Impatient drivers will be the death of us all, and eased his car into first gear. “So nine p.m. at the Mayflower?” Strongfellow asked as he pulled away. “See you there, Charlie.”
“Wait, Phil—” Charlie began, but it was too late; Strongfellow was already a full city block away, driving as if he were in the Grand Prix.
The light turned green and Charlie and Street crossed the street, resuming their walk toward the Capitol. The white and pink flowers of the cherry blossom trees were beginning to bud. Groundskeepers unfurled rolls of sod to cover the acres of barren, frozen dirt surrounding the Capitol grounds; turf harvesting was a postwar agricultural development that significantly enhanced the appearance of the capital’s tourist spots.
“What did you want to ask him?”
“It’s dumb. This note I found in my desk maybe belonged to Van Waganan,” Charlie said. “Scribbles about broadleaf crops and the University of Chicago. My intern called and wasn’t able to get any information about it because of wartime secrecy laws. Phil said he’d look into it for me.”
“Sounds pretty random.”
“It is. I don’t know much about Van Waganan. It’s probably nothing.”
“All I know about him is that his body was found in a cheap hotel room next to a dead hooker. That might be as much as I need to know, to be honest.”
Charlie stopped walking and looked at Street, stunned. “Really? A hooker? Everything I’ve heard made it sound like it was suicide.”
“Nope,” said Street. “They kept it out of the papers, a friend of mine with connections told me. To spare his family, they put the hooker’s dead body in a different room.”
“And what do they think happened?”
“They have no idea,” said Street. “It remains an open case.”
“Amazing. A dead congressman is an open case.”
“In company towns, like this one or Hollywood or Detroit or Nashville, police are often encouraged to let some crimes go unsolved. People in power don’t want them solved.”
“What?”
“Someday, for kicks, go to the homicide division here in DC and see how many dead young women are in the cold-case files. Attractive ones. You’ll be stunned.”
“Right, but Van Waganan and a dead prostitute—that has to be some form of murder-suicide, no?”
“All I know is what my guy told me. They think he didn’t kill her and she didn’t kill him. No cause of death. No evidence of sexual contact. There was no evidence of any relationship at all, actually—no phone records, no witnesses. Nothing tying the two together.”
“Other than their corpses being found in the same room,” Charlie said.
“Right.” Street laughed. “Except that.”
“It’s hard to believe the local police wouldn’t care about such a case,” Charlie said.
“They care,” said Street. “But when there’s a VIP involved, the FBI bursts in and claims jurisdiction and that’s it. We don’t hear about it after that. Hoover’s own private police force.”
They continued into the Capitol Building and walked up the stairs to the House Chamber. By now Charlie knew better than to ask Street if he was offended at not having been invited to the party that evening. With the exception of the veterans’ poker night, Street shunned most social functions, presumably to avoid the blatant racism so prevalent in Washington. Which wasn’t to say he was a shrinking violet; Street ate daily at the purportedly whites-only House Dining Room, and he didn’t give an inch when bigotry reared its head in his presence, routinely challenging the offhand remarks and “funny stories” that exposed his colleagues’ often unwitting, careless prejudices. Did Street care that he wasn’t invited to the bacchanal tonight? He’d already made it clear to Charlie that he far preferred to spend his evenings with his wife and twin baby boys than with most members of Congress. “Honestly, Charlie, most of them are just imbeciles,” he said once.