Senator Love Read Free Page B

its source. After he had passed out in the back of their cab, she
had had to half-cajole and half-cart him into the house, where he was now
sleeping it off in the downstairs den.
    "Literally old bones, Fi," Cates said, abandoning
his torturous singsong, getting to the serious nub of things, his usual
demeanor.
    "Why us?" Fiona said with a sigh, feeling the
sour backwash in her mouth, remembering further. She supposed that in a day or
two her judgement would be that she had had fun at the Pepsi bash. Even the
sudden squall that had crashed down on the party had failed to upset the
festivities. Apparently the host, rather than send the guests home on the river
in the hard rain, had managed to organize a giant fleet of cabs and limos to
return all guests to Washington, albeit two hours later than scheduled.
    All that talk about Senator Langford's sex life had been
interesting, of course, although at the moment it seemed quite inconsequential
to her life.
    "Again the obvious. It's the eggplant's bigoted sense
of demographics. The old bones are on your turf." He sucked in a deep
breath and she pictured his delicate nostrils twitching, always a sign of his
inherent disapproval. Like her, his Bahamian ancestry, accent and faintly
mulatto skin tone assured his fish-out-of-water status in their inner-city,
black, street-smart environment.
    "So once again. Cates, I got to carry you on my
lily-white ass."
    "My fate, Fi," he whispered.
    Her turf, in the eggplant's mind, was the clearly defined
bounds that housed the power elite. At first she had railed against this
pigeonholing, demanding equality of assignment. There was logic to it, of
course, considering her background. Also resentment, although she had earned a grudging
respect when she broke the hard cases.
    Lifting her naked body, she sat upright on the bed,
determined to gather her wits and attain some degree of professionalism. She
could hear his breathing at the other end of the line.
    "Where?"
    "Woodland Hills. Just off Rock Creek. Yesterday they
were bulldozing for a swimming pool. Apparently the rain did the rest."
    The chill on her naked skin revived her somewhat.
    "How much time?"
    "Pick you up in ten," Cates said with a hint of a
smile in his voice.
    "Make it fifteen," she said.
    "I'll split the difference," he said as she
slammed the receiver into its carriage. She padded across the room into the
shower and turned on the cold taps, screaming herself into alertness.
    One thing she could say about the eggplant, he got his
priorities right. A homicide happening in certain neighborhoods like Georgetown, Woodland Hills, Cleveland Park and upper Massachusetts and Connecticut Avenues
to the District line—the hallowed Northwest quadrant—put the ball in her
personal court. Parts of Capitol Hill were on a par and certain pockets
elsewhere as well. Everyone knew exactly where. It was a class and money thing,
well beyond race. In D.C. this was where, as he put it, the "powah
resahded." And, as everyone knew, the "powah" must be served.
    THE RAIN had continued through the night and looked certain
to be one of those long, soaking spring rains that cast a different tone of
light on the city, putting everything, from the wedding-cake buildings and
monuments to the people themselves, into sharper definition.
    She watched the windshield wipers make little progress
against the slanting rain as Cates drove through Rock Creek Park, respecting her need for silence. The normally benign creek was churning white water
beside them as Cates hurried the car to the Woodland Hills area, where the
wooded backyards of the western line of large homes backed up to the park.
    They spotted the site by the police cars parked along the
shoulder of the road and the uniforms poking around in the wet tree-studded
land that dipped sharply upward toward the rears of the houses.
    They got boots and slickers from the trunk of the car and,
getting handholds on stubborn brush, maneuvered their way up the