Murder at the Washington Tribune - Margaret Truman [8]
He shifted focus from the pictures to the few awards he’d garnered over the years. They amounted to nothing more in the aggregate than pro forma acknowledgments of having been with the Trib for twenty-three years, no more meaningful than yearly merit raises. At least the raises bought something tangible.
He was glad Georgia had abandoned him and gone to bed. Had she stayed, he knew what he would have heard from her: “You have everything to be proud of, Joe. You’re a respected reporter. More important, you’re a good and decent man, a wonderful husband and father. I hate hearing you degrade yourself and what you’ve accomplished.”
Fair enough. He’d feel better about himself—for a minute or two.
But then he’d point out that while he was proud of his family and his place in it, having achieved something greater in his career would not have diminished his role as a husband and father: “Christ, Georgia, career success and family happiness aren’t mutually exclusive.”
They’d go back and forth a while longer before both realized the issue was beyond resolution. They weren’t arguments; they were too predictable to qualify as such. The problem was—and he was quick to acknowledge to himself that this represented only his view—she didn’t understand what happens to a man whose dreams are dashed. It can do bad things to you.
He poured what was left of his drink in the kitchen sink and went to the bathroom where his pajama bottoms hung from a hook on the back of the door. He brushed his teeth, rinsed, and took a long, hard look at his mirror image. He hadn’t aged any worse than other men. There were jowls where they hadn’t been thirty years ago, and his reddish-brown hair had thinned somewhat. His waist had thickened, as one might expect; he’d never been slender, built as he was on the stocky side.
He thought of his wife asleep in their bed, and his depression eased. You’re one lucky guy, he silently told himself, and carried that thought with him to bed where he kissed her cheek before turning off the bedside lamp.
It took a long time for sleep to come.
CHAPTER THREE
Edith Vargas-Swayze sat at the counter of the Diner, on Eighteenth Street in Washington’s Adams Morgan district and tried not to look at the man seated next to her. He was noisily enjoying French toast slathered with maple syrup and a side order of turkey hash. It was seven in the morning, too early to process that. She focused on her cornflakes with sliced banana and black coffee, her usual breakfast fare at this neighborhood institution open 24/7 every day of the year.
She wore a multicolored blouse over a white turtleneck and black slacks, more to conceal the bulge of her standard-issue Glock pistol than to make a fashion statement. She’d been an MPD cop for fifteen years, the past four of them as a detective in the Violent Crimes Branch, which used to be known as Homicide until the MPD brain trust, aided by high-priced consultants, conquered the city’s appalling homicide rate with a stroke of the pen.
She’d been starting her day at the Diner for the past two years since she’d left her husband, Peter Swayze, and moved from downtown where they’d lived together to Adams Morgan, the ethnically mixed, lively community north of Dupont Circle named after John Quincy Adams and early settler Thomas Morgan. Their names also became a symbol of racial harmony in 1954 following the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. The Board of Education. A white school, Adams, and a black school, Morgan, were merged into one, creating the city’s only truly integrated community.
Divorce and relocation had been good moves. The marriage had been a mistake from the first. Not that Peter was a bad guy, nor could it be said that Edith hadn’t worked at the marriage. But if there had ever been a clash