Murder Inside the Beltway - Margaret Truman [7]
“I’ll make you some eggs.”
“That’d be nice, Mae. Thanks.”
He took an abbreviated shower, put on fresh shorts, socks, and T-shirt, got back into the wrinkled, stained, gray pin-striped suit, white shirt, and tie he’d worn the night before, and went to the kitchen. He came up behind his wife and kissed her neck.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, continuing to scramble eggs in a frying pan.
He sat in the breakfast nook and turned on a small TV. The local news was being reported—two drive-by shootings in Southeast, a major drug bust in Alexandria, a homosexual knifed to death by a jealous partner in a DuPont Circle apartment. He clicked off the set.
“Nothing but bad news,” Mae said as the toaster oven dinged.
“So what else is new?” he grumbled. “It’s a rotten world, Mae, with too many rotten people.”
“You see the worst of it,” she said, taking two halves of an English muffin from the toaster oven and buttering them. She delivered his breakfast and joined him. “I spoke with Christina today about all of us getting together at the Florida house. She loved the idea.”
“Yeah, that’d be okay,” he managed between bites of egg and muffin. He finished what was on the plate, wiped his mouth, and sat back. “You know what I think, Mae?”
“What?”
“You’ve been after me to pack it in at MPD for a long time now. I—”
“Only because I worry about you, Walt. You’re getting older and—”
“Just me?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I do. Anyway, I’ve pretty much had it. This city’s being turned over to the scum—the whole country is, for that matter. You can’t find a store clerk who speaks English anymore. The government’s run by a bunch of morons who only care whether they get reelected, big money from lobbyists buying their votes, and I end up playing nursemaid to a rookie detective who can’t find his own rear end with both hands. Maybe it’s time I turned in the gold badge and we headed for Florida, like you’ve been wanting to.”
She beamed. “You mean that?”
He patted her leg and nodded. “Yeah, I mean it. It’s not going to happen tomorrow, but maybe we should start planning for it, huh? I might even drag out the golf clubs, if I can find them, and become—” He gestured broadly and intoned, “A man of leisure.”
She giggled and squeezed his hand. That was one of the things that had attracted him to her twenty-five years ago, her fresh-scrubbed naiveté, and the fact that she found almost everything he said to be funny.
“Gotta run,” he said. “I’ll see if I can leave today at a decent hour, maybe grab something out tonight. Okay?”
“Okay, boss,” she said, tossing him a snappy salute.
As she watched him drive away, her sunny face turned cloudy. She hoped he was serious about planning to retire and move to the Florida house they owned. Their three children were in different parts of the country—two sons, one in San Francisco, the other in Colorado, and a daughter living and working in Atlanta. And there were the precious grandchildren, four of them, living too far away. Planning a family reunion in Florida had been a dream of hers for the past few years. Maybe now that Walt seemed serious about considering a change, it would become a reality.
She didn’t harbor any delusions about her cop-husband. He was a difficult man by any standard, crusty, cranky, and opinionated, incapable of accepting any views that didn’t mesh with his—a true my-way-or-the-highway personality. And he was cheap, too, although she preferred to think of him as being frugal and responsible. There were times when she wished he wasn’t quite as tight-fisted with their money. He often criticized her for having spent too much at the market for foods he didn’t feel they needed, or for failing to make better use of coupons and not seeking out bargains. Buying the house in Florida had been a wrenching decision for him, and it took more than a year