A Murder of Justice (10 page)

“How much?”

McDonnell shook his head. “Here. Take it.”

“I can’t. How much?”

McDonnell looked at Frank, then at the book, then back to Frank.

“You already have
The Praetorians.
” McDonnell thrust the book closer to Frank. “Please.”

Frank took it. Tight binding. Only the slightest shelf wear at the jacket edges.

“I can’t.”

McDonnell had dropped his hand back into his lap. “Make a donation to the Salvation Army.”

Frank thought about putting the book down on the stack by the Kaypro, then thought better of it.

“Thanks,” he said. He felt uncomfortable. As if he’d witnessed a personal tragedy and knew he ought to say something comforting but couldn’t find the words.

McDonnell broke the silence. “Haven’t seen your dad.”

“Moved back to the country.”

McDonnell nodded approvingly.

On impulse, Frank asked, “What’s the deal on Frederick Rhinelander?”

A woman came by, paused to browse over the books by the computer, and moved on. McDonnell watched her walk away, then looked up at Frank.

“Three-term congressman. Republican. New Hampshire.” McDonnell recited the basics.

Like somebody had flipped a memory switch.

“Personals?”

“Personal? . . . A piss-ant.” McDonnell said it dispassionately, without a trace of rancor. “All the nightmare insecurities of a little man who’s got a lot of money he didn’t earn.”

“Piss-ant? A member of Congress?”

McDonnell smiled, shrugged, and went back to his inventory.

Frank held up
The Centurions
. “Thanks.”

“You’re still missing
Yellow Fever
,” McDonnell said, eyes on the computer screen.

“You look for it?”

“Yes. But time’s running out.”

“And I pay.”

“Sure.”

“Closing a bookstore must be a lot like going to the gallows,” Frank said. It had popped into his head and out of his mouth.

McDonnell, eyes still on the computer screen, gave no sign he’d heard.

Frank hesitated, and turned to leave. Then he heard McDonnell behind him.

“Life’s pleasant, Frank. Death’s peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.”

Frank turned back.

McDonnell looked up from the computer and smiled a benediction.

 ELEVEN

M
ilton, a white guy with a graying brush-cut, wore jeans and a khaki shirt. Yellow-lens shooting glasses and a pair of sound-suppressing earmuffs around his neck accented his high cheekbones and gave him the lean look of a hunter, which he had been once.

He sat on the bench between Frank and José, the Gentry case folder open in his lap. On the firing line, ten or so feet away, a single plainclothes—a female officer—practiced slow fire at a silhouette target. The peppery nitro odor of gunpowder hung in the air.

Milton ran his hand over the jacket. He looked at José, then Frank. “You say ballistics connect Gentry and Skeeter?”

Frank nodded.

“And Calkins did the analysis?”

“Yes.”

Milton’s eyes shifted into the distance, as he worked to pull together the implications of what Frank and José were saying.

“Tell us about your snitch, Milt.”

“In so many words, the guy told me that Zelmer Austin got his head fucked up and decided to bag a honkie. He came back that night and told his woman he’d done it. Shot a guy at the Capitol South station.”

“That’s it?”

“Look,” Milton said. “You guys know how it is. . . . It’s a cold day in hell when a snitch comes to you with the whole story. All’s you get are little pieces. This was this asshole’s little piece. It wasn’t the only piece.”

“He say how he knew?”

“Said he got it from Austin’s woman.”

“You check?”

“We couldn’t find her. You know how these bitches are. . . .” Milton turned to Frank, then José, seeking agreement.

Milton got a look as if things were crumbling inside him. He was silent for a long time, staring at the jacket. “I got a goddamn ulcer from that case. Everybody from the mayor on down was on my ass. Fucking Emerson was over me like flies on a manure pile.”

“We remember,” Frank said.

Milton looked at Frank. “I guess it’s open again.”

“Yeah,” José said.

Giving no sign he’d heard José, Milton watched the shooter on the firing line squeeze off another round. “Same gun . . .” he whispered to himself. “Gentry and Skeeter Hodges.”

Milton handed the folder back to Frank.

Frank took it, but Milton held on for a second or two. When he dropped his hand, his eyes met Frank’s.

“Yeah?” Frank prompted.

Milton got up. He faced Frank and José. He motioned toward the folder. “I thought we had that case
good
, Frank. Wired. Or I wouldn’t have let Emerson . . .”

“I’m sure you did.”

“I mean
wired
.”

F
rank started the car. He heard gunfire in the distance.

Bam. . .bam. . .bam.

The single shooter on the range.

“I don’t feel like going back to the office,” he said.

“Me neither.”

“Where to?”

“Long time since we been to the Smithsonian.”

“National Gallery?”

“How about the Air and Space?” José pondered this, then nodded to himself. “Yeah. I feel like Air and Space. Something mechanical. You know, with wings and wheels and engines and shit like that.”

T
he National Air and Space Museum is one of Washington’s feature attractions. The busiest museum in the world pulls in more than nine million visitors a year. After flashing his credentials, Frank eased the Crown Vic down the ramp to the restricted underground garage.

A minute or two later, he and José stood in the elevator as the doors whooshed open onto the main entrance hall, the Milestones of Flight gallery.

Wow!

Frank felt a smile inside. No matter how many times he’d been to Air and Space, the sight touched off the same schoolboy reaction.

There stood
Friendship 7,
John Glenn’s spacecraft, scorched and battered by its fiery reentry through Earth’s atmosphere. High above Glenn’s capsule, Lindbergh’s
Spirit of St. Louis
flew in formation with the Wright Brothers’ “flyer,” a boxy kite of white muslin wings and brown ash struts.

For almost half an hour, the two men worked their way back through aviation history, from an Apollo lunar orbiter and Chuck Yeager’s Bell X-1 to the old classics—a Douglas DC-3, a beautiful Beech Staggerwing.

They came to a stop in front of Otto Lilienthal’s hang glider, suspended as if in flight. Frank stared up at the frail
craft. A manikin dangled in a harness below the birdlike wings of the century-old glider. A placard explained that Lilienthal had died in a crash. Several years later, the Wright brothers had used his data to build their own powered machine and launch a revolution.

“Good choice, coming here.”

“Yeah,” José said. He was looking at the Lilienthal glider too. “Something about airplanes . . . you got to do them right. There’s something clean about them. Bullshit and a fancy paint job can’t make them fly. Basics—all comes down to basics.”

Frank’s mind skipped a groove or two. He’d been thinking about the glider; then he caught what José had said about basics. Skeeter popped up, and Frank connected basics to the killing.

“Same gun killed Skeeter that killed Gentry,” he said.

José didn’t respond.

Frank went on. “Question is, same person? Two years. Long time for a killer to hold the same weapon.”

“Yeah.” José sounded as though he were only half listening.

Frank looked at José’s sad frown. “I know.” Frank sighed. “I feel the same way.”

“Milt shouldn’t have folded like that.”

“I know. But it must have seemed easy at the time to pin the rose on Austin. No red flags. After all, it wasn’t like Austin was a choirboy. And the snitch did know the holdouts.”

José didn’t say anything, but the frown stayed put.

“Emerson’s got to be sweating,” Frank said.

José nodded. “Yeah. It gets out he pressured Milt . . .”

“You know,” Frank ventured, “Milt always wanted that job running the range. Regular hours, no pressure. A good job to see him to retirement.”

“You saying Emerson paid him off?”

“Whether he did or he didn’t, that’s what it’ll look like. And Emerson knows it.”

 TWELVE

. . . Z
elmer Austin . . . hit-and-run?” Kate asked.

Ahead on N Street, streetlamps cast pools of light on brick sidewalks laid before the Revolutionary War. Frank savored the feeling of well-being that came from sharing good food and wine with Kate. Earlier, while waiting for her at the bar, he had made a resolution to stay away from Gentry and Skeeter. The resolution held less than a minute after he and Kate had gotten seated. The rest of the dinner had been spent sifting through every nuance of the crowded day. Frank realized with a start that they’d had three coffees after dessert and that Cafe Milano was now packed with Washington’s Euro-émigrés; as the night wore on here, the legs got longer and the skirts shorter.

“So Zelmer Austin didn’t kill Kevin Gentry?”

They reached Thirtieth Street and walked south toward Olive.

“They found a pistol with him, but it was clean. No ballistics history. Zelmer himself was capable. Nasty piece of work. He’d been one of Juan Brooks’s enforcers. Slipped one first-degree charge, two on manslaughter.”

“That man has questionable intentions, young lady.”

Frank and Kate turned toward the sound of the voice.

Charlie Whitmire walked down Thirtieth Street toward them, led by Murphy, a toffee-colored Wheaten terrier. Charlie, Frank’s next-door neighbor, could wear anything and still come across as fastidious. Tonight he had on a pair of khaki shorts and a faded Gold’s Gym sweatshirt. Short white hair and softly rounded features created the impression of an aging cherub, an impression destroyed by his roguish grin and floorwalker’s discovering eyes. Charlie and his partner, Jack, had lived on Olive Street for nineteen years, and they had been the first to welcome Frank to the neighborhood.

“Hi, Charlie, Murph,” Kate said, stooping to scratch Murphy’s ears.

They all walked down Thirtieth toward Olive.

“Stopped by earlier,” Charlie said. “You were out.”

“Cafe Milano,” Frank answered.

“The place to be, right, Murph?” Charlie turned to Frank: “You’re going to be a busy boy.”

“Always am, Charlie.”

“Bus
ier.
I was talking with a friend on the news desk. She said the Gentry case is opening up again.”

“You guys know already?”

“Frank,” Charlie said in a reproachful tone, “this is a town full of spooks, investigators, and media monkeys like me. Secrets last only until the first phone call. Besides, you got something against freedom of the press?”

“Hell no, Charlie. Some of my best friends are reporters.”

Charlie threw his head back in mock distaste. “I am
not
a reporter,” he said with dignity. “I am a
columnist
. A sensitive, compassionate observer of life and living.”

“You work for a newspaper,” Frank said.

Charlie smiled big and slightly evil. “Newspapers! Thank God they exist, otherwise I couldn’t find work in mainstream society.”

“Gentry?” Kate made it a question.

“Oh,” said Charlie. “
That
. That came in over the wire.
Also that a congressman . . . Rhinelander? . . . is calling for an investigation of D.C. Homicide.”

They turned the corner onto Olive Street.

“We’re headed home,” Frank said. “You and Murph want to come in for coffee or a drink?”

Charlie looked tempted, then held up an empty blue plastic bag, the kind newspapers came in. “You owe me. Murph hasn’t gotten all her walk in yet.”

I
nside, Kate settled on the small sofa in the breakfast room. Frank stood at the kitchen counter and debated whether to take care of the coffeemaker or pay attention to the answering machine’s insistently blinking red eye. He compromised and checked the caller ID.

“José,” he said, punching the answering machine’s Play button.

“Hey, Frank,” came José’s voice, “don’t forget to pick me up, tomorrow—Savoy’s. Oh . . . case you missed it, the Gentry thing’s on the damn tube. Worsham at eight. Had an interview with Congressman Rhinelander.” José’s sigh filled the room. “Bend over . . .”

Frank punched the Off button. “. . . and kiss your ass good-bye,” he finished. He stood staring at the machine, imagining how tomorrow would go.

“Come here, big boy,” he heard Kate say.

He got a warm, sensual feeling in his stomach. He turned in time to see Monty spring lightly into Kate’s lap.

She held Monty against her breast. The big cat purred, eyes closed, head resting on her shoulder.

Frank tried to freeze-frame the scene, knowing that he couldn’t.

Life goes on. Any second she’ll move and the picture’ll be gone. Nothing stays the same. Memory’s a blessing, he remembered his father saying once. Without it, there’d be no tomorrow, because there’d be no yesterday.

“What’re you thinking about?” Kate looked up at him and the picture went away.

“Us,” he said.

“What about us?”

“Just us,” he said.

P
enny.” Kate’s whisper came through the dark, warm and close to his ear.

Frank turned toward her and lined his body up against hers. “Ever play jackstraws?”

“Pick-up sticks? Not recently.”

“Remember how you have to lift off one stick at a time without disturbing the others? If you lift off enough to get the black stick, you win?”

“Oh-
kay
?”

“Just thinking about the other players in the game.”

“Emerson?”

“He’s one. Him . . . the media . . . this congressman, Rhinelander.”

“All after the black stick?”

“No. Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“They got different black sticks. Emerson’s is a good set of numbers.”

“So?”

“So he sets up a machine that gives him good numbers. You work for Emerson and you want an ‘Attaboy,’ you give him good numbers.”

“You and José don’t.”

“No. We got to where we are before Emerson came on the scene. And we aren’t going any further. Two old-timers who’ve vested retirement and who aren’t sucking for promotion are bulletproof.”

“But they’re expendable.”

“That too,” Frank said.

“And the congressman . . . his black stick?”

“Rhinelander and the media will play off each other. He wants the publicity he’s going to get if he investigates the department. The media knows law enforcement that works
doesn’t sell papers. So Mr. Rhinelander puts on a circus, shows that law enforcement’s broken, and the media sells papers.”

Kate put her hand on his neck. At the blood-warm crossroads of neck and shoulder. “And you and José, your stick is getting the killer. Simple as that?”

“It’s good enough. The shooters have their way, they’re going to sink the ship.”

“And you and José stop enough of them, the ship doesn’t sink?”

“Something like that.”

“And the ship? Is it going to be a better ship?”

Frank felt his pulse beating against her hand and wanted her hand there forever.

“Not our job to make it better. Just to keep it floating.”