A Murder of Justice (14 page)

“I have two things. They are not much, but . . .” He paused apologetically. “. . . they are some
thing
.” He came in heavy on the last syllable.

“Yes, Waverly?”

“The two things—one, Skeeter Hodges had insurance, and two, there are eyes on you and Detective Phelps.”

 EIGHTEEN

S
keeter had insurance?” José scoffed. “Didn’t get his money’s worth.”

“Maybe he didn’t keep up the premiums.”

“Names?”

“I asked Waverly who he heard it from—”

“Yeah?”

“He heard two guys he didn’t know jiving about it while they were looking for a watch.”

“And the eyes business?”

“Same guys . . . ‘eyes on you and Detective Phelps.’ ”

“He’d recognize them if he saw them again?”

Frank shook his head. “Two black males, late twenties, early thirties. Medium build. Shorter than Waverly.”

“Big help.” José tilted back in his chair and gazed out the window. The Weather Channel had predicted rain. Not a cloud in the sky. His eyes came back to Frank. “They had our names? I mean, Waverly said . . . ?”

“Yeah, he did. He said they said our names—Kearney and Phelps.”

The two men sat thinking about it, neither moving.
Finally José broke the silence. “Two calls this morning. Salvani and Gideon.”

“Oh?”

“Salvani wasn’t happy.”

“Unh-hunh?”

“He talked with Congressman Rhinelander.”

“And?”

“Just that the congressman didn’t want us digging in the subcommittee files, and was talking about calling Emerson about us.”

“Oh, shit.”

Emerson’s face . . . first, the wide eyes as he realized he really had heard what he thought he’d heard. Then the shattered look of disbelief. Finally the angry flush of betrayal. Get yelled at by Chief Day or, God forbid, the mayor.

“Salvani said he did some damage control.”

“Oh? Rhinelander just going to shoot us outright? No drawing and quartering?”

“We got a command performance with the congressman today.”

“We? You and me?”

“Yeah. I figure we’re gonna get a lecture, but we’ll get in. Otherwise Rhinelander’d be talking with Emerson.”

“Time?”

“TBD . . .” José said. “Sometime this afternoon.”

“Gideon . . . ?”

“He wants us to drop by.”

“He didn’t say why?”

José shook his head. “Maybe he and Waverly been listening in on the same party line.”

“Why don’t you take that? I want to do a little digging on Congressman Rhinelander.”

“Where you going to dig?”

“The Dragon Lady,” Frank said, reaching for the phone.

José nodded. He stood and gathered his cell phone and pager. He got the look of a man who had remembered something.

“Frank . . . ?”

Phone at his ear, Frank looked up.

“Those guys with our names . . . they said Kearney
and
Phelps?”

“That’s what Waverly said.”

José smiled. “Tell me, brother, how’d you get top billing?”

 NINETEEN

C
ommuters jammed the incoming lanes of the Fourteenth Street bridge. José eyed the bumper-to-bumper traffic as he drove past the Jefferson Memorial toward northern Virginia. He glanced at his watch.

Ten o’clock. Where the hell do all these people work, coming in this hour? Next life, I’m gonna get me a job like that—come in late, leave early, and nobody shoots at you.

Across the bridge, he swung off a ramp to his right, circled beneath the bridge, and headed south to Reagan National. Taking the left lane on the racetrack that routed cars by the terminals, he turned off into the hourly parking garage for US Airways. He drove slowly down one lane then the next until he’d covered the ground level, then took the ramp up and repeated the process on the second level.

As he came off the ramp onto the third level, he spotted the dark blue Ford Econoline van. He drove past the van and pulled into a slot two rows away. The early-morning flurry of passengers for the New York and Boston shuttles had subsided. The garage, filled with waiting automobiles, was still.

José got out and looked around over the tops of the cars. Terry Quinn had died in a garage like this. Shots and screeching tires had filled the semidarkness, and Terry’s brains had been splattered over the grease-stained floor. After the shooting, there’d been the cold silence, a weeping emptiness that came from an adrenaline hangover and the losing struggle to deny the in-your-bones knowledge of loss.

In the middle distance, the roar of engines on the runways.

His footsteps made hollow cupping sounds on the concrete as he approached the van. He reached inside his jacket and loosened his pistol in its holster. Coming up on the van from the right rear, he made out someone in the passenger seat, then circled around behind the vehicle. He walked to the driver’s side and tapped on the window.

The window lowered with a whine.

“Morning, Gideon.”

“Josephus.”

Weaver touched a button, and the cargo door slid open. José climbed into the van and settled in the backseat.

“This’s Cookie.” Weaver motioned to the passenger seat.

Cookie didn’t turn around. He had lowered his visor so that its mirror gave him a bank shot of José. All José saw in the mirror was a pair of wraparound Oakleys eyeballing him.

I paid that much for shades like that, I’d have Internal Affairs down on me in no damn time.

“Cookie? There a last name?”

“Cookie’s good enough.”

The voice was young and sullen, and José thought he sensed an undercurrent of fear.

“Cookie,” Weaver said gently, “tell your story.”

“I don’t answer no questions I don’t want to.”

“Your call, Cookie,” José said.

Cookie sat immobile and silent.

“Cookie.” This time Weaver had a warning note in his voice.

“Skeeter wanted Z-Bug dead because Z-Bug killed that whitey what brought down all the shit.” Cookie spewed it out and fell silent.

Z-Bug? Zelmer Austin? . . . Whitey? Gentry? Where’s this shit coming from?

As if he’d read José’s mind, Weaver said in a whisper, “Tell us where you got this, Cookie.”

“TV sayin’ Z-Bug didn’t kill that whitey, so why you give a shit?” Cookie asked.

“Just want to know where you heard it, Cookie.”

Cookie glanced out the side window, then started in a low, nearly inaudible voice. “Pencil tol’ me. Me ’n’ him was partyin’ one day and he got to braggin “bout how big his balls was.”

José nodded. “Pencil tell you why Z-bug did the whitey?”

“Said Z-Bug was feelin’ like poppin’ a cap on some whitebread mu’fucka.”

“Watch your mouth,” Gideon cut in. “God don’t like ugly.”

Cookie gave an almost imperceptible nod to show he’d heard. “He did the whitey.”

José detected excitement in Cookie’s voice.

Cookie hesitated, as though making certain his audience was still with him.

Once a snitch gets on about his story, he keeps on to the end.

“Yeah,” José urged, “go.”

“Z-Bug was partyin’ at his girlfriend’s house. They drank up all the Stoly. Z-Bug’s woman blasted him a couple times. Pencil said Z-Bug started yellin’ . . . screamin’ how he wanted to kill him a white man.”

“Unh-hunh,” José whispered.

“Z-Bug went out. Did it.”

“Killed the white man?”

“Yeah!” Cookie said in a tight, excited voice. “Oh, yeah!”

“What night was this?”

“Long time ago.”

“When’d you hear this?”

Cookie thought. “Year, maybe more.”

“You tell this to any police?”

In the rearview, José got a long look from Cookie through the Oakleys.

“It could help,” José added.

Cookie said nothing, but bobbed his head trying to figure out how much the truth might cost, then, “Yeah. A plainclothes name Milton.”

Not wanting to seem eager, or let Cookie know it was important, José took a couple of breaths before asking, “Those real Oakleys, Cookie?”

Cookie almost turned around. “Course they real.”

“Thought so. Good-lookin’ shades.”

“That all you want?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Cookie shifted, ready to open the door.

“By the way,” José asked, “you tell this cop Milton you heard the story from Pencil? Or from Z-Bug’s woman?”

Cookie sat still, as though somebody had thrown a switch and turned him off. In a sudden motion, he opened his door and got out. He looked back into the van at José.

“I tol’ you how it was, an’ I tol’ you how I tol’ that cop,” he said, voice rising, “You start givin’ me that ‘this or that’ shit.” He slammed the door, and walked away toward the entrance to the Metro.

José knew not to ask Weaver for Cookie’s real name. Weaver wouldn’t tell him, but Weaver could find him again.

Weaver sighed. “Young ones . . . they want to fly like eagles, but then they wear their pants down around their buttocks.”

F
rank bought a copy of the
Post
from a vending machine at the corner of Sixteenth and H, and walked into Lafayette Square. The Secret Service had closed off Pennsylvania
Avenue after the Oklahoma City bombing, and you could see straight through the square to the White House without having traffic block your view. That part he liked. The other part, though, he didn’t. Adding more locks to your doors didn’t mean you were any safer. Only that you were more isolated. Bearing right, he found his favorite bench and sat down. For a moment, he gazed across Jackson Place at Stephen Decatur’s home.

Swashbuckling naval hero of the War of 1812. Conqueror of the Barbary pirates. Dead at forty-one, killed in a duel. Back in Decatur’s day, you could walk up to the White House, knock on the door, and ask to speak to the president.

Frank opened the
Post.

The chemical industry was fighting the EPA over a report on dioxin. China had finally released the crew of the American EP-3 intelligence plane. A survey had counted 12,850 homeless in the Washington metro area. And forty-three people had died in a South African soccer stadium stampede.

“Good morning, Lieutenant. Any good news?”

Frank looked up. “I thought you’d know.”

Jessica Talbot was small—barely five feet—a delicately rounded face punctuated by dark eyes and framed by a halo of dark hair swept into a bun on the top of her head.

The first time Frank saw her, he figured Seven Sisters, Washington A-list, Kennedy Center patron, National Cathedral altar guild—quintessential bleeding-heart, little-pinky liberal.

He’d figured wrong. The only girl in a Pittsburgh steel family of five boys, a scholarship to Penn State. Ten years as an Associated Press stringer in Laos, Botswana, Nicaragua, and a dozen other pestilential-fever swamps whose major exports were malaria, dysentery, and plague. Jessica Talbot—never,
ever
Jess—had started at the bottom when the top management of the
Post
was known as the HBC—Harvard Boys’ Club—and had demolished several
glass ceilings before the term had been coined. Along the way she picked up a Pulitzer and turned out several generations of reporters who wrote simple declarative sentences in plain English.

“I don’t do good news,” Talbot said, sitting down next to Frank. “Just the bad stuff. The kind that sells papers.”

Frank folded the newspaper and put it beside him on the bench.

Talbot pulled a pack of unfiltered Camels from her purse, along with a battered Zippo lighter. She stuck a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. “Tell me”—she fired up the Zippo—“tell me what was behind the Calkins firing.”

“I thought you were on the foreign desk. Aren’t you supposed to worry about France and Bangladesh?”

“I live
here
, Lieutenant. Not Bangladesh,
which
, I might add, is safer than the District.”

“That’s because judges in Bangladesh don’t let killers out of jail.”

Talbot sailed a plume of smoke skyward. “Touché, Lieutenant. And speaking of judges who don’t let killers out, how’s your dad?”

“In love.”

Talbot nodded approvingly. “That’ll either kill him right away or add another twenty years.”

“I think add another twenty.”

Another drag on the Camel, and Talbot turned to business. “Okay, now . . . Calkins?”

“He was suspended, not fired.”

Talbot shrugged. “Whatever . . . hung out to dry.”

“Emerson covering his ass.”

“Washington’s favorite pastime. Calkins screw up?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You want to know about Frederick Rhinelander. He a suspect?”

“He’s a congressman.”

“As Twain said, a member of America’s only criminal class.”

“He was Kevin Gentry’s boss.”

Talbot reached into her purse and brought out an envelope. “Clips,” she explained, handing it to Frank.

He weighed the thick envelope in his palm, then put it in a pocket inside his jacket. “You said you knew him personally.”

“Him and his wife. She’s on the board of directors.”

“Of the
Post
?”

“It
is
a publicly traded company. And she—her family—owns a big chunk of our stock.” Talbot paused like a diver at the edge of a high board. She gave Frank a severe look. “This is background,” she warned. “This gets out, you’re dog meat.”

“Go.”

“Tom and Daisy Buchanan,” Talbot said cryptically.

“I’m sorry?”

“The couple in
The Great Gatsby
.”

“That’s Rhinelander and . . .”

“His wife, Gloria . . . Gloria Principi Rhinelander,” Talbot said. She took a drag deep into her lungs and Frank remembered how good a cigarette could taste. “Fitzgerald described Tom and Daisy as ‘careless people.’ He must have known Frederick and Gloria Rhinelander.”

“Sloppy careless?”

“No. Careless in the sense that they didn’t care about the consequences of their behavior. They never had to as kids. They’ve never had to as adults.”

“Entitled.”

Talbot blew a near-perfect smoke ring and watched as it dissipated. “Old-money people are interesting. Especially the men. A frightened bunch.”

“What’s scary if you got more money than God?”

“Losing it. A market crash. Somebody taking it from you. You see, they know deep inside that the money is what makes everything possible for them. It buys them through life. It buys things, influence. Even buys them friends. They know they wouldn’t be who they are without it. And because they inherited the money . . . because they didn’t
earn it . . . they don’t have the foggiest idea how to make more if they lose what they have.”

“And so?”

“And so they see danger around every corner. Everyone they meet is out to rip them off. They have a terrible sense of vulnerability.”

“Where’d the money come from . . . originally?”

“His from four generations of Boston banking and shipping. Hers from a father who set up a chain of pizza parlors, then sold out and got lucky in the market.”