A Murder of Justice (26 page)

“Does he know what happened?” Frank asked.

“You mean about his arm?”

Frank nodded.

“No. Not yet.” Forlorn, Esther shook her head. “I want to be the one to tell him, but I don’t want to be the one to tell him.”

Frank stared unhappily at his feet.

Her voice somewhat brighter, Esther said, “Let me see if I can wake him.”

Before Frank could protest, she leaned over and put her palm on her husband’s cheek and kissed him. “Leon,” she whispered. Then louder, “Leon?”

Nothing.

Frank held up a belaying hand. Before he could say anything, Janowitz stirred, a slight flutter of the eyelids, then a weak cough to clear his throat. His eyes opened and made contact with Frank’s. His lips moved.

Frank bent closer.

“Yes, Leon?”

“Frank,” Janowitz whispered, “you look like shit.”

“Thanks, Leon.”

“You okay?”

“I’m good. How you feeling?”

“Spaced out . . . What happened?”

Frank exchanged glances with Esther, who nodded slightly.

“My car was rigged with a bomb,” he said slowly. “It went off when I hit the remote to unlock it.”

It registered gradually with Janowitz. Frank felt he could see the realization bulling its way into Janowitz’s consciousness through layers of drug-suppressed pain.

“Bomb?”

Frank nodded.

Janowitz’s eyes widened in alarm. His left hand scrabbled at the sheet.

“A bomb? I still got my . . .”

Esther leaned forward and took his left hand. “Everything’s still there, sweetie.”

Leon smiled.

José rolled his eyes toward the door. “We’ll be back, Leon. Anything we can get for you?”

Janowitz was having trouble focusing, and his eyelids were fluttering rapidly. “Kill for some ice cream,” he muttered, beginning to drift off. Then, making a visible effort to double-back into consciousness, “You guys check Martin Osmond yet?”

“Today or tomorrow, Leon,” José said.

“Important,” Janowitz mumbled.

“Today or tomorrow,” José repeated.

Janowitz fought to keep his eyes on José and Frank. “You’ll let me know?” he whispered.

“Sure,” said José.

“No shit?” The words came faint, barely audible.

“No shit, partner,” José said.

F
rank turned onto Columbia Road, only partially paying attention to the early-afternoon traffic.

“I wonder how I’d take it . . . one minute walking down the street, the next thing waking up without an arm?”

José pushed his dark glasses higher on his nose with the tip of his finger. “You told him up front about the remote.”

“I don’t think it sank in.”

“It sank in?
What
sank in?” José asked irritably. “That
you blew his goddamn arm off? You wallowing in that self-blame guilt shit again?”

Janowitz’s bloodless face came back to Frank. “Can’t help it, Hoser, I couldn’t keep my mind off what was underneath those bandages. Thinking about her having to tell him . . . about when he realizes . . .”

José shifted in his seat to get a better look at Frank. “You remember the first thing he asked?”

“No. What?”

“He asked about
you
. Even before he asked about his dick. And you remember the next thing?”

“Martin Osmond.”

“Yeah. I’ll ask Daddy to set it up for us to talk with his grandmother.”

“Yeah. His file . . .”

“Eleanor ought to have it waiting when we get back.”

B
y early evening, the headache had taken a recess. Two Tsingtaos, and the stitches didn’t pull as much and the bruises didn’t protest while Frank moved around the kitchen. As he opened a third beer, Monty sprang up to the counter and settled himself on the one space he’d claimed since he was a kitten. His eyes locked with Frank’s.

“What’s on your mind?” Frank asked.

You humans.

“What now?”

The way you live.

“And?”

The cause of most of your troubles.

“We walk on our hind legs?”

You make too many decisions.

“Decisions?”

You live in a way that requires too many decisions. You are so busy deciding, you don’t have time to think.

“And the way you live?”

Monty got a bored look.
I have very few decisions to make. This lets me explore the universe. To travel in time.
To watch the things in corners that you can’t see. To talk with God.

Frank took another sip of beer. “And what does God say to you?”

Monty drew his head back as if affronted. He leaped down and made for the front door. A second later the doorbell rang.

When Frank opened the door, a smiling Kate waved an envelope. “And what am I offered in return for this court order?”

“Spinach salad, cold poached salmon, snow peas amandine, and a wholesome selection of the best of Ben and Jerry’s.”

“Pretty good kitchen work for a banged-up detective.”

“I did the salad. Dean and DeLuca did the rest.”

O
ver dinner, Frank described Calkins’s findings and the meeting with Emerson and Tompkins. When they were finished, Kate placed a “Stay put” hand on Frank’s shoulder. She cleared the table, and then poured coffee.

“So this Osmond’s the prime suspect for Gentry’s source?”

“
If
Gentry had a source. So far, this case’s a grab bag of suppositions and suspicions. According to Gentry’s CIA pal, Gentry made the recruitment in June ’ninety-eight.”

“Any chance the Agency’s dragging a red herring across the path?”

Frank shrugged. “There’s always a chance something’s going on under the blanket. The Navarro woman believes that investigating Skeeter’s operation was Rhinelander’s idea.”

“Your jackstraw game’s getting more complicated.”

Frank glanced toward the corner where Monty sat upright, a gray sphinx, gravely staring back at him, as if to say,
See, human, you make everything more complicated.

“One thing about jackstraws,” Frank said wistfully,
“you jiggle enough sticks and something happens. Problem is, sticks may not all fall your way.”

The image returned of the ICU and Leon Janowitz’s waxen face and bandaged arm.

“Leon?” Kate asked. “You can’t keep beating yourself with that.”

“Last night I sat here and went over the Vietnam album. First time I’ve done that in years. I hated that goddamn war. But I loved the guys around me. It was like we had a contract with each other . . . a responsibility. To take care of each other. And when somebody got wounded or bought the farm, each of us thought about it. Took everything apart . . . every move we’d made, every step we’d taken . . . trying to see where we might have screwed up.”

“Shoulda, coulda, woulda can haunt you if you let it,” Kate said.

Frank waved that off. “It was more than playing ‘What if?’ or taking a self-inflicted guilt trip. More than a survivor syndrome. It was self-preservation. You thought about those things so you might keep them from happening again. Because you knew if you didn’t keep those things from happening, none of you would make it through.”

A
ngel of Death got that woman marked,” Titus Phelps rumbled. “Husband got killed in that Korea War. Daughter smashed up on the Beltway. Grandson died in her front yard.” He sat in the big armchair, head to one side as though listening to the echo of his own words. The echo faded and he slowly swung his head from side to side. “Angel of Death marked her,” he repeated, with the weary air of a man who’d learned that truth had sharp edges.

“We want to see her tomorrow,” José said. He sprawled on the sofa. Across the living room, Channel 4 was giving out the evening weather and traffic. Neither man was paying attention. From the kitchen came the sounds of cooking.

“What can she tell you?”

“I don’t know. Won’t until we talk to her. If she talks to us.” He paused. “You mind calling her before we go over?”

“Mind? Yes, I mind.”

“But you’ll do it?”

“Yes,” he said wearily, “I’ll do it.”

Weather and traffic went off. A clip of Timothy McVeigh, a cut of the Murrah Federal Building, its face obscenely stripped away, then again a clip of the unsmiling crew-cut McVeigh.

“Evil man,” Titus Phelps murmured.

“You think he ought to die?” José asked.

“We all die.”

“You know what I mean . . . the death penalty.”

“For someone like him”—Titus Phelps’s eyes remained on the TV screen—“for doing something like that . . . I do.”

“But you been against capital punishment . . . always.”

“All my life.”

“But now . . .”

“I know . . . I know . . .” The man shifted in his chair to look at his son. “I used to think you get to some age, you get to some place where you’ve wrestled all your demons down. . . you’re at the magic place where doubt goes away.” He threw his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “I guess I’m still wrestlin’.”

“You knew Martin Osmond.”

Titus Phelps nodded. “Baptized him, buried him. In between, saw him in Sunday school, youth choir, league basketball.” He ran his fingertips across his forehead. “Happens a lot. Everything seems to be workin’. Then . . . the street gets them.”

“Street got Martin.”

“His mother lived, he mighta been all right. But he tied in with that Hodges boy.”

“His grandmother . . . ?”

“She did what she could,” Titus said. “You get to a certain age, your chirrun get too fast for you to keep up.”

José grinned. “I never got fast enough.”

His father swatted a hand at him. “There were times. Times I had to run plenty hard.”

“I know. I’m glad you did. You think Virginia Osmond finally gave up?”

Titus shook his head emphatically.

“Hunh! That woman doesn’t know give up. She was on that boy to the last.” He paused to think back. “There was a time . . . I thought maybe he’d get hisself straight, but . . .” Titus’s eyes strayed off into the distance, searching for a lost soul.

“She ever come to you about Martin?”

His father held up a hand. “That’s something you ask her.” As though he’d received a signal from the kitchen, he got up out of his chair. “Besides, supper’s ready.”

 THIRTY-SIX

Y
our daddy called. Said you’d be over.”

José nodded in a way that was almost a courtly bow. “Thank you for seeing us on a Sunday, Mrs. Osmond.”

Erect, as if on parade, Virginia Osmond came up to just below José’s shoulder. Her voice pulsed with a slight tremor, and her green eyes had a hollowed-out but luminous look.

“My partner, Mr. Kearney.”

Osmond gave Frank a minimal smile and motioned the men inside. “I fixed coffee and biscuits,” she said. “You don’t mind? . . . Sitting in the kitchen?”

José nodded again. “Kitchen’s the soul of the house.”

Frank got an impression of scrubbed . . . clean . . . neat. Smells of furniture polish, floor wax, and years of baking. The living room: two armchairs, a breakfront bookcase, and a camel-backed sofa. On a small table between the armchairs, a lamp, reading glasses, and an open Bible. The lamp was on, and the reading glasses rested atop the Bible.

A floral hall runner led back to the kitchen.

It was a kitchen from the 1940s or 1950s: old-fashioned
white enamel sink, refrigerator, and gas stove. A brightly colored oval rag rug covered much of the polished dark green linoleum. Four dowel-backed wood chairs waited around a sturdy harvest table. The only jarring note: ranks of prescription drug containers filling a stainless-steel surgical tray on the countertop.

Three places had been set at the table, two on one side, one on the other. Napkins, ceramic mugs, woven-rush placemats, cream, sugar, and a butter dish.

Osmond motioned to the two chairs. “Please.”

Frank and José sat. Osmond brought a coffeepot from the stove and filled the three mugs. A second trip to the stove for a basket of freshly baked biscuits, wrapped in a napkin. She offered the basket to José.

He took it, unfolded the napkin, and offered the basket to Osmond. She mouthed a “Thank you” and picked out a biscuit. José took one and passed the basket to Frank.

José paid close attention to buttering his biscuit before he looked up and said, “Mrs. Osmond, we need to talk about Martin.”

“Your father told me.” Osmond sat quietly, her hands folded in her lap.

Frank started. “People say Skeeter Hodges was selling drugs. That he made a lot of money that way.”

Osmond nodded warily. “Yes. People knew. . . they knew he was selling.”

“And people say that Martin and Skeeter spent time together.”

“Yes.” The admission came out, dragged across years of pain.

Frank was about to ask Osmond if she knew of her grandson’s dealing.

Of course she knows. What will it get you if she says yes? What will you do if she says no?

So instead he asked, “It bothered you, didn’t it? . . . Martin spending time with Skeeter?”

Osmond gazed through him as though she hadn’t heard. Then, almost inaudibly, “It bothered me a lot.”

“Did Martin ever talk with you about Skeeter?”

She shook her head. “Only when I brought it up.”

“And then?”

“And then he’d say they were just friends.”

“Nothing about Skeeter selling drugs?”

Again Osmond shook her head.

“When was the last time Martin and Skeeter hung out together?”

“They were together the afternoon Martin died.”

Frank asked, “So Martin and Skeeter Hodges were good friends?”

Osmond shook her head vigorously. “No. No they weren’t. They weren’t good friends.”

“But they were seen a lot together. And Skeeter was there at the funeral.”

“That didn’t mean
good
friends. That Hodges boy was not good. Not good for Martin. Not good for anybody. He was a tempter. He beckoned to the bad that is in us all. He was a
bad
friend.”

“And he beckoned to Martin?”

Anguish crossed Osmond’s face.

“Yes. He beckoned. I tried to give Martin the strength to say no. I thought Martin had shed himself of Skeeter. But he went back. I failed him. I raised him from a baby. His mama died and I raised him and then I failed him.”

“ ‘Shed himself’?” José repeated. “When was that?”

“Almost a year,” Osmond replied. “Almost a year to the day he got killed. He said he found Jesus.” Her eyes went rheumy, and she sat so still she might have been stone.

“And he went back . . . when?”

“June that year,” she managed in a pained whisper. “It was June.”

José said gently: “You found him. . . that night he died.”

“Yes.”

“Tell us what you saw and heard.”

Osmond closed her eyes. Her eyelids fluttered, then she opened her eyes. “It was late . . . late for me . . . almost
eleven. I was reading.” She gestured toward the living room, and Frank pictured the armchair and the lamp and the Bible.

“I hear Martin’s car pull into the driveway. I don’t hear him race the engine the way he usually does. I didn’t think anything about it for a while. But I realize I heard the door slam twice. And I didn’t hear him set his alarm . . . his horn always honked when he did that. So I went out, and he was in his car. He was lying down on the driver seat. He wasn’t breathing. I ran into the house and called nine-one-one and then went back to the car. He still wasn’t breathing.”

Osmond fell silent. Just as José was about to prompt her, she resumed. “And then I knew . . . Martin was gone.”

The old woman hugged herself, and rocked slowly back and forth, eyes distant, looking for something that she’d never see again.

“There was a sudden emptiness,” she whispered. “It was like something took flight from inside me . . . and it flew right out of my life.” Her eyes hardened. “They said Martin died of a drug overdose. They said heroin. But I knew Martin. I knew he would not do drugs.” Osmond’s hands began trembling.

José looked at Frank, who just looked back. There might be more. There probably was. But for now, it was time to go.

“Why now?” Osmond asked.

The question froze the two men as they pushed back from the table.

“Ma’am?” Frank was not certain he’d heard right, and if he had, what was Osmond driving at?

“Why now?” Osmond repeated. “My Martin’s been dead two years. Nobody came to talk to me when it happened. Now you back about Martin. Is it really about Martin? Would you be here if it wasn’t for that white man getting killed?”

The coldness penetrated the wall. It was something that writhed in Frank’s guts, something he wanted to pass off to José. And because he wanted to, he didn’t.

“No, ma’am, we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that white man getting killed.”

O
n Virginia Osmond’s front porch, Frank pulled deep at the morning air. He felt José’s hand gripping his shoulder.

“Jesus, Hoser.” He had to work to get it out.

José’s grip tightened. “I owe you one. You said the right thing.”

“Telling her it makes a difference who gets killed?”

“Always has,” José said, “always will.”

Frank looked down the street, toward where Skeeter Hodges’s Taurus had been parked.

“Truth always have to hurt?”

“No.”

“Then somebody’s gettin’ our share of the good stuff to pass out.”

“Think she’s a forgiver?” José asked.

Years earlier, over beers at the Tune Inn, Frank and José had decided there were three kinds of homicide victim’s relatives: forgetters, forgivers, and forevers. Forgetters put things behind them and moved on. Forgivers shed tears for the killer as well as for the deceased. Forevers never forgot and damn sure never forgave.

“I don’t know,” Frank said.

“Reads her Bible.”

Frank remembered walking in. . . the Bible and the reading glasses. “I think an Old Testament woman.” It was one of those things he’d say sometimes, not quite knowing how it came into his head or out of his mouth.

José nodded. “Daddy
teaches
the New Testament, but when he
preaches
, it’s the Old every time.”

Frank looked at the driveway where Martin Osmond had died. “She knows more than she’s telling us.”

“Everybody knows more,” José said. “Everybody always knows more.”

“Think she knew Martin was up to his ass in dealing?”

“Probably. Mothers know those things. They might not know everything there is, but mothers know enough.”

“She was his grandmother.”

“Mother, grandmother”—José shrugged—“same thing.”

“Martin and Skeeter together the day Gentry was shot. Then Martin buys it later that same night.”

José didn’t seem to be paying much attention. He was looking up the street. “Spring gardenin’ goin’ on.”

T
wo doors away, Edward Teasdale saw them coming and got up slowly from his knees. He stood waiting, a pair of gardening shears in one hand.

Ivy had grown through and over the chain-link fence surrounding Teasdale’s front yard. The ivy was closely trimmed, so it made a low green wall around the azalea-filled yard.

Frank and José stopped on the sidewalk.

“Morning, Mr. Teasdale. I’m—”

“You’re Kearney and you’re Phelps,” Teasdale said, pointing with the shears.

“You got a minute or two we can talk?” José asked.

“More about Skeeter?”

“Some him, some Martin Osmond.”

“Martin?” Teasdale asked. “You talked to Missus Osmond?” he asked, making certain Frank and José had touched all the bases.

“Unh-hunh.”

“Then what you need to talk with me for?”

“Martin lived here on the block,” José said. “He died here. Maybe . . . just maybe . . . you can tell us something that can help us clear up some things.”

Teasdale thought about that, then waved the shears at the front gate. “Come on in. Sit on the porch, you like. Or go inside.”

“Porch’s fine,” José said.

The porch ran across the front of the small house. A low brick balustrade held flower boxes filled with geraniums. The four massive rush-bottomed wood rockers faced the street in a precise row.

Teasdale took an end chair and turned it to face the other three.

Frank eased himself into one of the chairs and pushed back slightly to test it. The big chair rocked smoothly. Just the right amount of motion with the least effort. He caught Teasdale appraising him.

“Rocks good,” Frank said. “They cut the rocker rails wrong, chair won’t rock right.”

“Chairs over a hunnert years old. Wife brought those up from her daddy’s farm down by Charlottesville,” Teasdale said. “We’d sit out here summers. Friends come by . . .” Teasdale trailed off, thinking of a time he had had a wife and they could sit on their front porch and friends could walk down Bayless Place on a summer night.

Teasdale rocked a moment, then asked, “Why you asking about Martin? And why now? Two years later?”

José asked, “Anybody talk with you when Martin died?”

“No.”

“You lived here, what . . . thirty-some years?”

“Six,” Teasdale corrected, “thirty-six.”

“And Martin . . . his grandmother took him in after his mother was killed?”

“Boy wasn’t in school yet.” Teasdale rocked back, eyes on the ceiling in recollection. “That’d be late sixties sometime.”

“Different times then,” José said.

“Last of the good times. Nobody knew what we’d see.” Teasdale scanned Bayless Place, as if trying to recall it as it had been thirty years before.

“You saw him grow up.”

Teasdale nodded. “He’d come up here. I’d give him a quarter to do chores. Weedin’, cuttin’ grass. Boy liked to work. He got older, taught him to take up for himself.
Missus Osmond’s a good lady, but there’s things a boy got to learn from a man.”

Sadness dragged at Teasdale’s eyes.

“Bad,” José said, “him dying that way.”

“Bad, him gettin’ messed up with people who do shootin’ and drugs. Bible tells us about livin’ by the sword.”