A Murder of Justice (28 page)

“No question how Rhinelander knew about that task-force shit,” José said.

Frank nodded. “Nobody ever accused Randolph Emerson of not knowing which side his toast was buttered on.”

José’s cell phone chimed. He answered, then, covering the mike pickup, whispered, “R.C.”

“You’re where?” José asked into the phone.

A pause.

“We’ll be right there,” he told Calkins. He folded the phone and turned to Frank. “We both gettin’ absentminded.”

It came to Frank: The court order in his jacket pocket . . . Renfro Calkins waiting for José and him at the Riggs Bank. “After that crap in there”—he jerked a thumb back over his shoulder—“last thing I feel like doing is pushing a car that’s run out of gas.”

“Aw, come on,” José urged, “our chance to give the Bureau a little local assistance.”

A
cross Pennsylvania Avenue, half a block east of the White House and opposite the U.S. Treasury, Riggs Bank is Washington’s oldest private financial institution. Riggs financed Samuel Morse’s invention of the telegraph. Abraham Lincoln opened his Riggs account weeks after Jefferson Davis closed his. And court order or not, Riggs took care that its safe-deposit boxes remained as secure as its billions in assets. It was early afternoon before a vice-president ushered Frank, José, and Calkins into a small vaulted room.

The Riggs vice-president watched with rapt attention as
Calkins opened his print kit, dusted the exterior of the steel safe-deposit box, and lifted the prints. When he had finished, Frank and José placed the box contents in a heavy cardboard carton and signed the releases that returned the box to the bank.

S
ix hours and four carafes of coffee later, Frank tossed his pencil down, cupped his chin in his palm and surveyed his desk, cluttered with notes, crumpled papers, and a take-out container that earlier had held a prosciutto and Taleggio cheese sandwich. Three hours before, R.C. had called in with a preliminary: unsurprisingly, he’d found several sets of Gentry’s prints on the exterior of the safe-deposit box. Martin Osmond’s had appeared as well, on the packet of receipts and, of course, on the will and the cassettes.

Frank glanced at the whiteboard, covered with a hash of dates, times, names. He felt a sudden weariness welling up, a soul-deep exhaustion that had nothing to do with the hour or the stress of the day. He imagined he saw it too in José’s eyes.

“Why’d it happen, Hoser?”

“I think that’s pretty clear,” José said in a flat, leaden tone.

“No,” Frank disagreed. “
What
happened’s clear. Why . . . ?” He asked.

José got up and stretched. “The U.S. attorney’s satisfied with what happened. We called Atkins. Question is, we gonna let Emerson know?”

Their eyes met.

“Well,” José said with a conspiratorial smile, “I
had
to ask.” He paused, then asked, “How about Tompkins?”

Frank decided that José was working way ahead of him.

“Think so, Hoser,” he said. Then, assurance building, “Definitely.”

 THIRTY-EIGHT

J
ust after nine, Frank found a parking place on Virginia Avenue opposite the Watergate complex. José got out and stood on the sidewalk, looking up at the tall yellow stucco building that was now a George Washington University dormitory.

“Lost a real piece of American history there,” he said.

Frank followed José’s gaze. The dorm once was a Howard Johnson’s. And not just any HoJo. This was the Howard Johnson’s where Nixon’s dirty-tricks team planned their break-in of the Democratic Party’s campaign headquarters in 1972.

“I always wondered about those guys,” Frank said as he opened the car trunk. “I mean, two of those guys . . . E. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy.” He lifted out the small tape deck. “I don’t think we would have made the cut: J. Adams Phelps and F. Delano Kearney don’t have quite the same ring.”

B
rian Atkins opened the door. He wore faded khakis, a chambray work shirt, and Top-Siders. Over his shoulder, Frank took in a large, softly lit living room. Two dove-gray sofas faced each other, framing a powerfully colored red and blue Persian carpet and a low, intricately carved Chinese bamboo-and-elm table. Against a wall, a very good seascape oil hung over a black lacquer sideboard.

“Gentlemen, come in.” Atkins smiled. He momentarily eyed the tape deck Frank had slung over his shoulder, then turned to lead them to an enclosed balcony. Four teak chairs looked out on the Potomac, black and glistening in the night, and in the distance, headlights raced across Key Bridge between Rosslyn and Georgetown. In the background, jazz played on an unseen sound system.

Frank noticed a highball glass on the coffee table between the chairs.

“I’m having a little medicinal scotch,” Atkins said. “You guys?”

“Beer?” José semi-asked.

“Pilsner Urquell? Tecate?” Atkins offered. “I’ve somehow accumulated a regular United Nations in the fridge.”

“Anything cold,” José said.

Frank nodded. “Same here.”

Atkins disappeared, and Frank stepped closer to the glass wall of the balcony. Five stories directly below, Rock Creek Parkway. To his right and at a greater distance, Georgetown Foundry and the waterfront, and, somewhere in the darkness, the bench where he wished he and Kate were sitting now.

“Music too loud?”

Frank turned. Atkins was setting two Tecates and frosted mugs on the coffee table.

“Monk’s never too loud,” José said.

“This’s early Thelonious,” Atkins said as the three settled into their chairs.

“Riverside label,” José furnished. “With Gerry Mulligan?”

Atkins silently saluted José with his scotch. He watched as the two men filled their mugs. Then he was all business. “You guys didn’t come here for beer and jazz.”

Frank sipped his beer. It had a bitter metallic taste. “No, we didn’t.”

“You said there’s something new.”

“Some background first?” Frank asked. Getting a nod from Atkins, he put the beer down on the coffee table. “In the files we’re going to be turning over to the Bureau, there’re interviews in which two people told us that shortly before his death, Kevin Gentry was investigating Skeeter Hodges’s operation.”

Atkins’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “Investigating?”

“In preparation for congressional hearings,” José said.

“That’s . . . interesting.”

“You didn’t know?” Frank asked. “Neither Gentry nor Rhinelander said anything to you?”

Atkins smiled. “Hell, they may have and I just forgot or didn’t pay attention at the time. Some committee on the Hill is always talking about investigating something or somebody.”

“And then we go back to the weapon that killed Skeeter,” José picked up. “Two years before the shooting on Bayless Place, the same weapon was used to kill Gentry . . .”

“And the shell casings that you found on Bayless had Pencil’s fingerprints,” Atkins finished. Then, as if making a mental note to himself, “That pistol . . . if we only knew where it went . . . where it is now.”

“We may never know,” Frank said. “But there are some things we do know.”

“Oh?”

“We know that Gentry recruited somebody inside Skeeter’s organization.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Gentry told two people, who then told us . . . a guy he’d worked with at the Agency and the director of a think tank.”

“The insider has a name?”

“Martin Osmond,” Frank said

Atkins got a reflective look. “The name’s familiar . . .”

“He’s dead,” José said. “Died of a heroin overdose the same night Gentry was shot.”

“So, two men, both dead for over two years.” Atkins sipped at his scotch, then shook his head. “We’re seeing a replay of the old adage that dead men tell no tales.”

“But they leave things behind.” Frank pulled the safe-deposit key from his pocket and laid it beside his beer on the coffee table. “This is to a safe-deposit box Kevin Gentry maintained at Riggs Bank,” he explained. “Leon Janowitz found it in Gentry’s files in the Library of Congress archives.”

Atkins leaned forward, picked up the key, examined it, then put it back on the table. “And in the box?” he asked.

“A number of things,” Frank said. “A hundred and twenty thousand in cash. And Martin Osmond’s will.”

“A . . .
will?
”

“Osmond knew the game he was playing,” José said. “He left the money to his grandmother.”

“And in a box controlled by Gentry,” Atkins said.

“Gentry kept receipts,” José said. “Payouts began in June ’ninety-eight. They came out of a subcommittee account.”

Atkins held up a hand. “Let me guess . . . The payments totaled a hundred twenty K. So it’s obvious. . . Gentry slipped up somehow. Or maybe Osmond. Anyway, Skeeter and Pencil decide to take them out.”

Frank nodded. “That’s part of it. Some loose ends . . . like who killed Skeeter and, later, Pencil and his lady friend?”

“And who nearly killed you and Leon Janowitz?” Atkins added. “We’ll be nailing all that down.”

“Maybe we can help you,” José said.

Atkins pointed to the key. “That certainly did.”

“That box was full of surprises.”

Something in Frank’s voice brought Atkins’s eyes up. “Oh?”

Frank pulled an audiocassette from an inner coat pocket. “This isn’t the original,” he explained. “It’s a copy of one Osmond made from the original . . . a cassette that Skeeter and Pencil recorded.” He put the cassette on the coffee table, next to the safe-deposit key. Then he reached down and brought up the portable tape deck, flicked it on, and inserted the cassette.

“This’ll be interesting,” he said, as he pressed the Play button.

A hammering rap blasted from the small tape player.

Atkins winced.

Frank turned the volume down. “A recorder in Skeeter’s car was picking this up. This was in June ’ninety-two.”

“I still don’t . . .” Atkins said, frowning.

The tape went silent. Then a burst of static. The sound of a car door opening. Frank pressed the Pause button.

“The first voice is Skeeter Hodges.”

“How you doin’?”

It was a cruel, sly voice of arrogance and condescension.

Frank pressed the Pause button again.

Atkins stared at the tape deck, seemingly hypnotized.

Frank reached for the Play button, waited, and looked into Atkins’s eyes. “And the next voice is yours.”

“You called about a deal.”

“Yeah. You want Juan Brooks?”

“Yes.”

“You know who I am?”

“You’re James Hodges. You give me Brooks . . . what do you want?”

“I walk. Me, my friends Martin Osmond, Pencil Crawfurd.”

Frank punched the Stop button. Atkins had a thousand-yard stare—a man who’d seen a wished-away hell suddenly reappear, yawning open at his feet.

“You and Skeeter cut the deal,” Frank said, dispassionately, even sadly. “He’d turn in Juan Brooks. You’d get the publicity. And he’d inherit Brooks’s outfit.”

“And then Skeeter kept helping you.” José’s tone was less sympathetic, a tone borrowed from his father’s pulpit. “Skeeter would finger his competition. You’d shut them down. You’d put another notch in your badge, Skeeter’d add another piece of turf.”

Atkins sat emotionless, rocking ever so slightly in cadence, matching what he was hearing against some internal master record.

“You kept the heat off Skeeter,” Frank said in a hoarse whisper. “Warned him whenever the posse was saddling up.”

“Skeeter didn’t do the glitz that Juan Brooks did,” José said. “Even so, as he got bigger, it got harder for you to keep the heat off him.”

Frank leaned forward sympathetically. “Two years ago, Gentry and Osmond almost broke it open.”

Atkins nodded, a stricken, haunted look on his face.

“But you and Skeeter managed a last-minute save,” Frank continued almost soothingly.

José jumped in. “What happened then, Brian? Skeeter and Pencil get too ambitious? Too grabby?”

“You decide to take them out?” Frank followed closely.

“You screw up and don’t get Pencil,” José tacked on.

After the staccato buffeting, Frank and José sat silently for a second or two. Atkins brought his hand up and rubbed his eyes.

José picked up. “Pencil’s alive. You know you have to get him, and you know you have to get control of the case.”

“So the Colombian connection,” Frank continued. “Part was already there . . . Gentry’s time in Bogotá, his Agency connection. You added the necktie and bomb touches.”

“And you killed Pencil’s woman when she came in on you tossing the house,” José said.

“Looking for this.” Frank touched the Eject button and held up the cassette.

Atkins stared at it, then into Frank’s eyes.

A chance to top off a career as more than a midlevel agent. Years of watching others catch the brass ring. And then the chance to take out Juan Brooks. To get your portrait in the director’s corridor. What would have happened, Brian Atkins, if you hadn’t taken the deal?

Atkins finally spoke. “We’ve been in this business a long time, the three of us,” he said, talking like he’d just joined two friends at a bar.

“Yes,” Frank said, “yes, we have.”

“They want us to clean the sewers for them.” Atkins spoke with a mix of sadness and resentment. “And we do. We go about it the best way we know how. We make a profession of it . . . cleaning the sewers. And sometimes . . . sometimes in the sewers one finds a diamond in the shit.”

Slowly Atkins got to his feet. Silently, he held his hands out. Frank locked on the cuffs.

“You’re going to have to make a helluva case,” Atkins said in an almost jovial, professional manner.

“I think we have enough, don’t you?” Frank was working to be equally professional about it.

“You got most of it down,” Atkins admitted.

“Most?”

Atkins grinned as if enjoying a private joke. He shook his head. “Most,” he repeated, adding, “except . . . I didn’t shoot Skeeter.”